The Big Exit (23 page)

“Look, I gotta go,” he says. “But a card is going to accidentally fall out of my pocket on my way out, which means I didn’t
give it to you. It’s got a name on the back of it. If the guy hasn’t managed to off
himself yet, at least you’d have a second witness to go to if something like this becomes a factor.”

He slides the card onto the kitchen counter, then kisses her on the cheek and turns to leave.

She looks at the card, which has the Parkview Medical Center logo on the front but isn’t personalized in any way; there’s
just an address and phone number. Suddenly, she realizes he’s taken her bottle.

“Hey, my wine,” she calls after him.

“Requisitioning it,” he says, his back to her, holding it up above his shoulder as if to toast her. “I’ve got a birthday to
go to. Jim Toumey’s turning fifty. And I’m late. Thanks.”

“No fair.”

“You’ll get it back. Soon. I promise.”

Then he’s gone.
Fucker
, she thinks, wondering if he slipped her the card as a misdirection play. She half expects to turn it over and see nothing
on the back. But indeed there’s a name and number on the other side and she does what most people would do after reading it:
she goes to her computer in the other room and types the name into the Google search bar.

“Okay, Mr. Paul Anderson,” she says to herself as she types. “Let’s see if you still exist.”

“G
O HOME
, H
ANK
,”
SAYS
C
ARLYLE, STANDING BEHIND HIM IN FULL
uniform, radio clipped on. He’s just started his regular shift. “Go see your wife and kids. I’ll keep an eye on him on tonight.”

“I’m going,” Madden says. “In a minute.”

He’s sitting at the desk in his small office, watching the little blip on his computer screen that’s Richie Forman, who appears
to be making his way back to Tom Bender’s house. The pace of the blip on the map had thrown him at first. It had seemed to
be moving too slowly for Forman to be in a car but too quickly for him to be on foot. Madden guessed bike, and sure enough,
when he diverted a squad car to do a drive-by, the officer confirmed that Forman was cruising along on a mountain bike.

It seemed like an odd thing to do, riding around after dark, but it had been a day filled with oddities. They’d tracked Forman
to the Equinox gym, then the offices of Crune, McGregor’s old company, a second office building in Mountain View, then on
to a series of more mundane stops at Long’s Drugs in the Town and Country Shopping Center and some shops along University
Avenue in Palo Alto.

He was momentarily stunned when he found out Forman was palling around with Bender. It seemed beneath Lowenstein to swing
such a deal. But then again, if he was in his shoes, he probably wouldn’t have wanted to scrape together $2 million in cash
or collateral for a pro-bono client—or drop two hundred grand on the 10 percent non-refundable fee for the bail bond. Which
didn’t leave him much choice. But Bender? Christ.

Carlyle’s radio crackles behind him. The dispatcher mentions
something about a house alarm going off. Although last year they did have a string of burglaries over a period of three months
(two guys from way out in Merced were behind them), Madden thinks the owner probably tripped it. Armed it when he thought
he was disarming it. The usual bullshit.

“He still over at Stanford?” Carlyle asks.

Madden shakes his head. “On his way back to Bender’s.”

Forman hadn’t gone far on the bike. Using mainly side streets, he’d ridden about two and a half miles from Bender’s house
in Menlo Park to Angell Field, Stanford’s track-and field site, where he’d run around the track for around thirty minutes.

Now he’s almost back. Madden takes note of the blip’s location, then switches to another window he previously had open and
brings it front and center on the screen. It’s a close-up of the snake tattoo on McGregor’s hip.
Sedition 1918
. It’s been vexing him. There seems to be no question that the wording on the tattoo refers to the Sedition Act of 1918, which
he’s spent a little too much time researching. According to various websites, on May 16, 1918, Congress, in an affront to
First Amendment rights, amended and extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to make it against the law to say anything “disloyal,
profane, scurrilous,” about the U.S. government. This included the flag and military institutions.

What’s so troubling is that he still has no clue what “sedition” has to do with McGregor. As far as he can tell, the term
refers to subversion or a subversive act, and though it occurs to him that some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs view themselves
and their products as disrupting markets, McGregor, from what he’s learned about him, wasn’t exactly the subversive type.

He imagines some sort of secret society whose members run around with snake tattoos on their hips symbolizing their radical
form of capitalism. Or a secret order of hackers. That seems more plausible in light of the word “Hack” written in blood near
McGregor’s body. The only problem with this theory is that if Forman committed the murder, he’d have likely written the word
as a diversionary tactic. Should he be discounting its presence as much as he has? Probably not. Nevertheless he fixates on
different clues.

But the more he contemplates the tattoo’s potential symbolism,
the more absurd each guess seems, or as Billings put it: “Hank, man, you’ve been reading too many Dan Brown novels.”

Alas, he’s never read a Dan Brown book in his life. Or seen the movies.

“Anything come up?” Carlyle asks now.

Madden shakes his head. “There’s one political cartoon with a snake in it.”

He’s calls up the image on his computer for Carlyle.

The cartoon bears the caption “As gag-rulers would have it” and has a drawing of a large snake with the words “Sedition Bills”
written on its tail. The snake’s tongue is wagging menacingly at three Little Rascals–looking kids holding small sticks in
their hands. The kids represent “honest opinion,” “free speech,” and “free press.” As for the snake, it looks a little like
the one in the tattoo, but it’s far from being a match.

Carlyle looks at it for moment, shrugs, and says, “For all we know the guy got drunk one night and ended up pointing to something
in a book.”

Madden doubts that. “I had Billings email this picture to every tattoo parlor around here and a few up in the city. Nothing
so far.”

“Do you know if he got it in the Bay Area?”

No, he doesn’t. That’s the problem. He tells him that Beth wasn’t exactly sure when or where her husband got it, though she
was pretty certain it was after they got married. When she told him about it, she just said he had “a little snake tattoo
on his hip.” She didn’t mention any words.

“You’re wasting your time, Hank,” Carlyle concludes. “Send it to the feds. Who’s your buddy there? Santorum?”

“Santoro,” Madden corrects him. Carlyle, a staunch Republican, has been watching one too many Republican presidential debates.

“They’ve got a serious fucking database. If it’s some sort of cult or secret society, they’re going to have something. Do
it tomorrow. Go home now. Google will only take you so far.”

Carlyle’s right. He is wasting his time. He closes out the window and calls up the tracking map again. The blip has stopped.
Forman’s back at Bender’s. He minimizes the window, revealing the Google Docs spreadsheet underneath it that Billings has
put together for the
tips that have come in. Madden’s gone through all the tips, one by one, and placed a
1
,
2
, or
3
in the column marked “priority.” Billings, Burns, and a couple of other officers have been working through them, inputting
their comments on the spreadsheet and flagging promising leads that may be worth an in-person interview. Most of the tips
marked with a
1
have remarks in the comments box and probably a quarter of the tips designated
2
have also been investigated.

Once more he skims past the name Janie Cowen in row 241. The tip associated with her name, “Woman overheard McGregor saying
wife wanted to kill him approx. two years ago,” continues to fail to make much of an impression (he’d graded it a 3). Later,
he’ll realize he dismissed it mainly because whoever had taken down the tip had been too vague in his or her description.
If it had read, “Nurse in hospital overhears …” he would have rated it higher.

As it is, only a handful of the tips have proven helpful. They’ve had more luck with some surveillance footage from one of
McGregor’s neighbors’ security cameras that caught his car driving past followed by a bicyclist twenty minutes later. Because
the video was low resolution it didn’t have much detail, but the biker appeared to be Forman. After arriving at 4:28, he left
the area eight minutes and forty-two seconds later.

Crowley thinks the ID will stand up in court, and they’ve also lifted a pair of partial prints from the buzzer box outside
McGregor’s home that matched the prints on Forman’s middle and index fingers on his right hand. He appeared to have pressed
the button with his thumb while briefly laying his other fingers on the metal part of the box.

He closes the Google Docs window, takes a look at his email inbox, then closes that out, too.

Carlyle continues to hover over him. “You’re leaving, right?”

Madden calls up the map one more time. The blip remains motionless, parked at Bender’s address.

“If he heads out, I’ll call you,” Carlyle says. “I’ll tail him myself if he leaves.”

Madden nods, reluctantly shutting down his computer. He puts on his coat, picks up his keys from the desk, and drops them
in the right front pocket of his coat. Carlyle walks him out through the empty
office. It’s after seven, everybody else has punched out. Most have been gone at least an hour.

“There’s one thing that’s been bothering me,” Madden says, walking out to his car.

“Just one thing?” Carlyle replies.

“Well, a lot of things. But one thing I was thinking about was what does the guy do with the weapon? He’s got a bag, right?
So, what, he wipes the hatchet down, sticks it in his bag, rides off on the bike, and what, dumps it in the woods up there
in Woodside?”

“Sure. He could have wrapped it in a shirt. Or a newspaper or something. Presumably, he has something in the bag or else he
wouldn’t be carrying the bag.”

“I realize that. But we’ve got the bag and it’s clean.”

Carlyle considers that. “Look, the thing isn’t huge,” he says. “It’s not a full-on ax. In a lot of ways it’s perfect. It’s
easily concealable. It’s easier to use than a hunting knife, does a heck of a lot of damage.”

“He could have just left it there. It was McGregor’s after all.”

“He could have.”

“I wanna send someone up there.”

“Where?”

“Along his bike route.”

Carlyle’s radio crackles again. The dispatcher reports they’ve gotten a 911 call from someone saying he’s captured a “wanted
man.” She gives an address and he and Carlyle look at each other. It sounds awfully familiar.

Carlyle engages the microphone that’s clipped onto his uniform near his clavicle and turns his head to speak into it. “Carlyle
here. Can you repeat that address, please?”

She calls it out again. It’s Bender’s all right.

“Did the caller give a name?” Carlyle asks. “Please confirm.”

“Yes, Bender. Tom Bender. And he asked for an ambulance for his dog.”

Carlyle looks at Madden, then turns his head to speak into the microphone again.

“Did you say dog?”

“Roger that. D-O-G dog.”

R
ICHIE DOESN’T TELL
B
ENDER WHERE HE’S GOING, HE JUST SAYS HE
wants to get out for a bit and clear his head and would he mind lending him the mountain bike he saw in his garage for a
quick ride?

Bender isn’t keen on the idea. Immersed in dashing off a quick two-thousand-word rant on his site, he tells him to hang tight,
he’s almost done. The contract, he notes, only stipulates for eight hours of sleep and one hour of “independent recreation,”
and the trip to Equinox qualified as independent recreation in his book; after all, he’d been permitted to roam the gym freely,
had he not?

Everything with Bender is a goddamn negotiation, and in the end, he only relents after Richie offers to amend the contract
by hand and extend his stay by an hour.

“You don’t come back, there will be serious repercussions,” Bender warns.

By the time he gets to the track it’s fully dark outside and the lights are on. The facility isn’t loaded with people but
there’s a half dozen or so runners, some going about their business more seriously than others. He knows she probably won’t
be there yet—he’s fifteen minutes early—but he does a quick search before walking the bike over to the infield and setting
it down in a spot near the middle where he can keep an eye on it while he runs.

He hasn’t been to Angell Field in more than eight years. Earlier in the day, as he and Bender drove past the Stanford campus,
he had a flashback of running there with Beth. They’d gone there occasionally at night and he always remembered the place
fondly, maybe because she always looked so good in her running tights and Nike running hat.

When he called her in her room at the hotel (Ashley, with a little finessing of a hotel employee and perhaps even a small
bribe, had discovered she was staying there under her neighbor’s name), he hadn’t expected her to pick up. When she did—and
then agreed to meet him—he quickly had to come up with a rendezvous point. Angell Field it was.

He stretches his calves, then heads out onto the track, gradually ratcheting up his pace. He’s on lap six, the 1.5-mile mark,
when he spots her. She’s standing by the oval near the entrance wearing a loose-fitting dark gray sweat suit, her head covered
by the top’s hood. As he goes past, he slows but doesn’t stop.

“Come on,” he says. “Run with me.”

He keeps up the slow pace until she’s beside him, then picks it up a little.

“Not too fast,” she says. “I haven’t been running.”

“Anybody follow you?”

“I don’t think so. You?”

“I’ve got a tracer bracelet on my ankle,” he says. “They know where I am all the time. Every once in a while I get buzzed
by a squad car but I don’t think I’ve got an official tail.”

A short pause, then: “I’m sorry about the Marriott,” she says.

He’d told her on the phone that not surprisingly he’d lost the gig at the Marriott. The manager said that “regrettably” he
was going to have to “hold off” using him for now. Now that he was dealing with an accused killer, the bastard had gone from
being Mr. Gruff to Mr. Polite.

“I told him that with my newfound notoriety I could really pack them in and that he was a fool for not booking me, someone
else would.”

“Someone will,” she says.

“This guy Bender wants to do a concert around here somewhere to raise money for my legal defense. But he’s fucking crazy.”

They run in silence for about a hundred yards and then he says: “You know what I came here to ask you.”

“I didn’t set you up, Richie.”

She’d always had the eerie ability to know what he was going to say before he said it, and he’d never minded it, even found
it endearing. But this time her quick response grates.

“You sure about that? Last I checked, you were the one who said you wanted him dead, didn’t you?”

She pulls up suddenly and puts her hands on her hips, her jaw clenched. He stops, too, and when he does, she lunges toward
him and grabs him, pulling him toward her with her left hand. He then feels her other hand slip underneath his sweatshirt
and she begins to grope him. But that’s not really what she’s doing. She’s fucking patting him down.

“Are you wearing a wire?” she says in a low voice, a little wild-eyed. “Are you wearing a fucking wire? Is that what you’re
doing?”

He tears away from her and pulls off his sweatshirt, then his T-shirt, until he’s standing there bare-chested on the edge
of the infield grass, giving her his best Marky Mark.

“You want the pants off, too,” he says. “Oh wait, you already did a dick-check the other day at Watercourse Way.”

He doesn’t get the feisty reaction he expects. Instead, she just stares at him the same way she did back in the private hot-tub
room when he’d stripped down. Part of her still can’t get over his chiseled new body. He was in decent shape before he went
away, but now he truly does look like he could be on a billboard in an underwear ad.

When she realizes she’s staring, she looks down, embarrassed. “Put your shirt back on,” she says. “It’s cold.” And then she
jogs away.

It doesn’t take long to catch up to her.

“So you’re saying Watercourse Way was a spontaneous act? It wasn’t planned?”

“I didn’t say I wanted him dead. I didn’t.”

She’s still stuck on that.

“Well, what? What was the exact quote, ‘I sometimes wish he was dead. I wish he’d just go away.’
Want
,
wish
, what’s the difference? It’s fucking semantics.”

“I wish I could run a little faster. Do I want to? Not really. There’s a difference. And you took what I said out of context
anyway.”

He laughs. “Context? You’d just fucked my brains out and you’re lying there naked on a towel, all fucking splayed out, casually
sharing your inner thoughts like you’re talking to your shrink or something. Context?”

The image is indelible. More than the sex, more than the sensation of tasting her mouth again, that image of her lying there
had remained with him. He couldn’t get it out of his head, the way she kept pulling her wet hair back as she spoke, her eyes
staring up at the ceiling. She looked completely relaxed and yet possessed at the same time.

“Just leave,” he’d said. “File for divorce.”

She let out a laugh. “He’ll kill me before that happens,” she said. “His precious money. His precious fucking company. He
can’t stand the idea of giving any of it up.”

“I told you, go to the police. You have to.”

“He’s smarter than that. You don’t know how smart he is. You always underestimated him.”

She was right about that.

“I didn’t come here to fight, Richie,” she says now. “I shouldn’t have let Watercourse Way happen. I shouldn’t have brought
you into my shit.”

“But you did, Beth. And it wasn’t an accident. So don’t get all hindsight on me.”

She falls silent. Several strides later she says, “You know what the funny thing was? Things were okay when you were in prison.
Out of sight, out of mind, right? But it all started to deteriorate a few months before you got out. It weighed on him, you
getting out. I could see it. And then I wanted to know again. Sometimes I said to myself it was for you but it was really
for me.”

Now he’s the one who pulls up. “Know what?”

She stops, too, and stands there, hands on hips, trying to catch her breath. “I told you not to go so fast,” she says.

“Know what, Beth?”

“Whether he really switched places on you. I believed you, Richie, I really did. But part of me wanted to hear it from him.
It became sort of an obsession.”

She says that was what some of the drinking and drugs were about. She figured she’d loosen him up and get him to talk about
it. She’d ask in different ways, approach it from different angles, and every time he’d say he wasn’t behind the wheel. He
told the same story every time.

Then one morning when things were at one of their low points,
they were sitting in the kitchen, each having their coffee, reading the newspaper, when he turned to her and said, “I love
you, Beth, and if it makes you feel any better, I was driving.”

For a second, she thought she’d imagined it. She was pretty hung-over and her head was a little foggy.
Did he just say what I think he said
? Here, she’d tried to ply him with all these substances, she’d even looked into how she might administer one of the so-called
truth serums, sodium pentothal or some other barbiturate, and now, totally sober, he’d offhandedly confessed, wedging it between
a couple of layers of conflicted emotions. As far as sandwiches go, it didn’t taste good, and her first response, ironically,
was not to believe him.

“Yeah, I did it,” he said. “But not for the reasons you think I did.”

And then he got up from the table and left.

“He wouldn’t talk about it after that,” she tells Richie now. “It was as if he hadn’t said it. But he basically replaced one
uncertainty with another. It was sick. It was as if he knew I was giving up, that I was losing my curiosity and would ditch
him if it disappeared.”

The revelation leaves Richie not so much stunned as steamed—and in the cool night air, now that he’s stopped running, there’s
literally steam rising from his body. He should have known that the vindication he’s sought all these years would arrive with
such a resounding and dissatisfying whimper.
Fucking great
, he thinks.
Just fan-fucking-tastic
.

“Why didn’t you tell me this the other day?” he asks.

“You were already so disappointed with me. It was hard to have someone who used to love me so much have so much disdain for
me.”

“Is that why you had sex with me?”

The question seems to provoke her—and refocus her. “You want the truth?”

“Yeah. Give me your best Jack. I can handle it.”

“I just wanted to,” she says.

“That’s it.
I just wanted to
.”

“Hold on, I’m not finished. I wanted to and I didn’t give a shit if Mark found out.”

“So, you did set me up.”

“No. Not in the way you’re thinking. I was just being reckless.”

Her lip starts to tremble. “I’m so sorry,” she says. The tears come
after that; she’s full-on crying. He moves closer to her, gently pulling her toward him. She rests her head on his shoulder
and sobs quietly. He looks around, checking to see who’s watching. A runner looks at them as he passes by and Richie raises
a hand behind Beth’s back, flashing a hi-everything’s-all-right-nothing-to-see-here signal.

“My lawyer says they could arrest me,” she says after a moment, separating from him and wiping her eyes.

He shakes his head. “I can’t believe you hired her. Of all the fucking people. Did you have to? Carolyn Dupuy?”

“I like her. She’s tough. She got under your skin, not mine.”

He looks at her incredulously, wants to call foul, low blow.

“Well, she’s right,” he says spitefully. “They probably will arrest you. They just need to get a few more ducks lined up.”

“Why do you say that?”

He readies the big gun, the one he’s been holding back.

“They check phone records, Beth,” he says. “They know you texted me right before Mark was killed. They’re probably just trying
to get a little more evidence.”

“I didn’t text you.”

He looks at her, his eyes narrowing, trying to read hers.

“Really? You sure about that?”

“I replied to yours, yeah. You asked me if everything was okay, and I wrote, ‘y.’ One letter. That’s it. That was my big text.
I sent it when I got out of yoga. I thought your message was sweet but a little dangerous.”

“You didn’t write anything about Mark knowing about us and that he was coming home and that you were worried?”

“No.”

“You didn’t give me your address?”

“My address? Why would I do that?”

Shit
, he thinks, suddenly nauseated.

“Richie?”

“What?”

“You were there, weren’t you?”

He studies her eyes again, hoping they show some glimmer of deceit.

“You didn’t send it,” he says, but this time it’s not a question but an admission.

“What happened, Richie?”

He runs a hand nervously through his hair, his mind racing. If it’s true, if she really didn’t send the message, it means
someone else did. And it means someone else set him up. But who? And wouldn’t she see the messages he’d sent back? Someone
would physically have to get on her phone, tap out the messages, and delete the thread. The other possibility was that it
was done remotely via the spyware she claimed was on the phone. He just didn’t know what to believe at this point.

“Tell me what me happened, Richie,” he hears her say. He looks up at her. It sounds a little too much like a prompt, so now
it’s his turn to get paranoid. Moving closer to her, he slips his hand under her sweatshirt. “Do you mind?” he asks.

“I’m not taking off my shirt so you better go under that, too,” she says.

“Thanks.”

He slides his hand up her shirt and she flinches a little when he strafes her stomach. “Cold hands,” she says. He apologizes
with a shrug.

“Yeah,” he says after moment, “I was there.”

He tells her that after they split up after Watercourse Way, he biked over to University Avenue and locked his bike up and
walked around. He hadn’t been there in a while and wanted to see how much it had changed, chill for a bit, and fill his water
bottle and pump his tires up before doing a much curtailed version of a ride he used to do over the hill to San Gregorio Beach
through La Honda. He was in the Palo Alto Bicycles shop a little after four when he got her first message.

It said: “Mark knows. On his way home. Scared. Can you come?”

He wrote back: “Where are you?”

A few minutes later she gave him the address, followed by, “Please come now.”

He shot her back another text, trying to get more details, but she never wrote back. He didn’t go at first. In fact, he contemplated
calling the police and dumping it on them. But he couldn’t find a pay phone and didn’t want to call from his own phone, figuring
it might get him into trouble. And he didn’t know exactly what to say. So he rode over. It was a detour on his planned ride
but not that far out of the way.