The Big Exit (6 page)

“This is bullshit,” he said. “I haven’t spoken to Beth Hill in over a year. I haven’t seen her in close to four years.”

Soul Patch snatched the photos from him.

“No, you’re the one who’s full of shit, bro.”

Both his new friends laughed. He wasn’t sure why they thought that was funny, but they did.

“How long have you guys been following me?”

Soul Patch: “Longer than you think.”

“Who sent you?”

“An old friend who doesn’t take kindly to threats. You had a chance to resolve this amicably before you got out. The offer
was quite generous.”

“That’s why he sent you? Because he says I threatened him?”

“Yeah, you and the bitch have cooked this shit up. And we’re here to tell you it’s not gonna work, understand? No money, cuz.
ATM out of service.”

With that, the linebacker decided to add a little extra vigor to the verbal response. You could see it in his eyes: he’d been
itching the whole time to rush the passer and tick off a sack on the stat sheet. All that time on the bench, waiting in the
car, sipping lattes had gotten to him. He just couldn’t contain himself anymore.

He grabbed Richie by the top of the shirt and shoved him into the side of the building, just to the left of the entrance to
a wine store. As the top of his back met the wall, Richie felt his breath go out of him. But the guy made the mistake of not
pinning him there because as hard as he hit, Richie bounced right back, slammed his forehead into the guy’s nose and drove
his knee into his groin almost at the same time. The first hit left him blinded, the second buckled his knees, and as he fell
to a heap on the ground, Richie looked over and saw a woman pushing a baby stroller about ten yards away, frozen in the middle
of the sidewalk, a horrified look on her face.

Richie motioned for her to back off, then turned his attention to Soul Patch, who seemed as shocked by the turn of events
as the woman with the stroller. If the guy had a gun, Richie thought, now was the time for him to use it.

“Tell your boss that if I wanted his money, I’d take it.”

Soul Patch flashed him an intense look. Searing. “You really shouldn’t have done that, bro.”

The guy on the ground noticed that his nose was bleeding. “Fucker broke my nose,” he said, picking himself up. A little stream
of blood was running from the right nostril down the top of his lip and into his mouth.

“I didn’t break shit. That was a love tap.”

“We could put you back in prison,” Soul Patch said. “You understand that, don’t you?”

“And I could put you both in the hospital. Or better yet, I got a couple of friends who’ll take you on a nice boat ride out
on the Bay. You ever been to the Farallons? They’ve got great whites out there. The size of minivans. They usually put you
in a protective cage and don’t chum, but in your case, they’d make an exception.”

“This is your only warning, Mr. Forman,” Soul Patch said.

“And this is yours, too. Now get your piece-of-shit fake gangster vehicle out of here before I call the police.”

He started to walk away, continuing to face them as he made his exit. By the time he got to the corner they’d returned to
their car. A moment later they pulled out onto Brannan and headed over to the Embarcadero, where they made a right turn. Richie
was repeating the license plate ID to himself as Jason and Ashley approached.

“Holy shit,” Jason said. “What was that about?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Something weird’s going on. What’d you get?”

Jason handed him his camera and showed him which button to push to scroll through the images on the LCD. Richie’s hand shook
a little as he flipped through the images. His heart was still racing.

“You okay?” Ashley asked, noticing the tremor.

“Yeah,” he said. Jason had nice shots of the license plate and had also managed to snap a dozen or so shots of his new friends
handing him the manila envelope. You could see him looking at the photos of Beth, but only one or two shots clearly revealed
what was in the photos and it was hard to tell just how good the focus was. He wanted to see them blown up on a bigger screen.

“Who’s the woman?” Ashley asked.

“My ex-fiancée.”

“Beth?”

“Yeah.”

“That looks like it was taken right here. When did you see her?”

“I didn’t. Or at least I think I didn’t.”

“What does that mean?”

He wasn’t listening. He was looking at the photo of the photo. There was something incredibly eerie about it. It was as if
someone had taken a picture of a scene in one of his dreams and now it had somehow found its way into the real, physical world.

“What did those guys want?” Ashley asked.

He told her he didn’t know, even though he did. Or at least he thought he did. Someone appeared to be trying to blackmail
Mark.
But who? And how much were they were looking for?
At the same time, he wondered whether it had anything to with what Ashley was up to, poking around on his old case. At his
request, he’d told her he didn’t want to hear about it, but now he was a lot more interested.

“Ash, who’ve you been talking to about my stuff?”

“Why?”

“Just who.”

“A couple people. Mainly court clerks and I’ve been trying to track down the woman who was in the vehicle you hit. The friend.”

She looked at Jason, who gave her a hard look back. Richie saw her bite her lip nervously, a tell if he’d ever seen one. Poker
wasn’t her game after all.

He looked at her, waiting.

“Tell him,” Jason finally said.

“Okay,” Ashley said. “We were down there the other day.”

“Down where?”

“Down on the Peninsula. Menlo Park.”

“Doing what?”

“As I said, talking to a few folks. Down at the court.”

“And we shot a little,” Jason said. “We filmed some.”

“Some what?” Richie asked.

“Well, just the scene of the accident. There’s still a marker there. You know, alongside the road. A cross.”

Richie shook his head. He’d seen the cross a long time ago but hadn’t realized it was still there.

“I’m sorry,” Ashley said. “We should have told you. But you said you didn’t want to know what I was doing.”

No wonder they were in such a hurry to get over with their camera, he thought. They’re making a fucking documentary.

“You okay, Rick?” Ashley asked.

He looked at her, then at Jason.

“I’m going to need a copy of those pictures,” he said. “And from now on, I need to know everything that’s going on. Everything.
Understand?”

M
ADDEN HAS ALWAYS FELT BAD FOR
B
ETH
H
ILL
. I
F THERE WAS A
victim aside from the women in that Toyota Corolla, it was Beth. Her wedding was cancelled at the last minute, her life plans
dashed, and she wasn’t in either car, though there were times when she must have wished she was. Then she might have known
exactly what happened that night.

A faded white cross still stands there, a memorial to the accident, planted on the embankment just feet from where he first
encountered Mark McGregor. A couple of times a year, someone, probably the family of the victim, comes by and hangs a wreath
of flowers on the cross. The only time he really notices the marker is during the few weeks the wreath has color; otherwise
it sort of blends in with the dirt on the shoulder.

That open stretch of Sand Hill Road between the 280 off-ramp and Sharon Heights has always attracted its share of mishaps,
though the injured are mainly bicyclists, not drivers. Everything west of the freeway is Woodside. East is Menlo Park. And
after making the loop off the highway, the road runs downhill and the cars really get going, especially late at night when
traffic is light.

Years ago Sand Hill was largely undeveloped. It was all Stanford land; the university owned it. Then one day it became too
valuable. Now there is a luxury hotel next to the freeway and all the venture capital firms, most of them anyway, have set
up shop along on the north side of the road. There aren’t as many businesses on the south side
because the mile-long Stanford Linear Accelerator has been there since the sixties. That’s where the two women in the crushed
vehicle worked.

At approximately 12:52 that night their Toyota Corolla pulled out from the entrance of SLAC to make a left onto Sand Hill
(going west toward Woodside) and an old Cadillac convertible ran a red light and slammed into the driver’s side of the smaller
car, hitting it almost flush, T-boning it. The driver of the Cadillac hit the brakes at the last second but the skid marks
weren’t longer than ten feet.

An officer showed up within six minutes of the accident. Four patrol cars were out that night, each patrolling within a zone.
Typically, most of the action took place on the east side of town, the majority of it closer to the 101 freeway, where the
town’s pocket of ethnicity, Belle Haven, met East Palo Alto, which, during the crack epidemic of the nineties, had earned
the distinction of having the highest per capita murder rate in the country. One car was patrolling quieter West Menlo, but
the zone was actually pretty large in terms of square miles, and when the 911 call for the accident came in, the nearest officer
was a good three miles away.

He found the driver of the Cadillac groaning and bleeding from the side of his head. Lab tests would later reveal that his
blood-alcohol level was just north of 0.12, clearly over the legal limit of 0.08. Meanwhile, the passenger, who was wearing
a seat belt, was conscious but dazed. Tests would later reveal his blood alcohol content was within the legal limit.

Tapes from a San Francisco parking garage showed Beth Hill’s fiancé, Richie Forman, driving the car out of the garage. The
officer at the scene of the accident identified Forman as the driver. Blood on the steering wheel and driver’s seat matched
Forman’s. And yet Forman, saddened as he was for the victims and their families, said he wasn’t driving. Yes, he took his
car out of the garage, but he just drove it a few blocks to pick up his friend Mark McGregor, who he’d left talking to a woman
in a bar. McGregor had asked for the car keys, telling him he was in no shape to drive all the way back down to the Peninsula.
Forman didn’t know what had happened, but he said he wasn’t behind the wheel of the car that killed that woman and injured
her friend. His friend must have moved him after the accident, switched places with him.

At his trial months later, after nearly two hours of questioning, after going through every last detail of that night, not
twice, but five times, Carolyn Dupuy, the deputy DA cross-examining Forman, got what she was looking for on the stand. It
wasn’t exactly a confession, but a moment of doubt, a brief hesitation, and an admission that he couldn’t be 100 percent sure
he wasn’t behind that wheel.

Forman’s lawyer tried to suppress his answer, but it was too late; it was there, and that moment, when you played it over
and over to a jury, started to sound longer and more profound. It started to sound like a confession. And that’s how Richie
Forman ended up with a felony manslaughter conviction. With gross negligence thrown in, he got three to seven and a ticket
to a civil lawsuit. Few bachelor parties had ever cost as much as his.

If the jury didn’t believe him, did Beth Hill? During the trial, she’d sat impassively in the gallery with a mostly helpless,
drained look on her gaunt face. She had the appearance of someone who hadn’t gotten a full night’s sleep in weeks, maybe months,
and hadn’t been eating enough.

“I know Richie better than anyone,” she told a reporter. “He’s not someone who lies. And he’s not someone who backstabs his
friends. So, no, he wouldn’t accuse a good friend of doing something so nefarious as to pull him into the driver’s seat unless
it was true. He wouldn’t do something like this just so he could stay out of jail.”

The only problem was Beth Hill was good-looking. Very good-looking—in a natural way that wasn’t manufactured. Even if the
people who knew her before the accident said she appeared haggard at the trial, when she took the stand to describe her communications
with Forman that evening, the rest of the world—and those jurors—thought she was beautiful. She was fairly tall, with long
dark hair, a clear complexion, and elegant, slender hands that her stress-induced weight loss only seemed to accentuate.

Madden remembered overhearing one of the elderly jurors say after the trial that Beth reminded him of Katharine Ross in
The Graduate
. Another said she looked like a model. Whatever the case, when you saw her there, reticent yet forceful, demurely pulling
strands of hair away from her eyes between questions, you indeed thought a guy like Richie Forman—any guy really—would say
whatever it took not to lose her.

Now, looking at her sitting on the couch next to Carolyn in the Yeaghers’ den, Madden still has the same sentiment. Yes, her
forehead has a few more lines and her hair is short—dramatically so—and bleached blond. But she’s as pretty as ever.

“Before we talk about the past, Ms. Hill,” he says. “I need to know where you were tonight. Please.”

“I was at a yoga class.”

“What time did you leave the class?”

“Right around five thirty. But then I got my nails done. The nail salon is right next to the yoga studio.”

“Okay. Let’s assume you have someone who can confirm you leaving at that time …”

“Ms. Yeagher, her neighbor, has already confirmed it,” Carolyn cuts in. “She was there. She left literally five minutes later.”

“Okay. Then Ms. Hill, let me ask you, do you have any reason to suspect that someone wanted to kill your husband?”

Beth looks down. When she doesn’t say anything, Billings decides he’d better step in.

“Ms. Hill,” he says, “what Detective Madden means is, is there anything your husband may have said to you in the last few
days that may have indicated any concern on his part? Did he mention anything to you?”

Beth rubs her eyes with her fingers and shakes her head.

“There was no friction in his life?” Billings continues in a quiet voice, his eyes filling with sympathy. “No arguments with
business associates?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, there was friction,” she says.

“What kind?”

“Just day-to-day stuff. I don’t know. There were some heated arguments over the direction of the company. But nothing you’d
think would cause something like this.”

Madden: “If you don’t mind my asking. Where were you married? I didn’t see an announcement.”

She looks up at him, then over at Carolyn. She doesn’t seem to know quite what to make of the question. But Carolyn gives
an assuring nod, telling her it’s okay to answer.

“Out in Napa,” she says. “Almost four years ago.”

“And you were previously engaged to his friend Richie?”

Another glace at Carolyn, who again gives her the green light. “Yes. But as you know, the accident altered things.” She takes
a sip of water from a glass that’s sitting on the sand-colored marble-topped coffee table, next to where Harry Yeagher had
placed two white pills on a napkin. She picks one up, but Madden stops her before she can place the pill in her mouth. He
asks if she wouldn’t mind refraining from taking any medication until they’re through questioning her. He makes the request
calmly enough, but his emotion still shows through. He’s furious that this doctor, this neighbor, has given her anything.
Goddamn arrogant bastard
, he thinks.

Beth puts the pill back on the napkin and says, “You were hard on him, Mr. Madden.”

“If it were your daughter who was killed, you’d probably say I was easy on him.”

“You’re right,” she says. “Well, you were hard on Richie, Mr. Madden. You broke him.”

“I was hard on both of them.”

Beth smiles. It’s an odd, self-knowing smile. “Mark cracked,” she says. “But he didn’t break. Richie broke.”

Now it’s Billings’s turn to get politely blunt.

“Mr. McGregor was previously married, was he not? At the time of the accident, he was married, wasn’t he? I seem to remember
that.”

“No. He had a girlfriend.”

“I find something a little curious,” Madden says. “When your call came in, you were listed as B. Hill. Did you keep your maiden
name?”

“Yes.”

“Any reason?”

She shrugs. “It’s just not something I believe in. I was Beth Hill. I will always be Beth Hill. I just couldn’t see taking
another name. It’s also a pain to do. Maybe I’m just lazy.”

Somehow Madden doubts that—the lazy part anyway.

“And when did you and Mark get closer, so to speak?”

“I left the Bay Area for a couple of years. After Richie went to prison, I went back East. To New York. That’s where I’m from
originally. Upstate.”

She explains that Mark called her one day. He was in Manhattan for a tech conference and asked her if she’d consider having
a drink with him. He told her he’d broken up with his girlfriend. Beth wasn’t going to meet him at first, but he said he wanted
to tell her something and needed to say it in person. That’s how it started, she said.

“What did he tell you?”

She smiles again, seeming to relive the memory fondly in her mind. “He just wanted to apologize for ruining my life.”

“He felt responsible?”

“There wasn’t supposed to be a bachelor party. I didn’t care, but Richie didn’t want one. And then Mark and some buddies sprung
it on him. It wasn’t supposed to be that big a deal. Some sushi and karaoke, like they usually did. Richie had a good voice.
He could sing really well. He’d taken lessons when he was younger. He’d been in some school plays. They had this group of
guys who met up in the city once a month. Sushioke, they called it.”

“And you accepted his apology?”

“Not really. Not then. But he kept calling.”

He began by checking in every few weeks. And he sent her some gifts. Nothing serious. A box of apples, for example, because
she’d once told him about an orchard she’d visited in Oregon that had the most delicious apples she’d ever tasted. He sent
the kind of gifts that were more thoughtful than expensive. Then one day she called him. They hadn’t spoken in a couple of
weeks, and she wondered why he hadn’t called. It was bothering her, which she found kind of surprising. So she picked up the
phone and called. And that was really the turning point. She just became more open to the relationship. There wasn’t really
anyone who understood what she’d been through, she said. She was having a hard time with guys. She was pretty closed off.

“Mark understood where I was,” she explains, “and frankly, used it to his advantage. He really wanted to make my life whole
again. Well, really our lives, because it was as much about him as it was me.”

Madden isn’t all that concerned at the moment about how Mark McGregor felt or how he wanted to make ruined lives whole. He’s
more preoccupied with how Richie Forman felt.

“Beth,” he says, using her first name for the first time, “do you know where Richie is now?”

“He’s up in the city.”

“When did he get out of prison?”

“Well over a year ago. But he was in Sacramento for some months. He told me he was working in a restaurant.”

“You spoke with him?”

“Yes. A few times.”

The way Carolyn looks at her, this seems to be new information.

“What’d he say?” Billings asks.

“He called to let me know that he’d heard that I’d gotten married to Mark. I hadn’t spoken with him in three years.”

Madden: “And his tone, was it threatening?”

“No, not exactly.”

“What does that mean,
not exactly
?”

“He asked me whether I loved Mark.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said I was sorry but I did. I wasn’t sure how it had happened but it had.”

Madden looks at Carolyn. It’s hard to fathom. The Beth Hill he knew from all those years ago had seemed resolutely loyal,
even when all the details of the evening had emerged. Of course, five years was a long time to wait for somebody. A lot could
happen in five years. But this?

If Carolyn feels the same way, she doesn’t let on. She gives him a little shrug with her eyes, then looks back at Beth, who
seems lost in her own thoughts.

“And what was his reaction?” Madden asks.

“He said he was profoundly disappointed in me. Understandably.”

“That’s it?”

“Well no, but that was the gist of the conversation. Frankly, the whole thing was rather awkward. I think we both seemed like
strangers to each other. He’d changed in prison. He used to be a very buoyant person, someone who really enjoyed life. And
then he became sullen. I guess that’s the word. Not exactly bitter. Whenever I visited him, his eyes just had this piercing
look to them that wasn’t there before. He was always seething.”