The Disappearance (22 page)

The Wilsons exchange a glance. “Yes,” Mr. Wilson says. “Mind you, we don’t pry into other people’s lives, including our tenants. They’re adults, they have a right to their own privacy.”

“Sure.” They misunderstood his intention. “She wasn’t here that night, though, correct?”

“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Wilson says. “If she had been, Joe wouldn’t be in jail, would he?” she asks.

“No,” Luke admits ruefully. “He wouldn’t.”

“She was here so many nights,” Mr. Wilson says. “To have missed that one night out of so many …”

“I know. It’s too bad. But she wasn’t,” he goes on briskly, “so we have to defend him anther way. Let me ask you this: Did Joe bring other women here? On a regular basis?”

Mrs. Wilson nods. “Oh, yes.” She looks over at her husband.

“He did?” He tries to keep his eagerness in check. “Do you know who any of them were?”

“There was only one woman,” Mrs. Wilson says, “who was here on a regular basis.” She emphasizes the word “woman.”

“Would you happen to know who she was?”

Mr. Wilson answers. “His boss’s wife, Mrs. Lancaster. She was here quite a bit, until Emma was kidnapped. After that we hardly saw her anymore.” He hesitates. “She was the only other mature woman.”

A major brain cramp seizes him. Was Joe Allison having an affair with Glenna Lancaster? Could that be possible? “Was she a guest of Joe’s in the evening as well as during the day?” he asks timorously. Fleetingly, he thinks, “Why the phrase ‘mature woman’?” A generational thing obviously.

“Occasionally,” Mr. Wilson says. “Not that we pry into our tenants’ affairs,” he’s quick to add.

“Was Mrs. Lancaster around when Nicole Rogers was here, too? The two women were here together?”

Mr. Wilson looks to Mrs. Wilson for guidance. “I’m often gone during the day, so I wouldn’t know,” he explains.

His wife shakes her strong-featured head. “I don’t recall seeing the two women here at the same time,” she says thoughtfully. “There were never two women here at the same time. That’s odd, isn’t it?” she poses to Luke.

“Coincidental, I’m sure.”

Back in jail. Same lawyer-client room. Luke’s beginning to hate this space, the dirty off-white walls, the scarred chairs and table, the overhead fluorescent light that makes everyone’s face look green. The room is designed this way for a reason, to discourage intimacy and foster depression. He knows, because he was privy to the design when he was the
jefe
. It works, he’s thinking, sitting in it opposite his client.

“So here’s a question out of the blue,” he says. He waits a minute to ask it, while Allison looks at him blankly. “Were you and Glenna Lancaster having an affair?”

Allison, startled, sits up. “What are you talking about?”

Luke points a don’t-bullshit-me finger at the man. “Simple English, ace. Were you and the mother of the girl you’re accused of kidnapping and murdering sleeping together?”

Allison hesitates before answering. He chooses his words judiciously. “I wouldn’t call it an affair, but we did have sex together,” he admits. “A few times,” he adds.

Luke’s enraged. “You were sleeping with Glenna Lancaster and you withheld that from me? How long did it go on?”

“A while. On and off. It was only a few times,” he repeats.

“How soon after you went to work at the station?”

There’s no movement for a moment. Then Allison answers, his voice low. “A couple months.”

“A couple of months? You’ve been fucking her for, what—two years, man? That’s not an affair, that’s a relationship.”

“It was neither,” Allison retorts sharply. “We were friends, but it wasn’t romantic. We played tennis together, we jogged together. Jock things, mostly. That was how we spent our time together, not fucking. Look,” he continues, “Doug Lancaster was fucking around for years. She knew about it but she didn’t want to know, you know what I mean? Great lifestyle, great marriage on paper, movers and shakers in the community, the whole nine yards. So she swallowed it. Even if it was a dead-end situation. Until I came along, and she had someone to confide in. That’s what it really was. The sex was incidental.”

Tell that to a jury, Luke thinks. “So instead of doing something about taking care of her marriage, she seduced you?”

Allison shrugs. “She’s an attractive woman. And she was lonely. There’s a limit to how much resistance you can put up.”

“Obviously none, in your case. And you’re a liar. You’ve been lying to me since the day I met you. Which was the one thing I warned you never to do.” He pauses. “Did Glenna know? About you and Emma? Your make-out scene, as you call it? Or was there more? I don’t know what to believe from you now.”

“There was nothing more than I told you,” Allison declares. “And no, Glenna didn’t know about anything with me and Emma. I took great pains to make sure of that, as you can imagine.” He goes on. “Actually, she had gotten to the point, right before Emma was killed, that she was about to pull the plug on the marriage, regardless of the consequences. We talked about it. She saw a lawyer about it.” He leans forward. “I told her she ought to confront Doug and try to work it out.”

“And tell him about you and her, too?” Luke scoffs. “Doug Lancaster not only would’ve fired you, he’d have blackballed you from the business. You’d be doing the weekend weather in Nome, Alaska, if you got lucky.”

“I know,” Allison admits.

“You’re lying to me again. You didn’t try to talk her into coming clean with her old man. You talked her
out
of it, didn’t you?”

Allison’s no-answer says everything Luke needs to know.

“Did Nicole know?” he asks.

Allison shakes his head. “She wasn’t concerned that I might have slept with Glenna a few times. That wasn’t the problem.”

“She’d had enough to pull the plug once you decided to move south and give her the out, didn’t she?”

An unhappy nod. “It was our close friendship she didn’t like. Time taken away from her. And that’s the truth.”

Luke takes a deep slow-down breath. This is too surreal. “How did Glenna take your leaving town?” he asks. “Losing her favorite—it sounds like only—confidant?”

“She was upset.”

“Upset? She wasn’t angry? She didn’t think you’d led her on? She wasn’t harboring any romantic fantasies?”

Allison shakes his head emphatically. “We hadn’t slept together for a long time—not since Emma’s murder. Besides, she knew how careers like mine work.”

“She may have known in her head, but that doesn’t mean she took it okay, does it?”

Allison nods. “All right—she took it badly.”

“Was she planning on coming down and seeing you once you were set up in L.A.?”

Allison shakes his head. “I told her we had to end it—our friendship. We both had to start anew.”

“That’s pretty callous. You’re a prince, Joe.”

“No,” Allison says sharply. “My behavior with Glenna was anything but callous. She had no one to turn to. I was a lifesaver for her for a long time, believe me.”

Luke gets up and paces around. “I don’t know what to believe anymore. You’ve put us in a terrible position, Joe, I’m sure you understand that.”

“Because I lied to you.”

“Yes.” Luke sits back down. “I’ve got to think about all this. I may not be able to work with you as I have.”

Allison goes pale.

“What about this divorce deal? Did she actually go so far as to discuss it with a lawyer, to your knowledge?”

“Check it out if you don’t believe me,” Allison says. “Her lawyer was Walt Turcotte. He handled Glenna’s side of the divorce when it finally happened. Ask him.” He pauses. “It’s a terrible thing to say, but Emma’s death was a liberation for Glenna. A horrible way for it to happen, but she did get her freedom out of it.”

Luke looks away. What’s freedom from a bad marriage going for these days, he wonders? The price Glenna Lancaster paid was way too high for what she got in return.

Walt Turcotte, attorney-at-law, distinguished graduate of Stanford Law School, has for twenty years been the city’s preeminent divorce attorney. He sits behind his large rosewood desk, smiling warily at Luke Garrison, a friend and boon companion in the good old days. “You’re the second most unpopular man in this city right now,” Turcotte quips, after they exchange greetings and sit down. He goes on, “Seriously, it’s been too long a time, Luke. I’d assumed you’d resurface someday, but not under these auspices. Friend to friend—why the hell are you doing this?”

Luke gives Turcotte the short version. His fellow lawyer is under-impressed with the validity of the reasons, but accepts them at face value. “Around my second year in law school I made the decision not to moralize about my work,” he tells Luke. “Everybody else saw the law as some kind of political tool, but to me it was the foundation that held up the building, solid and unswayable. I don’t judge, and I try to hold my own biases in check.” Pressing a button others might shy away from, he says, “Ralph Tucker was a victim of a fallible system that’s better than any of the other fallible systems we’ve tried, so I could sleep with what happened.”

“I thought I could, too,” Luke says, “but it turned out I couldn’t.”

Turcotte leans back in his chair. “You want to talk to me about Glenna Lancaster?”

“Yes.”

Turcotte thumbs open a file resting on the corner of his desk. “This is attorney-client privilege, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I talked to her this morning, after you called. She’s okay about me talking to you about her looking into getting a divorce from Doug before Emma was killed. Which surprised me, since you’re Joe Allison’s lawyer, but it’s her decision.”

He doesn’t know, Luke realizes with a start. That Glenna and Allison were lovers. He has to be wary here, it isn’t his place to tell Turcotte about that. Turcotte would kick him out of his office if he knew about the affair.

“Maybe she doesn’t think Allison did it,” Luke says carefully. “They were close friends, according to him. I’m sure she wants her daughter’s murder avenged, but not at the expense of the wrong man.”

A cloud comes over Turcotte’s face. “I doubt that. But she has agreed to let me brief you on some of her history. So shoot—what’re you looking for?”

“Did Glenna Lancaster discuss divorce with you before Emma was kidnapped?” The affair is going to stay hidden, at least for now.

Turcotte nods. “Yes, she did.”

“Seriously, or was it an exploratory thing?”

“It was serious. She wanted to nail his scalp to the wall. Given their financial situation, she would’ve scored mightily. She did anyway, when they finally split.”

“Did she have a specific reason? Or reasons?”

Turcotte hesitates a moment before answering. “Adultery.”

“Doug was involved with someone else?”

“Elses. Plural.”

“Any names you could throw my way?”

Turcotte thinks about that request. “We’re getting in over our heads here, Luke,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t see how this relates to your defense strategy.”

Luke wants this information, so he makes a decision. “If I tell you a deep, dark, juicy secret, will you tell me some of yours?”

“Depends on the quality of the information,” Turcotte answers, intrigued.

“This is me and you, Walt. Strictest confidence.”

Turcotte hesitates. “Okay.”

“Doug Lancaster made me a substantial offer to turn down Joe Allison.”

Turcotte gapes at him. “No way!”

“He did. In the interest of justice, of course.” Luke leans back, having played his hole card. “Now, what’re you going to give me in return?”

“What do you want?” Turcotte asks cautiously.

“Did Glenna have a P.I. on Doug’s case?”

Turcotte nods. “Several.”

“Did they come up with anything?” He leans closer to Turcotte. “Here’s why I ask. If Doug Lancaster was screwing around, who knows what kinds of people could be attached to it? He’s screwing some bimbo who knows he’s richer than God and she’s got a whacked-out boyfriend who thinks the daddy will pay big bucks for the baby, so the boyfriend goes in and snatches Emma and it turns to shit and somehow Joe Allison gets framed.” He sits back. “Stranger things have happened. I’m going to turn over every single rock in California, if I think there’s something under one of them.”

Turcotte exhales, impressed at the passion of Luke’s wild thinking. “Okay,” he agrees. “I can help you. Not that it’ll help your case, but I have information for you.”

“Thanks. By the way,” Luke says, remembering the other part of this expedition, “did Glenna Lancaster ever talk to you about someone
she
might be seeing? Since she didn’t have her husband’s attention as much as she wanted? Some secret love interest she was hatching?” He has to nail down whether or not Turcotte knows about Glenna and Joe, America’s favorite clandestine couple.

Turcotte nods slowly. “There was someone.”

“Do you know who?”

“She wouldn’t tell me. Why?” he asks. “Do you think whoever it was might be connected? A parallel track to the Doug Lancaster theory?”

“No,” Luke lies. “I was just wondering.” When Turcotte finally finds out about this, it’ll be the end of the friendship, one of the few he has left.

Turcotte picks up the file folder he’s been pushing around his desk. “The detective reports Glenna Lancaster compiled. I want them back and I don’t want anyone to know you have them. I don’t want my reputation sullied, even with my client’s permission.” He finger-riffs through the reports. “Most of them didn’t check out—Doug was good at covering his tracks.” He hands the files across the desk.

Luke sticks them in his briefcase. “No one’s going to know.”

Turcotte walks him to the door. “Like I said, it’s good to see you again. Take care of yourself. And don’t be a martyr to the cause. It isn’t worth it.”

The files Glenna Lancaster’s sleuths compiled are okay. They show a pattern of screwing around on Doug Lancaster’s part that’s steady and consistent over a period of years. But they go back several years—the most recent are more than a year old—and to Luke’s practiced eye, the trails seem cold. One thing they do trigger in his mind, however, is that screwing around on his wife was the man’s m.o. for a long time. According to these reports, almost every time Doug Lancaster was out of town he was seeing a lover, alongside whatever legitimate business he was attending to. So it seems logical that on the night Emma was abducted, when her father was out of town on business, he would be seeing someone too.