Ring of Truth

  There was laughter, because it all sounded so obvious. “Can we go home now?” another joker asked.

  “You think this was premeditated, Carl?” came a serious voice from the back.

  “No,” said the second joker, turning around in his chair to face the questioner. “That life insurance is just a coincidence!”

  From the front of the room Carl said, “I think it sounds well thought out. Once we find the murder weapon, we’ll be able to tell more about that. If it was something he picked up at the scene, he could argue it was a crime of passion, momentary insanity, if he can explain how he didn’t leave tracks. Maybe his wife told him he had to leave his bimbo or she’d tell the church, I don’t know. But if it was something he had to bring with him, something he’d stored in her car, say, then we’ve got premeditation.”

  “What was the murder weapon, Carl?”

  “Heavy, wood, a baseball bat, like that.”

  “So, does the Reverend coach Little League?”

  A murmur of grim amusement circled the room. No one had yet connected the crime to the innocent-looking baseball bat propped in the umbrella stand in the front hall in Bayfield Estates.

  The squad commander interjected: “Check it out.”

  “She died somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be that day,” the case squad commander said when she took over the conference from Carl. “At least not according to her own husband. He said she told him she had an open house at 420 South Ocean. But there is no evidence to suggest she ever showed up there on Friday. We have a lot of work to do, ladies and gentlemen, a lot of things to check out, and just because the Reverend looks like a good suspect for us, that doesn’t mean he’s the one. Keep your eyes open. Do your jobs. Let’s not convict an innocent man, all right? Just because he’s a preacher, that don’t make him a bad guy.”

  Laughter eased around the room again.

  “Commander?” an officer called out. “Isn’t this the anti—death-penalty preacher? The one who’s always picketing outside the courthouse?”

  “And outside of the penitentiary,” somebody else said, sounding bitter. “He’s the moron thinks Stevie Orbach ought to get a new trial.”

  There was a rumble of anger at that idea.

  “Yeah, same guy,” the commander agreed. “Now, I personally don’t have any problem with that, because as you all know I do have some problem with capital punishment. Call me crazy, but I don’t think it’s a perfect system. I know that some of you feel the only good murderer is a dead murderer.”

  An approving chuckle or two could be heard in the room.

  “But I have this nutty idea that we ought to be sure they’re actually guilty before we fry them. Afterwards is a little late to say we’re sorry. So what I’m saying is, this isn’t about politics, girls and boys. This is about the brutal murder of a woman. And maybe her husband did it. And maybe it’s true that most husbands are the guilty parties. But we don’t know if that’s true in this case. Let’s not jump to conclusions here, just because some of you think it might be fun to watch him picket his own execution.”

  There was outright laughter at that jibe, which would become an ongoing irreverent joke in South Florida.

  “Be cops,” she warned them, in the serious but good-natured way that made most of them respect her. “Don’t be judges.”

  “Excuse me, Commander?”

  “Yes, Norm?”

  “Has the Reverend got an alibi, Carl?”

  He stood up again to answer her. “Depends if it checks out, Norm. He says he was visiting nursing homes with a member of the church.” Carl allowed himself a very small smile. “Guess who?”

  “Don’t tell me! Mrs. McGregor?”

  “Bingo. The Reverend says that Artemis McGregor picked him up at his house at ten A.M. and they drove around for the next couple of hours. Then he says she dropped him back off at his house, and he worked there all afternoon. Never made it to his church on Friday. Seems that’s normal for him, that he likes to stay home and work on his sermon for the following Sunday.”

  “What does the McGregor woman say?”

  “Nobody’s talked to her yet.”

  “But there’d be witnesses at the nursing home?”

  With a deadpan expression, Carl said, “Well, now, that’s an interesting point you raise there, Norm. It seems that the Reverend and Mrs. McGregor never actually went into a nursing home, they just drove by. It appears they got to talking and never actually got a lick of work done in two hours’ time.”

  There was an exchange of glances among the officers.

  “So, Carl,” one of them said, “you think she’s the woman?”

  But he merely shrugged, and smiled again. “Maybe she had a problem and just needed two hours of personal counseling from her pastor.”

  A cop suddenly voiced a thought out loud: “Carl, did you see any indication there could have been more than one killer?”

  His smile vanished. “She was beat to a bloody pulp. The medical examiner says every bone in her body was broken. One person could do that. But two people could do it faster.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t true that every bone in the body was broken.

  “Bones are made of calcium phosphate and collagen,” explained Adam Strough, the chief medical examiner for Howard County. Dr. Strough is known in law enforcement and media circles as a bit of a character and a born professor. He was more than happy to provide the gory details to anyone who wished more than a mere superficial understanding of what happened to the victim s body. “Seashells are made of calcium. I think of bones as being as fragile as seashell, but strong like them, too. It just kills me to see somebody break bones on purpose; I want to protest that God and a pregnant lady worked hard on this skeleton, so have some respect.”

  To reporters who craved excruciating detail, he added:

  “There are two hundred and six bones in the human body, and one more in those of us who have a wormian bone in our skull. Now, not everybody has one; its a small, irregular bone, a little island unconnected to any other bone. But barring a birth anomaly, we all have twenty-four ribs, twelve vertebrae in our necks, seven bones in each ankle, and eight in these marvelous wrists that can swing a tennis racket or play a Mozart sonata.

  “Almost all of those were broken in the victim’s body.

  “The distal phalanx was broken in her right thumb and in her left. The calcaneus bone of her heels was fractured, as was the mandible, both femurs, the coccyx.”

  He provided a list of the Latin names of all the bones broken.

  “Our skeletons have three primary functions, apart from storing organic salts and forming blood cells,” the medical examiner lectured, when given the opportunity. “Those functions are: protection of our soft inner organs, support, and motion. All three failed her. No one could have stood up under those blows. The violence that rained down on her produced breaks that ranged in severity from cracks to fractures to splintery smashes, to say nothing of the destruction of the organs within.”

  Susanna Wing had a wormian bone, and it was broken, too.

  “I wondered how much she felt,” the medical examiner mused away from the microphones. That was what people always wondered—especially the victim’s survivors—about horrific deaths. Did she suffer? How much? Or was she mercifully dead before the worst of it? “Its hard to know precisely which blow killed her,” Dr. Strough theorized, “and in what order they were struck, because there were so many of them. If he hit her skull first, it could have incapacitated her immediately and she truly wouldn’t have felt anything after that. But if he hit her lower first, then she felt quite a lot of it before she died.”

  He was positive about one thing: it was the beating and nothing else that killed her. The actual murder “weapon” was most likely a sliver of her own breastbone that punctured her heart.

  It was possible she had been raped.

  “She was either raped,” the medical examiner announced, “or she engaged in rough sex
just prior to being killed. There are abrasions, bruises, she bled. One way or another, it was violent. Brutal.” To the cops, he added, dramatically, “This guy’s a real bastard. I want you to remove him from the streets of the city where my wife goes to work and my daughters play!” Some of the cops would have smiled at that, except that they felt the same way. They might not have put it so theatrically, but they shared his sentiments all the same.

  The medical examiner saw the cesarian scar that her husband had told the police about, but he also found a tiny scar in the crease below each of her heavy breasts, where silicon gel sacs had been inserted. Those, apparently, were the other “distinguishing marks” that her minister husband had hesitated to mention to the officer in Missing Persons. It didn’t make him look any better in the eyes of the cops. But didn’t a woman, even a preacher’s wife, have a right to feel attractive?

  After Dr. Strough’s lecture on abraded genitals and fractured bones, Detective Chamblin thought about hate, rage, jealousy, fury, psychosis, temporary insanity, steroid rage. All the old familiar “reasons” why one human being might pulverize another. For some reason, jealousy stuck in his mind. Carl admits to having a bit of a jealous streak himself. “Who doesn’t?” he asks, rhetorically. Of course, he hopes there are no circumstances in which he might feel driven to behave like an idiot. Still, there was something, some chord that was struck in him as he examined the appearance of the body in the autopsy room, that made him think: This is what I might do if I were crazy and jealous and cold-blooded as a shark. People think it’s hot-blooded people who commit violent crimes—like that’s some kind of compliment to them, like they’re to be admired for being passionate, or something—but that’s bullshit. It takes a cold-blooded son of a bitch to kill somebody, even when they do it in a so-called moment of passion. All they’re really thinking about is themselves. What’s more cold-blooded than that?

  He said about as much to Dr. Strough, who replied, “Do you know, Detective, that the Latin root of the word ‘joint’ is ‘art’? When I look at that poor woman, I see the destruction of a work of art. I’ll tell you something. There’s only one thing wrong with the death penalty. And that is . . . that we ought to be allowed to take a baseball bat to the person who did this.” The medical examiner’s respect for nature’s genius did not extend to those who cruelly undid its handiwork. “And I would like to bat first in the lineup.”

  “Funny you should mention the death penalty,” Carl told him, and went on to explain who their main suspect was. “And funny you should mention baseball bats.”

  By that time, they’d made the bloody connection.

  Within forty-eight hours the Bahia Beach police had built a devastating case against the crusading preacher: Bob Wing had no confirmable alibi for the time of the death of his wife; he had in his house a baseball bat with traces of her blood and tissue and bone caught in the cracks of the old wood, although he denied knowledge of how it got in that condition. His fingerprints were all over the handle of the bat, which was not surprising, and he also had, provably, the two oldest motives of all—money and sex. If “coveting” is close to jealousy, then Carl wasn’t far wrong in his original guess. As for “cold-blooded,” crimes didn’t get much more cold-blooded than this one. The preacher’s alleged paramour, Artemis McGregor, wife of the church board president, Stuart McGregor, was arrested and charged as a codefendant a short time later.

  In South Florida, where the Reverend Bob Wing was well known, the response to the crime, the charges, and the eventual verdicts was sensational. Statewide, it made a splash. Nationally, coverage was limited to tabloids, and included the cheeky headline KILLER PREACHER LOVED HIS NEIGHBOR A LITTLE TOO MUCH.

  Bob Wing went to jail, refusing bond. Artemis McGregor was arraigned, then freed on a steep bond paid by her husband, Stuart. Tammi Golding took over the defense of both of them. Their plea? Not guilty. They opted for a joint trial, though their legal team advised passionately against it, hoping to pit one defendant against the other in front of different juries, if all else failed. But the defendants wouldn’t be used like that, they informed their lawyers.

  “We’re innocent,” Artemis said, “we didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I know that,” Tammi Golding assured her, “but we don’t have to establish that. All a jury needs to acquit is reasonable doubt. That’s all we have to do, just build a case for reasonable doubt.”

  At the same time, over in the state attorney’s office, Antonio Delano declared to his staff: “We’ve got them. I know it.”

  Susanna

  8

  “For a true crime writer, you’re a hell of a liar.”

  Having administered his delicious sentence for my crime, Franklin releases me. We sprawl on the bed—me in my bunched-up bathrobe, and he completely naked—and grin at each other.

  “So this is great news about your manuscript, Marie.”

  “Right,” I say, and roll over, suddenly feeling dulled again.

  “I was right about it,” he says, smugly, behind me. “It’s terrific.”

  “You liked it because I told you that if you didn’t I’d never sleep with you again.”

  “Yeah, that’s it, you’ve found me out.”

  I roll back over so I can see him. Even without touching him, I can still feel the luscious touch of his skin on mine, the smell of him, the feel of the curves and angles of his body under my hands, the curl of his fingers in mine, the feel of the top of his feet under the bottoms of mine, the taste of his tongue. Inside me, I can feel where he was and it makes me want him again. What would I do for sex, I wonder? How far would I go for love?

  “Will I see you when I visit Tony today?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie, it depends how busy I am.”

  Suddenly he is staring at me, and looking prosecutorial. “I’m not sure I like the whole idea of this appointment with Tony. What kind of bug has he got up his ass? He just can’t shut up about that damned case. But it is over. We won—”

  “And you lost.”

  He makes a face. “Oh, thank you. So good of you to remind me. Be sure to make a bigger point of that in your book, will you?”

  “Count on it.”

  “And my man Tony’s got other cases to work on now.”

  Even though this is the first time I’ve spent with him in three weeks, even though we don’t have much time to talk this morning, even though I’m really happy to be with him, there’s something that’s got to be said between us. It’s the reason I have diverted any talk of a shared vacation; there won’t be one if this isn’t solved. I didn’t want to say it last night and spoil our delicious reunion. But now I take a breath, and force the words out: “Franklin, it feels awkward to sit there pretending that you and I barely know each other.” The Howard County State Attorney and I have been “involved,” as they say, for some time now, and we’ve kept it a secret from the start, for reasons that seemed like good ideas back then. They don’t seem as good to me now. “What if your staff already knows about us? What if they’re pointing and giggling behind your back, and all the time you think they’re looking at you in awe because you’re such a great boss.”

  “Would they still be giggling then?”

  “Yes,” I say, deadpan. “In nervous awe.”

  “This didn’t bother you when you were interviewing cops and lawyers for this book of yours.”

  “Yes, it did, Franklin.”

  “But I like our little secret, Marie.” The sly smile returns and he waggles his eyebrows at me. “I thought you still enjoyed it, no?”

  “No.”

  Franklin almost manages to hide his surprise at my tone. The owner of the face that gives nothing away to juries—unless he plans it—cannot quite hide from me that I am taking him by surprise.

  “No? You’re the one who said secrecy is sexy.”

  “You must have me confused with another girlfriend.”

  “Yeah, that must be it. But admit it, it’s more fun this way, M
arie.”

  “Okay, I’ll admit it turned me on for a long time. But it doesn’t now, Franklin. We’re grown-ups, we ought to be able to do things that grown-ups do, like go to movies and restaurants, and not just hide out in my bedroom.”

  “Your bedroom is my favorite place.”

  “What’s the real reason, Franklin?”

  He lowers his lids and gives me a penetrating look from under them. I watch him decide whether or not to level with me, and while he’s taking his time doing that, I am deciding that quite a lot rides on the honesty of his answer.

  “Are you trying to pick a fight?” he asks, a question that I take for avoidance. “Are you mad about something else and you’re taking it out on me?”

  “Yes. No. What’s the real reason, Franklin?”

  “The real reason, Marie, is that I’m still not ready to tell my kids about you.”

  That hurts, and I can tell that he sees that it does.

  He didn’t even say “about us.” He said “about you.”

  He could add “I’m sorry,” but he doesn’t.

  There was a time when we first fell into this affair that we told ourselves that secrecy would protect us when it ended; nobody would know, so nobody would gossip, or take sides. We must not have expected it to last very long. But here we are, much later, and what started out thrilling has become kind of sad and exhausting to me.

  “I’m not talking about meeting them,” I say, with a bite to my words. “I’m talking about going to a movie. You and me. In public. Do you have to tell your kids about that?”

  “No, but if somebody saw us out together . . .”

  “They’re going to call your six-year-old and tell her?”

  He makes an exasperated face, which probably mirrors my own. I hate feeling put on the defensive about something that seems so simple to me. Why is he making this so difficult?

  “The divorce is still too fresh, Marie. For one thing, they might think it had something to do with you.”