“April fourth,” Sampson said. “Eight days after you drove her.”
He got out a phone, said, “When? Night? Day?”
“She was last seen around six thirty in the evening,” I said.
Kendrick thumbed the phone, looked up, and smiled. “What I thought. I was gone that entire day and the two days after, a three-day gig in New York City driving for the Landreys, a nice, rich old couple from Georgetown who wanted to see if a limo was more fun than the train. Go ask Marty, my boss. He can confirm it.”
CHAPTER 16
I DIDN’T SLEEP WELL; I had terrible dreams about Maya Parker and then Kay Willingham. In one, Kay was walking away from me, in and out of fog and mist. Occasionally she’d look over her shoulder or make a half turn and beckon me closer.
But every time I took a step her way, even when I ran toward her, I could not close the distance between us. She’d fade away, wrapped in the fog, and I’d start calling her name, waking myself up.
At ten minutes to five, I was groggy but awake for good. Bree appeared deep in the land of Nod. I eased out of bed, got on my running gear, then slipped from the room, went down the stairs, and walked out onto the front porch.
The air was thick; it was in the seventies, even at that early hour. I did some ballistic stretches Jannie had taught me, then set out at a slow jog that soon quickened into a nice steady pace. Ordinarily, running is a time for me to work my body and empty my mind. But I couldn’t empty my mind that morning. Kay Willingham kept barging in. So did Randall Christopher.
When had they met? And how? And where was Christopher’s wife? Did she kill her husband and his lover in a jealous rage?
Though I’d spoken to the principal five or six times over the years, I’d mostly seen him from a distance, heard him speak at parent-teacher events and whatnot.
Christopher was strikingly handsome, and at six foot two and weighing about one ninety, he was still built like the basketball guard he’d been at the University of Maryland. And yet the physique and good looks weren’t what I remembered about him. It was his palpable charisma, the sense you got the moment he opened his mouth that you were about to hear something both challenging and profound. He was smart without being a show-off, compassionate with the students, and naturally funny.
And he wasn’t afraid to be of service to the community, just as he had been during the early days of both the Parker and Hernandez disappearances, volunteering to help us organize the big civilian searches. I considered the possibility that he was involved in the rapes and killings because serial killers have been known to try to insert themselves into investigations.
Could Christopher have been involved? Were he and Kay killed for it?
I could not see it, at least not based on the evidence at hand, but I decided not to close the door on the possibility, unlikely as it was, that Kay had been wrong about Christopher, that her legendary instincts about political talent were off the mark.
The fact of the matter was that the principal had made concrete improvements in his students’ lives. I’d seen how much Jannie and her classmates had grown as people in his school. That had to have made Christopher attractive.
Was it what made him attractive to Kay?
Of course it was. His infidelity with her aside, on paper Christopher was just the kind of project Kay liked to take on: a political diamond in the rough that needed to be cut and polished so it would gleam brilliantly.
After all, didn’t she do that for her ex-husband? I thought as I ran up the sidewalk toward St. Anthony’s. I meant to head home. But when I came abreast of the church, I felt compelled to stop and go inside.
With a good forty minutes until morning Mass, the church was empty. I crossed to the rack of devotional candles and fished around in my back pocket for the five-dollar bill I always stuck in there in case I wanted to stop for water during my run. I slid it into the box, took a long stick match, and lit two candles, one for Christopher and the other for Kay. As the flame on her candle began to dance, I remembered watching the news after coming home from the Capital City Limo garage the evening before and feeling horrible at the way some in the media were treating her.
Alive, Kay had had most journalists in Washington eating out of her hand, but now they were tearing her to shreds. The rumor mills had been grinding out nonsense, filling the airwaves with snark and innuendo that smeared both victims’ reputations, but especially Kay’s. The socialite, it was suggested, had had a wild side before and after her marriage to the vice president. Kay allegedly had a series of torrid affairs over the years and at one time or another she’d been linked romantically to a wealthy Wall Street investor, an actor young enough to be her son, and an editor at the Post.
But thank God, not to me.
How long will that last? How long before Clive Sparkman gets into this mix and decides to sling some mud my way?
CHAPTER 17
I STOOD THERE LOOKING AT the candles, then I closed my eyes and tried to tune it all out for a moment, tried to see the Kay Willingham I’d known.
Her husband at the time, J. Walter Willingham, had been the governor of Alabama when I first met her at a charity function for victims’ rights nearly a decade ago, well before Bree came into my life. That was the same night I’d driven her home and she’d broken her heel and tripped.
After that there’d been no contact for almost two months. Then she called me and asked me to meet her for lunch at a restaurant in DC; she said she had a personal request. She wasn’t the kind of woman you turned down, so I agreed.
At that lunch, Kay asked me to look into the conviction of a killer on death row in Alabama who had written her asking for help.
“Most people like you would push a request like that to the corner of the desk or drop it in the trash,” I said after she set a bulging legal-size envelope in front of me.
“I’m not most people, Alex. I actually care about wrongfully convicted prisoners. And it’s not because of the privileged life I’ve led. If I see an injustice, I try to right it.”
I studied her. She was so much more than beauty, poise, and wealth. “Okay, I’ll take a look at this, see if there’s anything I can do.”
“Thank you, Alex,” she said. “I can’t tell you what this means to me.”
Her smile was dazzling and pure. Her eyes sparkled with empathy.
I swallowed hard, looked away, and gestured at the envelope. “What makes you so interested in this case? These usually go to the governor.”
Her smile faded. “Before we married, Walter was the prosecutor on this case. It was the one that helped launch his political career.”
“And you’re questioning the conviction?”
“No, I just want there to be zero doubt going forward. Between you and me, Walter is thinking of running for national office, and despite our current difficulties, I want no skeletons in his closet, no stone unturned before he launches his next campaign.”
Standing there in the church, I opened my eyes, remembering how I’d looked at the case only briefly because, with Nana Mama’s help, I was caring for three young children. I couldn’t run off to Alabama to learn more, so three days after she offered me the job, I turned it down. She’d accepted my decision gracefully when I explained about the kids.