Knife Edge (A Dead Cold Mystery Book 27) Read online

“In the first place they had no time. In the second place, I can’t imagine many women covering for a husband who is suspected of infidelity. I mean, nobody has a greater interest in knowing if he’s been unfaithful than his wife, right? And if he had been unfaithful, Dr. Margaret Wagner has got to be a pretty good candidate as his long-term colleague and potential partner. She’s also a looker. But his wife didn’t seem in the least bit suspicious of her. Or him, for that matter.”

  I grunted. “I want to talk to Emma Mitchell, without her husband present, and hear from her what went down that day, and if there was any time during the morning when she was not with her husband.”

  She glanced at me. “We can get that from the file. But I really don’t think she’d cover for him, especially as her daughter got killed in the same attack, and her son was driven into severe catatonic depression.”

  “I know,” I sighed, “and I agree. “But there is something about this that just doesn’t hang together right.”

  We had reached Washington Square East, by the NYU Arts and Science building, and crossed over to the park entrance. As we walked through the gates she said, “We need to have a good look at the backyard. I mean, essentially, what we are saying is that, if Brad Mitchell didn’t do it—and I don’t think he did—there was a…” She counted out on her fingers. “Emma Mitchell, Brad Mitchell, Lea, Lee and Marcus—that’s five. So what we are saying is, there was a sixth person either in the house or in the backyard. That person got into the garden shed when the kids were playing in there, and killed Lea and Lee.”

  I nodded. “Testimony from Emma and Brad states that they were the only people there aside from the kids.”

  “But clearly, if Brad is not our killer, then there was a sixth person. So one of the questions we need to be asking is, how did that sixth person get in?”

  We moved in among the crowd at the gate and then turned right, away from the people and in, under the trees. Dehan kept talking.

  “Was he knowingly admitted? In which case, are they shielding him?”

  “That seems unlikely.”

  “Yeah, I know, but psychiatrists and sociologists are all a little crazy, Stone, and we have to ask the question, even if we then dismiss it. Did one of them admit that sixth person?”

  “OK—”

  “So we have to ask that, and we also have to ask, did one of the kids let him in, and the parents didn’t know?”

  “Which brings us to Mitchell’s suspicion that Lee might have had some kind of accomplice.”

  “Right. Or, Lea or Marcus might have made a ‘friend.’ Sometimes the kids from these upper-middle-class families can lead very sheltered lives, and they can become really naïve.”

  I smiled. “So, if any of those scenarios is right, we are talking about a layout in the house and/or yard-cum-garden, where the kids could admit somebody to the backyard without being seen by their parents, from wherever they were finishing breakfast.”

  She screwed up her face. “Yeah, from which they could not be seen, but close enough so they could also hear the kids scream. But then again, far enough away that by the time they got there, the killer had had time to get away.”

  As we pulled away from the crowd she slowed her pace and linked her arm through mine.

  I said, “I didn’t get a chance to digest the file fully, but I do remember that they were having breakfast in the kitchen. It was a warm morning and they had the kitchen door open onto the backyard. The windows were open too. I know they have a large lawn, flowerbeds and trees. There is also a garage beside the house, and the shed is at the end of the lawn, up against some kind of a wall or a fence with trees.”

  “What’s on the other side of the fence?”

  I sucked my teeth and squinted up at the translucent green foliage above my head. “Another backyard, as far as I can recall. I’m pretty sure it’s another backyard.”

  “So our killer has done one of four things.” I was nodding, and she went on. “He has come through the front of the house or the garage, he has come over the walls at either side, from neighboring houses, or he has come from the neighbor’s yard at the back of the house. Unless our killer is one of the neighbors, we can rule out opportunism. He was not strolling by and saw an opportunity. He actually intended to kill those kids.”

  We came to the arch and I paused to stare at it with my hands deep in my pockets. It was massive, solid, immovable. The icy breeze crept down the back of my neck.

  “Unless there is some form of access, like a gate, that somebody left open, or unless somebody left the front door open when they went to get the paper or something of that sort, it is really very hard to see how it could be anything but intentional, and premeditated.”

  She gave a small shrug. “Premeditated, or spontaneous but after a long period of provocation, buildup…”

  I nodded. “It could be that.” And after a moment, “So what are we saying then?”

  She turned away, with her back to the arch, and stared away toward the crowds spilling out of Fifth Avenue.

  “Dr. Brad Mitchell is very skilled at hiding his feelings and playing the part of the wise, mature psychiatrist, but in fact Lee’s increasingly challenging behavior, his insults and his threats, had started to get to him. Something happened that Sunday. They were having breakfast, like they said, they heard screams or shouts…” She shook her head. “But they didn’t both go to see what had happened. Brad went alone. Whatever he found in the shed was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He lost it and killed Leroy. How Lea came to be killed as well, we can’t know. Maybe we’ll never know. But Brad went berserk and called his wife. When she got there he told her he had found the scene like that, and begged her to tell the cops they had gone to the shed together, otherwise he would immediately become their prime suspect, being apparently the last person to see them alive.”

  “Yeah, it seems to make a lot of sense, but only if you ignore the huge improbability of Mitchell killing his daughter, and we are back where we started.”

  “Alternative,” she said, “it was Emma Mitchell.”

  I turned and frowned at her. “With what motive?”

  “I’m just examining this from every angle, Stone, and thinking aloud. Motive?” She shrugged and turned to face me. “Motives to kill are not hard to find. Maybe she and Brad have an open relationship. Maybe she didn’t give a good goddamn if he had an affair. Hell, maybe they were having a ménage a trios. Maybe,” she said with more emphasis, “Emma is a shareholder in the clinic, with a vested interest in its success, and maybe that little brat Leroy was going to screw the project up for them by revealing that they were less than conventional in their amorous affairs!” She stuck out her hand and pointed her finger at me. “Maybe—and think about this—maybe his blackmail plot against Brad failed, exactly as they described it. So Lee did some research and tried again, this time with Emma, and maybe he found that she had a lover at the Sociology Department. After all, Stone, Emma is just as liable to have an affair as Brad is.”

  “That is a hell of a lot of maybes, Dehan, with not a single shred of hard evidence to support the speculation.”

  “First, Stone, we need some kind of theory so that we can start looking for evidence. The guys in that initial investigation got all the forensic evidence there was to get. It led them to a blind alley. We need to think around this in a different way, develop some theories and see where they take us.”

  I sighed heavily and grunted. “That is a very dangerous way to approach a case, Dehan. You know that. The last thing we want to start doing is hunting for evidence, or tailoring evidence to fit our theories.”

  “I’m not advocating that. What I am saying is that the evidence we have from the previous investigation only takes us so far. So we need to develop some kind of theory, based on the evidence we have, and see if that theory takes us a little further.”

  “OK,” I said with little conviction, “like what?”

  She spread her hands. “Look at the facts. It�
��s like that Holmes thing.”

  “Eliminate the impossible and whatever is left, however improbable, is the truth.”

  “That’s the one. Now, somebody killed those two kids, and if there was no sixth person in the house, there is no escaping the fact that it had to be either Brad Mitchell or Emma Mitchell…”

  I stared at her for a long moment, then shrugged and we both spoke at the same time.

  “Or both of them.”

  Five

  In the car, headed north through Manhattan toward the Bronx, Dehan called Dr. Emma Mitchell. She put it on speaker a couple of seconds before the ringing stopped and a slightly impatient voice said, “Yes, this is Dr. Mitchell…”

  “Dr. Mitchell, this is Detective Carmen Dehan. You spoke to my partner a while ago…”

  “Detective Stone, yes. What is it?”

  “As you know we are reviewing the murders of your daughter and your adoptive son…”

  Dr. Emma Mitchell clearly didn’t have a lot of time or appreciate those who would deprive her of the little she had. She sighed.

  “You’re quite right, Detective Dehan. I do know that. So there isn’t much to be gained from telling me it again. What can I help you with? And please, come to the point. I am very busy, Detective.”

  Dehan narrowed her eyes at me. “We would like to see the scene of the crime…”

  “Whatever for? We had cops tramping all over the house for days after the murder. They photographed it, measured it, scoured it, trampled it… What in God’s name do you think you are going to get from…”

  I’d had about as much as I was willing to take of Dr. Emma Mitchell and cut her dead.

  “Dr. Mitchell, this is Detective Stone. I’m going to offer you a deal—”

  “…a deal?”

  “Yeah, we won’t give you advice on how to teach a sociology class, and you don’t try to tell us how to conduct a murder investigation—or, for that matter, a cold case investigation. It would be very helpful for us to be able to have a look at the house, the garden and the shed. If you are unwilling to give us access, we will take due note of that and seek a court order. However, we would much rather have a positive, cooperative relationship with you.”

  There was a long silence. I wondered for a moment if she had walked away from the phone, but her voice came back with a peculiar tone to it.

  “All right, Detective Stone. You’ve made your point. When would you like to see the house?”

  “As soon as possible. How about today?”

  “Today?” She sounded more amused than surprised.

  “And I’d like to talk to you while we’re at it, Dr. Mitchell.”

  “For sure. Will you want my husband present?”

  “That won’t be necessary for now.”

  “Say, three o’clock?”

  “That will do fine.”

  “And, Detective, can you take me off speakerphone, please?”

  Dehan raised an eyebrow at me and handed me her cell. I took it off speaker and held it to my ear. “Yes, Dr. Mitchell?”

  “Will you be alone, or will your annoying partner be there?”

  “We’ll both be there. This is a murder inquiry…”

  “Don’t remind me, please. Very well, I’ll be there at three.”

  We stopped for a coffee at the Shore Haven Diner on Castle Hill Avenue, and at ten to three, made our way down to Turneur Avenue. The Mitchells’ house was a large, two-storey, double-fronted affair in cream clapboard, with gabled roofs and an art deco stained-glass fanlight over the front door. Seven redbrick steps rose to a small porch with a white, wrought-iron balustrade. There were two lawns at the front, with carefully trimmed orange trees, and a broad concrete path led to a double garage in back. We pulled up outside the white, wrought-iron gate and I saw that there was a cream Range Rover parked by the garage. Dehan raised an eyebrow.

  “Who was it said there were no liberals left in New York, because they had all been mugged?”

  I smiled. “It’s a popular myth, but there are plenty of liberals left in New York, they’re all just busy mugging other liberals.”

  The car doors slammed in the quiet street and we crossed the front yard to climb the steps to the front door. It opened before we reached it and a woman, still youthful in her late forties, leaned on the jamb and smiled at me.

  “Detective Stone?”

  “Are you Dr. Mitchell?”

  “I am.”

  She held out a hand, palm down as though she expected me to kiss it. I ignored it and pulled out my badge.

  “I am Detective Stone, this is my partner Detective Dehan. May we come inside, Dr. Mitchell?”

  She raised a mocking eyebrow. “So formal! By all means, come on in.”

  We followed her into what was not so much a room as a broad space that seemed to take up most of the first floor. There was a staircase that climbed up the left wall to the upper floor, and at the rear of the room a set of sliding, plate-glass doors through which I could make out the luminous green of a lawn. In front of it there was a large dining table covered in magazines and newspapers. Bookshelves lined most of the walls and to the right of the front door an eclectic cluster of armchairs and sofas formed a loose semicircle around an open fireplace.

  She stopped and turned to face me. She didn’t look at Dehan.

  “So, what do you want to see?”

  I glanced at Dehan. She said, “Where exactly were you sitting when you and your husband heard the screams?”

  Emma Mitchell narrowed her eyes at me and turned on her heel. “We were breakfasting in the kitchen.”

  We followed her through a door to the left of the sliding doors, under the stairs, and into a kitchen which, at about half the size of the living room, was still large. A window on the right overlooked a patio beyond which a large expanse of lawn led to a pond and a row of cypress trees. Just beside them, in the far right-hand corner of the garden, there was a large, wooden toolshed. Flanking the lawn on both sides were rosebushes and tall, redbrick walls.

  Inside the kitchen, beneath the window, there were two sinks and a marble work surface. To the left of that there was a door to the backyard. It stood closed. In the middle of the floor was a solid pine table, and up against the walls were a vast fridge, a sofa, a couple of scruffy armchairs and a coffee table. Here too there were bookcases.

  Emma Mitchell gestured with both hands at the table.

  “That is where we were sitting.”

  Dehan stood and looked from the table to the window and back again. She moved to it, pulled out a chair and sat down, looking over at the window again.

  “This is where you were sitting.”

  “I said so.”

  “The table is in the same position it was in that day?”

  Emma Mitchell sighed. “I told you, that is where we were sitting that morning.”

  Dehan glanced at me. “You can’t see the lawn or the shed from here.”

  I jerked my head at the kitchen door. “That door was open?”

  Emma sighed again, a little louder. “Yes, the door and the windows were open. I was sitting there,” she pointed at Dehan, “and Brad was sitting at the other end. We were reading the papers. I suppose the sounds of the children playing had become a kind of background noise, and we didn’t really notice when it stopped.”

  She paused, leaned against the fridge and stared down at the floor.

  “Ours has always been a very peaceful, quiet home. Happy. We all got along very well. If there was ever any noise it was usually laughter. Lea and Marcus used to laugh a lot. Nothing…” She looked up at me and frowned. “Nothing ever happened. Brad and I had the whole thing sorted.” She smiled. “Our life was like a well-oiled machine. Everything happened as it should, according to what we had planned. That day should not have been different to any other. The silence that fell over the garden that morning, while we were sitting here reading, drinking coffee, should not have meant anything. It should not have presaged anything.”
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  I rested my ass against the sink and we waited. She looked down at the terracotta floor again and seemed to shrug with her eyebrows.

  “It did, though,” she said quietly, simply. “The first we knew was a terrible, shrill screaming. I remember it constantly, every day, at every moment, and every time I do, it seems to me that we sat there interminably, staring at each other without moving. And all the while poor Lea was in terror, being killed. And I was just sitting there.

  “I ask myself, every day, if I had reacted sooner, if I had done something sooner, might we have saved Lea’s…” She stopped and closed her eyes. “Might we have saved Lee and Lea’s lives?”

  “What were they screaming? Were there words? Were they calling to you?”

  “No.” She gave her head a brief shake. “It was incoherent, like hysteria, shrieking noises.”

  I asked, “What happened next?”

  She shook her head again. It was a gesture of bewilderment, still, after all those years. “I sat, like a moron, and watched Brad walk to the window and look out. Then there was another shrill scream. This time the hysteria was unmistakable. I recall it as though it were in slow motion. Brad turned and frowned at me. And I just frowned back.” She raised her hands to her head. “I wish I could go back in time and kick us both, scream at us to get out into the yard and do something. But it wasn’t till the third scream that Brad reacted and suddenly ran.”

  “What did you do?”

  She looked surprised by the question. “Well, I went after him, of course.”

  Dehan leaned her elbows on the table. “At what point did you realize the screaming was coming from the shed?”

  Emma Mitchell looked at her for the first time. She didn’t answer straight away.

  “I suppose, when I went out into the yard. Brad was running for the shed.”

  “Was the screaming still going on?”

  “No, it had stopped.”

  Dehan glanced at me. I gave her a small frown, but she went on. “So, you went for the shed because your husband was running that way?”

  “Yes, I don’t know what you’re driving at.”