“When will you be home?” he asked before she could hang up.
“Soon.” She’d rather not spend another night at the bungalow without him, but at least it wasn’t storming. She’d be able to tell if someone was trying to break in, especially if Makita was there with her. And if the weather turned in a few hours, as it so often did in Alaska, she’d just have to cope. She refused to spend another sleepless night at the office.
“I’ll stop by to see you,” he said.
“Okay.” When she put down the receiver, Russ shoved the letter he was holding in front of her.
She recognized the handwriting. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
He blinked at her. “What?”
“This is from Fitzpatrick.”
“I know.”
“You don’t think he’s writing me, too? You don’t think I’ve already heard it all?”
After tossing the letter on her desk, he plopped into the seat across from her. “I feel so bad, Evelyn. He’s pleading with us.”
She shoved the letter back toward him. “A lot of convicted murderers never stop maintaining their innocence, Russ.”
“Let’s not forget everything Tim’s accomplished. He’s a renowned psychiatrist. That’s why you enlisted his help to get this place approved and built. You were too fresh out of grad school to do it all on your own.”
Tim might have been well respected at one time, but he’d definitely tarnished his reputation. “I understand that. I’m grateful to him for his help in bringing Hanover House into existence, but—”
“Before you go into all that, can I just tell you what I’m thinking?” Russ broke in.
She gestured for him to continue.
“Since it was Jasper who murdered three of your friends twenty years ago, it’s far more likely that he also murdered Mandy Walker and Charlotte Zimmerman Pine last winter. The psychopath you’ve described to us all, in great detail, would love the idea of scaring you that way, of returning to the place where he committed his very first atrocities and taking two more lives—two more people you knew—as a little reminder.”
Russ wasn’t telling her anything new. She’d been over all of that in her own mind, thousands of times. But there were other considerations. “The murders in Boston stopped after Fitzpatrick was arrested. How do you explain that, Russ?”
“If it was Jasper and not Tim, how would you explain it? You’d say it was Jasper’s way of laughing at the system, of hurting another innocent by letting Tim take the fall and of keeping you anxious and unsure at the same time, right?”
Right. But was that giving Jasper too much credit? Had she built him up too much, made him almost superhuman?
“You’re forgetting how terribly Fitzpatrick let us all down in the end,” she said. He became so obsessed with her, he’d started creeping around her house, watching her through the windows, even taking pictures of her in various stages of undress. He’d also undermined her authority whenever possible. He’d actually superimposed her face on pornographic pictures of women involved in sex acts, which he’d shown to the psychopaths he was studying, instead of using other pictures that were meant to determine how they reacted to certain stimuli. He should’ve lost his license and would have if she hadn’t kept quiet for the sake of the institution. The only reason he hadn’t been fired was because he quit.
Russ lifted a placating hand. “Adjusting to Alaska hasn’t been easy for any of us. I understand he made some poor choices.”
What he’d done went beyond “poor choices,” but Eve lyn didn’t care to dredge up the details, so she let the statement go.
“That doesn’t make him a murderer,” Russ finished.
“Have you looked beyond what he’s been telling you—at the evidence?” she asked. “He was following Charlotte Zimmerman Pine. Calling her and hanging up. And the police found his shoe print at the scene of the crime in her blood!”
“He was following Charlotte because Mandy Walker had just been killed and he didn’t want Charlotte to be next. He’d found a picture in your yearbook, one where you were painting a Homecoming sign with all your girlfriends, and he knew she was the only person in that picture, besides you, who was still alive. As far as he was concerned, that meant she had a bull’s-eye on her forehead. So he was trying to keep her safe. He was calling to scare her enough to make her cautious, hoping she’d pressure the police to keep an eye out, too.”
“What about the blood with his shoe impression on the bathroom floor?”
“Tim claims he was sitting in his van at the end of the block, watching the house where Charlotte was babysitting, when a vehicle came tearing past him. Something about the fact that it was obviously a rental car and it looked as though it’d come from around the block, where someone could’ve approached the house without his knowledge, made him go closer to check. That was when he saw the door standing ajar and went inside to find Charlotte lying in a pool of her own blood.”
“The jury didn’t buy that explanation, and I’m not convinced I should, either. That isn’t the story he initially gave police.”
“He admitted to following her and calling her. He also explained why he did both. So what if he didn’t tell them he’d been inside the house? Would you? The police were already looking at him as a person of interest. He didn’t want to become their primary suspect!”
“If he hadn’t been trying to insert himself back into my life, he wouldn’t have been anywhere near her!”
“He wasn’t trying to insert himself back into your life. He was trying to be useful again, to recover from his previous mistakes and find meaningful work. Can’t you have a little compassion for him?”
She couldn’t help being offended. It was easy for Russ to forgive Fitzpatrick; Russ hadn’t been victimized by him. “I do have some compassion for him. I just don’t want to be blinded by it.”
“The knife used to kill Charlotte has never been recovered. And there was no evidence tying him to Mandy’s murder. None whatsoever.”
“So?”
“So both those things speak in Tim’s favor.”
“That the knife was never found speaks in no one’s favor.”
“It says he didn’t have the murder weapon in his house or car or anywhere the police searched. And whoever killed Mandy killed Charlotte. Not only was Charlotte murdered shortly after Mandy, they were both friends of yours, both in that same yearbook picture.”
Evelyn couldn’t argue that Charlotte’s and Mandy’s murders weren’t connected. They had to be. But she had so much responsibility on her shoulders already. She didn’t want to feel she had to take on the justice system in addition to everything else, especially for Tim. “Just because there’s nothing to suggest Tim killed Mandy doesn’t mean he didn’t. He didn’t have an alibi for either night.”
“He lived alone. Rarely went out. Not having anyone to corroborate his whereabouts wouldn’t be unusual for someone like that. Heck, I live pretty much the same way, so there’d be no one to vouch for me, either, if I was in trouble.”
With a sigh at his persistence, she propped her chin on her fist. If not for Fitzpatrick’s behavior with her and that shoe imprint, she would’ve been absolutely convinced it was more likely Jasper who’d killed Mandy and Charlotte than Fitzpatrick. Jasper had a history of killing people; Fitzpatrick didn’t. And she could imagine someone in Tim’s situation following Charlotte in an attempt to be involved in something he felt might resuscitate his career. At the time, he’d been eager to reclaim his former prestige.
But he’d behaved so terribly when they worked together. How could she ever believe in him now?
“The justice system is supposed to determine his guilt or innocence, not me. And he’s already had his day in court.”