BOYNTON SAT ON the floor, held his nose, which was gushing blood, and moaned. “I’m suing. Whoever you are, I’m suing.”
“No, you’re not,” I said as Sampson came up behind me. “We’re homicide detectives investigating Edita Kravic’s murder. We saw the e-mails you sent her.”
That rocked him. He wiped at his nose, groaned, muttered, “I had a bad reaction to a generic version of Singulair, an asthma drug. Talk to my allergist. He said in rare cases, it could make you manic. It definitely made me that way.”
“Some of the things you wrote sounded threatening and psychotic,” I said. “She was going to file a restraining order against you.”
His shoulders slumped. “I swear to you, Detective, that wasn’t the real John Boynton writing those things. It was a hopped-up, crazed version of me. Two days after getting off that goddamned drug, I was fine.”
The way he said it, exposed and defeated, made me believe it was possible that some of the messages had been fueled by a bad reaction to a drug.
“Okay, let’s put those particular e-mails aside,” I said. “The fact is, you seem to have had an escalating obsession with Edita Kravic from the first day of law school. Did you love her?”
Boynton looked ready to deny it but then surrendered and nodded. “I thought she was perfect.”
“But she didn’t feel that way about you?”
“She liked me at first, then I got all weird with the medicine.”
“You wrote to her once accusing her of hiring muscle to threaten you.”
“Said he’d take a baseball bat to my face if I didn’t end all contact with Edita.”
“Who was it?”
Boynton shrugged. “The cop she was sleeping with, and died with.” Something about the way he moved just then made me recognize him—this was the guy with the knapsack who’d run out of McGrath’s apartment.
“Can I go to a hospital, please?” he whined.
“When we’re done talking,” I said. “You’re not going to die from a nosebleed. Why did you break into Chief McGrath’s place?”
He hesitated. Then he said, “She asked me to.”
“Bullshit,” Sampson said.
“She did,” he insisted.
Boynton claimed that Edita had called him and said that she’d done some research and now believed him about the medicine. She’d also said she was in trouble and needed his help. They met, and she asked him to steal McGrath’s laptop.
“She said McGrath had stuff on the computer that could get her in big trouble, prevent her from becoming a lawyer,” Boynton said.
“Like what kind of stuff?”
“She wouldn’t tell me, but she was convincing,” Boynton said. “You could hear it in her voice and see it in her body language. She was scared by whatever he had on the laptop.”
Recalling the e-mails I’d seen in Edita’s computer, I said, “You were supposed to meet at ten the night before she was killed?”
He nodded and said she’d come over later than that, around eleven, to give him McGrath’s apartment key and to have sex.
“Edita was sleeping with you both?” Sampson asked, eyebrows raised.
“She was going to break up with McGrath after I gave her the laptop,” he said, looking crestfallen. “She was finally going to be mine.”
Before she’d left Boynton’s apartment that night, Edita had told him she was taking McGrath to an early-morning yoga class and then to breakfast at her place. Boynton would have plenty of time to use the key and get the laptop. I thought about it, remembered Boynton running with the backpack from McGrath’s place. It all fit in a strange way.
Boynton said he had the laptop at his apartment. We got him to his feet, handcuffed him, and told him we’d swing by his place on the way to the hospital.
“Am I under arrest? They’ll throw me out of school.”
“You’re in custody for now,” I said.
In the car on the way to his apartment, I turned around in the front seat and looked at him.
“In one of your e-mails during your manic phase, you wrote something like ‘I know what you do, Edita, and I’ll tell everyone.’ What was that all about?”
Fear flickered across Boynton’s swollen face. “I was just bluffing, you know? Everyone has a secret, so I figured—”
“You’re lying to me, Mr. Boynton,” I said with a sigh. “Every time you lie, you get closer to an arrest and the end of law school. So what do you know?”
“I … I followed her a few times.”
“You stalked her?” Sampson said.
“Just followed her. I wanted to see what she did when she wasn’t at school. That’s all.”
“Get to it,” Sampson said. “Where did she go?”
“This place in Vienna, Virginia, called the Phoenix Club.”
Edita went there three or four days a week, he told us. She’d often stay until after midnight. Boynton tried to get inside once but was told it was a private club. He said he stopped following her once he realized someone else was following her.
“Who?” Sampson said.
“Another cop,” Boynton said. “At least, he talked like a cop.”