Chat - Archer Mayor [108]
Joe had seen only one photograph of this woman—from a brochure that Sam had collected while visiting her medical practice—and it was hardly reflective of the person standing before him now. But it seemed reasonable when he asked, “Dr. Gartner?”
“Don’t move.” John Leppman’s wife’s voice was a taut monotone.
“I’m not. What do you want?”
“That you leave us alone.”
“Am I bothering you?” Joe’s brain was working overtime, trying to bridge the gaps between what she knew, what he knew, and what she thought he might know. Incongruously, he also made a mental note to address the building’s lax security—the door downstairs had no metal detector, and a lock so flimsy, Joe himself had popped it open one night when he forgot his keys.
At the time, that had been a good thing.
“Spare me. You people have been digging into every corner of our lives.”
“Are you surprised?” Joe switched to considering his own survival. No one rational walked into a cop’s office with a gun—not that someone hadn’t done precisely that in his home just twenty-four hours earlier. But what was this one hoping to gain? Joe doubted that it was her own self-preservation. Sandy Gartner was here for her sole surviving daughter.
“Nothing wrong was done by anyone.”
“Those two men deserved to die,” Joe suggested.
“They were hoping to rape teenage girls—children.”
“So, you wanted to be helpful.”
After a moment’s pause, Gartner said, “Yes.”
Joe was torn between the conversation and its context. The gun was no prop, and its eventual use depended on the depth of Gartner’s self-delusion. On the other hand, if he played this right, her very words could close the case, here and now.
He decided to try inching her back toward reality, while fantasizing that if the movies were right, a sudden leap by him—as he whipped out his own gun in midair—would result in a full confession and his not lying dead on the floor.
“And you did that by using the stolen Taser on the first man, and the chemical cookie on the second. You know, according to our lab, the DMSO probably wasn’t needed. The fentanyl would’ve worked on its own.”
Sandy Gartner took a few paces toward him, revealing more of her face to the light. Joe could tell from the confusion in her eyes that his comment had hit home. The problem was that he was now approaching the very edge of his knowledge and had already taken a huge, albeit calculated, risk. He and his squad had assumed that those two drugs had materialized via the horse vet route, despite the vet clinic’s having told them that none had gone missing. But as Joe had uttered Gartner’s name out loud, it occurred to him for the first time that the easiest, least complicated source of both chemicals could have been a doctor’s office.
But what about Wendy? Joe had convinced himself that she’d delivered the cookie to the second victim and stolen the Taser cartridge used on the first, both with her father’s involvement.
The woman with the gun suggested otherwise.
“Did you know their names?” Joe asked her, hoping her answer would start to clarify who had done what.
Her eyebrows rose slightly. “They don’t have names.”
“These two did. One of them even had a wife and child.”
Gartner held out the gun and sighted along it. Joe watched her eye floating just above the black hole of the barrel as she aimed at his face. Her hand was trembling slightly.
“They were monsters,” she said. “I saw them.”
Maybe now’s the time to jump, he thought. I might get lucky.
A soft male voice floated into the room. “Sandy? Sweetheart? Put the gun down.”
She startled. Joe winced, surprised that, in fact, she didn’t fire and he didn’t jump.
But the gun didn’t go off. Nor was it lowered.
A second shadow entered and stood quietly by