I'll Walk Alone - Mary Higgins Clark [108]
“Yeah. Thanks.” She clicked off.
I wasted a night’s sleep, he thought. She won’t go to the cops. Once again he picked up a newspaper with Zan’s face on it. “I can’t wait to see your expression tomorrow when that real estate woman and her buyer find Brittany and Matthew, and you get the sad tidings,” he said aloud.
And like that he figured out the solution that was at his fingertips. It would take money, but that kind of money he could willingly spare.
He just didn’t have the heart to kill the child himself.
71
It was late morning when he got to his desk after seeing Brittany La Monte’s roommates. Wally Johnson leaned back in his chair. Totally ignoring the phones and conversations going on in the big room, he studied Brittany’s photo montage. There is a slight resemblance to the Moreland woman, he thought. Angela Anton had said that La Monte was a consummate makeup artist. He held the montage against the front page of the Post showing Alexandra Moreland coming out of the courthouse. The headline read: ZAN SCREAMS, “I AM NOT THE WOMAN IN THOSE PHOTOS.”
Was there even the faintest chance that she was right?
Wally closed his eyes. On the other hand, was Brittany La Monte still alive, or had Bartley Longe managed to carry out his threat to her? She had not been seen in nearly two years, and the postcard could well have been a phony.
The tape of that phone call was enough to bring Longe in for questioning. But suppose… Wally Johnson did not finish the thought. Instead, he reached for his cell phone and called Billy Collins. “Wally Johnson, Billy, you at your desk?”
“On the way in. I had to stop at the dentist. Be there in twenty minutes,” Billy answered.
“I’ll take a run up. I want to show you something.”
“Sure,” Billy said, mildly curious.
* * *
The night before, Billy had gone directly from Zan Moreland’s arraignment to a play at Fordham University on the Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx. His son, a senior, had one of the leading roles in it. Billy and Eileen had heard about the shooting of Fr. Aiden O’Brien in the car on their way home to Forest Hills.
“I’m sorry we won’t get this case, but it happened in another precinct,” he had told Eileen heatedly the night before. “To shoot a seventy-eight-year-old priest when he’s in the process of offering you forgiveness has to be the worst form of lowlife. I just spoke to Fr. O’Brien earlier today, something about the Moreland case. The crazy thing is that Fr. O’Brien was warned about that guy. Alvirah Meehan, the friend of Zan Moreland I told you about, had seen someone watching that priest Monday evening. She even went to view the church security camera tape, but couldn’t get a decent look at him.”
All Friday night, Billy had kept waking up, feeling as if he had, in some way, personally failed Fr. O’Brien. But we did look at the tape, he thought. The glimpse we got of that guy with a lot of dark hair was useless. He could have been anybody.
The first thing he did in the morning was to phone the hospital, where a police guard had been placed outside the intensive care unit. “He’s holding his own, Billy,” was the reassuring answer to his inquiry.
At the precinct, Jennifer Dean was waiting at his desk with David Feldman, one of the detectives assigned to investigate the shooting of Fr. O’Brien.
Although Jennifer Dean was outwardly calm, Billy knew her well enough to sense that she was tense. “Wait till you hear what Dave has to tell us, Billy,” she began. “It’s pretty explosive.”
Feldman didn’t waste time on preliminaries. “Billy, as soon as the medics got the priest on the way to the hospital, we looked at the security cameras.” The crinkles around David Feldman’s eyes were proof that the detective was by nature a man who frequently smiled, but now his expression was grave. “We had a description from some of the people who were in the atrium after they heard three popping sounds. They saw a six- or six-foot-one man with a bushy head of black hair, trench coat, upturned