Just Take My Heart - Mary Higgins Clark [10]
An hour later she was walking up the steps of the Bergen County Courthouse and, as she placed her bag on the electronic security monitor, timidly inquired as to the location of the elevator that would take her to the second-floor prosecutor's office.
Just Take My Heart
8
As Alice Mills was getting off the bus down the block from the courthouse, Emily was reviewing her notes for the interview with Bill}' Tryon and Jake Rosen, the two homicide detectives who had worked on the Natalie Raines case from its inception. They had been among the prosecutor's team which responded to the call from the Closter police after they had arrived at Natalie's home and found her body.
Tryon and Rosen had settled in chairs opposite her desk. As usual, when Emily looked at them, she couldn't help but feel the stark con?trast in her reaction to the two men. Jake Rosen, age thirty-one, six feet tall, with a trim body, close-cropped blond hair, and an intelli?gent demeanor, was a smart, diligent investigator. She had worked with him several years before, when they both had been assigned to the juvenile division, and they had gotten along well. Unlike a cou?ple of his colleagues, including Billy Tryon, he had never seemed to resent having a woman as his supervisor.
Tryon, however, had been cut from a different cloth. Emily and other women in the office had always felt his thinly veiled hostility. They all resented the fact that because he was Prosecutor Ted Wesley's cousin, no complaints, however justified, had ever been filed against him.
He was a good investigator, Emily didn't dispute that. But it was
common knowledge that in the methods that he sometimes used to obtain convictions, he walked the line. There had been numerous accusations over the years by defendants who angrily denied that they had made the incriminating verbal statements he described in his sworn testimony at trials. While she understood that all detectives receive that kind of complaint at some point, there was no doubt that Tryon had much more than his share of them.
He was also the detective who had been the first to respond to Easton's request to talk to someone from the prosecutor's office after his arrest for the burglary.
Emily hoped the distaste she felt for Tryon did not show in her expression as she looked at him, slouched in his chair. With his weather-beaten face, shaggy haircut, and eyes perpetually half closed, he looked older than his fifty-two years. Divorced, and known to consider himself a ladies' man, she knew that some women out?side the office found him appealing. Her distaste was magnified when she heard that he was telling people she wasn't tough enough to try this case. But after studying the file she had to admit that he and Rosen had done a thorough job of investigating the crime scene and of interviewing the witnesses.
She did not waste time on pleasantries. She opened the manila folder on top of the file on her desk. “Natalie Raines's mother will be here in a little while,” she said crisply. “I've been going over your reports and her initial statement to you the night Natalie died and her written statement a few days later.”
She looked up at the two of them. “From what I see here, the mother's first reaction was that she absolutely refused to believe that Gregg Aldrich could have anything to do with this.”
“That's right,” Rosen confirmed quietly. “Mrs. Mills said she loved Gregg like a son and had begged Natalie to go back to him. She thought Natalie worked much too hard and wanted to see her give more time to her personal life.”
“You'd think she'd want to kill him,” Tryon said sarcastically. “Instead she's all worried and upset about him and his kid.”
“I think she understood Aldrich's frustration,” Rosen said, turn?ing to Emily. “The friends we interviewed all agreed that Natalie was a workaholic. The irony of it is that what drove him to murder could make the jurors feel sorry for him. Even his own mother-in-law