Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [31]
Hastroll walked over to stand beside him. He could see Hannah lying in bed, eating the lunch he’d prepared for her. A songbird was singing. For a moment, he wasn’t sure even of what day it was.
“Is there a problem, Detective?”
“That woman,” Hastroll said, pointing across the courtyard, “she might be in danger.”
“Oh, no,” the nurse said. “What kind?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.” She clucked her tongue.
“Do you ever see her get up?” Hastroll asked. “Ever see her walk around?”
“Never,” she said. “She’s sick, I think.”
“You ever see anything suspicious?”
“No. All I see is her husband occasionally.”
“Notice anything strange about him?” Hastroll wondered if she might’ve recognized him, but it didn’t seem so.
She shook her head. “He brings her meals every day.”
“Do they seem like they love each other?” he asked.
This made the woman laugh.
“Oh come on, now, Detective, what kind of person could tell that from here?”
Detective Sheppard wanted a full report on the Pepin case.
Fastidious, arrogant, and hyperroutinized—put bluntly, a control freak—his partner gave Hastroll the creeps. Plus his voice was grating. It was high-pitched and nasal, incongruous for such a large, athletic-looking man. And when dealing with cases that involved the murder of a spouse, it made Hastroll doubly uncomfortable to talk specifics.
“Ward.”
“Sam.”
Hastroll sat across from Sheppard. Next to the man’s pipe caddy was a picture of his wife, Marilyn. If it happened that Hannah died, Hastroll wondered, would he still keep pictures of her around?
“Where are we?” Sheppard asked.
He told Sheppard about Pepin’s adulterous relationship with Georgine Darcy. He was looking into it further, but it now seemed the affair was over long before Alice’s death and had to be ruled out as a motive. He described the lab report from forensics analyzing the samples taken from under Pepin’s fingernails. There were traces of nutmeat under the nails on the ring and index fingers only, and the bite marks on the top and bottom of each digit matched those of his wife, either corroborating the story that he’d tried to clear her airway or confirming that he’d shoved the nuts down her throat before she’d bitten down. She’d broken a tooth on Pepin’s finger, her right upper incisor, though the odontologists they’d consulted were at odds as to the cause: Dr. Wendell Corey thought the fracture was from blunt-force trauma—from a hand forced down the victim’s throat—while the other, Dr. Iphigenie Castiglioni, saw the wrenching force of the husband’s extricating his two fingers. Traces of salt and saliva on the palms of Alice’s hands supported the suicide claim; also, her fingerprints were on the plate itself while Pepin’s were absent. He told Sheppard that according to Alice’s psychiatrist, Dr. Fred Graham, she had a long history of depression, but during their last session four weeks before her death, she’d been happier and more stable than he’d ever seen her, which he’d attributed to her tremendous weight loss and concomitant gain in self-esteem, though she had, Hastroll noted, refilled her prescriptions afterward. Hastroll also reported that he was going over security tapes from cameras on the Henry Hudson Parkway, the West Side Highway, and the Museum of Natural History. He told Sheppard that the couple’s financials showed that in addition to their joint account, they’d secretly opened accounts in different banks, that both had rented personal PO addresses to which statements from their credit cards and checking accounts were sent, but that none of the charges on these cards seemed out of the ordinary. Alice had used hers to pay for therapy visits, medical co-pays, and prescriptions related to her diet, for workout