Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [99]
Sheppard stared at the barred window in Mobius’s cell.
“Yet why would you kill your wife after the two of you had happily announced her pregnancy at dinner with your family just a month before? Or did Dr. Bailey—Donna Bailey’s husband—not tell the truth when he testified that when he congratulated you about the pregnancy on the morning of July third, your response was, ‘That’s what you get when you forget to use birth control’? Does that maybe answer that?” He took a deep breath.
“Perhaps it’s simply the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love. Marilyn’s clothes were laid out on the chair in your bedroom, no? That meant she folded them neatly before putting on her pajamas and going to sleep. She went to sleep peacefully, routinely. If the Aherns saw you asleep on the daybed when they left just past midnight, as they claimed, that would mean you woke up and went upstairs with the intent to kill Marilyn. Or she woke up and then woke you up to start a fight that turned vicious enough for you to snap, bludgeoning her with a weapon that was never recovered. Who bludgeons his wife twenty-seven times on the head? How mad do you have to be to do something like that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Why didn’t the dog start barking?”
“Kokie was meek.”
“If you did kill her, how was it that a man of your strength instead of barely denting her dura couldn’t smash through her brain plate? Did the killer lack conviction? Was he a weak man or just meek like the dog?”
Sheppard closed his eyes.
“And what about the green duffel bag found the morning of the murder, in the woods halfway down the stairs to the lake, with your school ring, keys, and watch in it—the watch not only flecked with blood but also stopped at four fifteen and the crystal full of condensation. When asked about the blood, you said it must have gotten there when you took Marilyn’s pulse. You also told the detectives, without them asking, that it had gotten wet several days beforehand, when you played golf in the rain. Interesting you’d felt the need to explain that, just as it is that Eberling—not even a person of interest at the time—should, when questioned by police, blurt out that his blood was all over the Sheppard house because he’d cut himself removing a window screen the previous week and then went to the basement to wash the wound. There were multiple blood spots found in the house, from bedroom to kitchen to patio to basement, on the stair risers too, more than a trail, really, more like something from a meandering headless chicken—moreover, blood that investigators couldn’t match to yours or Marilyn’s. And yet the police were so sure it was you who did it they neither questioned Eberling further nor typed his blood. Interesting. Just as interesting, unidentified red fibers were found under Marilyn’s nails that matched nothing you were wearing. Just as it’s interesting who Hoversten should go off to play golf with the day before the murder, Dr. Robert Stevenson, to my mind the only man who’d really want to destroy you, since you’d been fucking his fiancée, Susan Hayes, for years—up until that March, in fact. Since you’d