The Perfect Husband - Lisa Gardner [57]
The next morning Difford arranged with the Berkshire County DA to keep Officer Jim Beckett busy that afternoon. Then Difford paid a visit to Beckett’s wife.
Difford liked Theresa Beckett. He didn’t know why. He’d been prepared to hate her, to think nothing of her. If her accusation was true, then she was the Bride of Frankenstein. What kind of woman married a killer? What kind of police force gave him a job?
Maybe it was the way Theresa sat across from them, so young and scared, but still answering their questions one by one. Maybe it was the way she cradled her two-year-old daughter against her neck when the baby cried, rocking her gently and whispering over and over again that everything would be all right. Maybe it was the way she handed over her life to them. Every small, tortured detail, with her whole face telling them she would do the right thing, she needed to do the right thing.
They stripped her bare that first week. They met with her at prearranged locations every afternoon and dissected her marriage. How long had she known Beckett? Where did he come from? What did she know of his family? What was he like as a husband, a father? Was he violent? Did he ever try to choke her? What about sex? How often? What kinds of positions? Any S&M, choking, sodomy? Hard-core pornography?
And she answered. Sometimes she couldn’t look them in the eye. Sometimes tears silently streaked down her cheek, but she gave them everything they asked for and then she gave them even more. She’d kept logs of his car odometer for six months. She’d noted what time he left for work, what time he came home, and listed any inexplicable scratches or bruises on his body.
She told them that Jim Beckett actually wore a wig. Shortly after their marriage he’d shaved his head, his chest, his arms, his legs, his pubic hair, everything. The man was completely hairless, like a marble sculpture. The kind of perp that would leave no hair samples behind at the crime scene.
She told them he was cold, arrogant, and without remorse. The kind of man who would poison the neighbor’s dog because he objected to a Pekingese shitting on his lawn. She told them he was relentless, the husband who always got his way. The kind of person who knew instinctively how to make people suffer without even raising his fist.
And each afternoon when they tucked their notebooks away, they told her they needed more conclusive information before they could move against Officer Beckett, and they left her to face her husband alone for another evening.
By the seventh day, they thought they had enough, but apparently so did Beckett. They never figured out who leaked what, but he walked into a sandwich shop on his lunch hour, tailed by two agents, and never came back out. That simply he dropped off the face of the earth.
They moved in force.
Difford still remembered the look on Theresa’s face, the way her eyes widened, the way her whole body swayed that afternoon as she opened her door and investigators swarmed her house. They all wore white airpacks borrowed from the fire department, full laboratory treatment suits with hair covers to keep them from further contaminating the crime scene. They looked like creatures from a bad sci-fi flick, weighted down with equipment, moving with an eerie rustle, and descending upon her home.
Samantha had begun to cry, so Theresa called her mother to come take her daughter away.
Then she sat alone on the sofa as the men pulled up her hardwood floor, ripped up kitchen tiles, dug up sections of the basement floor, and chipped mortar from between the stones of her fireplace. They vacuumed all surfaces with a special high-powered vac that picked up hair particles and dust particles. The bags were sent to the Mass. State Police crime lab for analysis. Stains on the carpet were cut out and sent. Ditto with the kitchen tiles. Later, the police crime lab said it had never churned out so many reports on baby saliva and spit-up peaches. One patch of dirt in the basement revealed bovine blood approximately