No Second Chance

“At the Seidman house?”

“Right.”

“Okay, go.”

“The window was broken from the outside,” Regan said. “That could be how the perp gained entry to the house.”

“Or,” Tickner added, “Dr. Seidman broke the window to throw us off.”

“Or he had an accomplice do it.”

“Right.”

“But either way, Dr. Seidman would have been in on the broken window, right? If he was involved, I mean.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“Just stay with me, Lloyd. We think Seidman was involved. Ergo, Seidman knew that the window had been broken to make it look like, I don’t know, a random break-in. Agreed?”

“I guess.”

Regan smiled. “Then how come he never mentioned the broken window?”

“What?”

“Read his statement. He remembers eating a granola bar and then—bam—nothing. No sound. No one sneaking up on him. Nothing.” Regan spread his hands. “Why doesn’t he remember hearing the window break?”

“Because he broke it himself to make it look like an intruder.”

“But see, if that’s the case, he would have kept the broken window in his story. Think about it. He breaks the window to convince us the perp broke in and shot him. So what would you say if you were him?”

Now Tickner saw where he was heading. “I’d say, ‘I heard the window break, I turned and bam, the bullets hit me.’ ”

“Exactly. But Seidman did none of that. Why?”

Tickner shrugged. “Maybe he forgot. He was seriously injured.”

“Or maybe—just stay with me—maybe he’s telling the truth.”

The door opened. An exhausted-looking kid in scrubs looked in. He saw the two cops, rolled his eyes, left them alone. Tickner turned back toward Regan. “But wait a second, you’ve caught yourself in a Catch-22.”

“How so?”

“If Seidman didn’t do it—if it really was a perp who broke the window—why didn’t Seidman hear it?”

“Maybe he doesn’t remember. We’ve seen this a million times. A guy getting shot and hurt that seriously loses some time.” Regan smiled, warming up to this theory. “Especially if he saw something that totally shocked him—something he wouldn’t want to remember.”

“Like his wife being stripped down and killed?”

“Like that,” Regan said. “Or maybe something worse.”

“What’s worse?”

A beeping sound came from the corridor. They could hear the nearby nurse’s station. Someone was bitching about a shift time or schedule change.

“We said we’re missing something,” Regan said slowly. “We’ve been saying that from the beginning. But maybe it’s just the opposite. We’ve beenadding something.”

Tickner frowned.

“We keep adding Dr. Seidman. Look, we both know the score. In cases like this, the husband is always involved. Not nine times out of ten—ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Every scenario we’ve devised includes Seidman.”

Tickner said, “And you think that’s wrong?”

“Listen to me a second. We’ve had Seidman in our sights from the get-go. His marriage was not idyllic. He got married because his wife was pregnant. We seized on all that. But if their marriage had been friggin’Ozzie and Harriet , we’d still say, ‘Nah, no one is that happy,’ and leap on that. So whatever we’ve stumbled across, we’ve tried to fit it into that reality: Seidman had to be involved. So for just a second, let’s take him out of the equation. Let’s pretend he’s innocent.”

Tickner shrugged. “Okay, so?”

“Seidman talked about a connection with Rachel Mills. One that’s lasted all these years.”

“Right.”

“He sounded a little obsessed with her.”

“A little?”

Regan smiled. “Suppose the feeling was mutual. Check that. Suppose it was more than mutual.”

“Okay.”

“Now remember. We’re assuming Seidman didn’t do it. That means he’s telling us the truth. About everything. About when he last saw Rachel Mills. About those photographs. You saw his face, Lloyd. Seidman isn’t that great an actor. Those pictures shocked him. He didn’t know about them.”

Tickner frowned. “Hard to say.”

“Well, there was something else I noticed about those pictures.”

“What?”

“How come that private eye didn’t get any pictures of the two of them together? We have her outside the hospital. We have him coming out. We have her going out. But none of them together.”

“They were careful.”

“How careful? She was hanging outside his place of work. If you’re being careful, you don’t do that.”

“So what’s your theory?”

Regan smiled. “Think about it. Rachel had to know Seidman was inside the building. But did he have to know she was outside?”

“Wait a second,” Tickner said. A smile started coming to his face. “You think she was stalking him?”

“Maybe.”

Tickner nodded. “And—whoa—we’re not talking about just any woman here. We’re talking about a well-trained federal agent.”

“So one, she would know how to run a professional kidnapping operation,” Regan added, raising a finger. He raised another. “Two, she would know how to kill someone and get away with it. Three, she would know how to cover her tracks. Four, she would know Marc’s sister, Stacy. Five”—the thumb now—“she’d be able to use her old contacts to find and set the sister up.”

“Holy Christ.” Tickner looked up. “And what you said before. About seeing something so horrible Seidman doesn’t remember.”

“How about seeing the love of your life shooting you? Or your wife. Or . . .”

They both stopped.

“Tara,” Tickner said. “How does the little girl fit into all this?”

“A way of extorting money?”

Neither one of them liked that. But whatever other answers they came up with, they liked those even less.

“We can add something else,” Tickner said.

“What?”

“Seidman’s missing thirty-eight.”

“What about it?”

“His gun was in a lockbox in his closet,” Tickner said. “Only someone close to him would know where it was hidden.”