The Silent Widow

Chief Brody and Goodman both stared at Johnson. Neither of them were in the mood for guessing games.

‘His mistress!’ Johnson announced triumphantly. ‘Some Russian chick. She was in the passenger seat. Died too, killed instantly. The first Dr Roberts knew about her husband’s affair was the day he died, when the emergency crew cut two bodies out of the wreckage! Can you imagine what that must feel like? The pain? The humiliation? When the whole world believed you had some perfect, fairytale marriage? Including you?’

Johnson was looking directly at Goodman now, with an infuriating I told you so expression on his face.

Goodman struggled to process this new information. Nikki had opened up to him about her husband’s death only last night. She’d alluded to feelings of anger, mixed in with the loss, and to finding things out about Doug that she hadn’t known before. But she’d never said anything about a mistress. Apart from anything else, Goodman found it hard to believe that anybody lucky enough to be married to Nikki Roberts would want a mistress. Willie Baden cheating on over-the-hill Valentina was one thing, but this? It almost made him wonder whether Johnson was making the whole thing up.

‘How’d you know this?’ he asked, more aggressively than he’d intended.

‘It was reported online,’ Johnson answered. ‘Not at the time but a few weeks later. A brief, one-line mention of a female passenger. But I did some digging with Doug and Nikki’s friends, and they all confirmed it. The dirty secret she’s been trying to hide, how the anger’s been eating away at her—’

‘OK, so the shrink’s husband was playing away,’ Chief Brody said gruffly, cutting him off. ‘What does this have to do with our murders?’

‘Well, sir, I’m curious about this whole mistress thing, especially as Roberts never so much as hinted about it to us,’ said Johnson. ‘So two days ago I go looking for the accident report, to see what I can find about Doug Roberts and this Russian woman he was seeing.’

Goodman could contain himself no longer. ‘You never told me any of this!’ he exploded.

‘Hey, you were “busy”, remember?’ Johnson shot back. ‘You haven’t exactly been Captain Transparency yourself, my friend. In any case, there was nothing to tell because, guess what? Turns out, there is no accident report.’

‘What do you mean?’ Chief Brody asked. He was growing tired of riddles.

‘Exactly what I say,’ said Johnson. ‘There is no report in the system. Either one was never filed, or it was filed but someone deleted it later.’

This was interesting. But it still wasn’t a theory on who killed Lisa Flannagan and Trey Raymond, as Chief Brody pointed out.

‘I’m getting there, sir, I swear,’ insisted Johnson. ‘So now I’m really curious, because this accident did happen. It was in all the papers at the time, along with a big, whitewashed obituary in the LA Times about what a great and saintly guy Doug Roberts was, his beautiful, grieving widow, they’re both so young, yadda yadda yadda. But no mention of the Russian broad. That little nugget only came out later, online. So anyways, I tracked down the shop where they took what was left of Doug Roberts’ Tesla after the accident. Spoke to an engineer there who told me they’d checked out the car’s computer systems and it looked as though they might have been messed with before the crash.’

‘“Messed with”?’

‘Hacked into remotely,’ Johnson explained. ‘He couldn’t be sure, but it looked to him like faulty code might have affected both the steering and the brakes, once the car reached a certain speed. He says he told his boss, who said he would report it to the police.’

‘And did he?’ Chief Brody asked.

‘There’s no way of knowing. Because like I said, there is no report. And because Damon’s boss dropped dead of a heart attack on Easter morning.’

Chief Brody took this in silently. As did Goodman.

‘So,’ the chief asked Johnson eventually. ‘Your theory?’

‘My theory, sir, is that Nikki Roberts is a psychopath. She finds out her husband’s doing someone else, while she’s in the middle of fertility treatment; totally loses it, pays someone to tamper with his car. She stages an accident, killing him and the mistress.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ Goodman muttered, but Johnson was on a roll.

‘The plan works like a dream. Her husband and his Russian fancy woman are both dead, and no one suspects a thing. She’s emboldened, but she’s still mad as hell about the affair, and that anger needs somewhere to go. So she develops a grudge against all mistresses, all marriage wreckers – like her patient Lisa Flannagan. It becomes an obsession with her. And remember, at this point she’s already killed once and gotten away with it. I think Nikki Roberts had Lisa Flannagan murdered. I think she paid a hitman to do it, possibly using Brandon Grolsch’s remains as some sort of forensic cover story, like Goodman suggested.’

‘Don’t drag me into this!’ Goodman’s frustration was mounting. ‘This is total bullshit, Mick. You have no evidence against Nikki Roberts. None!’

‘I don’t agree.’ For once Johnson kept his cool. ‘It’s circumstantial, sure, but there’s a pattern here, a pattern of deceit. She said she was “fond” of Lisa Flannagan, but her notes plainly show otherwise. She said she loved her husband, but multiple friends have attested to her flashes of rage over his affair. I think Nikki Roberts is a very smart woman. But I also think she’s a pathological liar and a murderer. She’s behind this, Chief. I know it in my bones.’

‘Your bones,’ Goodman scoffed. ‘What does that even mean? You’ve had it in for her from the start.’

‘And you wanted to sleep with her from the start!’ Johnson retorted furiously. ‘It’s clouded your judgment.’

‘All right, all right,’ Chief Brody stepped in. ‘Knock it off, both of you. What about Trey Raymond?’ he asked Johnson. ‘Weren’t he and Nikki Roberts close?’

‘On the surface, maybe. But underneath,

who knows?’ said Johnson. ‘Maybe Trey knew about Doug’s affair all along and helped hide it from Nikki? Or maybe he found out she was behind Doug’s “accident”? Or that she killed Lisa Flannagan, who we know Trey had the hots for. I don’t have the details yet, sir,’ Johnson admitted. ‘Like I said, it’s a theory.’