"Just keep going. Play it out for me."
"Okay, somebody with access to her apartment, somebody who was there the night she died, put the letters in her drawer. And it seems to me that the choice of drawer is female. A guy isn't as likely to pick the lingerie department to hide something. We don't know when the letters were written because there were no envelopes, no date stamps. They all could've been written the night she was killed. And if they were, that might rule out premeditation and move into covering up an impulse. Crime of passion."
"So the theory is person or persons unknown killed Marsha Stibbs on impulse, then put her into the bathtub hoping to cover up murder as an accident. Concerned perhaps that wasn't enough, this person or persons then wrote letters from some nonexistent lover, planted them in the victim's underwear drawer so that it might then appear she was killed by said nonexistent lover during an argument."
"Okay, it sounds a little out-there."
"Then bring it in."
"I'm just nervous, because this really feels like a test." Peabody cleared her throat when Eve merely sent her a stony stare. "Some of the rest of the theory is just instinct. You look at the way the two of them reacted to us. Boyd seemed sad, a little shaky initially, but was glad we were there. It could've been an act, but with no time to prepare, it just feels real as does his insistence that Marsha didn't have a lover."
She paused, waiting for Eve's affirmation or rebuttal, and got nothing but silence. "Okay, on my own. His alibi's solid, and even if he knew or arranged the killing, it seems to me he'd have been nervous or annoyed that we'd walked into his nice new life and opened the possibility of exposing him. On the other hand, when she comes in, she's scared, she's angry, and she wants us out. Away from her nice new life with her dead pal's husband. Maybe that's a normal reaction, but it could just as easily be guilt and fear of exposure."
"Guilt because she was—what was it?—canoodling with said dead pal's husband before said pal was dead?"
"Maybe, but what if she wasn't?" Anxious, and just a little excited, Peabody shifted in her seat so she could see Eve's profile. "What if she just wanted to? What if she was in love with him, and here he is, just across the hall, day after day, happily married, seeing her as a friend of his wife's. She wants him for herself, but he's never going to look at her that way as long as Marsha's in the picture. It's Marsha's fault he doesn't love her. Marsha's fault she's not living that dream—nice home, great husband, maybe a couple of pretty kids down the line. Pisses her off, makes her unhappy. She's always got to be acting like the friend and neighbor and she just can't get the fantasy of what it could be like out of her head."
"What does she do?"
"She has a showdown with Marsha. Boyd's out of town, now's the time. She blasts Marsha for going off to work every day instead of staying home and taking care of her man. She doesn't deserve Boyd. If she wa
s his wife, she'd be there to fix the meals, buy the groceries. She'd give him a child. She'd give him a family. They fight about it."
She wanted to see it, as she knew Eve could see such things. But the imagery was still indistinct. "Marsha probably tells her to get the hell out. To stay away from her husband. I bet she said she was going to tell Boyd everything. That neither of them would have anything to do with her again. That's too much for Maureen. She shoves Marsha, and Marsha falls, cracks her head. File said it was a fall against the corner of a reinforced glass table that killed her. She panics, tries to cover it up. Strips Marsha down, puts her in the bathtub. Maybe they'll think she slipped, hit her head on the tub and drowned.
"But then she starts to think again, and realizes that maybe they won't think it's an accident. More, this is an opportunity. Like a gift. She didn't mean to kill her, but it was done. She couldn't take it back. If Boyd and the police think Marsha'd had a lover on the side, it would solve everything. They'd go off looking for him as a suspect. Why should they ever look at her? So she writes the letters, plants them, then she goes home and waits for it to play out. I bet, after a while, she started to believe it really did happen the way she'd made it seem. It was the only way she could live with it, the only way she could sleep beside him night after night and not go crazy."
She blew out a breath, swallowed hard because her throat was dry. "That's the theory I'm working. Are you going to tell me it blows?"
"How'd you come to it?"
"I kept looking at the reports, the data, the photographs. I read the statements until my eyes hurt. Then I was lying in bed last night with all that running around inside my head. So I put it all like in this corner of my brain, and used the rest of it to try to think like you. Or how I thought you'd think. You know, how you walk onto a crime scene and you start visualizing, sort of like you're watching it all happen. And that was the way I watched it all happen. A little murky, but that's how I saw it."
She started to take another deep breath, then blinked. "You're smiling."
"You're going to want to get to her when he's not around. You'll want to question her when she's alone. With him and the kid, she's got defenses built up. She can tell herself she's protecting them. Get her into Interview. Make it formal. She won't want to. but the uniform will intimidate her into it. It's not likely she'll yell lawyer straight off, because she'll worry it'll make her look guilty. Let me know when you're ready to set it up, and I'll try to observe."
Peabody felt her heart beating again. "You think I'm right? You think she did it?"
"Oh yeah, she did it."
"You knew it. The minute she walked into the apartment, you knew."
"Doesn't matter what I knew or what I know. It's your case, so what matters is what you know and getting her to tell you."
"If you did the interview—"
"I'm not doing the interview, you are. Your case. Work out your approach, your tone, then bring her in and break her down."
Eve pulled into a driveway, and Peabody looked around blankly. Somehow they'd gotten from city to suburb.
"Now put it away," Eve ordered. "Pettibone's front and center now."
She sat a moment, studying the rosy redbrick house. It was modest enough, even simple until you added the gardens. Floods, rivers, pools of flowers flowed out from the base of the house, streaming all the way to the sidewalk. There was no lawn to speak of, though there were tall clumps of some sort of ornamental grasses creatively worked in to the sea of color.
A stone walkway ribboned its way through to the base of a covered porch where flowering vines, thick with deep purple blooms, wound their way up round posts.
There were chairs with white cushions on the porch, glass-topped tables, and yet more flowers in pots that had artistically faded to verdigris. Obviously Shelly Pettibone liked to sit and contemplate her flowers.