Thatcher brought his gaze back to the sheriff, but he didn’t say anything.
Bill said, “You’re thinking Mrs. Driscoll was dead, and he carried out her body without Eleanor Wise seeing him.”
“I’m not accusing anybody of anything.”
“Understood, understood. We’re just talking off the top of our heads here.”
Thatcher didn’t contradict him, but the truth was, he’d given this a lot of thought. Based on what he knew for fact and not scuttlebutt, he’d dismissed the various theories that had been disproved already or were too outlandish to put stock in.
The process of elimination always left Thatcher with only one plausible explanation for Mila Driscoll’s disappearance.
“If she’d died accidentally,” Bill said, musing aloud, “like if she’d fallen down the stairs, something like that, Gabe would have reported it.”
“Um-huh.”
“If they’d had a quarrel that got out of hand, if he flew off the handle and struck her—”
“A quarrel between them wouldn’t have gone that far.”
Bill’s sharp look invited Thatcher to explain why he thought that.
He said, “When she talked about him, her cheeks turned rosier than normal.”
“A woman in love.”
“A woman who worshiped the ground her husband walked on,” Thatcher said.
“Do you have a lot of experience in that area?”
Thatcher smiled. “No. Just wish I had a woman light up when she talked about me like Mrs. Driscoll did when she told me how fond her husband was of her shortbread. I doubt she ever said a cross word to him. But if they did have a squabble, she would’ve given in early. It would never have reached the boiling point.”
Looking troubled, the sheriff ran his hand over his mouth and mustache. “Here’s the thing, Thatcher. If a man kills his wife, it’s usually in a fit of passion. Fed up with her nagging about his multiple failures, he loses his temper and, while teaching her a hard lesson in who’s boss, he kills her, intentionally or not.
“Or a husband finds his beloved in bed with another man, goes blind with rage, kills them both. Afterward, he feels either justified for doing it—‘They had it coming. I’d kill them all over again.’—or mortified, and he lives out the days till they hang him eaten up with regret.
“Of course some wife-killings are plotted. Another woman catches a man’s eye, he disposes of the spouse who’s blocking his path to greener pastures.”
Bill paused and took a breath. “Over the course of my career, I’ve seen all that many times. What I haven’t seen is a man killing his pregnant wife, his very pregnant, devoted wife who thought the sun rose and set in him. Not accidentally, not in a burst of violent rage, but with cold calculation. To take her life as well as his unborn child’s, to do that with aforethought, would call for a total absence of soul. I just can’t feature it.”
Not wanting to interrupt the sheriff’s thought process, Thatcher held his peace. He picked up another rock and tossed it from hand to hand.
“And anyhow,” Bill went on, “it couldn’t have been premeditated. The doc didn’t know he was going to get called away from the house that night.”
“It would help to know the length of time between the emergency call from the roadhouse and his arrival there.”
“No more than half an hour, Lefty said.”
“What’s it usually take to drive it?”
“Roughly that. Gabe would have had to plan a perfect murder and implement it in a matter of minutes before racing out to treat the young prostitute who got beat up.”
Thatcher looked at him intuitively. “You already asked this Lefty about the timing of the doc’s arrival?”
Bill nodded.
“So this isn’t a sudden notion of yours. It had crossed your mind that the doc had a hand in Mrs. Driscoll’s vanishing.”
Bill’s sigh was as good as an admission. “He’s the one link between Mrs. Driscoll’s disappearance and Wally Johnson’s homicide. The more I thought about it, the less coincidental it seemed.”