“Let me go, Detective!” she screamed.
“That won’t help things, Mrs. Barnes,” Sampson said.
“Detective?” said her husband, who looked baffled and then worried.
“Washington DC Metro Homicide,” I said, showing the man my badge.
“Murder?” Barnes said, paling. “Abby, what’s—”
His wife wrenched so hard against Sampson’s grip that I heard fabric tearing before she went off on Barnes again. “I saw you, you pig, on tape!” she yelled. “So pleased with yourself after God knows what debauchery!”
“Tape?” he said, genuinely confused and looking at me.
Before I could answer, Abigail screeched, “You were leaving that sleazy massage parlor on Connecticut Avenue where Mad Man Francones was murdered! They have it on tape. They’re showing it everywhere! Betsy Martin saw it on the television in the bar at the club and showed me! At the club!”
She broke down weeping and sagged. Sampson caught her and walked her to a wingback chair.
Harold Barnes’s skin had lost all its color. His hand sought his mouth and he staggered out of the room, choking, “My God, what have I done?”
That seemed to revive Abigail Barnes, because she interrupted her crying to start screaming after him again, “You’ve ruined us, that’s what you’ve done! I’ll be the laughingstock of…of everything!”
“Mr. Barnes?” I called, hustling after him.
But by the time I reached the hall, he’d dodged into a powder room, shut the door, and started gagging. I stood there listening to his wife crying back in the living room, and him retching, and frankly felt bad that my instincts had been correct and my idea had worked.
Right after I’d spoken with Sampson I’d called Captain Quintus and convinced him to release the footage of the man in the business suit leaving the area of the Superior Spa.
“Gonna be a shitty wake-up call for some poor bastard and his wife,” Quintus had told me after agreeing to the plan.
Leaning against the hallway wall, suffering the sounds of a fracturing marriage I’d helped break, I had to agree.
Chapter
55
Harold Barnes was a successful and influential patent lawyer with an impeccable pedigree. Dartmouth. Georgetown Law. Editor of the law review. Clerked at the US District Court. Became a partner in a prestigious firm. Husband of twenty-seven years. Father of three girls.
“Thank God they’re all off at school,” Abigail moaned as I turned the corner back into the living room and found her slumped in the chair.
I raised an eyebrow at Sampson. “See if you can find her some coffee.”
Behind me I could hear the door of the powder room opening. Barnes’s wife looked toward the hall, said, “No, I want to hear everything about his filthy life.”
“I’ll let you two deal with that in private,” I said firmly. “Right now we’re hoping he can help us solve a mass murder and maybe save three lives.”
Mrs. Barnes looked appalled and then incredulous, as if I’d somehow challenged the idea that the planets revolved around her and not the sun.
“Let’s take a walk, Mrs. B,” Sampson said, and held out his hand.
She balked and then, reluctant and wobbly, got to her feet. Barnes must have heard me talking, because he’d stalled back there in the hallway. Sampson supported the crushed socialite as they left the room by another door.
As it shut behind them, I heard her sniffle, “I never thought my life would become a cliché. Was I naïve, Detective?”
Her husband came back into the room, looking like a husk of what he’d been not ten minutes before. Broken glass crunched beneath his wingtips, but he seemed not to notice.
“My name’s Alex Cross,” I began.
“I know who you are, Dr. Cross,” Barnes said weakly before sinking into the chair his wife had just occupied. “I read the papers.”