Deal Breaker (Myron Bolitar 1)

“Me? What about?”

“They know about the fight,” he said. “A neighbor was walking a dog. He heard you and Dr. Culver.”

She stiffened. Myron waited, but she said nothing.

“Dr. Culver wasn’t feeling sick that night, was he?”

The color ebbed from her face. She put down her cup of tea and dabbed the corners of her mouth with a cloth napkin.

“He never intended to go to that medical conference in Denver, isn’t that right, Mrs. Culver?”

She lowered her head.

“Mrs. Culver?”

No movement.

“I know this isn’t easy,” Myron said gently. “But I’m trying to find Kathy.”

Her eyes remained on the floor. “Do you really think you can, Myron?”

“It’s possible. I don’t want to give you false hope, but I think it’s possible.”

“Then you think she might be alive?”

“There’s a chance, yes.”

She finally raised her head. The eyes were wet. “You do what you have to do to find her, Myron.” Her voice was surprisingly steady and strong. “She’s my daughter. My baby. She has to come first. No matter what.”

Myron waited for Carol Culver to continue, but she fell back into silence. After nearly a full minute, Myron said, “Dr. Culver just pretended he was going to that medical conference.”

She took a deep breath and nodded.

“You thought he’d left that morning.”

Another androidlike nod.

“Then he surprised you here.”

“Yes.”

Myron’s soft voice seemed to boom in the room. An antique clock ticked maddeningly. “Mrs. Culver, what did he see when he arrived?”

Tears began to flow. She lowered her head again.

“Did he see you,” Myron continued, “with another man?”

Nothing.

“Was the man Paul Duncan?”

She lifted her head. Her eyes met his. “Yes,” she said. “I was with Paul.”

Myron waited again.

“Adam set a trap,” she continued, “and we got caught.” The words were once again steady and strong. “He had become suspicious. I don’t know how. So he did just what you said—pretended to go to a conference in Denver. He even had me arrange his flights, so I would be sure he was gone.”

“What happened when your husband saw you?”

Shaking fingers rubbed her cheeks. She stood, turned away. “Exactly what you’d expect to happen when a man finds his wife and best friend in bed. Adam went crazy. He’d been drinking pretty heavily, which didn’t help matters. He shouted at me, called me horrible names. I deserved that. I deserved a lot worse. He threatened Paul. We tried to calm him down, but of course that was impossible.”

She picked up the tea again. Each word was making her a little stronger, making it a little easier to breathe. “Adam stormed out. I was scared. Paul went after him. But Adam drove off. Paul left after that.”

“How long have you and Paul Duncan …?” His voice just sort of mumbled away.

“Six years.”

“Did anybody else know?”

Her composure gave way. Not slowly. But as if a small bomb had blown it off her face. She crumbled, weeping freely. A realization came to Myron. He felt his blood freeze.

“Kathy,” he whispered. “Kathy knew.”

The sobbing grew more intense.

“She found out,” he continued, “during her senior year.”

Carol tried to stop her tears, but that took time. Myron remembered how Kathy had worshiped her mother, the perfect woman, the woman who balanced old-fashioned values with a sense of the modern. Carol Culver had been a homemaker and a shop owner. She had raised three beautiful children. She had instilled in her children more than just a sense of what is now popularly called “family values.” For her values had been a rigid doctrine that she insisted her children follow. Jessica had rebelled. So had Edward. Only Kathy had been successfully locked in, like a lion kept in too small a cage.

And she had finally broken free.

“Kathy …” Carol Culver stopped, shut her eyes tightly. “She walked in on us.”

“And that was when she changed,” Myron finished.

Carol Culver nodded, her eyes still squeezed closed. “I did that to her. Everything that happened was because of me. God forgive me.” Then she shook her head. “No. I don’t deserve forgiveness. I don’t want it. I just want my baby back.”

“What did Kathy do when she saw you two?”

“Nothing. At first. She just turned and ran away. But the next day she broke up with her boyfriend Matt. And from there—she made sure I paid for what I’d done. For all the years I’d been a hypocrite. For all the years I lied to her. She wanted to hurt me in the worst way possible.”

“She began to sleep around,” Myron said.

“Yes. And she made sure I knew all about it.”

“By telling you?”

Carol Culver shook her head. “Kathy wouldn’t talk to me anymore.”

“So how did you find out?”

She hesitated. Her face was drawn, her skin pulled tight against her cheekbones. “Photographs,” she said simply.

Something else clicked into place. Horty and the camera. “She gave you photos of herself with men.”

“Yes.”

“White men, black men, sometimes more than one.”

Her eyes closed again, but she managed to say, “And not just men. It started slowly. A couple of nude pictures of her. Like the one in that magazine.”

“You saw that same picture before?”

“Yes. It even had the name of a photographer stamped on the back.”

“Global Globes Photos?”

“No. It was something like Forbidden Fruit.”

“Do you still have the picture?”

She shook her head.

“You threw them away?”

She shook her head again. “I wanted to destroy them. I wanted to burn them and pretend I’d never seen them. But I couldn’t. Kathy was punishing me. Keeping them was a form of penitence. I never told anyone about them, but I couldn’t just throw them away. You see that, Myron, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“So I hid them in the attic. In an old storage box. I thought they’d be safe there.”

Myron saw where this was going. “Your husband found them.”

“Yes.”

“When?”