“Why are you looking for him? He didn’t do something wrong, did he?”

“That’s what we’re trying to establish.” Certainly Jack Dorian is behaving like a guilty man. He isn’t answering his phone, and now he’s avoiding any contact with the police. Frankie looks around at the garage, picturing the events that Larry has just described to her. She imagines Dorian pinned between his vehicle and Cody Atwood’s black SUV. She thinks of how easy it is to shatter bones and crush flesh with one stomp on the accelerator. Why did the boy attack him? Was this about Taryn Moore, a battle between someone who’d loved her and someone who’d wanted her dead?

“Frankie,” Mac calls out, waving his cell phone. “You’ll never guess who just walked into Schroeder Plaza and wants to talk to us.”

“Jack Dorian?”

“No. His wife.”

On a normal day Dr. Maggie Dorian would be considered a beautiful woman, but this is not that day. She sits slumped at the interview table, her red hair in disarray, her eyes hollowed out by anguish. Now approaching her forties, she no longer glows with the rosy flush of youth; how can she compete with the parade of eternally fresh-faced girls who pass through her husband’s classroom? Frankie and Maggie belong to the same sisterhood whose husbands have betrayed them, so it is all too easy to identify with her pain, but sympathy could blind Frankie to the truth. As she pulls out a chair and sits down, Frankie keeps her face neutral, betraying no hint of that sympathy. Although Mac is next door, watching them through the one-way mirror, neither Frankie nor Maggie can see him. In this room there are only the two of them facing each other across the table, woman to woman.

“We’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon, Dr. Dorian,” says Frankie.

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you return my calls?”

“I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I needed time.”

“Time for what?”

“To think. To decide what to do about my marriage.”

Maggie’s head droops, and Frankie notices streaks of gray in her auburn hair. This woman has devoted years to her marriage, to a man she trusted, and she has every reason to be angry. But instead of rage, what Frankie sees in the slumped shoulders and bowed head is grief.

“If he were my husband, I know what I’d want from him,” says Frankie. “I’d want to know the truth.”

“The truth?” Maggie raises her head and looks at Frankie with haunted eyes.

“About his affair with Taryn Moore. Do you know about it?”

“Yes. He told me.”

“When?”

“Today. He said you’d questioned him about the girl’s death. He said it was all going to come out anyway, and he wanted to be the one to tell me.”

“What else did he say?”

“That she’d gotten pregnant and . . .” Maggie pauses, holding back tears. “He might be the baby’s father.”

“That must have been painful to hear.”

Maggie wipes a hand across her face. “Especially because we’ve been trying for years to have a baby. And then, a few weeks ago, we found out it was finally going to happen.”

Frankie frowns. “You’re pregnant?”

“Yes. And we were so happy. I was so happy.” Maggie takes a deep breath. “But now . . .”

In the face of such misery, Frankie can scarcely bring herself to ask the next question, but it must be asked. “Did you have any idea your husband was having the affair?”

“No.”

“Has he done this before? Been involved with other women?”

“No.”

“Are you sure about that?”

For a moment Maggie stares at her with tear-swollen eyes. This is the point when it could get interesting, thinks Frankie. Now the woman is questioning everything she thinks she knows about her husband. She is wondering if she’s been blind to other secrets, other infidelities.

“Dr. Dorian?”

Maggie gives a sob. “I’m not sure of anything anymore!”

“So there might have been other affairs.”

“He told me this was the only one.”

“And do you believe that?”

“Maybe I’m crazy, but I do. I can even understand how this happened. Why it happened.”

“The affair, you mean.”

“Yes.” Maggie wipes away another tear. “God, marriage is so complicated. I know how easy it is for things to get stale, monotonous. But even on our worst days, I never once believed that he stopped loving me. I know he still loves me. Yes, part of me wants to strangle him. But another part of me wants to forgive him.”

“You’d forgive a murderer?”

Maggie stiffens. “You don’t really think Jack would kill anyone?”

“Let me present you with some facts, Dr. Dorian. We know that Taryn Moore was murdered. We know there was a struggle in her apartment and she fell and hit her head against a coffee table, fracturing her skull. The killer then dragged her out to the fifth-floor balcony and dropped her to the sidewalk, discarding her body like a used-up piece of trash. And you can’t decide whether to forgive him?”

Maggie shakes her head. “He couldn’t have done that. It’s not possible.”

“Not only is it possible, it’s likely.”

“I know my husband.”

“Yet you didn’t know he was having an affair.”

“That’s different. Yes, he made a mistake. Yes, he was stupid. But killing a girl?” Again, she shakes her head, this time emphatically. “He’d never hurt anyone.”

Frankie glances at the one-way mirror, wondering if Mac feels as frustrated as she does. It is time to strip the veil from her eyes and force the woman to confront the brutal truth about her husband.

“Dr. Dorian,” Frankie says, “here’s what we can prove. Your husband had an affair with his student, Taryn Moore. She became pregnant and was about to reveal the truth. She was a threat to his reputation, his career, and his marriage. He would lose everything. I’d call that a pretty good motive for murder.”

“It still doesn’t mean he killed her.”

“Friday night—the night she was killed—he went to her apartment.”

“No, he didn’t. He stayed home.”

“Are you prepared to swear to that?”

“He told me—”

“Will you swear he was home with you that night, all night?”

Maggie sags back in her chair. “I can’t,” she says softly.

“Why not?”

“Because I wasn’t home all night. I was called into the hospital around midnight to see a patient. When I got back home at four, Jack was still in bed, sound asleep. Just the way I left him.”

“So there were four hours when you weren’t at home. That’s plenty of time for him to have slipped away to Taryn’s apartment. He had both the motive and the opportunity to kill her.”

“Where’s your proof that he actually went to her apartment? Is there a witness? Surveillance video?”

“We have his text messages.”

Maggie blinks. “What messages?”

“The ones he sent to his girlfriend,” Frankie says and notes the way Maggie flinches at the word. Girlfriend. “Taryn’s wireless carrier provided every text message she sent and received. Lo and behold, your husband’s cell phone number shows up again and again. On the night she died, they’d made plans to meet at her apartment.”

“But Jack stayed home that night. He told me he was home.”

Frankie pulls out the printout of Taryn’s text messages and shoves it toward her. “Then how do you explain this?”

Maggie stares at what her husband texted to his mistress. There it is, printed in black and white, the evidence that he lied to his wife.

Tonite, your place. Wait for me.

“He wrote that on Friday evening, the same night Taryn Moore died. While you were in the hospital, busting your butt as a doctor and saving lives, your hubby slipped out of bed—your bed. He drove to his girlfriend’s apartment, the girlfriend who’d been causing him all that trouble, and he took care of the problem. He cleaned up the blood to make it look like a suicide, and then he went home. In time to be back in bed when you returned.”

“No. This is all wrong.”

“Where is your husband right now?”

“This can’t possibly be—”

“Tell me where he is.”

“He’s probably at home.”

“He’s not there. We’ve been watching your house.”

“Then he’s at the university.”

“He’s not there either.”

“Oh God, this isn’t happening!” Clutching her head, Maggie stares down at the table. “I know my husband. I know what kind of man he is, and he can’t even kill a fucking spider. How the hell could he . . .” She stops, her gaze fixed on the printout of text messages. “Maybe he didn’t write this,” she says softly.

“Oh, come on. You can see it was sent from his phone. Friday, six thirty-seven p.m.”

“Friday,” Maggie murmurs. For a moment she sits perfectly still, staring at the sheet of paper. “That’s the night it rained so hard. The night we had dinner and . . .” Her head snaps up. She rises from the chair. “I think I know where Jack is.”

“Dr. Dorian! Where are you going?”

Maggie doesn’t even glance back as she heads for the door. “I’m going to save my husband.”

CHAPTER 45

JACK