He was waiting in the spacious back parking lot to Janice Durbin's office building and saw the African American woman he'd met before get out of her own car at a few minutes before eight. Summoning all of the patience he possessed, Glitsky gave her another ten minutes to let her get settled, and then he went to the door and into the building, heading upstairs again to suite 207.
She recognized him right away, greeting him with a warm smile. "But I'm sorry, I don't remember your name."
"Glitsky," he told her. "Lieutenant Abe Glitsky."
"And I'm Roberta. So what can I do for you, Lieutenant Abe Glitsky?"
"Well, you'll remember yesterday I was asking about who in the building might have known or been close to Janice Durbin. It turns out that might not have been the right question. I talked to Holly down the hall and she told me that Janice had admitted to her that she was seeing someone outside of her marriage, and that that person had apparently come by here to this building after hours, maybe several times. So I noticed you seem to have video cameras mounted over the doors and I wonder if one of them might have picked up a picture of either this guy or his car."
Roberta scrunched up her face in disappointment. "This would have been more than a week ago, then, wouldn't it?"
"Right. At least eleven days, maybe a lot more."
She tsked. "I'm sorry, but I don't think you're going to be in luck. We're on a seven-day cycle on this building and most of the others we monitor. If we're going to need to identify somebody, usually we know the next day, if you know what I mean. When the robbery or vandalism is reported. Three days at the most, if it's over a weekend. You're sure it would have been that long ago?"
"At least, I'm afraid." Glitsky's mouth tightened in frustration. "Would you mind telling me how else you monitor the building? I notice you've got alarms at the doors. People punch in a code when they go in or out?"
"Right. But that's only for off-hours. Normal business hours, we're wide-open." Roberta suddenly perked up, snapping her fingers. "But wait, here's something else, maybe." She got up from behind her desk and walked over to a bank of filing cabinets against Glitsky's right-hand wall. "We've got a nighttime drive-by service every two hours from six P.M. to eight A.M. That's every night. Physical inspection of the building and parking lot. Patients and clients and tenants are welcome to use the lot whenever they need to, but generally at night it's pretty empty. And if it's a nontenant car, they make a note of it-license number, make, and model. Or they're supposed to." She reached into the file and pulled out two relatively thin binders. "Here's the hard-copy reports from January and last December. February's probably still out with the unit. You're welcome to look at them." At a quarter to four that afternoon, Novio turned his cell phone on as soon as he got back to his office from his last class. "Chuck. It's Michael," he heard. Durbin's voice on his voice mail was hoarse with emotion. "Please call me as soon as you get this. It's urgent."
Frowning at the tension in his brother-in-law's voice, he hit the "call back" graphic on his iPhone and waited for the connection.
It came before the end of the first ring. "Chuck. Thank God. Where are you?"
"My office. Just finishing up."
"Can you meet me at Janice's right away?"
"Janice's office?"
"Yeah."
"Sure. What's wrong?"
"Everything. I just talked to Glitsky. I think he's coming down to your house to arrest me. I had to get out of there. I'm not going to jail." A pause. "I've got my shotgun with me."
Novio swore. Then, "Don't do anything stupid, Michael. I'll be right there. Hang tight." Less than ten minutes later, Chuck knocked on Janice's office door.
"Come on in."
Michael sat back, his hands clasped in his lap, at one end of the couch that was under the window. His face looked pasty, drawn with fatigue and stress. His shotgun lay on the top of the file cabinets next to him, the barrels broken open, the brass backs of the shells visible in them.
The weapon was loaded.
Chuck's eyes went quickly from Michael over to the shotgun, then back to Michael. Carefully he closed the door after him, then turned back. "What are you doing?" he said, motioning toward the gun. "What's that thing doing here?"
"I told you I'm not going to jail, Chuck."
"Of course you're not."
"No. I mean I really wasn't going to jail. If Glitsky was coming down for me, I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction. I wasn't going to let him put the kids through the whole ordeal of a trial, with me a murder suspect."
"The kids would be fine through it, Michael. They'd be way worse if you weren't there for them at all."
"I'm not sure that's true."
"Well, I'm telling you it is." Chuck half turned and lowered himself down onto the front edge of the leather lounge chair. "We'll get you the best lawyer in town and…"
But Michael was holding up a hand, shaking his head no. "That's not happening. In fact, none of this is happening."
"None of what? What do you mean?"
"I mean I came down here thinking it would be a good place to end things, you know? A little symmetry. Janice betrayed me and I splash my brains all over her office. You see what I'm saying?"
"There's no reason to end things, Michael. If you didn't do it…"
"What do you mean, if I didn't do it?" Michael moved up to the front edge of the couch, his voice raspy. "You of all people know goddamn well I didn't do it. And you know why you know that?"
"No, I don't." Chuck was the picture of rational calm and concern for his brother-in-law. "Except that I believe you if you say it wasn't you."
Michael all but collapsed back on the couch. "God, you're good," he said.
Like an inquisitive bird, Chuck cocked his head to one side. "What are you talking about, Michael? Good at what?"
Regaining his composure, Michael straightened up. "Maybe it was actually getting close to thinking I was going to end my life over this, Chuck. What a goddamn waste that would be when I knew I was innocent. So while I was sitting here trying to rationalize myself out of it, my brain must have gone into high gear and I remembered something you said."
"Something I said?"
Michael nodded. "That first weekend after Janice was killed. You told me that Glitsky had asked you about all these cell phone calls to and from you on Janice's phone, and you'd told him that you were both planning a surprise party for Kathy's birthday, that was the reason for them. You remember that?"
"Sure."
"Well, the thing is, Chuck, you in fact weren't planning a surprise party for Kathy. Janice wasn't planning a surprise party for Kathy."
Chuck put on a rueful expression. "I know," he said. "She found out about it and we had to cancel the surprise part. I don't see anything sinister in that. I wasn't hiding anything."
"No? That's funny, because once I started thinking about those phone calls, that it might have been you who was having the affair with Janice…"
Stung with a cattle prod, Chuck held up both hands. "Whoa. You're out of your mind, Michael. Janice and I didn't-"
Michael cut him off. "So I started thinking you two must have been meeting all those nights she told me she was out with her patients and you were at school, working late. And where would those meetings have been? Probably right here. And since I was down here anyway, I went to the security office, just down the hall, just a couple of hours ago. Did you know they keep track of the nontenant cars that are parked here at night? Hard-copy records, Chuck. With license plate numbers. How about that? So are you going to try to tell me you were visiting somebody else in this building all those times? Or maybe you had become one of Janice's patients? And you certainly got here fast enough when I called you today, didn't you? No directions needed."
Both men were breathing hard in the tense silence. After a long moment, something went out of Chuck's shoulders. "We didn't plan it, Michael," he said. "It was just one of those things that happened. We were trying to stop. We didn't want it to hurt anybody in the families. I am so, so sorry."
Crushed by the enormity of this admission, Michael hung his head. When he looked up again, he asked in a hoarse whisper. "So why did you have to kill her?"
Chuck's eyes went wide as if he couldn't believe the accusation. "Michael, I didn't kill her. I swear to God. I had no reason to kill her. I loved her."
"You loved her, but you were fucking someone else, too?"
"I wasn't…"
"Chuck, she had chlamydia. She didn't get it from a toilet seat and she didn't get it from me. You gave it to her. So who gave it to you? One of your students?"
Chuck held Michael's gaze until it became too much for him, and this time it was Chuck who hung his head, letting out a deep sigh. Looking back up, he saw that Michael was wiping tears from his eyes. Suddenly as quick as the strike of a snake, he bolted from the chair and reached out across the small room, getting his hands on the shotgun, snapping the barrels shut, and bringing it to bear on Michael's chest.
"You fucking idiot," he said. "You stupid, meddling fool." He let out a one-note bitter laugh. "You and Janice deserve each other. You want to know what happened? One of my students happened to go to her for counseling, fed her a load of shit about being exploited."
Novio kept talking, working himself up. "All they wanted was their fucking As, you know. They were happy as hell to trade a little tail for it. But Janice thought that was wrong. That wasn't just fucking. That was taking advantage of the poor students."
His knuckles were growing white holding the shotgun. "So now it's not just being mad at me, it's a moral crusade. And do you know what she was going to do? She was going to go not just to Kathy, but to the school, the dean. You hear that?"
"Sure. I hear it."
"Well, that would have been it for me. You get it? Turns out the little bitch was seventeen. Like I knew."
Lowering his voice, he drove in the last nail. "And that's statutory rape, my friend. Janice was going to call the cops and have them put me in jail. She wouldn't even admit it was personal. She kept saying that as a therapist, she was mandated to report sexual abuse."
Michael sat back on the couch, his eyes trained on the twin barrels. "So what are you going to do now? Kill me, too?"
Chuck let out another humorless laugh. "Me? I'm not going to do anything. I'm afraid I'm going to have not gotten here fast enough. I was just coming through the door when my poor brother-in-law, thinking he was about to get arrested for killing his wife, blew himself away."
Chuck advanced a step. "And, by the way, thanks for the tip about there being no good forensic record with a shotgun." Coming closer, now within a couple of feet, he cocked back both hammers and went down to one knee. "I like this lower angle," he said. "Like you put the thing up to your own throat."
And he pulled both triggers. Glitsky had started to lead Bracco and the three other inspectors in their charge to the door of Janice Durbin's office before they heard the pop and came barreling in with their weapons drawn.
"Throw down the gun and put up your hands!" Glitsky yelled. "The gun!"
Chuck Novio dropped the shotgun to the floor with a heavy thud. He stood there, staring down at an unharmed Michael Durbin as though he were looking at a ghost. "What the hell?"
Pairs of strong hands took each of his arms, jerked them back behind his back, and fastened them together with handcuffs.
Glitsky was already around Novio next to Durbin on the couch, looking for signs of burns or other damage.
"I think I'm okay," Durbin said. "Maybe a little deaf."
"You did good," Glitsky said. "You did amazing."
Behind them, Bracco was telling Chuck Novio that he was under arrest, that he had the right to remain silent, that anything he said could and would be used against him.
Glitsky turned back to Durbin. "Sorry we didn't get in sooner. We thought he'd give a little more warning but he moved too fast. But the good news is you're okay and we got it all. Quite a confession."
As the inspectors marched Novio out of the room and down to the waiting car, Durbin tried to get to his feet, but found that he didn't have the strength. "I've just got to sit here a minute, Lieutenant," he said. "I can't seem to get my legs to work. I feel like I might faint. Jesus Christ. Poor Kathy. Those poor girls."
"Take a deep breath," Glitsky said. "Put your head down between your knees. You'll get all the time you need to think about it later. For the time being, though, you're a bona fide hero."
"I don't feel anything like a hero."
"Well, join the club," Glitsky said. "Most of 'em don't."