Margaret Truman's Experiment in Murder Read online

  “Was the doctor married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Where’s his ex-wife live? And kids.”

  She gave him the address and phone number in Chevy Chase.

  “He have a girlfriend?”

  She managed a smile. “A few.”

  “What about his patients? He get involved with any of them?”

  “Involved? You mean romantically?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t think so.”

  He hated “I don’t think so.”

  But she did know. She’d become aware over the years of working for him that he had become sexually involved with a few of his patients. It bothered her, but she wasn’t in a position to challenge him about it.

  The detective’s cocked head invited her to answer again.

  “No,” she said, “I don’t think so.”

  Nothing to be gained by pressing her.

  “He have any enemies, you know, people who got mad at him for something he did or didn’t do in his practice, somebody who held a grudge?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know of anyone.”

  Their questioning of her lasted another fifteen minutes. Their final query was, “Do any of his patients have blond hair?”

  This brought forth an incredulous, pained laugh from her. “Lots of them do,” she said.

  After suggesting that she call all the patients to alert them that the doctor wasn’t available—and informing her that other officers would be back later that day to ask more questions and to examine the office—they left.

  “He was screwing patients,” one said as they drove back to headquarters.

  “Looks that way.”

  “You figure that’s the direction we go?”

  The driver shrugged and swerved to avoid a bicyclist. “Idiot!” he muttered.

  “The world’s full of them.”

  “If the good doctor was playing kissy-face with his patients, the world has one less idiot.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Me, too. Dunkin’ Donuts?”

  CHAPTER

  4

  After jelly donuts and coffee, the detectives who’d been called to the accident scene contacted their superior and were instructed to go to Sedgwick’s apartment, seal it off, and wait for Forensics to show up. They secured the cooperation of the building’s superintendent and now sat in the living room, where they discussed their confusion over the order they’d been given.

  “They’re treating this like a crime scene,” one said. “Doesn’t make sense. The guy was just a shrink in private practice who got run over.”

  “Deliberately.”

  “Even so.”

  “Homicide is homicide,” his partner said. “Doesn’t matter how somebody kills somebody. Maybe there’s something in here that’ll point to the mysterious blonde with the heavy foot.”

  His colleague got up and perused a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, then went to the window and looked out over a pocket park. “Nice place the doc had.”

  “There’s good money in treating head cases,” said his partner, who’d left the living room and gone to a small second bedroom used by Sedgwick as an office. He slipped on a pair of latex gloves, sat at the desk and opened its drawers, fingered their contents, and closed them. A desk calendar contained handwritten dates and times of its owner’s October schedule—lunch dates, a dental appointment, reminders of TV shows he’d wanted to watch, a Saturday notation “Day with kids,” and other indications of his life slipping by. He looked up at the second detective, who stood in the doorway. “You figure they’ve notified the doc’s ex-wife?”

  “I hope we don’t catch it,” was the response. “Petrewski enjoys catching next-of-kin notification. You know that about him? He’s like a ghoul.”

  Their conversation was ended by the arrival of the Forensics unit. As the newcomers set about scouring the apartment, the two detectives who’d secured the place went to their car and called in. Ten minutes later, they sat with their superior at headquarters on Indiana Avenue.

  Their boss listened to the results of their findings at the accident scene. When they’d finished, he said, “We ran a background check on the deceased. He had a top secret security clearance.”

  “I thought he was in private practice,” a detective said.

  “That’s right. And he also had a top secret security clearance. Langley ran his clearance twelve years ago. It was updated last year.”

  One of the detectives laughed. “A shrink and a spook,” he said.

  His boss didn’t laugh. “He was a consultant to the CIA’s”—he looked at a note—“the CIA’s Medical and Psychological Analysis Center. I want you to canvass people in his apartment and office buildings. Maybe someone picked up on a relationship with a blond woman, heard them argue, things like that. It’s a long shot, but so is finding a white sedan with D.C. plates. I have people working on that now, checking MV records and repair shops. We’re treating this as a homicide based upon what your eyewitnesses said. They seem to know what they were talking about?”

  They nodded in unison.

  “What about the ex-wife?” one asked as they prepared to leave. “She been notified yet?”

  “As we speak.”

  “Maybe she’s a blonde.”

  “Or a brunette wearing a blond wig,” said their boss. “Get going. I have a feeling that this is going to heat up.”

  * * *

  Jasmine Smith-Sedgwick wasn’t a blonde, at least not that day. She wasn’t a beautiful woman; handsome would be a more apt description. Her figure was nice, though, and she was tall, with reddish hair worn long. Her jeans and sweatshirt fitted her the way they should.

  Two detectives pulled up behind a black Mercedes in the driveway of her Chevy Chase home and rang the bell.

  “Yes?” she said.

  A badge was shown. “Your former husband was killed this morning by a hit-and-run driver,” a detective said.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Hit by a car? Where?”

  “Virginia Avenue, in front of his apartment building.”

  She looked back inside, concern etched on her face. “The children aren’t here,” she said. “They’ll be devastated.”

  “Sorry to bring you bad news,” one detective said. “Maybe it’d be better if we sat down inside. We have some questions to ask you.”

  “Questions? What kind of questions?”

  “About your former husband. You see, it was a hit-and-run, and people who witnessed it said it appeared that the driver intended to hit him, deliberately aimed at him.”

  She gasped.

  “If you don’t mind, ma’am.”

  “Yes, of course, please come in.” She looked past them and was relieved that they’d arrived in an unmarked car.

  They went to a family room. It had a big flat-screen TV, a pool and game table on which a jigsaw puzzle was half completed, and plenty of comfortable furniture. She offered them a soft drink or coffee, which they declined. One detective remained standing while questioning her; the other sat on a couch next to her and took notes.

  “Can you think of any enemies your husband had?”

  She wrinkled her face in thought. “No. Of course I haven’t been in his life for the past three years since the divorce. We see each other only occasionally, but he’s inconsistent about spending time with the kids. Of course he’s always traveled a great deal, which often gets in the way of visitation.”

  “Why does he travel that much?” Jasmine was asked.

  She shrugged. “I never knew. It was always to some psychiatric convention or other. He’s been involved for years with a clinic in San Francisco. I really don’t know much about it and frankly never cared. I just knew that it took him away from home more than was healthy for the children.”

  “He ever talk about his patients with you?”

  She shook her head. “That was strictly off-limits. I understood.”

  “A witness said the driver was
a blond woman.”

  Her face was blank.

  “He ever talk about girlfriends?”

  “No, of course not. We’ve kept our private lives to ourselves since we separated and divorced.”

  “We’re told that he had some sort of government connection.”

  “That’s right. He had a security clearance and was a consultant to NIH, at least for a while. He also did work at GW, where he received his training.”

  “He was busy.”

  “Too busy. What will happen with … with his body?” She choked up, then allowed the tears to flow.

  “That’s up to the medical examiner, ma’am.” He handed her his card. “Again, sorry to be the bearer of bad news. We’ll leave you alone now. I’ll see what the plans are for disposal of and—” He forced a smile. “Call me and I’ll let you know.”

  She escorted them outside.

  “Is that Mercedes your only car?” one asked.

  “No. I have another in the garage.”

  “Mind if we see it?”

  “No, of course not.”

  The taller of the two detectives peered through a row of small windows at the top of the garage doors and saw a white vehicle.

  “Open the garage for us, please.”

  “All right but … you aren’t thinking that—”

  “Please open the door.”

  She did. The white car was another Mercedes. The detectives examined the front of the vehicle, which was perfectly intact.

  “Many thanks, ma’am,” they said as they got in their car and drove away.

  “Nice lady,” the driver’s colleague said from the passenger seat.

  “Must not be easy married to a shrink.”

  “The money’s good, though. Two Mercedes Benzes. Not bad.”

  “My wife has a shrink friend, a psychologist. Whenever we’re with her I think she’s analyzing everything I say.”

  “She probably is.”

  “Makes me uncomfortable.”

  They drove in silence until the driver said, “There’s more to this guy than meets the eye, huh? They send us to deliver the news instead of a Maryland cop. A Maryland cop would have been the one if it was routine.”

  “You never know about people.”

  “Especially shrinks. They’re all weird. You ever see one? I mean for a problem?”

  “No. You?”

  “Once, to help me get off cigarettes.”

  “It worked. You don’t smoke.”

  “I don’t know whether the shrink helped or not. He tried hypnosis. That mumbo-jumbo didn’t work. I kicked the habit on my own, cold turkey.”

  His partner nodded. “Hypnosis? Lotta mumbo-jumbo. Shrinks. They can really screw you up. Let’s move, Harry. I’m taking the wife out to dinner tonight.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  The following day, Nicholas Tatum sipped cold tea from a Styrofoam cup that had rested on his desk since class commenced a little less than an hour ago. The classroom was filled to capacity, which it usually was when he taught his two-hour seminar on evaluating human behavior to aspiring attorneys enrolled in the George Washington Law School. He conducted the seminar only once each semester, and it had immediately become a favorite elective. Did students flock to it because they viewed the subject as important to their legal careers, or because it was a welcome respite from classes on torts and contracts and habeas corpus? It didn’t matter to Dr. Tatum, or “Nic” to his friends. The behavioral sciences was a discipline about which he was passionate, and he enjoyed imparting what he knew to these young men and women no matter to what use they put it.

  “Look,” he told a student who questioned what benefit there was in knowing how hypnotizable someone was, “it doesn’t have to do with hypnotizability. I’m not suggesting that you hypnotize a client to get to the truth. What I am saying is that if you pick up on the subtle clues about how that client processes life, you’ll be in a better position to judge whether he or she is telling you the truth. The same holds true when questioning witnesses in a courtroom. Once you’ve discovered how a witness tends to react to various stimuli and then acts upon them, you know the best approach to breaking through whatever barriers he or she has put up.

  “Let me go over the basic premise again. Each of us is born with a natural wired ability to be hypnotized, and it correlates directly with personality style and how we function. There are three basic types of people—Dionysians, Apollonians, and Odysseans, named after the mythical Greek gods Dionysius and Apollo, and the not so mythical Odysseus.

  “Dionysus was the fun-loving god. He worshipped freely and with abandon, his approach to life based upon freeing one’s natural self through madness, ecstasy, and wine.”

  Laughter erupted in the room and fingers were pointed.

  Tatum waited until the merriment had ebbed before continuing. “People who are known as Dionysians tend to trust others. They’re intuitive and make many decisions based upon feelings rather than cognitive thought. Apollo, on the other hand, was the god of logic, reason, and order. Apollonians tend to want to lead rather than follow. Put a Dionysian and an Apollonian in a car, and the Apollonian will want to drive while the Dionysian will be content to let him.

  “Dionysians are prone to being influenced by others more readily than are Apollonians. And then there are the Odysseans. They form the middle ground between Dionysians and Apollonians. They tend to fluctuate between action and despair, between feeling and thinking. Most people are Odysseans. Now, which group do you assume is more hypnotizable?”

  “The Dionysians,” three students answered in unison.

  “Correct,” said Tatum. “Dionysians are more easily led than Apollonians or Odysseans, more open to suggestion. They often prefer to follow rather than to lead. Apollonians are the opposite.”

  Tatum checked his watch. “We’ll take a fifteen-minute break. When we come back we’ll get into how you can determine which category a client or witness falls into based upon some easily visible signs and traits. See you in fifteen.”

  Tatum exited the classroom and went to the faculty lounge, from which Mackensie Smith was just leaving.

  “Are my best and brightest getting your message?” Smith asked, chuckling.

  “Not sure, Mac, but it’s easy to tell which ones are.”

  “The Dionysians,” Smith said.

  Tatum nodded. “Not hard to spot them. How’s Annabel?”

  “Fine, just fine. Available for dinner Saturday?”

  “Saturday night? Sure. The weather forecast for Saturday is good so I thought I’d get in some flying time, but I should be finished by five.”

  Among Tatum’s many hobbies was piloting a vintage aerobatic aircraft, a Micco SP26, which he housed at Potomac Airfield in Fort Washington, Maryland.

  “Seven? Annabel is suddenly in the cooking mood. She’s whipping up her signature veal martini. Bring a guest.”

  “Sounds great. Cindy and I had planned to get together for dinner.”

  “Looking forward to seeing the two of you. Fly safe, Nic. Do you ever worry that the wings on that aerobatic plane of yours might fall off one day?”

  Tatum laughed. “Every time I go up.”

  “I have to run,” said Smith. “Can’t be late for my tennis match with Dean Molino.”

  * * *

  Mackensie Smith had recruited Tatum to teach the law school course. Smith had been one of D.C.’s top criminal attorneys, the go-to lawyer when your life was at stake. He was a ferocious advocate in the courtroom but a gentle, accepting man outside it. It was that lighter side that had attracted Annabel Lee to him. She’d been a successful matrimonial attorney until meeting the erudite Mac Smith, whose first wife and only child, a son, had been slaughtered on the Beltway by a drunken driver. When the drunk’s attorney successfully mitigated his client’s culpability before a jury of his peers and got him off with a minimal sentence, Smith reconsidered the use to which he’d put his extensive legal knowledge for all those years. He fo
lded his private practice and accepted a teaching position at GW Law. Was teaching young attorneys to defend people any less unsavory than doing it himself? He sometimes wondered. But not often.

  Recently Smith had succumbed to the lure of the courtroom and the give-and-take of negotiation, and had taken on a small select number of clients, mostly friends in whom he believed and whose legal needs weren’t outside his comfort zone. Annabel wasn’t especially happy with his reimmersion into the world of advocacy law but understood what was driving him. While the classroom could be challenging at times, it paled in comparison with what her husband termed “the real world of the law.”

  After they’d married, Annabel, too, decided that she’d had enough of representing men and women whose need for revenge against a soon-to-be-former spouse trumped their common sense, especially when it came to the welfare of their children. She’d fostered a lifelong ambition of owning an art gallery devoted to pre-Columbian art, and with Mac’s encouragement she took down her shingle, found the perfect space in Georgetown, and realized her dream.

  While both were busy people, they found time to maintain relationships with a variety of Washingtonians, including some in high positions of government, a few cabinet members, the attorney general, congressmen and -women, and Senator George Mortinson, whose campaign to unseat the current president, Allan Swayze, had gained traction and placed him comfortably ahead in the latest polls. Smith had acted as counsel to a committee chaired by Mortinson, and they’d become good friends, their relationship embellished by their love of tennis. They often played when Mortinson was in the Senate and whenever Smith’s bad knee wasn’t acting up. Since Mortinson announced that he was running for the presidency, their tennis matches had become less frequent, although he occasionally took time out from campaigning to meet Smith on the court, much to the chagrin of his campaign staff and the Secret Service detail assigned to protect him while on the stump.

  * * *

  Tatum, in his midforties, had earned his Ph.D. in American University’s behavior, cognition, and neuroscience graduate program. He’d been at the top of his class since high school and throughout college; his doctoral thesis that correlated a person’s level of hypnotizability with the effectiveness of acupuncture was considered one of the best papers ever written by someone in the program, and he was recruited upon graduation by myriad universities, hospitals, and government agencies. To everyone’s surprise, he opted to join the Washington MPD’s small but growing Criminal Behavior Unit that had been established to better predict the actions of known criminals. Patterned after the FBI’s criminal-profiling department, the CBU was soon emulated by other police departments across the country, and Nic Tatum was quickly recognized as a rising star in the division.