At eleven-thirty she caught Robin’s eye and waved good-bye. Robin would go home from the game with her best friend, Cassie, and would spend the afternoon at her house.

A few minutes later, Kerry was on the road to Trenton.

She had visited the state prison several times and always found the grim aspect of barbed wire and guard towers a sobering sight. This was not a place she looked forward to seeing again.

25

Kerry found Geoff waiting for her in the area where visitors were registered. “I m really glad you made it,” he said. They talked little while they waited for their scheduled meeting. Geoff seemed to understand that she did not want his input at this time.

Promptly at three o’clock a guard approached them and told them to follow him.

Kerry did not know what she expected Skip Reardon to look like now. It had been ten years since she had sat in at his sentencing. The impression she had retained of him was of a tall, good-looking, broad-shouldered young man with fiery red hair. But more than his appearance, it was his statement that had been burned into her mind: Dr. Charles Smith is a liar. Before God and this court, I swear he is a liar!

“What have you told Skip Reardon about me?” she asked Geoff as they waited for the prisoner to be escorted into the visiting area.

“Only that you’ve unofficially taken some interest in his case and wanted to meet him. I promise you, Kerry, I said ‘unofficially.’”

“That’s fine. I trust you.”

“Here he is now.”

Skip Reardon appeared, dressed in prison denims and an open-necked prison-issue shirt. There were streaks of gray through the red hair, but except for the lines around his eyes he still looked very much as Kerry recalled him. A smile brightened his face as Geoff introduced him.

A hopeful smile, Kerry realized, and with a sinking heart wondered if she shouldn’t have been more cautious, perhaps waiting until she knew more about the case, instead of agreeing so readily to this visit.

Geoff got right to the point. “Skip, as I told you, Ms. McGrath wants to ask you some questions.”

“I understand. And, listen, I’ll answer them no matter what they are.” He spoke earnestly, although with a hint of resignation. “You’ve heard that old saying, I have nothing to hide.”

Kerry smiled, then went straight to the question that was to her the crux of this meeting. “In his testimony, Dr. Smith swore that his daughter, your wife, was afraid of you and that you had threatened her. You have maintained that he was lying, but what purpose would he have in lying about that?”

Reardon’s hands were folded on the table in front of him. “Ms. McGrath, if I had any explanation for Dr. Smith’s actions, maybe I wouldn’t be here now. Suzanne and I were married four years, and during that time I never saw that much of Smith. She’d go into New York and have dinner with him occasionally, or he’d come out to the house, but usually when I was away on a business trip. At that time my construction business was booming. I was building all over the state and investing in land in Pennsylvania for future development. I’d be gone a couple of days at a time on a fairly regular basis. Whenever I was with Dr. Smith, he seemed not to have much to say, but he never acted as though he didn’t like me. And he certainly didn’t act as though he thought his daughter’s life was in danger.”

“When you were with both him and Suzanne, what did you notice about his attitude toward her?”

Reardon looked at Dorso. “You’re the guy with the fancy words, Geoff. What’s a good way to put it? Wait a minute. I can tell you. When I was in parochial school, the nuns got mad at us for talking in church and told us we should have reverence for a holy place and holy objects. Well that’s the way he treated her. Smith showed ‘reverence’ for Suzanne.”

What an odd word to use about a father’s attitude toward his daughter, Kerry thought.

“And he was also protective of her,” Reardon added. “One night the three of us were driving somewhere for dinner and he noticed that Suzanne hadn’t put on her seat belt. So he launched into a lecture about her responsibility to take care of herself. He actually got fairly agitated about it, maybe even a little angry.”

It sounds like the same way he lectured Robin and me, Kerry thought. Almost reluctantly she admitted to herself that Skip Reardon certainly gave the appearance of being candid and honest.

“How did she act toward him?”

“Respectful, mostly. Although toward the end-before she was killed-the last few times I was with them, she seemed to be kind of irritated at him.”

Kerry then ventured into other aspects of the case, asking him about his sworn testimony that just prior to the murder, he had noticed Suzanne wearing expensive pieces of jewelry that he had not given her.

“Ms. McGrath, I wish you’d talk to my mother. She could tell you. She has a picture of Suzanne that was run in one of the community papers, taken at a charity affair. It shows her with an old-fashioned diamond pin on the lapel of her suit. The picture was taken only a couple of weeks before she was murdered. I swear to you that that pin and a couple of other pieces of expensive jewelry, none of which I gave her, were in her jewelry box that morning. I remember it specifically because it was one of the things we argued about. Those pieces were there that morning and they weren’t there the next day.”

“You mean someone took them?”

Reardon seemed uncomfortable. “I don’t know if someone took them or if she gave them back to someone, but I tell you there was jewelry missing the next morning. I tried to tell all this to the cops, to get them to look into it, but it was obvious from the beginning that they didn’t believe me. They thought that I was trying to make it look like she had been robbed and killed by an intruder.

“Something else,” he continued. “My dad was in World War II and was in Germany for two years after the war. He brought back a miniature picture frame that he gave to my mother when they became engaged. My mother gave that frame to Suzanne and me when we were married. Suzanne put my favorite picture of her in it and kept it on the night table in our room. When my mother and I sorted Suzanne’s things out before I was arrested, Mom noticed it was missing. But I know it was there that last morning.”

“Are you trying to say that the night Suzanne died, someone came in and stole some jewelry and a picture frame?” Kerry asked.

“I’m telling you what I know was missing. I don’t know where it went, and of course I’m not sure it had anything to do with Suzanne’s murder. I just know that suddenly those things weren’t there and that the police wouldn’t look into it.”

Kerry looked up from her notes and peered directly into the eyes of the man facing her.

“Skip, what was your relationship with your wife?”

Reardon sighed. “When I met her, I fell like a ton of bricks. She was gorgeous. She was smart. She was funny. She was the kind of woman who makes a guy feel ten feet tall. After we were married…” He paused. “It was all heat and no warmth, Ms. McGrath. I was raised to think you’re supposed to make a go of marriage, that divorce was a last resort. And, of course, there were some good times. But was I ever happy or content? No, I wasn’t. But then I was so busy building up my company that I just spent more and more time at work and in that way was able to avoid dealing with it.

“As for Suzanne, she seemed to have everything she wanted. The money was rolling in. I built her the house she said she had dreamed of having. She was over at the club every day, playing golf or tennis. She spent two years with a decorator, furnishing the house the way she wanted it. There’s a guy who lives in Alpine, Jason Arnott, who really knows antiques. He took Suzanne to auctions and told her what to buy. She developed a taste for designer clothes. She was like a kid who wanted every day to be Christmas. With the way I was working, she had plenty of free time to come and go as she pleased. She loved to be at affairs that got press coverage, so that her picture would be in the paper. For a long time I thought she was happy, but as I look back on it, I’m sure she stayed with me because she hadn’t found any better setup.”