Confidential(94)

Greer’s personal life was a blackout, internet-wise. I needed to come at this another way.

I knew a couple of Michael’s passwords, managing to lurk nearby while he was logging in, but he’d long since changed them. Still, I tried them on his email accounts, because you never know.

No luck. But then I had an inspiration: His bank accounts. He might be foolish enough to use one of the passwords he’d discarded from his email for his bank accounts. Might think I’d never look there.

Bank of America. I can have a photographic memory when I need it, and I’d seen him toss mail on his counter with their red-and-blue logo on it.

I went to the website and tried to log in. The first password failed. But with the second, I got a message on the screen saying that my computer hadn’t been recognized and I’d need to answer a few verification questions. There I got lucky. He’d told me some things that were true, like the name of his first pet, a golden retriever named Biffy. I was in.

And shocked. Because I found that Greer had transferred two payments of $50,000 each, weeks apart.

One hundred thousand dollars! That was not payment for therapy services rendered.

I also found that he’d made payments to a Cyrus Hillard. As in, a relative of Maureen Hillard, one of the women who’d withdrawn her complaint?

I hadn’t even bothered to check for a husband; I’d just assumed there wasn’t one. But if Maureen had been married and had an affair with her therapist, she might have withdrawn the complaint on her own, for her own reasons, not due to pressure from Michael.

A quick search revealed that yes, Cyrus was Maureen’s husband. And he looked like kind of a scary, beefy dude. I wouldn’t want to be the one sleeping with his wife.

The payment had been made just a few days after the first money transfer from Greer. Michael put up the alarm system sticker just about then, too. So maybe that hadn’t been for me at all but for Cyrus. Just because Michael had paid Cyrus didn’t mean he’d feel safe. There was no honor among blackmailers. Maybe the money hadn’t been enough to make up for the assaultive visions of Michael with Maureen. Michael had been acting strange and jumpy for the past few months. He might have feared for his life.

When he’d sobbed in my arms that night and I thought it was about his terror at losing me and what we had, it probably hadn’t been about me then, either. I said I was so sorry, I’d do anything, and he’d responded, “No one does anything.” He was probably talking about the police or just expressing his general helplessness. It had nothing to do with loving me. I was a footnote.

The upside was that I might not have to do much at all: Michael was already getting what was coming to him.

No, I wanted him to know it was me.

Now there was a paper trail. Proof of his misdeeds. I’d caught him red-handed, or as close as I could come to it. This, plus my testimony and Lucinda’s testimony—we had him. We were going to take this fucker down.

I couldn’t believe it. That he could be that full of himself, or that dumb, as to transfer money directly from his account to Cyrus’s. He wasn’t even worried about a trail, though I’d warned him. I told him I was coming for him, and here I was.

But what about Greer? What could he possibly have on her? If Cyrus and Maureen were blackmailing Michael, with Greer it seemed to be the other way around. Maybe she’d told him something in therapy and he was using it against her . . . ?

Or more likely, Greer was so lovesick she’d lost all common sense. He could have told her some cockamamy story about his needy mother and she bought it. But did she know she was subsidizing his payments to a former accuser’s husband? She might be interested in that information. It could be enough to get her on my side.

All night, I was strategizing, and then in the morning, I did one last online trawl and nearly fainted.

Michael was dead.

I never thought . . .

When Lucinda and I had been talking, I was just spitballing. Fantasizing, like Jeanie said. I told Lucinda we were in it together.

I hadn’t meant . . .

I never thought she’d have the guts. But then, Michael always told me that people were surprising.

I’d caused Kate to be in a coma, and now I might have set things in motion for Michael’s death.

Sure, I’d snapped the other night, and sure, I’d wanted to make him pay, and sure, I’d wanted him to know that I was the one behind it. But I’d been thinking the cost would be his reputation, not his life.

I staggered to the floor. He was dead.

Was it Lucy? Or could it have been Greer? Was this all my fault?





PRESENT DAY





CHAPTER 77





GREER


It was my usual routine upon waking: check my phone for messages and my computer for news.

Today, it was the most awful stereo. In a truly surreal experience, I heard Michael’s voice as I was reading, PSYCHOTHERAPIST FOUND DEAD IN HIS OFFICE.

“You’ve been avoiding me, and I think I know why,” he was saying. “I have a feeling someone’s gotten to you . . .”

The body of Michael Baylor, a licensed clinical psychotherapist practicing in the affluent Rockridge section of Oakland, has been discovered.

“. . . and you’re either hearing or are about to hear a lot of—well, not misinformation, exactly, but very skewed information. I want to tell you my side.