Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(26)

Two months went by, then three. Christopher seemed more distracted, inventing more reasons to be away from the house. But when she confronted him, he denied everything, said this was just his life getting more complicated, that he was trying to juggle the school and a possible mayoral run.

“I know it was stupid, but I went off my meds around then and started to obsess about the affair,” she said. “Pretty soon it was all I could think about.”

One day Elaine decided to follow her husband, and she caught him going into Kay Willingham’s town house in Georgetown when he’d claimed he was attending a breakfast prayer meeting. Another time, she caught Kay going in the back way to the charter school after hours.

“They’d have sex in his office,” she said acidly. “Easy, close to home, and sneaky. I think they liked that. I mean, he knew I suspected, and here he was, throwing it in my face.”

“You confront him again?” Mahoney asked.

“I did,” she said. “Randall admitted it, said he loved her and that he was sick of my ups and downs. He said he was leaving me.”

“When was this?” I said.

“Ten days ago?”

“Did he move out?”

“Into his office at the high school,” she said. “That’s why I was there that night he was killed. In the schoolyard.”





CHAPTER 28





THE FIRST FORTY-EIGHT HOURS after Randall Christopher walked out were the worst. Elaine sent the girls to her mother’s in Baltimore and locked herself in her bedroom, weeping, drinking, phone off, everything off.

“I’d think about killing myself. I’d think about killing Randall,” she said. “I’d think the problem was me and beat myself up. But then I’d think, No, and get angry. Randall was the one who cheated. Not me. Elaine Paulson? She is a good woman, a good mother. But her thoughts, they just kept coming back to Randall and how he left her.”

I thought it was odd that she’d started talking about herself in the third person. “Explain why… Elaine—you—were at the murder scene.”

“I know who I am and I’m getting to that,” she said, suddenly upset with me. “Please, I was trying to think differently at the time, I really was, but it wasn’t working. For every good thought, I’d have five bad ones about losing Randall to a woman ten years older than me, and the bad ones became interlocking obsessions, playing over and over in my head.”

She said she soon felt compelled to spy on her husband, to find out what he was doing in his new life without her. Four days before her husband’s body was found, she said she woke up at three thirty a.m., unable to sleep. She decided to go for a run.

That run led her by the school, where she saw a light on in Randall’s office. But on early runs the following morning and the morning after that, the light was off.

“He was staying at her house, I guess,” she said. “I mean, I knew he was. But I couldn’t help waking up and going for a run the fourth morning.”

Elaine claimed she jogged toward the school campus, going past the bodega and the laundromat and crossing the street to Harrison Charter, which puzzled me, because Sampson said he’d watched the footage and didn’t see anyone on it.

Before I could press her on that, she said her husband’s offices were on the second floor, northeast corner of the building. She said she stopped below the windows, looked up, and to her disappointment saw the lights were off for the third morning in a row.

“But Randall often worked in two adjacent rooms, a formal office where he met parents and a smaller personal space where he liked to get things done,” Elaine said. “I went around the north end of the school to the football field so I could look back at the window to the smaller office, but it was dark too.”

I remembered the two offices from our search of the school and was following her description in my mind. “What did you do then?” She hesitated and closed her eyes. “I’d decided to loop back through the rear parking lot and head home when I heard this popping noise, two of them, and then a woman’s scream that got cut off with two more pops.”

Elaine said she stood there petrified for several minutes and then crept forward. She started to take a peek around the corner of the building when flickers of movement caught her attention.

She opened her eyes. “I can’t be sure, but I believe it was a person crouched over and moving in the dark shadows over near the football stands.”

“Headed?” Mahoney said. “Direction?”

“North,” she said.

“Male? Female?”

Elaine said she didn’t know. Her heart was beating so wildly, she was just happy when the person vanished into the dark. Then she looked around the northwest corner of the school and south through the rear parking lots. “There were two of them, males, running away from the dumpsters,” she said, motioning with her hands. “Headed south. They wore dark hoodies and went through a hole cut in the fence that gets you into the alley.”

I nodded. I knew the hole in the fence. I’d used it.

Elaine said she stood there at the northwest corner of the school, unsure of what to do. Then she figured she’d better see what had happened before she called 911.

She shook her head. “I had no idea it would be… them. No idea I’d find them… like that.”