Alan took a deep breath. It had been easier in his imagination.
“Good morning, Mr. Gale,” Cavanaugh said in a surprisingly soft voice. “Thank you for coming.”
Alan instinctively moved closer to the glass to hear him better before figuring out the voice came to him through the little speaker in his hand. Cavanaugh didn’t seem to notice his unease or take any offense at being told how good the morning was.
Alan looked down at his pad, pencil in hand. “I have a lot of questions for you, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. How old are you, Mr. Gale?”
Alan glanced up. “Uh… I am twenty-six.”
Cavanaugh nodded.
Alan had a flash of realization and scribbled some quick figures. Cavanaugh’s age minus twenty years since the–
He was the same age Matt Cavanaugh had been when he twice pulled the trigger.
“Are you married, Mr. Gale?”
Alan was friends with many on the force. Beat cops, sergeants, detectives. The detectives had their ancient and immutable rules of thumb. One of these was they never let the suspect ask the questions.
He was not a detective, and Cavanaugh was not a suspect. Not anymore. But still the questions put him off a bit.
“Yes, married for four years.”
“I am not going to even ask if you love your wife. I can see it on your face. You greet her with a kiss every morning and go to sleep with a kiss. And in between… kisses.”
“Yes, I think that pretty much describes us. Why?”
Cavanaugh leaned forward and rested his elbows on the shelf. “Because I am going to tell you a story nobody else in the world knows. Maybe you can understand it.”
Alan felt a drop of sweat coalesce between his shoulder blades and start its trickle down his back. Matt Cavanaugh had given no interviews before, during, or after his trial. He told his story to the police, and that story was, yes, he had shot them both. Nothing else mattered. Nothing could excuse what he had done.
He had confessed fully. There was no doubt.
When the police arrived at the scene, they found Matthew sitting on the floor in a pool of his wife’s blood. He was cradling her body and crying hysterically. The responding officers initially thought an unknown perpetrator had killed the two and Matthew had found them dead.
He started to confess while his wife’s shattered skull was still leaking onto his lap. All the forensic evidence confirmed his story. The gun was his. There were no other fingerprints in the house but those of Matthew, Christine, and the third victim, one Shayne Linwood. Most of the prints belonged to the wife, and many older prints belonged to Matthew. Only a few belonged to Mr. Linwood, a bartender at a pub some two miles from the murder scene, who had apparently never been in the Cavanaugh house before his ill-timed first visit. Investigators failed to find any previous contact between Linwood and Mrs. Cavanaugh.
It was just Linwood’s unlucky day.
The serum blood alcohol showed both victims were quite intoxicated. Cavanaugh had been stone sober.
The case was a slam dunk, open and shut, a cakewalk. The DA had who, what, where, and how. Why was so obvious it did not warrant consideration. The prosecution had everything they needed to convict Matthew Cavanaugh, whose lawyer put on a defense crippled by the fact that his client admitted to everything.
The case sold many papers. Front page for several days, then occasionally below the fold during the trial. Everyman loses it. Crime of passion. But in the end there was no hook to elevate the story to be more than what it appeared — a mundane tale of jealousy and rage. Sadly unremarkable, sadly too common.
Cavanaugh’s case whirled through the system, through all the mandatory appeals. It faded from the news. Nobody cared about it anymore except for the surviving relatives of the deceased.
And Matthew Cavanaugh had never talked about what really happened in the six months between his disappearance from his home and his reappearance on the day of the crime.
Now he was seemingly willing to tell the story to him, Alan thought. Pulitzer Prize shit. The Peabody– He had to stop leaping ahead. Focus. This was going to be a grind. Plus, he would have to protect this story so another bastard on the news staff didn’t try and poach it.
“Go ahead,” he said into the handset.
Cavanaugh glanced at the nearest guard, then back at Alan.
“Imagine,” he said in a quiet voice that made Alan think of his father reading If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to him night after night. “Imagine your wife wakes up at 5 am every morning in the middle of a loud convulsive orgasm. And you had nothing to do with it.”
Alan blanched. He felt it and felt ashamed of his lack of self-control. He nodded. Continue.
Cavanaugh told him how his wife Christine started having erotic dreams of a man — she professed not to know him — who appeared most nights and had sex with her, ejaculated into her.
“At first I was turned on. Those mornings I woke up to her hot, wet, and ready to go,” he said.
Then he found out the imaginary lover had a name. That bothered him.
Then his wife started calling out her lover’s name in her throes. That gutted him.
“I withdrew. I started sleeping in another room. One day I just left.”
Alan made a note. The police had interviewed a young woman who witnessed him leave. She had been looking for the house she was supposed to clean in preparation for it being put on the market when she rang the doorbell of the Cavanaugh house. So his date of departure, at least, was confirmed.
Cavanaugh was staring into the distance. “Over a dream, I left her. It was just a dream.” He returned his attention to Alan. “I have thought about putting it on my tombstone.”
“Sorry, what was that?”
“It was just a dream,” Cavanaugh repeated.
Alan waited, but the topic was complete.
“Your car was found in an Amtrak parking lot,” Alan offered as a way back to the narrative.
Cavanaugh shrugged. “I left my phone in it and took the next train that came along. I took a lot of money out of my bank. When I got to Florida, I dropped my wallet in a dumpster. I kept the cash.”
“You were untraceable.”
“That was my crappy plan. Disappear so well Chris would not be able to find me and convince me to come back. Because she could and she would. I was never able to deny my wife anything.”
Neither spoke for several minutes.
“I greeted her with a kiss every morning and went to sleep with a kiss. And in between… kisses,” Cavanaugh said.
Alan closed his eyes for a second. “Were you in Florida the whole time?”
“No. I hitchhiked around down there until I got bored, then I drifted west. I worked day jobs to supplement my stash, stayed in the kind of motels that reminded me of–” He waved his free hand at their undecorated environment. “Talked to people, walked a lot. Saw the Grand Canyon at last. Ate, shit, slept.”
“Why did you return?”
“I thought I might have an epiphany. Or a vision. Maybe a dream… that would be either fitting or ironic, I don’t know. No, I headed home because of a simple graph.”
Alan thought he had misheard the man. “Excuse me… did you say a graph?” Then he remembered the man was an engineer — of course he saw the world in a graph.