Guilt by Association Read online

  HERE’S THE VERDICT ON

  SUSAN R. SLOAN’S

  GUILT BY ASSOCIATION

  “A STRONG DEBUT BY SUSAN SLOAN … AS TIME LESS AS ANY GOOD YARN…. ITS CLIMAX IS A TENSE COURTROOM SHOWDOWN THAT ENDS WITH A GENUINE SURPRISE”

  —Seattle Times/Post-lntelligencer

  “SLOAN HAS WRITTEN MORE THAN A THRILLER. IT IS A CHRONICLE OF CHANGING ATTITUDES TOWARDS WOMEN THAT COVERS MORE THAN THREE DECADES.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “SURE TO SHOCK … AN IMPECCABLY WRITTEN EMOTION EVOKER… . And more than a tale of tragedy, it is a tale of sweet, satisfying revenge for which every victim of a heinous crime must wish.”

  —El Paso Herald-Post

  “RINGS TRUE EMOTIONALLY…. Sloan gives an affecting look at Kern’s turmoil over the years and proves, in her procedural way (including a very good courtroom sequence), to have been building to a splen did and ironic surprise.”

  —Los Angeles Times more…

  “COMPELLING … SOLIDLY CRAFTED … RUSHES HEADLONG TOWARDS A TAUT AND THOROUGHLY SATISFYING FINALE.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “THE EVIL OF POWER AND THE POWER OF EVIL— Susan Sloan has captured the stains of both in this explosive drama of atonement and resurrection.”

  —Stephen Greenleaf, author of False Conception

  “GUILT BY ASSOCIATION IS A HARROWING, UNFORGETTABLE NOVEL AND HAS A CONCLUSION THAT WILL CHILL YOU TO THE BONE.”

  —West Coast Review of Books

  “A BRILLIANT BOOK [THAT] WILL HAVE YOUR HEART THUMPING AND YOUR HANDS GRIPPING YOUR SEAT. A guided missile straight to the heart of America.”

  —Greensboro Watchman (AL)

  “AN INGENIOUS PLOT FOR REVENGE … THAT LEAVES THE READER CHEERING AND SMILING to the very last page.”

  —Baton Rouge Magazine

  “A COMPELLING STORY”

  —Salisbury Post

  “GRIPPING…. A BLOCKBUSTER DEBUT NOVEL THIS IS TERRIFIC FICTION INEVITABLY DESTINED FOR THE BIG SCREEN.”

  —Toronto Saturday Star

  “YOU ARE RACING TO GET TO THE IMPENDING CONCLUSION AND MOURNFUL ABOUT HAVING TO CLOSE THE COVER.”

  —Mystery Review

  “DELIVERS A SATISFYINGLY TRICKY PLOT IN A NARRATIVE BRISK ENOUGH TO KEEP READERS ENGAGED ALL THE WAY.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “COMPELLING EXCITING, WELL WRITTEN, AND WELL PLOTTED.”

  —Ellenville Press

  “A BRILLIANT BOOK [THAT] WILL HAVE YOUR HEART THUMPING AND YOUR HANDS GRIPPING YOUR SEAT.”

  —Book World

  Copyright

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1995 by Susan Sloan

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: December 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-57113-5

  Contents

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  DECEMBER 22, 1962

  PART ONE: 1962

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  PART TWO: 1964

  one

  PART THREE: 1969

  one

  two

  three

  four

  PART FOUR: 1971

  one

  two

  PART FIVE: 1979

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  PART SIX: 1981

  one

  two

  PART SEVEN: 1991

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  PART EIGHT: 1992

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  For Pamela,

  who was there from the beginning,

  and got the body up front.

  And for Virginia,

  who never stopped believing in me.

  I know she’s smiling.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  I would be more than remiss if I did not acknowledge some of the people who helped make this book a reality.

  I wish to thank Lieutenant Mike Pera and Sergeant Angela Martin of the San Francisco Police Department, Sexual Assault Division, and members of the San Francisco Rape Treatment Center, for their invaluable input.

  My sincere appreciation goes to Dr. Susan Pendergrass for her expertise, to Susan E. Klein for her research and observations, and to Janine Asch and the library staff of Half Moon Bay, California, for their assistance.

  I am indebted to my agent, Esther Newberg, for being one in seventy-eight, and to my editor, Jamie Raab, for creating more out of less.

  I am particularly grateful to Linda Stenn for her many contributions, to Howard Schage for his continuing support, and to my little group of readers who kept me going when I was ready to quit.

  And my deepest gratitude goes to Sally Sondheim for her unflagging faith in me—and her eagle eyes.

  DECEMBER 22, 1962

  It was cold—the kind of cold, at once heavy and bitter and I penetrating, that was so characteristic of New York City in winter. There hadn’t been much snow to speak of, only a brief flurry now and again that powdered the sidewalks and dusted the rooftops and then disappeared, as if by sleight of hand, leaving people to wonder whether they had really seen anything at all.

  It was three days before Christmas, and Manhattan could not have been described as anything but bleak. Temperatures lurked in the low twenties and skies were filled with sullen clouds that never managed to do more than glower by day and threaten by night.

  Margaret Westfield was not used to being awake at six o’clock on a Saturday morning, much less dressed and out. But she had a week’s vacation from her job as an assistant bookkeeper for a Seventh Avenue clothier, and she was taking advantage of the time off to spend the holidays with her family in Rhode Island. She wanted to give Brandy, her frisky golden retriever, a good run in Central Park before relegating him to the cramped back seat of her Volkswagen beetle for the three-hour journey to Providence.

  Only rich people and crazy people kept automobiles in Manhattan, Margaret knew, but her father had ignored her protests.

  “It’s just my way of making sure that you’ll always have a way to get back home to us,” he said when he handed her the keys.

  He knew she had gone to New York to get away from the family or, more precisely, away from the embarrassment of being thirty-three years old and the only one of his eight children who was still unmarried. But he had no intention of abandoning her.

  “If traffic’s not too bad, we’ll be there in time for lunch,” she told Brandy as they crossed Fifth Avenue and entered the park.

  It was too early for most New Yorkers to be up and about, and Margaret found herself alone on the path she a
nd the dog usually took to the pretty little lake in the green oasis that ran down the middle of the concrete city. After several yards, she stopped and, reaching down, unsnapped Brandy’s sturdy leather leash. The retriever bounded on ahead of her and was soon out of sight.

  Margaret pulled her knit cap down over her short brown hair, buttoned her navy pea jacket over her stocky figure and started after him. She wasn’t concerned. They took this same route every day and she knew Brandy wouldn’t go any farther than East Drive, where he would sit on his haunches, with his tongue hanging out and his tail wagging, waiting for her to catch up so they could begin their game of fetch with the ratty tennis ball she always carried in her pocket. Even in the middle of winter, he couldn’t wait to plunge into the lake’s icy water. But when she reached the road, the dog was nowhere in sight.

  “Brandy?” she called. “Come on, boy. We haven’t got all day.”

  There was no response. Margaret frowned, peering up and down the road in the pre-dawn gloom. The four-year-old retriever was impeccably trained, responding to her voice commands almost before the words were out of her mouth, and next to his breakfast and dinner, there was nothing in the world he liked better than his morning play.

  Margaret crossed the road and continued along the walk toward the lake, looking in all directions, calling for the dog every fifteen or twenty steps. She was well beyond the boathouse before she heard a faint whimpering sound.

  “Brandy, where are you?” she shouted.

  This time she received a short urgent bark in response which came from somewhere off to the right. Margaret spotted a narrow path and turned quickly onto it, hurrying along for several hundred yards while it twisted and turned and the retriever’s woofs and whimpers grew louder. Around one last corner, the path abruptly widened into a small clearing. The dog was about forty feet away, barely visible, with his rump exposed and the rest of him buried beneath a clump of bushes.

  “Brandy, you come out of there,” Margaret ordered. She hoped he hadn’t cornered some small animal in the brambles. She had never known him to go after a park creature before, but she supposed there was always a first time.

  The retriever looked over at her, gave another short urgent bark, and turned back to the bushes, making no attempt to obey her command. Margaret was totally bewildered. He had never behaved like this before. Sighing, she reached for the leash she had slung over her shoulder and started toward him.

  When she was thirty feet away, she realized that, in between his cries and yelps, he was indeed working at something he had found. The last thing she ever allowed him to do was pick up strange food.

  “Brandy, no,” she demanded at twenty feet. “Whatever it is, you leave it alone.”

  When she was ten feet away, Margaret stopped dead in her tracks. In the gray dark, she saw a human foot in a black satin pump. Margaret gasped. The body of a girl lay half-hidden under the bushes. Whatever clothes she might have worn were shredded beyond recognition, she was covered with angry-looking bruises, and her skin had a bluish tinge to it. Brandy was crouched on top of her, licking at her face.

  “Oh my God,” Margaret murmured, now frightened, inching closer, one hesitant step at a time.

  The girl’s face was swollen and caked with frozen blood, and ugly purple marks showed on her throat. There was something unnatural about the way one leg was positioned but Margaret didn’t dwell on it. She was sure the girl was dead, yet when she mustered up enough courage to push her fingers against the purple neck, she felt a feeble, thready pulse.

  “She’s still alive, Brandy,” Margaret cried. “She’s not dead—she’s still alive. We have to do something.” She tried to think. “Keep her warm, that’s it. We have to keep her warm.”

  She pulled off her pea jacket and laid it over the part of the girl’s body that the dog wasn’t already covering. She didn’t have any idea how long the girl had been lying there, or how close she was to freezing to death, but she knew the temperature was low enough to numb her own body in just the few seconds since she had shed her coat.

  “Brandy, stay,” Margaret ordered the retriever. “I’m going to find help.”

  With the bitter cold urging her on, Margaret ran as fast as she could back up the twisting path, past the boathouse, across the deserted East Drive, and out to Fifth Avenue. She knew it was still too early for much traffic, but she prayed that there would be someone about at this hour. She ran into the middle of the road and stopped the first vehicle that came along.

  “What’s the matter with you, lady?” the irate taxi driver yelled, slamming down hard on his brakes and skidding to a stop. “You wanna get us both killed?”

  “Help,” Margaret cried. “Oh, help me, please. There’s a girl back there. I think she’s been beaten up and she may be almost frozen to death. Please, get a doctor, get a policeman— get somebody.”

  “Okay, lady, okay,” the cabby said in a more reasonable voice. “Calm down. There’s a police station right up the road. Just tell me where to bring ‘em.”

  “It’s back there,” Margaret told him, quickly pointing out the direction.

  “Yeah, yeah, okay, they’ll be able to figure out where that is.” He reached into the back of his cab and pulled up a car blanket. “Here,” he said. “It’s not much, but maybe it’ll help till I can get someone to you.”

  Margaret took the blanket and quickly retraced her steps to the clearing and the clump of bushes where her retriever was right where she had left him.

  “We have to keep her warm awhile longer, Brandy,” she said. “Until help comes.”

  She picked up her coat and put it back on, jumping up and down a few times until she grew warm inside of it. The last tiling in the world Margaret wanted to do was get near the girl. Even the thought of blood was enough to make her queasy, but she suppressed the surge of nausea and forced herself to crawl into the bushes, lie down on the ground as close beside the broken body as she could get, and drape the blanket carefully over all of them. Brandy stirred a little beneath the unfamiliar cover but stayed where he was.

  The stench of waste was awful. Margaret shut her eyes and swallowed hard and, searching her mind for anything that might distract her, began to think about the Christmas tree that her family would be trimming tonight.

  Unlike any other in the neighborhood, the Westfield tree would be hung with garlands and ornaments that her mother and sisters spent weeks creating, each one hand-fashioned and unique. It was a tradition that had been passed down through generations of Westfields, but Margaret had never really cared that much about it, until now. Now it seemed like the most important thing in the world, and for the first time since she had moved from Providence to New York, she couldn’t wait to get home.

  She didn’t know if the girl she held in her arms could hear her, but she began to talk aloud, about that tree and about her family, and about all the silly, crazy, happy moments they had shared down through the years, one thought leading to another, in a soft, soothing voice.

  They stayed there like that for almost half an hour—the girl, the woman and the dog, until the cabby appeared, bursting into the clearing with a burly policeman and two white-uniformed medics in his wake.

  PART ONE

  1962

  We believe no evil till the evil’s done.

  —Jean de La Fontaine

  one

  Karen Kern left the subway at Columbus Circle, deciding on impulse to walk the rest of the way to the Hartmans’ West Side apartment.

  Office Christmas parties, held on Friday by companies that would be closed on Monday, were ending. Cabbies, cold and irritable, leaned on their horns as they inched around the clogged intersection. Salvation Army Santas in stuffed red suits clanged their bells from every corner, and the tantalizing odor of roasting chestnuts hung in the air.

  Karen didn’t mind that there was no snow. She had just come down from Ithaca, where almost three feet of it had fallen in forty-eight hours, disrupting traffic, causing accidents, and
canceling classes at Cornell University, where she was a junior. She didn’t mind the cold, either, although the black cashmere coat wrapped tightly around her slender figure gave little real protection.

  Dodging taxis, donating a quarter to the nearest Santa, and skirting knots of tipsy secretaries with a smile, Karen threaded her way through the intersection and headed north along Central Park West. It was December 21, 1962. She was young and healthy, and she had never been happier.

  Even in the murky glow of the streetlights, it was clear that her face was too long for classic beauty, her nose too small, her cheekbones too prominent. But her dark Jackie-Kennedy-styled hair gleamed, her blue-gray eyes sparkled, and a pair of impish dimples framed her full lips. Her slim feet in black satin pumps barely touched the pavement.

  Her mother might have been devastated when Karen was rejected by Radcliffe, where she would have mingled freely with Harvard men, and refused even to apply to Smith or Mount Holyoke, which were well within striking distance of Yale, but Karen was delighted with her choice. She loved Cornell, with its picture-postcard setting, grand Gothic campus, and amiable atmosphere. Besides, her father was a graduate of the university’s dental school, which didn’t exactly leave her mother in much of a position to protest.

  “Don’t waste time with undergraduates,” Beverly Kern had advised. “Concentrate on the men in the professional schools.”

  For a month or so, Karen made a halfhearted effort to comply, ever conscious of her mother’s social set, in which success was measured by the number of doctors or dentists or, at the very least, lawyers brought into the fold. It was the direction in which sons were pushed and the end to which every parent of a marriageable daughter openly aspired. But then Karen met Peter Bauer, and her mother’s exhortations flew right out of her head.

  The very thought of the senior engineering student was enough to deepen her dimples and warm her heart on this frigid night, and she had thought of little else for weeks. After two years of dating, she and Peter had gotten pinned, in one of those incredibly romantic ceremonies, and were already talking about getting officially engaged come summer.