Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

down, Ms. Alexander. I don’t want you to think I take no responsibility for my decision. I am not without backbone. But the temptation ...“
    “Nearly impossible to resist, a chance like that.”
    He nodded.
    “And you had no idea how obsessive—”
    “Obsessive? Oh, believe me. That, yes, I did see. But not how violent he was. Perhaps I was naive.”
    I didn’t respond. I wondered, instead, how many of us could resist an offer like that, the dream of a lifetime on a silver platter.
    “Did you live there, too?”
    He nodded again.
    “At the cottage, over the lab?”
    “No. The main house, top floor.”
    “Then who lives at the cottage?”
    “No one.”
    “What’s upstairs? More lab space?”
    He looked at me again. “You are something, aren’t you? You were there, too?”
    “Everywhere.”
    He smiled that cold smile of his. “No, not quite, Ms. Alexander.”
    “I sit corrected.”
    He nodded. “There are some things you still don’t know. Isn’t that why we’re here rather than you being wherever it is you spend your time and me being in jail?“
    “You didn’t mind, living at the office, no escape from it?”
    “Not for a long, long time. Work is pretty much my life,” he said. He looked at his hands, the long slim fingers a pianist’s hands.
    Only he hadn’t been the musician. Charles Madison had, Charles Madison whose sausage fingers had come toward me on the roof hours before, ready to send me flying into a cold, hard death so that his secret could remain so.
    “Elizabeth?” I asked.
    “She had nothing to do with any of it.”
    “Is that a fact?” I said. Blondes, apparently, do have more fun, assuming this broomstick of a man could be considered fun. “How about when she was performing her play in three acts as the lovely, dark-haired Loma? Did she have nothing to do with any of it then?”
    “She was only trying to ...”
    “To?”
    “Please her father. He wasn’t easy to ..
    “Please?”
    “She . . .” He swallowed hard. Something, it seemed, was stuck in his craw, whatever that means. “He was difficult to . . . Look, she only wanted to feel loved, the same as any kid does.”
    “Touching,” I said.
    He gave me a hard look. “There’s no need to be sarcastic.”
    “Dr. Philips, it may have escaped your notice, but because of your employer’s massive ego, and your own, three people are dead, including Elizabeth’s father and brother. How did she handle that news?”
    “How do you think?”
    “Were they close?”
    He turned the other way. In fact, he turned around, scanning the park, as if he had to see who might be listening before he could continue.
    “Close? I wouldn’t say they were, no, not especially.“
    “And the mother? Where was she?”
    “No mother. He’d never married.”
    “Raised by wolves?”
    I got that look again.
    “By a nanny. A loving—”
    “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “You can tell by how secure and relaxed they both are, were, as adults.”
    For a moment, he screwed up his face. Something was troubling him, finally, after all this time, after all he’d let pass.
    “But she—”
    “Yup. You can see it all around you, women in the park with children not their own, talking to other nannies instead of to the kid. Loving, you said? I don’t think so. Especially not with a prick like Charles Madison for an employer.”
    He examined his hands again.
    “So, you say other than her role as the seducer of my client, other than delivering her to the faux veterinary practice, other than that, and delivering the cloned puppy to Sophie, Elizabeth had nothing to do with any of this? By the way, was it you who harvested Blanche’s DNA, or was that Elizabeth?”
    He shook his head dismissing my last question. “She knew what I was doing, of course. But she didn’t know anything about Sophie’s accident.”
    “Good one.”
    “She thought it was a seizure, a terrible mishap.”
    “A mishap?But not you. You didn’t think it was a mishap.”
    “Well, yes. I mean, no. I had no idea he planned to kill her.”
    “With rat poison?”
    “No idea. I never would have allowed him—”
    “And how would you have stopped him, Dr. Philips?”
    This time he turned slowly. I saw those long fingers gripping his thighs so hard his nails were white, trying to regain the control he felt he was losing.
    “Well, I could have threatened to leave. He wouldn’t have liked that.”
    “But you didn’t.”
    “It was all after the fact, when I found out