Piece of My Heart (Under Suspicion #7) - Mary Higgins Clark Page 0,28

bar brawl. She was the one who wanted to know what the two men had been fighting about in the first place. Gunther never offered his side of that story, but Pratt said it started after he bought a drink for a woman he knew from boarding school. Eileen heard that and… boom!” Leo pointed a finger for emphasis. “Eileen said, ‘That’s it! I guarantee you, it’s about Gunther trying to control that young woman. He didn’t want her talking to another man.’ Sure enough, I got hold of this bartender from Finn’s, a woman named Clarissa DeSanto. She said Gunther had been focused all night on another customer—female, probably three years older than him, dressed down in jeans and a sweater for a night in the Village, but wearing two-karat diamond studs and a stack of Cartier bracelets.”

“Out of Gunther’s league?” Alex asked.

“That was Clarissa’s impression, so I worked that angle. I tracked the female customer down through one of her friends’ credit card charge. Her name was Jane Holloway. She and Pratt went to high school together. She said Gunther kept trying to talk to her all night. At first, she was flattered, but then she and her friends joked about him behind his back, saying he was the next Wolf of Wall Street, that kind of thing. She finally fibbed and told him she was engaged, so he’d leave her alone. Then when Pratt showed up, Gunther said something like, You must be the lucky fiancé. Your girl’s been talking to me all night. From there, it quickly became clear there was no actual engagement. Jane had embarrassed him big time.”

“So it was all about his fragile ego,” Alex said.

“Exactly, or at least, that was my theory. I pulled him back into the interrogation room, this time making it clear I knew how insecure he was. How rejected he must have felt. How he had spent his entire birthday seeking attention from a woman he could never actually date. How Jane had treated him like a joke. When he realized that I knew—that I could see who he truly was—he finally confessed, and this time it was the truth. He called the girl and her friends names that could never be repeated in polite company, and he admitted that he stabbed Finn in a blind rage.”

“All because a woman rejected him,” Laurie said.

“It happens much too often, sadly,” Leo said. “When the trial came around, Gunther denied ever making that confession. He told the jury I fabricated every single word of it, claiming once again that he never even saw the knife and had no idea who stabbed Lou Finney. He said someone else in the crowd must have done it.”

“And you really think that Gunther might have something to do with Johnny’s disappearance?” Laurie asked.

“The thing that has always made him tick was his desire to control his own narrative,” Leo said. “First, he wanted to be the up-and-coming, hot-shot financial wizard. Now he wants to be the brilliant writer who was railroaded by the police. And guess who’s the bad guy in this narrative—the one he needs to control if his story’s going to stick?” Leo held up one hand. “This guy. Gunther probably hoped I’d be six feet under by now, or living out my days playing horseshoes on a beach, not caring one way or the other about some ancient case. But that’s not me. I’ve been fighting him every step of the way. Unless I say I fabricated that confession, the DA’s not going to dump that conviction.”

Laurie closed her eyes and tried to imagine Darren Gunther plotting from a prison cell to abduct a child to gain leverage over the detective who stood between him and freedom. Using an innocent little boy as a pawn would be sociopathic. But she knew Gunther was cunning and charming. He had contacts with people outside of prison who might be willing to help him obtain what they saw as justice in the long run.

But how could Gunther connect the cop he despised to a child born nearly a decade after Gunther went to prison? Her mind suddenly flashed to an image of the magazine article that was currently framed on the wall of her studio office.

“Dad, New York magazine did that profile last year, when you went back to the NYPD to join the counterterrorism team,” she said. “The writer included that whole section about how you originally left the department to help me