Guilt by Association

by Susan R. Sloan

Genres: Mystery; Crime Fiction; Legal Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

A provocative tale that mirrors today's headlines, this page-turning first novel is a gripping, intelligent and totally satisfying account of one woman's brave struggle to triumph over the pain of a vicious rape, her battle to rebuild her life and the ultimate, shocking confrontation with the man who nearly destroyed her.

Release date: November 11, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 496

Sample

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

 


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 and 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 thing 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.


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.


She could still remember how special she felt, standing on the porch of her sorority house, surrounded by all her sisters,
grinning from ear to ear, while the men from Peter’s fraternity serenaded her. And at the moment when he actually fastened his fraternity pin to her pink angora sweater, she was profoundly sorry for every other girl in the world.


Karen sighed in the chill Manhattan night, watching her
breath frost in front of her, and wishing Peter were here beside her instead of in Bangor, Maine, spending Christmas with his family. Despite her mother’s importunings, Peter was everything Karen had ever wanted, ever hoped to find in a man, from his quick mind and generous nature to his short crop of sandy hair, warm brown eyes and soft lips that hardly needed an excuse to curl into a grin.


“At least we’ll spend New Year’s together,” he’d told her when they hugged good-bye at the Ithaca train station. “I’ll see you on the thirtieth.”


Nine days and counting, Karen thought with anticipation. Still, she couldn’t suppress a small stab of disappointment because she would have so enjoyed the chance to show him off at the party Jill and Andy Hartman were throwing tonight.


At Seventy-seventh Street, she turned west.

Although Great Neck, the upper-income suburb jutting out into Long Island Sound where Karen had been born and raised, was no more than half an hour’s train ride from Manhattan, the very last thing the Cornell coed had planned to do on the Friday before Christmas was come into the city. But here she was, dressed in her finest and on her way to her best friend’s party.
Her best friend who had returned from her sophomore year at Northwestern ten pounds overweight and two months pregnant.


What a mess that had been—Jill disgraced, Andy dragged back from his summer abroad, Jill’s parents trying in vain to put a good face on everything. No one bothered to mention the option of a back-alley butcher. Instead, there was a hushed, rushed little civil ceremony that was promptly predated six months. Jill’s father, a prominent New York attorney, pulled some strings to get Andy transferred from Northwestern to the law school at Columbia. Of course, Jill had to quit college.


Karen could just imagine what her own parents would do were she to get herself into such a predicament. The very thought of her mother’s wails and screeches brought her stomach to the edge of revolt She said a silent prayer of thanks for Peter, who had made a few attempts to get her to
go all the way with him, in the back seat of his green Pontiac after they had drunk too much sour-tasting beer, but had never pressed her past a certain point.


Perhaps it was going out of style nowadays, but Karen still believed in the value of virginity and the importance of saving herself for her wedding night. Besides, her mother had certainly warned her often enough about the perils of promiscuity.


“Men might date tramps, but they marry virgins,” Beverly Kern would state bluntly, hammering her message home at every opportunity.
“Would you go into a store and pay top price for used merchandise?”


Karen had to admit she wouldn’t.

“And God forbid you got pregnant,” her mother always continued. “How could we ever hold up our heads in this town again? The tongues would never stop wagging.”


Just the notion of humiliating her family in such a way was enough to make Karen break into a cold sweat. So each time she found herself getting high on beer in the back seat of the Pontiac, a prudent little voice, which always sounded remarkably like her mother’s, would begin to echo very clearly in her ear. It was more than enough to keep her resolve firm and her legs crossed.


Karen felt awful for Jill having to quit college, for having to marry so inopportunely, and for having a baby when she was still practically a baby herself. She knew Jill had dreamed of going to Paris after college, of living in a quaint little garret on the Left Bank, painting surrealistic versions of the Eiffel Tower, and hobnobbing with expatriate artists for a year or so, until her graduation money ran out.


For herself, Karen had no such lofty ambitions. While she intended to earn a degree in English at Cornell, a career did not really figure into her future. In fact, there wasn’t any fantasy in her head that didn’t ultimately end in getting married and having children—a whole houseful of children. Especially since she had met Peter. And while such a goal might have seemed dull or old-fashioned to some, she could hardly
wait for the day when, as she pictured it, she would walk down the aisle and begin her real life.


Karen knew a few girls at Cornell who planned to pursue careers after graduation, but her mother had always dismissed a vocation as something to fall back on only in the case of early widowhood, and dismissed Karen’s schoolmates as girls who, lacking enough marketable assets to make good marriages, were simply making the best of unfortunate circumstances.


Moreover, Beverly Kern was convinced that anyone with Andy Hartman’s good looks and other attributes, having been forced into marriage, would probably divorce Jill at the earliest possible moment, thus ruining her forever.


By the time Karen reached the corner of West End Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street, it was after eight o’clock. The brick building in front of her, which rose twelve stories and occupied almost half the block, was, like so many that lined the streets of Manhattan, a once-elegant structure that was past its prime. In the dreary December night, it appeared more gray than red.


A doorman in maroon livery ushered her in out of the cold and across a softly lit lobby so ornately appointed that Karen imagined it might have been lifted from a palace like Versailles.


“At last,” Jill Hartman exclaimed when the elevator deposited Karen on the eighth floor and she made her way to Apartment G. “I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind about coming.”


“And miss a good party?” Karen laughed. “You know me better than that.”

Jill was now eight months pregnant and she looked absolutely radiant. Her long, honey-colored hair glistened, her hazel eyes danced, and her face glowed. This party was her final fling, as she described it, before the baby burst onto the scene.


“Well, come on in,” she cried. “There are scads of great-looking guys here that ought to keep you from pining for Peter for at least one evening. I’d take you around and intro-
duce you, but the truth is, they’re mostly friends of Andy’s. I hardly know any of them.” She took her guest’s coat and purse and waddled off down the hallway. “Don’t be shy,” she tossed over her shoulder. “Just jump right in.”


Karen chuckled. Always bright and bubbly, she was anything but shy. So she fluffed out her hair and smoothed down her skirt and looked around. The apartment was truly fabulous, boasting large, airy, cream-colored rooms with high ceilings and intricately carved moldings. Crystal sconces graced the walls, velvet curtains framed windows that overlooked the Hudson River, and those floors that weren’t buried beneath thick carpeting were highly polished parquet.


With insolent indifference, the Hartmans had taken this glorious setting and filled it with Danish modern furniture. A makeshift bar sat at one end of the living room, while an assortment of spindly teak sofas and chairs upholstered in ugly brown tweed occupied the other. Across the foyer, a stick-legged dining table sagged under an extravagant buffet supper. The throaty voice of Nat King Cole drifted out of an elaborate hi-fi system that Andy had installed, completing the incongruity.


The crush of guests who filled the apartment were split pretty evenly between the bar and the buffet. Karen wasn’t much of a drinker, so she turned toward the dining room. She was in the process of filling a plate with creamed chicken, shrimp curry,
and a variety of salads that must have taken Jill a month to prepare, when someone brushed up against her, jostling her elbow,
and she felt warm breath tickle her ear.


“You must’ve just arrived,” a husky voice whispered, “or I would certainly have noticed you were missing.”

It was so unexpected that Karen promptly spilled macaroni and mayonnaise down the front of her favorite black party dress.

“You’re right, I did just get here,” she managed to say, although at the moment she felt more like grinding her high heel into the stranger’s foot. “But now you’ll have to excuse me.”


She set her plate back on the table, and, without so much as
a glance in his direction, fled down the hall to the bathroom where she stood in front of the mirror and stared in dismay at the oily stain that had quickly spread across the expensive satin.


“Damn,” she muttered, snatching a towel off the bar and beginning to dab at the mess.

“What’s the matter?” Jill asked from the doorway.

With a sigh, Karen turned around.

“Good heavens,” her friend cried. “What happened?”

“Some would-be Don Juan tried to whisper a sweet nothing in my ear as I was helping myself to the macaroni salad.”

“Cornstarch,” Jill said, vanishing and returning faster than Karen would have believed possible, given her friend’s present condition, with a box of powdery white stuff, which she proceeded to sprinkle liberally over the black satin. “Who whispered in your ear?” she asked as the two of them waited for the cornstarch to soak up the oil.


“I don’t know,” Karen replied. “I didn’t stop for the formalities.”

“Well, go find out,” Jill suggested when the home remedy had worked its miracle. “And spill some cocktail sauce down his shirt.”

“Now that’s an idea,” Karen chuckled. But she skipped the buffet this time and went to the bar instead, busying herself with a bottle of root beer.


“I’m sorry about your dress,” the voice said from behind her. “I’d be happy to buy you a new one.”

“That’s all right,” Karen told him, wondering whether root beer would do as much damage as cocktail sauce. “Most of the stain actually came right out, and I think a good cleaning will take care of the rest. But I appreciate the offer.”


She turned around then and looked up into a pair of aquamarine eyes so arresting that she was left with only a fleeting impression of what the rest of him was like.


“It’s a beautiful dress,” he said, and Karen actually felt his blue-green glance travel from the rise of her bosom to the turn of her ankle.


“Why thank you, kind sir,” she responded lightly. In fact, it
was a beautiful dress, a graceful, scoop-necked concoction with a tight bodice and a flattering tulip skirt.


“I’m Bob,” he said with a seductive smile that lit up his face, a very handsome face she now saw, with straight brows, a thick fringe of eyelashes, a thin nose, sculpted mouth, and a small black mole on his right cheek that may have marred perfection but suited him absolutely. The whole was set off by a lot of dark hair that apparently curled too much for his liking, judging by the amount of Brylcreem he had used.


“I’m Karen,” she replied.

“Well, Karen,” he said as though he were actually caressing the name, “there’s no doubt that you’re the most attractive woman here tonight.”


She knew it was a line, but he delivered it so well that she couldn’t stop a little shiver from skidding down her spine. Bob was taller than Peter, who was far from short, and, where Peter was lean and trim from hours on the tennis courts, Bob was broad and muscular like a football player. She noted that his slacks were sharply creased, his cuffs, peeking from beneath a navy blazer, were fastened with expensive gold links, his tie was modestly striped, and his loafers were polished to a high gloss.


He was obviously quite stuck on himself, but Karen had handled this type before, and she didn’t feel she would be betraying Peter any if she let a handsome stranger pay her a compliment or two.


“I think you have exceptionally good taste,” she said, smiling back.

He touched his Scotch highball to her bottle of root beer. “Well then, here’s to getting to know you better,” he said softly.

The party circled around them. Karen was at her best in crowds, moving in and out of various groups with such grace and ease that a professor once observed that she would be a real asset to an ambitious politician. She was included in a conversation about the truth behind the Cuban missile crisis, took part in a discussion of James Meredith and the future of integration,
and joined a circle speculating about the future of
a shaggy-haired quartet from Liverpool who went by the name of some insect.


The comfortable cloak of Camelot—that invisible sense of security and innocence and well-being—rested gently over everyone.

Karen would have enjoyed spending more time with several of the people she met, but Bob seemed always at her elbow, distracting her. At some point, he took charge of the drinks, pouring her root beer into a tall glass and adding a little something extra when he thought she wasn’t looking. Karen grimaced a bit at the unpleasant combination of Hire’s and Scotch, but didn’t object.
Bob was so attractive and he was being so considerate and, although she knew it was all just harmless flirtation, it made her feel terrific when, several times, she caught the envious glances of some of the other young women.


It’s only for tonight, girls, she thought with a self-satisfied smile. Tomorrow, he’s all yours.

Bob, as it turned out, was a friend of a friend of one of Andy’s former roommates from Northwestern. He told her he was a born-and-bred California boy and had graduated from Stanford.


“Palm trees, sunshine and tequila,” he summed up for her with a nostalgic sigh. “It was a glorious four-year-long party.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that,” Karen said, laughing.

“But now that I’m at Harvard Law,” he added with a grimace, “all I get to do is study, study