Read Online Just Take My Heart by Mary Higgins Clark - Free Book Online Page A

attracted national attention. Natalie had been a major Broadway star and an Academy Award nominee. Gregg, a regular at star-studded events, was a familiar figure to the avid tabloid readers whose lives revolved around those of celebrities. After Natalie's death, Gregg had been a particular target of the pa-parazzi. Every time he escorted an actress to an event, it was rumored that he was involved with her.
    The headlines in the gossip magazines had also kept front and center the fact that he was a "person of interest" in Natalie's death.
    Michael knew Gregg was carrying a lot of baggage into the trial. But added to that was an unexpected element: The news stories were also focusing on the young, beautiful prosecutor Emily Wallace, and the skillful manner in which she was building up the case against Aldrich.
    As a former defense attorney, Michael recognized that Emily was closing the doors to the possibility that Natalie's death had been a random crime. The detectives from her office, Billy Tryon and Jake Rosen, were good witnesses, articulate and prompt in their answers to her questions.
    They testified that there had been no breakin at the home of Natalie Raines. The security system had not been tampered with. A professional thief could have opened the small safe in Natalie's bedroom closet with a can opener, but there was no sign it had been touched. Evidence seemed to indicate that the perpetrator had ex-ited by the back door and run through the yard and the wooded area behind it to the next street. It had rained during the night and they believed he might have had some kind of plastic covering over his shoes since it was impossible to get a useful cast of a footprint, even though there were two specific indentations where the grass was particularly soft. The shoe size ranged between a ten and a twelve.
    Gregg Aldrich wore a size eleven shoe.
    The security system log was entered into evidence. The last time it was turned on was at four o'clock Friday afternoon, March 13th. It was disengaged at eleven thirty that same evening, the security installer testified, and was never reset, indicating the house was not armed over the weekend nor on the Monday morning Natalie Raines was murdered.
    When she was on the stand, Natalie's mother, Alice Mills, testified that Natalie kept a spare key inside a fake rock in the backyard of the Closter house. "Gregg knew about that rock," she swore. "He bought it for Natalie. When she lived with him, she was always los-ing or forgetting her apartment key. That was why when she moved to Closter, he told her she'd better have a spare key around, or she'd find herself locked out on a cold night."
    Alice Mills's next remark was stricken from the record but it had been heard by everyone in the courtroom. She had started sobbing and, looking at Gregg, had cried: "You were always so protective of Natalie! How could you have changed so much? How could you have hated her enough to do that to her?"
    The next witness was a clerk from Brookstone with a copy of the sales slip showing that Gregg had paid for the rock with his credit card.
    The medical examiner's testimony was unemotional and specific. From the position of the body, he believed that Natalie Raines was attacked as soon as she walked in the door. A lump on the back of her head suggested she had been grabbed and thrown down on the floor, then shot at close range. The bullet just missed her heart. The cause of the death was internal bleeding.
    "If she had received immediate help after she was shot, could she have been saved?" Wallace asked.
    "Absolutely."
    That night the panel discussion on Courtside centered on Emily Wallace.
    "The look she gave Aldrich after that last question to the medical examiner was pure theatre," Peter Knowles, a retired prosecutor, commented. "What she was telling the jury was that after Aldrich shot Natalie, he could still have saved her life. Instead he left her to bleed to death."
    "I don't buy that," Brett Long, a