Monday. Memorial Day. Everybody in the United States was going to be hanging out and having a good time—except the sworn officers of the Millers Kill Police Department. Maybe this is why my social life sucks, Kevin thought, taking his seat for the morning briefing. At least it wasn’t sucking alone. Everybody was on today, all shifts: the part-time guys and the volunteer fire traffic wardens, too. Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day—they were always big.
But they didn’t always arrive with three unidentified homicide victims.
“The two discovered yesterday were both killed in the same way as John Doe number one.” The chief, sitting in his usual spot atop the table, was grubby and crumpled around the edges. He, MacAuley, Hadley Knox, and Eric McCrea had been up half the night, working the scenes with the state CSI techs. “Single tap at the back of the head with a small-caliber weapon, probably a full jacket. Classic execution style.”
“Scheeler’s report noted there wasn’t any signs the first John Doe’d been restrained,” MacAuley pointed out. “If he’d been taken out to the woods for an execution, you’d think whoever did it woulda trussed him up beforehand.” He was standing at the whiteboard, summarizing the briefing.
The chief paused. “Taken by surprise, then. Wham, bam, thank-you-ma’am.”
“So what are we looking at?” Paul Urquhart said from the back of the room. “Gangland slaying? Organized crime? If we had something like that moving into our area, we’da noticed it before this.”
The chief held up his hands. “Let’s go through what we know step-by-step.” He slid off the table and turned to the bulletin board, almost covered with photos of John Does one, two, and three, environmental placing shots, and the down-state rap sheets Kevin had looked at Friday night. “John Doe one.”
“Juan Doe,” Urquhart muttered.
“Male Hispanic aged between twenty-one and twenty-eight. Killed sometime mid-April. John Doe two. Male, possibly Caribbean or African-American, based on hair fragments—”
“DeWan Doe.” Urquhart sniggered.
The chief stopped. “You got something you want to share, Paul?” Urquhart shook his head. The chief gave him a long look before continuing. “Age between twenty-one and twenty-eight. Killed sometime last year in the late fall or early winter. John Doe three: male, age between twenty-one and twenty-eight. Killed more than a year ago.”
“The ME any more specific than that?” MacAuley asked.
“He had some fillings. Doc Scheeler’s going to get a dentist to try to date the amalgam. We probably won’t have anything until tomorrow at the earliest.”
The chief crossed to the laminated township map that covered half the other wall. “Location of the bodies,” he said. “John Does three and two were found roughly a mile north-northwest of the old Muster Field off Route seventeen in Cossayuharie.” He marked a three and a two with a dry-erase marker. “They were slightly less than three-quarters of a mile away from each other”—he drew a broken line that slanted drunkenly northwest from the pale green rectangle representing the Muster Field—“buried along a natural flint formation that runs along this line and then drops off steeply into the valley below.”
“Somebody walked in.”
Kevin hadn’t realized he said it aloud until the chief nodded. “Somebody walked in.”
“And went as far as he could go along fairly level terrain,” MacAuley added.
“Who owns that land?” Eric McCrea asked.
The chief looked at Noble Entwhistle. Noble was no Sherlock Holmes, but he gave you better results than Google if you needed a name or date for something that happened in Millers Kill. “The town,” he said. “It used to belong to Shep Ogilvie, but they took it for unpaid taxes back in ’eighty-seven, when his dairy went under.”
“Easy access from the highway,” McCrea said. “If there’s no snow, you can drive a car almost all the way back to the tree line on that field.”
“That’s one big difference between John Does two and three and the first guy we found,” the chief said. “It’s a coupla kidney-cleaning miles from the nearest public road to where John Doe one was dumped.” He put a 1 on the McGeochs’ farm.
“But it is in the same general area where you were out chasing those runaway illegals,” MacAuley pointed out.
“I think we can safely say that’s a dead end.” The chief went back to his table and picked up his coffee mug. “The men running around in those woods were in Mexico last year when the last two John Does were killed.”
“The Christies and their kin weren’t.”
The chief let his hand fall open. “Put them on the board.”
“Chief.” Kevin tried to control his face from pinking up as everyone turned toward him. “How do we know they were in Mexico a year ago? I mean, if they were illegals, there wouldn’t be any trail, because that’s kind of the point. I know they weren’t employed by your sister and her husband, but maybe they were in the area working for somebody else.” He paused. The chief made a “go on” gesture. “Maybe we should canvass area farms and see who might’ve had migrant workers last year and over winter.”
“Maybe.” The chief leaned against the table. “My problem with that is I don’t see the connection between dairy hands and professional executions.”
Kevin figured everyone was thinking the same thing. So he said it. “What if it’s not professional?”
“What do you mean, Kevin? A sport killing? Somebody doing it for kicks? No.” The chief pinched the bridge of his nose. “I refuse to believe we’re dealing with some sort of serial killer here.”
“You need to at least put it on the table, Russ.” MacAuley wrote the words “Thrill killer” at one corner of the board.
“Serial killers go after vulnerable populations. Kids. Prostitutes.”
“What about Jeffrey Dahmer?”
“Bob Berdella?”
“Randy Steven Kraft?”
MacAuley gave them a look that said shut up. He turned to the chief. “The vics already fall into a class,” he said. “Young men in their early twenties.” He ticked a point off one finger.
“Watch out, Kevin,” Urquhart said.
“Non-Caucasians.” The deputy ticked off another finger.
“We can’t say that about three.” The chief crossed his arms over his chest.
“Killed during tourist season.” MacAuley ticked off his third finger.
“April? Nobody comes to Millers Kill in April.”
“Bodies left in remote locations in Cossayuharie.” MacAuley ticked off a fourth finger. “And finally, all three of them killed in the same fashion with the same-caliber weapon.” He held his hand up and waggled his fingers. “We can’t rule out a serial killer. Not with three bodies agreeing on five points.”
“Why—” Hadley started to say, then shut her mouth.
“Go, on, Knox,” the chief said.
She swallowed. “Why was the first guy—I mean, John Doe one—why was he dumped? The others were buried. Not deep, but they were buried. He was just laying out there in the open.”
The chief slid up onto the table and braced his boots on a chair. “What do you think?”
Her face fell into the cool expressionless mask that had completely unnerved Kevin when she’d directed it toward him. She’s panicked, he realized. She’s afraid of coming across like an idiot. The chief looked at her patiently. MacAuley looked at her like a guy who was running late for his proctologist’s appointment. Kevin twitched in his seat. Urquhart was smirking.
The search. He tried to beam the thought into her head. It must have worked, because her eyes slid toward him. He put his hand up to his mouth. “Huggins,” he coughed.
“The search for the men who ran away after the accident interrupted the killer,” she said instantly. “There was no chance to bury the victim because the area was crawling with searchers.”
“Which means,” the chief said, “somebody who was there that night may have seen something. We need a list of everyone on the SAR team who participated, and the various Christie relatives who turned out. That’ll be your job, Eric.”
McCrea slid low in his chair and groaned. Several “baas” erupted from the back of the room.
“The other possibility,” the chief said, “is that the body found in the back of the McGeochs’ property is unrelated to the two found past the Muster Field.” The dep snorted loudly but didn’t say anything. “We’ve sent the pictures and the ME’s preliminary report down to the Bronx, where they’re trying to find the two men Knox and Flynn stopped last week.” He stared at the whiteboard, which had a lot of theories and very few solutions. “Kevin, you go ahead and follow up on the local migrant worker population.”
Kevin clenched his fist in triumph. In like Flynn.
“Knox, you’re with McCrea. Noble, you take the SAR volunteers. Lyle, since you like the serial killer angle so much, you get to work on the VCAP database and see if you can find anything that sounds familiar.”
“Any evidence that John Doe one was sexually assaulted?”
The chief’s eyebrows went up. “I didn’t see anything in Scheeler’s report. Although, since he did his prelim before we found the other two, maybe he wasn’t looking in that—uh—direction.” Urquhart snickered. The chief ignored him. “You thinking someone preying on young gay men?”
The dep shrugged. “Two guys alone in the woods with no signs of coercion? It’s not like we haven’t seen it before.”
The chief pinched the bridge of his nose again. “Yeah.”
Hadley leaned toward Kevin. “What are they talking about?” she hissed.
“Three summers ago,” he whispered, “two gay guys were beaten up and another one killed.”
She flinched. “That’s awful.” Then her expression changed. Became thoughtful. “Why are we assuming it’s a guy?”
“Knox? Kevin?” The chief was frowning.
“If you two brought candy, you better have enough for the other kids,” the dep said.
“Why are we assuming it’s a guy?” Hadley said, loud enough for everyone to hear. She looked up at the chief. “Maybe the killer is a woman.” Hadley looked around the room, measuring the others’ reactions. “She could have lured them into the woods.” She turned to MacAuley. “You don’t need to restrain someone if he’s busy taking his pants off.”
“If it was poison, or there was money involved—those are the sort of situations where women’ve appeared as serial killers.” The dep sounded like he was trying to be diplomatic. “Naked guys tapped in the woods—there just aren’t many recorded instances of women doing that.”
“Maybe that’s because they’re better at covering it up than men,” Hadley said.
Clare hoped she would miss Janet when she took Amado back out to the McGeochs’ to get the rest of his stuff. It was Memorial Day Monday, after all, and most reasonable people were taking the day off.
No such luck. Russ’s sister came running out of the barn as soon as Clare’s Subaru pulled in the dusty yard. Clare and Amado hadn’t gotten out of the car before the apologies started.
“Oh, my God, Clare, I’m so, so sorry! I had no idea when that man showed up that he was—well, I thought it was odd that he knew Amado, but I was so distracted—when Russ told me, I nearly died, I was so . . .” Apparently, there wasn’t a word big enough, so Janet threw her arms around Clare and hugged her. “Thank God, thank God you weren’t hurt. I thought Russ was just being—well, cranky, when he said you’re as tough as an army boot, but he was right!” She hugged her again. “Oh, there’s Amado!”
Clare listened while Janet repeated her whole apology to the young man, who looked at her with alarmed incomprehension, protecting his cast with his good hand. Smart kid, Clare thought. If she hugs any tighter she’ll rebreak that bone.
“I thought, all things considered, that Amado should stay at the rectory after all,” Clare said, loudly enough to catch Janet’s attention. “The Christies will probably make bail as soon as court opens tomorrow.” She made a go on gesture to Amado, who needed no encouragement to escape. He took off around the barn at a trot.
“Are you sure that’s safe?” Janet, having disgorged the apologies she must have been holding in for two days, visibly settled. “I mean, what if they come back?”
“It’s a lot less likely in the middle of town than out here in a trailer.”
Janet ran her hand through her Medium Golden Blond No. 5 hair. “Is it true you broke Donald Christie’s nose?”
Clare rubbed her own nose. “I didn’t mean to.”
Janet whistled. “You go, girl.”
Clare held up her hands. “Violence is not the answer, to paraphrase . . . a whole bunch of people. Including your mother.”
“Mmm. So, have you seen Russ since that night?”
Oh, God. What did he tell her? But no. He wouldn’t have spoken about the two of them. Or about the bodies they found at the Muster Field. Janet didn’t know her John Doe had been reclassified as the first of a series of murders.
She was saved from coming up with a truth that told nothing by the thrum of tires along Lick Springs Road. Janet craned her neck and shaded her eyes. “Shit,” she said under her breath.
Clare twisted around to see the squad car speeding down the long sweep of hill toward the McGeochs’ barnyard.
“I gotta call the men,” Janet said. She raced toward the barn, leaving Clare alone at the end of a train of dust puffs rising and falling in the air.
Her heart rose in her chest to sink again when she glimpsed the red head through the driver’s window. Not fair. She wasn’t going to hold it against the rest of the MKPD just because they weren’t Russ.
“Hey! Reverend Fergusson!” Kevin waved jauntily as he unfolded from his cruiser. “What’re you doing out here?”
She gestured toward the barn and, by implication, the bunkhouse that lay somewhere beyond it. “I brought Amado out to get the rest of his things. I’m moving him into the rectory.”
Kevin considered that. “Does the chief know?”
She resisted the first comment that came to mind. “I think he’s got a little more on his mind than my interim sexton’s living arrangements, don’t you?”
He hooked his thumbs over his gun belt in a perfect copy of Russ. “Those Christies will be making bail tomorrow, you know.”
“That’s why I’m out here today. How about you?”
His face lit up. “I suggested we ought to find out what migrant workers might have been in the area last year, when the other two were killed, and the chief agreed with me.” His pleased expression wavered. “Well, honestly? He didn’t exactly agree. But he’s letting me follow up on it.” He looked around, taking in the white-paint barn, the harrow and hay wagon and truck corralled between outbuildings, the cows grazing just far enough away to be scenic rather than smelly. “This is my first stop.”
At Russ’s sister’s. Who allegedly didn’t have any migrant employees.
“Are you hoping to track down who the two men from yesterday are?”
“Nope. We’re trying to track down their murderer.” There was a certain relish in the way Kevin said “murderer.”
“A migrant worker? You must be kidding. Those men do backbreaking labor six or seven days a week for wages most of us would turn our noses up at. Why on earth would one of them get involved in something like this?”
Despite the absence of anyone else in the barnyard, Kevin leaned in close. “We’re thinking . . . serial killer.”
“Oh, please. In Millers Kill? Pull the other one.”
He shrugged. “There are three men dead, all of ’em killed in the same way, by a similar weapon, in the space of a year or so. All of ’em left within seven miles of each other. If that happened along the Green River instead of in Millers Kill, what would you think?”
Good Lord. Kevin Flynn is growing up into a real cop. A civilian Humvee drove past the barnyard, its woofer rattling their car windows. This has gotten way too deep. Janet has got to come clean with them.
As if he could read her mind, he said, “Are the McGeochs around?”
“In the barn,” she said.
“Thanks.” He strode toward the barn while she told herself it wasn’t her business and she wasn’t going to get involved. This didn’t have anything to do with her, or her people, or her church. Except . . . Sister Lucia had asked her to take care of these men. And so far the only thing she had done to uphold the sister’s charge was to keep her mouth shut about their location.
“Wait for me,” she called. Kevin paused in the wide doorway and watched as she jogged across the dusty yard. Inside, it was cool and lofty. They alarmed a pair of barn swallows, who fluttered through the mote-hung air before arrowing out the door. The sound of wings echoed in the almost-empty haymows.
“Mr. McGeoch?” Kevin shouted. “Mrs. McGeoch?”
“In here!” The faint answer came from the small doorway set opposite the tractor-wide entrance to the barn. Clare dogged Kevin as he ducked through and they emerged into a long, low cow byre. Clare stumbled, and the young officer caught her by her arm. She looked up and down the center aisle. Cement. Drain holes. The steel-basketed lights hung, one each, at the stall entrances. Her skin went clammy. She swallowed.
“Are you okay?” Kevin let her arm go.
“Yeah,” she said. “This just . . . looks a lot like the MacEntyres’ barn.” She breathed in. Manure and urine and hay, earthy and sharp and green. No copper-sweet smell of blood.
“Don’t worry,” Kevin said, “You’re safe here.” He meant to be reassuring, but all Clare heard was the perfect assurance of someone who had never had anything horrific happen to him.
“Clare?” Janet emerged from one of the stalls, pitchfork in hand. “Officer Flynn?” That last sounded genuinely surprised. She jammed her pitchfork into the manure cart squatting in the middle of the aisle. “What’s up?”
“Hi, Mrs. McGeoch. Sorry to interrupt, but when I went to your house, your daughter said you were over here, and I wanted to talk to you first, because the chief said you’d talked to some local farmers about migrant workers before you hired that service to, you know, help you get your own, so I was hoping you or Mr. McGeoch could fix me up with some contacts so I can find out a little more about who’s hiring migrants and if they’ve had workers stay year-round.”
“What?”
Clare shook off the shadow of the angel of death. “Officer Flynn needs a list of farmers in the area who employ migrant workers.”
Kevin looked a bit affronted. “That’s what I said.”
“Maybe,” Clare said, “if Mike’s around, he could help Officer Flynn?”
“He’s cleaning the equipment. I can—”
“Because I want to talk to you—um, about Amado possibly returning to work here.” She was speaking so broadly, she might as well be winking and nudging.
“O-kay.” Janet walked toward the center of the byre. “You see those doors there?”
Kevin nodded.
“That’s the equipment room. Go ahead and tell Mike what you want. He’s better with names and numbers than I am.”
“Thanks,” Kevin said. He started down the central aisle. Stopped. Turned. “Big place you got here. How on earth do you two manage it by yourselves?”
“Oh, we’ve got help.” Janet’s voice was as light as air. “But it is Memorial Day, you know.”
“Don’t I just.” He resumed walking toward the equipment room.
Clare gestured toward the narrow walkway leading to the larger barn. “Can we talk out there?”
“He won’t be able to hear us. With the steam cleaning equipment on, he’ll hardly be able to hear Mike.”
“It’s not that. This place is way too much like the MacEntyres’ for my comfort. I keep expecting to see someone with a gun coming out of the abattoir at any moment.”
Janet looked, frowning. “Sure.” She led the way, the top of her head almost brushing against the low ceiling of the passage. Clare took a deep breath once they were in the sun-shafted expanse of the hay barn. “So,” Janet said. “Let me ask you something. Do you think my brother would react in the same way? If he were in the byre?”
Clare thought about how, thirty-odd years after the need, Russ still couldn’t walk through heat and green leaves without watching for the glint of a gun barrel. About the way his face would still and his words dry up when conversation wandered onto certain old cases. “Yes,” she said. “I’m pretty sure he would.”
Janet shoved her hands in her jeans and looked around the three-story cross-beamed space. “Okay,” she said. “That helps explain some stuff. Thanks.” She focused on Clare. “What did you need to speak to me about?”
“You’ve got to come clean about the workers you have here.”
“What? Why?”
“I didn’t tell you something—earlier.” Clare caught a strand of free-falling hair and shoved it into her twist. “There were two more bodies discovered yesterday. Killed the same way as your John Doe. Buried in shallow graves a mile past the Muster Field. It’ll probably be all over the local news tonight or tomorrow.” She looked into Janet’s eyes. “Kevin’s asking for names of migrant workers because they’re thinking this may be the work of a serial killer.”
“What, a guy who comes up here from Mexico and whacks people on his day off? That’s ridiculous.”
“I’m not saying one of your men is responsible. I’m not saying the migrant-did-it theory even makes much sense. Russ gave the job to Kevin, so you know it’s not their top priority.” She opened her hands. “What I’m saying is that something terrible has happened. And your brother needs every piece of information he can get to find the person responsible.”
Janet was shaking her head. “I can’t. I just can’t. We haven’t started the application process for new workers, and we can’t get these guys permits retroactively. They have to leave the country and stay out for sixty days before they can apply again. If the police show up here to question them, what do you think’s going to happen? They’ll scatter to the four winds. He won’t get any information from them and we’ll be up the creek without a paddle.”
“Janet, how are you going to feel if someone else shows up dead and you didn’t do anything to help stop it? For what? To save a few bucks on payroll?”
“You don’t understand what a razor-thin margin we’re working on. Almost everything we pay out is a fixed cost: gas, feed, vet bills, insurance. We sure as hell can’t charge more for the milk. The only place where we have some flexibility is our labor. Hiring locals would cost twice what we pay the Mexicans, plus Social Security and unemployment insurance. That “few bucks” on the payroll would be thousands more. Thousands.”
“You’re not paying Social Security and unemployment?”
Janet had the good grace to look embarrassed. “We would have, if the original plan had held up and we had workers with permits. But now . . . the seven guys we have aren’t supposed to be here, so how would we explain having a payroll?” She rubbed her hands on the front of her jeans. “We’re doing the whole thing under the table at this point.”
“Oh, good Lord.” Nervous energy sent Clare pacing in a circle. “That’s just dumb. Just plain dumb. Now you’re going to be in trouble with ICE and the IRS.”
Janet crossed her arms. “I’m not telling my brother about them. I can’t.” She twisted, following Clare. “You can’t tell him either.”
Clare stopped. “How can I not?” She waved her arms in the air, wanting to snatch her hair out in frustration. “Christ on a bicycle,” she said.
Janet stared at her. Then laughed.
“What?” Clare said. “What?”
Janet sobered. “You can’t tell,” she said. “You promised me.”
“Promised you what?” Kevin straightened as he came out of the narrow passageway from the byre. Mike McGeoch followed him, looking as calm and contented as one of his cows, as if he lived in a world where murder and illegal aliens and tax fraud never intruded. Maybe for him they never did.
“It’s personal,” Janet said. She glanced at Clare, then at Kevin. “About my brother.”
Clare saw the lights go on in Kevin’s upstairs. His face pinked. “Oh. Sure. Personal.” He was shaking hands with Mike when he looked toward the barn’s entrance. “Who’s that?”
Clare turned. Amado and the McGeoch’s foreman were silhouetted in the wide doorway; an identical height, one gangly and broken-armed, one broad and muscular. The foreman hugged the younger man, held the back of his head, murmured something too low for them to make out. He handed the kid a backpack, adding to the small duffel and bulging shopping bag he was already toting.
“My interim sexton,” Clare said. “Amado.” The kid and the foreman both looked up. The foreman spotted Kevin’s uniform, slapped the younger man on the back, and strolled out of sight, not fast, not slow.
“No, the other guy. I thought you didn’t have any Latino workers here.”
“Oh, that’s one of our neighbor’s men.” Janet’s voice was thin and high. “Works for us on his off days.” She laughed, a brittle, unconvincing sound. “We’re lucky to get him.”
Kevin frowned. “He seemed pretty tight with Amado for someone who’s just dropping in once in a while.”
Janet looked at Clare, who kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t telling any more lies for Russ’s sister.
“I think a lot of the guest workers around here come from the same area in Mexico.” Janet shrugged. “They may even be related.” She raised her voice. “Do you know Octavio from home, Amado?” The young man stared at her. “Octavio? ¿Un amigo?” He tightened his grip on the backpack and continued to stare at them like a spooked horse.
“It’s okay, Amado. Go ahead, get in the car.” Clare turned. “I need to get him back to the church. Janet, please consider what we talked about.” She gripped the other woman’s arm, trusting it would look like a friendly squeeze to Kevin. “Officer Flynn. Good luck on the—um, investigation. It’s a big responsibility.”
“It is, isn’t it?” His face brightened. “See you later, Reverend. Enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend.”
Friday night she’d been attacked in her church. Sunday, they had found two bodies at the annual picnic. She opened her mouth to point these facts out, then shut it at the sight of the young officer’s cheerful expression. “Thanks, Kevin. I’ll try.”
She went into the church to pray that evening. She hadn’t anticipated how dislocated she would feel with a houseguest, a disturbance made worse by Amado’s shy formality and their lack of a common language. Her unsettled feeling wasn’t helped by the fact that every time she passed her sofa or sat at the kitchen table, she experienced erotic flashbacks hot enough to make her wonder if she were going into premature menopause. When had she last had sex? She couldn’t pin down the exact year, but it was at least two presidential elections ago. She had been celibate a long time. A looong time.
So she fled to St. Alban’s. She loved coming here alone at night, lighting only the candles and reading Compline at the old high altar. She would trace the carving along the edge of the marble—PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF THE REVEREND DR. MATHIAS ARCHIBALD DUNN, RECTOR OF THIS CHURCH—and pray she would, though she suspected the late Dr. Dunn rolled over in his grave every time an ordained woman broke bread at his altar. Tonight, she spent a long time in the quiet and the candlelight, praying to be opened, to discern God’s way, to know what to do.
Go see Lucia Pirone.
The thought was there, fully formed in her mind. Her hands fell open and her head came up. Of course. She should visit Sister Lucia. In person.
You should have paid a call weeks ago.
That was the voice of Grandmother Fergusson, not the Almighty. Tomorrow, she’d head over to the rehab center and spill her guts to the missioner nun. If she baked a homemade treat, she thought, absently rubbing Dr. Dunn’s name, she’d satisfy both God and her grandmother.
“Clare. How wonderful to see you.” Sister Lucia’s eyes were as keen as ever, but her hand shook as she took Clare’s. “And what’s this? For me?” She leaned forward, coughing, to accept the box Clare held.
“Let me help,” Clare said. She untied the string and pulled the top off.
“Good heavens. These look delicious. Are these pecan tassies? And”—Sister Lucia took out a round cookie and put it in her mouth—“bourbon balls?” She chewed and swallowed, closing her eyes. “I haven’t had one of these since the last time I was in Texas. Wherever did you find them up here?”
“I made them this morning.” She grinned. “Since they don’t let you bring in a bottle of bourbon itself.”
“There’s enough there to feed the entire floor! You didn’t have to do that.”
“It’s by way of penance. I should have come to visit long before this. How are you doing?”
“Well, the pneumonia has cleared up, and they tell me that’s good. But it put me behind on my therapy for this darned hip.” She made a face. “A broken hip. If that doesn’t tell me I’m an old woman, I don’t know what does. Ah, well.” She looked at Clare sharply. “I’m guessing you didn’t come all the way over here from Millers Kill to learn about my exercises.”
Clare shook her head. “I’m afraid not.” She told the nun about Janet and Mike McGeoch, the bodies, the investigation, her own part in concealing the truth of the situation from the police. By the time she finished, Sister Lucia had put away several more bourbon balls and was nodding.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” she said, when Clare ran out of steam.
“What should I do?”
“Who’d you say was the lead detective on this?”
“Our police chief, Russ Van Alstyne. He was there the night of the crash—I don’t know if you saw him.”
“Surely not the redhead. He didn’t look old enough.”
“No, no. That’s Officer Flynn. He’s a sweetheart. No, the chief was the older man with the”—she couldn’t help it, she gestured with her hands, shaping Russ’s broad shoulders—“tall. Very tall. Blue eyes.”
“The really attractive one?”
“Oh. Yes.”
The nun’s lips twitched upward. “I didn’t see him.”
Clare felt her cheeks go red.
“Evidently, you know him.” Sister Lucia’s glint of amusement mellowed. “Do you trust him? To do the right thing, if you tell him about the men working at the McGeochs?”
“Our definition of ‘the right thing’ is sometimes very different.” She thought for a moment. “If he feels it’s his duty to turn them in, he’ll do it. He may not like it, but he’ll do it.”
“Even if it hurts his own sister?” The nun sniffed. “Sounds inflexible to me.”
“Not inflexible. Honor-bound.” She couldn’t help smile. “Admittedly, it does make him a pain in the ass at times.”
Sister Lucia laughed, which set off another bout of coughing. One of the nurses came in just at the moment Clare began to be concerned.
“Sister?” She helped the nun lean forward until the coughing fit stopped.
“Sorry,” Sister Lucia gasped.
Clare stood. “No, no, I’m sorry. I’ve overtaxed you.”
The nurse nodded. “It may be time for another treatment.”
Sister Lucia grasped Clare’s arm. “Tell him,” she said, her voice a rattle in her throat, “justice is important. Rights and jobs and working conditions are important. But the bottom line is, without life, none of those matter.” She looked up at Clare, her face fierce in its weakness, like a martyr’s. “If there’s some connection, anything . . .” She left the implication unsaid. “Tell him.”
Clare was on her way home from the rehab center when her phone rang. She turned down her Jason Mraz CD and glanced at the number: Russ. For a second, she considered letting her voice mail pick it up. She had to talk to him, she was clear on that, but in fairness’s sake she felt she had to let Janet know what she was going to do first.
She flipped it open. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey. It’s me. Where are you?”
Huh. That was to the point. “On my way back from the Rehabilitation Center at the Glens Falls Hospital. I was visiting Lucia Pirone. You remember her.”
“The nun from the crash, yeah. Look, can you meet me at the county courthouse? You know where that is?”
“Certainly. Why? What’s going on?”
He made a disapproving noise. “Amy Nguyen of the DA’s office wants to talk to us.”
“Us? Together?”
“The Christie brothers are up for bail, and apparently their lawyer wants to start the horse trading right now. Can you get over there?”
“Yeah. Where?”
“Just ask for Amy when you check in. Thanks. ’Bye.”
He hung up before she had a chance to say anything else. Maybe he was in a tearing hurry. Maybe they were back to not talking. That’s what she missed the most: talking. Serious, silly, bone-deep, flippant, all their words and thoughts like gifts to each other, the only gifts they, with their hobbled hearts, could give. She turned the CD player back up. Another day to sing about the magic that was you and me. Oh, yeah. Always time for that.
The Washington County Courthouse was in a low, modern brick building that could have passed for a bank center or a modest corporate headquarters. Its lines were softened by ornamental crab apples in full flower and row upon row of daffodils and paperwhites. She paused a moment on the walkway from the parking lot, breathing in the scent of apple and thick May grass rising over the tinny smell of cars baking in the sunshine. She wondered if the small slices of spring soothed or taunted the prisoners who went in and out of here.
At the security station, she asked for Amy Nguyen and was pointed toward a meeting room that was, when Clare opened the door to a “Come in!”, scarcely bigger than a broom closet. A petite Asian woman about Clare’s age stood behind a table stacked with manila folders and Redweld document cases.
“Amy Nguyen?”
The woman looked up from the open file she had been reading. On someone less harried-looking, her expression would have been a smile. “You must be the Reverend Fergusson.” She held out a hand. Only the faintest trace of an accent indicated English had not been her first language.
“No one else seems to want the job,” Clare agreed, shaking Nguyen’s hand. That earned her an actual grin.
Clare pulled out one of the molded plastic chairs shoved beneath the table. “What’s up? Chief Van Alstyne said you wanted to talk to me about the Christies.”
“Let’s wait until Russ gets here so we can all—” Amy broke off as the door opened, almost banging into Clare, and Russ sidled into the room, taking up any remaining free space.
“Sorry if I’m late,” he said. He glanced at Clare. “Reverend Fergusson.” Looked at Nguyen. “Amy. It’s been awhile.”
She reached over the table to shake his hand. “It has been. I was so, so sorry to hear about your wife. I can’t imagine what a terrible loss it must be for you.”
“Thank you,” he said stiffly. “It’s been—yes. Thank you.” At Nguyen’s gesture, he attempted to wedge himself into one of the chairs. He did not look at Clare.
“Okay, here’s the situation.” Nguyen laid her hand on the file she had been reading. “The Christies’ attorney is holding up the bail application because she wants us to drop all charges against her clients.”
“What?” Russ sounded outraged. “The hell she does! If I hadn’t gotten there when I did—”
Nguyen held up one hand. “In exchange,” she stressed, “they will drop their suit against you and the Millers Kill Police Department for assault and battery.”
Russ rocked back, threatening to tip the flimsy chair.
“Yes,” Clare said. “I’m willing to drop all charges. Go ahead.”
“No!” Russ turned toward her. “That bastard could have killed you!” He scowled at the ADA. “Neil and Donald Christie broke into her church and tried to beat the crap out of her. Look at her! Either one of ’em is twice as big as she is.”
Nguyen picked up a piece of paper. “According to the Christies, they went into an open unlocked church seeking an acquaintance. When they tried to find him, Reverend Fergusson”—she looked over the top of the paper at Clare—“assaulted them with a large wooden staff.”
“The processional cross,” Clare said, realizing the moment she said it that only the worst sort of pedant would correct someone accusing her of attacking them.
“They claim Ms. Fergusson struck Donald unconscious, broke Donald’s nose, and battered both of them with the—ah, cross.” She picked up five or six papers clipped together. “Their attorney helpfully included the records from their admission at Washington County Hospital, which backs up this account of their injuries.” She almost smiled at Clare. “If I’m ever in a dark alley someplace, I hope you’re with me, Reverend.” She turned to Russ. “Donald Christie then goes on to attest that before he had a chance to comply with your demand that he assume a prone position pursuant to arrest, you punched him several times in the face.” She rattled the hospital records. “Also borne out by the medical evidence.”
“Look,” Russ began.
Nguyen shook her head. “I don’t want to hear it. If their attorney files this, our office will have a responsibility to investigate. Don’t tell me anything.” She dropped the papers and braced her arms on the table. “I read your report. And the Reverend Fergusson’s statement. Believe me, I get the picture of what really went down. But this is going to be a bear to prosecute, Russ. The trespassing will never stick, they have good traction with the self-defense, and if we go ahead with resisting arrest, their lawyer’s going to make damn sure the jury knows about their pending lawsuit against you. Which, I will point out, is going to cost the town a hell of a lot of money, even if you successfully defend yourself against judgment. Maybe—maybe—I can get a win on threatening, for a whopping five-hundred-dollar fine.”
He stared at his knees, shaking his head like a bull that had been gored one too many times.
“I’ll drop the charges,” Clare said again. “I’m fine, and Amado’s fine, and that’s the only thing that matters.”
“That’s not the only goddam thing that matters,” he said, his voice low.
Clare risked laying her hand on his arm. “Maybe not,” she said. “But I’m not willing to—”
Buy my happiness with your marriage. She could see it in his eyes, the echo of the words she had said to him so many months before. Before his wife died. Before they had both been broken.
She inhaled. “To see you endanger your job and the reputation of the police department.” She looked at the ADA. “I don’t need state-sanctioned punishment. As long as they stay away from Amado and me, I’m willing to drop the whole matter.”
Nguyen nodded. “We can absolutely make that part of the deal.”
Russ snorted. “Like a restraining order is going to stop those guys? Please.”
Nguyen steepled her fingers. “I leave the enforcement up to you.”
He still looked deeply unhappy.
“If it makes you feel any better,” she went on, “it appears they truly weren’t after Ms. Fergusson. They indicated in their statements that your handyman”—she gestured toward Clare—“had been seeing their sister, and they wanted to speak to him. They didn’t even know your name.”
The mechanics of dropping the complaint were simpler than Clare had feared. The assistant DA had already prepared the order of restraint, and all Clare had to do was sign it in front of one of the frazzled court clerks, who then stamped her notary seal on the paper and sent them out to wait. After half an hour, they were ushered into Judge Ryswick’s chambers—the ADA had pointedly suggested Russ go out for a sandwich, and he had just as pointedly ignored her—and Clare got to repeat her account of the events of Friday night. Ryswick made a few disapproving tchs, jotted a couple of lines on the papers Nguyen had given him, and, after a long look at Clare that made her feel as if she must be guilty of something, approved the order.
She was back outside in the parking lot an hour after she had arrived, clutching a sheet of paper that was supposed to stand between her and the Christies. “That was fast,” she said to Russ, who was scowling at the sunshine as if it were a personal affront. “Who said, The wheels of justice grind slowly?”
“That wasn’t justice,” he said. “That was convenience.”
“I told you, as long as they leave me and Amado alone, I’m happy.” She glanced up at him, shading her eyes. “Do you think they told the truth? About Amado dating their sister?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe. That would certainly clear up how they knew him. I haven’t been able to figure out any other explanation. It’s not like the kid’s been out partying at the Dew Drop Inn.”
“So how did he meet the sister?”
“I dunno. You’ve spent more time with him than anyone else. Is he a Latin lothario?”
“Hardly. He strikes me more like Kevin Flynn, if Kevin had been born in a poor village in northern Mexico. Sweet, helpful, and can’t say boo to a woman.”
“Huh. Not anymore. Friday afternoon I caught Kevin propositioning our new officer. Had to read them both the riot act.”
“Kevin Flynn? Propositioned Hadley Knox? I don’t believe it.”
“Well.” Russ hitched at his gun belt. “It was more along the line of asking to carry her books home from school. Which for Kevin is the equivalent of inviting her to meet him up against the wall in the alley. I laid down a blanket no-fraternizing rule.” He glanced back as the courthouse doors swung open, discharging a group of men and women suited in every hue from black to charcoal. “I suppose I’ll have to get the town’s attorney to draw something up for us and make it all legal.”
She was facing away from the sun, toward the parking lot, while he was talking, which is why she saw trouble coming first. “Uh-oh,” she said.
He turned. “What?”
She gestured with her chin to the man ambling across the asphalt toward them. Sleeves rolled up, no jacket, tie loosely knotted—as he drew closer, she could see it had a picture of Snoopy on it—in this bastion of lawyers and defendants and witnesses, no one would mistake him for anything other than a reporter.
“Oh, crap on toast,” Russ said. “Ben Beagle.”
“Be nice.” Clare sounded like his mother.
“Nice? He printed a story in the Post-Star implying we spent the night together before I killed my wife! Do you know the circulation of the Post-Star? Twenty-five thousand! I looked it up.”
“Ssh.” She got the same look on her face he had seen on the times he’d been to her church: bright, open, welcoming. It wasn’t fake, but it was certainly whitewashed.
“Hey! Chief Van Alstyne. Just the man I was hoping to see. You’ve saved me a trip to the MKPD.” Beagle pulled a small notepad from his pocket and clicked his pen, smiling as if Russ was an old army buddy who owed him a drink. “What can you tell me about the two bodies found this past Sunday in Cossayuharie?”
“How do you know about that?”
Clare cleared her throat. “Uh, Russ—”
“There were close to two hundred people there,” Beagle said cheerfully. “You know what they say. Two hundred can keep a secret if one hundred are dead. Or something like that.” He waggled his fingers at Clare. “Reverend Fergusson. Nice to see you again. I understand it was a little boy from your congregation who started the whole hullabaloo.”
“Uh, yes,” she said.
“For chrissakes, Clare, you don’t have to talk to him.” She frowned at him. Him! “I’m just trying to save you trouble,” he said under his breath. “Every time you land in the newspaper your bishop has a fit.”
“Really?” Beagle’s eyes lit up. “Why is that?”
Her frown became a glare before she turned to Beagle. “Oh, you know Chief Van Alstyne,” she said, going all southern. “He will have his little joke.” Russ was pleased to see Beagle looked dubious. He didn’t have a reputation for little jokes, and he didn’t want one, either.
“A two-and-a-half-year-old wandered away from the St. Alban’s parish picnic,” Clare went on. Her voice took on that precise tone people get when speaking for attribution. “He was lost in the nearby woods for—oh, almost three hours before the Millers Kill Search and Rescue team located him, with the help of a wonderful dog handler from Saratoga. I can’t recall her name, but John Huggins will have it. We’re all very grateful to have him back, safe and sound. That’s St. Alban’s, Five Church Street, Millers Kill: Holy Eucharist Sundays at seven-thirty and nine in the summer, child care provided.” She crossed her arms and smiled sweetly while Beagle scribbled on his pad. Russ couldn’t decide if he wanted to kiss her or drop her on her head.
“Thanks,” Beagle said. “Now, Chief. About those bodies—”
“No comment,” Russ said.
“Can you confirm that they’re contemporary and not historical?” Every few years, someone in the county plowed up a forgotten burial site from the eighteenth century.
“No comment,” Russ said.
“Can you confirm that the medical examiner’s office has possession of them pending a homicide investigation?”
“No comment.”
The unending string of rebuffs was making Russ’s jaw tight, but Beagle absorbed them without losing his serenity.
“Can you comment on the connection between the two unidentified bodies found on Sunday and the one found the Friday before?”
He managed to stop himself from demanding to know where the hell Beagle had gotten that information. It must have shown on his face, though, because the reporter’s expression sharpened. “I understand the—ah, Joe Friday was Hispanic. Kind of unusual for this part of the state. Are you considering it a possible race-related hate crime?”
Clare’s brows pulled down in worry. “You mean, somebody targeting Latinos?”
“Or migrant workers.” Beagle clicked his pen as if emphasizing the possibility. “It wouldn’t be the first time. In the teens and twenties of the last century, this area was a KKK hotbed. Lots of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant violence.”
“You’re kidding!” She looked appalled. “Russ?”
“No. Comment.”
She drew in a breath, ready to rip into him, but stopped herself. She glanced at Ben Beagle, then at Russ. Her eyes narrowed: Later for you. He wasn’t sure if it was a promise or a threat. “I need to be going,” she said. “It was nice to see you again, Mr. Beagle.”
“Please.” The reporter took her hand. “Call me Ben. We should get together for lunch sometime, talk about maybe doing a day-in-the-life story on your church.”
Clare smiled warily. “I don’t think we have much at St. Alban’s to interest an investigative reporter.”
Beagle was still holding her hand. “It’d be a human-interest piece. Heartwarming. Heartwarming sells papers.” He grinned at her. “Not as much as crime and car crashes, but—this being Washington County—sometimes we run short on those.”
Clare looked amused. It struck Russ that the reporter was a lot closer to her age than he himself was, and that Beagle might even have some appeal—to some women. Like a scruffy teddy bear won at a carnival, maybe.
“Weren’t you going?” he asked. It came out harsher than he intended.
She stiffened. Then smiled brilliantly at Beagle. “I’d like that, Ben. Give me a call.” She withdrew her hand and, never once glancing at Russ, stalked away to her car.
“Good-bye,” he yelled. She sketched a wave without turning.
“Quite a woman,” Beagle said.
Russ grunted.
Ben clicked his pen again and turned to Russ. “So, Chief. Are you going to be able to give me any information on this serial killer haunting the Millers Kill area?”
POLICE DENY SERIAL KILLER, the headline read. Hadley picked the paper up from the kitchen table, where Hudson had dropped it—his morning chore was bringing the Post-Star in for Granddad—before dashing back upstairs to get his backpack.
Millers Kill chief of police Russell Van Alstyne refused to comment on the possibility that a serial killer is responsible for three murder victims found in Cossayuharie over the past week, despite strong similarities in each slaying.
Hadley shook her head. The chief would have a heart attack when he saw this.
Speaking of which . . . she took Granddad’s medicines from the cupboard, untwisted the complicated seals, and shook his daily dose into a cup next to the coffeemaker. He hadn’t been taking them regularly, despite her nagging, so she was trying to make them unavoidable.
“Hudson! Geneva! Hurry up or you’ll miss breakfast!” She grabbed three boxes of cereal from the shelf and hefted the gallon jug of milk out of the fridge. Half gone. She jotted milk on the back of the National Grid envelope she was using for her grocery list and stuffed it into her tote bag.
A clatter on the stairs, and Genny trotted into the kitchen, holding a pair of dress boots Hadley had picked up on sale at Wal-Mart a week after they arrived in the North Country. “Mom, will you help me zip up my boots?”
Hadley pulled out a kitchen chair and deposited her daughter in it. “Lovey, it’s June. We don’t wear boots in June.”
“But these are Hello Kitty boots. And I have a Hello Kitty shirt on.”
She couldn’t argue with that. “What about the sandals Grampy got you?”
Geneva gave her a look like Joan Rivers dissecting a badly dressed actress on Oscar night. “Those are Strawberry Shortcake sandals. Strawberry Shortcake is for preschool. I’m in first grade.” She wriggled the boots on and stuck her legs out.
Hadley weighed the teacher’s reaction to the unseasonable footwear versus the time lost convincing Geneva to change her mind, and decided she could live with Mrs. Flaherty thinking she was a neglectful mother. She zipped the boots. “You get your cereal and I’ll help you with the milk,” she said. She strode through the family room to the foot of the stairs and yelled, “Hudson!”
He emerged from his room, an overfull backpack swinging from one shoulder, clutching a fistful of papers. “I need signatures,” he said, handing them to her. “And two checks.” Behind him, she could hear Granddad thumping down the hall.
Hadley examined the papers as she followed her son into the kitchen. Permission slip for a field trip to Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Cost, ten bucks. Permission slip for a field trip to the Mohawk Canal museum. Cost, five bucks. So much for getting her hair cut this week. A notice of upcoming field days—please make sure your child is adequately sun-screened. She dropped the forms on the table and poured milk into Genny’s bowl, holding it away from herself to avoid splashing her uniform. “I don’t know why they bother to have school into June,” she said to Hudson. “You’re not spending any time there.”
She grabbed her checkbook from the tote and started filling out the forms. “You should have given these to me last night,” she told her son, who was steam-shoveling spoonfuls of cereal into his mouth. He nodded.
“Hey, Honey,” Granddad called from the family room. “Come on in here and check this out.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“Your police department’s on the channel six news.”
Hudson and Genny both looked up, eyes wide. “Finish your breakfast,” Hadley ordered, even as they slipped from their chairs and ran into the next room. “I am not driving you to school,” Hadley warned, following them. “You’re out the door at five to eight whether you’ve finished breakfast or—”
She broke off. A streaked blonde in a pink jacket was breathlessly talking into a microphone in front of the MKPD. Before Hadley had a chance to hear what she said, the picture changed to dawn breaking over the Muster Field. “This was the site where the second and third bodies were found.” The blonde, wearing a trench coat in this shot, turned to an “area resident who witnessed the recovery of the victims.” She thrust the mic toward a heavyset man who seemed excited about his moment of fame, despite the early hour. He launched into a description of the events of Sunday afternoon.
“Mom, we didn’t see any bodies,” Hudson complained.
“That’s ’cause we went home like sensible people once they found the Burns boy,” Granddad said.
The screen switched back to the MKPD. “Mom, look!” Hudson said. “Maybe you’ll be on TV, too!”
God forbid.
“Could this be the work of a serial killer?” the reporter asked the camera. “So far, the Millers Kill police refuse to confirm or deny the possibility. But meanwhile, the residents of this far-flung rural township watch. And wait. And wonder. This is Sheena Bevins, WREB News.” The screen switched to the anchor.
“Mom, what’s a serial killer?” Genny asked.
“Someone who puts poison in cereal.” Hudson leered menacingly. “You may have already eaten it. Do you feel sick?”
Genny shrieked.
“Stop it,” Hadley said. “Both of you, into the kitchen and finish your breakfast.”
Granddad shook his head. “What’s this world comin’ to?” He heaved himself up out of his recliner. “You any closer to solving this?”
“We’ve got nothing.” Hadley flopped her checkbook open against the top of the television and began to write out the field trip payments. “We don’t even have an identity for the first guy.” She ripped the checks out and folded them in the permission slips as she crossed the kitchen. “Upstairs and brush your teeth, you two,” she said, zipping the papers into Hudson’s backpack. She scooped up the bowls—still half full of milk and cereal, in Genny’s case—and dumped them in the sink.
“I’ll take care of those,” Granddad said. “You better get going. They’re going to need you at the station.”
Granddad was convinced she was one rung below the deputy chief at the department. He seemed to think her twice-weekly trips to Albany were some sort of high-level investigator’s training, instead of Police Basic. Albany. Tonight. Shit. That meant she had to fill up her gas tank.
She ran up the stairs to her room, pausing just long enough to stick her head into the bathroom and say, “Brush!” without checking to see what the kids were actually doing. She had five bucks and change in a mug on her dresser. She emptied it into her pocket and then took her gun safe down from the closet shelf. She didn’t like to put on her belt before the kids left for school, but it couldn’t be helped when they were running late. She unlocked the safe box, checked the gun just like her instructor had told her, and snapped it into its holster. She wondered if she would ever feel at ease with the thing. She made sure everything else was secure—baton, cuffs, radio mount, ammo pouch—then buckled it on. She twitched the rig around a few times to try to get more comfortable, then banged on the wall adjoining the bathroom. “Finish up!” she yelled. “It’s bus time!”
Geneva bolted past her as she left the bedroom, with Hudson following. He eyed her rig. “Ooh, Mom,” he said. “Could I—”
She held up one finger. “No. I don’t even want you to ask. If you ask again, you’re getting a consequence.”
He gave her a Look and slumped downstairs, muttering just quietly enough for her to ignore it. In the kitchen, the kids shouldered their backpacks and kissed their grampy, who had abandoned the morning news long enough to make coffee. The pills lay untouched in the cup. “Take your medicine,” Hadley said. “And no smoking!”
“I’m not smokin’ no more,” he said, with the same expression Hudson got when he was lying.
“I’ll try to get home at lunchtime and return the cans and bottles.” She kissed Granddad. The deposit money and what she had in her pocket should get her to Albany and back. She hoped. She shooed the kids out the door before her and tossed her tote into the back of the car. The bus rumbled to a stop and Hudson and Genny climbed aboard without a backward glance—which, she supposed, was a good thing.
She spent the five-minute drive to the station worrying about what she was going to do for child care over the summer. Granddad was going back to work sooner rather than later, and even in a small town she didn’t want to leave Genny and Hudson home several hours a day. The Millers Kill recreation department had a seven-week day camp that sounded perfect, except that it was four hundred per kid. The sight of the TV vans parked in front of the station put an end to her pity party. There were three reporter/cameraman pairs on the front steps that she could see, bringing traffic to a near standstill as drivers on their way to work slowed down to rubberneck.
She pulled into the lot that ran beside and behind the station and killed her engine. She sat, hands still wrapped around the steering wheel, wondering how in hell she was going to get by those people without getting caught on camera.
A flash of copper near the asphalt caught Hadley’s eye. Kevin Flynn’s disembodied head rose from the edge of the parking lot. What the hell? He beckoned to her. She slid out of her car, snagging her tote bag, and hiked toward him. He was, she saw as she got closer, standing in a stairwell. Rotting leaves drifted over half the cement steps. At the bottom, a door stood ajar.
“In here,” he said.
She didn’t need to be told twice. She descended carefully so as not to slip on the leaves and ducked inside, Kevin treading on her heels. She was, she found, next to the evidence locker.
“They used to have cells on this floor in the olden days,” Flynn explained, tugging the heavy door back into place. “This was the way they took prisoners out.”
In the enclosed area, Flynn towered over her. She moved forward, well away from his body space, out of reach. She had decided she was going to approach him with a kind of big-sister courtesy unless and until he hit on her again. Cold and standoffish was a turn-on for some guys, and while she didn’t think Flynn was like that, she wasn’t taking any chances. She figured if she treated him like everyone else on the force did—as if he were sixteen years old—he’d get over his crush fast.
“Thanks for sneaking me in,” she said. She threaded her way past file boxes stacked three deep against the wall and headed for the stairs. “When did the reporters show up?”
“They were here when I got in,” he said, his voice echoing along the subterranean hallway. “The chief’s not a happy guy right now.”
At the foot of the stairs, she paused. Almost made him go up first. Then she pictured the two of them maneuvering around each other, changing positions. The hell with it. She mounted the stairs. If he wanted to get an eyeful of her brown poly-clad ass, so be it.
She could hear voices coming from Harlene’s dispatch when she got to the top. “—gotta make a statement,” MacAuley was saying.
“I know, I know.” That was the chief.
She walked in and was surprised to see the deputy chief spiffed up in the brown wool uniform jacket none of them ever wore, his cap tucked beneath his arm.
“Morning,” she said.
Harlene rolled her chair away from the board and stood up. “Looks like I better make more coffee.”
“Don’t bother on my account!” Hadley called after her, but it was too late.
The chief frowned at her. “Did you say anything to the reporters coming in?”
She shifted her tote bag to her other arm. “No, sir.” She could feel a solid mass in the doorway behind her, and knew, without turning, it was Kevin Flynn. “Flynn let me in through a downstairs door. By the evidence locker.”
MacAuley raised his brushy eyebrows. “How’d you know to let her in?” He directed the question well over her head.
“Um.” Flynn’s boots scraped the floor. “I was watching. From the interview room.”
MacAuley and the chief looked at each other. The chief opened his mouth.
“I really appreciated it.” Hadley leaped in before the chief could say anything. She spoke in a just-us-grown-ups tone, as if she were talking to Hudson’s teacher with him standing there. “He’s a thoughtful kid.”
“Mmm.” The chief gave Flynn one more considering look before turning back to MacAuley. “You sure you know everything you’re going to give them?”
MacAuley flicked an invisible piece of lint from his hat. “You want to talk to them? Go right ahead.”
“Hell, no,” the chief said. “I’ve seen myself on camera. I always look like I’m about to grab the mike and start threatening people with it.”
“Then trust me. I’m good at this.” MacAuley buffed the bill of his already shining cap on his sleeve and settled it square on his head. He stood up straight, tugging his jacket into place, and was transformed from his usual sly, slouching self to a gray-haired diplomat for law enforcement. He immediately spoiled the effect by winking at them. “Once more into the breach, dear friends.”
“C’mon,” the chief said, as MacAuley sauntered down the hall toward the station entrance. “Let’s get into the briefing room and catch everybody up.”
“Everybody” consisted of Eric McCrea, leafing through the Glens Falls Area phone book and jotting down addresses and numbers in his notebook. “Lyle and I have already gone over things this morning,” the chief said, tossing his folders on the table. “We got the report from Doc Scheeler on John Doe three’s fillings. The amalgam’s contemporary, no more’n five years old. Which jibes with Scheeler’s estimate of his age as between twenty-one and twenty-five. We have DNA samples from both bodies taken from behind the Muster Field, and the state lab’ll be happy to run a comparison for us within two to three years.”
Flynn groaned.
“What about dental records?” Hadley asked. It was a lot easier to risk sounding dumb when most of the force was someplace else.
“Dental records are great when you’re comparing an unknown victim to a known missing person. They’re useless in tracking down an identity. We’d have to go through every dental office in New York State—assuming this guy was from New York. Where we are, he could just as easily be from Canada or northern New England.”
“Anything on John Doe one?” Flynn didn’t sound hopeful.
“No.” The chief sat on the table and planted his boots against a chair seat. “It’s making me nuts. We got prints. We got those damn tattoos. Even if there’s no—” he cut himself off. Hadley was pretty sure the rest of the sentence would have been connection with the guys Knox saw. No one believed she had seen the same tattoos on Stud Boy: Santiago. She didn’t know why that bothered her. It shouldn’t matter. She got paid whether they caught whoever did this or not.
“John Doe one did time,” the chief went on. “I’m sure of it. So why don’t we have an ID for him yet?”
It was a rhetorical question. Hadley and Flynn looked at each other. “Eric.” The chief pitched his voice to include McCrea. “You got anything to add?”
“Hadley and I interviewed the members of the volunteer search-and-rescue team yesterday. No one noticed anything unusual.”
Hadley didn’t realize she was making a face until the chief asked her, “What is it?”
She glanced toward McCrea. He grinned. “John Huggins wanted to know what a sweet little thing like Officer Knox was doing on the force.”
The chief pinched the bridge of his nose. “Huggins has some . . . difficulties with women that don’t fit his—ah, traditional ideas.” He looked at Hadley. “He’s harmless, though. And our departments often work closely together, so let’s try to keep things civil.”
Hadley frowned. “So I shouldn’t have told him to eat shit and die?” The expression on the chief’s face was priceless. She held up her hands. “Just kidding. I was very civil.”
He gave her a withering look. “Kevin?”
“Between Mr. McGeoch and Agent Hodgden, I got a list of area farms that employ immigrant workers year round, and the names of laborers with legal permits and sponsors.”
The chief’s eyebrows went up. “Paula Hodgden just passed on that info?”
Flynn looked as if he couldn’t decide to be embarrassed or proud of himself. “I—um, may have given her the impression that I was going to be rounding up anybody I found who wasn’t on her list.”
“I see.”
“I didn’t promise anything.”
“Uh—huh.”
“Anyway, I’m ready to get out and interview people, but I have a problem. I don’t speak Spanish.” Flynn’s forehead creased, as if he were afraid his language skills were letting the department down. “I do speak some German. I took three years in high school.”
“That’s great, Kevin,” the chief said. “The next time we find a John Doe wearing lederhosen, you’re on it. In the meantime, however—”
“Hadley can go with Kevin instead of me,” McCrea said. “I’m going to be tackling the Christie relatives today, and it might be better if I don’t have someone inexperienced around.”
Well. That stung. But at least McCrea was up front with her.
The chief crossed his arms over his chest and stared into the middle distance. She was beginning to recognize it as his thinking stance. Finally he said, “Okay. But if I’m going to send the two of you out there, I want to maximize the possibility of getting useful information. I want you two in civvies.”
“What?” Hadley said.
“We’ve already noticed that the sight of a cop car and a uniform doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in these guys. Change into something you can wear with a shoulder or a pancake holster and go in one of your own cars.”
“I don’t have a pancake or a shoulder holster,” Hadley started to say, but her objection was drowned by Kevin’s excited, “You want us to go undercover?”
“No, Kevin. I want you in plainclothes. There’s a difference.” He looked at Hadley. “You can draw a holster from the gun locker.”
“Plainclothes,” Flynn breathed, in the way someone might have said, “The Holy Grail.”
“I haven’t practiced with a pancake or shoulder holster!”
A disapproving sound rumbled out of the back of the chief’s throat. He stood up. “Look. Maybe this is going too far too fast for you two—”
A clamor of noise from the front of the station cut him off. There was a flap-flap of footsteps, and a squeaky-pleased “Hel-lo!” from Harlene, and then MacAuley was ushering in Reverend Clare, whose neat black clerical garb looked at odds with her flushed face and falling-down twist.
“The Reverend here arrived near the end of the press conference,” MacAuley said. “Some of the reporters got a little overexcited.”
“Thank you so much, Lyle.” She laid a hand on MacAuley’s arm. “I wasn’t expecting to be keelhauled by the Fourth Estate.”
MacAuley’s eyes half closed, and he smiled a wide, wicked smile. “Shucks, ma’am. ’Tain’t nothing.”
“Don’t you have a case to clear?” the chief snapped. “What are you doing here?” he asked Reverend Clare. “Is it the Christies?”
“The Christies? No. I, uh”—she glanced around, taking in Hadley, Flynn, and McCrea—“need to speak to you.”
The chief gestured impatiently.
He exhaled. “My office.” He motioned for her to go through the doorway ahead of him, perhaps not noticing Reverend Clare’s narrowed eyes and set jaw. They stalked away through the dispatch room. This time, Harlene didn’t say anything.
MacAuley pursed his lips. When they heard the chief’s door slam shut, he asked, “Did he have that stick up his ass before Reverend Fergusson got here?”
Hadley looked at Flynn to see if he was going to say anything. No way she was going to answer that one.
“Nope,” McCrea said.
“Interesting.”
Flynn shook his head, as if dismissing the chief, his moods, and the minister from his mind. “I’ve got a change of clothing in my car. Do you have something here, or do we need to hit your house before we go?”
“Wait a minute,” Hadley said. “I think he was about to tell us not to go.”
He looked at her like she’d grown a second head. “That’s why we have to move now. Do you wanna take your car? Or my Aztek?”
She thought about her less-than-half tank of gas. “Your Aztek,” she said, then realized she was committing herself. “Wait!”
“I’ll get you a pancake holster. Trust me, it’ll feel just as natural as the one you’re wearing now.”
Oh, there was a great recommendation.
“Do you want me to drive you to your house or meet you over there?”
“Meet me,” she said without thinking. Flynn nodded and headed out the door. “Wait!” she said.
A bellow from the chief’s office stopped her short, but Flynn kept right on going. The baritone yell was followed by a loud and impassioned alto voice, which was drowned out by more deep and angry words, which were topped by an even more strident female response. Hadley couldn’t make out what they were fighting about, but it sounded like a doozy.
“Interesting,” MacAuley repeated.
McCrea pushed back from his desk and gathered his notepad and phone book. “I’m getting out of the kill zone,” he said.
MacAuley nodded. “You might want to think about that as well,” he told Hadley.
She groaned and shouldered her tote. Looked like will-she, nil-she, she was going to be driving around the North Country acting as Kevin Flynn’s translator. As she ducked down the stairs, the sound of her minister and her boss going at it hammer and tongs, she was already trying to come up with a civilian outfit as ugly and unflattering as her uniform. It wouldn’t do to give Flynn any ideas.
Kevin Flynn was having the best day of his life. He had the window rolled down and his arm hanging out, the late-May sun warming his skin, dry sweet air blowing through the Aztek. No heater like in March, no manure smell like in April, no blackflies like in—well, they were a plague all summer long, but they weren’t getting in at forty-five miles an hour. He was in plainclothes, his polo shirt hanging loose over his Colt .44, managing—managing!—the investigation, deciding where they would go and who they would question next.
The best-looking woman in Millers Kill sat beside him, listening to his Promise Ring CD, and if she wasn’t saying much, she also wasn’t tearing his head off. When they had stopped for lunch, she had even let him buy her a sub, after he told her it’d be her turn next time.
She had on a T-shirt and those baggy shin-high pants only girls wear, with a vest to cover up her Glock 9mm, and she looked so damn cute it was all he could do to keep from grinning at her. It was a relief, he decided, getting smacked down by the chief. Embarrassing as hell at the time, but after he’d cooled down, the no-fraternization rule started to seem like a sturdy fence along an observation post at, say, Niagara Falls. Something that let him look all he wanted at the magnificent work of nature without getting swept away and killed.
For real, it didn’t get any better than this.
“Flynn,” she said. She leaned forward and turned down the music. “I don’t think this is getting us anywhere.”
For a minute, he panicked. Was she talking about . . . could she be talking about . . . then he realized she meant the interviews.
“All we’re getting is a bunch of negatives. ‘No, I didn’t see anything. No, I don’t know anything. No, I don’t recognize the man in the picture.’ ” They’d been showing the best head shot they had of John Doe one—although even cleaned up and in tight focus he didn’t look anything other than good and dead.
“That’s what you hear in most interviews. Unless, you know, you’re breaking up a fight or something. Where everybody in the crowd saw what happened. No just means you’re closing off one more dead end.”
“I get that, but what are we going to learn? I mean, what if the guy we want is working on one of these dairies? What’s he going to do? Give it up to us?”
“Sometimes. Yeah.” Kevin glanced at her. She was worrying her birthstone ring. “The chief or MacAuley gets a guy into the interrogation room, they ask him a few questions, and boom! next thing you know, we’re calling the DA’s office because the guy’s spilled his guts. Never underestimate a perp’s need to get it off his chest.” That last bit of wisdom came from the deputy chief, but he figured he didn’t need to quote chapter and verse.
She looked at him skeptically. “We’re not the chief and MacAuley.”
“Hey, everybody’s got to start somewhere.” He pointed his elbow toward their folder. “Who’s next on the list?”
The three farms after that were repeats of the morning interviews. It was slow work, trailing after workers scattered between the barn and the field and the machine shed, assuring them and their employers that no, they weren’t from ICE and no, they didn’t have any interest in seeing visas or work permits or Social Security cards. After their first stop that morning, when Hadley told him to stop scaring the workers by towering over them like the damn Statue of Liberty, Kevin found everybody relaxed more when he got as low profile as possible. He’d taken to squatting on his haunches as if he were powwowing at scout camp. Hadley, who’d acted like she was giving an oral examination the first few times, had smoothed out her patter, even—based on the occasional laugh she got—tossing in a joke now and again.
Kevin thought they were creating about as good a rapport with the migrants as they could, but they still didn’t shake anything loose until Jock Montgomery’s place. It was after four when they pulled into the dooryard, scattering a horde of small boys who turned out to be Montgomery sons and their friends. There was a bit of confusion as to why Hadley was there, since her oldest kid was in the same class as the middle Montgomery boy. Then the babysitter, Christy McAlister, recognized Kevin from when he wrote up her boyfriend’s accident last winter, and she had to catch him up on everything going on with both the boyfriend—deployed overseas—and the car—totaled and replaced.
The good news was that it was coming up milking time. Montgomery’s three full-time year-round farmhands were all in what the dairyman called the milking parlor, which, despite its old-fashioned name, had the same stainless steel and sterilized hoses as the other farms. Back at the Hoffmans’, Hadley had commented, “It’s all rubber and restraints. I bet there’s some serious fetish activity going on after hours in a few of these places.” He’d turned the same color as the red Ayshires in the field, but now he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
They had gathered the men in the tack room, and, since the concrete floor was stained with unidentifiable brown blotches, Kevin forsook the squatting for sitting atop a plastic five-gallon bucket of antibiotic feed additive. Hadley perched on another bucket and showed them the photo, asking—he assumed—if any of them had seen John Doe one.
The three men—short broad-faced Mayans with arms large enough to wrestle calves out of their mother’s bodies and skinny, bowed legs—shook their heads. Lined up in Astroturf-green lawn chairs, they looked like teak garden ornaments that had been stored in the barn for a season.
Hadley asked them another question, smiling, her voice inviting confidence.
The men glanced at one another. Kevin, examining the straw and manure glued to the edge of his sneakers, sat up straight. This was the first time they hadn’t gotten an almost-instant denial. “Hadley,” he said, his voice quiet, unthreatening. “Remind ’em we’re just here for information.”
She rattled off something in Spanish, still trying to sound upbeat. One guy said something to another. The third nodded, adding what might have been an encouragement or an order. The one in the middle was still, like he was weighing what the other two had told him. Finally, he said something to Hadley. A short sentence.
“¿Qué?” She was obviously surprised.
“What is it?” Kevin asked.
She didn’t turn to answer him. “He says he was shot at.”
He kept his mouth shut while she asked the guy another question. Got an answer. Asked something else. Got a longer, more detailed reply, with the other two nodding along. Kevin made himself wait, not wanting to bust up the flow of the interview. After ten minutes of back-and-forth, Hadley said “Gracias,” and everybody except Kevin stood up.
The three men left. Kevin exploded off his bucket once the last one vanished into the milking parlor. “What?” he said. “What?”
Hadley rubbed her lips, her eyes still on the lawn chairs. “We need to take a look at Mr. Montgomery’s van. The guy in the middle, Feliz, says he was driving it to the Agway to pick up a load of feed and somebody shot at him. Put a hole through the back panel.”
“When?”
“April.”
Yes! In like Flynn. He was out the door in two strides. “Mr. Montgomery!” he called. “Mr. Montgomery?”
Jock Montgomery emerged from the cold room, wiping his hands on a cloth. He was a Caucasian version of his workers, bandy-legged, powerful shoulders, with an up-country Cossayuharie accent you could use to stir paint. “They tell you what you needed to know?”
“Did your van get shot this past April?”
“Ayeah.”
“Why didn’t you report it?”
“Aw.” Montgomery shoved the cloth into his overalls pocket. “There’s no need to kick up a fuss. Just somebody jacking deer. I figgured if he needed the meat so bad, I wun’t gonna put trouble his way.”
“Do you know who did it?”
Montgomery rubbed the back of his neck.
“We’re not asking ’cause we’re looking for game violations. We’re investigating multiple murders.”
Hadley piped up for the first time. “Someone may be targeting Latino migrant workers.”
Kevin winced. He didn’t think the chief wanted that theory floating around Millers Kill.
“Huh. So you think . . . maybe he wun’t huntin’ after all?”
“Maybe not for deer,” Hadley said.
“I don’t know who did it.” Montgomery sighed. “But it happened when Feliz was on the Cossayuharie Road, passing though the Christies’ woods. I figgured—well, they’re hard up enough to do it. Huntin’ out of season, I mean.”
Hadley caught his sleeve and tugged him away from the farmer. “The twenty-two?” she said quietly.
“That’d be hard to punch through a moving vehicle. But maybe.” Kevin turned back to Montgomery. “May we see the van, please?”
“Right out here next to the feed room.” They followed Montgomery, keeping a few paces behind so they could talk.
“The Christies,” Hadley whispered.
“That’d put a different spin on them going after that Mexican guy working at St. Alban’s.”
They stepped over a chewed-up wooden lintel and out into the late-afternoon sun. “There ’tis,” Montgomery said. “You can see why I took it for a hunter.”
Kevin could. The ragged-edged hole was the work of a large-caliber weapon. But it wasn’t the size of the shot that interested him. It was the van itself. The big, white, paneled Chevy Astro was identical to the one Sister Lucia Pirone had been driving.
He hadn’t called before hauling over to his sister’s farm, so it was his own damn fault his mother was there to see the blowup. He heeled his squad car into her driveway—the old one, not the new one—and was pounding up the steps before the engine stilled. He hammered on the front door. “Janet! Goddammit, open up!”
The door opened. He saw empty air where he expected Janet’s face and looked down. His mother frowned up at him. “What on earth are you fussing about now, Russell? Swearing at the top of your lungs right out in front of God and everybody. What if the girls had been home?”
One-handed, he swung the door all the way open and pushed past her rotund form. “This is official business, Mom.” He strode into the McGeochs’ living room, nearly knocking over his niece Kathleen’s music stand. Empty plastic laundry baskets and piles of folded clothing covered the sofa. Sneakers in assorted sizes and shades of pink were piled like a canvas landslide against the TV console. “Janet!”
Janet appeared from the kitchen, a full laundry basket in her arms. Her lips thinned. “Clare told you.”
“Clare told me,” he said. “And I don’t know who I’m madder at, her for keeping it a secret or you for laying it on her. This is a goddam murder investigation, Janet. Don’t you get it? We got three dead men to account for. That’s a little more important than you saving a few bucks on your taxes.”
“I told you everything you needed to know about the body! It doesn’t matter who found it!”
“That’s not your call to make!”
“Would somebody tell me what in Sam Hill’s goin’ on?” their mother asked.
“Janet and Mike have a whole crew of illegal workers at the new farm. It was one of them found the body on their property, not Janet. She lied about it, and she got Clare to back up the lie, and she’s kept on lying despite the fact that we’re up to three bodies now and there may very well be some connection between the migrant workers and the murders.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and tried to breathe deep. The drive over hadn’t cooled him off any.
Their mother pinned Janet in place with narrowed eyes. “This true?”
“We hired those workers in good faith. It wasn’t our fault we got screwed over by the employment agency!”
“Is it true?” Margy’s voice was relentless.
Janet glared at the wall. “Yes.”
Their mother closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she had an expression both Russ and Janet knew well. Knew and dreaded. “Janet Agnes,” she said, “I am ashamed of you.”
Russ could see Janet fighting not to drop her head. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mom.” Her voice was unsteady. “But when it comes to the farm’s future, to my family’s future, I have to do what I think best.”
“I’m tryin’ to think of a way hidin’ the facts in a murder investigation could be best,” Margy said.
“We need those workers to survive. I was afraid that if he knew about them, Russ would have to turn them in to Immigration and Customs, and Mike and I’d be left trying to run two hundred head between the two of us. Native-born hands would cost us twice as much, if we could find anyone to take on the job.”
Russ shook his head. “You should have just asked me. I checked with the town attorney back in April, when your men first went missing. Unless someone’s been arrested for a crime, I don’t have any obligation to ask about their status, legal, illegal, whatever.” He felt his anger leaching away. “Why didn’t you just ask me?”
His sister looked at him, disbelieving. “Because if the answer had been different, you would’ve called ICE. You might’ve been sorry, but that wouldn’t have stopped you.”
“Then you should have told me.” Margy’s voice was sharp. “It’s my farm too, you know. I don’t expect to be treated like some old fool with an open purse and a closed mind.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. Really.” Janet turned to Russ. “And . . . I apologize to you, too. For the . . . for not asking. And for coming between you and Clare.”
He did not want to go there. “Forget it. Lemme interview your men. See if anyone saw anything. Then we’ll call it quits.”