Eleven

Peyton entered the interview room Thursday at 9:45 a.m. with two Styrofoam cups of coffee. She set the coffees down, removed a recorder from her pocket, started it, and recited the date, stated who she was, and said the suspect’s name. Then she asked Fred St. Pierre Jr. if he’d been read his rights.

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Whatever.”

She handed him a coffee, and he took it without thanking her.

“Place ain’t exactly cozy, eh?” he said, the French accent reminding Peyton of his now-late father’s. He smelled like fertilizer, an earthy, pungent scent.

“It’s an interview room, Freddy, not a Marriott.”

“One metal desk, one chair? Feel like I’m on NCIS. You know me, eh, Peyton. You know I didn’t shoot Simon Pink, right?”

“The slug is from your .22.”

“That don’t mean nothing. Don’t prove I did it.”

She sipped her coffee. Tim Hortons wasn’t Starbucks, but it was popular in the region, and until Aroostook County got a Starbucks (or pigs flew), it was as good as it got.

“Any theories,” she said, “as to how a slug from your pistol ended up in Simon Pink’s head?”

“I got no idea. Last I knew, my .22 was on top of my closet.”

The state troopers had found it in his sock drawer. Following the shooting, they’d gone through the St. Pierre house. Aside from the .357 Fred Sr. had used to kill Marie, it was the only other gun discovered.

“You know what the last two days been like for me?” He was staring at the Formica tabletop.

“I should’ve said this earlier,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry for your loss. I truly am.”

“I mean, I get home, see the blood on the porch—”

That was a relief to Peyton: Fred Jr. hadn’t seen the corpses.

“—then I get questioned by Leo Miller about my parents. He tries to tell me my father shot my mother then shot himself. I still don’t believe him.” He looked away. “Leo says you saw it happen.”

“That’s true, Freddy. Again, I’m terribly sorry.”

“I can’t believe it, eh. I mean, that couldn’t happen, right? You know my parents.”

“I hadn’t seen them for a long time. But what Leo told you is true.”

He leaned back in his chair, folded his arms across his chest, and cursed under his breath.

She didn’t speak. He hadn’t requested his attorney yet; he could curse all he wanted, so long as he kept answering questions.

“How long have you known Simon Pink?”

“Known? I didn’t exactly know the guy, eh. Papa hired him. He worked the harvest a couple times.”

“Doing what?”

“Driving, so I didn’t see him often.”

Potato trucks weren’t cheap. Peyton remembered a day when she’d been a girl and was called in from the field to help load a truck. She’d stood beside the conveyor belt, tossing potatoes that had fallen off it back onto the belt. She remembered watching them tumble into the back of the truck before Claude, her father’s most trusted employee, drove them to upstate New York. “Take it slow,” her father had reminded Claude more than once. That truck, it had seemed to her back then, was worth as much as the farm itself to her father since the crop couldn’t be delivered without it.

“You and your father ran the farm together, right?”

He looked at her, nodded, and she saw his face change.

“Jesus, he’s gone. Really gone, eh?” And the tears came.

Fred Sr. had died nearly twenty-four hours ago. Maybe it had taken a day to sink in. She’d lost her own father, had spent a day traveling back from El Paso, had sat on one plane then the next, staring out the window, thinking about him, about the words I’ll never see him again. Fred Jr. was doing that here.

“Who hired the truck drivers, Freddy?”

“Papa. I was in charge of the field, the kids, and the tractor drivers.”

“Who hired Simon Pink?”

“What do you mean?” he said and shifted. “I told you already. Papa hired Simon,” he said, pronouncing the dead man’s name as his father had—See-moan.

“Was he the only truck driver?”

“Papa drove a load once in awhile, but we only have one truck. When it’s on the road, if someone wants a load of potatoes, they send a truck to us, and we load it.”

“What are your responsibilities during harvest?”

“I just told you, eh. I oversee the fields.” The crying had subsided. He’d ridden the emotional wave, been distracted, and had gotten swept away. He’d catch the wave again and be exhausted in a few hours.

“Did your mother prepare a big midday meal during harvest?”

She remembered the noon meal her own mother cooked each day—meat, potatoes, dessert—the entire crew squeezing in on formal and folding chairs around the dining room table, her father leading the conversation. They’d covered local politics, sports, anything but the work at hand. The work was hard, and it would come later. The midday meal had been about welcoming these employees into her father’s home. And he was respected for it. It was a tradition. She wondered if it still existed; hoped it did.

Fred Jr. shook his head.

“Hard to believe that after all the work you and your crew do in the field, you wouldn’t want to know who, ultimately, is handling the potatoes, transporting them. I worked a bunch of harvests, Freddy, remember?”

“So what? I didn’t shoot the guy, Peyton.”

“Where were you Monday night?”

“I got an alibi,” he said.

And with that statement, a red flag went up. Using the A word never made the suspect more credible.

“Let’s hear it.”

“I was with my girlfriend.”

“All night?”

He smiled. “All night long.”

“Lucky lady.”

“Got that right.”

“What’s her name?” she asked.

“You going to call her?”

“You said she’s your alibi,” she said. “I bet you told her to anticipate a call.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Tell me her name.”

“Nancy Lawrence. She teaches middle school,” he said. “What did I say?” he asked, eyes narrowing.

It had been an amateur mistake: she’d slipped, displayed her disbelief that he and Nancy Lawrence were dating.

“Spend much time in the cabin behind your house?” she asked.

“No.”

“When was the last time you were there?”

“Last fall.”

“What’s it used for?”

“What do you mean? It’s just a cabin. What’s it got to do with the farm?” he said.

“I was hoping you could tell me, Fred. What was it built for?”

“Dad spent some nights out there.”

“When?”

“Last year.”

“Doing what?”

“Sleeping.”

“Your mom go with him?”

Fred Jr. shifted, uncomfortable now. “No,” he said. “Just Dad.”

“There a reason for that?”

“It’s private.”

“Three people are dead,” she told him. “We don’t have time or a reason now to keep things private.”

“More reason to keep them private now than ever,” he said.

“What do you mean, Freddy?”

He shook his head.

“Your mother throw your father out of the house?”

“I told you. It’s private.”

She leaned back in her chair. “Want more coffee?” she said. She wanted to know more about the cabin, but they had time. He wasn’t going anywhere.

“I’ll probably need it, the way this is going, eh.”

“I’ll get us some coffee,” she said, “but one question before I go: Your dad told me you helped him roof the cabin. Is that right?”

“Yeah. So what?”

She stopped the recorder, pocketed it, and left the room.

She paused in the hall outside the interrogation room. The bullpen was at the end of the corridor, but she didn’t walk to it. She stood, replaying bits of the conversation with Fred St. Pierre Jr. in her mind.

He’d announced that he had an alibi—a move that always looked suspicious—for the night Simon Pink was shot to death and his body torched. The details of the alibi would be checked, of course, but none of it felt right to Peyton.

Nancy Lawrence and Fred St. Pierre Jr.? An item?

Peyton knew Nancy Lawrence types. She’d gone to Garrett High School with plenty of them—teenage girls who acted (and often looked) much older than they were and who undeniably believed they were better than the local boys. Too-big-for-this-small-town types. She hadn’t respected that mentality then, didn’t now.

Or maybe her instant disbelief that Freddy was dating Nancy Lawrence said something else. Something about Peyton herself. Maybe she’d grown cynical, her worldview soured after more than a decade as an agent. Had she jumped to a conclusion? Profiling could come in forms other than race and ethnicity. Maybe Nancy Lawrence would date a man like Fred Jr., a guy who wore Carhartt and had grease under his fingernails and smelled like fertilizer.

“Excuse me,” a voice called from the bullpen, the tone slow and deliberate. “Where is my brother?”

Peyton turned around, looked down the hallway, and instantly recognized the former Sherry St. Pierre amid the desks in the area where Linda Cyr, the receptionist, sat.

“Where is my brother?” she repeated.

“Please, come sit down, ma’am,” Bruce Steele, the station’s lone K-9 handler, said, motioning to a chair near his desk.

“No thank you. I want to see Freddy. Now.”

“Ma’am,” young Miguel Jimenez said, “you really—”

“I said now!”

“Sherry,” Peyton said, hustling toward her.

“Peyton?” Sherry said. “Peyton Cote?”

“Yeah, Sherry. I’m talking to your brother right now. He’s cooperating fully.”

Sherry shook her head. “The interview is over,” she said.

“The interview is voluntary, Sherry,” Peyton said. “Your brother is cooperating. I think he wants to know why it happened.”

“My attorney—Freddy’s attorney—will be here momentarily. The interview is over.”

Gone were the faded Levi’s and flannel shirts from high school. Wearing boot-cut DKNY jeans, high-heeled suede boots, and a cardigan over a white blouse, the sleeves of which were creased and cuffed neatly over the sweater, Sherry looked far more stylish than any professor Peyton remembered at the University of Maine. The only hint that she was an academic was her large-framed purple glasses. She figured Sherry had waved goodbye to Aroostook County on her way to Boston to attend the Harvard Kennedy School of International and Global Affairs and never looked back.

She also noticed the dark puffy rings around her one-time friend’s eyes: the past two days had seen lots of tears.

Once the Portland-based lawyer arrived, Peyton knew the show was over. She wanted just a little more time with Freddy. To get it, she’d have to pacify Sherry.

“Bruce, can you take this coffee to Mr. St. Pierre?”

Steele stood and did so.

“Sherry, it’s been a long time.”

“Yes, it has.”

“Too long,” Peyton said and smiled.

Sherry paused, caught off guard, and, judging from her expression, momentarily forgot her brother, instead recalling a past the two women shared.

“More than fifteen years,” Peyton said, thinking of when the girls were fourteen—and of the phone call during their freshman year that ended their friendship. She remembered, too, hearing Fred St. Pierre’s deep murmuring voice in the background as Sherry had spoken that night.

“You’re a professor now?”

“Yes,” Sherry said.

Peyton had known people who achieved excellence to prove something to a parent and guessed Sherry was one of them. The woman’s father had sure as hell given her motivation.

“Where’s my brother, Peyton?”

“In that conference room.” She pointed. “He’s under no duress. He and I were just talking. Could you and I chat for a couple minutes?”

“What has he told you?”

Peyton thought about the question. Sherry would soon have access to every detail of the interview Fred could remember.

“Your brother told me he has an alibi for the night Simon Pink was killed.”

“What is it?”

“Come with me,” Peyton said and started walking before Sherry could argue.

“The past eighteen hours have been absolutely unfathomable,” Sherry said. Peyton could smell Obsession perfume. “You have no idea what it’s like. I mean, first my parents, then my brother. No one knows what this feels like.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Peyton said.

But Sherry wasn’t listening. She muttered, “I didn’t sign on for this.”

They were in Mike Hewitt’s office, Hewitt having offered to “step outside for a few minutes” when he saw Sherry following Peyton. Peyton was in Hewitt’s high-backed leather chair; Sherry sat across the desk in the seat typically designated for visitors (or Peyton).

The situation wasn’t new. Peyton had listened to someone who sat on the wrong side of the table make a statement or ask a question posed to evoke an emotional response hundreds of times: Agent, you have kids? Know what it’s like to not be able to care for them? You’d drive a car with birth certificates over the border, too, lady, if you couldn’t feed your kids. Once, a man had told her he’d smuggled drugs, simply driven a car through a border crossing, to earn money to get his wife cancer treatments. She’d caught him, and he’d gone to prison. That one was tough. Darrel Shaley. Peyton couldn’t forget his name.

Each time someone posed a statement or question, she didn’t respond. It did no good to do so because she knew emotional appeals didn’t matter. Emotion had nothing to do with her job. She manned an international border and stopped contraband from entering or leaving. Period. But each time someone offered her the bait, she also remained silent for another reason: truth be told, she knew if life had dealt her a different hand, she couldn’t say for certain she wouldn’t be seated across the table, too.

Somehow this interview was different. Sherry’s voice was matter­-of-fact, not urging sympathy. And her eyes offered something else Peyton didn’t expect. The woman she hadn’t seen in close to two decades was reaching out to her; her eyes were desperate for someone to listen. So Peyton found herself returned to childhood, at the St. Pierre barn on a fall day, sunlight streaming through gaps between wall boards, slanting in, turning the hay golden, she and Sherry feeding horses apples. Then, years later in middle school, the horses gone, in Sherry’s room, listening to music, talking about boys and basketball, and laughing. She remembered Sherry’s laugh as if she’d heard it the day before. And, finally, the night during her freshman year, Peyton alone in the hallway outside the kitchen, Sherry’s shaky voice over the phone cracking and finally breaking.

“I mean it,” Sherry said. “Any idea what it’s like to learn that your father did that to your mother? I mean, how can that happen?”

Sherry was crying now. Not sobbing. Not head in hands. Just staring straight ahead, tears in rivulets down her cheeks.

“I’m terribly sorry for your loss,” Peyton said again. “I have fond memories of your parents.”

“Not of my father,” Sherry said. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

“I focus on the early years, Sherry. The times we had on that farm as kids. I have some wonderful memories of those days.”

“Those days all ended after my freshman year. You know that better than anyone.”

“Almost anyone,” Peyton corrected.

“Yeah,” Sherry said. “Not better than me.”

“I remember the night you called,” Peyton said. “I’ve thought about it for years.”

Sherry tilted her head. “Really?”

“Sure. We’d been friends since first grade. Then, with one phone conversation, it was over.”

“I couldn’t see you anymore. Couldn’t really see anyone. I had to call to tell you.” Sherry turned away to look out the window at the Crystal View River.

Peyton followed her eyes. “From here, the river looks black. Water’s cold.”

“I owe you an apology, Peyton. I cut you out of my life.”

“No.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Not you,” Peyton said. “I knew it wasn’t you. That’s why I never stopped reaching out.”

“You knew?”

Peyton nodded. “It took a while, but I figured it out. It wasn’t you.”

“You knew that?”

“Not immediately. But we all figured it out.”

Sherry took a deep breath. “It’s humiliating to hear that, even now. You all knew my father forced me to cut ties?”

“It’s been twenty years, Sherry. Let it go.”

But Sherry’s eyes widened, then narrowed, and her bottom lip quivered momentarily. And Peyton realized the weight of what she’d just said.

“I shouldn’t have said that, Sherry. It might not be easy to just ‘let it go.’ I don’t know what it was like for you.”

“To be alone, friendless, for four years of high school? Not too great. My father made me call you and say I couldn’t see you anymore. He was behind me as I spoke. He just thought …” But she didn’t finish.

Peyton leaned back in the leather chair, her hands folded calmly in her lap. “We all have to come to grips with our childhoods.”

“You never stopped reaching out to me—sitting by me at lunch, in the library during free periods, picking me for teams in gym class. And I never told you what was really going on.”

“It’s over, Sherry.”

“Four long years.” Sherry’s hand went absently to her earring.

Peyton noticed the large diamonds for the first time.

“My father had dreams for me. He thought I was wasting too much time. That was the farmer in him.” Sherry spoke in a low, quiet tone, the way many did, Peyton realized, when recalling the deceased. “Farmers always think they can work harder. In my father’s case, he passed that on to me. We call it transference in the social sciences. But it wasn’t passed on—not genetically and not as a learned behavior. Instead, he forced me to call you that night, to tell you I wouldn’t be—”

“Wasting time,” Peyton finished her sentence for her.

“That’s what I said that night, wasn’t it?”

Peyton nodded.

“But not wasting time,” Sherry said, “actually meant something else—coming home and studying four hours a night, having no weekends, no friends, no boyfriends.”

“Looks like it all worked out for you. You went to Harvard, and now you’re very successful.”

Sherry looked at her. Peyton watched as Sherry’s hands clasped the long sleeves of her cardigan, as if drying her palms.

“There are many definitions of successful,” Sherry said.

“I made my peace with it long ago,” Peyton said, “and I’m sure you did, too. Let’s talk about your brother and—and I know this is difficult—about your parents a little. Your father said something I need to ask you about before he …” She didn’t finish, but Sherry rubbed her palms on her thighs and nodded.

“He couldn’t have killed her,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Sherry, I need to ask you something about your parents’ final seconds.”

“Oh God. When you say it like that,” Sherry said, her hand flashing to her mouth.

Peyton thought the woman, who looked so confident, so self-directed, might wretch.

“I’m sorry,” Peyton said, “but I need to ask you this.”

“What is it? I can hear it. I probably need to.”

“One of the last things your father said was, ‘I hope she can forgive me.’” Peyton looked at Sherry, who pursed her lips, brows creased in deep contemplation. Then she shook her head abruptly.

“No idea,” Sherry said. “Who will forgive him? My mother?”

“I don’t think so,” Peyton said.

“Was it you, Peyton? He wanted you to forgive them because he dragged you into their abusive relationship?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t think so. Do you have any other theories?”

“None,” Sherry said, her voice suddenly serious. “Now, tell me what my brother is charged with.”