Paula texted me back when I was standing in the bushes on the corner of a property across the street from Rod Wilkerson’s house. I had the phone on vibrate so there was no loud sound, but I still started a little violently at the shock of the sudden movement and the slight buzzing. Not that I thought anyone could hear it from across the street.
Duffy, Ben, and I had split up the three Poughkeepsie contacts we had for a kind of stakeout. It had been—of course—Duffy’s idea.
“After all the activity of the day and the obvious pains someone is taking to cover up the death of Michelle Testaverde, it is not an enormous leap to suspect one or more of these people could be involved in the crime,” he’d begun in the parking lot of the barbecue place we’d left hastily. “There are three people in town whom we know had some contact with the victims in these murders, and each of them has behaved suspiciously in some way when we questioned them. It might also have been worthwhile to watch Barry Spader and Sgt. Dougherty, but Barry is in Virginia, and the sergeant is working the night shift at the police station. That makes the surveillance simpler since there are three of us and three of them.”
Simpler. The man thought that was simpler.
It led to us splitting up nonetheless. Duffy and Ben were trailing Walt and Louise, respectively. That was largely due to the fact that those two Poughkeepsie residents lived within two blocks of each other while Rod lived on the other side of town, and that meant the person with the car (that’s me) would be better utilized at his house. I wasn’t crazy about Ben watching Louise in her house at night, but I do admit to some sense of payback that Walt was under surveillance when he didn’t know it. Karma is a crime fiction writer.
I don’t know about the two guys, but I was standing in the bushes as the temperature started to drop just a little and wondering what I was doing there. For one thing, I really had no sense of what it was I should be looking for. The shades were drawn in all of Rod’s windows, and there were lights in both front rooms. Contrary to the 1950s song, there were no silhouettes on the shades.
I was watching a house. They don’t tend to do much.
So when Paula texted, alarming though it was for a moment, I felt a little bit of relief from the tedium. Watching a house is not all that dissimilar to watching grass grow, except that the grass is actually doing something, so if you are crazy enough to watch for days, you’ll see a difference. Houses will deteriorate on their own, but it’ll take years.
I got my phone out of my pocket as it buzzed and looked at the message, which read, No huge withdrawals but am on to something and will get back to you. Paula is an information tease. If she said she was looking into something and implying it might get interesting, you (or at least I) could count on significant data coming soon. It gave me a ray of light to hope for while the sun went down over Rod Wilkerson’s house.
Rod had a driveway with a four-year-old Honda Accord in it. It seemed odd because he made at least part of his living selling real estate, and realtors tend to have larger cars, SUVs, and the like to accommodate people shopping for houses more comfortably. Maybe Rod was a bad real estate agent. Somebody had to be.
Ben, Duffy, and I had established a text group before we’d split up so we could all communicate easily. Duffy had objected to the idea of our breaking radio silence, but Ben said we needed to be alerted immediately when something happened at any of the locations under watch, and Duffy, even in this unofficial investigation, deferred to Ben.
Rod’s house sat there. It’s what houses do.
Then my worst nightmare came true.
A woman walked out of the house on the corner, the one whose shrubbery was serving as my cover, and looked over in my direction. “What are you doing there?” she called fairly loudly. “Who are you?”
I remember when people would see a stranger nearby and ask if there was anything they could do to help. Those days are gone. It’s possible I was imagining them.
“I’m not doing anything,” I said in a stage whisper. “I’m just standing here.”
“Is this drugs?” the woman bleated. “Are you buying drugs?”
“No, ma’am. There’s no one else here. I’m just standing outside on a nice night.” I looked over at Rod’s house. It was maintaining its insistence on embodying the opposite of activity. For once I was grateful for that.
“Well, stand outside somewhere else!” she shouted. “This is private property! Get out of here, or I’ll call the police!”
Thanks, lady.
I gave up my position just to get the volume level on the street to subside. I didn’t see any neighbors looking through windows or opening doors, which was helpful. I just nodded at the woman and walked off her property and toward my car, which I’d parked a block away. Normally, I would have surveilled Rod’s house from the Prius c, but his street allowed parking only on the side on which his house stood, and it was parked up. Putting my car in his driveway seemed just a little obvious for the task at hand.
The woman watched me as I walked away, then shook her head with derision and stomped back into her house.
I didn’t go all the way back to the car, though. I figured if Rod’s house was just going to sit there, I didn’t necessarily need a prime vantage point. There were trees on the street that might obstruct my view from certain angles, but if I leaned next to one of the trees on my side of the street, Rod would only see me if he knew he was being watched. And if he knew that, my effort had already failed.
The phone buzzed again, and I looked at it. The text was from Ben. Louise staying in the house but moving around a lot. Movement in the house. I wondered what that looked like.
I texted back, Rod’s house is a house. I figured that was an evocative summation of my experience so far. I didn’t get into the whole writing biz for nothing, you know.
Duffy texted nothing, undoubtedly to prove to us that he was disciplined and we were not. For a guy who based his life on fact and deduction, he could be as petty as a twelve-year-old girl when he felt like it.
So Ben pushed his buttons and texted, Duffy check in.
Seconds later came, Roger. I’m sure Duffy would have preferred something even more terse, like Rog, but he went with convention and acknowledged Ben’s request. Lord, the man could be a pain sometimes. I wondered why I’d created him in the first place.
Then one of the lights went out in Rod’s bedroom, or at least the front room on the second floor. I walked a couple of trees closer. I checked my phone for another text from Duffy, but nothing more came in. I texted back: Anything happening?
There was no answer. I tried to do the right thing and just wait, assuming Duffy was in the middle of something and didn’t want his phone to make a noise right now. I waited for much longer than I wanted to, which was probably about five minutes. Then I waited a little bit more, but each minute felt like an hour.
Nothing happened. Then everything happened at once.
My phone buzzed with a new text from Ben: Louise on the move. Getting in her car. Heading south.
And then I heard a gunshot reverberate through Rod’s house.
I hadn’t seen a flash of light, but I had been looking down at my phone and not at the house when the shot rang out. I texted to the group: Shots fired at Rod’s house. Technically, it had been one shot, but you never hear cops say that in the movies: “Shot fired!” It didn’t have the same dramatic oomph that way.
When my phone buzzed after that, it was a call, not a text, from Ben. “Gunshots?” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. It was actually one gunshot. I’m across the street. I just heard it; I didn’t see it. I can get closer.”
“No!” Ben sounded like he wanted to jump through the phone. “Don’t go near the house. Do you hear anything else? People yelling? More shots? Anything like that?”
“No, outside of that, it’s been quiet,” I said. That sounded stupid. “A couple of people have stuck their heads out of their front doors to look, but they don’t seem especially worried. Maybe Rod takes target practice in his house every night.”
“Call the PDP,” Ben said. “Report the shots. I’m going to head that way right now.”
It took me a moment, I’ll confess, to realize the PDP was the Poughkeepsie Police Department. I write for a living; don’t judge. “You’re on foot,” I told Ben, although I could be relatively sure he knew he wasn’t in a motor vehicle at the moment. “It’ll take you a while.”
“Well, I can’t do much good here,” he answered. “Louise took off in her car, and I don’t run that fast. Now call the cops and wait for me. Don’t move, Rachel.” And he hung up before I could argue, which was just as well because I had no intention of contesting his point. I did wish he’d said it in a slightly less condescending let-the-men-handle-it-little-lady way, but you can’t have everything. He was right that I should stay there and call the police. I could have suggested he get an Uber, but he’d probably think of that anyway.
I was about to dial the cops when I realized Duffy had not responded to my text about the gunshot. That was very odd; it was the kind of thing Duffy would usually leap at. He loved solving crimes, and there was little doubt he’d find the idea of a discharged firearm in the home of one of our suspects irresistible.
And yet he’d resisted. My stomach clenched a little, and I noticed the damp chill in the air all of a sudden. I didn’t like it.
If there was nothing wrong, Duffy would be annoyed with me for calling, I mused. But we’d been texting, and that didn’t seem to bother him too much. I decided to try that again and sent: Duffy? Respond please.
A minute went by. Two. I know because I kept checking my watch, and it was moving much slower than usual, it seemed. Time passed, and no reply from Duffy.
That guy was going to drive me crazy. Maybe I already was crazy, and everything that had happened to me since he called my house the first time was a hallucination. There was something strangely comforting in the thought.
I called his cell phone and got sent directly to voice mail. That wasn’t good. It was very, very not good.
Maybe I should call Ben. I texted him: Duffy’s not answering.
No immediate answer from Ben. What was I supposed to be doing? Right. Calling the cops.
But it was weird that there had been one gunshot and then nothing. You’d—or at least I’d—expect other noises from the place. I definitely wasn’t going into Rod’s house, but I could certainly get closer. Just to hear.
I had taken exactly two steps when the phone buzzed. Ben: Probably turned off his phone. That was sensible. Ben was on his way. I’d just cross the street to see if there was anything else to hear and report back to him when he got here. And I’d call the cops as soon as I knew if there were moans or other scary sounds.
This was not something I’d refrain from having a character do; I was not taking an unnecessary chance. I could see the house, so I’d know if anyone came out. I wouldn’t get close, not even inside the front walk. I’d learned my lesson about venturing where I shouldn’t.
See, I have this policy about not looking for trouble. Even when I was trying to help Ben and Duffy catch a serial killer, I did my very best to avoid danger. The fact that it ended up with me coming very close to being the killer’s next victim was irrelevant. In that argument. Clearly, I would have preferred not to have been in that situation.
Maybe that wasn’t a good example.
Anyway, I approached the house very carefully and slowly. I had my phone up next to my ear despite not actually being on a call. Years of spending evenings in New York City had taught me how to be a less attractive target for people who might be looking for targets. I didn’t say anything into the phone, but I did nod now and again to give the impression I was listening to someone.
I thought about calling my father, but the explanation alone would have lasted until after Ben got to me. It might have lasted until the sun came back up the next morning.
Nothing seemed to be going on in the house. There was no sound coming from the windows, and the front ones were open. There was no visible movement. Lights stayed on where they were on and off where they were off. It was almost like nobody was home, but I’d heard the gunshot. Unless it was part of a suicide attempt on Rod’s part, there had to be someone inside, and alive.
The cops. Right. I wasn’t going inside, so I wasn’t going to learn anything else. It was time to summon the people whose job it was to figure this stuff out, or at least to haul the body away.
Crime writers. We’re like everyone else, only we constantly think there’s a dead body, or should be, in every location.
Just to cover myself for the unseen, nonexistent audience I was imagining, I said, “Okay, talk to you later,” into my phone and then brought it down away from my ear. I pulled up the keypad and had punched the “9” of “9-1-1” when I heard a sound behind me.
I wasn’t sure what it was, but when I started to turn my head, I heard a voice I only vaguely recognized say, “Don’t turn around.”
That’s never good.
But that was no reason to think things couldn’t get worse. Not a moment later, I felt a pressure in the left side of my lower back, the side away from the street, where it was less likely to be seen by any neighbor still curious enough to be watching through the front door or the living room window. A hard, round pressure right around the location of my kidney.
The barrel of a pistol.