AUGUST 20, 1972
“We’ve got the perp in custody.”
“Hmm?” The Millers Kill chief of police was so intent on the body sprawled in the road, he didn’t quite hear his sergeant. He had been awake—barely—when the phone rang with the news from the dispatcher. He had taken just enough time to shim into his uniform before climbing into his Fairlane and barreling up the hills into Cossayuharie, praying the whole time that this was different. A hit-and-run, or a gunshot victim. Route 137, not McEachron Hill Road. His prayers had gone unanswered.
He squatted next to the pretty girl in her lacy white minidress. Long, dark hair in a braid as thick as a rope. No shoes. No pantyhose and no bag. He could see one side of her face; her lips, pale in death, made even paler by her frosted lipstick. It changed, women’s makeup. You wouldn’t think that, since faces didn’t change. Two eyes, one nose, a mouth. Nowadays, it was all blue eye shadow and lipstick like this. The other woman had worn a deep red. Someone had told him it was called Cherries in the Snow. He couldn’t remember if he had paid his phone bill this week or not, but he remembered that.
He stood abruptly, stepping out of the way of the coroner and his assistant. “Okay. Turn her over.” He wanted to see a gunshot wound. The marks of a car grille. A slit throat. Anything except more of the lacy dress and pale skin, untouched and inexplicable. Control yourself, he thought. Control yourself, control the situation.
They maneuvered the body onto a stretcher. No necklace on this one; instead, a pair of plastic hoop earrings. One set of false eyelashes had slipped, and lay half across her cheek. Other than that, there were no signs of anything amiss.
“Huh.” The coroner frowned. “If that don’t beat all. You ever seen anything like this?”
“Yes,” Jack Liddle said. “I have.”
“Chief,” his sergeant said again. “We’ve got the perp in custody. Some drifter on a motorcycle banged on the MacLarens’ door before daybreak asking to use the phone. Claimed he found her here.” The sergeant lowered his voice. “Vietnam soldier. Probably high. You know what those boys come back like. Stone killers.”
Jack sighed. “Any other reason to suspect him? Other than the fact he’s a soldier?”
“MacLaren held him on the porch with his shotgun while his missus called us. This guy pulled out a knife the size of your arm and threatened to gut MacLaren with it.”
“That may be, but he didn’t use it on this girl.” At the expression on his sergeant’s face Jack held up a hand. “Okay. I’ll talk to him.” He looked up at the circus that had assembled itself up and down the sides of McEachron Hill Road. The ambulance and the meat wagon and police prowlers and, oh joy, a Karmann Ghia he recognized as belonging to a reporter for the Post-Star. “Is he in a car?”
“Davidson took him down to the station house. We got the impound truck coming for his bike.”
“Okay. I want the men walking quarter turns across these fields looking for evidence. Tire tracks, footprints, anything that doesn’t belong.”
His sergeant looked at him as if he were crazy. “For a hit-and-run?”
Jack swung back to the coroner. “Does this look like a hit-and-run to you?”
The coroner didn’t glance up from where he was bending over the body. “Doesn’t look like anything to me. Which makes me think maybe an overdose.” He ran his hand up her arm, bunching the lacy sleeve and revealing more blue-white skin. “No needle tracks. Huh.”
“She might have been shooting up between her toes or near her groin if she wanted to keep it hidden,” Jack said.
The coroner looked up at him. “Don’t worry. The pathologist’ll give her a good going-over once she’s on the table.”
The sergeant snickered. Jack turned to him. “Did you find any paraphernalia on the soldier? Or on the bike?”
“No, but—”
“So we’re looking for evidence. Get them out in those fields and I don’t want to find anyone’s doing a half-assed job of it. Finding the perp is only half the case. Finding—”
“Finding the evidence for the prosecutor is the other half. You got it, Chief.”
Jack considered stopping at his house for a shave on his way to the station, but weighing a scratchy face against getting a cup while the first pot of coffee of the day was still fresh decided him on the latter. He barely managed the cup of joe—he had to call out his request to the dispatcher while Davidson, who had more enthusiasm than brains, herded him to the interrogation room. “We got that knife off him, Chief.” Davidson handed him a manila folder with his preliminary notes and the tape recorder. “No track marks on his arm, but he’s definitely on something.”
The something was Old Grand-Dad, by the smell that greeted Jack when he entered the room. The kid was folded over the table, head buried in his arms. He was wearing a wrinkled olive drab army jacket over blue jeans so new they still had fold marks in them. Army boots on his feet. Not just another ’Nam vet, then. This boy looked to be straight off the plane from Saigon, or wherever they flew them from these days.
Jack laid the manila case folder and the tape recorder on the table. “You’re in a spot of trouble, son. Why don’t you tell me what happened up there in Cossayuharie.”
The soldier lifted his head. Sandy hair growing out of a military cut, bleary blue eyes. A bruise starting to purple up on his temple.
Holy Mary, Mother of God. It was Margy Van Alstyne’s boy.