AUGUST 1972
He planned to swing by the station, get the necessary information, and take off again, so Jack was unpleasantly surprised to find Russell Van Alstyne waiting for him in his office. Margy had made it very clear she didn’t want him talking to her boy without a lawyer, and he didn’t want to get any further onto her bad side.
“What are you doing here?”
The boy scowled at him. “You said I should tell you if I remembered anything else.”
Today, he was wearing fatigues and a MKHS T-shirt. Still in army boots. Was the boy deliberately trying to be provocative? Surely, some of his civvies must still fit him. Jack rubbed his forehead. “You didn’t have to—you could have just called, Russell.”
Russell surged to his feet. “I didn’t know! I thought I was supposed to report in person!”
It wasn’t lost on Jack that the kid’s temper fired faster than a moon rocket on a short countdown. He may not have killed the Jane Doe in Dr. Roberts’s care, but he was headed for some serious trouble if he didn’t learn to control himself. Jack gestured him back to his seat. “What was it you remembered?”
“The name of the girl I talked to. At the Paddock. She was Cyndi Bradford.”
“This is the one who shot you down?”
Russell looked at his boots. “Yeah.”
“And you’re sure about her name.”
“Yeah. I was lying in bed and all of a sudden it popped into my head.”
“Okay. Stay here.” Jack half-closed his office door and strode into the bull pen. No one from the investigating team was in, of course, so he grabbed Andy Carruthers, on his way out for traffic patrol, and sent him off to connect “Cyndi Bradford” to an address and phone number. Then he hustled to the dispatch board, where he found Harlene poring over a ten-code list as long as her arm.
“Harlene, I need an all-call for our guys. I know someone mentioned a hippie commune somewhere around here, and I want to know where it is.”
“Um.” Harlene looked up from her switchboard. “I know that.”
Jack’s eyebrows shot up. He made a go on gesture.
“I heard Sergeant Gifford talking about them. They’re part of the back-to-nature movement—you know, chop your own firewood, can your home-grown produce, that sort of thing.”
“That’s a movement? Half the farmers around here do that.”
“Well, the commune also has a no-private-property rule and free love.” Harlene’s voice went down on the last phrase, as if just speaking the words might conjure a writhing mass of undressed hippies. “Or so Sergeant Gifford said. I don’t know personally.”
“Where are they?”
“Cossayuharie, at the old Stevenson farm. I guess they’re going to try to bring the orchard back.”
He pictured the house and barn, left mouldering since Roscoe Stevenson died with no descendants willing to work the land. It was a straight shot from that property, across Route 17, and then onto McEachron Hill Road. Far enough away in miles that his men hadn’t gotten to it in the first round of knock-and-ask, but less than a ten-minute drive by car. Or motorcycle.
“Okay. I’m headed out there.”
“Are you all done with the Van Alstyne boy?”
“Yeah, he can—” The thought stopped him. Margy wasn’t going to want him to interview her boy. He’d bet she didn’t even know Russell was here right now. He turned it over in his head for a second. If he took the boy along, he’d have a chance to talk with him. More importantly, he’d have a chance to see how Russell reacted, if the hippies knew their dead girl’s name. “I’m going to take him with me.”
“This is stupid.” Russell was slumped down in the passenger seat, his knees hitting the glove box and his chin tucked into his chest. Jack figured he was hoping none of the shoppers along Main Street would recognize him riding shotgun in a squad car.
“The folks out at the commune are going to be your age. I’d like your impression of them.” That was true, as far as it went.
“You really think I’ve got anything in common with a bunch of hippies?” Russell ran his hand over his bottle-brush hair. “Besides, I’ve got stuff to do.”
“Like what?”
There was a long pause. Finally he said, “My mother wants me to help paint the new house.”
“That’s good. That’ll be less work she has to do.” Jack slowed to a stop for the red light on Route 17. “Free her up to cook for you, do your laundry…”
“What do you want? I’ve only been out for a couple weeks!”
“Fair enough.” The light turned, and Jack took the right toward Cossayuharie. “But you ought to have some plans. Are you going to start looking for a job?”
“Yeah. I guess. I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s definitive.”
Russell jerked upright. “What the hell kind of job am I supposed to get? Go back to bagging groceries? You know what my skills are? I can strip and reassemble an M-14 rifle in the dark. I can dig a foxhole and plot my location on a map. I can slap a bandage over a man with a gaping hole in his gut and toss flare canisters in the hopes that maybe there’s a chopper near enough to evac him before he bleeds out. I can hump through a rain forest in ninety-degree weather carrying sixty pounds on my back. And I can kill people. Tell me what sort of job that’s going to get me in Millers Kill.”
Jack found himself noticing the granite plinths on Veterans’ Bridge as they crossed over the river. “Have you ever thought about law enforcement?”
Russell looked at him as if he’d suggested cannibalism. “Be a cop?” He shifted his focus to the radio and baton rack by his thigh. “No.”
“Why not? You’re bright, inquisitive, you notice things”—at least that described the boy he had been before he left for Vietnam—“I assume you can keep your cool in a tense situation.”
Russell huffed a laugh. “Yeah. That’s one way to put it.”
Jack pressed the accelerator as the car began to climb the first of the rolling Cossayuharie hills that would eventually top out at the colonial-era Muster Field. “We’ve got a Jane Doe. In all likelihood, we won’t be able to break the case if we can’t figure out her identity. How would you go about finding who she was?”
“How would I know?”
“Give it a shot.” Jack kept his voice light. Casual.
“Unh … fingerprints? Or, um, a missing person report?”
“Already tried those. No dice.”
“Then I’d take her picture around to bars and discotheques and schools and places like that. See if anyone recognized her.”
“Good. What else? Remember, we only know what was on her when you found her.”
“Maybe … where her dress came from? Or…” He turned to face Jack for the first time. “Was there anything unique about her, herself? A birthmark or something?” He looked at his own hand. “Like, I have calluses on these two fingers, from the M-14. So even if I couldn’t tell you, you’d know I’d been a soldier.”
Jack repressed a satisfied smile. “Why not an avid hunter?”
“Hunting season’s been over too long. Any calluses I’d have built up would be gone by now.”
“Good thinking.” Jack turned off Route 17. The road to the old Stevenson place wound through fields sliced with rivulets and pinned down by granite boulders. They topped a rise and were greeted by row upon row of apple trees, twisted with growth left too long unattended, crowded with saplings and thornbushes and grass gone to seed. As they neared the farm, a good quarter mile downslope, Jack could see signs of industry: branches pruned, junk plants uprooted, grass mown.
He had expected a VW van or a repurposed school bus in the dooryard—cliché, really—but instead he parked next to an aging European car he couldn’t ID and a ’52 Chevy pickup that looked to have been used for hauling manure not too far in the past. The large barn doors were rolled back; inside Jack could see a spreader and a disc harrow, as ancient as the truck outside.
“What are we doing here?”
“Listen and learn.” Jack opened his door and stepped out into the sunshine. “Hello! Anyone home?”