AUGUST 1972
Jack Liddle stared at the boy sitting in his interrogation room. “Russell?”
“The prodigal returns.” Fatigue, yes, and also anger in the boy’s voice, and barely leashed violence. He smelled of liquor, but whatever he had drunk the night before had burned off him. He dropped his head back onto his arms, as if the weight of all it carried was too much to bear.
Jack stopped himself from saying the first thing that came to his mind, and the second, and the third. Just because he knew this boy, had known him since birth, didn’t mean he wasn’t involved in the young woman’s death. The fact she had been dumped on McEachron Hill Road, the missing shoes and stockings—he couldn’t let himself get caught up in the similarities between this death and the one he had been witness to so many years ago. He knew damn well Russell couldn’t have been responsible for that debacle. He also knew Russell had been a good-natured kid. But he had been a hell-raiser, no doubt about it, and God alone knew what two tours of combat duty in Vietnam had done to him.
So. He was going to approach this very carefully. Jack pulled out the chair opposite the boy and sat. “It’s good to see you again, son.”
“Oh, yeah.” Russell didn’t bother lifting his head this time. “It’s like having a parade. Except I was handcuffed in the back of a cop car instead of waving to the crowd.”
“Well, it’s a hell of a welcome home for you, that’s a fact. I’ll tell you what. We’ll get some coffee in here, and you tell me how you came to be banging on the MacLarens’ door.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with that girl. I just found her. I didn’t do anything to her.”
“Okay. Tell me how you found her.”
There was a rap on the door. “C’mon in,” Jack said.
The dispatcher entered, balancing a tray with two mugs, a bowl of sugar, and some packets of creamer. Two large doughnuts sat on two white napkins. “I thought you both might like some.” She smiled nervously.
“Thanks, Harlene.” Jack refrained from pointing out they didn’t, as a rule, treat suspects in the interrogation room as guests. Harlene was new—the first woman ever at the MKPD—and she was desperately anxious to prove her worth. Most of the officers openly speculated she’d leave as soon as she fell pregnant, and Jack wasn’t sure they were wrong.
Harlene closed the door behind her. Jack tore open a creamer and watched as Russell spooned sugar into his mug. He let the boy take a few swallows before continuing. “Okay. So you met up with the girl…”
“I didn’t meet up with her.” Russ set his mug down. “I was coming home from Saratoga when I found her lying there in the middle of the road.”
“What were you doing in Saratoga?”
The boy looked at him incredulously. “Drinking. Trying to meet chicks.”
“All night?”
The boy shrugged.
“How long have you been home?”
“Three days.”
“Pretty quick work. Saratoga can be a rough town.”
Russell’s eyes went flat and dead. “Really? Thanks for the warning.”
Jack shook his head. “I’m sorry. That was a damn fool thing to say to a soldier, wasn’t it? Where did you go in Saratoga?”
“Bennie’s. The Paddock. The Flying Dutchman.”
“That’s up by the college.”
“I told you, I was trying to meet girls. I struck out.” He paused. “I left the Dutchman and headed for the Golden Banana.”
Jack raised his eyebrows at the mention of the notorious strip club. “Decided to try for a different kind of girl, did you? Did anything happen at the place by Skidmore?”
Russell scrubbed at his face. “I got into a fight with some rich asshole who thought the war was my fault.” He flashed a wolfish grin. “I flattened him. They threw me out.”
“Did you pull a knife on him, too?”
“Hey, that farmer had a 12-gauge pointed straight at my gut! I was just defending myself. He’s lucky I didn’t take the gun away from him and break it over his head.”
Jack took a drink of his coffee. “Is that what you wanted to do to Mr. MacLaren?”
“I was trying to do the right thing. Jesus. Look. I’ll plead guilty to hauling my knife out if you want. Resisting arrest, punching that jerk in Saratoga, whatever. I don’t care. I did those. But I didn’t have anything to do with that girl in the road, and I wish to hell I’d’a just swerved my bike around her and kept going.”
“Tell me about finding her.”
“I was swinging down from Route 137. It was just getting light in the sky. I spotted something in the road—I thought maybe it was garbage fallen off a truck. I went wide to avoid it. Her. It was as I was passing I realized it was a body.” He paused for a moment. “I wasn’t sure I was really seeing it, you know? I thought maybe…”
“Did you touch her?”
“Of course I did. I turned her over to check if she was breathing.”
“What did she feel like? Was she warm? Cold?”
Russell thought for a moment. “Cool. Like the way your skin is after swimming. I’d guess she’d been dead a couple hours by then.”
Jack just managed to stop himself from asking how Russell would know that. The boy might have dealt with more dead bodies than he had at this point. “Did you see anyone else on the road? Any other vehicles?”
“No. There wasn’t any other traffic after I turned off Route 9.”
Some of the tension he’d been holding in his shoulders eased. Nobody under suspicion would pass up the chance to point to a vehicle or two to throw the scent off himself. Unless he was stupid, and Jack was confident that, whatever other changes Vietnam had wrought in Russell, he was still smart as a whip.
There was a quick rap, but before Jack could say anything, the door burst open. Harlene looked frazzled. It was only eight thirty, and she had already chewed the lipstick off her bottom lip. “Chief, Mrs. Van Alstyne is here. She’s demanding to see her son.” Her voice dropped, as if Russell couldn’t hear her if she whispered. “One of the men at the impound garage is her cousin, and he called her. I didn’t know what to do.”
The boy stood.
“Sit down, Russell. You’re not going anywhere yet.” Jack stood up. “I’ll talk with Mrs. Van Alstyne.”
She was waiting for him at the front desk. “Where is he? What has he done? Is he hurt?” Her dark hair was in loose, unruly curls and she was wearing jeans and a wrinkled shirt that did nothing to hide her figure. Her narrow feet were thrust into unlaced tennis shoes.
“Come into my office, Margy.” He ushered her down the hall, not actually touching her back. “Russell’s okay. I’m not sure what he’s done, but I don’t think he’s hurt anybody.” He spoke with more certainty than he felt. Seeing Margy, he realized he didn’t want her son to be guilty. Which was a hell of a dangerous mind-set to take into an investigation.
“You don’t think—?” She turned back to him. She clutched at his arm, hard, then let go instantly.
Jack closed the door behind them. “A young woman’s died. He claims he found her body on the road when he was coming home early this morning.”
Margy stared. “You can’t imagine Russell had anything to do with that.”
“He says he was out all night roistering in Saratoga. We’ll have to check out the places he’s said he’d been to to firm up his alibi.”
Margy looked up at him. “He was drinking.”
Jack nodded. “He was drinking.”
Margy had the clear, fair skin of the Cossayuharie farm girl she had been, the kind of complexion that showed her every emotion. He watched as her cheeks flushed with a dull red color. “Goddamn it!”
He blinked. Margy Van Alstyne never swore.
“I’m sorry.” She pressed her hands against her cheeks.
“I know you worry about him and alcohol.”
“Apparently, I have good cause.” She let out a brief laugh tinged with hysteria. He moved toward her, but she held up one hand. “It’s all right. I’m all right.” She hugged her arms around herself. “It’s just—I thought everything would be okay again once he came home. But he’s not really home. I mean, he’s there, at the table or in front of the television or in his room. But the rest of him is somewhere else. He has no idea what to do with his life now he’s out of the army. And he certainly doesn’t want to listen to me. I’m a middle-aged mother who’s lived in the North Country her whole life, and he’s spent the last two years shooting people in Southeast Asia. We have nothing in common anymore.”
“Really.” Jack leaned against his desk. “Seems to me you know all about fighting a war you can’t win.”
Her cupid’s-bow mouth curved into a sad smile. “You’d think watching his father drink himself to death would have taught him something, wouldn’t you?”
“Some things can’t be taught. You just have to learn them through experience.” Jack pushed himself away from the desk. “I need to go over his account of events some more. How about I call you in an hour or so and then I’ll release him to your custody.”
“How about I call a lawyer and he doesn’t answer any more questions until he’s got some legal advice?”
Now she sounded more like the tart apple he was used to. “He hasn’t asked for representation yet. And he’s an adult now.”
“We’ll see about that. I’m not going to let the system roll over my son.” She glanced at his desk. “May I use your phone?”
Jack couldn’t help himself. He laughed. “Help yourself. When you’re done, you can wait for your attorney at the front desk.”
“You’re going back to interrogate him, aren’t you?”
“Margy.” He put his hands on her shoulders, squaring her, squaring himself to her. “I’ve got a job to do. But you can absolutely rely on me to deal fairly with your boy. If he honestly had nothing to do with the girl’s death, he’ll be fine.”
Her brown eyes brightened with tears. “But what if he did?”
He thought about the girl, about her fancy dress and her shoeless feet and the sprawl of her limbs in the road. He thought about this time. He thought about the last time. “I don’t know, Margy. I don’t know.”