There’d been too much coming and going at the Fitzgerald house the day before to suit Mars, but when he turned down Cornelia Drive on Sunday morning around ten o’clock it was clear the traffic problem had gotten worse.
He was nearly a block away when he noticed that cars were parked solid on both sides of the street. Pulling up in front of the Fitzgeralds’, he saw a cluster of high school girls standing on the lawn, eyes and noses red from crying. They hugged and cried more. Phil Keck was standing on the front steps, talking earnestly to a couple who looked like they were on their way to or from church. Another pair pushed their way out the front door, giving Keck a pat and a handshake as they left.
Mars double-parked, locking in a bright orange Saab convertible. He walked across the grass, royally pissed not only that Keck had allowed the house to turn into Grand Central Station, but that Keck seemed to view his role as social director. Keck should have been back at the station, working the investigation.
Mars was close enough to smell Keck’s aftershave lotion before Keck noticed him.
“Mars! We need to talk. I’ve been waiting for your call. Come on over and meet …”
Mars nodded at the couple but kept walking, pulling Keck into the front hallway. A woman approached, dipping down to smooth her hair in front of a wall mirror. The kitchen was to the immediate left of the front hall. Mars could see a group of women standing in front of an open refrigerator. They were rearranging the contents of the refrigerator to accommodate a tableful of foil-covered dishes.
Mars said, “You’ve got to clear the house. All I want around is the Fitzgerald family and, if she’s here, the Prince girl.”
“Whoaaa …” Keck held up both hands. “This isn’t some crack house in the inner city, Special Detective. Folks out here expect to be treated with courtesy, even when—I should say especially when—a family member has been murdered. If the Fitzgeralds want to be alone, we’ll have the house cleared. But last I heard, this was their house, and I’m not about to tell them who can and can’t be here.”
Mars said, “Let’s take a trip to the garage.”
Looking confused, Keck followed Mars through the kitchen into the attached garage. They found three teenagers smoking.
“Excuse me,” Mars said. “Chief Keck and I need you back in the house just now.”
The girl spoke. “We can’t smoke in the house.”
“So put your cigarettes out. I need you gone. Now.”
The girl twisted her mouth in an expression of resentment and brushed by Mars, knocking him slightly as she passed. The two guys were grinning and indifferent. Better zip codes, Mars thought, don’t make better teenagers.
He turned to Keck.
“You’re not getting it, Phil. This isn’t an awkward social situation where you get points for good manners. We’ve got one of your kids dead on my ground. So Minneapolis PD is
on the hook. If people are offended by what we have to do to get a handle on this case, I can’t help that. But I can tell you this. You’d better brace yourself. I’ve never seen a murder investigation where the family didn’t find out more about the victim than they wanted to know. And I damn well don’t want to spend the rest of the investigation butting into you because you’re worried someone’s going to feel bad. It comes with the territory. Somebody’s been murdered, and everybody’s going to feel bad. Now, you can go back in the house and clear it out, or I’ll do it. What’s it gonna be?”
Keck had turned away from Mars. In profile, his face was tight with the tension of indignation and uncertainty. He stubbed the cement floor with a highly polished tassled loafer once or twice before answering. “You say you want our support. I haven’t heard anything since you left here yesterday. I’ve got the family and half the population of Edina banging on my door and I don’t know anything more than they know. I’ve got the management of Southdale breathing down my neck wanting to straighten out their involvement. You want our cooperation, it’s got to be a two-way street.”
Mars grimaced inwardly. Keck had a point. Mars finessed. “I’d like to sit down with you and the family. Talk about what we know so far. I can’t do that with a house full of people. Let’s get this situation under control.” Then, pausing, “I apologize for not getting back to you yesterday. Fact is, I didn’t know much of anything until early this morning, after I met with the ME. One thing: I’m gonna want your investigators to follow up on people Mary Pat partied with, people she spent time with when she was going to tie one on.”
“I don’t need to talk to my investigators about that. I can tell you here and now that Mary Pat Fitzgerald didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs, didn’t smoke. That’s a given.”
“And I can tell you that it’s a given that Mary Pat had a
blood alcohol of point two one at the time of death, with enough gin still in her stomach to kill her if she hadn’t died first from a puncture wound to the aorta.”
Phil Keck stared at him. “That’s not possible. Not Mary Pat. She fucking hated drinking.” Keck looked back toward the house; Mars knew he was thinking about Mother Fitz. “If Mary Pat had a blood alcohol of point two one, someone was forcing her to drink. She wouldn’t have done it on her own.”
“It’s like I said, Phil. Every murder investigation, you find out things you’d rather not know. You and the family are going to have to remember everything you know about Mary Pat down to the smallest detail. And you’re going to have to be open to the possibility that there was a side of Mary Pat you didn’t know. That’s what’s needed if we’re going to figure out what happened. Okay?”
Keck looked subdued. “Let’s go back in,” he said. “I’ll talk to Doc about having people leave. I think it’ll go better if he asks, rather than having me order people around.”
And easier on your image, Mars thought. He followed Keck back through the kitchen into the living room. Within fifteen minutes the crowd had cleared, and Mars sat with Keck, Doc, and Mrs. Fitzgerald in the living room. Becky Prince, they said, had been over first thing that morning, but had left to pick up Robert Fitzgerald, Jr., at the airport. They were expected momentarily.
The Fitzgeralds were existing in the high-oxygen interlude that follows tragedy, when normal activities and responsibilities become irrelevant. Mother Fitz’s reactions were hard to gauge behind the dark glasses. Doc’s face looked strained, but he continued to play the role of gracious host.
Mars was gentle, choosing his words carefully. He spoke of a quick death, assuring them that Mary Pat had not been mutiliated or sexually assaulted. And then, in a quiet voice, “I think you should know that Mary Pat’s blood alcohol level
was high. Can you think of anything that might have upset her, that might have caused her to drink more than she usually would?”
Mother Fitz’s cup stopped midway in the air. Doc’s face froze in an expression of disbelief. “Blood alcohol level? Mary Pat? This just isn’t possible. Mary Pat wasn’t a drinker. Wouldn’t even go out with anyone who drank. If she went to a party where the drinking got out of hand, she’d come home early. When she was a sophomore, she broke up with a boy she liked because she thought he drank too much. You remember, Mother … that Kerry boy, Don and Elise Kerry’s oldest boy—”
Mars interrupted. “I know from what everyone’s said that it wasn’t typical behavior. But the simple fact is that her blood alcohol level was very high. And precisely because it wasn’t usual for her, it’s important to know why she was drinking on Thursday morning. If there was something that upset her, that made her act out of character. Someone she might have hooked up with if she was going to drink. It might have been someone she wouldn’t have spent time with … .”
Doc got up and paced the room. “This is a nightmare.” He stopped suddenly, covered his face with his hands. A wrenching, sharp cry came from under his hands. His shoulders shook. Phil Keck rose and put an arm around Doc. Mars noticed that Mother Fitz didn’t move from her chair or change her expression. As he thought about it, he realized he hadn’t seen Mother Fitz and Doc touch during the past two days.
They all started when the front doorbell chimed.
Mars walked to the bay window that faced Cornelia Drive. There was no sign of the blue Ford pickup they were expecting Brian to be driving. He couldn’t see who was at the front door, so he told Keck to get it, adding, “I don’t want anyone else coming in. No more hot casseroles.” Mars moved
near the front hallway to listen as Keck walked to the door. The visitor was one of Keck’s investigators, a tiny, frecklefaced brunette Mars had met the day before.
“Sorry to butt in, Chief, but something’s come up I thought you should know about right away.”
Keck stepped back to let her in. Lt. Toni Andorf noticed Mars and gave him a crisp nod, flushing slightly. Mars could tell she cared about making an impression.
“A counselor at Edina mentioned that one of her counselees—Erin Moss—was unusually jealous of Mary Pat. So I followed up by going over to talk to Erin, and she said something I thought you should know before you interview the boyfriend. She said it was common knowledge around school that Brian had been physically abusive to Mary Pat. Erin saw Brian and Mary Pat at a basketball game earlier this year, saw him hit Mary Pat so hard she fell to the floor.” Lt. Andorf stopped and waited for a response.
“Have you talked to anyone who confirms that?” Mars asked.
“That’s just it. It’s like everybody clams up when I ask if Brian and Mary Pat had any relationship problems. They don’t say no, they just look away and shrug. The Moss girl is the only one who’ll say anything, but like the counselor said, she’s more than happy to say something negative about Mary Pat.”
“You talk to the Prince girl … Becky?”
Toni Andorf made a face. “Her. Like she’s going to give me the time of day. Everybody says, ‘Talk to Becky,’ but nobody says how I’m gonna get Becky to talk. She’s a spoiled brat, if you ask me.”
“Keep talking to the other kids. It may be important to have more than one person document the abuse angle. And one other thing. Push on whether people knew that Mary Pat occasionally got stone-cold drunk.”
Mars returned to the living room before Keck came back. He faced the Fitzgeralds’ expectant faces. They didn’t need to hear Andorf’s news. “Nothing. Just one of Phil’s officers, checking in.”
It wasn’t more than a half hour after Toni Andorf left when Robert Fitzgerald, Jr., and Becky Prince arrived. Even Mother Fitz got up when Bobby Fitzgerald came into the living room. For the first time, Mars felt he was seeing a family as he watched the mother and father embrace what was now their only child.
Bobby’s face had the same look of blank disbelief as his father’s, but a sense of deep emotion was much closer to the surface. He wasn’t in the same state of denial as his parents. In a few moments he turned to Keck.
“What do you know? What happened? Do you have any idea …”
Keck looked sideways at Mars, not certain that he should answer. When Mars stayed silent, Keck said, “We don’t know very much. We’re anxious to talk to Brian. We hope there’ll be some answers there.”
“Why Brian? You’re wasting your time if you’re checking out Brian. He’s a good kid, he wouldn’t do something like this.”
Mars and Keck exchanged glances. Mars spoke. “In a situation like this, it’s more likely than not that Mary Pat was killed by someone she knew. That’s why we have to check all of you out pretty carefully, not just Brian. Statistically, that’s just the way it is.”
Bobby Fitzgerald sputtered. “So. While you’re spinning your wheels chasing statistical probabilities, whoever did it gets harder to get, right?”
“I can understand from your perspective it looks like all we’re doing is focusing on the obvious. But between Phil and
me, we’ve got almost two dozen officers working this case. We’ve got people combing Southdale for witnesses who saw Mary Pat while she was there. We’ve got people checking out anyone who might have seen her walking back to Cornelia Drive after she found the flat on her car. We’re working with Edina administrators to identify who Mary Pat spent time with at school. I’ve got officers down on the bluffs interviewing vagrants who live under the bridges and interviewing people who worked in the buildings on Southeast Main above the bluffs. I’ve got people down at city hall running computer searches based on what we know about what happened, running down creeps who get involved in this kind of thing and might have been around. The point is, we’re not just kicking back and waiting for Brian to show up.”
Hands on his hips, Bobby paced. Mars’s answer may not have satisfied him, but it shut him up. Watching him, Mars decided Bobby looked like his sister. Their coloring was different. Bobby had a head of curly auburn hair, but the bone structure and the perfectly proportioned body came from the same genetic stuff.
“Brian’s here.”
Becky Prince had been staring out the front bay window since she’d come in. She made an immediate move toward the front door.
Mars said sharply, “No!” He turned to Doc. “Dr. Fitzgerald, answer the front door without saying anything to Brian. Just ask him to come into the living room.” Mars half turned to the others. “The rest of you. Please, say nothing until I’ve told Brian about Mary Pat.”
Mars moved quickly to the side of the picture window to watch Brian. The kid was still in his truck, with the driverside door ajar. He slid out of the front seat, started to shut the door, stopped, leaned across the cab, pulled back, and shut the door, taking a skipping jump across the curb and
onto the lawn. He caught himself short and detoured to the sidewalk, a longer path to the front door. The kind of move a kid who cared what his girlfriend’s parents thought about him would make.
Every muscle in Mar’s body tightened, and the poison juice of doubt shot through his gut. Not doubt. Certainty. The kid didn’t have a clue. There was not a hint of self-consciousness, wariness, or tension in Brian Peterson.
So much for moving this mess back to Edina fast, was what Mars thought.