Noble Entwhistle was about as solid and unimaginative an officer as Lyle MacAuley had ever worked with. He was the guy who did the door to door, called everyone on the thirty-page phone list, worked the radar gun. If you wanted leaps of deduction or seat-of-the-pants interviewing, he was no good, but if you wanted methodical, if you wanted organized, if you wanted polite to old ladies, you wanted Noble Entwhistle.
Lyle never in a million years could have pictured him hunched over in the snow, crying snot-faced, unable to speak.
Noble had made it three steps out of the kitchen door of 398 Peekskill Road before collapsing, openmouthed and weeping. He had reholstered his flashlight but forgotten to turn it off, and now a beam of light jerked up and down as his tree-sized back shook with sobs. Fat snowflakes blazed for a moment in glory and then vanished into the deepening drifts on the ground.
None of the three police vehicles parked in the drive had its lights on. Lyle had radioed them to go dark almost as soon as he had gotten the brief from Harlene, their dispatcher. Instead, he had left the mudroom door, open when they arrived, pushed wide. Warm light spilling out. Cold air seeping in.
“Jesus, Noble,” he said. “Try to pull it together.”
Noble twisted his head in Lyle’s direction. “Pull it together,” he gasped out. “Did you . . . did you see her? Her face is just gone.”
Lyle, shadowed against the bright light spilling from the mudroom and screened by the fast-falling snow, knew he was no more than a blur to his officer. And thank God for it. His self-control was hanging by a thread. One wrong word, one tiny misstep, and he was going to lose it as bad as Noble. Poor sonofabitch. He racked up his voice to make a steady shot. “I saw her.” Butchered like an animal. “You’re not going to help her by falling apart.”
He scanned the road. A lone car drove toward them, slowed down, and kept on going. Good. He heard the muffled crunch of boots through loose and packed layers of snow. “Whaddya got, Eric?”
“I completed the friend’s statement.” Officer Eric McCrea’s features emerged out of the darkness as he plodded toward the long rectangle of light. “Are you sure you don’t want me to run her down to the station and get it on video?”
“No.”
Eric leaned in closer, as if to pierce the shadow cast by the brim of Lyle’s cap. “This is not the time for shortcuts. We’re going to catch the fucker who did this, and when we do, we don’t want him getting off because we were half-assed putting the evidence together.”
Lyle drew in a breath to ream McCrea out, but cut it short with a click of his teeth. It wasn’t his fault. He was on edge. They all were. And Lyle wasn’t going to be able to carry this off by himself. He was going to need one or two others backing him up. Containment—that was going to be the trick.
“Well?” Eric demanded.
A brilliant splash of light broke their stare-off. Another vehicle was churning up the driveway’s slope, its headlights bouncing through the billows of white.
“Shit. That’s Kevin Flynn’s truck.” Lyle glared at McCrea. “Did you call him?”
“No. But what if I did? What the hell’s the deal, MacAuley?”
The almost-new Aztek looked like what it was, the prize possession of a boy who got his first learner’s permit seven years ago. It rumbled to a stop behind McCrea’s badly angled squad car, and Flynn jumped out. Kevin, the most junior officer of the Millers Kill Police Department, was finally getting enough meat on his bones to lessen his resemblance to a six-foot Howdy Doody puppet. In an effort to look older than sixteen, he had lately grown a soul patch, a would-be-cool square of facial hair beneath his lower lip. Unfortunately, Flynn’s facial hair was the same color as the stuff on top, and he now looked—to Lyle’s old and uncool eyes, at least—as if he had an enormous furry freckle on his chin.
“Harlene called me! On my cell phone!” Kevin kicked through the snow, his face open and eager. “I told her I wasn’t working today, but she said to get over here. Whadda we doing at the chief’s house?” He had gotten close enough to finally make out Lyle’s and Eric’s expressions. He frowned. “Guys? What’s up?”
Harlene called him. Lyle’s heart sank. Christ, she was probably ringing up every guy on the force to pitch in. How the hell was he going to manage this now?
Behind him, Noble lurched upright, a messy, tear-sodden bear emerging from its den. Flynn saw him. “Noble?” He turned to Lyle. He looked scared. “Is it . . . is it the chief?”
“No.”
The one-word answer didn’t do anything to relieve the anxiety on Kevin’s face. Lyle breathed in and tried again. “The chief is fine, Kevin. We’re trying to . . . deal with a crime scene here without drawing too much attention to ourselves.” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Eric’s jaw swing open. “This is what you can do for me. Take your truck and park it at the intersection of Peekskill and River Road. You got your flares?”
Kevin nodded.
“Good. I’ve called in the state police CS unit. They’re going to be sending a van and a couple of techs, and I want you to be on the lookout for ’em. You know how it can be with people from away driving these country roads. You send ’em up here. Can you do that?”
Kevin nodded again. His expression relaxed. The low-man-on-the-totem-pole job; this was familiar territory.
“You need anything, you call Harlene on your cell phone. Don’t use your radio.”
“I don’t have one in my Aztek yet.”
“Okay, go.”
Flynn fluffed through the snow, intent on his assigned task.
“That’s the biggest load of bullshit make-work I’ve ever seen. There’s not a man in Troop G who couldn’t find this road in the dark, and half of ’em probably know which house is the chief’s.”
Lyle nodded. “That’s why I put in the call to Troop D.”
McCrea stared at him. “Are you nuts? They’re down in Amsterdam. It’ll take their CS unit an hour to get here.” He scrubbed his face with one gloved hand, dislodging the snowflakes that were attaching themselves to his eyelashes and beard.
“Eric,” Lyle said. “Stop. And think for a moment. Forget who all’s involved. Lay it out like a domestic violence case.”
Eric’s mouth twisted in disgust. “Domestic violence?”
“Just do it for me.”
“Okay.” McCrea closed his eyes for a moment. “A woman found dead in her home. No signs of forcible entry. No known history of drugs. No arrests. No known involvement with any suspicious individuals.”
“The victim recently separated from her husband,” Lyle added. “The husband left the marital home under protest. The husband has access to weapons and is trained in their use.”
Eric stared at him. “You can’t say . . . Jesus, you don’t think the chief had anything to do with this?”
“Ssh. Keep it down.” Thank God, this part he had already rehearsed. He didn’t hesitate. “Of course I don’t think the chief was involved. But if you didn’t know him, if you didn’t have any stake in this investigation, who would you peg as the prime suspect?”
Eric’s mouth worked before he could get the words out. “The victim’s husband.”
“And if this investigation gets taken away from us and handed over to the staties, who do you think they’ll come down on?”
Eric shook his head. “But . . .”
“You don’t think we can crack this case without their help?”
“No, but—”
“ ’Cause I’ll tell you what the staties will do. They’re gonna tag the chief as it, and the entire rest of the investigation is gonna be devoted to proving them right. If we don’t want that to happen, we need to keep this as quiet and lowkey as possible. We need to control any information, starting right here and now. Are you with me?”
Eric stared down at the snow beneath their boots, packed by the footsteps of everyone who had already crossed this dooryard and gotten involved. “I gotta tell you, Lyle. I been a cop ten years now, and four as an MP before that. And this . . . this gives me a bad feeling.”
“Christ almighty, don’t you think I feel the same way? It’s making me sick to my stomach. If you think it’d go down a different way if the staties took over, please, convince me. I’d love to hear I’m wrong.”
“You aren’t wrong.” Eric squinted toward the neighbor’s house, a good quarter-mile away on the ridgeline. Lights had come on in the windows. Lyle thought he could see someone’s silhouette. Watching them. “Okay,” McCrea said. “I’m in.”
“Good. I want you to run the crime scene. You know to expect the Troop D CS.” A mournful yowl wound through the sky from somewhere behind the barn. “For God’s sake, get ahold of her cat and get it to a shelter.”
“Will do.”
“I’m heading back to the station. I’m going to call the ME when I get into town.”
“You sure you want to wait that long to get the medical examiner out here?”
“Yes. Control. That’s our motto here. Control. I need to tell Harlene to clamp down on the phone calls.” His gut churned, acid and fear and regret all mixed together. “And I need to tell the chief.”