No Woods So Dark as These

by Randall Silvis

  “It’s a tiny little town, Ryan. Second Street isn’t very long. And the way I accessed it from Front Street was by traveling east on Pine.”

  “Okay,” DeMarco said.

  “But on the way up here, where did you tell me Joe used to live?”

  “In a little town a few miles west of Benezette.”

  “You already figured this out, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “I haven’t figured anything out. Just tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “What I’m thinking is,” she told him, “Joe leaves his home west of town, travels east to a dentist on Front Street. He gets his filling replaced. If he even had a dentist’s appointment. But if he did, why would he then continue east on Pine to Second Street, where he encountered the girl, when the Ridgway station house is northwest of the dentist’s office?”

  “Good question, isn’t it?” DeMarco said.

  Eighty-Eight

  The Silver Cloud assisted living facility sat on a ridge overlooking the city, with tall, stately pines to its rear, a flagstone courtyard with south-facing wooden benches out front, and a white split-rail fence surrounding the grounds. Lou Stottlemeyer showed them to the library down the hall from the front lobby. “Only place to get some peace and quiet,” he told them. “Who reads at my age? It’s all screens and audiobooks nowadays.”

  He was a good ten years older than Loughner, and every one of those eighty years showed in his face, from the frown lines to the deep creases across his cheeks and forehead. His hands were swollen, fingers bent, his walk steady but slow, a stiff yet determined shuffle. “You said Joe sent you?” he asked before stepping into the room.

  “More or less,” DeMarco answered.

  Stottlemeyer slid his hand along the wall, found the dimmer switch and added a soft glow of illumination to the room. “You’re going to have to explain that,” he said, and crossed to a set of three red velvet wing chairs beneath a stained-glass window, with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books and DVDs at his back. He settled into the chair facing the other two and waited for Jayme and DeMarco to sit before asking, “So what’s that supposed to mean, he more or less sent you here?”

  DeMarco smiled. “He strongly suggested that we read his incident logs for the week before and the week after Thomas Reddick Sr.’s murder.”

  The creases around Stottlemeyer’s eyes pinched together for a moment. “And why would he do that?”

  DeMarco explained the case they were working on, and Joe’s certainty that Luthor Reddick was involved in the triple homicide. “Luthor went missing right after Jayme and Trooper Boyd first questioned him.”

  Jayme added, “Joe thought his incident reports might give us an idea or two about where to look for Luthor.”

  “And did they?”

  “No,” DeMarco said. “And we learned just an hour ago that Luthor has returned back home.”

  The old man cocked his head. “So why are you here then? Joe have you checking up on me? How the hell is he doing, by the way?”

  “Doing okay,” DeMarco said. “Still working with the Evidence Recovery Team out of Erie.”

  “He’s drinking a lot,” Jayme said. “Excessively.”

  DeMarco flinched at that. Too brusque. He waited for Stottlemeyer to tell her to mind her own business.

  Instead, Stottlemeyer looked at her evenly for a few moments, then lowered his gaze and nodded. “He wasn’t like that when we worked together. As sober as a corpse, I used to tell him.”

  “What changed?” Jayme asked.

  “You said you both were with the state police till recently? Then you oughta know the answer to that. Occupational hazard.”

  Jayme nodded. “He was also wounded in the line of duty. I imagine that must have had a big effect on him.”

  “He was a good, good cop,” Stottlemeyer said.

  DeMarco asked, “Did he have something personal against the Reddicks?”

  It took a while for the old man to answer. “You have any characters back in your jurisdiction you’d just love to put away but can’t? Somebody you know is evil to the core but you just can’t get enough on him to do any good? That’s how it was with old man Reddick. We knew he was garbage. Knew he was selling drugs to kids. Bad drugs. Not just weed and watered-down coke. And yeah, Joe took it personal.”

  Jayme said, “We’ve never talked to him about family, and, as far as I recall, he’s never mentioned having one. Does he?”

  Again, another pause from Stottlemeyer. Then, “You probably hit the nail on the head there, young lady.”

  “He has a family?”

  “Past tense. Wife and little girl came here with him. She hated the place. Nothing to do but hunt and fish and stare at the trees, she said. And she hated his job, and not just him being away at all hours, having to get up and go every time his phone rang. Deep down I think she hated cops in general. So one day he comes home from a long shift and they’re gone. She’d scribbled him a note and left it on the table. This isn’t working and it never will. Kimmy isn’t yours anyway. Kimberly being the little girl’s name.”

  “Good lord,” DeMarco said.

  “He tracked them down later, but by then the girl was in her teens and her mind so poisoned that she refused to even talk to him.”

  “And of course it affected his work,” Jayme said.

  “You had to really know him to see it, though. But we were close, the two of us, so I knew. He was seething inside. The only thing that gave him a moment’s happiness was dragging some piece of crap up before a judge. That’s why he took it so hard that Reddick was too slippery for us. Believe me, there wasn’t a decent person in the county who wasn’t happy when Reddick got what he had coming to him.”

  He blew out a long breath then, his eyes on the floor. When he looked up to DeMarco again, he said, “That’s all I have for you. Sorry. I know it has nothing to do with the case you’re working on.”

  Jayme looked at DeMarco, one eyebrow cocked. He caught the question and gave her a little nod that said, Yeah. Go ahead.

  “Sir?” she asked. “On the day of Reddick’s murder, about six hours before you and Joe responded to the 9-1-1 call, Joe was driving along Second Street and spotted a teenage girl under the influence.”

  “I know about that,” the old man said. “He put her in the car and took her home. He wasn’t about to arrest some girl barely in her teens.”

  The phrase barely in her teens jumped like a rabbit in DeMarco’s mind. Loughner’s report hadn’t been that precise.

  “The thing is,” Jayme said, “that happened only a few blocks from Reddick’s house.”

  The old man waited for a few moments, then responded. “And?”

  “And we can’t come up with a good reason why Joe would have even been on Second Street. According to his report, he returned to work after visiting the dentist. But the station house was in the opposite direction.”

  The old man slowly pushed himself erect and straightened his shoulders. Then leaned back in the wing chair. Said, “You’re asking me to read another man’s mind, and I can’t do that. Joe’s the only one can tell you where he was and what he was doing that day.”

  “Yeah, that’s what’s bothering us,” DeMarco answered. “We think he was telling us what he was doing. By sending us up here to read his incident logs.”

  “I’m not following,” the old man said, but with a tone that suggested the opposite.

  DeMarco said, “We think maybe he was coming from Reddick’s house when he spotted the girl. And that maybe the two things are related.”

  For a full fifteen seconds, the old man sat silent. Then he said, “I wasn’t there. I have no idea what did or did not happen to anybody but me.”

  “Do you have any idea of the girl’s address?” Jayme asked. “Where she used to live, or where she lives now?”

  “D
idn’t know then,” he said, “don’t know now. And I have no need to ever find out.” He smiled at Jayme. “It’s nice to have met you folks. Thanks for coming by. Tell Joe for me that I remember him well and still think of him highly. And good luck with your case. Do me a favor and turn the lights off on your way out.”

  With that he clasped his hands atop his belly and closed his eyes.

  Eighty-Nine

  Jayme paused at the visitors’ book in the lobby, checked her phone, and signed them out. DeMarco waited with his hand on the lever across the front door.

  When they walked outside together, he reached into a pocket for his sunglasses but they weren’t there. Left them in the car, he thought and squinted across the parking lot.

  Jayme took his hand. Squeezed it. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He nodded. Walked stride for stride with her to the car.

  Seated inside, DeMarco at the wheel this time, still squinting, his movements slow. He slipped the key into the ignition but did not turn the key, only sat there with the key between his fingers.

  “We don’t have to do anything, babe,” she said. “Just keep working the case.”

  He turned her way. “He wanted us to know. So that we will do something.”

  “You think he’s been living with it too long, and this is his way—”

  DeMarco was nodding. “He wants it over with. And he picked us—me—to do the dirty work.”

  “So you give what we have to IAD, and then what? It’s all speculation. And even if it weren’t, even if we knew exactly what happened in Reddick’s house that day, every case Joe ever worked on will be impeached. Every single arrest challenged. You’re talking about probably hundreds of arrests. A man’s entire career.”

  “He knows that. He just wants somebody to put him out of his misery. Can you blame him? I don’t. I was there once. Exactly where he is now.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not the same, babe. He could go to jail. He will still have to keep living with it. Whatever exactly it is.”

  “You know what it is,” he said.

  “I know what I’m thinking and that you’re probably thinking the same thing.”

  “Okay, what? There’s only one expert on human psychology in this vehicle, and it’s not me.”

  “Hardly an expert and you know it. I could have six master’s degrees and I would still be hypothesizing.”

  “So hypothesize for me, okay? It helps to hear it out loud.”

  She breathed in through her nose, let the air slip out between her lips “Maybe he didn’t even have a dentist appointment that morning. Maybe he was watching Reddick’s house. Maybe that had become part of his day, every morning before he went to work. But on that morning, something happened. The girl, who should have been in school, went to Reddick’s house instead. His wife was at work. And maybe he sold the girl some drugs.”

  “You’re forgetting how Reddick’s body was found.”

  “I’m not forgetting. T-shirt and socks.”

  “She was probably trading sex for drugs. Joe watched her go in, then he got inside somehow, picked the lock on the back door probably, if it even was locked. He caught them going at it, and he lost it.”

  “He was a father too,” she said. “Even though his little girl wasn’t with him anymore.”

  DeMarco nodded. “Multiple blunt trauma to the head. Then he put the girl in his car, gave her a lecture she’d never forget, and dropped her off in front of her house. Drove back home as fast as he could, cleaned up and changed clothes, and was back at work thirty minutes later.”

  “I hear you,” she told him. “It’s a credible scenario. But it’s still just speculation. Do you really want to try to track down that girl and force her to give Joe up? We could check with the dentists but records that old have probably been destroyed by now. And Boyd would need a subpoena to even get them, and no judge is going to issue a subpoena based on what we have.”

  DeMarco held out his hands, palms up. What am I supposed to do?

  Jayme said, “What if he just wanted somebody to know?”

  “And he picked me?”

  “Of course he picked you. The moment he heard the name Reddick associated with Choo Choo and the others, he picked you. I saw the way you two were drawn to each other. You recognized each other. And you know exactly what I mean.”

  He nodded. “Nathaniel Hawthorne called it the shock of recognition. The first time he met Herman Melville.”

  “And the first time I saw you, babe. The first time you met Thomas Huston. You see somebody and you just know.”

  He let a few heavy seconds tick past. “So now what?”

  “Let’s go home,” she said. “Let’s get some rest and then go back to work on putting Reddick away.”

  He nodded again. Started the car. Asked, “How would you feel about getting a couple of motorcycles when all this is over? We could tour the country. The continent. The hemisphere.”

  “What about Hero?”

  He smiled. Took his sunglasses out of the cup holder and put them on. “That’s one thing I do have figured out.”

  Ninety

  The doctor’s office was in an old house in Greenville, a Craftsman-style building, square but with a punch-out upstairs and a covered front porch that ran the length of the place. The front door opened onto the sitting area, where there were four old folks scattered around the room as if they had all agreed to sit as far from each other as possible, three leafing through old magazines while the fourth, a female, squinted and scowled at her cell phone.

  In a little room in the back corner partitioned off from the rest of the room, with an open area above a shelf, stood the secretary/receptionist/office manager, a middle-aged woman with too much makeup and sagging jowls and startled eyes, who looked like she had stepped from behind the counter at the nearest greasy spoon and now found herself facing two Pennsylvania state troopers.

  Directly across from the woman’s tiny office was a hallway leading to two examination rooms and a half bathroom. Boyd stepped up to the shelf with Flores just off his left shoulder, handed the woman two photos taken of Cheryl McNulty’s prescription bottle labels before she had bonded out, and said, “We need to see this patient’s records.”

  Before the woman could answer, Flores stepped up and held out a sheet of paper. “Here’s the warrant,” she said.

  Rather than reaching immediately for the warrant, the woman turned to look at the waiting patients, all of whom were looking at the troopers now. One very old male patient in a wrinkled brown suit grinned as if thinking, What an interesting twist to another dull morning!

  Then the woman behind the shelf, holding the photos in her right hand, took the warrant in her left hand, looked at it, and laid it on the shelf. She said, “Give me a minute.” Then turned away and crossed to a bank of filing cabinets along the near wall of her little room.

  It took her a while, working down from the top row of cabinets to the next-to-bottom row, to find what she was looking for. By then she was on her knees, which allowed both Flores and Boyd to see that she was wearing men’s green cloth bedroom slippers and that her ankles were fat and swollen. Then she found the appropriate folder and pulled it out and laid it open atop the others still inside the drawer. “Hmm,” she said. And sat motionless for a moment before closing the folder and picking it up in her left hand. With her other hand to the cabinets, she pulled and pushed herself back up.

  To Boyd she said, “Let me see if the doctor can speak with you,” and opened a blank door on the far side of her room and disappeared inside.

  Boyd and Flores kept watching that door, and both were mildly startled when a door opened behind them instead, along the hallway to the examination rooms. They turned to see the white-smocked Dr. Sanjay Narang leaning out of one of those rooms.

  He was well past retirement age, with only a thin ban
d of white hair in an eroded horseshoe shape around his ears. His head seemed too small for his body, which started out thin at the neck and shoulders but expanded quickly from the chest to the stomach to the buttocks, then decreased gradually past the hips to the calves and feet. His skin was dark, his face round, eyes looking too large behind tight brown frames holding round no-line bifocal lenses. He jerked his head to motion them back, then disappeared inside the room again.

  He was seated at a small desk when they entered, the low chair swiveled their way. He tapped the folder open on the desk. It lay adjacent to a clear plastic container holding a spoon buried in a brown mound of tabbouleh—bulgur, chopped tomatoes, and parsley and mint—the source of the pleasant minty aroma in the room. “I haven’t written a prescription for this patient in quite a while,” he said. “Three years and seven months, to be specific. She stopped coming here. Marylou sent her a few reminders, but received no response. We assumed she had moved or switched doctors or passed away. Why is she of interest to you?”

  “Thank you for the information,” Boyd said. “We’re going to need those photos back.”

  Outside, as they crossed the street to their vehicle, Flores noticed that Boyd was smiling. “What are you so happy about?” she asked.

  “Social security disability fraud,” he said. “Identity theft. And now forging a prescription.”

  “How could she get away with it for so long? Aren’t there safeguards to keep something like that from happening?”

  “Of course,” he said. “But it happens anyway. A lot. That’s why I love it so much when the bad guys trip over their own messes.”

  She smiled too. Almost told him, You’re really handsome when you smile. But didn’t. Took the warmth of the thought and kept it to herself.

  Ninety-One

  “The pharmacist came through!” Flores said.

  DeMarco was sitting on the edge of his bed, wearing a clean white T-shirt, a damp towel wrapped around his waist. Hero lay across his feet, soft furry belly against DeMarco’s ankles; he could feel the animal’s heat on his skin. The light through the window was lemony and soft, the magic hour, one of his favorite times of day, second only to sunrise. When the phone rang, he had been waiting for Jayme to emerge from her shower wearing nothing, her skin soft and cool and soap-scented, her face washed clean of everything but the freckles.