“That’s what you hear in most interviews. Unless, you know, you’re breaking up a fight or something. Where everybody in the crowd saw what happened. No just means you’re closing off one more dead end.”
“I get that, but what are we going to learn? I mean, what if the guy we want is working on one of these dairies? What’s he going to do? Give it up to us?”
“Sometimes. Yeah.” Kevin glanced at her. She was worrying her birthstone ring. “The chief or MacAuley gets a guy into the interrogation room, they ask him a few questions, and boom! next thing you know, we’re calling the DA’s office because the guy’s spilled his guts. Never underestimate a perp’s need to get it off his chest.” That last bit of wisdom came from the deputy chief, but he figured he didn’t need to quote chapter and verse.
She looked at him skeptically. “We’re not the chief and MacAuley.”
“Hey, everybody’s got to start somewhere.” He pointed his elbow toward their folder. “Who’s next on the list?”
The three farms after that were repeats of the morning interviews. It was slow work, trailing after workers scattered between the barn and the field and the machine shed, assuring them and their employers that no, they weren’t from ICE and no, they didn’t have any interest in seeing visas or work permits or Social Security cards. After their first stop that morning, when Hadley told him to stop scaring the workers by towering over them like the damn Statue of Liberty, Kevin found everybody relaxed more when he got as low profile as possible. He’d taken to squatting on his haunches as if he were powwowing at scout camp. Hadley, who’d acted like she was giving an oral examination the first few times, had smoothed out her patter, even—based on the occasional laugh she got—tossing in a joke now and again.
Kevin thought they were creating about as good a rapport with the migrants as they could, but they still didn’t shake anything loose until Jock Montgomery’s place. It was after four when they pulled into the dooryard, scattering a horde of small boys who turned out to be Montgomery sons and their friends. There was a bit of confusion as to why Hadley was there, since her oldest kid was in the same class as the middle Montgomery boy. Then the babysitter, Christy McAlister, recognized Kevin from when he wrote up her boyfriend’s accident last winter, and she had to catch him up on everything going on with both the boyfriend—deployed overseas—and the car—totaled and replaced.
The good news was that it was coming up milking time. Montgomery’s three full-time year-round farmhands were all in what the dairyman called the milking parlor, which, despite its old-fashioned name, had the same stainless steel and sterilized hoses as the other farms. Back at the Hoffmans’, Hadley had commented, “It’s all rubber and restraints. I bet there’s some serious fetish activity going on after hours in a few of these places.” He’d turned the same color as the red Ayshires in the field, but now he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
They had gathered the men in the tack room, and, since the concrete floor was stained with unidentifiable brown blotches, Kevin forsook the squatting for sitting atop a plastic five-gallon bucket of antibiotic feed additive. Hadley perched on another bucket and showed them the photo, asking—he assumed—if any of them had seen John Doe one.
The three men—short broad-faced Mayans with arms large enough to wrestle calves out of their mother’s bodies and skinny, bowed legs—shook their heads. Lined up in Astroturf-green lawn chairs, they looked like teak garden ornaments that had been stored in the barn for a season.
Hadley asked them another question, smiling, her voice inviting confidence.
The men glanced at one another. Kevin, examining the straw and manure glued to the edge of his sneakers, sat up straight. This was the first time they hadn’t gotten an almost-instant denial. “Hadley,” he said, his voice quiet, unthreatening. “Remind ’em we’re just here for information.”
She rattled off something in Spanish, still trying to sound upbeat. One guy said something to another. The third nodded, adding what might have been an encouragement or an order. The one in the middle was still, like he was weighing what the other two had told him. Finally, he said something to Hadley. A short sentence.
“¿Qué?” She was obviously surprised.
“What is it?” Kevin asked.
She didn’t turn to answer him. “He says he was shot at.”
He kept his mouth shut while she asked the guy another question. Got an answer. Asked something else. Got a longer, more detailed reply, with the other two nodding along. Kevin made himself wait, not wanting to bust up the flow of the interview. After ten minutes of back-and-forth, Hadley said “Gracias,” and everybody except Kevin stood up.
The three men left. Kevin exploded off his bucket once the last one vanished into the milking parlor. “What?” he said. “What?”
Hadley rubbed her lips, her eyes still on the lawn chairs. “We need to take a look at Mr. Montgomery’s van. The guy in the middle, Feliz, says he was driving it to the Agway to pick up a load of feed and somebody shot at him. Put a hole through the back panel.”
“When?”
“April.”
Yes! In like Flynn. He was out the door in two strides. “Mr. Montgomery!” he called. “Mr. Montgomery?”
Jock Montgomery emerged from the cold room, wiping his hands on a cloth. He was a Caucasian version of his workers, bandy-legged, powerful shoulders, with an up-country Cossayuharie accent you could use to stir paint. “They tell you what you needed to know?”
“Did your van get shot this past April?”
“Ayeah.”
“Why didn’t you report it?”
“Aw.” Montgomery shoved the cloth into his overalls pocket. “There’s no need to kick up a fuss. Just somebody jacking deer. I figgured if he needed the meat so bad, I wun’t gonna put trouble his way.”
“Do you know who did it?”
Montgomery rubbed the back of his neck.
“We’re not asking ’cause we’re looking for game violations. We’re investigating multiple murders.”
Hadley piped up for the first time. “Someone may be targeting Latino migrant workers.”
Kevin winced. He didn’t think the chief wanted that theory floating around Millers Kill.
“Huh. So you think . . . maybe he wun’t huntin’ after all?”
“Maybe not for deer,” Hadley said.
“I don’t know who did it.” Montgomery sighed. “But it happened when Feliz was on the Cossayuharie Road, passing though the Christies’ woods. I figgured—well, they’re hard up enough to do it. Huntin’ out of season, I mean.”
Hadley caught his sleeve and tugged him away from the farmer. “The twenty-two?” she said quietly.
“That’d be hard to punch through a moving vehicle. But maybe.” Kevin turned back to Montgomery. “May we see the van, please?”
“Right out here next to the feed room.” They followed Montgomery, keeping a few paces behind so they could talk.
“The Christies,” Hadley whispered.
“That’d put a different spin on them going after that Mexican guy working at St. Alban’s.”
They stepped over a chewed-up wooden lintel and out into the late-afternoon sun. “There ’tis,” Montgomery said. “You can see why I took it for a hunter.”
Kevin could. The ragged-edged hole was the work of a large-caliber weapon. But it wasn’t the size of the shot that interested him. It was the van itself. The big, white, paneled Chevy Astro was identical to the one Sister Lucia Pirone had been driving.
X
He hadn’t called before hauling over to his sister’s farm, so it was his own damn fault his mother was there to see the blowup. He heeled his squad car into her driveway—the old one, not the new one—and was pounding up the steps before the engine stilled. He hammered on the front door. “Janet! Goddammit, open up!”
The door opened. He saw empty air where he expected Janet’s face and looked down. His mother frowned up at him. “What on earth are you fussing about now, Russell?
Swearing at the top of your lungs right out in front of God and everybody. What if the girls had been home?”
One-handed, he swung the door all the way open and pushed past her rotund form. “This is official business, Mom.” He strode into the McGeochs’ living room, nearly knocking over his niece Kathleen’s music stand. Empty plastic laundry baskets and piles of folded clothing covered the sofa. Sneakers in assorted sizes and shades of pink were piled like a canvas landslide against the TV console. “Janet!”
Janet appeared from the kitchen, a full laundry basket in her arms. Her lips thinned. “Clare told you.”
“Clare told me,” he said. “And I don’t know who I’m madder at, her for keeping it a secret or you for laying it on her. This is a goddam murder investigation, Janet. Don’t you get it? We got three dead men to account for. That’s a little more important than you saving a few bucks on your taxes.”
“I told you everything you needed to know about the body! It doesn’t matter who found it!”
“That’s not your call to make!”
“Would somebody tell me what in Sam Hill’s goin’ on?” their mother asked.
“Janet and Mike have a whole crew of illegal workers at the new farm. It was one of them found the body on their property, not Janet. She lied about it, and she got Clare to back up the lie, and she’s kept on lying despite the fact that we’re up to three bodies now and there may very well be some connection between the migrant workers and the murders.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and tried to breathe deep. The drive over hadn’t cooled him off any.
Their mother pinned Janet in place with narrowed eyes. “This true?”
“We hired those workers in good faith. It wasn’t our fault we got screwed over by the employment agency!”
“Is it true?” Margy’s voice was relentless.
Janet glared at the wall. “Yes.”
Their mother closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she had an expression both Russ and Janet knew well. Knew and dreaded. “Janet Agnes,” she said, “I am ashamed of you.”
Russ could see Janet fighting not to drop her head. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mom.” Her voice was unsteady. “But when it comes to the farm’s future, to my family’s future, I have to do what I think best.”
“I’m tryin’ to think of a way hidin’ the facts in a murder investigation could be best,” Margy said.
“We need those workers to survive. I was afraid that if he knew about them, Russ would have to turn them in to Immigration and Customs, and Mike and I’d be left trying to run two hundred head between the two of us. Native-born hands would cost us twice as much, if we could find anyone to take on the job.”
Russ shook his head. “You should have just asked me. I checked with the town attorney back in April, when your men first went missing. Unless someone’s been arrested for a crime, I don’t have any obligation to ask about their status, legal, illegal, whatever.” He felt his anger leaching away. “Why didn’t you just ask me?”
His sister looked at him, disbelieving. “Because if the answer had been different, you would’ve called ICE. You might’ve been sorry, but that wouldn’t have stopped you.”
“Then you should have told me.” Margy’s voice was sharp. “It’s my farm too, you know. I don’t expect to be treated like some old fool with an open purse and a closed mind.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. Really.” Janet turned to Russ. “And . . . I apologize to you, too. For the . . . for not asking. And for coming between you and Clare.”
He did not want to go there. “Forget it. Lemme interview your men. See if anyone saw anything. Then we’ll call it quits.”
THE FEAST OF ST. ALBAN
June 23
I
The Feast of St. Alban was traditionally celebrated, in Millers Kill, with a bake and white-elephant sale, the sort of fund-raiser designed to maximize the work required of parish volunteers and minimize the return. In the three years Clare had been rector, she’d been inching the senior festival committee members—a blue-rinse bunch who had controlled the event for close to two decades—toward a more active and profitable fund-raiser.
The arrival of Elizabeth de Groot in January, followed by the unfortunate slip-and-fall of the committee chair later that month, opened the door for a change. With half the committee in Florida for the winter months, the new deacon and the equally ruthless-in-a-good-cause Karen Burns engineered a bloodless coup, inserting themselves as “temporary chairs.” They shot down the white elephant, source of so much of Clare’s office furniture, and took the bake sale off the table.
In its place, on Sunday night they were having an all-you-can-eat dinner (one ticket), a silent and live auction (another), and, as an inducement to hang around till the end of the bidding, a public dance in the park across the street from the church with Curtis Maurand and his Little Big Band (free, but contributions accepted).
Thanks to Elizabeth’s ability to wheedle donations—she got such extraordinary results Clare wondered if threats of force were involved—they were having a blowout that, with luck, would fund half their yearly outreach program.
Elizabeth and Karen agreed that well-lubricated bidders were free-spending bidders, so the auctions were accompanied with cheese, hors d’oeuvres, and a never-ending stream of donated bottles—one of which was clutched in the hands of Clare’s date.
“Vicar! Mrs. Burns!” Hugh Parteger waved plastic glasses toward an auction table, where Clare and Karen were counting their chickens before they hatched. “Merlot? Or Cabernet?” Several female committee members behind the silent auction tables stared at Hugh. With his British accent, double-pleated trousers, and two-hundred-dollar haircut, the New York resident was an exotic specimen for Millers Kill.
“Merlot,” Karen said.
“For me, too.” Clare glanced at the bid sheet for a weekend of sailing and catered meals at Robert Corlew’s summer home on Lake George. Her eyes bugged out. “I knew we had some reasonably affluent folks here, but I didn’t expect this.” She kept her voice low.
“They’re not all ours. Elizabeth has a ton of contacts in Saratoga, and she got the word out.” Karen also spoke under her breath. An older gentleman Clare had seen at the dinner approached the table, and Clare and Karen drifted out of his way. “I was afraid with this serial killer scare on, people would be reluctant to come out at night,” Karen went on. “Thank heavens it’s not holding anyone back.”
“Maybe folks feel there’s safety in numbers,” Clare said.
Hugh appeared again, brimming plastic cups in hand. “Maybe they feel there’s safety in being white. I read the murders may be race-related.” He handed one cup to Clare
“Read?” Karen accepted a glass. “Where?”
“Oh, there were several news sources with stories. I get Google alerts for anything containing the phrase ‘Millers Kill,’ did I tell you? That, and ‘hot-n-sexy Episcopal priests.’ ”
Karen coughed out half a mouthful of wine.
“Ignore him,” Clare said. “He’s only a few Internet sites away from complete deviancy.”
“You can leave your collar on,” Hugh sang.
“Remind me to take you to the church’s next General Convention. There are a number of my sister priests I’d love to introduce you to.”
He sighed. “You see what I have to fight against?” he asked Karen. “I travel up here from New York, I wine her and dine her, and she’s still trying to foist other women on me. I may as well wander out into the night and let myself fall victim to the Cossayuharie Killer.”
“You travel to Saratoga from New York,” Clare pointed out. “I’m just conveniently located. And you might have trouble locating the alleged serial killer, since the town’s promised us a police presence at the dance.”
“Oh, goody.” She could have dehumidified the undercroft with that tone.
Karen, no slouch when it came to managing awkward social moments, smiled brightly and handed Hugh her plastic cup.
/> He stared at it for a half second before his usual good manners reasserted themselves. “May I freshen you up?” he asked.
“And get some for yourself,” she encouraged.
“Alas, I’m not indulging. I have to drive to the Stuyvesant Inn, and”—his mouth twisted—“I have no wish to attract the attention of local law enforcement.”
There was a moment of silence as Clare examined the nearby air molecules and Karen did not look at Clare.
“Of course,” Hugh said, “if I could stay at the vicarage . . .” It was almost, but not quite, a joke. Karen, thank God, looked more amused than scandalized.
“Hugh.”
He raised his hands. “Sorry, sorry.” He assumed a pained expression. “She is an unassailable tower of virtue,” he told Karen.
“I’ve been assailed once or twice in the past,” Clare said.
“Yet you never sail with me.”
“You’re a venture capitalist. Go venture,” Clare said. “Talk up the auction. Run up the bids. Loosen some purse strings.”
“Sadly, the only strings I’ll be loosening tonight.” He took Karen’s hand and squeezed it before pointing a finger at Clare. “Don’t forget, I have the first dance, Vicar.”
They watched him cross the floor, working the crowd.
“He’s awfully nice,” Karen said.
“Yes, he is,” Clare said. They had met at a party three summers ago and had managed a weekend together every couple of months since then.
“He seems pretty fond of you.”
“Yes, he is.” He’d been pushing to move their relationship up a notch since the past fall. Nothing obnoxious, nothing that backed her into a corner. Reasonable, considering the dinners in Saratoga, the phone calls, the trips she had made to New York.
“It’s so pleasant being around someone happy and uncomplicated, isn’t it?”
I Shall Not Want Page 23
