by J. A. Kerley
Harry nodded toward the sheriff’s office.
“You want me to ask your supervisor if you can take a field trip?”
Barlow stomped toward the door. “Christ. Let’s git this bullshit done so I can git back to work.”
We followed Barlow for several miles, cut down a tight dirt lane more cow path than road, the Crown Vic bottoming out as we pitched over ruts for a mile or more. Barlow was driving a high-sprung SUV. He stopped near the edge of a sprawling woods.
“This isn’t my usual routine,” he said. “Babysitting people wantin’ to see an ancient crime scene.”
Harry stared evenly into Barlow’s eyes. “Four years isn’t ancient. It’s yesterday. And last I recall, there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
Barlow grunted and led us to a clearing. Centering it was a stew of scorched timbers, twisted roofing metal, heat-shattered brick.
“Here’s where her body was found.”
“I thought it was in a shack,” I said.
“Guess it burned down.”
I heard my teeth grinding and looked into the distance. Jutting above trees a hundred yards away was a tall microwave tower, a white light strobing at its tip.
“Who was she?” I asked. “The victim.”
Barlow cleared his throat, spat. “State cops have that stuff. Teacher. Retired.”
“Age?”
Barlow flicked something from his gray teeth, shrugged. “Sixty-something.”
“Who was lead on the case, Sergeant Barlow?”
“Some kid was putterin’ in it. He ain’t here no more.”
“This puttering kid was abducted by aliens?” Harry asked. “Fall down a sink hole? Drown in his grits?”
“Moved to Montgomery.” Barlow grunted, spat, walked away. He climbed in his cruiser. Harry walked over.
“You always this helpful, Barlow? Or you just being nice to fellow law enforcement?”
Barlow hawked deep, started to spit toward Harry, thought better of it. He swallowed.
“I got four more months to pretend I give a shit. Then I’m retired. You get out the same way you come in.”
Barlow drove away in the opposite direction, cutting through a road in the trees.
“Why’d he go that way?” Harry asked.
“I think I know. Follow his tracks.”
We aimed our front bumper at Barlow’s rear one. A couple hundred feet later we came to a paved road. Barlow’s vehicle disappeared in the distance.
I said, “He brought us in a mile across the fields just to bang us around for the hell of it. A local custom, you think?”
“Hick asshole,” Harry muttered.
We put Barlow in our Unpleasant Memories file and headed to the local state police post. Luckily, we knew our contact here, Arn Norlin, a pro with twenty-plus years in grade. We called ahead with an outline of what we wanted to talk about. He was ready fifteen minutes later.
Arn looked like a Viking who’d traded the horned helmet for a trooper’s Stetson. He had a ruddy face, strong Nordic nose, wide forehead, eyes of diluted blue. His hands were thick and hard, like he’d rowed between Denmark and Iceland. Those same hands painted the most expressive watercolor seascapes I’d ever seen and I was honored to have one of Arn’s works in my living room.
“We have part of a file. I think the cold-case folks look at it now and then, scratch their heads, move on to more fertile ground. I’d love to say we’ve got it front-burnered, but…”
“Manpower,” I said.
“Every politician talks about putting more feet on the beat, but come budget time, we’re hidden in the basement like a crazy aunt.”
“Part of a file, you said?”
He shot me a look over tortoiseshell reading glasses. “Pieces disappeared. Misplaced, supposedly.”
“When?”
“In the hands of the county folks. Barlow didn’t tell you, I take it?”
“A slight omission,” Harry said.
Arn leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head. “I had hopes for a solve on the county side, kept out of it. It was a Pettigrew case.”
“Pettigrew?” I said.
“Ben Pettigrew. A young guy, only on the county force a couple years. Pettigrew was a hot dog, the good kind, bright, curious. It was his first gut-wrencher case, knifeplay, torture. Pettigrew took the case to heart. Went at it with hammer and tongs.”
“Good for him,” Harry said.
“First thing Pettigrew did was grid the whole area. He was crawling on the ground, pushing through sticker bushes. You see the microwave tower near the scene?”
I nodded.
“Pettigrew climbed the damn thing to get a better lay of the land. He saw where a car had been hidden away and also felt someone had been laying in the weeds at the base of the tower.”
“Barlow mentioned Pettigrew moved to Montgomery.”
“Got recruited by the city cops up there. Good for a bright, hard-charging guy like Pettigrew to get on with a big-city force. Good for Montgomery to have a guy like that. Bad for the county.”
“Because it lost a hotshot?”
“Bet you money if he’d stayed, he’d have nailed the killer by now. That boy was a pit bull.”
“Wish Pettigrew was still around,” Harry said. “We couldn’t get squat from Barlow. The guy treated us like we had airborne syphilis.”
Arn picked up a couple of paper clips, linking and unlinking them.
“I don’t know what happened there. Barlow used to be a pretty decent cop. A few years back, he suddenly got old and cranky. It was like someone he loved died and he never came back from it. But I didn’t catch news of anything like that.”
“Years back?” Harry asked. “Like four?”
Arn dropped the clips to the deskpad and brushed them aside. “That’d be about right. Maybe a bit less. How’d you know?”
“It’s a time span we’re hearing more and more.”
Montgomery Police Department detective Benjamin T. Pettigrew leaned back in his chair and set tooled alligator boots on the meeting-room table.
“It was grim,” Pettigrew said. “The victim was crumpled inside the little hunter’s shack, over two dozen knife wounds.”
Even at a steady twenty mph above the limit it had been a two-hour trip to Montgomery, and one we probably didn’t need to make. But between the lost files and the burned-out shack and Arn Norlin’s description of Pettigrew, we felt it best to cover all bases. And face time beat the hell out of phone calls.
“Fingers broken?” I asked.
He wiggled the appropriate digits. Pettigrew was in his late twenties, sandy hair and a light complexion. He wore a threadbare cotton jacket over jeans, a beaded leather belt. He looked relaxed but his eyes were fully engaged.
“Arn Norlin says you scoped out the scene down to individual blades of grass,” Harry said.
“Norlin exaggerates. I did what little I could.”
“You really climbed the microwave tower?”
“Wanted to get a bird’s-eye view of the field and woods. I did find something interesting at the base of the tower. The grass and weeds had been crushed down. I found blood on the grass, bagged it for Forensics. It DNA’d out as Frederika Holtkamp’s blood. The victim.”
“A teacher was what Barlow said.”
“Special education. Taught retarded and autistic kids. Retired. Seemed to be getting on all right, real nice house, good car. She had more money than most retired teachers I’ve seen. But we never found out much more. We don’t even know where or how she got taken. It was so slick it was scary.”
“You mentioned blood around the tower. But the shack was a football field’s distance away. How you figure her blood got there?”
“I thought maybe she’d broke loose from the perp, ran to the tower scattering blood from her wounds. But Forensics said it wasn’t spatter but soaking. Like a bloody rag left on the weeds. Or clothes.”
“The perp rested there, maybe,” Harry
suggested. “Soaked with blood.”
Pettigrew sat forward, picked up a pencil and tumbled it through his fingers.
“I grew up hunting with my daddy and uncle. Deer, wild hogs, anything. Got OK at tracking. A lot of it’s looking for subtle indicators.”
“Talk subtle to me,” Harry said.
“I was up in the tower, fifty, sixty feet. It was half past eight in the morning. Ms Holtkamp had been found an hour earlier by two old farmers out squirreling before chores. Sunlight was at a sharp angle and dew hadn’t cooked off yet. I saw several trails in the weeds, the dew knocked off, the tiniest shift in color. A camera wouldn’t pick it up. The trails met at the base of the tower.”
“Arn Norlin said you found evidence of a vehicle.”
“Definite tire impressions in the grass, busted-off branches probably used to cover the vehicle.” He paused. “There was one thing about the car that never made sense to me.”
Harry said, “That being?”
“Tire impressions where it had been driven back into the trees, fifty, sixty feet off the road. There was another set where it backed out. The tread picked up dirt, got faint where the vehicle pulled onto the road, but still discernible. Then the tracks stopped dead.”
“Vanished?” Harry said, narrowing an eye.
“Like the car pulled onto the asphalt and disappeared. Never figured it out. Sucked into a Martian spaceship?”
He chuckled at the example, but I could see it still bugged him.
“Your take on the whole scene?” I asked.
Pettigrew put his arms on the table and leaned forward. He spoke near a whisper.
“You guys are the PSIT down in Mobile, right? The guys that get the crazies?”
“It’s a part-time gig,” I said. “Like twice a year.”
“Ever do any conjectures that get a bit out of the box?”
I nodded. “Even when we’re wrong, it’s the right way to think. Everything’s a possibility.”
Pettigrew leaned forward and lowered his voice. “My conjecture: the perp brought the victim to the shack, made his kill. He wandered from the scene to the tower – tired? High on something and disoriented? I’ll never know. But someone else showed up. More than one someone, I’m thinking.”
“Keep going.”
“I think someone else caught up with the killer at the base of the tower.”
“Who?” Harry asked.
Pettigrew grunted, slapped the table. “No idea. None. Not a damn one.”
“What about the car?”
“Two choices: either it belonged to the perp, or his pursuers. I’d think the perp, since it was hidden.”
I’d been tumbling a thought through the back of my mind since Pettigrew mentioned the lost tire tracks.
“If the car got hauled away instead of driven away, it might explain the missing tracks.”
“I like that,” Pettigrew said, narrowing an eye, like squinting across four years. “I like it a lot. Wish I’d considered it then.”
“What did Cade Barlow think?” Harry asked.
Pettigrew’s nose wrinkled like someone had opened a garbage can under it. “What do you know about Barlow?”
“That he ain’t much interested in a murder that took place in his jurisdiction four years back.”
I’d seen how Ben Pettigrew looked when he was uncertain. Now I got to see what he looked like angry.
“Barlow should have been trying to get out ahead of me on the case, steal my thunder. It’s how he was, a scene-stealer and credit-grabber. I didn’t mind, the competition kept me sharp. But on the Holtkamp murder, he threw roadblocks in my way, ridiculed my ideas. I floated my thoughts on the trails in the grass, Barlow rolling his eyes, comparing it to crop circles, asking if I thought extraterrestrials killed the woman. He had higher-ups laughing at my ideas.”
“Think he had something to do with the missing case materials?” I asked.
Pettigrew instinctively glanced through the meeting-room window into the squad room, making sure we weren’t being eavesdropped.
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
I had a sudden thought, one of those errant connections. “You ever see Barlow talking to a guy, square-built, hard-looking, six-one or –two, blond curly hair? Looks kinda like Jerry Lee Lewis if he pumped iron instead of playing piano.”
Pettigrew pursed his lips, thought. “Got a photo?”
“I can fax you one.”
“Do that, may spark something.”
We stood, shook hands, thanked Pettigrew for his time.
“That case sits hard in my craw,” he said. “It was tough to leave in the middle.”
Harry said, “Arn mentioned you got hired by the Montgomery force. Recruited.”
“They needed patrol personnel, had a grant for adding cops, got my name somewhere. Hired me the day of my interview. Got the gold two years later.”
“They came looking for you?” Harry said. “Big compliment. I’m impressed.”
Pettigrew reddened; for a split second I saw a shy country boy.
“Aw hell, they were just beating the bushes for small-town cops looking for the big-city experience, guys that wouldn’t need a lot of training.” He shrugged. “I hated leaving cases hanging, but the Montgomery department needed me fast. It was basically jump right then or spend my days dealing with Cade Barlow. I jumped.”
CHAPTER 27
We were fifteen minutes above Mobile on I-65. I was lying in the back, trying to make sense of the last two weeks. I felt someone had set a basketball-size tangle of thread before me and said, “Untangle it, but don’t use your hands.”
The phone rang in my jacket. I spoke, hung up, looked at the back of Harry’s head.
“It’s your favorite lawyer. Walls wants to talk.”
Harry wrinkled his nose. “The scumbucket say what he wanted? He always wants something.”
Walls met us at the door, pointed us to his office. Harry pulled out his bandana handkerchief and dusted off the chair before he sat. Walls pretended not to notice.
“Something came to me,” Walls said, sitting behind his desk and pinching lint from his shiny silk suit. “The picture of the blond guy. See, I was in my office late last night, working on a client’s case, guy named Tony Binker, Tony the Bee…”
“Oh shit,” Harry moaned.
“Tony’s not a bad guy, just a kid who got trapped in the wrong crowd…”
Harry said, “Tony the Bee runs a drug gang, Walls. He makes wrong crowds.”
“…when it occurred to me you guys were the investigating officers on Tony’s little event. While I was trying to place the guy in the picture, it also occurred to me that you guys could make a positive recommendation to the Prosecutor’s Office about Tony. Lighten things up if he goes down.”
Harry smoldered. Walls licked his forefinger, scratched something from the lapel of his suit. He rolled whatever it was into a ball and flicked it away.
“In many ways I’m like a social worker, y’know? Giving my life to disadvantaged human beings who take a wrong road. Folk needing a modicum of rehabilitation, probably not half as much as the state deems necessary…”
I shot a look at Harry. Disgust blanketed his face. Still, he nodded his head, Do it.
I said, “All right, Walls. We’ll do what we can with the prosecution side. No promises.”
“Harry?” Walls said. “Is that your thinking?”
Harry’s lips twitched with the words he wanted to say, finally coming out as, “Yeah, Walls. I’ll back it up. See if they can shave a bit. It’s the least I can do for such a fine social worker.”
Walls beamed. “You boys are aces.” He reached out to shake hands on the agreement.
“Your turn,” I said, ignoring his hand and holding up the photo. Walls blocked it with his fingers, like he didn’t want it in his field of vision.
“First off, Harry, Carson, you never heard any of this from me.”
Harry grunted. “We don’t take ads out in
the Register saying where we get our information.”
“I’m in deep water here, guys. I don’t need to look up and see a shark coming my way.”
“This guy’s a shark?”
Walls went to his door, looked into the lobby as if expecting an eavesdropper under the carpet. He closed the door, snapped the lock, sat back down.
“He’s a king-hell shark. A shark for sharks. Name he usually goes by is Crandell. He’s a fix-it man, problem-solver. But this shark doesn’t swim at the bottom of the barrel. He swims way up high. Unions, though maybe not lately. Oil companies. Brokerage houses. Big shiny places like Enron.”
Harry was dubious. “He kills for them?”
“If it came to that, sure, he’d probably love it, be happy for the chance. But at Crandell’s level, killing is a last resort. Too messy, and someone in the hierarchy has to point a finger and say go. I imagine Mr Crandell spends most of his time returning lost items to where they belong. Missing art. Misappropriated stocks. Wayward spouses.”
“How do I know you’re not making this up?” Harry said. “A crock to knock a couple years off your boy’s drop.”
“I started in a big practice – Barton, Turnbull and Pryce. This was a dozen years back. White-shoe firm, guys who talcumed their fingers to make the tip of their nails whiter. We had a big-ass corporate client. The wife of one of the directors ran off. Wifey was telling tales on the guy, that he was a wacko, sick. It didn’t reflect well on the corporation. Plus the lady’d appropriated a fat pile of bearer bonds to finance her new life.”
I said, “I can see where that might be embarrassing.”
“Legal action was a spotlight no one wanted. Someone in the firm had heard of Crandell, called him. Crandell looked like a successful businessman, a guy who’d started on the loading dock, now ran the firm. Bright smile, intelligent vocabulary, boardroom clothes. See, dealing with a guy like that, your standard white-collar types need to feel they’re passing the job over to another businessperson, like, ‘Here’s a problem in marketing, deal with it.’”
“Just don’t tell us how.”
“It’s business: results are everything. Anyway, I met Crandell, not knowing what he was or did. Most people couldn’t tell, but I could.”
