In the Bleak Midwinter

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  “Well . . .” Brenda looked uncertainly at Clare. “You know, there wasn’t nothin’ gonna bring Katie back, was there? And maybe Darrell would have turned him in after he’d gotten what he wanted.” She opened her hands. “I didn’t really . . . think about it.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Russ was dropping piles of papers on the big scarred-oak table in the briefing room when Mark Durkee strolled in, fifteen minutes early for the evening shift. “Hey, Chief. How y’doing?”

  “This goddamn case is giving me a goddamn headache,” Russ informed him, slapping down a manila folder next to a reprint of Katie McWhorter’s high school photo.

  “Actually, I was thinking more like, how are you feeling after that shootout at the Stoner’s place yesterday? Everything cool?”

  Lyle MacAuley stopped in the doorway, already changed into his civvies. “Yeah, Chief. That post-cow stress disorder can be a killer.” Mark laughed. “Maybe you ought to have yourself checked out,” Lyle went on helpfully, “make sure you didn’t pick up any hoof-and-mouth disease.”

  Russ gave both of them what he hoped was a killing look.

  Mark laughed harder. “Really, Chief, we were worried about you.”

  Lyle nudged past the younger officer. “Hell, Mark, it’ll take a lot more than some pumped-up kid with a shotgun to take out the chief here. It takes a solid ton of muscle, hide, and milk to make the man sweat.” He leaned over the assorted folders and files, his bushy, graying eyebrows rising in interest. “Whatcha got here?”

  “I’m drowning in reports on the McWhorter case. I’m sorting everything out, trying to shake something loose.” Russ slid a broken stick of chalk across the table to Lyle. “Get up to the board there, Lyle, help me time line this thing out.”

  Lyle moved to the school-room sized blackboard hanging on the windowless wall of the briefing room.

  Russ opened the medical examiner’s report on Katie McWhorter. “Friday, December fourth.” Lyle chalked the date in the upper left-hand corner. “Sometime between seven and nine o’clock, the killer—no, wait, better make that killer A—bashes Katie’s head in and drives off.” Underneath the time, Lyle added “A→Katie McW.”

  “A could be one or both of the Burnses. They have no alibi other than each other for Friday night. It could have been Darrell McWhorter—”

  “Those names he gave you checked out, though,” Lyle reminded him. “Dave Jackson?” He stepped back to the table and ran his finger over the single-sheeted investigative reports. “Here it is. He was ready to affidavit that he and his wife had been with the McWhorters from seven to eleven that night.”

  “Yeah, I know. Okay, erase McWhorter. Ethan Stoner could have done it, too. He had the truck, he had the time, and he was mighty riled up about something that night when I saw him around ten or so.”

  “I took his initial statement,” Mark said. “He said his friends would testify that he’d been with them all that evening.”

  Lyle and Russ looked at each other. “Is it me, or does that boy seem awful young to you?” Lyle asked.

  Russ pushed the bridge of his glasses up his nose. “I’m sure his friends would say just that, Mark. And I’m just as sure that five minutes of grilling would bust that story wide open if the Stoner boy hadn’t been babysat all night by his buddies.”

  Lyle wrote down the name.

  “Ethan’s blood type checks out as the possible father of Katie’s baby. But,” Russ tapped the hospital’s test report, “Noble showed Katie’s picture around to the local motel owners and found that the guy who runs the Sleeping Hollow Motor Inn saw Katie with some man who wasn’t Ethan Stoner right around Thanksgiving. Had a record of the car and everything. We ran a match on the ’86 Nova they were driving. Turns out it’s one of Katie’s roommate’s cars. We haven’t been able to match the name and the numbers on the license the guy showed the clerk, which leads me to believe it’s a fake I.D. So, Katie and whoever stayed three days, and when they left, they took a blanket with them that’s an exact match to one of the blankets the baby was wrapped in.”

  “So Ethan’s not the father?” Mark hitched a hip onto a wide sill and leaned back against the wire mesh covering the lower half of the tall, turn-of-the-century window.

  “I don’t like Ethan as the father,” Russ said. “It doesn’t fit with what we know about Katie. She broke up with him clean, and according to her sister, she was nice to him, but not friends with him, after that. She doesn’t strike me as a girl who’d have jumped in the sack with her old boyfriend on a whim.”

  “Doesn’t mean Ethan couldn’t have killed her when he found out about the baby,” Lyle said. “He wouldn’t be the first rejected guy to build up a fantasy about getting together with a girl and then turn violent when reality intrudes. And let’s face it, we’ve seen he’s capable of picking up a gun and threatening to kill someone.”

  “I know. That’s why I haven’t discounted him as her murderer.” Russ flipped open the medical examiner’s report on Darrell McWhorter. “Let’s take a look at the next one. Darrell McWhorter meets with the Burnses on the morning of December eight.” Lyle noted the date. “He tells them he and his wife are keeping the baby, because it’s the last link to their little girl or some cowpuckie like that. Sometime between eight and ten that night, he’s shot to death by the side of the Old Schuylerville Road. Probably while on his way down to Albany. In Albany, some man shows up at Katie’s house around ten o’clock, says he’s her father and ransacks her room.”

  “It couldn’t have been Ethan Stoner, because he was sitting in the county jail in Glens Falls at the time,” Mark reminded him.

  Lyle tapped the chalk stick against the Burnses’ names. “How ’bout these two?”

  “How ’bout them?” Russ said. “Again, no alibi except each other. Reverend Fergusson and I drove past their place at eleven-thirty that night, and both cars were in the drive.”

  “It only takes an hour to get to Albany,” Lyle said. “An hour and a half in bad weather.”

  “Was the Northway speed limit reduced to forty-five last night?” Russ asked.

  “Nope. Snow wasn’t that bad, the plows kept up with it.”

  “So it’d be tight, but possible.”

  “Maybe they have a winter rat,” Mark said.

  Lyle and Russ looked at each other again. Lyle nodded thoughtfully. It was a common practice for people to protect their good cars from the ravages of rock salt, potholes, and cycles of freezing and thawing water by garaging them between December and March and driving a winter rat instead; any junky old heap with a heater and a defroster that worked.

  “If they did,” Mark went on, “One of them could have taken it out while the other one stayed home, parking the cars in the drive, turning on the lights, maybe even making phone calls to establish an alibi.”

  “Is it just me, or does that boy seem awfully smart to you?” Russ asked. Lyle grinned. “Okay, Mark,” Russ continued, “run with it. Get into the DMV records and find out how many vehicles are registered to Mr. and Mrs. Burns. Don’t forget to check any that might be under her maiden name. Or registered to their law practice instead of to them as individuals.”

  “If it was Geoff Burns who tossed the student apartment in Albany,” Lyle said, “what was he after?”

  “Maybe there was something there that would tie him to Katie’s murder,” Russ said. “A letter, a note she wrote to herself—something.” He leaned one-handed against the table and tapped the folder containing the Burnses’ statements. “The way I see it, during the negotiations with the Burnses, Darrell thinks of whatever it is that could prove Geoff Burns killed his daughter. So he calls everything off. Tightens the screws, makes the Burnses see he’s going to play hardball. Then he calls Burns later, tells him about the evidence or whatever, and arranges the meeting. On the way to Albany, Burns shoots him.”

  “Burns shoots him because . . .”

  “Hell, I don’t know. To cover up the blackmail? Because Darrell pissed him
off bad enough? Geoff Burns has a temper like a bantam rooster, and believe me, Darrell McWhorter was the kind of guy you could easily get pissed off at.”

  Lyle took aim at Mark with a half-cocked finger. “Did you ask ’em about owning any firearms when you spoke with ’em last night?”

  “She’s got a nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson registered in her name. Said she keeps it in the trunk of her car for when she’s traveling long distances alone. I didn’t even ask to see it at the time. It was late, and the chief had said to go real carefully.”

  Russ nodded. “We’re gonna need a warrant to be able to test that weapon, sure enough.”

  Lyle crossed his arms over his flannel shirt and looked at the worn-down green chalkboard, where abbreviations and arrows connected the Burnses to Katie and Darrell McWhorter. “You think you got enough to convince Judge Rys-wick to let you take a look at that gun? These are a couple of lawyers, remember. People like him. Not the usual type to get hauled up on a murder charge.”

  Russ sighed. “Dunno. Maybe.” He pointed at the three events Lyle had written down and circled. “We’ve got an abandoned baby. We’ve got a dead mother and a dead grandfather. So, do we have three separate suspects, one who fathered the baby, one who killed Katie, and one who killed Darrell?”

  “Too complicated. I don’t like it,” Lyle said.

  “So maybe we have one suspect. The same man who was at the motel with Katie when her baby was presumably born, later killed her and her father. It’s a lot neater, but we’ve got squat evidence.” He rapped his knuckles on Katie McWhorter’s autopsy report. “Or we have one man, identity unknown, who is Cody’s father, and one other suspect who did both the McWhorters.” He smiled one-sided at Mark, who squinted up at the blackboard’s crisscrossing lines. “Maybe I should take the chalkboard in with me to Ryswick, you think?”

  “I think finding another car will help.” Lyle dropped the chalk into Russ’s hand and headed for the door. “Maybe we’ll luck out and find a bloody baseball bat locked in the trunk.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Russ said. “A signed confession, too. Get out of here, stop bucking for overtime.”

  Lyle rounded the corner, waving good-bye. Over the sound of his boots clumping down the wooden stairs, Russ could hear him mooing.

  “That guy,” he said to Mark. “Tell you what, you do the run-down on the Burnses’ registration, and I’ll cover your patrol time until you’re done. I’ll just drive the squad car home afterwards if I’m not near the station.”

  “You don’t have to be home?”

  “Nope. I’m batching it until Linda gets back on Saturday.”

  “You got a deal.”

  The streets had been plowed clear early in the morning, and the day’s sun, though intermittant, had warmed things up enough to dry up the slush. It was a pleasure to drive without having to pay too much attention to the condition of the road. Russ headed south, where the scenery opened up into long valleys between easy, rolling hills. The lights of farmhouses and barnyards scattered across the landscape, familiar and comforting. To the west, and behind him, to the north, the Piedmont rose in wave after rounded wave. The great hills broke the sky into two darknesses, the one above glittering with stars, the one below glowing, here and there, with snow.

  He loved this part of the world more than any other, loved the sight of those old hills surrounding him. There was something unknowable about them, a mystery that had been there when the first Dutch and Scottish settlers had carved farms for themselves along the rivers running out of the vast wilderness. With the dark hills looming and the lights few and far between, it was easy to imagine what it had been like nearly three hundred years ago. The Adirondacks were still a wild and sometimes dangerous place, sparsely settled, with few roads in and out of the great Adirondack Park, a wilderness stretching thousands of square miles over ten counties. Every year, a few unprepared or incautious people went into these mountains and never came out.

  He thought about that fight he had had with Linda their first winter here, when she was planning on driving up to Gore Mountain to consult on a curtain order for somebody’s chalet. He had insisted she pack the car with a blanket, a self-heater, a flare, and even rations. She couldn’t believe a stalled engine or a car in a snow-covered ditch could be fatal. He had won that one, and was rewarded, when she got back, by her casual observation that the chalet hadn’t had another neighbor within twenty miles. Twenty steep, single-lane, hardly plowed miles.

  “Ten-fifty to Ten-fifty-seven, over.” The crackle of the radio brought him back to his squad car.

  “Ten-fifty-seven, go,” he said.

  “Mark’s all done, Chief,” Harlene said, “and he says to tell you he hit the jackpot. There is another car.”

  “Yes!” He pumped the radio receiver in truimph. “Give that man a kiss, Harlene.”

  “Well, if I gotta . . .”

  “I’ll sign off and take this unit back to my house if he’s ready to roll.”

  “Okay, I’ll log you off duty. You had a phone call a while back. Reverend Fergusson.”

  “Clare called?”

  “Ayeh. Said she wanted to talk with you about the McWhorter case.”

  “Oh. That all?”

  “Yes, that’s all. She’s a smart girl, she knows better than to waste a police dispatcher’s time with a lot of chit-chat.”

  “Uh huh. Don’t forget who signs your paychecks, honey.”

  “The town clerk. I won’t.”

  He laughed. “Okay, thanks, Harlene. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He realized a second after he clicked the unit off that he didn’t have Clare’s number on him. He thought about calling Harlene back and getting it, but it was only fifteen, twenty minutes into town. He’d feel better if he could check up on her, make sure she was doing okay after everything that had happened last night. And while he was there, it would be worthwhile checking that MG of hers, making sure she was prepared for a winter breakdown. He swung the squad car across lanes and headed back north, toward the ancient hills half-hiding the winter stars.

  St. Alban’s was dark when he swung past it from Church Street onto Elm. For a moment, he thought the rectory was dark, too, until he saw the lights shining out the back of the house. Of course, it was seven o’clock. She was probably making dinner. Nothing like showing up uninvited and unexpected at suppertime. He parked behind her car and trudged along the beaten-down snow. Didn’t she have anyone to plow for her? He kicked his boots against the lowest stairstep before mounting to the door.

  The kitchen door was as uncurtained as the rest of the house, and Russ could see the rector of St. Alban’s sipping red wine and cooking up a storm on her gas stove. She was wearing jeans and a University of Virgina sweatshirt hacked off around the waist. From the bulk of the sleeves pushed up her arms, it must have belonged to one of her hulking brothers at one point. He could hear music through the glass, the pounding of the bass vibrating throught his palm when he touched it. Some group from the ’eighties, Sons of the West or something, singing, “Live it up, live it up, Ronnie’s got a new gun,” and as he watched, smiling helplessly, Clare shimmied back and forth shaking some sort of dried herb from a little glass bottle into an enameled pot on the stove. He started laughing at the point where the music blasted, “You can take all your flags and march ’em up and down,” because she did just that, swinging her hips and jabbing a wooden spoon in the air. Russ knocked loudly on the door before he could scare her by suddenly appearing in her window when she turned around.

  He startled her anyway. She spun at the sound, dropping the spoon, her stockinged feet slipping on the floor. She didn’t screech, but she did clap a hand dramatically to her chest as she reached for the door. “Holy cow, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” she said, standing in the doorway.

  “Sorry.” He retreated down a step, so her eyes were almost level with his. Coming over in person suddenly seemed intrusive. “I’m sorry, I should have just called.”

  “I tried to reac
h you at the station,” she said, crossing her arms around herself against the cold. A gust of wind stirred her hair. “Good lord, it’s freezing out here. Please, come in.”

  He paused. “Just for a minute.” He stomped more snow off on the top step. There was a wide rubber mat inside the door and beside it, a cardboard moving box held rubber rain-boots and a pair of wet running shoes. A coat tree tilted precariously toward the telephone, weighed down by the Millers Kill police-issue parka she still hadn’t returned.

  She shut the door behind him. Her arms were still crossed, the wooden spoon clenched in one fist. “Please. Take your things off. Can I—oh, dang!” A dollop of tomato sauce had dripped off the spoon onto the worn white linoleum. Clare grabbed a rag and swiped at it while Russ shucked off his parka and hung it on the opposite side of the tree. There was a calendar thumbtacked into the wall next to the phone, picturing a stained glass window. There were saints listed in most of the days, and each Sunday was highlighted in red.

  Clare tossed the rag into a bland, stainless steel sink, and replaced the spoon in the pot. She leaned one hip against the counter, her arms crossed again, while Russ rocked back and forth in his boots, reluctant to tread muck all over her floor, hesitant about taking them off.

  “Oh, take off your boots and sit a spell,” Clare said, as if he were a book she could read. Bent over unlacing, he could hear her deep breath. “I wanted to apologize for last night,” she said. “I never just break down like that. It was inappropriate and poorly timed and I’m sorry.” It sounded as if she had practiced the speech.

  Russ straightened, sliding his boots off heel by heel. “Never? You never break down and cry?”

  A flush rose in her cheeks. “Okay, almost never. Certainly not with someone I haven’t known for very long.” She clapped her hands to her cheeks. “Oh, this is embarrassing.”