Season of the Wolf

by Summers, Robin

  “What do you mean?”

  Devon hoisted a memory up from the depths, one that could give her nebulous perceptions form and substance. “We never really saw any of the guys Billy worked with—they never came by the house, and we never went to the station—except at the annual Fourth of July picnic. One year—I was probably ten or eleven—I was sick. Billy insisted we go, so we did. I was too sick to play, and I finally got bored listening to Mom and the other wives talking about recipes and gossip, so I went off to find Billy. He and the guys were playing poker. I hung back, just watching them, all laughing and smiling—even Billy was having a grand old time. It was down to Billy and another deputy. The deputy showed his hand, a straight flush. Everybody started patting him on the back, and he leaned forward to pull in his chips. Then Billy cleared his throat. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He turned up his cards. He had a royal flush, ace high.”

  Devon remembered the looks on the other men’s faces, the thickness of the silence that descended over the table.

  “The one guy remarked that it was Billy’s second royal flush of the afternoon. The other men looked at him, like they couldn’t believe he’d said that. Then I saw the look on Billy’s face. I had never seen it before, but I came to know it well. His eyes narrowed and his lips curled up in this sickening smile, and he asked the other deputy if he was calling him a cheat. The others at the table stepped in so fast. They were practically falling over themselves to apologize, telling Billy that of course no one would accuse Billy of cheating. They told Billy to take the pot.”

  Devon had never told anyone this story. She had never shared what it was like to realize she and her mother weren’t the only ones who were scared of Billy.

  “I didn’t really understand what had happened, but then Billy turned his head toward me, seemed to notice I was there for the first time. He was staring at me, that same, sickening smile on his face. And in that moment, I understood what it was to be terrified.”

  *

  Henry leaned back in his chair, his head throbbing, the pain clouding over logical thought. He had been at it for hours, but he felt like all he had to show for it was this damn headache. He squeezed the bridge of his nose, methodically moving his thumb and forefinger in small circles. It was a trick Ella had taught him long ago. Whenever he was frustrated by a case, he got headaches like the one he was having now. Something about squeezing his sinus cavity and the rhythmic motion of his fingers helped him clear both the pain and his mind. It was the only thing that seemed to work. Another of the little miracles his wife had performed for him in her lovely but too-brief life.

  The trick worked, like always, and Henry felt the pain lifting, taking the fog with it. He scanned his notes once more, working through the other details he and Lawson had gleaned from their search. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services showed that Devon had entered the foster system upon her parents’ deaths and had lived in a group home for a few weeks before being placed with Debra and Dale McMillan. She lived with them for nearly two years, and then left for Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.

  In his experience, colleges could be very difficult about releasing student records without a warrant, but because of the murder of Devon’s roommate, campus security had been more than happy to oblige. Along with Devon’s student file, they had faxed over everything they had on the murder, including the full report from the local police. That had surprised Henry. Campus cops were usually quick to wash their hands of real crime on school grounds, but NIU’s cops had done a surprisingly thorough job of keeping track of the formal investigation.

  The report confirmed that, four weeks into the 2002 fall term, Devon’s roommate, Jessica Morgan, had been found dead in their room. Devon had discovered the body. Campus security, which had already been called by another student who reported hearing a loud argument, arrived shortly after Devon had entered. Jessica’s body had been lying on the bed, her throat cut. The campus cops quickly called the local authorities and did not question Devon themselves, given the seriousness of the crime.

  The formal police file outlined the physical details Devon had told Henry and Jordan earlier. Questioning of the floor’s other residents had yielded no significant information and no suspects; no one had seen anyone who didn’t belong. A couple of students, including the one who had called the campus cops, had thought they heard some kind of argument between a male and female but, upon further questioning by the local authorities, they realized they hadn’t heard anything.

  Henry shook his head. He could imagine how the cops had helped the students to their supposed realizations. It happened all the time. Some cops got a story in their minds and actively worked to eliminate any evidence that didn’t fit what they thought they knew. That had clearly been the case with these cops. The report indicated they had locked on to Devon as a person of interest early on. The room had been dusted for prints, but apart from those belonging to Devon, Jessica, and a couple of other students, none could be found. The report indicated that there was a lot of blood on the bed, but there was no indication of spatter beyond the bed. The bloodstains on Jessica’s clothes and Devon’s bedspread all belonged to Jessica. The forensic investigation had yielded nothing else of value. They’d done a complete search of the dorm and surrounding grounds, and the murder weapon was not found.

  The autopsy indicated bruising to Jessica’s wrists and thighs, as if the killer had wrestled her to the bed, kneeled on her legs and held her wrists. She’d also had a light bruise on the first two knuckles of her right hand. There was no bruising to the head and no trace of drugs in her system, which meant she most likely hadn’t been unconscious when she was killed. The blade had sliced through both the jugular and carotid, which would have sprayed blood up and out in a wide arc. The lack of significant splatter at the scene told Henry that whoever had killed the woman took the brunt of the splatter—though Henry would have liked to see the crime scene photos to be sure.

  Henry tried to imagine Devon overpowering Jessica and holding her down, but he couldn’t. Although Devon wasn’t tiny, she was neither big enough nor powerful enough to keep Jessica pinned to the bed while slitting her throat in the way the autopsy suggested. In order to make the bruises on Jessica’s thighs, Devon’s knees would have had to have been pressing into them with all her weight, her feet off to either side for balance. That wasn’t an easy position to maintain, and Jessica would have been fighting for her life. The bruising on Jessica’s wrists could have been caused by Devon holding them pinned above her head, but how would Devon have held Jessica’s hands down while also slicing her throat? Devon would have had to hold both Jessica’s wrists with only one hand, and Devon’s hands were just not big enough for that. And slitting someone’s throat—especially from the front—was no easy task. It took some power to get through all that muscle and sinew. The killer had to have either been a very big girl or, more likely, a man.

  None of that, however, had seemed to matter to the local police. Although there had not been enough evidence to arrest Devon or even officially name her a suspect, their conclusion was there in the report, clear as day. No reasonable suspect beyond Madison Montgomery.

  They had interviewed her three times, the last one about a week after the murder. While the first interview had been simply to take her statement, it was clear that by the second interview two days later, they had already begun to see Devon as a suspect. When they brought her in the last time, the interrogation—there was no other way to describe it—had lasted five hours. No attorney had been present.

  During that first interview, Devon had indeed tried to tell the cops that she thought her father was responsible for Jessica’s murder. They’d asked her why she thought it was her supposedly dead father, but the only response recorded was the manner of Jessica’s death and a “feeling”—the cops had actually put it in quotes—that her father was somehow responsible. She’d asked them if they’d found a wheat penny, but no such evidence had been found.


  It was clear the cops had not believed her from the start, though Henry supposed if it had been him, with the evidence they both had and didn’t have, he might not have believed her, either. The main difference between him and those cops was that he would have seriously investigated her claims. The cops had called the Roscoe sheriff’s office and spoken to one of the deputies, and that was about it. They hadn’t even gotten the case file from Roscoe. The sheriff’s department considered it case closed, and so the DeKalb cops did, too. In their eyes, that meant Devon was either supremely delusional or hiding something.

  During the final interview, they had tried to break her. The transcript read like something out of a bad police movie. They had used every trick in the book, including some that were clearly illegal, to get her to confess. It hadn’t worked, Henry assumed, because she hadn’t done anything wrong. They’d had to let her go and told her not to leave town. The final note in the file indicated that a few days later they tried to reach her for another interview but had been unable to locate her. A warrant had been issued for her arrest, and the case had remained open, unsolved.

  Henry put aside the DeKalb file and scanned the campus police report. It was thin, since they’d handed the case off, but one of the campus cops had taken a few notes of his impressions, from the initial complaint call to the arrival of the local cops. The call had come into the campus police approximately ten minutes prior to their arrival. The caller, a female in the suite next door, had called to complain about noise coming from Devon and Jessica’s room. She reported a loud argument, followed by a couple of thumps against her wall and moaning. The caller said she banged on the wall but the moaning continued, and she was tired of Jessica and her boyfriend going at it all day and night when she needed to study.

  The campus cop noted that they normally didn’t respond to sex complaints, but the argument the caller described had concerned him. He had arrived to find the door open. Devon had been standing in the middle of the room, staring at the body on her bed, seemingly in shock. He’d immediately called the DeKalb police and had guided Devon out into the hall to wait. From the doorway, not wanting to disturb any evidence, he had surveyed the room. There was no obvious sign of a break-in. The campus cop theorized that Jessica had let the killer into her room willingly. He also noted a small reddish smudge on the wall in the hallway outside the room, about five feet past the door.

  Son of a bitch. Henry flipped to the notes from the official investigation. He could find no mention of any such smudge, or any other mention of the campus cop’s report. Either they’d missed it or they’d excluded it, and either way it bothered Henry. The mark in the hall could have been unrelated, he supposed, but if it wasn’t, it indicated the killer had been out in the hallway after murdering Jessica. And the timeline was significant, too. Devon had no blood on her and no discarded bloody clothes were found on scene, according to the report. Only ten minutes passed between the call to the campus police and their arrival, nowhere near enough time for Devon to commit murder, get cleaned up, dispose of the bloody clothes and the murder weapon, and get back to her dorm room. That should have been enough to exclude Devon as a suspect.

  Henry shook his head again. The gaps in logic the cops had been willing to overlook in order to make Devon fit the crime were astounding. He wondered what other evidence they had missed. Had they overlooked a wheat penny left at the scene? When this was all over, he was going to drive out to DeKalb, Illinois, and have a word with the excuses-for-cops involved in this travesty.

  Henry put aside the files and thought about the diner murders. He hoped the Pittsburgh Mobile Crime Unit detectives would be able to link something at the scene to Billy, some shred of evidence that could not only prove his involvement but that would indicate where and how to find him. Henry had sent Billy’s fingerprints to the lab to see if they could find a match in the diner. Henry didn’t think they would—Billy seemed too careful for that—but they’d try.

  Henry would still need to follow up with the investigating officers in DeKalb, but he wasn’t in any hurry. The state cops hadn’t asked questions since Billy was nothing more to them than an old application collecting dust, but cops with a cold case and an outstanding warrant would be more inquisitive. Henry wasn’t about to let the locals screw this up for Devon again, and he certainly wasn’t about to let them arrest her.

  Something else was bothering him, beyond all the bad police work. His mind went back to the house fire. Though he didn’t have the reports he needed to prove it, the newspaper articles had all said two bodies had been found. Two bodies had been buried. So if they had found two bodies and one of them wasn’t Billy Dean Montgomery, who in the hell had died with Marie Montgomery in that explosion?

  A dozen possibilities ran through Henry’s mind, each one more outrageous than the last. There was simply no way to know, short of having the body exhumed and DNA tested. And that wasn’t an option for the time being. As next of kin, Devon was the only one with the legal right to allow them to dig up the grave. But there was no way to have the body dug up without confirming that Devon was Madison Montgomery, and with the warrant out for her, Henry would have no choice but to turn her over.

  He was breaking the law by harboring Devon. He had never broken the law before, never even thought about it, had never so much as jaywalked, but he was surprised to find that instead of making him feel guilty, he felt kind of good. Not that he was about to go out and knock over a liquor store anytime soon, but he realized that for the first time in his life, upholding the law was not his first priority. Doing the right thing mattered more, and that meant protecting Devon and bringing Billy Dean Montgomery to justice.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Devon lay awake in Jordan’s bed, Max’s rhythmic breathing serving as a metronome for her thoughts. The shepherd was curled along her side, his head tucked into the nook between her breast and arm. She gently stroked his silky fur, feeling ever safer with each rise and fall of the dog’s strong chest. Max’s back legs spasmed once, then again. Devon smiled, imagining the rabbit Max was no doubt chasing through the field of his dreams.

  She rested her head on her biceps, Max’s fur tickling the tip of her nose. She thought back over the strange, terrible, wonderful day, trying to reconcile the horror of how it had begun with how she felt now. Warm. Protected. Perhaps even…content?

  Talking about her childhood hadn’t killed her. As afraid as she’d been to talk about her past—to put words to things of which she had never, ever spoken—it had felt okay, even good, to share them.

  Guilt settled over her at that last thought, pressing down upon her with its weight. She shook it off. Didn’t she deserve to feel good, to feel content? Didn’t she deserve, even for the most fleeting of moments, to feel something other than guilt? Or fear? Or numbness?

  Yesterday, or even that morning, she would have said no. She would not have allowed herself to think such thoughts, to feel such things. There was no escaping her past, or her shame. It was her burden to carry, the stone she deserved to have tied around her neck, dragging her down into the frigid obsidian waters of her everlasting guilt.

  But now there was a light shining above her, calling her out of the depths. Maybe this load was not hers alone to carry, not anymore. Maybe she deserved more than this half life she had been living for so long. Maybe, just maybe, there was a way out of Billy Montgomery’s long, decrepit shadow.

  It felt foreign to her, this hope welling inside, like a stranger sleeping in her bed. She nearly laughed at the irony as she lay in the bed of Detective Jordan Salinger, a woman who twelve hours earlier had been nothing if not a stranger. But now? She was a stranger no more, though what exactly Jordan was remained elusive. Devon’s hope? Her salvation?

  It was a lot to put on Jordan, on both her and Henry, but it was all Devon had.

  Beside her, Max grunted softly, kicking all four of his legs now. Apparently that rabbit was giving him a devil of a time. Devon stroked his side more firmly and he set
tled back down into slumber.

  After dinner, after all the questions about Billy and her mother and her childhood, Jordan—seeming to sense Devon could take no more—had suggested they play a game. “Your choice,” Jordan had said, rummaging through the hall closet and holding out an ancient version of Trivial Pursuit, a Chutes and Ladders that had seen better days, and a deck of cards. Devon had chosen the cards.

  Devon had been surprised by the idea, by how oddly ordinary it seemed. In the end, though, she thought it was Jordan who had been surprised—by how good Devon was at rummy. She had skunked the detective four times in a row. As they played, Devon found herself telling Jordan about Mrs. Eleanor Brindle, who had taken her in when she’d fled Illinois and ended up in Colorado and who had taught Devon how to play cards.

  “She was a kind, gentle lady, but when she got you across the deck of cards, she was ruthless,” Devon had said, laughing with fond remembrance. Jordan’s silence made her realize she had divulged something she hadn’t intended. She’d waited for Jordan to press her, but instead Jordan had shuffled the deck. As she lay now in Jordan’s bed, she felt the familiar panic again as her mind raced. She knew she would have to tell Jordan and Henry the rest eventually, but she wasn’t ready. She just wasn’t. What would they think of her then? They would arrest her for sure, throw her into some dank, dark pit and turn their backs on her forever.

  She still felt Jordan’s hand, telling her with a soft squeeze that she understood. She’d looked up into Jordan’s face, which reflected the same understanding. She would press no further, at least not this night.

  Devon didn’t know how long her luck would hold, but she knew the truth was like sand slipping through an hourglass, and eventually the last grain would fall and her time would have run out. She would have to tell them. She owed it to them. All of it. Every last, disgusting, terrible detail. But not yet. That thought followed her into an uneasy sleep, full of shadows.