She plunked a platter of scrambled eggs in front of me. Beside it, she deposited a server bearing a stack of pancakes. There was no way the two of us would be able to eat all this, but any hope I had of Barrett joining us faded when his grandmother took her seat across from me.
“I’m afraid my grandson’s up and gone already.” She passed me a pitcher of real maple syrup. “Once that boy gets something in his head, it’s hard to get it out.”
“Forgive me for asking,” I said, trying not to speak with my mouth full, “but do you know what he’s got in his head?”
“Bad memories.”
“Of Pamela Wentz?”
“And the trouble that followed.” Mrs. Barrett pushed her plate away untouched. “This is a small town, Jamie. People here are slow to forget the past. Adam’s always been slower than most in that regard. But you might already know that.”
“Well, I know Eric Wentz has a memory as long as a country mile. And an imagination to match it. I found that out yesterday.”
“I take it you don’t believe Adam did that awful thing to that child.”
Something in her tone made my fork feel like it weighed four hundred pounds. I couldn’t lift it from my plate. I couldn’t lift my eyes to hers, either. Because after my little trip to the library—and our conversation behind the house—I trusted in Barrett’s innocence. But if his own grandmother had reason not to…
Carefully, I said, “Do you think he did it?”
“No. Some young men can get ahead of themselves. They make mistakes and those mistakes can be hurtful. Others are just plain mean. They want to bend others to their will. They like the thrill of force and of fear. Adam’s never been either kind.”
I released a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“Who, then, do you think attacked Pamela?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Barrett said, her voice trembling. “But I’ll tell you one thing. Whoever he is, he’s a coward, Jamie. A coward.”
Mrs. Barrett’s assessment stayed with me long after I helped her clear the table. It stuck with me as I headed for my car. Beyond the lady’s back door, the October air was as crisp as a fresh apple. And it was much colder than the air in D.C. Dew sparkled on the curves of my Jaguar instead of frost, though, so I counted my blessings.
I unlocked the car, glanced at the windows over the garage. The apartment behind them was dark. I wished that meant Barrett was sleeping deep under his bed’s Lone Star quilt instead of prowling the countryside to keep tabs on Eric Wentz, but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
I stopped wishing and started driving. Though it was Sunday, someone would be holding down the fort at the Sheriff’s Office. And I intended to coax, cajole, or otherwise convince that someone to give me a glimpse of Pamela’s case file. I wasn’t sure I bought Miranda Barrett’s theory about cowardice, but I wanted to know what the former sheriff had known about Pamela’s attacker. Most of all, I wanted to know why he’d never made an arrest.
To my surprise, however, the current sheriff pulled into the parking lot immediately after I did. Luke Rittenhaus emerged from his cruiser, his familiar travel mug with the Apple Blossom Café’s logo in his hand. His face shuttered as I approached him.
I said, “I’d offer to buy you a donut to go with that coffee, but I hate to pander to stereotypes.”
The ghost of a smile darted across his features. His black eye certainly was better this morning. It had turned purple and green, as if it were on its way to fading altogether. I was glad of that. The less opportunity he had to recall Barrett’s bad behavior, the better.
“I’ll pass on the donut,” he said, “but give me a rain check for a mocha cappuccino and I’m your man.”
“It’s a deal.”
We fell into step with each other.
When we reached the building, he opened the lobby door and held it for me.
“What brings you by my office so early on a Sunday?” he asked. “I doubt it was to offer me a donut.”
“I want to see the file on the Pamela Wentz investigation.”
At the service counter behind the plate-glass window, the same deputy I’d seen the day before, with the mustache and the monobrow, goggled like I’d asked for every detainee in the lockup to be set free.
Rittenhaus didn’t take my request much better.
“Why,” he demanded, “should I show the file to you?”
“Because it’s a cold case. Because acquainting me with the facts won’t hurt anyone. And because I asked nicely,” I said, sending him a smile as sweet as any newborn lamb.
“None of these becauses would have anything to do with Adam Barrett, would they?”
Of course they did. Every last one of them. Not that Rittenhaus needed me to say it.
He grimaced when I kept my own counsel. “Well, come on, anyway.”
He led me past the deputy and down the corridor to his office. He waved me to the same seat I’d occupied on my initial visit, balanced his coffee mug on a stack of reports still cluttering up the surface of his desk, and hung his jacket on a handy coat tree. But if I’d expected him to pick up the phone then and call down to some file morgue, I expected wrong.
Instead, Sheriff Luke Rittenhaus slid into his chair, opened the lower right-hand drawer of his desk. He withdrew an accordion file as thick as Webster’s New American Dictionary. He tossed it across the desk to me and it hit the surface with a dull thud.
The fact that he’d kept this cold case so close at hand spoke volumes.
I just wasn’t sure what those volumes said.
Rittenhaus shrugged, however, like his having the file was no big deal. “Cold cases are few and far between here in Fallowfield.”
I had no doubt this was true, but that didn’t quite explain what he was doing with this one at his fingertips. And I wasn’t a fool. I hadn’t forgotten that he’d been close friends with Barrett, Vance McCabe, Eric Wentz—and maybe even Eric’s sister, Pamela.
I said, “What made you go into law enforcement?”
“I liked the dental plan.”
“So your career choices had nothing to do with the unsolved rape and subsequent suicide of a high school buddy’s little sister?”
“That was a shame. Pamela didn’t deserve it.”
Frankly, no one did, but I didn’t get a chance to point that out to Rittenhaus.
He said, “I’d just turned eighteen. It was the first time I saw what a real crime could do to an entire town. The attack on Pamela wasn’t like the time Blake Mahaffey got caught stealing car radios during the football game. He brought that on himself, but Pamela? It was tragic. It made everyone fearful. Deeply fearful.”
I could understand that.
“My mom,” Rittenhaus said, “started carrying a kitchen knife in her purse. My dad made me walk around the outside of my aunt’s house every night, checking the doors and windows. Charlotte Mead’s nasty aunt threatened to send her to boarding school in Massachusetts just to get her out of town.”
“Did parents really do that? Send their daughters away?”
“Well”—Rittenhaus chuckled—“Char had a crush on Adam and she didn’t bother to hide it.”
“Oh.”
I’d only met her once, but I’d seen her yearbook photos. I could picture the Apple Blossom Café’s redheaded owner as a teen queen too confident to conceal her crush. I could imagine Barrett returning her attentions, too.
I tried to banish that little scenario to the back of my mind, but irritation nagged me like a buzzing bee.
Or maybe that was just jealousy.
I said, “You knew Adam back then. Do you think he attacked Pamela?”
“Adam?” Rittenhaus rocked back in his chair like this was the craziest question he’d ever heard. “No, but some folks will tell you otherwise.”
Like Eric Wentz. Out loud I said, “You’ve reviewed the case.”
“Many times.”
“Then who do you think assaulted her?”
Rittenhaus hesitated. I could see him measuring how much to tell me. He made his decision, drew breath to speak—and Deputy Monobrow tapped on the door.
“Excuse me, Sheriff?”
The deputy spotted the cold-case file in front of me—and whatever else he wanted to say melted in his mouth.
“Well, Dawkins,” Rittenhaus snapped. “What is it?”
“Oh, sorry. The coroner wants you to come down to his office right away.”
Rittenhaus rose from his seat, snagged his jacket from the coat tree.
He grumbled, “For a dentist who spends most of his time trying to get to a golf course, you’d think he’d rather swing by here instead of calling me down to the morgue.”
“Dentist?” I said.
“Coroner is an elected position in this jurisdiction,” Rittenhaus explained.
I’d heard of the practice of electing a medical professional to the post, and to my way of thinking, it wasn’t a bad one. It meant Fallowfield didn’t need a full-time coroner, because unattended, accidental, and/or suspicious deaths were few and far between. Not every community could boast about that.
“Maybe he’s lonely,” I suggested. “His constituents probably have the good manners to die of natural causes. That doesn’t give a coroner a lot to do.”
“He has enough to do today.” Rittenhaus grabbed his coffee mug from its stack of folders. “A couple hikers passing through town got themselves killed last night.”
I was pretty sure I’d seen those hikers. Yesterday. Eating spaghetti in the Apple Blossom Café.
“What happened?”
Rittenhaus shrugged. “Security guard at the railway yard found them. Looked like exposure to me.”
Exposure? If this morning’s chill was anything to go by, last night would’ve been pretty cold for my Washington, D.C.–tempered hide. But it hadn’t been that cold.
Had it?
Rittenhaus wasn’t a weatherman, however. He was a sheriff. And he tapped the thick file in front of me with his trigger finger as he made for the door.
“This stays here.”
“Sure,” I agreed, and thanked him for showing it to me.
With a curt nod, he decamped. Deputy Dawkins cast one more look at me before trailing after him. I watched their retreating shadows slip away on the hallway’s mud-colored carpet—and as soon as they were gone, I pulled my iPhone from my pocket.
I fired up the camera feature, opened the file, and dove in. I snapped pictures of the folder’s contents as I skimmed summaries once typed up on electric Smith-Coronas, read reports tendered by the county coroner and state lab techs, and absorbed statements signed by strangers, schoolmates, and every possible suspect this little town could cough up. Pamela never named her assailant. In an interview with Sheriff Bowker himself, she swore she couldn’t even describe him. So it was no wonder Bowker had never made an arrest.
Her parents were no help in coming up with a shortlist of suspects, either, though they certainly tried. The sheriff’s every discussion with Mr. Wentz devolved into a heartbreaking recollection of him helping his little girl with her math homework earlier that fateful evening. And the mother’s denial that Pamela’s nightgown was anything besides baby-blue flannel that buttoned to the neck was downright disturbing, considering Barrett had claimed she’d worn a slippery red silky chemise—and that the thing had been stripped from her, never to be seen again.
In Sheriff Bowker’s own scrawl, he noted the garment, regardless of what it was made of, could’ve possibly washed away, since the creek running through the crime scene had been swollen with spring rain. Maybe he got that idea from the state lab techs. While they’d found Barrett’s DNA left behind from his kiss, they blamed the absence of more DNA, hair, and fiber evidence on Pamela’s spending the night semiconscious in that creek bed.
But I took this to mean something else altogether. I took it as an indicator Pamela’s assailant had come to that field prepared to accost her. And had known enough about emerging DNA technology to bring a condom.
And then there were the photos.
Bowker’s deputies had shot every aspect of the trail Pamela had taken to meet Barrett, and of the bank where she’d been found, just in case a photograph captured a clue that would bring the perpetrator to justice. There were pictures of Pamela, too, beaten to a bloody pulp in the course of her assault. They were gruesome and they were shocking—even to me, who, in the course of my career as a PI and my life as a general’s daughter, had seen my share of ugly. But the worst images, in my opinion, catalogued her swinging from a rope in her parents’ barn. And documented her vulnerable body laid open at autopsy.
My stomach clenched as I took pictures of these pictures. Still, I did it because I harbored the same hope Fallowfield’s deputies had probably held twenty-some years ago. I hoped if I could stand to look at these images long enough, I’d see some telltale sign that had gone unnoticed—and that that sign would bring Pamela’s rapist to justice.
But I didn’t spend a second longer with Pamela Wentz’s cold-case file than was absolutely necessary. By the time I finished reading it, I felt like I needed a scalding shower and another slice of the Apple Blossom Café’s chocolate cake. Just not necessarily in that order.
Eager to escape from the building, I made my way toward the front entrance, passing an empty wardroom and a vacant kitchenette. Apparently, Sunday was a quiet day for Fallowfield’s Sheriff’s Office, and I rather envied that. In Washington, everyone I knew used Sunday to get a jump on the week ahead.
Deputy Dawkins was still at his post, however, just in case the phone rang. I found him perched on his stool behind the service counter. I handed Pamela’s file to him.
“I’ll see the sheriff gets this,” he assured me.
He was younger than me, and probably younger than Pamela, too. But if he’d lived in Fallowfield all those years ago, he’d probably have heard about her assault and death. After all, kids have a way of hearing everything, even if a community conspires to shield them—and if so, his perspective would be worth hearing.
I hooked a thumb at the file in his hands and said, “Did you know her?”
“Pamela Wentz? No, ma’am. I only moved here about twelve years ago when I married my wife. I’m still an out-of-towner by most folks’ standards.”
“Well,” I said, hoping my disappointment didn’t show through my smile. “There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m an out-of-towner, too.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He buzzed me through the steel door and out into the lobby.
I was halfway across the terrazzo when Dawkins called to me through the aluminum grill in the plate-glass window.
“Ma’am, since you’re not from around here, either, you might want to watch your step.”
I halted in my tracks, turned to face him.
He’d turned his attention to rearranging the items on his counter.
As near as I could tell, we were the only two souls this side of the jail. Sheriff Rittenhaus hadn’t returned from his meeting with the coroner, and all the other deputies were off duty or on patrol. In the corner, above the heavy door I’d just passed through, a closed-circuit TV camera blinked at me, reminding me it would record every word I, in the lobby, might say. If Dawkins had just threatened me from behind the glass, I had no one to witness it. But if he’d just offered me a well-meant warning…
I never got a chance to find out.
Just then, the lobby door banged open. A harried-looking woman in a boiled-wool coat and boots blew in, herding three children ahead of her like cats. She marched past me and up to the window. Dawkins ignored me while she complained about some guy named MacFarland who’d flung his empty beer bottles in her driveway again just so his wife wouldn’t find them in his truck before church. And with her voice—and the deputy’s words—ringing in my ears, I left the Sheriff’s Office.
Chapter 9
No one awaited me in the parking lot. Nothing seemed unusual as I approached my car. But
Dawkins’s edict still had me looking over my shoulder. And maybe that was the point. Maybe he’d intended to make me feel uneasy. Maybe he didn’t think civilians such as myself should be poking into sheriff department business. I wasn’t sure, but I intended to take his advice.
I intended to watch my step.
That included watching my tail as I drove away from the law enforcement complex and deeper into the countryside. No one followed me as my Jag and I gobbled up one twisty turn after another. When I was sure I was on my own, I pulled into the driveway of a lonely-looking elementary school, punched a location name into my GPS system.
Thirteen minutes later, I was cruising along an undulating stretch of blacktop called Hawthorn Road.
Both the cold-case file and The Fallowfield Examiner had listed locations on Hawthorn Road as the sites of Pamela’s attack and of her suicide. The first, according to Barrett, had been a shortcut through farmers’ fields. How accessible were those fields and that creek bed—and from which direction would Pamela’s assailant have come to intercept her there?
I got my answer soon after the county’s well-paved road abruptly gave way to sparse gravel and packed dirt. My tires complained with a growl and a bounce, and I tapped my brakes to slow down. No grader had been this way in a long time, judging by the washboard ridges rippling across the road’s surface, and I doubted Fallowfield’s snowplows ever passed through here in the winter.
But why should they? Neglected pasture rolled away from both sides of my car. Only the occasional dilapidated building dotted the meadows. The structures must’ve been old cottages or cattle sheds, but I couldn’t tell one kind of dwelling from the other, since the roofs had gone rotten and fallen in.
I drove on, rumbled over a stone bridge. The brook below skipped over river rock. The waterway dwindled to the size of a modest creek, hugged the base of a hill, and finally hid in a fold in the earth. On the hill itself, a switchback of beaten terrain zigzagged across the rise. It might’ve been the path dairy cows once trod.
The Kill Box Page 7
