But maybe there was an opening here, if I could just see it. Did I know anyone close to the mayor besides Jack Rivers? Was there any way I could send him a message? If I could, what message would I send?
The telephone rang. It was Sue.
“Hey, Charley. Sorry I wasn’t awake when you left. You must have made your eight o’clock with time to spare.”
“No trouble at all.”
“You know, I’m still on this unrequested leave. How about lunch?”
I glanced at my watch. It was almost twelve. No breakfast. I was starving.
“Sounds good,” I said. “You want to meet at Benny’s, or were you thinking of something a little nicer?”
“Mmm, a little nicer.”
“Then how about the Pickeral Inn?”
“You read my mind. I have to confess that’s where I am right now.”
“I’ll be right over.”
On the way, I circled the block looking for the brown van, or one from Michigan Bell, or anything even remotely like them. Nothing. At least theoretically, everything that was said in my office or on the telephone could now be taken down on tape. I was going to have to do something about that, though I wasn’t quite sure what it would be.
Sue was waiting at a good table with a view. Í settled in across from her and thanked her for the Diet Coke that was waiting for me.
“Did you sleep in?” I asked. “Mother Nature’s own cure for everything that ails you.”
“No, I’d slept enough,” she said. “Actually, I’ve been pretty busy today. I had breakfast with Bud Billings.”
“Uh-oh. Doesn’t sound to me like you’re maintaining proper distance.”
“I’m not maintaining distance from the case—after all, I’m going back to it tomorrow—but what I’m working on is the ‘proper’ part.”
“Which means?”
“I’m working on my attitude.”
The waitress appeared. Whatever Sue had, she’d picked out while she was waiting for me. I ordered pickerel, the obvious specialty of the house.
Once the waitress was gone, Sue leaned forward and said quietly, “Bud likes old man Evans for these awful murders, all of them.”
“I gathered as much from a little talk I had with him yesterday morning.”
“There’re a lot of things that tie up with his daughter’s death.”
“I know. I was interested enough in the case that I looked up the newspaper accounts. It all happened before I hit town, you know.”
She nodded. “Bud worked the case.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Look, I know you’re thinking we’ve both got the Evanses on our mind—if it’s not Sam, it’s got to be Delbert. But there are some troubling coincidences.”
“Such as the dates?”
“So, you noticed, too. These murders began just about four years to the day from the time that Evans’s daughter died and was buried.”
“That might be an absolutely bona fide, one hundred percent coincidence, kiddo.”
“All right,” she said, “it could be a coincidence, but listen to this. Bud was present when the little Evans girl’s body was exhumed. He said at each one of these ‘snow burials,’ he’s flashed back to it. First of all, there was snow on the ground at the time.”
“Not unusual for Michigan in November.”
“All right, but get this, Charley. Bud says that she hadn’t been under ground long, and the cold helped preserve the body. She was in her best dress, freshly washed, and the little girl was wrapped in clear plastic, the kind that your clothes come in from the cleaners, just like—”
“Listen, Sue, all I can say is that yes, there do seem to be a lot of coincidences, but I think maybe you’re getting into dangerous waters here, and a lot of what you’re saying is pretty circumstantial.
“It would be natural for Mrs. Evans to prepare her daughter for burial and dress her in her finest, wouldn’t it? But can you really see her doing that for the little bodies that were found out there in the snow?
“And can you imagine old man Evans taking that kind of care with those same bodies? I think you’d agree that he’s not the kind of guy who’s too concerned with appearances. As for the coincidence of the clear plastic, it’s an intriguing detail, but what else would you bury a body in if you weren’t going to use a coffin?”
As I was winding down my spiel, it occurred to me that maybe I was protesting too much. After all, when I’d first read the account of Annie Louise Evans’s strange death and even stranger burial, didn’t I have my own suspicions? No one ever said that they were Christian Scientists who refused to call a doctor for their little girl, so religion evidently didn’t play a part in her death. And Mrs. Fenton had said that somehow the Evans family always seemed to find money when they needed it, so it wasn’t that they couldn’t afford a casket.
Maybe they were the kind of sickos who hate their kids and kill them. Look at Susan Smith, drowning her two children in that lake. Sam was still alive, sure, but you could see that old man Evans despised him. Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Evans were depraved and thought the world would be a better place without children. Sure, the past and present events could be seen as mere coincidence, but they might also point to a killer. All I knew at the moment was that I didn’t like the way this conversation was going.
“Look, Sue, let’s just drop this, shall we? I’m sounding more like a defense lawyer every minute, and you’re sounding more like a cop. Just remember what you said last night about having a lot to protect.”
I watched her go through the same process: about to respond sharply, then checking herself, thinking about it, and nodding in assent.
“Okay, Charley.”
Just then our salads arrived, along with a plateful of rolls. The waitress served us and fled back to the kitchen. She may not have shown much style, but it was a welcome interruption. It gave us time to regroup.
“Anyway, that’s not all I did this morning,” she said brightly.
“Oh? What else?”
“I drove out to Hub City.”
“So you could nose around a little on your own? Really, Sue, don’t you think—”
“Hush, Charley, shush, shush, please. Remember? I told you I was working on my attitude?”
I nodded.
“Well, that’s what this was all about. I needed to talk to someone, and I drove out to Hub City and had a session with Father Chuck. Remember him?”
“Sure, I represented him in that phony lawsuit the Evanses were threatening—Father Charles Albertus.”
“You said you liked him.”
“And you said if he weren’t a priest, you could really go for him.”
“Come on, Charley, give me a break.”
I offered an apology in the form of a wink. Just kidding. “How did it go?” I asked.
“It went just great. I’ll tell you, if there’d been more like him, I might never have left the Church.”
“He probably told you that you never did.”
“Something like that. But there is that somewhat pivotal divorce I went through about ten years ago.”
“Not to mention the three I’ve had over the last twenty. Did he tell you he’d like to have you back in the Church?”
“Something like that.”
“He made a pitch to get me back in, too—mild, restrained, but a pitch.”
“But that wasn’t what it was about, really. No, he was trying to be helpful. He said he’d just come back from a retreat with some other priests, and they got to talking about how adults never come to them with their problems. Oh, there’s confession, of course, but that’s often desperation for the one who’s doing the confessing, and for the priest, it’s, well, it’s a formula—garbage in, garbage out. Priests just never get a chance to talk things through with people anymore. He says it’s like they’ve been left out of the equation.”
“So I suppose he was quite receptive.”
“He helped me a lot. First of all, he listened. Tot
al attention. Not that you don’t, but I don’t know, in a way you’re too close to help. I guess what I needed was somebody objective who’d listen and tell me that I might have a problem. I told him about how the stress was built right into the job, that I handled sex crimes, and I gave him as a more or less typical example of my cases that kid who raped his grandmother. He was properly horrified and said that mine was probably the toughest job of all because I saw humanity at its worst.”
“It’s true, of course. I’ve wondered myself sometimes how you put up with it.”
“But if you’d only say that, Charley, it’d really help a lot. Okay, okay, I didn’t want to get together just to dump on you, so forget I said that. What I told Father Chuck is that what really troubled me was working on these serial murders of children. He was interested in that, wanted to know how the investigation was going. No, I didn’t mention anything about the Evans family, but I did tell him we had some definite leads.”
“You’ve got a witness. Sam Evans. He saw something, but he doesn’t seem to know who or what he saw, though.”
“Let’s not go into that again. Father Chuck seemed surprised I was working on the case.”
“How come?”
“He said he didn’t know that they were being classified as sex crimes. He hadn’t seen anything about that in the newspapers. He wanted to know if there was some reason to think they were. I explained that until we knew otherwise, we were assuming there was a sexual element involved, and besides, they had all available personnel working on it. I was just part of the team.
“But then I told him about my own response to the murders,” she continued, “how I’d lost it out there on Beulah Road, gotten hysterical and everything. I’ll tell you, Charley, when I saw little Billy Bartkowski in his jeans and plaid shirt, half-covered with snow, he looked like he was asleep, not dead. His eyes were shut. His mouth was just slightly open, like he was just taking a nap.”
She almost lost it again. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. She turned away from me and wiped at them with one hand. I reached across the table, grasped the other hand, and gave it a squeeze.
“Was that the boy’s name?” I asked. “Billy Bartkowski?”
She cleared her throat. “That’s right. Didn’t you see the papers? The ones in Detroit are really giving it a big play—‘the third dead and no end in sight,’” she quoted.
“I hope they’re wrong about that.”
“You’re not the only one. But I must say Father Chuck had a very interesting take on all this. He reminded me of the three murders, two of the children were from his parish. He said it’s not easy to face parents in such a situation, but that he would tell me just what he had told the Quigleys and the Bartkowskis. He said that the world is a sad and terrible place, that life can be hurtful to children as well as adults. Who knows what terrible trials awaited them as adults, what evils they might have met in their lives? Catherine and Billy had been spared all that. Every one of us has to die, so isn’t it at least in some sense better to die when you’re without sin and assured of a place at God’s right hand?”
“I take it you’re quoting him pretty directly?”
“Almost word for word.”
“Did he say how the parents took that?”
She thought about that a moment. “No.”
“What did you think about it? I have to say, Sue, it’s talk like that that drove me out of the Church.”
“And not your divorces?”
“They came afterward.”
“I don’t know, Charley,” she said. “I have to say that I was moved. He is right, after all, the world is a terrible place. Maybe it’s a case of you had to be there. If you’d seen him, heard him, you might have understood.”
It wasn’t often that I’d seen Sue so intense. Of course, she was badly tossed by these murders. Who wasn’t? The death of a child is unthinkable, and now there were three children dead and not much to go on as to who killed them or why.
And it was clear that Father Chuck was in his compassionate way trying to help her through this nightmare. He was a priest, after all, a good one at that, and his offer of comfort was much appreciated. I was glad that he was there for her, in a way that apparently I was not, because I was thinking that she had begun to unravel.
As much as I liked and admired Father Chuck, I couldn’t shake my innate ambivalence about the Church and its theology. Which was basically what he was spouting to her. Yes, I had been brought up to believe that God is good and that when a good person dies, it’s God’s will. And that the person will be assured a place in heaven at His side. But time and life had pretty much turned me into a skeptic, and now what I believe is that when you’re dead, you’re dead, and who knows if there’s a heaven or a hell?
As good-hearted as Father Chuck was trying to be with Sue, I couldn’t help but think that he was full of it. Someone had killed those poor kids for no good reason other than madness. They were little people who deserved to lead a full life. They were dead and they shouldn’t be.
As I drove back to my office, I did another trip around the block, searching for potential eavesdroppers. Again, I was relieved to find no suspicious vans or trucks, no dish antennas pointing in the direction of the office. About halfway around the circuit, I stopped at a red light and was hailed from the left. I looked over there and found Dominic Benda waving and grinning. It seemed like he was back on the job—in uniform, except for the insignia, driving a patrol car without the domelight and the official county markings—just painted over.
“Hey, Charley!” he yelled. “How’s the girlfriend? She recover from the party yet?”
I forced a smile and nodded as I waved back at him.
Then he leaned back behind the steering wheel, waved again as the light changed to green, and pulled away. Would you call that impersonating an officer of the law, or just refusing to accept retirement? Either way, it seemed sort of sick. He couldn’t be much over sixty, maybe sixty-two, having spent his whole working life behind the wheel of a Kerry County Police patrol car. He’d probably been back at the station, hanging out with his former fellow officers, or maybe at lunch with them. They’d get tired of having him around soon, and he might wind up as a security guard someplace in Port Huron. If I’d asked him how he liked retirement, he would have told me it was terrific. They ought to have mandatory psychiatric care as part of the retirement package.
I pulled into the office parking lot and found it right there waiting for me—a Ford van, blue but otherwise like the brown one that had made life miserable for me that morning. Who knows? Maybe they’d just given it a quick paint job. I jumped out of my car and walked over to it, determined to have it out with them, no matter who they were—tekkies, Mayor’s Squad, it didn’t matter to me at that moment.
It was empty. Nobody in the cab, and although there was equipment of some kind in the back, nobody was concealed there. Confused, still annoyed, I trudged up the stairs and walked into my office.
Mrs. Fenton pointed behind me to the couch. “This gentleman has been waiting for you for about fifteen minutes.” Something in her manner said that she approved of him.
He advanced toward me, a small man in his fifties, neatly dressed, what you might even call dapper.
Offering me his card with a modest smile, he said, “A mutual friend told me you might have need of my services.” He smiled again, looking like a gerbil with a secret.
The card read ALONZO BRAGG, COMMUNICATIONS SECURITY SPECIALIST. Beneath that was a Detroit phone number but no address.
I frowned, unable to think for a moment what a communications security specialist might be.
“I understand you had a surprise visit from Michigan Bell yesterday afternoon. They may have left some equipment behind. Perhaps you might like me to look? They can be quite forgetful sometimes.”
It had to be Mark Conroy who had sent him over. “This mutual friend,” I said, “have you looked around his place?”
“Oh yes, t
his morning. It was very messy, bits and pieces left all over. He was sure you would have a similar problem.”
“Certainly, Mr. Bragg, do what you can.”
He brought up his equipment case, laid it on the coffee table, and unpacked it. When he finished, he had outfitted himself with a kind of electronic stethoscope that ended in a wand that could be pointed anywhere he liked. The entire contraption was powered by a battery pack he strapped around his waist. He smiled at me and nodded.
“Ready,” he said.
“Then go right ahead.”
He did, moving quite professionally and thoroughly through the room, covering it with the wand as he waved it this way and that.
Mrs. Fenton watched, fascinated by the entire operation. As he approached her desk, she stood up and moved away, taking a place beside me.
“He’s the most fascinating man,” she whispered. “We were having a conversation about astronomy before you came in, actually about the planets, the possibility of life on them. All very well informed. None of this UFO nonsense,” she added firmly. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was smitten.
He pulled her phone apart and took out a little half-inch dot of a receiver and transmitter, all in one. He found one just like it in my phone, too, but made sure that my entire office was otherwise clean. When he’d finished, he held them out in the palm of his hand for my inspection. They seemed impossibly small to do all that they were supposed to do.
“These are very nice,” said Mr. Bragg, “much better than that Brazilian junk I usually find. Would you mind if I kept them?” He was almost giddy with anticipation.
“I have no use for them.”
“What about that item in the corner?” He pointed to the dish antenna.
“I’m holding that for the owners.”
“You never know.” He gave me an amused little smile then, as if he’d made quite a joke. “Now, I was told there’s also some question about your place of abode.”
“I suppose there is.”
He followed me over to my apartment building in his blue van, did a sweep of my three rooms and kitchen, and pronounced them clean. We walked together back down to the parking lot, and he explained that he really hadn’t expected to find anything in my apartment.
The Judgment Page 20
