Instruments of Night

by Thomas H. Cook

  But it could not have been Allison to whom Faye nodded that morning. Graves discovered this once he turned to the statement Allison made to Sheriff Gerard only minutes after his interview with her father. It could not have been Allison because Allison had been in the dining room at the time, reading a book she’d started the night before. She had seen her friend only once that morning, she went on to say, the same glimpse she’d years later described to Graves, though in the earlier interview she’d added that “Faye gave me a little wave before she turned and walked away.”

  Graves let his mind dwell upon that brief moment, as he knew Allison Davies must still dwell upon it, with that odd combination of irony and sorrow all people feel who have said a last good-bye without knowing it, watched a loved one wave, smile, offer a departing word as if it were merely one of thousands yet to come. He knew what Allison had done after that. She’d gone back to the dining room. Back to her book. Faye had returned to the gazebo, spoken briefly to Warren Davies, then glanced up and nodded to someone Mr. Davies assumed to be standing at one of the windows on the second floor.

  In his mind Graves saw Faye’s eyes lift upward, saw the small, slight movement of her head. It seemed to him that Mr. Davies might well have been right, that Faye had received a signal of some kind.

  But from whom?

  For the rest of the morning Graves tried to find out. He studied the notes Sheriff Gerard had compiled during the interviews he’d conducted on the morning after Faye’s disappearance. As he read, he often stopped to envision a scene, looking for hidden themes, motives, sinister connections. One by one the denizens of Riverwood came before him—not only the Davieses themselves, but maids and cooks, handymen and retainers. But despite all the work Sheriff Gerard had done in his initial interviews, Graves could find little to feed his imagination. For although several people at Riverwood had seen Faye that morning of her death, only Jake Mosley had followed her into the wood.

  Two days after Gerard’s initial visit to Riverwood, Faye’s body had been found in Manitou Cave. At that point, with the “missing person” found, the focus of the investigation shifted from Sheriff Gerard to Dennis Portman, from a man searching for a girl to one searching for her killer.

  CHAPTER 12

  And so Graves knew it would be there. The Murder Book. The lead detective’s account of a homicide investigation. He found Dennis Portman’s Murder Book in the top drawer of the filing cabinet behind his desk.

  The Murder Book consisted of a detailed record of Portman’s activities, everything that had been done in the course of the State Trooper’s investigation. There were usually photographs of the victim, of suspects, sometimes even witnesses, along with precise timetables of the detective’s movements, the collection of evidence, everything from lab reports to interviews with witnesses, the time and place such interviews had occurred, and summaries of what each witness had said.

  It was all gathered in a plain blue folder, remarkably neat and orderly. Almost too neat, Graves thought. Too orderly, so that he wondered if perhaps Detective Portman had expected it to be reviewed at some point in the future, his work reconsidered and evaluated, his long effort to discover what happened to Faye Harrison now passed to other hands.

  A newspaper article had been taped just inside the front cover. Its headline read DENNIS R. PORTMAN TO LEAD RIVERWOOD MURDER INVESTIGATION. An accompanying photograph showed Portman as a big man, his bulky body draped in a transparent plastic rainslick almost identical to the one Graves had earlier imagined him wearing. Reality had added a gray felt hat, however, one Portman had tugged down over his brow, leaving his face in shadow.

  For a moment Graves peered into that shadow. He tried to make something of the dark, unblinking eyes that peered back at him through the years, sunken, hooded, with puffy bags beneath and deep creases at the sides. The eyes seemed pressed into the great doughy mass of the face that surrounded them, a fat man’s face, dissolute, with flabby jowls and a second chin that hung in an indulgent crescent beneath the first.

  As he continued to look at the photograph, Graves could feel his imagination heating up, filling in the blank spaces, creating an identity for Dennis Portman. He began to feel the man’s vast heaviness, hear his labored breathing as he’d mounted the stairs toward the main house at Riverwood or struggled up the steep forest trail that led to Indian Rock. How the heat of that long-ago summer must have afflicted him. How often he must have swabbed his neck and brow with the white handkerchief that protruded from the right front pocket of his rumpled flannel jacket. How longingly he must have stared out over the cool green water. Had he remembered the slenderness of his youth, the speed and grace that had once been his, the whole vanished world of his lost agility?

  Graves drew his eyes from the photograph, making himself stop. He knew that he was perfectly capable of losing his focus for hours, wasting a whole afternoon dreaming up a shattered life for Dermis Portman, and thus forgetting that other shattered life, Faye Harrison’s, that it had been the old detective’s job to investigate.

  Portman had placed his first interview at the front of the book. The subject was Jim Preston, the hiker who’d spotted Faye Harrison on Mohonk Trail the afternoon of her murder. Since Graves’ reading had given him considerable experience with police argot, he found it easy to decipher the shorthand Portman used in his notes.

  RE: James Miles Preston

  ARVD: PH/BF/8/30/46-14:30

  PD: WM—Ht: 6’1” Wt: 145—(DOB: 2/3/28)

  Status: NOW

  CR: Neg.

  TI: 14:37

  PI: SO/PH/BF

  IO: DP/NYSP

  DOI: 1h/12m

  OP: 0

  ROI: A.T.

  From these notes, Graves learned that James Preston was an eighteen-year-old white male. He was tall and rather thin. He had no criminal record, nor any outstanding warrants against him. That such a background check had been run on Preston at all indicated that he’d briefly been under suspicion, though probably for no more substantial reason than that he’d been the last person to see Faye Harrison alive.

  On August 30, at 2:30 P.M., Preston had arrived at police headquarters in Britanny Falls. Seven minutes later he’d been interviewed by New York State Police Detective Dennis Portman in Sheriff Gerard’s office. That interview had lasted one hour and twelve minutes. It had been conducted by Portman alone, with no others present, and, in the absence of a stenographer, it had been recorded by means of audiotape.

  The contents of that tape had later been transcribed, a copy of the transcription officially included in Portman’s Murder Book. The transcript was nearly twenty pages long, a rambling, repetitive conversation, with Portman applying the usual police method of revisiting the same area again and again, hoping to glean some additional fact the witness had either forgotten or chosen to conceal.

  In the case of Jim Preston, the method had succeeded only in extending a brief sighting into an elaborate account of Preston’s own activities on the day of Faye Harrison’s disappearance:

  PORTMAN: I guess I’ll start by asking you what you were doing on Mohonk Trail, Jim?

  PRESTON: I had been hiking all that morning.

  PORTMAN: Where had you started from?

  PRESTON: Just outside Millerton.

  PORTMAN: What time did you start out?

  PRESTON: Around seven o’clock.

  PORTMAN: Do you remember the route you took?

  PRESTON: Up through Larchmont Gap. Then along Higgins Creek.

  PORTMAN: Where had you planned to end up?

  PRESTON: At the end of Mohonk Trail. I figured it would take me about three hours to get there from where I started, then I could get back home by lunch.

  For the next four pages of transcript, Preston traced his route through the mountains, meticulously indicating particular trails. He’d walked for over an hour before finally penetrating the forest surrounding Riverwood, encountering no one else until he began to make his way up Mohonk Trail.

 
Up the trail, as Graves noted particularly, just as it had been reported in the local paper the day after Preston had first been questioned by Sheriff Gerard.

  PORTMAN: Now, about what time was it when you got onto Mohonk Trail?

  PRESTON: Well, I don’t carry a watch, but I think it was probably a little after eight o’clock.

  PORTMAN: How long after that did you run into Faye Harrison?

  PRESTON: About forty minutes or so. I’d made it to the top of the hill. That’s when I saw her.

  PORTMAN: What did you see?

  PRESTON: Well, I was walking up the trail and when I made it to the top, I stopped. There’s a big rock there. Right at the top of the hill. Indian Rock, they call it. That’s where I was when I saw her. She’d already passed Indian Rock. She was headed down the other side of the hill.

  PORTMAN: So she was ahead of you?

  PRESTON: Yes.

  PORTMAN: How far ahead?

  PRESTON: Oh, maybe thirty yards or so. Going down the slope to where the trail forks. One trail goes to the parking area and the other down to the river.

  PORTMAN: Which one did she take?

  PRESTON: I don’t know. I didn’t watch her that long. I just saw her heading down the trail.

  PORTMAN: Did she see you?

  PRESTON: I don’t think so. Her back was to me.

  PORTMAN: Was she alone?

  PRESTON: Yes, sir. She was all by herself. Moving pretty fast down the trail.

  The fact that Faye Harrison had been moving at such an accelerated pace had triggered a thought in Portman’s mind.

  PORTMAN: The way she was walking. So fast, I mean. Did you get the idea she might be trying to get away from somebody?

  PRESTON: Could be.

  PORTMAN: Now, when you first talked to Sheriff Gerard, you mentioned seeing another man in the woods. Was he on the same trail?

  PRESTON: No, sir. He wasn’t on the trail at all.

  Graves saw Portman lean forward on the cluttered desk, his sunken eyes boring into Preston’s open, youthful face.

  PORTMAN: Now, you’ve already identified that man as Jake Mosley, right?

  PRESTON: Yes, sir. Sheriff Gerard showed me a picture of him—Mosley—and he was the man I saw.

  PORTMAN: How far from Faye Harrison was Mosley when you saw him?

  PRESTON: He was pretty far down the slope from her. Almost at the bottom of the hill. The other side of the hill from where the girl was.

  PORTMAN: You mean back toward Riverwood?

  PRESTON: That’s right.

  PORTMAN: What was he doing down there?

  PRESTON: Just standing there, as far as I could tell. At the bottom of the slope. He was sort of leaning against a tree.

  PORTMAN: Did you ever see him come up the trail?

  PRESTON: No. I just rested there at Indian Rock a minute, then went on down to the parking lot.

  PORTMAN: Was Mosley still at the bottom of the slope when you left Indian Rock?

  PRESTON: I don’t know. I didn’t look back down that way.

  PORTMAN: So you never saw Mosley again?

  PRESTON: No, sir.

  PORTMAN: Did you see Faye Harrison again?

  PRESTON: No. She just disappeared. I glanced down the hill and saw this man, Mosley, the one you’re talking about. Then I looked down the other side of the hill, where I’d seen the girl. But she was already down the trail and out of sight.

  “Down the trail,” Graves said aloud, glancing back over the transcript of Jim Preston’s interrogation, noting that Preston had referred to Faye Harrison as going “down” Mohonk Trail on four separate occasions. He felt something shift in his mind, a tiny, audible movement, the sound Slovak heard when something didn’t fit.

  He walked to the map on the wall and peered at it closely. Mohonk Trail clearly ran “up” the ridge toward Indian Rock, then circled it and headed down the other side of the mountain at a steep angle until it reached the Hudson River. If Faye had been going down Mohonk Trail when Preston saw her, she had already gone past Indian Rock.

  With his finger, Graves traced the path Faye had to have taken to have been seen going down Mohonk Trail. If Faye had intended to meet Allison Davies at Indian Rock, why had she not stopped there? Why had she not waited? And if, after realizing that Allison was not going to meet her at their “secret place,” why had Faye not returned to Riverwood? Why had she gone down the opposite slope instead?

  One answer presented itself instantly. Graves saw a dark figure moving swiftly along Mohonk Trail, Faye, now alert to its presence, rushing away, past Indian Rock and down the other side of the ridge, no longer precisely aware of where she was headed, only that she had to get out of the encircling woods. A man. Pursuing Faye from behind. Closing in swiftly. Reaching for her shoulder. Now Graves saw Faye twist round to face him, a figure his imagination had already draped in Kessler’s black leather coat. As if he were a boy again, he felt Kessler’s hand grasp his shoulder, heard the words that had sounded in the darkness behind him, Start walking. He knew Faye must have obeyed instantly, instinctively, already half-paralyzed, fear searing through her sharp as an electric shock. He recalled the words he’d heard that night, Kessler’s and his own.

  Where you live, boy?

  In that house there.

  Okay, walk on.

  And he had walked on, moving meekly through the covering darkness, with no thought of escape, no notion of resistance, frightened only for himself, for what might happen to him if he did not obey, and knowing all the time exactly what he was doing, a little voice mercilessly reminding him that he was leading Ammon Kessler to his sister.

  Graves peered at the map intently, as if something lay hidden along the trails and ridges it portrayed, the unfound rope that had been used to murder Faye Harrison. He saw her once again on the trail, shoved brutally from behind, and wondered if she’d made it far enough down the slope to have seen the open area through the trees, cars parked there, people getting in and out. How near they must have seemed before she suddenly felt the hand grip her shoulder, heard the voice behind her. And after that, how far.

  CHAPTER 13

  There were no pictures of the actual procedure in Faye Harrison’s autopsy report, but Graves could easily imagine her corpse on a stainless steel table, faceup and callously exposed under a fluorescent light. From the many books he’d read about forensic pathology, he knew that it had been flayed open in a Y incision, flaps of skin folded back from the trunk, then sewn together again in a crisscross of thick black thread. By the time the examination had run its course, Faye’s young body would have been fully explored, every cavity and orifice, the contents of her stomach emptied, her bowels uncoiled, a physical violation so extreme, Graves found it unspeakable in the living, barely endurable in the dead.

  But as the report revealed, despite the dreadful thoroughness of his search, the coroner who’d conducted the autopsy on Faye Harrison had uncovered little of consequence. He’d found no sign of rape or torture. There were a few scratches on her arms and legs, probably the result of her body being dragged into the cave. Beyond such superficial wounds, the coroner noted only that the girl’s fingers were red and raw, and that three of her fingernails had been broken. Some kind of rope had been wound around her throat. A few of its fibers were lodged beneath her fingernails. In the coroner’s opinion, the rope had been “yanked hard,” cutting into the flesh and leaving a collar of bruised tissue around her neck.

  But for all the apparent force with which the rope had tightened around Faye’s throat, it had not broken her neck, as the report stated flatly, thereby avoiding what that specific lack of trauma actually meant: that Faye Harrison had not died instantly, but had felt every moment of her protracted strangulation, the bite of the cord, the constriction of her airways, the sense of slowly exploding from the inside that is the physical sensation of suffocation, its particular agony, and which would have thrown her into a violent seizure, a hideous flailing of arms and legs, the kicking and bucking
that Graves knew to be the awful dance of this kind of death.

  He found photographs of her body in a separate envelope, wedged in between the testimony of Jim Preston, and that of Andre Grossman, who’d actually stumbled upon her body. The envelope was marked simply SOC—no doubt Detective Portman’s police shorthand for “scene of the crime.”

  Graves felt the old dread grip him as he laid the envelope on his desk. It was like thousands of tiny wires suddenly pulled taut inside him. He knew what he’d do if they began to break. He’d rise, bolt from this room, and never come back. By the time he reached his cottage, he’d be shivering uncontrollably, just as he had the night before Gwen’s burial, when Mrs. Flexner had escorted him to the funeral parlor where his sister had been taken, leading him gently down the dark corridor, his body shaking so violently by the time she’d opened the door and he’d glimpsed the black coffin in which Gwen lay that she’d abruptly turned him around and hastily rushed him back down the musty hallway, the two of them nearly sprinting by the time they’d bolted through the entrance door and into the warm night air. He could still hear her voice trying desperately to calm him, It’s all right, Paul. You don’t have to look at her if you don’t want to.

  He was poised once again at the entrance to that room he’d fled so many years before. As if thrown back in time, a boy again, he felt himself reach for the brass knob, though in reality it was the flap of the SOC envelope he reached for; felt his hand push open that scarred wooden door, though it was really his fingers drawing out the three photographs that had been placed inside the plain brown envelope; felt his body move toward his sister’s coffin, its lid thrown open, a pale light rising from what lay inside, though when he reached it and looked down, it was the corpse of Faye Harrison he saw.