They say police officers have the longest memories of all. The trouble is they can forget to use them, after years of work alongside so much pain. Especially when it becomes logical, deeply felt, to think or even say out loud, If he didn’t do it, you know he sure as shit did something else.
Which is why, after a fashion, even though he’d tell the last kid on Earth that being a cop is the best job out there, Martin will admit that sometimes he likes defense attorneys.
* * *
Four days into his first week at his new job, it’s all red tape to cut and forms to complete. Police reports to order. Property records to check. Dispatch calls and photographs that must be applied for and reviewed, plus diagrams and on-scene video and rap sheets. A dozen or two dozen requests to put into the field. Lab reports. DNA. Forensics. Field notes and logbooks. Ultimately, procedures upon procedures mirror the endless legalese. And all of it’s five times worse since it occurs in New Hampshire.
The state’s not exactly used to this sort of thing, or familiar with Martin Krug. Not just new to the beat, he’s a foreigner. Witness statements turn up incomplete, barely existent. He doesn’t know the pathways or even the proper nicknames to find them. Calls go straight to voicemail. Assistants lose his notes. Text messages exit the galaxy.
Then again, he hasn’t been part of a double murder in more than a decade. On two hands he can count the number of homicides he saw. That used to be a good thing. Then again, what man’s life ever was improved by less experience? Small-town policing had been a cruise, mostly, with a seat at the captain’s table. He listened to complaints. Started winter coat programs, made Scout troop speeches. Mostly, he’d been an HR manager.
On his fourth day in Claymore, Martin visits the scene, the doctor’s house. It’s back to an ordinary home again, free from police gear. Set behind a windbreak of trees in a green hilly subdivision, the development overlooks downtown Claymore. As if ratcheted up the incline by money. Nice house. Recent construction, two stories with a basement and a wraparound porch. A pair of skylights above the kitchen, gray paint job, glossy black trim and brassy gutters. Storybook New England, quaint like the neighbors. Everyone nice and quaint.
A shingle hangs off the mailbox. FAMILY PRACTICE, N. ASHBURN, M.D.
But the doctor’s house is a little nicer than the others, a little more polished. The medical practice is attached to the garage, a small cottage, almost a guesthouse. No toys in the yard, no basketball hoop. So no young children. Probably no young grandkids, either.
He pictures a bistro poster in the half-bath, just like the one in his own half-bath. On the porch is a cedar wine chest on steel legs. Lillian purchased the exact same one back in March for a client, same color even. It’s that year’s model. Eleven hundred bucks.
So maybe we know, he thinks, the doctor had money. Perhaps a recent influx of more money, for such largesse. Therefore it’s not unworkable that some kid, person, or persons could dream up a couple thousand bucks stashed under a rug.
Martin gets out and walks the perimeter. A red-haired woman stares from a window next door. He waves, smiles warmly. She disappears. Perhaps too warm.
Through the garage windows are two SUVs, Lexus, one white, one goldish, sparkling clean. Along a wall is a workbench, vise grip, work gloves. The tool locker is a double-wide, gray, with horizontal shelves. A potter’s wheel stands by, still in its packaging. Bags of golf clubs hang from a beam. A retired couple with money, nothing more.
He goes back to the porch. Steps are clean. Porch is clean. He sits on the stairs and tries to work through some of his questions. To start: If the kid did it, forget incentive, how’d he do it? The kid’s not big. Never used violence so far as they knew.
“He’s spindle-necked,” Martin says out loud, to the flagstones.
Yet somehow a scrawny, hollow-chested kid overpowered or surprised the big doctor adequately to stab him multiple times. And strangled the wife?
While presumably she put up a fight, on the worst day of her life. But not enough to leave any marks on the kid.
What was she strangled with anyway? The kid says a thin rope. So he just happens to keep a garrote in his pocket, the kid with no priors.
And somehow, by his lonesome, he loads both bodies into the truck.
And cleans up the mess.
And drives off without being noticed by the neighbors.
Detectives have a low tolerance for ambiguity. You don’t build the truth, you build a case. Brenner didn’t have the autopsy yet, but they already knew a couple things. Multiple knife wounds to the doctor’s gut. Jagged, rough cuts, which probably meant a struggle took place. And so agreed the scene report and samples, blood that had been found on the floor. Also, there was a wound on the back of the head. Bruise, old blood, presumably from when the body hit the ground.
Blood on the wife’s robe was verified as the doctor’s. Probably the killer transferred it, or maybe she’d embraced the body at some point, or gotten blood on her in the Explorer.
At some point the bodies may have rolled around together in the back.
According to the report, latent prints inside the house matched to the doctor, the wife, and Nick Toussaint Jr. They also got a great print for a plumber who confirmed he’d been to the house two days before the attacks took place, to replace a toilet. Otherwise clean.
The poor guy wanted to know if it was okay to cash Mrs. Ashburn’s check.
Martin gets up from the stairs and telephones his new colleague.
“New Jersey,” Brenner says. “This has to be quick.”
“I’m at the house.”
“So?”
“I thought we could do a walk-through together. If you’re free.”
“Martin, I have eleven pending cases. Twenty-plus briefs marked ‘open.’”
“Okay, I get it.”
“Do you? I have to be in court twenty minutes from now. Then I have to testify up in Ossipee because some moron reopened something we all thought was dead months ago.”
“I said, I get it.”
“Call me when you crack the case.”
He walks in a circle, with a chest full of aggravation. If the kid did it, then there’s gotta be an accomplice. Plus some motive he doesn’t know about yet. Some reason the kid would jump to give a false confession, despite the setting, the handcuffs, the senior cop who shouted in hospital rooms.
But if the kid didn’t do it, then he likely knows who did, or has a good guess. Either way he’d taken a fall for some reason, and won’t say why because—
Because he doesn’t know why.
Or, the kid knows why, and he likes why.
Somehow he is the why.
Or he wants to protect someone. For whom, out of indebtedness, he can stomach two murders.
“That’s one hell of a debt,” Martin says under his breath.
Or he actually did do it, with an accomplice.
Or he simply did it, solo, just like he said.
Martin retrieves his notebooks from the car. Sits on the stoop, clips his nails with his penknife. For the last couple days he’d dug through the Ashburns’ public lives. Four speeding tickets in five years between them. Their credit score was fine, no obvious trails of addiction, no known wacky sex. No proof of subpoena service. No record they purchased guns, boats, exotic pets. They’d bought the house in cash after selling a previous home at profit, otherwise didn’t appear to spread around much money. Donations to Republican candidates, local charities, the Sierra Club.
He’d found an adult daughter, Moira Ashburn, employed at a veterinary clinic nearby. She’s next on the list.
A pair of curtains flash in the neighbor’s house. A minute later, he knocks three times on the door.
The redhead opens it a foot.
“Are you with the media?”
“Police, ma’am. With the Public Defender’s Office, actually. My name is Martin Krug. May I come in?”
“I’ve already talked to the police.”
S
he’s forty-something, exuding interest but defensive. Self-justifying in most things, with that tone, he’d guess.
A little girl says something indecipherable in the background, in conversation with a television show.
“Can I ask first,” he says, “why you thought I’d be the media?”
“I’m just surprised.”
“Have you had a problem with the media? Mrs.…”
“Not yet we haven’t.”
“So what I’m doing here,” he says, after a moment, “is repeating the police investigation on behalf of the defense. Just in case the police missed anything.”
“I don’t see how they did. Not on my part at least.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“I heard that the boy confessed.”
“Ma’am, can I ask you a couple questions?”
“Go ahead.”
“The night of June seventeenth, you were at home?”
“If you want to know where kids like him go wrong, you should start with the motorcycle rally. All the scum that washes up around here, that’s where the drugs come from.”
“Ma’am, you were at home on the night of the seventeenth.”
“We were. Me, my husband, and my daughter.”
“I have a daughter, too. How old is she?”
“She’s four.”
“That night, did you hear anything strange? See anyone in the neighborhood that surprised you? Any strange cars, for example.”
Then the child starts to wail. Martin knows what comes next, he quickly writes down his phone number and hands it over before the door closes.
At noon, he breaks for lunch, gets a sandwich. Thirty minutes later he’s back to dog it, fast and furious. But after three hours, nothing’s new, nothing’s different from the reports. He’s about to quit when he remembers: the doctor’s office. Attached to the garage. He’d forgotten about it completely. Going senile faster than he knew.
The door is locked. There’s a row of tiny brass hooks in the kitchen. He snatches all the keys. One works. Inside is a cramped lobby, a small rounded desk for a receptionist, piles of file folders, two pale blue prescription pads with the doctor’s name on top. And no sign of forced entry. Nothing unusual.
He moves restlessly. The one examination room’s got all the usual stuff. So what’s he missing? There’s something right in front of him, he knows it. And there it is: No computer. No cords, no dust abnormalities.
Not only is nothing missing, there hasn’t been a computer here for a while. If ever.
He picks up one of the prescription pads and taps it against his leg.
What doctor’s office doesn’t have a computer?
Martin goes into the garage. He looks more closely at the tool locker. It’s locked. He’s an idiot: the drawers are way too deep for wrenches. A little silver key unlocks it. It’s all files inside. He checks the Ts, and look at that, Nick Toussaint Jr.
* * *
sorry u guys … kinda sad update but does anyone know anything more w/r/t ashburn murders? im not finding much, not much here on FB either :(
Claymore Kid® is in custody, trademark mine. Judge Toffler will preside. For now the Kid keeps rooms at the courthouse.
Hi Al. How do you know all of this??
Friend on the inside. FWIW the Kid’s family used to be hoity-toity. Let’s just say you’d recognize the last name. Mom gives piano lessons up on Oak Hill. I hired the husband to fix my roof years ago. F-ing prick took me to small-claims court for $75. He said I owed him lunch breaks. That kind of family now.
DUDE IM STILL LAUGHING
Yeah well according to the checkout girl at Hannaford’s tonight the Kid did it for revenge because Dr. Ashburn messed up some kind of medical treatment on his leg.
You guys hey, hey Al, how’s things?? Thought I would chime in here with some info. So my daughter is same year as this guy’s girlfriend at CHS so naturally the school is all talking about this on social media, surprise surprise. Real name of the girl I won’t say because she’s a minor (let’s show some class howabout??) but turns out she is the daughter of let’s say a prominent official, I kid you not. (Also, Al, of a family we all “know,” so to speak.)
This generation can’t surprise me anymore lol
FURTHER EVIDENCE CLAYMORE = MYRTLE BEACH OF NEW ENGLAND.
* * *
The previous week, at a gas station in central Massachusetts, during her drive up to New Hampshire from New York City, Leela Mann checked her email on her phone and found two messages: a note from her father that she archived without reading, and an actual response to her email of employment desperation.
It was from a boy she once knew, during her internship at Jambands, Bryan James. Except the message didn’t originate from Jambands.com, but a domain she couldn’t recognize. Or, a domain she did recognize, as in really recognized, but never had received an email from and didn’t quite believe was in her inbox. Never mind attached to Bryan, of all people.
How on earth had Bryan James found a job over there?
What she remembered best about Bryan was that he always wore a Yankees cap, and generally gave off a glow of someone for whom life kept going great. He was attached most strongly in her memory to an evening that had followed her last day at the website—Bryan was the same guy who once informed her, boastfully, that occasionally he liked to stream porn at work for the moral challenge of not pleasuring himself—when he DM’d her out of the blue to say he’d received an invitation to a cocktail party that night, at the august offices of a literary magazine, and he wanted to know if she’d be his plus-one.
For two hours, she couldn’t decide what to wear. She’d finally settled on a romper from Urban Outfitters, a bright vintage print of roses that she could picture on Greta Gerwig. Romantic, quirky, austerely whimsical. The new her. Then, at the party, she was ravaged by nerves. She stepped through the door. Music, smoke, loud chatter. People turned, people stared—as if she’d punctured their moment. The bubble quickly resealed. Everyone was older, sophisticated, voluble in the soft light of overhead lamps. The kind of people whom Greta Gerwig probably actually hung out with. None of them in a little girl’s onesie.
She’d found a beer as fast as possible. Closed her eyes slowly and, after a long time, opened them again and floated around the rooms for an hour under the gaze of so much taxidermy—stuffed birds, old men in blazers—while she listened to rapid, pitched conversation about what Truman Capote had said about Bianca Jagger (she didn’t catch it), about the dogmas of Lorrie Moore (she didn’t grasp them), about fields of significance to be tilled in the Benetton-hearted songbook of John Mayer (she agreed totally). And she loved it all, despite her self-consciousness, her heavy hands and feet. And so she tried, tried, to smile at the right moments over someone’s shoulder, laugh in the proper spots behind the joke, echo people’s feelings in her face as best as possible so she seemed like she, too, had something valuable to say.
Though not once did she volunteer her thoughts, or suggest that anyone should ask her anything, so no one did, which seemed painfully unfair.
For nearly another hour Leela sulked next to a piano and pretended to read a magazine. She was about to get rid of any prideful feelings with steel forceps if necessary, and simply go get pizza, when Bryan found her. There’d been an emergency at the office, a server on the fritz. He was apologetic. He coaxed her to stay. He was happy she was still there. He’d put on a bow tie, even tucked in his shirt. She smiled.
“I’m so nervous,” he said. “My bowels are totally messed up.”
“Mine, too,” she said. “But mine are always messed up.”
Four hours later, they were flat-out drunk and stupid, and it felt great, it felt like freedom. Inside a bathroom she found two porkpie hats. They crashed on a couch, talked about their favorite books, favorite old movies. Was that girl across the room Julia Stiles or a look-alike? They went to find out, but she vanished hastily, and then lo and behold, epiphany: it turned out they had a m
utual vampiric thing for Mark Twain, as found photographed in a sepia-toned picture on the wall—which, for an exciting, brief moment, felt originally erotic to both of them, the idea of the three of them in a threesome. The two of them and Mark Twain! Too much.
Later, one thirty, with a dozen people in the room, Bryan leaned in and muttered, “I love your legs.”
“What’d you say?”
“I love your legs. In those shorts.”
“Thank you. Actually it’s a romper.”
“I want to fuck you on the stairs.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Let’s go.”
“You’re joking.”
“Leela, I want to fuck the shit out of you.”
And she couldn’t help but laugh. The “shit” out of her? Wouldn’t that be a little unerotic? She looked at him. He was bothered, seriously all worked up.
His hand slid up her leg.
At which point she’d excused herself, fled outside, hailed a taxi. Embarrassed for him, swiftly even more embarrassed for herself: did she seriously just run away?
And so it wasn’t a big surprise that she didn’t hear from Bryan James again—not until the email she received at a gas station in central Massachusetts, from [email protected]: Hey what’s good. Your timing’s great actually, a kid got booted yesterday. It’s a big mess but there’s going to be an opening soon for a junior web producer. Like asap. It’s grunt stuff but sometimes you write for the site. They move fast so let me know, we’ll see what happens. Maybe you could be my work wife;)
Leela said loudly, “Holy shit.”
A woman at one of the other gas pumps turned to stare, but she didn’t care, she really did not care this one time.
* * *
Leela’s roommate for her first two years in college, Rebecca Dinovelli, took an English class their second spring called “Introduction to Creative Nonfiction.” In Leela’s mind, it didn’t even make sense on a grammatical level. Also, Rebecca was Biology, not English. Who was she kidding?
The Last Kid Left Page 10
