by John Farrow
“What about my involvement?” Cinq-Mars inquires. He suspects he knows the answer to that one.
“You bring something to the table, Émile. Expertise. Experience beyond the norm. You helped me out this morning, perhaps you can give me a boost on the new case tonight. No pressure. A long shot, I know, but the way things stand, I don’t have much else going on.”
“That’s not it,” he tells him. “Not all of it anyway.”
Till glances over. Once, twice, then he chuckles lightly to himself.
“What?” Cinq-Mars probes.
“You’re right. You’re right. You’re a smart man. I’m letting you in on this first thing, even before I get out there myself, because when the troopers find out that I brought you in they’ll be so pissed off they’ll wet themselves. They’ll have to go change their shorts. Won’t be a damn thing they can do about it though, am I right? If they come away from the experience so irritated with me they’ll want to spit in public, then maybe it’ll occur to them why that is. Next time they might slow down a tad before calling the governor to give me the heave-ho. Not that anybody wants a next time to take place.”
“Except, you already have one,” Cinq-Mars points out to him.
“What’s that?”
“A next time.”
“See what I mean? A man needs to plan ahead. Look, Émile, I don’t believe I’m obstructing. The contrary. From what I saw this morning, me and you taking our time with this investigation will only help things along. Not hinder. I’m not bringing you in only to piss off the troopers, teach them to mind their manners. That’s part of it, I’ll cop to that, but I know about you. If you can help me get a quick start, then who knows? This might work out.”
That still doesn’t seem completely coherent to Cinq-Mars. Something else is going on—what is it that this man is not saying?—yet he holds his doubts in abeyance. They drive on, and as they do he rehearses how he’ll explain this to Caroline after claiming that such an invitation would not be forthcoming in his lifetime. He decides that he might reply by saying that he never expected to live this long, get a laugh that way.
“I’m connected to this town, Émile. Grew up near here. Still live here. I’m sworn to protect its citizens. That’s all I care about. The troopers want to close this morning’s murder, for sure, I don’t doubt that for a second. I do, too. Mostly I want to protect this town, and the towns around us we serve. If you think about it, there’s a difference. Trooper Hammond, he might say otherwise, but he’s not showing me he gets the difference.”
Émile doesn’t recognize the neighborhood they’re in, and can’t figure out where they’re headed. Even when a road sign comes up, it’s next to impossible to decipher through the wet windshield. He gives up trying to map a suburb’s twists and turns where all the homes have a similar look with matching yards, certainly in the dark, and entrusts his fate to Chief Till’s hands. They stop amid a mess of patrol cars, with a few brave residents across the street standing out in the rain, watching, but nothing on the outside of the house seems worthy of anyone’s attention other than the police presence. He and Till hurry inside out of the rain.
That the victim won’t be a student is the extent of his knowledge as he enters, yet Cinq-Mars is geared to catalogue similarities or connections between the two murders occurring in nearby towns on the same day. Stepping into the home, he’s struck by how one murder scene is so unlike the other.
He doesn’t have far to go.
“Answered the doorbell,” Till’s lead officer remarks, walking them through the obvious part. The cop is wearing casual clothes, which is a little disconcerting. “Backed up a few steps, the way I see it, away from the gunman, takes a bullet through the neck. Nothing clean or neat about it. The bullet hit the far wall. Embedded there. The victim bled out. Or suffocated on his own blood, one of the two. Hard to say which came first. Not that it matters much.”
“It matters,” Cinq-Mars contradicts him.
The cop in jeans and a striped polo looks at him, then says, “To the vic, you mean.”
“No,” the retired investigator states, “it matters to us.” Cinq-Mars met this officer briefly earlier in the day, they were introduced, although his name escapes him for the moment. Shilling, he wants to say, yet guesses that that’s not right. “Have you been promoted to detective?”
“Sir?” the man asks, worried that he’s being mocked.
“You’re in plainclothes.”
“No, sir. Off duty when I got the call.”
“Just curious,” Cinq-Mars says. “I didn’t know towns this size even had detectives. Neighbors never heard a shot?”
“Who are you again?”
Till explains to his officer, “Old cop, having a look-see. Don’t worry about it.”
“The neighbors?” Cinq-Mars asks again.
“The door was probably closed by the time the gun was fired. Either way, with the rain, the sound gets muffled. He’s been dead a while. Thunder and lightning at the same time as the gunshot maybe, or around the same time. It’s all similar noise. Who’d notice an extra crack? Everybody’s windows were shut tight to the storm anyway. Air conditioners were on. Plus, this looks cold-blooded, professional, don’t think it was a robbery, so yeah, maybe he had a silencer, who knows?”
“No silencer,” Cinq-Mars tells him. He can tell that the officer has been pleased to be running down the case, despite a total lack of experience. In a way he’s sorry to upend his applecart.
The two town cops stay quiet an extra moment, looking at him. They find that the retired detective is absorbed in gazing at the corpse.
“Who found the body?” Cinq-Mars asks.
“Neighbor’s teenage son. Came over to see if he knew anything about toilets. With the storm, his was backing up and his dad was up to his elbows in shit. Door was ajar. He peeked in. Bit of a shock.”
Cinq-Mars seems to be exploring the walls, the ceiling.
“Ah, how do you know, sir, that there wasn’t a silencer, if you don’t mind my asking?” the off-duty officer asks him.
Till wants to know the same thing.
Cinq-Mars looks at them both, notes their confusion. “A killer with a silencer would’ve shot him again. Put him out of his misery. That’s also why how he died is meaningful to us. Through the throat the man isn’t talking, right? He wasn’t keeping him alive to have a conversation. He was flinching down on the floor, making a commotion as he died. Gagging on his own blood, fighting for his life. The killer’s instinct would be to finish him, except he didn’t want to take a chance on firing twice. One gunshot, if they hear it at all, the neighbors think a tree limb cracked off in the storm, like you said. One shot, they stand there listening. Two, they might get curious, storm or no storm, take a look outside. He let him die slowly because he didn’t want to fire a second shot and he didn’t want to fire because he didn’t have a silencer. That he died gagging on his blood confirms that.”
The two local men nod, and resume gazing at the corpse as well. They can visualize the sordid moments better now. Till asks his man, “Do you have a name?”
The officer, who’s wearing nitrile gloves, produces a Ziploc bag from his pants pocket, and from the bag the victim’s wallet. He opens it up to display the man’s driving license. “Philip Lars Toomey. We’re standing in his residence. Do you want to know where he works?”
“Do I?” Till asks.
“Dowbiggin,” Cinq-Mars answers. “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Dennis,” the detective answers. “Sergeant Schiller.”
“Right.”
“How did you know?” Schiller asks him back.
“His lapel pin. He either has a child graduating from Dowbiggin or he works there. This place marks him as a bachelor, makes me think he works there. I take it I’m right?”
Schiller displays a card in the man’s wallet without removing it from its sleeve. “Faculty. I guess he’s a professor.”
“What department?�
�
“Don’t know,” Schiller admits.
“There’s a computer over there,” Cinq-Mars points out. “Find out. Interesting to see if his department is the same as Addie’s, the dead girl’s.”
Till gives a nod of consent and his officer goes over to the computer. He keeps his nitrile gloves on to type.
“What makes you think he’s single?” Till asks his new adviser.
“Where’s the grieving hysterical widow? I don’t see her distraught presence anywhere in sight, do you? It’s not the time of day to be working and it’s not the sort of day to go out on a long walk. Besides. Where are the family photos if he has one? This is the room for that. Nowhere in sight. He’s a bachelor, or divorced for such a long time he might as well have been single his whole life.”
Cinq-Mars is looking around the room as Till leans over the corpse for a last look at him. “The throat,” Till says. “Kind of a strange choice. Was he a bad shot, the killer, or was he just mean that way?”
“Could’ve been a shaky hand. More likely, your officer nailed it.”
“How so?”
“He wanted the door closed. To muffle sound. Two things follow from that. The shooter was moving in the act of closing the door. And the victim, hands up, perhaps, obedient, perhaps—he hadn’t turned to run away. He was probably scared shitless and somewhat of a moving target. The shooter missed, slightly. We can withhold a definitive opinion until the killer’s in custody. That conversation will be interesting.”
Schiller returns to them, beaming. “Diplomatic relations, that’s his field. He’s been at Dowbiggin for only two years.”
“Before that?”
He finds out why Schiller is beaming. He has that answer, too, at the ready. “State Department.”
“Really,” Cinq-Mars muses. “What did he do there?”
The question rapidly diminishes Schiller’s bright grin. “I’ll check on that,” he says, and is about to retreat back to the computer.
“Before you go,” Cinq-Mars says. “The wallet. Where’d you find it?”
“Hip pocket.”
The dead man is wearing trousers, a white shirt, a light mauve sweater where the lapel pin resides, socks and slippers. “Anything else in his pockets?”
“No, sir. Not a thing.”
“Nothing? Not even keys?”
“No, sir.”
Cinq-Mars puts a request to Till. “Send an officer outside. The vehicle in the carport, is it wet?”
“Wet?”
“It’s been raining today, have you noticed? If the car was in use, I don’t think it would’ve dried off in this humidity. If the car was out, he was out, but I don’t believe these clothes have been wet today. Look at his hair. Fluffy. I bet he showered and shampooed before his death. If he wasn’t wearing these clothes outside today, what clothes was he wearing, and what’s in those pockets, anything? He could’ve transferred the wallet, but did he leave anything behind in the other pockets?”
“Okay, but how will we know what he wore today? By what’s still wet, I suppose.”
“That’ll make it easy. Also, if he was good enough to drive his car today then leave his keys in his pockets, that’ll confirm his outfit.”
Till sends a uniform out to check on the car.
“Make and model,” Émile calls to him as the uniform is going out the door.
Schiller returns from the computer. “Funny thing. I can’t find what he did for the State Department. Maybe somebody better than me on computers can.”
“You Googled him?”
“His name comes up as a professor at Dowbiggin and that’s it.”
Cinq-Mars thinks about that, then pulls out his cell phone and walks away from the others. They hear him say, “Hey, it’s me … Yeah, it’s been a while … Good, good, how are you doing?” Apparently that question requires a lengthy answer before they hear him make a request. “I need information on a guy. Formerly at the State Department.” Another pause, and he says, “It’s on his résumé, but not showing where you’d expect to find it.” He listens, then says, “That’s the thing, I know what it means. That’s why I’m asking you.”
He gives the particulars over the phone, thanks his contact, and concludes the call. When he comes back to their huddle, Chief Till asks, “Who was that?”
Cinq-Mars doesn’t say. He acts as though he never heard the question.
The uniform returns from the carport.
“Looks like it’s been standing in a car wash all day,” he reports. “Just like we do.” Then he addresses Émile directly. “BMW, 5 Series. Quite new. Silver-gray. Black interior.”
Cinq-Mars appreciates the impulse to provide details, although it isn’t necessary in this instance. “Was it locked?” he wants to know.
“Yes, sir.” Good that he checked.
“Let’s see if we can’t find his keys. Start with his wardrobe.”
Finding a pair of damp trousers, neatly hung on a hanger in his closet, doesn’t take long. A wet shirt has been dropped into a laundry hamper. A sports jacket is also damp, and in it they find the car fob and house keys on separate rings. Chief Till pulls out a sheet of paper, folded into eighths, from the inside chest pocket. He passes it to Schiller, with his gloved hands, to unfold. He doesn’t read the two words that have been computer-generated, instead holds up the sheet for the others to read for themselves.
Breached
Run!
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Cinq-Mars relates.
“Alice in Wonderland,” Till says back.
“You’re well-read,” Cinq-Mars deadpans. They’ve been feeling each other out this whole time. He passes the BMW fob to Officer Schiller. “Check the interior, will you? Touch nothing. Observe everything. Then report back.”
“Yes, sir,” the man responds. He looks a little sheepishly at his actual boss, but Chief Till isn’t miffed in the slightest, and gives him a nod that sends him on his way.
“Chief, you don’t get to investigate murders routinely,” Cinq-Mars mentions. “I understand that, and trust me, you don’t want to if you think otherwise. What do you investigate around here? What’s the worst of it?”
“The worst? Bar fights. Domestic abuse. The worst though, of late, has been rape on campus. Been a big issue. We’ve had demonstrations, vigils, the administration has taken heat for trying to keep the problem out of the media. Objectively, if not in the beginning, then of late, I think they’ve reacted well. Taken measures. By the way, we do have murders around here, only they’re the kind where everybody and his uncle knows who the killer is, and it takes about ninety minutes to bring him in.”
“All serious stuff,” Émile notes. He looks around. “Outerwear, somewhere,” he directs, and they go off in search of a raincoat.
What they find provides no further information. The coat’s still wet, the pockets yield only Kleenex tissues, used, and old credit card receipts, one from a Walmart and the other from a restaurant in town. “He ate alone,” Émile points out. “Time of day suggests dinner. This place for under thirty bucks, that’s one person only. Three weeks ago.”
“Okay,” Till says.
“Okay,” Cinq-Mars concurs.
“If that’s all we’ve got I’m calling in the state troopers.”
Before he can do that, his phone rings. He walks off to take the call and then returns. In the meantime, Émile sifts through the victim’s bedside table and the top of his bureau. He sees a card with formal printing on it, an invitation, which he saw before in the hand of the dead girl, and under the card is an envelope mailed from the Dowbiggin School. Émile takes out his mobile phone, and taps information into the phone’s note-taking feature. He’s not accustomed to doing this and hopes he’ll be able to retrieve it later. Then he takes a photograph of the card, also with his phone. He’s still getting used to all these bells and whistles on his new device. He wanders farther through the bungalow to get a feel for the place, then returns to the living room at Till’s bidding. �
��What’s up?”
Till wants to talk to him alone, then protects their privacy by whispering. “We’ve got another one.”
“Another what?” Émile asks, then catches on before the man has a chance to reply. “You’re not serious.”
“White River Junction. Not my jurisdiction. Not my town. Across the river—that’s across the state line, too, in Vermont. Our state troopers won’t directly be called in to that one, either.”
“Nor will you be. Who called?”
“The chief of police over there. We’re pals. Mostly he called to let me know that he has one of his own, because he heard about today’s murder, obviously. I told him that I now have two. That made us both think that I better check his out, in case they’re related. This one? We don’t know yet. I guess the Dowbiggin connection is compelling.”
“You’re saying we’re invited to the scene?”
“I am, anyway, and I’m inviting you along with me. Just don’t announce it to the media.”
Émile understands. “Or to the New Hampshire state troopers.”
Dennis Schiller has returned from his inspection of the BMW’s interior with a look on his face that’s difficult to decipher. He’s tickled about something. “Why the shit-eating grin? Any bodies in the trunk?” his chief of police inquires.
“Car’s clean. Immaculate. I guess guys with cars like that take care of them.”
“Anything of interest?” Cinq-Mars inquires.
“Hell, yeah. You’ll like this. Locked in the glove box, sir.”
He always hated it when officers make him crawl around to pick up bits of meaning off the floor. “Tell me.”
“A necklace, sir. There’s a necklace in his glove box. It sure looks a lot like the one this morning.”
“Seriously? Describe it.”
The junior officer does so, and while they have to push him to refine his memory of the details, it’s clear that he might as well be describing the necklace worn by Addie Langford in her death pose.
That’s enough, but Till asks the officer, “Anything else?”
“Yes, sir. Between the front buckets, he’s got a mobile phone.”
The chief and Cinq-Mars exchange a glance. They both know what this means—a treasure trove of information—but there’s a limit to how far they can push the boundaries, and that limit has now been broached.
