“Yeah,” Wally Jr. said. “He goes away for periods of time, but he always comes back. People like the Plunketts don’t go very far. His family’s strewn up and down the old Thurmont Highway like so much garbage. You’ll find Troy there, or drinking at the No-Name Tavern.”
“The No-Name?”
“That’s what we call it. Because it’s got no name. It’s just a place on the highway, with no name and no sign. You go up a little ways, past the John Deere store, and then it’s there on your left.”
Tess waited to see if more precise directions would be offered, but the Guntses appeared to feel this should be clear enough. She said good-bye to each in turn. Everyone’s handshake was limp and damp, except for Gunts Sr., who squeezed her hand almost too hard and looked as if he blamed her for his daughter’s death. They were nice people. Tess wanted to like them more than she did. If their daughter had died differently—from a preventable illness, in an act of terror-ism—they might have been filled with a sense of purpose. But the murder betrayed a certain lower-middle-class tackiness. Nice people just didn’t die this way.
But the Guntses were so passive, so bewildered and overmatched by life in general. Had they always been this way? Tess didn’t know, and she didn’t care. She just wanted to get away from them, and away from the wispy, unknowing smile on Tiffani’s face.
CHAPTER 6
The Old Thurmont Highway was not easy to find, but Troy Plunkett was. Tess overshot the unmarked road at least twice and drove so far out of her way that she almost hit Camp David. It turned out there was a Thurmont Highway, an Old Thurmont Highway, and this narrow stretch of falling-apart farmhouses, which might have been called the Older-Still Thurmont Highway. Tess didn’t see any signs of life in the littered yards, most of which were posted with NO TRESPASSING signs. She did see the name Plunkett lettered on several of the old mailboxes, however, and at the end of the road she discovered the No-Name. A concrete rectangle on the edge of a cornfield, it looked like a good place to sit out a nuclear war.
Tess ordered a beer, a Rolling Rock, which was served with a smeary glass and a skeptical look.
“Most women order light beer,” the bartender said.
“When it comes to light beer, I’ve always wondered: What’s the point?”
The line had charmed many a bartender back in Baltimore. But this was not Baltimore. The bartender made a point of turning his back to Tess and pretending great interest in the television on a shelf behind the bar. A baseball game was on. It looked odd, perhaps because it was in black and white. No, the players had big sideburns and builds that were at once stockier but less sinewy than today’s pumped-up professional athletes. It was a rebroadcast of some game from the seventies, on that ESPN classics station. Now that was the definition of pathetic to Tess’s mind: sitting in a bar on a spring afternoon, watching a baseball game that was decided three decades ago.
Besides, it was the World Series with Pittsburgh, the 1979 one the Orioles lost. Traitors.
She glanced around the compact room. Little space was wasted here. It was a serious place, a place for drinking, watching television, shooting pool. It was not a place where a stranger, male or female, could announce, “So, anyone here know Troy Plunkett?”
Eavesdropping, another much underrated tool, also yielded little. The men here barely used nouns at all, it seemed, just grunted monosyllabic adjectives at one another.
“That’s good,” said a man at a nearby table.
“Yeah,” his buddy said.
“I mean real good.”
“Real good.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
They could be talking about their beer, the Orioles, the weather, or Fermat’s Last Theorem, Tess thought.
She was getting ready to try and engage the hostile bartender when the door swung open and everyone in the bar recoiled a little, vampires catching a dose of sunlight. A man’s backlit silhouette, slightly bow-legged, crossed the threshold. Real Good Man number one lifted his hand perhaps an inch from the table. Even the gestures were laconic here.
“Troy,” he said.
And Tess was reminded, as she so often was, that it’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.
“Yeah,” Troy said.
He took a seat at the bar two stools down from Tess and gave her a curious look. Not a predatory one, just a glance of mild surprise, the way an alcoholic might regard the pink elephant on its second or third appearance in his living room.
“Troy Plunkett?” she asked, adopting the local custom of verblessness.
He looked at her as if the pink elephant had tentatively brandished a small knife—and he was trying to remember where he had stowed something larger and meaner.
“Humph,” was all he said.
“I’m a private investigator out of Baltimore.”
He hunched his shoulders and bent forward over his beer, as if he hoped she would be gone the next time he looked up. She wasn’t.
“So?” He fit a lot of menace into that one small word.
Troy Plunkett was a small man, with the bristling belligerence peculiar to runts. He wore cowboy boots beneath tight grimy jeans, and the heels were hooked on the lowest rung of the chrome stool. If there had been no rung, his legs would have swung free, several inches above the floor. His exposed skin was dark, a farmer’s tan that appeared to be almost a stain at this point in his life, which Tess judged to be about thirty to thirty-five years under way. She had assumed he was Tiffani’s high school classmate, but Tiffani would be twenty-eight if she were alive now. Cleaned up, trying to charm, he probably had a modest way with some women. Unworldly women. Young women.
But he was not clean now, and he was not trying to charm.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“No,” he said.
“Just a few.”
“Ask all you want. I’m not answering.”
“I’ll pay you twenty dollars for your time.”
He sized her up.
“Forty.”
His appraisal had fallen short of the mark. Tess would have been willing to go to sixty. She pulled two twenty-dollar bills out of her wallet, crisp, sticky ones fresh from a Frederick ATM, and put them on the bar. Not quite between them, a little closer to her than they were to him, and pinned down by her right elbow.
“Six years ago, a woman was killed.”
Troy’s face was blank.
“A woman named Tiffani Gunts. The local authorities think she was killed by an intruder, but they never made an arrest.”
He couldn’t even be bothered to shrug both shoulders, just popped the left one up.
“Understand this: I don’t care who did it. But I care about how the police went about their job. Get me? I’m not a cop or an officer of the court. I’m a private investigator who’s trying to figure out if local law enforcement agencies know what they’re doing.”
He either didn’t believe her or didn’t want to believe her. He stared ahead, so she was looking at his profile. It wasn’t a bad profile. Tess could see how a woman could be lonely enough, or desperate enough, to ignore the dozens of warning signs that Troy Plunkett gave off.
“You get me? I’m just examining the police work in the case.”
“Like internal affairs, or something.”
“Right.”
“I had an alibi,” he said, as if it were a piece of information he had to dig for. “Yeah, that’s it.”
“So you were interviewed?”
“First thing, you bet.”
“Cops can be real assholes when they’re trying to close a case.”
A corner of his lip curled. He wasn’t buying her fake sympathy.
“I’ve been interrogated myself,” she added.
“For what? Shoplifting lipstick?”
“I saw a murder once.”
This interested him. It interested most people. Sometimes, even Tess found it intriguing. Then she remembered what it had been like, and a
ll she wanted to do was forget it.
“Just saw it?” Although it sounded more like sore or sour in his mouth.
“Right. So the only way you can one-up me in this conversation is to have actually committed one.”
She managed to get the tone right, so this came off more as a flirtatious dare than an accusation. He turned to face her.
“Well, sorry, I never did. And if the sheriff’s department doesn’t know anything else about Tiffani’s death, they know that much. I had an alibi.”
“So you said. What was it?”
“I was in bed with some old gal.” He grinned. “And when I sleep with a woman, there’s not much sleeping and no forgetting I was there.”
Tess furrowed her brow, pretending confusion. “What do you mean?”
“I leave ‘em sore,” he said.
“You mean you hit them?”
“No.” He was angry that her obtuseness was forcing him to explain his offhand sexual boast. “I mean, I can do it all night long.”
“Oh.” Then, falsely contrite, “I didn’t mean to suggest you’ve ever hit a woman.”
He nodded curtly, accepting her apology in a he-man’s wounded fashion.
“Except—you have, haven’t you?”
“Have what?”
“Hit women. Hit Tiffani, at least. My guess is the reason the cops came to talk to you is that there was a string of district court arrests from your relationship with her.”
It was literally a guess. Tess hadn’t thought to check the local court records. After all, the Gunts family hadn’t mentioned abuse. But it was an explanation that would make some jagged pieces fit—the father’s anger, the sense that everyone else in the family was in some form of denial.
“Every charge was dropped,” he said.
“They often were, before the law changed and state’s attorneys pursued cases even when the women decided they didn’t want to go forward.”
“Yeah, women say shit and people believe them. They say you hit them, and how are you going to prove you didn’t? They bump their leg on the kitchen counter and wear shorts the next day, and all of a sudden you’re the worst guy in the world.”
“Or they say they had your baby and blood tests bear them out.”
“Blood tests.” He tossed back the rest of his beer and a fresh one materialized. The bartender was hovering close—protective of Troy, his regular customer. “I don’t believe ‘em. I bet one day we’re gonna find out it’s all bullshit, this DNA, just some crap the government made up to stick it to regular guys. I mean, how you gonna argue with it, you know? You’d have to be a scientist or something. And it’s never a hundred percent. Nothing is ever a hundred percent.”
“Did the cops know about the arrests, the blood test? Did they press you on this stuff?”
Her prey retreated at such direct questions. Plunkett was back in profile, staring at the television.
“I’m sorry. I know this isn’t something you want to talk about. But you’re making money, remember?” She indicated the two twenties, still beneath her elbow. “I need to know. Did they really treat you like a suspect, or was it enough for them that you and your lady friend agreed on your whereabouts?”
“They didn’t bother me much. Because I didn’t do it.”
“Did they bring you in more than once? Administer a polygraph?”
“They talked to me at my house, and they poked around in all the Plunkett houses. When they didn’t see any new appliances, they knew I didn’t do it. You know how far I’d have to go to sell some brand-new refrigerator without someone knowing who I was? Pretty far. Besides, that’s not my gig. You checked my records, right?”
Tess nodded, taking her lie to the next level.
“Okay, then. So you didn’t see no burglary charges. I don’t steal.”
“No, you just hit women and refuse to pay child support.”
He turned back to her. His eyes had the heavy-lidded, sleepy look that some call bedroom eyes. But there was nothing sensual in this look.
“Let me explain something to you. A man has to assert himself in this world. I’ve hit other men, standing up for myself. If I had a child—and I don’t happen to believe I do—and he talked smart to me, I might hit him. Women are always talking about equal treatment. Well, that’s what I give them. They get above themselves, I bring them back down. The only thing that keeps me from teaching you a lesson, right now, is that Joe doesn’t let anyone fight in his place, and I respect his rules. So maybe you ought to leave before I take it in my head to follow you out of here.”
“When you hit a woman, she knows she’s been hit,” Tess said, mocking his earlier boast.
“I don’t do things halfway.”
“What was her name?”
“You already said it: Tiffani. Tiffani Gunts. Dumb Gunts. Her brother was in my little brother’s class over at the high school. You’re such a smart lady, I bet you can guess what they called Wally Gunts when he was a kid.”
Tess could. “I didn’t mean Tiffani. I meant the woman you were with, your alibi.”
“Shit, I don’t remember. It was five years ago.”
“Six.”
“That just makes it one year harder. Can you imagine how many women I’ve been with in the past six years?”
“I don’t know. How many women in Frederick County have IQs under a hundred?”
The question slid by him. “Whoever she was, she was just someone to spend a night with. Which is all Tiffani was to me. That’s what bugs me about women. You’re trying to have a good time, nothing more. They tell you they’re all fixed, you don’t have to wear no rubber. Then she shows up with a baby she knew you never wanted, trying to play house. That’s not for me.”
Tess, having seen the Plunkett estate, couldn’t disagree.
“What do you do? I mean, for a living.”
“Whatever I can. There’s a lot of work off the books, if you know where to find it.” For the first time, he looked panic-stricken. “Hey, if you’re from the IRS—”
“I’m not. I told you the truth. I’m a private investigator. I’m second-guessing the police, not you.”
“Well, I hate to give them credit, but our dumb-ass sheriff did his job as far as I was concerned. They would’ve loved for me to do it, tried to hang it on me every which way. But I didn’t, and they couldn’t.”
Tess slid the money down to him. “Consider this a gift. I don’t want you to feel you have to report it on a 1099 at year’s end.”
Her conversation with Troy Plunkett would end up being the day’s most productive. As Tess had feared, the investigators who had handled the Gunts murder had moved on. Not up, just on. One was now a traveling salesman for a home security outfit, the other had gone back to school to become a pharmacist.
“A pharmacist?”
“He heard there was a shortage,” said the sheriff, who was new in the job, as of the last election. He even looked new, very spick-and-span, with a shiny well-scrubbed face and glossy white hair. “What’s your interest in this old homicide? Did some information come to light? It’s an open case. If a civilian knows something, we’d expect you to cooperate.”
“It’s a routine matter. Almost like an accounting thing.”
“Life insurance, something like that.”
“Yeah,” Tess said. “Something like that.”
“Well, I can’t open the file to you—it’s an open case, you know. Homicides stay open forever. But it’s the kind of thing that’s not gonna get solved until the man who did it gets taken in on some other charge, decides to confess. Could be years. Could be never. That’s how it works sometimes. Public doesn’t like to hear it, but we’re human. There’s only so much we can do.”
“Can you at least tell me if her former boyfriend was questioned, the one who fathered her child?”
He looked at the file. “Troy Plunkett? Oh, most certainly. Troy’s well known in our offices.”
“What about the fiancé, Eric Shivers?”
“What about the crime scene? Investigators who don’t have a lot of experience with homicide can disrupt crucial evidence.”
The sheriff drew himself up. “Look, miss, I didn’t care for the gentleman who had this job before me. That’s why I ran against him. But we’re not a bunch of dumb hicks out here. We know how to do our jobs. Sometimes a person’s just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If your insurance company wants to fight a claim, that’s between you and your conscience. But don’t drag us into it.”
It wasn’t what Whitney’s board wanted to hear, Tess realized, but she wasn’t being paid to bring home what they wanted. That’s why being a private investigator was better than being a reporter. The bosses couldn’t fault you when reality didn’t match the story they envisioned in their heads.
Tess had decided to spend the night closer to where she would begin her next day, in Sharpsburg. There was an overdone inn on the West Virginia side of the Potomac with wonderful German food. The only problem was that it didn’t allow dogs, which meant she would need the cover of darkness to smuggle Esskay into her room. To kill a little time on her way out of Frederick, she stopped at the development of town houses where Tiffani Gunts had died and called Crow on her cell phone. “How’s it going?”
“Not great,” she said. “But it seldom does at the beginning. I’m sitting outside the place where the first woman was killed.”
“What does it look like?”
“Seedy. Sad.”
“Would you feel that way if you didn’t know someone had been murdered there?”
If she didn’t already love Crow, such a question would have clinched the deal.
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