by Lis Wiehl
Usually Elvis came running out of the henhouse at the first sign of Tommy’s approach, doing battle before allowing Tommy to get near the hens and their tasty eggs. Today, the coop was strangely quiet.
Inside the henhouse Tommy braced himself, expecting the rooster to rush him. Instead, he found only hens, some nesting, others rooting placidly in the feed bin.
“Elvis … ,” he called out.
He went outside to the fenced-in chicken yard, but the rooster was nowhere to be found. He’d had the coop professionally reinforced against predators, including an expanse of chicken wire overhead to keep out the owls and the red-tailed hawks. The wire at ground level was of a small enough gauge to keep out snakes and weasels and wood rats and obviously anything larger, like foxes or raccoons. The henhouse floor was an impenetrable slab of poured concrete. He examined the fence and gates for holes, the ground for invasive burrows, but found none. His rooster was simply gone. The only explanation he could think of was that a raccoon, with its near-humanlike hands, had figured out how to undo the gate latch.
He took the Jeep to Katonah and sat with his father at Grace Lutheran, where the local descendants of the Scandinavians who’d resisted the temptation of cheap farmland in Wisconsin and Minnesota worshipped. It was at an after-church coffee hour that Tommy first noticed his dad was failing, unable to recognize faces or remember the names of friends he’d known all his life. Now when Tommy brought him, those friends understood and introduced themselves by name and shook Arnie’s hand and let him know he was still loved, even if the people who loved him were strangers.
After church Tommy dropped his father off at the senior center, where Lucius Mills would pick him up. Lucius (pronounced “Luscious”) was Arnie’s visiting personal caregiver, a gentle black man who was bigger than many of the offensive linemen Tommy had battled when he played football. He was also a combat veteran. Tommy initially hired him as security when he’d received bags of hate mail and threats after quitting the game.
Tommy then drove to Clark’s Hardware in East Salem to purchase a padlock for the gate. Clark’s had been there since 1874, and so had some of the stock on the shelves. A clerk told him that padlocks were in the basement.
“Ideally padlocks with combinations raccoons can’t figure out,” Tommy said.
“They’re all thieves,” the hardware man said. “That’s why they wear those masks.”
The treads squeaked as Tommy descended the wooden stairs. He found what he was looking for in aisle 5, but when he turned to go upstairs and pay at the cash register, he recognized the man in aisle 4. Crazy George Gardener.
George was eighty-one years old, his white hair close-cropped and thin on top, his face tanned from the hours he spent cutting hay for the local horse farms. Tommy had driven past the Gardener Farm any number of times and seen the old man working in his fields. He was still robust enough to lift the bales and handle heavy machinery, and his posture was erect and stiff. He had large ears with tufts of black hair extruding from them like coils of barbed wire, and one of the more spectacular strawberry noses Tommy had ever seen. He was wearing dark green pants and a matching green shirt that made him look like a custodian in a public school.
He was examining furnace ducts when Tommy approached him.
“George Gardener?” Tommy said.
The old man turned, and Tommy offered his hand.
“Tommy Gunderson. I live up the road, past the country club. My dad owns the nursery. I think we’ve sold you some plants from time to time.”
Crazy George was suspicious.
“I know,” Gardener muttered, lowering his head and gazing at Tommy sideways through his overgrown eyebrows.
“Have you got a second?” Tommy said. “I was hoping maybe you knew something about chickens.”
“Strange thing to hope.”
“It’s just that yours is the only farm around here that does something other than raise pretty horses to look at,” Tommy said. “So I thought you might know.”
“What’s your question?”
“Well,” Tommy said, “I lost a rooster. A French Maran. I checked the coop, but I couldn’t find any tears in the wire or burrow holes or anything. I was thinking maybe raccoons figured out how to open the gate. They’re pretty smart.”
“Smarter than some people,” Gardener said.
Tommy laughed. “Anyway, that’s the only explanation I can think of.”
“Maybe the hens got him,” Gardener said. “Pecked him to death and ate him.”
“That can happen?”
“Anything can happen.”
“Well,” Tommy said, “anyway, I’m hoping the raccoons aren’t smart enough to pick a padlock.”
Gardener said nothing.
“Your family’s been on that farm how long?” Tommy asked.
The old man’s expression remained cautious, wary. “Since snakes walked,” he replied.
“Well, thanks for your help,” Tommy said. “Hope your mother’s okay— I was the one who called the police the other night when she got away from the nursing home. I found her in my backyard. I don’t think she knew where she was.”
“You found her?”
“Uh-huh,” Tommy said. “Middle of the night. I thought maybe she was trying to get home. My house is more or less between the nursing home and your place. Have you talked to her?”
The old man’s expression softened. “Thank you for taking care of her,” he said. “I wouldn’t call it ‘talking to her.’ She do that?” He was looking at the marks on Tommy’s throat, nearly faded now.
“No,” Tommy said. “This was a rosebush that got the best of me. Is she okay?”
“They gave her something for sleep,” Gardener said. “But she won’t take it.”
“That can’t be good,” Tommy said. “I read if you don’t get enough sleep, you start dreaming while you’re still awake.”
“One way to look at it,” Gardener agreed.
“Same night that poor girl was killed up on Bull’s Rock Hill,” Tommy said. He left the statement hanging, but the old man didn’t take the bait.
“Has she ever done that before?” Tommy asked. “Tried to come home? I gather she isn’t as clearheaded as she used to be.”
“Even salmon can find their way home,” George said. “And pigeons.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to my rooster,” Tommy said. “Maybe he went back to France.”
“Doubt it,” the old man said. “You know what I’d do?”
“What?” Tommy asked.
“Look a little harder. It’s easy to miss something right under your nose.”
When Tommy got home, he gathered the tools he needed to reinforce the gate and walked to the chicken coop where, as soon as he pressed on the latch, he heard a raucous noise from the henhouse. Elvis charged him, crowing with all his might, wings flapping in a cloud of noise and dust.
Tommy left the gate closed and considered.
He’d looked everywhere he could think of for a hole in the wire, a way a predator might have gotten in, or a way his rooster might have gotten out. He hadn’t considered that his rooster might have been hiding from him … maybe sitting in a nest, where a hen might sit. In his search for one thing, he had missed another thing that was right under his nose. He could have looked right at it but not seen it, because it wasn’t what he expected.
There was an important lesson in that.
George Gardener had called it.
He’d known.
He’d known about the marks on Tommy’s throat too, though Tommy hadn’t told anyone but Carl and Frank … and the doctor who wasn’t real.
14.
“Well, that’s forty minutes of my life I’m never going to get back,” Detective Casey said. “Let’s hope the next one is a bit more cooperative. Thoughts?”
“Very unlikely to be a killer,” Dani said. “Terence is just a kid who wishes he knew more than he does.”
“Lying? Hiding anything? Protecting some
one?” Casey asked.
“Maybe protecting someone,” Dani said. “Let’s see what the others have to say, and we’ll know better.”
Part of Dani’s role was to help investigators determine the order in which witnesses were questioned. She’d done as much research as she could into the lives of the participants, checked their academic records, scanned their Facebook pages, read their Twitter tweets, talked to their friends. On her recommendation, they’d spoken first with Terence Walker, a tall, fair-haired young man who showed up wearing dress slacks, loafers, a clean white dress shirt, and a blue-and-red-striped tie.
He struck her as easily manipulated and likely to cooperate, and if he seemed so to Dani, he would have seemed so to the other witnesses, who waited together in nervous anticipation. The others would wonder how much Terence said if he went first.
A good interviewer played witnesses or suspects against each other. “X said you did this, but Y said you did that, so which one is lying?” Casey agreed that they wanted to speak to Rayne Kepplinger last and use the threatening video she’d sent Liam for leverage.
Unfortunately, Terence’s answers were as unilluminating as Liam’s. He’d been to a party at Logan Gansevoort’s house. Logan had invited him. He’d gotten wasted at the party and passed out. He didn’t remember what happened next and woke up several hours later in the entertainment room in Logan’s basement. He thought he remembered hearing music. He walked home around four in the morning. Nobody heard him come in. It was all a blur.
“What can you tell me about Julie Leonard?” Detective Casey asked. “Did you know her from school?”
“I knew who she was, but that night was the first time I ever talked to her.”
“What’d you say to her?”
“Just stuff like, ‘Where do you live?’”
“What’d you think of her? Did you like her? She like you?”
“I didn’t really form an opinion.”
“What kind of mood was she in? Good mood? Bad mood?”
“She was having a good time. She was dancing.”
“Who with?”
“By herself.”
“Did you have a conversation with her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t seem to have a lot to say.”
Today, because it was Sunday and the DA’s office was closed, but also in deference to the families and to keep the names of the teenage suspects out of the newspapers, Irene had decided to use a safe house away from prying media eyes and telescopic camera lenses. She’d chosen the Peter Keeler Inn, just off the East Salem town square. It was a large slate-roofed multigabled building with white clapboard siding covered in ivy, black shutters, and a wraparound porch. Inside were a four-star restaurant and, upstairs, a dozen elegant rooms and suites.
The Empire Suite was comprised of a master bedroom and a sitting room, separated by double doors. Each room had its own hall entrance. In the sitting room, a pair of video cameras on tripods pointed at a pair of easy chairs and a sofa. Cables snaked from the cameras through the double doors to recording equipment and monitors in the bedroom. The witnesses were made to wait in a room across the hall, which was also under surveillance. Their parents and their lawyers waited downstairs in the lobby; the lawyers were summoned when it was their client’s turn to answer questions.
Dani had learned to recognize the signs of guilt, the body language where crossed arms served as protective armor and a backward slouch was an effort to gain distance. She’d seen how guilty people waived their right to counsel with surprising frequency and were willing to talk to investigators simply because they wanted to learn how much the cops already knew. She’d seen how exhausting it was to lie, to carry the burden of guilt. Criminals who tried to remember everything and keep their stories straight and out think the cops sometimes actually fell asleep during breaks in questioning. It was one reason the cops often made the interview sessions last as long as possible.
“If you tell the truth,” Mark Twain said, “you don’t have to remember anything.” The corollary was if you lie you have to keep track of everything.
Detective Casey had requested a lie detector in the room, not to actually use, just to scare people into telling the truth. Sometimes implied threats were more effective than explicit ones.
Dani and Casey questioned the witnesses, accompanied by their lawyers. The law required that a uniformed officer be present as well to provide corroborating testimony as to what went on during the interrogation. Stuart, assisted by a technician, watched on the monitors in the bedroom, which also provided a secure video feed over the Internet to Irene in her office twenty-five miles away.
“When we’re done, walk the kid all the way back to the parents and chat him up,” Casey advised Stuart. “One time I was questioning a guy we thought was breaking into apartments. Three hours, I get nothing. We tell him he can go, I’m riding down in the elevator with him, and he laughs and says, ‘Actually, I broke into all five of those apartments.’ Like now that we’re in the elevator, he’s free to confess.”
The people Liam named had been invited to come in voluntarily. Two, Logan Gansevoort and Amos Kasden, had failed to respond to the invitation. Blair Weeks had a soccer game and would be late.
Dani’s early impression was that Julie Leonard was a sweet girl who wanted to be something more. She’d been invited to a party with the “cool kids” and she was trying hard to simply fit in and not make any mistakes or social faux pas. She was lonely, and desperate not to be. Dani hoped to have a full picture of the victim by the end of the day.
Dani and Detective Casey next questioned Parker Bowen, who’d arrived accompanied by a pair of lawyers in expensive suits and by his father. Parker Bowen Sr. was a lean man in his late forties with hair a bit too black and a tan a bit too orange for either to be natural.
Parker Bowen Jr.’s story differed little from the one they’d just heard. He’d been to a party, got wasted, passed out, couldn’t remember anything. Yes, he’d passed out at parties before. No, he didn’t think he had a drinking problem. No, he didn’t remember what he’d been drinking, a little of this, a little of that. No, he didn’t know Julie Leonard before the party, though he’d heard she had a reputation.
“A reputation for what?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”
“For hooking up.”
“Based on what?”
“It’s just what some people said.”
“What people? I have to tell you, this does not fit with what we know about Julie Leonard. It doesn’t sound like her.”
“I didn’t say it was true. It was just what people said.”
“That why you went to the party? Hoping maybe she’d have too much to drink and then you’d hook up with her?”
“No.”
“What else do you remember?”
“Nothing.”
They paused when they were finished with Parker to consult with Stuart. Blair Weeks had arrived and was waiting across the hall with Rayne Kepplinger and Khetzel Ross, though Rayne and Khetzel sat together while Blair kept herself apart.
“Something’s going on between them,” Stuart said. “Also, we got early labs back from serology. Now we know what the delay was all about. Guess what the blood type was for the blood used to draw the symbol on the body? O, A, B, negative, positive—guess.”
“None of the above?” Dani said.
“Try all of the above,” Stuart said. “They think they have DNA from at least five people. Banerjee wants STRs and SNIs. We’re getting swabs from the kids. Once they’ve isolated the sample, they can run them through CODIS, but I’d be shocked if anybody here is in an FBI database.”
“At least it gets us warrants to search the houses,” Casey said. “Irene’s gonna like that.”
“Also,” the assistant DA said, “while you were talking to Mr. Bowen, I met in the lobby with Davis Fish.” He pause
d to see who recognized the name. “Logan Gansevoort’s lawyer. The one who’s on TV all the time, commenting on prominent cases. Apparently Logan has a medical emergency”—Stuart made quotation marks in the air with his fingers—“and won’t be joining us.”
“They sent his lawyer to tell us that in person?” Casey asked.
“No,” Stuart said. “They sent Davis Fish to tell us Logan is being advised by the one and only Davis Fish. We can still get Logan to talk to us, but not by sending a polite request to stop by the office for a chat.”
“What about the other kid?” Casey asked, looking at his notes. “Amos Kasden. Did we send somebody to his house?”
“Doesn’t have a house,” Stuart said. “He’s a student at St. Adrian’s Academy. Which has en loco parentis grandfathered into their charter. Since Detective Casey was in diapers. We need a writ.”
“I didn’t wear diapers,” Casey said. “Went straight to boxer shorts. When you get the warrants for the kids’ houses, make sure to get the shoes they were wearing. We got wholes and partials in the mud at the crime scene.”
Dani watched the three teenage girls yet to be questioned on the monitor. Rayne had beautiful black hair that shone like a crow’s feathers. Khetzel had short blond hair and severe bangs that made her look like the art director at a fashion magazine. Blair had long blond hair and was both the prettiest and the least adorned of the three.
According to what Dani had found out from perusing their Facebook pages, Rayne was the leader of the cool clique at East Salem High, and Khetzel was her consigliore. They’d skied on the ski team together, swam at the same swim club, boarded their horses together at Red Gate Farm, and formed the East Salem High School Girls Equestrian Club. More significantly, they’d both dated Logan Gansevoort, Rayne in sixth grade and Khetzel in ninth.
