Veritas

by Anne Laughlin

  *

  Sally was just turning off her computer and getting ready to leave for the day when her cell phone rang. She glanced at the display and smiled.

  “Hi, Mom. I was just about to leave the station.”

  “I’m glad I caught you, then. I need you to go by Werni’s and pick up your dad.” Sally’s mother, Nancy, wasn’t big on small talk.

  “What’s he doing there?” Neither of Sally’s parents were big drinkers, but Mike Sullivan always had a beer at the end of the day.

  “I forgot to pick up his beer at the store today and we are completely out. He came in from work, opened the fridge, and looked at me like I’d just slashed his tires. Stormed out without saying a word, so I imagine he went straight to Werni’s.”

  “Why don’t you just let him sit there for a while? We can wait dinner on him. I’ll go get the dogs and come on over to the house.”

  “Humor me,” Nancy said. “You wouldn’t want one of your officers picking him up for a DUI, would you?”

  “God, you worry about him too much.” Sally turned off her desk lamp and headed out of her office, leaving the station by the back door, her phone at her ear.

  “I worry about you too, but that’s a whole ’nother conversation. Now go on and get your dogs and your father. We’re having a roast chicken tonight.”

  Sally couldn’t think of a single Friday night since she moved back to Mount Avery that she didn’t have one of several conversations with her mother as she got ready to leave work and join her parents for their weekly dinner together. Her mother either wanted Sally to pick up something at the Hy-Vee that she needed for the meal, or she wanted her to pick up her father at one of the town taverns, or she just wanted to make sure Sally was coming.

  Sally got into her Jeep Cherokee and headed out of town toward her house. When she moved back to Mount Avery she’d bought a property about two miles from the center of town, ten acres of mostly wooded land, some tillable, with a small frame house and an old barn. It had once been the focal point of a much larger holding, with the thousand acres behind it long ago swallowed up by one of the area’s corporate farms. The property represented everything Sally’s life in Chicago had not been—simple, quiet, in harmony with something other than street violence and bad memories of more despair and ugliness than she thought it would be possible to see.

  As she pulled into the long drive leading to the house, she could see the faces of her two dogs pressed against the living room window. They weren’t barking or jumping up and down. They were checking out who was arriving. Their faces disappeared as they ran to the kitchen to meet her at the door. They were both Labs, one chocolate, one black, both on the small side. Sally had picked the smallest from two litters just a week after she’d closed on the property. She named one Betty and the other Lou, and almost immediately began to wonder how she’d ever lived without dogs. She opened the door to let them out, pausing for a few licks and head rubs before following them into the yard.

  The dogs did their business and then started exploring the yard as if they’d never seen it before. Sally watched them with her hands in her pockets, her mind wandering to the conversation with Beth the night before, a topic she had returned to repeatedly throughout the day. She felt confused by it. Despite the fact that there was nothing overtly flirtatious about their time together in Beth’s kitchen, Sally sensed that Beth was growing more comfortable and more interested as the evening passed. Why then did Sally end the altogether pleasant time together with the remark about Mel? She didn’t even know for a fact that Beth was sleeping with Mel, though she’d be shocked if she wasn’t. Mentioning it was out of line, though. There had to be something in Beth’s question about girlfriends. Women didn’t ask that unless they were looking for a specific answer.

  While the dogs gobbled down some dinner, Sally changed into jeans and a sweater, and then the three of them left to pick up her dad. The dogs followed her into Werni’s, a tavern that often had a dog wrapped around the bottom of every other bar stool. Betty and Lou were not regulars like some of the dogs there, but they were known. Their entrance was barely noticed by the Labs and spaniels already hunkered down for a night of drinking with their people. Sally stood at the door for a moment to look for her father, but it didn’t take more than that to spot him. Werni’s was a small place, a simple rectangle of a saloon with a long wooden bar on the left, a pool table at the right rear, and a few tables in the right front. A small back room past the end of the bar had a service window. From here Werni served up his blue plate specials to the workers at the corn sweetener plant who came in for their dinner breaks, and on Fridays he sat there and cashed checks for the same workers. Quite a bit of the cash he handed to them through the window made its way back into his till by the end of the night. It was a clean place that mostly had town drinkers, but there was a group of college students with several empty pitchers of beer on their table. There were also a couple of the town boys playing pool. The college students didn’t even seem aware of the pool players’ presence, but Sally figured they would be before the end of the night. She sighed.

  Her father was sitting at the bar down near the end, his mug of beer empty. Sally could hear him laughing as he talked to the bartender, Marilyn, who’d been tending bar at Werni’s since Sally was a teenager. She was tiny and vibrant and as healthy as you can imagine any seventy-year-old to be, which amazed Sally when she thought of where she spent her days. There was enough secondhand smoke in the bar to do a person in. She loved flirting with all the regulars at the bar, even the semi-regulars like Mike Sullivan. He picked up her lighter and touched her cigarette with it, snapping the Zippo closed when she pulled away from the flame. Sally rolled her eyes and took the stool next to him.

  “Mr. Gallant.”

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Never mind. Mom says I need to drive you home so that I don’t have to arrest you for operating a vehicle while under the influence. Have you exceeded your limit, sir?”

  He grinned. “Officer, I admit it’s true. My limit is usually one beer. Tonight I’ve had two. Do your duty, if you must.”

  “Sorry. I’m off duty. Let’s have one more and head home. You can apologize to Mom for being a pig today.”

  “What are you talking about?” He looked at Marilyn and back at Sally. “I haven’t done anything.”

  “You stormed out of the house like a brat because Mom forgot to pick up your six-pack. What are you, twelve?”

  Marilyn laughed and started to walk away. “Honey, they’re all twelve. You’re just smart enough to not keep company with men, so you tend to forget.”

  “Oh, Christ. Don’t go bringing that up,” her father said. He turned his head to the Cubs game on the television over their heads. Another season of woe was just getting under way.

  “Dad, are you still afraid to hear people actually say that I’m gay? Here’s a news flash for you—everyone knows. The officers who work for me know, and guess what? They still have my back.”

  “You’re their boss. They know they have to have your back.” He got up from his stool and leaned down to pat Betty. “You know I don’t like to talk about this. I haven’t said anything about the way you live, so you should just let me have my ways too.”

  Sally drank her beer and let her father change the subject to the Cubs, an old standby that either of them could talk about at length. She didn’t really care about the Cubs.

  *

  Sally and her parents were on their second Law & Order rerun. Nancy and Mike loved it when Sally pointed out where the show was inaccurate in matters of police procedure. Sometimes Sally illustrated a point with a made-up story, just because they got such a kick out of it. Sally’s cell phone rang just as the second show was getting under way.

  “Chief, it’s dispatch. We have a dead body reported.”

  Sally stood at the excited tone in Dave’s voice. She walked into the kitchen with the phone at her ear, her parents following right behind her.
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br />   “Give me the address, Dave. Give me everything the caller said.”

  “I don’t know what all. Let’s see. The address is four-twelve West Third and the guy just said the body’s dead and that it looks like he’d been shot.”

  “Third Street or Third Avenue?”

  “Third Avenue.”

  Sally recognized the address. It was the home of Professor John Barrow. She’d driven by his house several times over the past two days.

  “Have you called paramedics?”

  “No, Chief, I called you first. I never had a murder here.”

  Sally was walking out the door to her car.

  “You have to do your job now, Dave. Get me an ambulance and at least four squads at that address. I’m on my way.”

  “We’ll watch the dogs,” Nancy called as Sally waved and reversed quickly out of the drive, on her way to her first murder scene in Mount Avery.

  Chapter Six

  The nights in Mount Avery were so dark, the streets so wide and uncluttered that Sally felt she was driving to an emergency scene in a place that couldn’t possibly have an emergency. In Chicago, the night was never really dark. The pale blue streetlights cast their glare on every block and the streets themselves were so full of legally and illegally parked vehicles, never mind sidewalks full of hydrants, trash cans, streetlight poles, traffic light poles, newspaper boxes, mailboxes, and people, that emergency vehicles were forced to pull up to a scene in any way they could. That’s after they fought the traffic and other obstacles to get there in the first place. As Sally neared the address on Third Avenue, there were two patrol cars and an ambulance in front of and behind her, lights and sirens going. They all pulled neatly to the curb in front of the house where a man and a dog stood in the yard, the man waving his arm, the dog straining at his leash. The dispatcher had relayed to all units that the victim was reported to be dead, but still Sally and the others ran at speed to the body lying in the doorway of the dark house. She sent two officers around back. The paramedics knelt and did a quick assessment.

  The body was of a younger man, dressed in corduroy trousers and button-down shirt, blood blossoming a stain in the middle of the chest. He lay flat on his back, eyes pointed straight up, arms at his sides, as if he were playing a dead man in a play. Most of his body lay within the living room of the house, with his feet jutting out the doorway, propping the screen door open. The house itself was dark and the paramedics used flashlights.

  “He’s dead, Chief,” said Tonya Mitchell, the senior paramedic in the fire department. “Looks like a bullet to the chest.”

  Sally took stock of the people standing around her. There were her two patrol officers on the second shift, Jake Edmunds and Bob Geddings. Bob was a veteran who was training Jake, but neither of them had ever worked a murder scene. They were staring at the body as if they couldn’t believe it. Tonya had been around for a good while, but her experience of dead bodies had come in Iraq, where she’d just completed a second tour of duty. The man and his dog were standing quietly out of the way. Instead of being excitable about his find, the man seemed reverent, as if quiet and respect were what were called for. Sally thought they were, but no one ever seemed to get that. Sally had been at countless murder scenes, and she was accustomed to irreverence from the professionals on the job. Now she was the only officer around with any murder experience.

  “Okay, here’s what we do,” Sally said. “We’ll use red tape to mark off the body and the area surrounding. Do not walk past the red tape for any reason. If you destroy evidence, I will fire you. Jake, you take care of that and also set up our perimeter. Bob, you need to call Dr. Rice out here on the double, and then put a call in to State to get a forensics team in as soon as possible. And, Tonya, you just hang back, all right? We’ll need you to take the body in to the hospital morgue in Center City, but it’s going to be a while yet.” Sally pointed at a group of officers standing in the back of the crowd around her. “I’m going to take you three and clear the inside of the house.”

  Sally led the way to the back of the house and entered, the team spreading through the house, each room entered and swept with guns at the ready. There was no one in the small two-bedroom house. She made note of the fact that not a single light was on and the blinds were all drawn. There was nothing on the kitchen counters or in the bathroom that would indicate Barrow, or an intruder for that matter, had been interrupted in the middle of anything, other than the open bottle of wine and the half-filled glass. No mess that would have been made if a burglar was ransacking the house and been interrupted by Barrow’s return. She didn’t see a laptop anywhere, but the things normally taken in a home invasion—desktop computers and other electronics—appeared to be present. A more thorough search would have to wait for the forensics team.

  Out back again, Sally put an officer in charge of maintaining the log that would record the name of everyone entering and exiting the house. Then she stepped over to the middle-aged man and his dog, who were now sitting on the lawn. Sally crouched down to talk.

  “Sir, I’m Sally Sullivan, the chief of the Mount Avery Police Department. Can you give me your name, please?”

  “Sure, sure. I’m Andrew Thompson. I live next door.” Thompson reached over to pat his dog, a young beagle.

  “Would you take me through what you saw, everything that happened tonight?”

  “I came out to walk the dog at the same time as usual. His last walk is around eleven and we always head this way so we can go into the park. Morgan here started whining almost right away and pulling at his leash. He was really yanking me toward John’s yard here so I followed him a bit, gave him some leeway. I noticed that the front door was open and then I saw the body lying right where it is now. I ran up to see what I could do, but I could tell right away he wasn’t alive. I felt his wrist for a pulse and checked his breathing. He definitely seemed dead. I didn’t touch anything, just called nine-one-one on my cell. That’s it, really.”

  “Who is John? Is that the owner of the house lying here?”

  “Yeah, his name is John Barrow and I think he rents the place. I know him because we both work at the college. I probably wouldn’t know him otherwise. He lives alone and really keeps to himself.”

  “Did you notice whether there were any lights on in the house? Both earlier this evening and when you saw the body?”

  “I don’t think I noticed one way or the other when I got home from work. It wasn’t dark then. Just now, I’d have to say the house was dark. I do remember that the room was dark behind him.”

  “And you didn’t turn any lights off yourself?”

  The man looked horrified. “No. Why in the world would I do that?”

  Sally felt Bob coming up behind her and turned around.

  “State is sending over a scene of crime team. Should be about an hour before they all get here,” Bob said. “And, Chief, we’ve got a pretty good crowd gathering around here. What do you want me to tell them?”

  In addition to the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles, the street was lit up by the front porch lights of every house on the block. Neighbors in bathrobes were as close as the sidewalk in front of the house, while Jake was winding crime scene tape around a tree at the side of the yard. “Bob, get over and tell those folks to move the hell back, and don’t be nice about it. I want them way back. No, I want them home, but since they won’t do that, you and Jake need to push them way, way back. Get that perimeter set up. And get a couple more officers down here. We’re going to need to talk to every one of these folks.”

  Sally stood. “Mr. Thompson, we’re going to have to get a full statement from you later, so I want you to sit tight at home now. Just tell me whether you saw anyone around this evening, or anytime today, who went to Mr. Barrow’s home, parked in front, anything at all.”

  “Nothing.” Thompson looked sorrowful at this.

  “And you didn’t see anyone leaving the house?”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  �
�It’s nothing to be sorry for. It just is,” Sally said. “If you’d write your name and contact information down here for me, I can let you go inside your house.”

  As Thompson wrote in Sally’s notebook, she once again surveyed the scene. There was a line of cars now on Third Avenue as the whole town became aware of something big happening. Mel’s truck pulled up. Sally could plainly see a young woman in the truck with her, sitting close to Mel on the bench seat. On the other side of the street, Beth was walking toward the taped-off area. Sally met her at the tape, motioning her inside it. Maybe Beth hadn’t seen Mel. Or better yet, maybe she had.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Beth looked perplexed. “The same as everyone else. I wanted to find out what happened.”

  “I would have been calling you anyway, because you’re dean. John Barrow’s been shot, dead.”

  “What?” Beth looked shocked.

  “That’s literally all I know, but I’m going to need to talk to you later. For right now would you get me the next of kin information so we can notify the proper person?”

  Beth stood with her mouth slightly open, her eyes set straight in front of her. She blinked once, said, “I’ll go get that,” and then turned and walked back the way she came. Sally frowned as she watched her blend back into the crowd. She wanted to follow her, take her by the hand, reassure her. She wanted Beth to squeeze her hand back. She knew that hearing of the murder of someone you knew was a shock for almost anyone, but Beth seemed completely dazed.

  “Chief, the ME’s here,” Tanya said, tapping Sally on the shoulder. Dr. Tom Rice was an internist in town and the medical examiner for the county. He had the lanky build of a long-distance runner, and Sally often saw him out running the same routes that Beth did. She had not worked with him other than at a teen suicide the year before. Now he was kneeling next to the body, pulling instruments from his bag. Sally knelt beside him.