How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  “I know what I think,” Howard said. “You don’t need to tell me how to think.”

  They sat there in the sawdust and Barrett tried to conceive of some words that would make Howard feel less alone. What might he say to a widowed man who’d raised his daughter and watched her blossom into a beautiful, intelligent young woman? Just what might those words be?

  Did you know that there were sixteen thousand murders last year in this country? he could say. More than a quarter of a million people have been murdered in this country since the day your daughter was born, Howard. Don’t feel isolated. You’re not alone. Enough people have been murdered in Jackie’s lifetime to populate the city of Portland, Maine, five times over. You are anything but alone.

  Howard wiped his mouth. Sawdust stuck to his face, which was still damp with tears. “I best get this work done while there’s still daylight,” he said. “You just…call me tomorrow. When you…”

  He couldn’t finish, and Barrett didn’t make him try. He said, “I’ll call you.”

  He knew it was time to go then, and so he stepped through the open door. The wind had picked up and the smell of the sea was heavy and there was only a narrow band of crimson light, thin and bright as an opened vein, left to fight the descending darkness. Behind him, the work lamps cast a harsh white glow inside Jackie Pelletier’s unfinished studio, where her father had ripped out the staircase to build something that would feel more magical.

  Ascending. Ayuh, that’s just the word.

  Barrett walked back down the hill. The local who’d brought him out, a retired lobsterman named Brooks who’d known the Pelletier family all his life, was waiting patiently in his boat. He had not asked why they were going to Little Spruce today. He never did. But he looked at Barrett closely when he stepped down into the boat, and before he started the engine, he opened a stowage locker and removed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and held it out without a word.

  He had never offered Barrett a drink before.

  “Yeah,” Barrett said. “Thanks.” He opened the bottle and took a long drink and then tried to hand it back. The old lobsterman shook his head.

  “You keep it,” he said, and then he started the motor. Barrett cast off the dock lines and sat down, his eyes on the cottage on the hill and the new building going up beside it.

  “Ascending,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Brooks asked.

  “Nothing,” Barrett said. “Just talking to myself.”

  He took another drink and turned to face the wind.

  5

  The pond where the bodies of Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly allegedly lay was twenty-four acres of water fronted by only three seasonal homes. The rest of the shore was composed of marsh grass that led into the pines. At its center, the pond was approximately twenty feet deep. Between the dock and raft, it couldn’t have been much more than ten.

  But, as Kimberly Crepeaux had said, it was dark water, and a lonely place.

  As the sun came up, Barrett stood on the shore with Don Johansson and watched the dive team gear up. A few other cops from the state police were on hand, but the divers were from the Maine Warden Service. They’d pulled bodies out of ponds, rivers, and oceans. On more than a few occasions, they’d gone through ice to do it.

  Today, though, the air was already warm at dawn, fragrant with the scent of pine needles and moss. Watching the sun chin up and over the tree line, Barrett found himself thinking of the way Kimberly Crepeaux had described Mathias Burke’s reaction to that unseasonably hot September day: As if the sun had come up hot that day looking only for him, like somebody picking a fight.

  Barrett was exhausted, and he knew that Don had to be too. Neither of them had slept. After returning from Little Spruce Island, Barrett had gone directly to a meeting with the state and county police and the prosecutor and mapped out their plan for the search, the arrest of Mathias Burke, and the handling of media inquiries. It had been after three in the morning before they were done, and they’d stayed in the station, drinking coffee and talking about nothing, each distracted by his own thoughts about what had gone into this and where it would end.

  At dawn, they went to the pond.

  Now, after getting the thumbs-up from Clyde Cohen, the warden who was in charge of the dive team, Barrett said, “Let’s bring them home.”

  He watched the divers vanish, one at a time, beneath the water.

  Descending.

  When the divers came up, this investigation would be done. When they ascended, it would all be over.

  He expected it to go quicker than it did. The divers stayed down, and the minutes ticked by, and the sun arced into Barrett’s eyes. He tried not to look at his watch. Don Johansson checked his plenty, but he didn’t say anything.

  Barrett blinked at the sun, annoyed by its brightness reflecting off the water even with his sunglasses and a baseball cap shielding his eyes. The smell of the water and the pines reminded him of fishing Maine ponds like this with his grandfather. They’d go out on a little boat with a ten-horse Johnson outboard and work Rapalas and Red Devil spoons along the weed edges, hunting bass and pike. His grandfather would drink and talk, usually about the military or manhood or all the ways his own son—Barrett’s father—was an example of a culture gone soft. The professor, he would sneer. He always called Barrett’s father the professor. Fuckin’ philosophy, you kidding me? Let me tell you about some good men who died over fuckin’ philosophy, Robby.

  Twelve years after his father’s funeral and ten after his grandfather’s—Ray had outlasted his son; Ray had outlasted almost everyone, running fast and hard on booze, cigarettes, and venom—the smells of this Maine pond took Barrett right back to those fishing trips. Smell was supposed to be the sense most closely linked to memory, but this wasn’t a day to recall the past. This day was supposed to be about moving forward—it would be painful and tragic, yes, but it would also move things forward. And quickly. The water wasn’t deep enough to hide bodies for long.

  You won’t find ’em.

  Barrett twisted his watch so the face was pointing inward and he couldn’t see the dial.

  It was nearly noon when the warden in charge of the dive team told Barrett that there was nothing to be found within a hundred yards of the raft.

  “You’re positive? I thought you said visibility was awful down there.”

  “It is, but the water’s shallow. We’ve been crawling the bottom, basically. Every square foot. They’re not in this cove. I’m sure of it.”

  “Maybe out deeper,” Barrett said, but already he was unsettled because Kimberly Crepeaux had been so clear on the location. “They weighted the bodies, but maybe not enough. They could have drifted pretty far out.”

  “With no current?”

  Barrett looked at the warden. “Go deeper,” he said. “They’re down there.”

  The divers went deeper. By two, they were in the middle of the pond. Word of the search had leaked, and spectators began to arrive. Johansson brought in additional troopers to keep them back and secure the road. Then a TV helicopter passed overhead and filmed the divers’ repeated, and empty-handed, returns to the surface. It was very warm, and Barrett’s mouth was very dry.

  “They’ll find them,” he said to no one in particular.

  By four, they had worked all the way to the opposite shore and found nothing but beer bottles, fishing lures, and one rusted Louisiana license plate.

  “‘Came up with the Gulf Stream—from southern waters,’” the diver said, tossing the plate onto the plastic sheet they’d spread for any items of potential evidentiary value. He grinned, but Barrett couldn’t match it.

  “Not a Jaws fan, Agent Barrett?”

  “Not today.” Barrett worked his tongue around his mouth and tugged his baseball cap lower. The sun’s glare was relentless. “No pipes, no pieces of metal?”

  “Plenty of metal if you count beer tabs and Rapala hooks. But anything bigger than that?” The diver shook his head. “It’s a clean botto
m. Ponds like these, we usually find all sorts of shit. Refrigerators, car doors—hell, entire cars, for that matter. This is an unusually clean bottom.”

  Barrett nodded and tried to look impassive. The diver adjusted his mask and mouthpiece and went back in again. The television chopper took another pass, its rotors shimmering shadows on the glassy, glaring surface of the pond.

  “You said every part of her story checked out,” Johansson said to Barrett in a low tone. It came out more accusatory than questioning.

  “It did. Every single stop. You know that. You reviewed the same route.”

  “Every single stop before this one checks out. This one is pretty damned relevant too.”

  “She was telling the truth,” Barrett said. “I’ve spent a lot of time talking to her, Don, and I am sure that she was telling the truth about this.”

  “I’m aware of the time you’ve spent on Kimmy’s stories,” Johansson said, and again Barrett caught the loaded, accusatory tone. Johansson struggled to believe anything offered by Kimberly Crepeaux. I don’t want to hang my case on a jailhouse snitch, Johansson had said. And Barrett had told him that they wouldn’t have to because they’d have the bodies.

  Find the bodies, close the case.

  Barrett moved away from him and paced the shore, scanning the water and weeds, working south. Then he beckoned for Johansson.

  “The warden’s wrong,” he said. “There’s a current to this pond.”

  Johansson arched an eyebrow as he looked from Barrett out to the mirrored surface of the water, which was unblemished by so much as a ripple. “You think?”

  “It’s stream-fed. Water comes in at the north end and goes out the south. Let’s take a look at the south end.”

  They slogged through the boggy soil, boots sinking six inches deep, then coming free with a wet sucking sound, the mosquitoes and blackflies buzzing. Everything at ground level was a battle, assaults by mud and bugs, by muscle aches and sweat, and everything above was a beautiful tease, pine-scented air leading up to a cobalt sky. The idea that the two worlds were joined felt absurd.

  At the south end of the pond was a berm, dug out and then backfilled with gravel. The pond had been built by a man with visions of developing the property for summer cottages. The soil wasn’t right for building, though; it stayed too wet for too long, and he’d created more of a marsh than a pond.

  Don Johansson and one of the wardens measured the water depth on the other side of the berm, where the water worked toward the creek.

  “Sixteen inches,” the warden said, slapping at a mosquito that was treating his neck like a buffet line. It left a bloody smear behind. “No chance a body drifted through here even if it hadn’t been weighted.”

  “It was a wet winter,” Barrett said. “December rains, right? Then again after the snowmelt. Would’ve been high back then.”

  The warden looked at Barrett and then away.

  “Agent Barrett? Even at record flood levels, you’re not going to have enough current in here to carry a body from that cove, across the pond, and through this.”

  Barrett watched the water flow past the berm, sparkling under the sun, melodic as it passed over the rocks. Most people would have said it was a beautiful sound, and on most days Barrett would have agreed with them, but right now the soft rippling seemed like a mocking chuckle.

  “Keep at it,” he said. “I’m going to see Kimberly.”

  6

  On the day after Cass Odom’s body was found, Kimberly Crepeaux climbed behind the wheel of her car with an open vodka bottle and drove the wrong way down a one-way street in Rockland near the police station. When police finally pulled her over, she made no effort to conceal the plastic bag of pills that lay in plain sight on the passenger seat. Her blood alcohol level was a modest .10, barely above the legal limit and hardly enough to create such inebriated thinking that she would fail to even attempt to hide the drugs.

  “I think you wanted to be arrested,” Barrett told her the first time they spoke.

  She’d rolled her eyes.

  Today two corrections officers brought her into the interview room, uncuffed her, and left. She was a waif of a girl, five feet—although she insisted on saying five one, the way she insisted on him calling her Kimberly even though everyone else called her Kimmy—and one hundred pounds. The orange prison garb hung off her in loose billows and folds. Her blond hair was cut just below the ears, a perky bob that enhanced the childlike look of her small face, with its splash of freckles and bright green eyes. She was the mother to one child, a daughter immediately claimed by Kimberly’s grandmother, who’d explained the decision to Barrett with wide eyes and a cigarette dangling from her lips. Why’d I take the little one from her? Mister, you’ve met her.

  When Kimberly entered the room, Barrett got to his feet with practiced courtesy. You showed respect from the start if you wanted to get the truth. What you had to do was encourage conversation, not force it; you wanted the suspect to talk comfortably, not feel baited or coerced. People thought that you understood them when you kept your mouth shut, maintained eye contact, and listened more than you talked. When people thought they were understood, they tended to talk more.

  Another rule: You didn’t sit on the opposite side of the table or desk from the suspect. Those were power dynamics in some cases, but in all cases they were literal objects placed between you and the other person. He didn’t want barriers. He pulled out one of the red plastic chairs for Kimberly and made sure that she was seated first, like a guest; these small gestures of respect counted. Then, after she was seated, he brought his own chair around the table so that they were both on the same side, nothing between them. He sat with good posture, not a military ramrod bearing but also not with any slouch that suggested disinterest or dominance, and he leaned forward ever so slightly, toward her, toward the source of the words that mattered. Then he tried to clear his mind to hear her words. Tried to push back those images of the empty-handed divers and the way Johansson’s face had looked when he kept checking his watch.

  Kimberly said, “So it’s over now?”

  Almost immediately, Barrett’s temper rose, and he had to still himself. Slow down your breathing, slow down your speaking. Slower was always better. Emotional physics; control was easier to maintain at fifty miles an hour than a hundred.

  Of course, there was always black ice.

  Barrett let a few seconds pass, watching the particular black ice in front of him, before he said, “It is not over. I will need to find the bodies before it can be over.”

  Kimberly already had a jailhouse pallor, but it seemed to whiten an extra shade, her freckles standing out stark.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Where are the bodies?” Barrett asked.

  “They’re right where I told you. In the pond, out between the dock and the raft.”

  “No, they’re not.”

  Kimberly gaped at him. Then she said, “You missed them. It’s dark water. Maybe he got them out closer to the raft. Maybe the water pushed them around a little.”

  Bullshit, he wanted to snap. Stop lying. But instead he breathed slowly and kept his tone steady and his eyes on hers when he said, “We’ve had divers in that pond since dawn. There are no bodies in there, Kimberly.”

  In all of their interviews, Kimberly Crepeaux had been generally stoic. She had enough familiarity with police questioning that it didn’t make her immediately nervous, and she also liked to portray herself as a willing participant in the investigation, a helpful citizen, a team player. As Barrett’s questions tunneled in on her drunken references to a night with Mathias Burke and Cass Odom, she’d begun to show a slightly more emotional reaction, but even then it wasn’t overt. She would avoid eye contact, pick at her nails, look at the ceiling, twirl her hair. Small, fidgeting responses. But never, not even when she’d confessed, had she seemed scared.

  Now she was shaking. It was minor at first—a tremble of her right hand on the tabletop—and she
clasped her hands together in her lap as if to still it. Instead, the tremble spread up to her shoulders, and then her jaw began to quiver.

  “He moved the bodies,” she blurted.

  “Mathias?”

  “Of course. That’s what he did. He must have, right?”

  “Mathias went out there, dove twelve feet, found bodies wrapped in plastic and pipes, brought them back to the surface, loaded them in a vehicle, and moved them?”

  “He could’ve used ropes or something? How would I know? The last time I saw them they were right where I told you! They were sinking into that pond, out in the cove, out between the dock and the raft! They’re down there and you just missed them!”

  She’d never shouted at Barrett before. She’d been crude, she’d made jokes, she’d cried, taunted, flirted. She’d tried every tactic—but she had never shouted.

  Barrett studied her quivering jaw and her hands squeezed so tightly together that those oft-injected veins pressed blue threads against her white skin, and he thought that she was telling the truth.

  “Where is the truck?” he said. “If that’s what happened, if he moved the bodies, then I’ve got to pivot. I need evidence. The truck will get me started. Blood evidence. That is—”

  “I don’t know about the truck!”

  “Then we are back to where we started. Kimberly? Without those bodies, your confession will be worthless. Mathias will get lawyers to pound away at your story, and then they’ll turn to the jury and say, If she was telling the truth, the police would have found the bodies. And the jury will agree.”

  “Mathias moved ’em.”

  “That’s a tough scenario to believe,” Barrett said. “You all were damn lucky not to have been seen when you put them in, if I’m to believe that story. But now you’re saying someone went back and found them, dragged them up, and relocated them without being seen? I can’t sell that one.”