by Brad Smith
“Why do you say that?”
Claire shrugged. “The fact that we don’t have any idea where he is?”
“I know where he is,” Joe said. “North of the St. Lawrence. And I’m heading there today to ask a few questions about that.”
When Joe was gone Claire sat at her desk feeling slight remorse that she didn’t tell him that Virgil Cain was not in Canada. But then, Claire didn’t know that to be a fact. Two nights earlier he had still been in the country. He could very well have crossed the border since then. So she couldn’t, in good conscience, have discouraged Joe anyway. Let him travel north in his Brooks Brothers–suitable-for-meeting-Mounties duds, and see what he might learn.
She heard a call come in to dispatch and half listened as she went through her e-mail. The name Dirk Hopman was mentioned and she looked up. She didn’t know why it held some significance but it did. The man was reporting an assault. The address was the Irish Line, a side road about halfway between Saugerties and Woodstock.
Which was, she knew, just around the corner from Virgil Cain’s farm.
Claire went into her notes and found where she had written Hopman’s name. Mary Nelson had mentioned it, and not in a flattering way. Claire put the notebook in her pocket and walked over to the front desk.
“Who took this Hopman thing?”
“Sal Delano. He just walked out the door.”
Claire caught up with the cruiser a few miles down the road and followed it to Route 212, through the back country, and finally into the driveway of Hopman’s farm. The place looked like something from a Dorothea Lange photograph, the rain gutters falling off the house, shingles missing, the lawn uncut. A large man wearing overalls was standing in the yard, his legs spread, watching them approach.
Sal had been watching Claire in the mirror for several miles. Now, when he parked, he got out and approached her.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Thought I’d tag along,” she said. “I’m bored.”
Sal raised his eyebrows and she knew that he’d expected a little more information than that. If there weren’t other matters at hand, it seemed that he might ask her to be more specific. Claire liked that about him.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m being nosy. I’ve heard about this guy Hopman.”
Together they walked over to the man in the overalls. Claire saw now that his face was bruised badly, his left eye swollen nearly shut. He was standing with his arms folded across his chest, looking pretty damn defiant for somebody who’d just taken a shit kicking. Or maybe he was embarrassed and the defiance was a pose.
“Dirk Hopman?” Sal asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s the story here?”
“The story here is that I was attacked last night. Right here on my own property.”
“By who?”
“I only got one name for you. Mary Nelson. A vet from town’s been harassing me for weeks.”
“Harassing you how?”
“Claiming I mistreated horses. She’s full of shit. Had me arrested once and then showed up here last night accusing me again. I don’t have a single horse on the place. I ain’t even allowed to because of her and those SPCA people. But that don’t stop her from showing up and shooting her mouth off.”
“What about the assault? Is that what happened to your face?”
“What do you think?” Hopman asked. “I was trying to get her to leave. I asked her politely to get the hell offa my property. And I got jumped. One minute I’m talking to the old broad and the next I get hit from behind by some guy—” Hopman hesitated. “It was two guys, you wanna know the truth. And I don’t even get a chance to defend myself. They don’t have the balls to come at me straight on.”
Sal glanced over at Claire. She was listening to Hopman but wasn’t looking at him, as if he wasn’t worthy even of that. She wore the expression of someone who was listening to a mildly amusing joke that was taking far too long to tell.
“Did you get a look at these guys?” Sal asked.
“No. I told you, they jumped me from behind.”
“I don’t understand,” Sal said. “Did they arrive here with the Nelson woman?”
“Well,” Hopman said slowly. “I don’t know how they got here. They musta snuck up somehow because I didn’t see them. Lookit, I gave you her name. Arrest her and get her to tell.”
“We intend to talk to her,” Sal said.
“Any minute now,” Claire said, looking toward the road. Mary Nelson’s F-250 was coming down the lane, followed by a van with the SPCA logo on the side. Behind the vehicles was an Ulster County trooper in a marked cruiser. Claire turned to Hopman and smiled.
“You ought to charge admission to this place.”
It took a few minutes to get everything straightened out. It seemed that while Hopman was filing an assault complaint against Mary Nelson and her unknown accomplices, Mary and the man from the SPCA, whose name was Donald Lee, were filing against Hopman, claiming he had horses in his possession, contravening a court order that denied him that right.
“And that’s pure bullshit,” Hopman said. “There’s no horses here.”
Mary Nelson looked at Claire. “There are horses in a corral behind that barn.” She paused. “Let me put it this way. There were horses there at seven o’clock last night.”
Claire indicated for Mary to go have a look.
“I don’t want her snooping around my property,” Hopman snapped.
“Shut up,” Claire told him.
Donald Lee went with Mary and the two of them walked around the barn. Sal was talking to the trooper by the cruiser. It seemed the trooper was going to leave Sal with both complaints, to save doubling up on the paperwork. Claire waited in silence but was pretty sure there were no horses on the property. When Mary came back, she confirmed that with a shake of her head and a knowing look. Claire turned to Hopman, who was smirking like a kid who’d gotten away with stealing apples from a grocer.
“What time was this alleged assault?” Claire asked.
“Like she said. Seven, eight o’clock last night.”
“So you waited for twelve hours to file a complaint.”
“Well, I was in a daze,” Hopman said. “I was pretty beat up. Lookit my face. Lookit this eye.”
“While you were in this twelve-hour daze,” Claire asked, “you wouldn’t by any chance have trucked a bunch of horses out of here . . . ?”
“No.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yeah, I’m sure about that.”
Claire turned to Mary. “Mr. Hopman claims that a couple of your friends jumped him and beat the hell out of him. Is that true?”
“No, that is not true.”
“What happened?” Claire asked.
“I’ve been watching this place”—Mary raised her voice, glaring at Hopman—“because Mr. Hopman has abused and starved animals in the past. Last night, I saw six or eight horses behind the barn. By law, Mr. Hopman is not to have horses on this property. So I stopped to ask why they were here. He threatened me, and then he choked me.”
“And?” Claire asked.
“So I hit him.”
“You hit him?” Claire laughed.
“You lying fucking bitch!” Hopman said.
“I told you to shut up,” Claire said. She looked at Mary.
“There was nobody here with you?”
“No.”
Claire was enjoying this now. It appeared that Mary Nelson was a character, and probably a straight shooter. She wasn’t, however, a particularly accomplished liar.
“I’ll take your statement in the car,” Claire told her. “Sal, you can get Mr. Hopman’s story.”
In the car Mary Nelson stuck with her tale, although she seemed a little uncomfortable telling it one on one. Claire didn’t push her too hard. She already knew no charges would be filed. Hopman couldn’t identify his mysterious assailants so there would be nobody to arrest on that count. And there were no horses o
n the property for the moment so Hopman would be excused from violating the court order. Of course, Hopman could always charge Mary Nelson with assault, but Claire doubted that the man wanted to appear in court to say he’d been beaten up by a septuagenarian half his size.
“You say that Hopman choked you?” she asked Mary.
“Yes.”
“Do you want to file a complaint?” Claire asked. “Because I’ll charge him with assault here and now. I’ll even go so far as to say it would make my day.”
“No. It’s okay.”
Claire flipped her notepad closed and put it on the seat between them. “And you’re certain there was nobody else here last night? Just you and Hopman?”
“That’s all I remember.”
Mary looked away as Claire smiled.
“I assume you were out this way because you’re still looking in on Virgil Cain’s farm.”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t heard from him?”
“No. I heard on the news that he might be in Canada.”
“Yeah,” Claire said. “He might be.”
She looked over at Sal and Hopman, standing by the front fender of the cruiser. From Hopman’s animated expression she assumed that Sal had informed him there would be no charges pending on the assault. Hopman was yapping and his arms were flapping up and down as if he were trying to take flight.
“What does he do with these horses?” Claire asked.
“Sends them to Europe to be butchered.”
“That’s not illegal.”
“Eating horses is not illegal,” Mary said. “Starving them is.”
“You can go,” Claire said. “Do me a favor and keep the bare-knuckle brawling to a minimum, will you? It’s not very ladylike.”
Mary opened the door and then looked back and smiled at Claire. “He started it,” she said.
Claire left Sal to sort things out and, since she was in the area, drove over to Virgil Cain’s farm. She didn’t expect to find anything. She certainly didn’t expect to find Virgil Cain, although if she did find him, she suspected he would be sporting some bruised knuckles this morning. How he would have ended up at Hopman’s, though, was a mystery. Another in a line that was growing every day. The guy was turning into an upstate Scarlet Pimpernel.
She pulled up to the pasture field and got out to look at the horses. She picked out the skinny mare, the horse that Mary Nelson said had come from Hopman’s. She was already looking healthier, moving along the fencerow and pulling at the grass. Claire saw that the water trough was nearly empty. Apparently Mary had not been here yet, or had forgotten, with the excitement at Hopman’s. Claire walked into the shed and had a look around. An electrical line ran between a switch and a wall-mounted pump with a large steel wheel on it. Claire hit the switch and the pump kicked noisily into action. A moment later she heard water gushing into the trough outside.
When the trough was full she walked to the house and went inside. Nothing had been disturbed since her last visit. Nothing she could see, anyway. She went upstairs and had a look in the master bedroom. It had been left a mess by the police and was still a mess. She went into the bathroom and glanced quickly around. She was about to leave when something occurred to her. She opened the shower curtain. There was a washcloth hanging over the shower spout. The cloth was damp. In fact, the cloth was damp enough that Claire was certain it had been used in the past few hours.
“You got a lot of nerve, Virgil Cain,” she said.
She searched the house then, not really believing he was hiding there at that moment, but knowing she had to anyway. Besides, every time she had tried to predict what he might be doing, she had been wrong. Thinking about that, she hoped that Joe was having a fruitful conversation with the RCMP. While he was urging the Mounties to throw a dragnet over the Great White North, Cain had been at home taking a shower.
After she left the house, she walked out to the barn and looked around there as well. She even climbed the ladder to the haymow. The fresh, sweet-smelling hay immediately brought back memories, many years submerged, of her summers as a kid, when her mother would take her to her uncle’s farm in Vermont. There she and her sister would catch frogs and build rafts and attempt to ride a brown and white pony that Claire realized years after the fact must have suffered from some mental disorder not unlike disorders she’d encountered in people she’d arrested over the past couple decades. The pony would kick anyone behind it, and bite anybody in front. And buck people off and scrape riders along the rough wall of the barn. Back then they had referred to the animal as frisky.
Claire climbed down and walked through the rest of the barn and the other outbuildings, thinking as she searched that she should be more nervous than she was, given the charges against the guy she was after. She was calm, though, partly because she really didn’t expect to find him there, but also because she didn’t think he was a danger to her, which was incredibly naive, given her years on the job.
She walked back to her car and leaned with her forearms over the roof, watching the farm buildings and the fields beyond. She wondered how he was getting around. Because he was definitely getting around. She knew that, if not much else.
She also knew that he was coming back here, at least from time to time. And if he was coming back, it stood to reason that she should be able to catch him when he did.
TWENTY-ONE
Jane might have stayed another night at Suzanne’s, but Miller Boddington came home Monday morning. With him was a man named Rafael; Jane wasn’t certain if that was his first name or his last. He had shoulder-length gray hair and was, Miller announced, the lawyer who would soon see him cleared of the animal abuse charges.
The two men were having breakfast in the dining room when Jane and Suzanne returned from an early-morning excursion to the farmers market in Bearsville. That was when Jane received the single-name introduction.
“Rafael’s an old hippie,” Miller said. “Everybody out there is an old hippie. You guys probably know each other from back in the day.”
“How would we know each other?” Jane asked.
“From your wild years out on the coast,” Miller said. He smiled. “With Charlie and the gang.”
Jane stared at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, I think you do.”
Shortly after that, Jane decided she wanted to go home. Suzanne drove her. She had been uncharacteristically on edge all morning. The suggestion that they go to the farmers market took Jane completely unawares; she doubted Suzanne had ever made the trip before. It seemed like an excuse to get out of the house. Jane knew she’d received a phone call from Miller the night before, telling her he was on his way home. Jane didn’t know what else he’d told her, but Suzanne was definitely upset about something. At the moment she was driving too fast, her fingers drumming on the steering wheel, her attention span virtually nonexistent.
“What’s going on?” Jane asked finally.
“Fuck,” Suzanne said. “Miller says he’s going to put the place up for sale.”
“And move to California?”
“Fucking California.” Suzanne spit out the words as if the entire state was a leper colony, and then reached for a cigarette.
Jane waited until she had lit up. “Can’t you swing both places? It’s not a question of money.”
“Money’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Then what is it?”
“He feels this horse business has sullied his reputation. He wants to start life anew on the coast.” Suzanne took a deep drag off her cigarette. “Where he can go about re-sullying it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Suzanne said flatly, exhaling. She pulled again on the cigarette. “He’s not selling the house. That’s my house.”
“You’d better talk to him,” Jane said as they pulled up to her house. “Before it goes too far.”
“Oh, I’ll talk to him,” Suzanne assured her. “If
he’s as smart as he pretends to be, he knows that the one person he doesn’t fuck with is me.”
Jane got out and watched the Mercedes disappear down the winding road. When she went inside, she realized that Miller had not mentioned Alan’s death. The two men had never been close, but they had known each other for years. Miller had little interest in music, or in any aspect of the arts. Alan held Miller in contempt, referring to him usually as a “phony little fuck,” although that designation pretty much included almost everyone he encountered in recent years. Still, Jane found it odd that Miller never commented on the fact she had lost her husband. It seemed, given his cryptic comment about Jane’s past, that he had other things on his mind. She tried not to read too much into it. Miller, by nature, liked to dig at people, as if getting under someone’s skin somehow made him superior to them. He was a little man with an overblown ego, and he was always, it seemed, looking for ways to make those around him feel small.
The police had finished their forensics work on Monday, and Walter had arranged for a cleaning company to make everything appear as if nothing had ever happened. Even if they couldn’t scrub away the images in Jane’s head, they did a very good job otherwise. They ended up replacing the cedar deck boards where Alan’s body had bled out that night. The blood had saturated the wood.
The house smelled of bleach and Pine-Sol. Jane got a bottle of water from the fridge and stood by the French doors, looking out at the deck. The new boards stuck out like a succession of sore thumbs. They would fade with age, though. As would it all, given enough time.
The message light on the kitchen phone was blinking. She heard the dogs barking and so ignored the phone for the time being and went outside to let them out of the run. They were excited to see her, having been given minimal attention from the maid these past couple of days, Jane assumed. After they settled, she sat down on the top step of the deck and watched the two animals run around the yard. She should go for a run with them, she knew. The dogs could use the exercise and Jane could use the distraction.
