Out Cold

by William G. Tapply

  A big circle of yellow crime-scene tape had been strung around the corner of the parking lot. It encompassed the snowbanks where the plow had cleared the lot and a large area of drifted snow beyond the snowbanks.

  Horowitz ducked under the tape, held it for me so I could bend under it, and then led me to the edge of the lot. He played his flashlight on the ground.

  She was sprawled on her side on the packed snow on the parking lot near the snowbank. Her head was twisted awkwardly to the side, and her legs were bent in a running position. She was wearing a hip-length fake-fur jacket, a short black skirt, fishnet stockings, and leather boots. A red beret lay beside her body. She had long dark hair. Her skin was unnaturally white.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Recognize her?” said Horowitz.

  “You better let me see her face.”

  “Don’t touch anything.”

  I kept my hands in my pockets and scootched down beside the body. Horowitz shone his flashlight on her face.

  It was Misty.

  “I know her,” I said.

  “You got a name?”

  I stood up. “She called herself Misty. That’s all I know. She was a pro, hung out in Chinatown. How’d she die?”

  “Beaten and strangled. Looks like they dumped her here. Killed her somewhere else, loaded her into a vehicle, and tossed her out. Cleaning service spotted her in their headlights when they were leaving around four this morning.” Horowitz looked at me. “Misty? That what you said?”

  “Yes. I assume it’s her, um, professional name.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “A hooker named Misty with your business card in her pocket?”

  “It’s nothing like that, for Christ sake.”

  “Better not be. Jesus, Coyne.”

  “If it was, would you tell Evie?”

  “Bet your ass.”

  “Evie knows all about Misty.”

  “Well,” he said, “I don’t. Let’s go over to my vehicle, turn on the heater, and you can talk to me.”

  On the way to Horowitz’s car, he stopped, poked a uniformed policeman in the chest, and said, “Run down to the Dunkin’ and get me and Mr. Coyne here some coffee and a couple sugar-covered crullers. You might as well pick up something for yourself, too.” He fumbled in his wallet and handed the cop a twenty-dollar bill.

  The motor was running and the driver’s door of Horowitz’s sedan hung open. We got in, closed the doors, and cracked the windows so they wouldn’t steam up.

  “Okay,” he said. “Talk to me.”

  I told him how Henry found Dana Wetherbee’s body in my backyard, how she died from blood loss and exposure to the cold. When I told him how she’d been on fertility medication and the M.E. surmised that she’d miscarried because her fetus had outgrown her uterus, Horowitz, said, “Humph.”

  When I mentioned Saundra Mendoza, he muttered, “Yeah. Good cop.”

  I told him about Sunshine, and the Shamrock Inn, and running into Misty, Zooey, and Kayla, and seeing a van with New Hampshire plates and a logo with bears on the side. I told him that Evie was the one who identified the girl as Dana Wetherbee and that she and I were planning to drive down to Rhode Island that afternoon to talk with Dana’s grandmother.

  About then the cop came back with our coffee and crullers. Horowitz and I stopped talking long enough to take a couple bites of cruller.

  When I started up again, I told him about finding the photo in the baggie stapled onto Henry’s collar.

  Horowitz’s head snapped up at that. “In your backyard?”

  I nodded. “I haven’t told Evie about it.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Don’t blame you. You told Mendoza, though, I hope.”

  “I did,” I said. Then I told him how Misty had called my office on Tuesday, how she said she needed to talk with me confidentially, something about the guy who’d been driving the van with the bear logo. She was concerned about her friend Kayla, but she didn’t tell me why. I told him that she agreed to meet me at Dunkin’ Donuts on Tremont and Boylston but never showed up. I told him how the next day I’d tracked down the Happy Family Restaurant on Beach Street where, according to Bonnie, the hostess, the three girls hung out. I summarized what Bonnie had told me. “You should talk to her,” I said. “And Kayla and Zooey. They were Misty’s best friends. The three of them were there together the day she called me.”

  “Never would’ve occurred to me,” he grumbled. “Thanks.”

  “You don’t need to be sarcastic,” I said. “I’m just trying to help.”

  Horowitz was taking notes in his pocket-sized black notebook. Without looking up, he said, “Yeah, sorry. That was excellent detecting.”

  “I thought so, too,” I said. “Evie called me Sam Spade.”

  He snorted.

  “Dana Wetherbee weighs heavy on my heart,” I said. “So does Sunshine. And now Misty.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. He snapped his notebook shut and shoved it into his jacket pocket. “These women, they run into you, next thing you know, they’re dead.”

  “I appreciate your sympathy,” I said. “But I don’t think I’m the important connection among the three of them.”

  “That wasn’t sympathy.”

  “Gee,” I said. “You could’ve fooled me.”

  “So did she have a pimp?”

  “Misty? I have no idea. You think?…”

  “Beaten and strangled. A pimp or a customer, huh?”

  “Funny,” I said. “She’s a prostitute. But I never really thought about it. About what she did, I mean.”

  “You didn’t, huh?”

  “No. She was just this pretty young woman. She was smart and savvy, she had friends, she liked Chinese tea…”

  Horowitz was shaking his head.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Evie called me naïve.” I took a bite of cruller. “You think whoever did this picked her up in the city and drove up here to dump her?”

  Horowitz shrugged. “She worked in the city, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “But why pick a place on the opposite side of the road where you’ve got to cut across traffic? I mean, there are plenty of office buildings on the northbound side.”

  “We’re checking out this building,” said Horowitz. “Assume it’s not random. Assume our killer specifically chose this building. Maybe he works here, or used to work here. Maybe his ex-wife or the guy who fired him works here.”

  “That’s not exactly what I’m saying.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That panel truck I mentioned, the one with the bears? It had New Hampshire plates.”

  “Heading south on Route One, coming down from the Granite State,” said Horowitz. “Stops along the way to dispose of a body. That what you’re thinking?”

  I shrugged. “What do I know?”

  He sighed. “What do any of us know.”

  “So what’re you going to do?”

  “Do?” He shook his head. “We’re got to solve this damn murder, that’s what.”

  “I mean—”

  “Look, Coyne. I’m sorry to drag you out of bed, and I appreciate all your help. I really do. But I don’t need your advice on investigating homicides, and I sure as hell don’t want you banging around getting in my way. Understand?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  He looked at me and rolled his eyes. “I know you, Coyne.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I just want to know what happened to Dana Wetherbee.”

  “Sam Spade, my ass,” he grumbled. He flipped through his notebook, then looked up at me. “Okay, so let’s go over your story again.”

  Sixteen

  Edson, Rhode Island, turned out to be a little postcard-pretty New England village similar to dozens of quaint New England villages on the Massachusetts South Shore and in Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New Hampshire’s Monadnock region. To get to the Arsenaults’ house, Evie and I had to drive through what passed for the center of town. The re
ctangular village green featured a statue of a man on a horse and a World War I cannon with a pyramid of cannonballs. A white-spired Congregational church, a rambling nineteenth-century inn, a general store, a post office, a town office building, and several well-tended colonial houses encircled the green. A graveyard rolled across the hillside behind the church, and villagers were ice skating on the little frozen pond in back of the post office. The roads were lined with giant maple trees and old stone walls, and everything was draped with pristine white snow that glistened in the late-afternoon January sunshine.

  Edson, Rhode Island, looked like the kind of place where nothing bad could ever happen to anybody.

  Evie was driving her Volkswagen Jetta. I was navigating with the directions I’d printed out from MapQuest.

  Most of the way down we’d talked about Misty.

  First Dana. Then Sunshine. And now Misty. They were all connected, and the connection seemed to be me.

  Brady Coyne, KOD. The kiss of death.

  “You’re not that powerful,” said Evie. “Everything doesn’t revolve around you. You’re just some guy. A nice guy, true. A fairly lovable guy, most of the time. And cute. But still, just a guy. You can’t save the world.”

  “I don’t know why the hell not,” I muttered.

  Shirley and Richard Arsenault lived in a white dormered Cape at 27 Marlboro Road, one-point-three miles past the center of town according to MapQuest and confirmed by the Jetta’s odometer. An old blue Ford Escort wagon was parked in the driveway beside the house.

  Evie pulled in behind it. She turned off the ignition, blew out a breath, and said, “Okay. Here we go.”

  We walked up the steps to the front porch and she rang the bell.

  After a minute, the door opened, and a boy—he looked twelve or thirteen—stood there. He was small and pale with just the beginnings of fuzz on his upper lip. “You’re Mrs. Banyon,” he said to Evie. “You’re here about Dana.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m very sorry.” I noticed that she did not bother correcting him about the “Mrs.”

  He nodded. “I remember you from the hospital.”

  “I remember you, too,” she said. “This is Brady.”

  He looked at me, then held out his hand. “I’m Bobby Wetherbee.”

  I shook his hand. “Brady Coyne. Good to meet you.”

  Bobby Wetherbee’s hand was small but his grip was manly. “Come on in,” he said.

  We followed him into the house. The front door opened directly into a small, dim living room.

  Bobby took our coats and gestured at the sofa. It had a faded slipcover featuring large brownish flowers. “Have a seat,” he said. “My nana will be right there.”

  We sat, and Bobby left the room. A little gentleman.

  An upright piano dominated one corner of the room. On one wall a brick fireplace was flanked by built-in bookcases with glass doors. A braided rug covered the pine-plank flooring. A single copy of Reader’s Digest and an empty green-glass candy dish sat on the coffee table.

  The only wall decoration was a picture of Jesus on the cross. He had a crown of thorns and a halo around his head, and his blood was bright red. A sprig of dried palm fronds had been tucked behind the frame.

  From somewhere inside the house came the hum of a refrigerator and the loud tick of a clock. Otherwise, it was ghostly silent.

  Evie squeezed my leg. I covered her hand with mine.

  After a minute, a woman came into the room. She was short and stout, with tightly permed white hair and sharp pale eyes. She wore gray sweatpants and a blue Providence College sweatshirt and white sneakers. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. She nodded at us without smiling.

  Evie stood up. “Mrs. Arsenault, hello. I’m Evie Banyon. We met a couple years ago.”

  The woman nodded. “Yes. In the hospital. I remember. When Verna was dying. You were kind to all of us.” She glanced at me and arched her eyebrows.

  “This is Brady Coyne,” said Evie. “My husband. Brady’s a lawyer.”

  I stood up, smiled at Shirley, and held out my hand.

  She shook it quickly, then took a step backwards, as if she was afraid to get too close to me. “Did Bobby offer you coffee?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s all made,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said Evie. “Coffee would be great.”

  Shirley Arsenault shuffled out of the room.

  “Husband,” I whispered to Evie.

  She smiled.

  Shirley Arsenault was back a couple minutes later with a tray bearing an aluminum carafe, three mugs, a pitcher of milk, a matching bowl of sugar, a plate of Fig Newtons, and a stack of napkins. She set it on the table and poured the mugs full of coffee. Then she sat on the rocking chair across from us. She perched on the edge of the seat with her knees pressed together, holding her coffee mug in both hands. “This is all my fault,” she said softly.

  Evie said nothing. Neither did I.

  “I should have stopped her. I know Verna would never have allowed it. She was just a child.” She looked at Evie.

  “You mean Dana?” said Evie.

  She nodded.

  “Dana ran away?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t stop her. I let her go.”

  “Where did she go?”

  Shirley Arsenault shook her head, then plucked a handkerchief from the cuff of her sweatshirt and dabbed at her eyes with it. “I didn’t ask for my daughter to die, Lord knows, and I didn’t ask to have two young children to take care of. I’ve already got Richard. That’s my husband. Since he had his stroke, he’s worse than a child. I have to feed him and bathe him and change him, and…” She was looking down into her coffee mug. “I’m just tired all the time,” she said. “I can’t do it all by myself.”

  “You’ve been taking care of Dana and Bobby since Verna died?” said Evie.

  “Obviously doing a poor job of it,” she said.

  “What about their father?” I said.

  “Benjamin?” Shirley looked up. Sparks flashed in her eyes. “Benjamin drives trucks back and forth to Oklahoma and Utah and places like that. He doesn’t have time to raise children. Never did. Sends me a little money once in a while. Very little. That’s about it for Benjamin. It’s not as if I had a choice, mind you. Somebody had to take the children. Now Bobby, he’s a good boy. Helps his old nana out around the house, sits and reads to his grandfather, gets good grades in school. But Dana…” Shirley blinked, then picked up her mug and took a sip.

  “Dana wasn’t a good girl?” said Evie.

  “She used to be,” said Shirley. “When her mother was alive, Dana was a sweet, serious girl, helpful and obedient and, you know, just nice. But always a sad, private child. You never knew what she was thinking. It was hard to blame her. Her mother was sick all the time, in and out of the hospital. Then when Verna died, Dana became even more…quiet. Moody. I know I should have tried harder to help her, but I was awfully sad myself. Verna was my only child.” She stared hard at Evie. “There’s nothing worse than outliving your children.” She glanced up at the picture of Jesus. “I tried to get Dana to go to Mass with me, but she wouldn’t. That was another thing. When Verna died, Dana stopped going to church. Then she turned sixteen, and next thing I know, she tells me she’s not going back to school, she’s found a job, and she’s leaving, and then…she just left. And I never saw her again.”

  “What was this job?” said Evie.

  Shirley shook her head. “I don’t know. I remember she said it was important work, whatever that meant. She said she’d keep in touch with me. I asked her about this job, where she’d be, what she’d be doing. She said she’d tell me more when she got settled down.”

  “She ran away,” said Evie.

  “It took me a while to realize that’s what it was. I guess I wasn’t thinking very straight.”

  “Did you report it?” I said.

  Shirley narrowed her eyes at me. “Yes, of course I did. After a few days,
I realized what Dana was doing. I called the Edson police. I gave them a photo, answered a lot of questions, and they said they’d keep an eye out for her. But they said if she was sixteen, she could quit school and leave home, and unless she’d been abducted or something, there wasn’t much they could do.” She shook her head. “I called them a few times after that to see if they knew anything. But they didn’t. And then…then yesterday this policeman comes to my door with that awful photograph….”

  “When did this happen?” said Evie. “When did Dana leave?”

  “At the beginning of the summer. Her birthday was in June. The nineteenth. I gave her a jacket. I think she liked it. We don’t have much money. She left a week or so after that. It was a Saturday. When I came downstairs that morning, Bobby told me she was gone.”

  “Did you hear from her after she left?” I said.

  Shirley swiveled her head to look at me. “Just once,” she said. “A few days later. She called me on the phone, told me she was fine, and asked to speak to Bobby. Bobby wasn’t here at the time.” She shrugged. “I told her it was wrong for her to be gone, that she should finish school first. I asked her to come back home. She said she would, but not yet.” She shrugged. “After that one phone call, I never heard from her again.”

  “You must have been worried,” said Evie.

  Shirley looked at her. “Of course I was worried. But she said she was fine, and I just prayed that she was. I spoke to the police. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “She said it was important work?” I said.

  “Yes. Important. That was the word she used.”

  “Any idea what she meant?”

  Shirley shrugged. “All I can tell you,” she said, “is that ever since I can remember, Dana wanted to be a doctor. I suppose it was because her mother was always sick.”

  “She used to tell me that, too,” said Evie. “She was very interested in Verna’s disease and how she was being treated. She asked very good questions.”

  “I doubt that Dana left home at sixteen to enroll in medical school,” said Shirley. She leaned forward and put her coffee mug on the tray on the coffee table. Then she sat back in her rocking chair and looked at us. “That policeman yesterday, he said I’d have to go to Boston to identify her body.”