The Prettiest Feathers

by John Philpin

  I managed to find my car, which was parked illegally on the street. At least Lane hadn’t given me a ticket. As I drove toward the interstate, headed north for Hasty Hills, I scanned the stations for talk radio. I locked into one where a caller was saying, “They’re not telling us anything. All these women are murdered or missing, and the police are saying they don’t have any reason to think they’re connected. I think they are connected, and I think they have a responsibility to tell us what we need to know in order to protect ourselves.”

  “There isn’t any way to protect yourself,” I told her.

  The host said, “Captain Hanson held a press conference this morning, as most of you listening probably know. Let me just read you something from that. He was asked a question—a direct question—about Maxine Harris and Sarah Sinclair, the woman who worked in the bookstore where a source has revealed Maxine Harris shopped—and this is what Captain Hanson had to say. ‘At this time we have no reason to consider these cases related, although we are looking at all possibilities. There is no reason to panic. Our investigation is ongoing.’ Not much comfort in that, is there? We have another caller on the line.”

  I’m still driving the old beat-to-shit Ford I bought when Sarah and I were together. She laughed at the car. “Eight hundred bucks,” I told her. “It’s only got sixty-three thousand miles on it. This thing will go forever.”

  It’s over 120,000 now, and still going. Why is it so important that I was right, and that Sarah was wrong? Maybe I needed Sarah to be wrong, to know nothing of the practical things in life, so she’d need me. Maybe that’s it.

  “I don’t know much about serial killers other than what I see on TV,” the caller said.

  “Welcome to the club,” I said.

  “They must be sick to do what they do. If they’re that crazy, why can’t the police spot them?”

  “They have to be incredibly sick,” the host agreed, “but, from what I’ve read—and that’s not a whole lot—these killers, these savages really—believe it or not, they look and act and talk and walk just like the rest of us. They go shopping, pay their bills, join a softball team, get out the votes for the local Democratic party. I had to get that last one in. Couldn’t resist it. Theodore Bundy, who killed thirty or forty young women, worked for the re-election of Washington governor Dan Evans.”

  “Evans is a Republican, shithead,” I said.

  “That’s probably a poor example because Dan Evans is a Republican, but you catch my drift. These guys are hard to spot.”

  I took the Hasty Hills exit and drove slowly through the quiet little town, down the main street, past the municipal building, and on out into the country. After about three miles I found the place I was looking for—third house on the left after the covered bridge. Except there wasn’t any house. Just a crater.

  I parked across the street from the yellow crime scene tape and got out of the car. I approached a local constable who had been left to guard the area, and flashed my badge. He looked at the can of Old Milwaukee.

  “Off duty,” I said. “What happened out here?”

  “Doc Chadwick’s place,” he said. “Was in the Barngreve family for years before Doc bought it. Fire marshal’s been all over it. The bomb squad from the city—and some boys from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Monday morning it just went up. You could hear it clear into town. They found part of a jawbone, but they ain’t said it was Doc yet.”

  The radio in his cruiser squawked and he went to see what was what.

  When he walked back toward me, he said, “I’ve got a ten-fifty with possibly injury out on Fury Road. Stay back from that edge, now. You drink enough of those things, we’ll be pulling your jawbone out of there.”

  The constable drove off to tend to his automobile accident.

  I slipped under the tape and skirted the edge of the chasm. I don’t know what I expected to find. Probably nothing, but I had to look.

  I was just starting to move around the lip of the crater toward what remained of the garden when I saw an old man with a cane walking past my Ford. He was headed in my direction.

  “Don’t get too close to the edge,” I called out to him.

  “Just taking my walk,” he said. “I don’t see very well, but I can smell it just fine.”

  As he drew nearer I could see that he was crippled in some way, and was wearing heavily tinted glasses.

  “Arthritis,” he said, as if he were reading my mind. “And cataracts. When I get close up like this, I can see pretty good. The doctor says I have to take my walks, but with all the trucks and cars up here the last few days, I went the other way. Too much trouble. Name’s Henry. I live down the hill there.”

  “Robert Sinclair,” I said, extending my hand.

  “Police?”

  “City.”

  “Why you boys coming all the way out here? Over the state line, and all.”

  “Curiosity,” I said.

  “Big bang.”

  “You heard it?”

  “Monday morning,” he nodded. “Doc’s dead, I guess.”

  “Constable says they’re not sure about that. Did you know Doc Chadwick?”

  “Oh, yes. Neighbors for—what?—five, six years? Fine man. Good conversationalist. Intelligent. Of course, I never could understand him doing the work he did.”

  “Ever meet any of his friends?”

  “Doc kept pretty much to himself. I don’t remember any friends of his, or any people at all going in and out of his place. Only thing we ever talked about, really, was the old alma mater.”

  When I didn’t say anything, he added, “Harvard. Only thing we had in common. Except he went on to the medical school, of course, and I was in literature.”

  I nodded, hoping he’d go on, tell me more about Chadwick. But Henry had other plans.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve got to walk on now. Pleasure meeting you, Robert.”

  “Careful as you go, Henry,” I said, watching him start down the hill.

  As I was driving back toward the city, I reached for a beer. I hadn’t realized how tired I was, or how drunk. I thought I saw Sarah in the road—just standing there, wearing that white dress, looking at me that way she always did. If I’d been in the desert, it would have been a mirage. But out there, on a Connecticut road, it was a ghost. And as long as I was drunk enough to see it, I was drunk enough to swerve to avoid hitting it.

  The last thing I remember about my trip to Hasty Hills is the car crashing through a guardrail, headed toward a stand of white birch trees. More ghosts.

  Lane

  When I left Robert’s place, I returned to Sarah’s neighborhood, hoping to catch some of the residents who’d been gone when I made my first two visits to the area.

  This was tedious work. No one had heard anything. No one had seen anything. Most people just wanted to tell me how horrible it all was, how they’d watched Sarah grow up before their eyes, and now she was gone, and so young, with so much ahead of her, and wasn’t it awful about her little daughter, too.

  I lost count of how many worried women asked me to recommend a good lock or an affordable gun. One couple said they put their house on the market as soon as they heard.

  I parked in Sarah’s driveway, and had just gotten out of my car when I noticed a woman—one I hadn’t been able to question yet—across the street, waving at me and saying something, which I couldn’t hear. I walked over.

  “I was trying to tell you that Miss Sinclair isn’t home,” the woman said.

  “I know. I’m Detective Frank,” I told her, showing her my shield.

  “Terrible thing about Sarah. Have you caught the one who did it?”

  “Not yet, but we’re working on it. I don’t suppose you saw anything out of the ordinary over the weekend—any prowlers or strangers?”

  “You mean at Miss Sinclair’s house? Oh no. She was the only one who was ever around there. Very solitary. Kept to herself.”

  I gave one of my cards to the woman. “Well, if you happ
en to think of anything, would you mind giving me a call?”

  She assured me that she would and I was about to walk back down her front steps when she said, “Of course, there was that man the other day.”

  I stopped.

  “What man?”

  “The one sitting in his car, watching her house on Saturday. He was parked back a little ways, over there. I remember it was in the afternoon because my sister always calls me between two and five o’clock, to make sure I’ve taken my heart pills. After we got off the phone, I looked out my window again and saw that he was still there.”

  “Do you remember what he looked like?”

  “I didn’t get a good look at him at all. His windshield was filthy. And I don’t know one kind of car from another. But I have something that might help.”

  She disappeared into her house. When she returned several minutes later, she was carrying a piece of scrap paper. “Here,” she said, handing it to me. “I wrote down his license plate number. Just in case.”

  When I got back to my car, I scribbled down the few notes that might require some additional footwork.

  “Frustrating case?” a man’s voice asked just behind me.

  I whipped my head around to see the DA’s investigator.

  “Oh. You startled me. Robbins, right?”

  “Yes. Sorry,” he said. “I was in Sinclair’s and noticed you were out here.”

  “Get anything from the scene?” I asked him.

  I didn’t know what was distracting me more—Robbins’s eyes, or his silent approach behind me.

  We walked to a diner at the end of the block.

  “No, but I’ve been thinking of the woman in the cemetery. Harris. It seems like these killers follow a pattern. I’ve read some of the books—the true crime stuff. You’re gonna think I’m crazy, but it’s almost like you can plot what they do. Where. When. How they kill. There’s a logic to it.”

  “What does the logic tell you?” I asked.

  “That there’s somebody else on his list. That’s easy. But who?”

  Robbins reached into his jacket pocket and handed me a book—Hunting Humans—by Elliott Leyton. “Read it. Like I said, this isn’t my bailiwick. Then again, maybe I’ve just given you the answer to who’s next.”

  On my way back to the precinct, I called in the plate number that the old lady had given me. By the time I arrived, a printout was sitting on my desk. The plate belonged to Robert Sinclair.

  When I got the call from Fuzzy, three hours later, I was still trying to figure out what my partner had been up to, keeping his ex-wife under surveillance only a day before her death.

  “Sinclair’s been in an accident,” he said. “He’ll live, but he’s got some injuries. You’ll find him in St. Paul’s ER.”

  I’d been going all day on nothing but coffee and about ten minutes’ sleep. I figured the doctors and nurses could do a lot more for Robert than I could at the moment, and besides, the woman who answered the phone in the ER said that Robert had been transferred to a room on one of the regular med floors. Not intensive care. He was going to be fine.

  I thought about going home, grabbing a nap, showering, getting into some fresh clothes, then following up on a couple of loose ends. But I was even too tired to make the drive. I knew that I had something worse than the standard flu. I’d already been through the aches and pains, and the low-grade fever. I decided to stretch out on the couch in the women’s rest room, my makeshift bed for the past two nights.

  Even though I was exhausted, I didn’t fall asleep right away. There was something nudging at the back of my mind, something I couldn’t identify—but it made me nervous. And I felt a whirlpool in my stomach, just like I always do when I realize that I’m in over my head.

  When I was in college, I watched as most of my classmates prepared for careers in making money. A few of my friends had a different idea. They wanted to teach, or work as community organizers—to contribute something to the quality of other people’s lives by improving “the social order.” I figured that somebody had to help maintain what order there was if things even had a prayer of getting any better, and I loved the idea of living in a real city for a couple of years. The NYPD had a high staff turnover rate, and they were quota conscious, so I called a family friend, Ray Bolton, a detective in Boston.

  “You’re crazy, and your father will kill me,” Ray said.

  “Two years and I’ll be in grad school,” I swore.

  So he called a friend in New York, wrote a glowing recommendation for me, and I got the job. Because I’d been on the college track team, I was in better shape than most of the male applicants—also taller—and I’d known how to handle weapons since before I got my first driver’s license. It seemed like a natural—something that was right. And, the years I spent in uniform were right. I was a good street cop. Quick on my feet, and capable in a confrontation.

  But then I followed Robert over to Homicide, and it’s been one frustration after another. I don’t think I’m cut out for the mind games that murder demands.

  I was in a blurry, floaty fugue—with half my brain cells drifting off to sleep and the other half wide awake, wired, and ready to go. I needed to sleep, to get my head clear—but something still nagged at me, trying to emerge from the fog in my brain. The harder I tried to remember what it was, the more elusive it became. Just as I was giving up the struggle, succumbing to sleep, it hit me. John Wolf. The shootout in the alley. I hadn’t checked Robert’s file.

  I got up and walked down the hallway, back to Homicide. Robert has status: his own phone and his own desk. As it turned out, he also had everything put away, and all his drawers were locked.

  I grabbed a paper clip from the communal desk just outside Robert’s cubicle and, by unbending it and maneuvering the tip just so, I was able to get two of the drawers open: the wide one in the middle, and the bottom drawer where he kept his file folders.

  The middle drawer had nothing in it but two ball point pens, some rubber bands, a telephone message from two Julys ago, and the caps off a dozen beer bottles.

  But the bottom drawer held exactly what I was looking for: the dossier on the fictitious Mr. Wolf. I read through all the material—including Robert’s report, which was more confusing than helpful. But one note penciled on the file cover did catch my attention: “Check Wallingford.”

  I went down to the evidence room, retrieved the business card for Wallingford Antiques that I had found at Sarah’s—the one with Chadwick’s prints on it—and returned to Robert’s cubicle so that I could give Mr. Wallingford a call. A woman answered with a simple hello, no company name.

  “Is this Wallingford Antiques?” I asked.

  There was a pause before the woman said, “Well, yes. But the store is closed.”

  “What are your hours?”

  “No, I mean closed. Out of business.”

  “Could you please tell me how to reach Mr. Wallingford?”

  It sounded like muffled sobs on the other end of the line.

  “I guess I’ve called at a bad time,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that my brother John—Mr. Wallingford—has passed away and I …” With that, the woman broke down again.

  I could hear the phone being passed to someone else, then a male voice said, “May I help you?”

  “Apparently not,” I said. “I was hoping to speak with Mr. Wallingford.”

  “I’m his brother-in-law. Are you calling about the ad that was in the newspaper?”

  “The ad?”

  “The shop we have for sale?”

  Sounded good to me. “Yes,” I said. “I was wondering if I could stop by and see it.”

  Wallingford’s brother-in-law gave me the address and assured me that it wouldn’t matter how late I arrived. They’d be there long after midnight, packing up the items that his wife wanted to keep.

  As I hung up the phone, I realized that I was floundering, no closer now to solving Sarah’s murder than when I walked int
o her living room and found Robert looking so sad and so lost. Nothing was adding up. Leads that looked like they might go somewhere ended up right back where they began—like that license plate that had come back to Robert. What did it mean? I was yearning for street duty. That feeling of competence I used to have.

  So I did what I always do when I feel most lost. I wrote to a forensic psychiatrist—a man for whom I have the most profound respect. He’s prematurely retired, living in a cabin in northern Michigan—where he heats with wood and draws water from a well, yet remains connected to the rest of the world via a Group III fax machine.

  He is twice my age, with an IQ that sometimes seems to be triple mine. He insists that he likes people, but I’ve heard him speak highly of only two or three who are now living. His heroes tend to be long-departed legends like Milton Erickson, Yeats, Lenny Bruce, and John Lennon. He was in love, once, with a woman named Savannah, but she left him years ago to live on another continent—where she pursues her interest in wildlife. She’s a veterinarian, and also his wife, though he hears from her only once each year, on their anniversary.

  In the four years since he walked out of his Boston office, never to return, he has refused even to look at case files that are routinely sent to him—the Unabomber, the Tamiami prostitute murders, a series of child killings in California.

  Investigators can’t believe—or accept—that a profiler of his stature could drop out of the law enforcement loop and mean it. They can understand the need for a temporary rest, a time-out from all the psychos and sickos that kept turning up in his in box uninvited, but no one with such a magical gift could simply close up shop forever. Profiling is in the blood—a skill that takes command of the one who possesses it, giving him no choice but to keep on keeping on. Or so investigators have thought, and hoped, in his case.

  But I know better. I know his resolve, and I understand his motivation. It’s a matter of survival. He fears that if he opens his mind to one more killer, there’ll be no more room for himself. And he’s afraid that he’ll lose touch with that other side of life—the one he sees in nature, hears in music, and feels whenever the one person he loves most in the world is near.