MacKinnon came in with some paperwork. “We got everything on Aaron Mosier’s tattoo shop. All cards run through his payment system.”
Reed approached, grabbed the file, started going through it. “Who do we have?”
“Half the town.”
“Anyone we’ve seen in connection to this, though?”
She gently took the file and flipped to a page. “I cross-referenced and made a list. Daryl Snow. Lloyd Cox. Logan Terrio. Dan Wheeler. Ida Stevens. Chase McNary, the cook at Betty Beaver’s. They’ve all been customers of Aaron Mosier.”
He looked up at her. “Ida?”
“Yep. ’Bout eight months ago.”
“And these are credit cards.”
“Or debit cards,” Mackinnon answered.
Kruse and Virginia had drifted over. “Okay,” Reed said, “but what I mean is – you got Dan Wheeler on there, but could be his son, Tyson, with his father’s card. Credit or debit.”
“Sure,” Mackinnon said.
“And Chase McNary…” Reed drifted, remembering the tattoos from the diner cook. Maybe he’d go over and have another look, see if there was any Eye of Ra or “Anunnaki” he’d missed.
For now: “Is there a picture of the work that goes with these? Like a client file? I bet a guy like Aaron Mosier takes pictures of his work.”
“Oh yeah. It’s all on the internet. But no faces. Just work.”
“Keep checking the laptop,” Reed said. “Look for client files.”
“I’ll try. He’s sneaky, this guy.”
“We need to link the work to the purchases, is what I’m asking. To the people.”
“Right. I’m on it.”
Mackinnon smiled and left.
“I like her,” Virginia said.
Reed returned to the chain of whiteboards on the wall, focusing on the last one, on details.
2020, Kasey Stevens. He’d written the names Ida Stevens and Daryl Snow, then Andy Zurn and Katherine Snow, connecting them with a dash. Above the Zurn-Snow dash, he’d scribbled an M for married.
Kruse looked up from his laptop, took his pen out of his mouth and pointed at the names. “If Katherine Snow married Andy Zurn, and she’s Daryl Snow’s sister, then that means Katherine Snow… well, if it’s not incest, it’s close.”
Virginia wrinkled her nose. “Gross.”
Reed asked him, “How long after Ida Stevens split with Andy Zurn did she hook up with Daryl Snow? Do we know?”
“I wouldn’t doubt that Ida was with Daryl during her time with Zurn.”
“Why?” Reed asked.
“Ida Stevens likes her parties, her family get-togethers. We get a domestic call over there at least once a year. I think the first report we have on the books of a disturbance, where Daryl was listed among those present, was twenty years ago. Doesn’t mean they were intimate, but indicates they’ve definitely been friends that long.”
Reed nodded, then walked to a corner and called Katherine Zurn – he’d been meaning to for a while, and now it was fresh in his mind. With no answer, he left her a voicemail, apologizing for the delayed response, asking if she still wanted to talk.
Walking back toward Kruse and Virginia, he said, “All right – are we dancing around the obvious here?”
Kruse said, “People have affairs. They have parties.”
“But when they have lots of affairs, it’s either adultery, or it’s something else.”
“I’ve been an investigator here for eleven years. Never seen anything that looked like a sex cult, if that’s the inference.”
Virginia said, “But what does that mean? Do cults always look the same? What would we even be looking for?”
“Symbols carved into bodies,” Reed said.
No one objected.
Then Kruse said, “But my point is, we haven’t seen any definitive cult activity in this area. Outside of this.”
Reed pressed. “Nothing?”
“Not since I’ve been here. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing, though.”
Virginia remained philosophical. “Everyone thinks Charles Manson or David Koresh, but the definition of a cult is a system of religious devotion toward a particular figure or object. I memorized it.”
Kruse said, “Sounds like a definition of religion.”
“With obvious differences,” Virginia said.
A minute of quiet followed. Virginia held Reed’s gaze. He felt like they were on the same page. He’d studied religion, and there was nothing overtly religious about any of this, not in the conventional sense. Not even in the devil-worshipping sense. There was the symbol, yes, but it pretty much stopped there. People had extramarital affairs. People had strange or seemingly inappropriate relationships. And, like Kruse said, they partied. That didn’t make a cult.
But there was folklore of a sort. Wetiko. A symbol carved into flesh in two cases. Not one, but two. And a family involved across two disappearances. Plus, proximity: In all, three young women had either disappeared or been found murdered within fifty miles of one another…
He noticed Virginia’s gaze had drifted away. She pecked her laptop keys, her forehead creased with concentration. He was about to check on the subpoenas again when she suddenly said, “Okay, boys – I found the investigator who worked the Paine disappearance.”
At last. Something.
“He’s old,” Virginia went on, “but he’s still alive. And he overwinters in Florida, it looks like, but he’s back, has a house fifteen miles from here on Long Pond.”
Reed started for the door. “Let’s go.”
Virginia said, “He might also be a late-stage alcoholic.”
Reed paused, looking at her.
“Richard Morrison. Says he retired with full pension, but he had a lot of problems during his time in. Some lawsuits, mishandled cases, things like that. Drinking related.”
A moment passed. “So,” Reed said, “he’ll be colorful.”
Retired Detective Richard Morrison’s house was set back from the road down a long winding dirt driveway, through slender poplars and birch trees. The farmhouse looked remodeled, though sections were still showing disrepair; fresh pine siding wrapped the exterior, and a red metal roof shone in the midday sun. The grass had been mowed in the immediate vicinity of the house, but the outer yard was starting to get overgrown, even for late May. Piles of indeterminate junk littered the property.
Morrison waited on the porch. He was dressed in Carhartt overalls and a green flannel shirt, open at the neck. Even from here, Reed could see the age in the man’s face. He wasn’t so old, though – just seventy-five – but they said mental health problems could age you prematurely. Especially the degenerative kind, like chronic alcoholism.
Reed stopped the van and killed the engine. The cloud of dust he’d dragged in blew past and dissipated. Stepping out, he first felt the warmth of the sun, and then he smelled something mechanical in the air, like cooked brakes. Virginia got out the passenger side.
“Hey there,” Reed called to Morrison. He and Virginia moved toward the porch easily, as if Morrison might be wild or rabid. They each introduced themselves.
Morrison took a sip from the coffee cup he held. He first tipped Virginia a smile, then squinted as he sized up Reed, his wiry eyebrows squeezing together. “You’re older than I thought. Hairier, too.”
Reed had one foot on the bottom porch step and smiled. “I appreciate that.”
Morrison took another sip, his eyes switching between Reed and Virginia. There was a tremble to him, you could just see it in his movements – like he was running a higher octane fuel than his carburetor could handle. “Can I ask you a favor?”
“Ah, sure,” Reed said.
“I need you to raise your arms, turn around, and let me pat you down.”
Reed just stood there a moment. Then he said, “Okay – check me for a wire?”
“Checking to see if you’re real.”
So it was that bad.
They sat out on the front porch as
the sun dropped toward the treeline.
“Florid hallucinations,” he said. “Means they come and go.” He sniffed and looked out at his property. He owned seventeen wooded acres, in addition to a rambling, 1800s-vintage farmhouse, a barn and a large woodshed. He looked directly at Virginia and said, “I never drank on duty. Just after hours. Until my wife divorced me and took the kids.”
Reed watched a cloud of gnats jittering in the lemony light. “Did drinking affect your handling of the Laurie Paine case?” He caught a stern look from Virginia and amended, “What I mean is, was your work devalued? What happened with the search?”
“The search?” Morrison rocked in the chair.
“You did search the Paine place…”
“Oh yeah. The family helped. Some neighbors. We didn’t find much, and everyone thought she ran away.”
“So no ICC, no search grids, nothing like that.”
Morrison grinned without humor – more of a grimace. “Let me tell you – I was on my own. No incident control, no search procedures. This is 1970. We’re talking about the beginning of one of the toughest decades in New York State. The oil embargo, inflation soaring, and high, high unemployment. I worked a couple of cases – you know what they were? Truck hijackings.” He rambled with the unselfconsciousness that came with his advanced years, or perhaps his drinking. “People robbing trucks for beef, but they’d also be robbing them for toilet paper. That’s how it was. Drug trafficking was up in 1970, violent crime was on the rise. We had our hands full, and we had dwindling resources. They called it ‘doing more with less.’ That was the state government; that was our mandate. In four years, we didn’t hire any members to replace the retired or resigned.”
“And the Paine case?” Reed reminded him.
“Like I said, I was on my own. What I had was that she was a girl from a poor family, everyone was expecting the mines to close, and they were already struggling.” Morrison stood up from the rocker and dumped his mug over the railing. Black liquid splattered against the ground. He then ran a finger around the inside of the cup and came up with little flecks of coffee grinds. When he caught them staring, he said, “See? I considered your coming here being on-duty.”
Reed dug for some gum. “So the search you were able to put together – the friends and family – did it turn up anything at all?”
“Nothing. No trace of Laurie Paine. We looked. Three pasture fields, past the treeline, into the woods. Her sisters, the neighbors, her older brother, Zachary. He was something. Trying to be the man of the house when her father left. I remember that.”
“It also looks like there was some trouble with the report. Some redacted material. That’s part of why we’re here, and part of why I asked about your… state of mind at the time.”
Morrison sat in the chair and leaned back. There was a twitch beneath his left eye, a nerve firing in the baggy skin. “Not everybody liked what I had to say.”
“Which was?” Reed put the gum in.
“That I thought the family was hiding something. The thing with that – there was another state cop who worked the zone with me, and that was John Paine. So he had some things to say about my report.”
“John Paine – related to the girl?”
Morrison nodded. “Her uncle.”
Reed gave it a beat. “Do you think Laurie Paine was killed?”
He spat to the side. Nodded once. “I do.”
“Her sister Lois is the mother of a victim from 1998…”
“Melanie Hollander,” Morrison finished. “That’s right. Lois Paine married Skip Hollander.”
“Skip?”
“You’d know him as Roy. The kids called him Skip. He wanted to be a sailor like his daddy. A skipper. They called him Skip.” Morrison abruptly changed subjects. His trembling had notably worsened. “Was her hyoid bone broken?”
Reed was confused. “Melanie Hollander’s?”
Morrison shook his head. “I know hers was. I meant the most recent victim. Stevens.”
“Yes. Contusions and a cracked hyoid.”
Morrison nodded some more. “It takes a bit of pressure to strangle someone so hard you’re cracking bones. Any bruising?”
“Yeah.”
“Interesting. Sometimes if it happens fast, might not show any bruising. So you’ve got long, sustained pressure, is what it sounds like.”
Reed glanced at Virginia. He tried to picture pale, skinny Aaron Mosier doing that damage. Squeezing long enough to raise blood, hard enough to eventually crack a bone.
He said to Morrison, “Stevens’s body also had a symbol carved into the flesh. We’re pretty sure it was done with a surgical tool called a lancet.”
“And why don’t you like the boyfriend for it?”
Reed glanced at Virginia again. “It’s not that we don’t. It’s just that we don’t think the story ends there.” He leaned forward a little. “I was wondering if there was anything in the Laurie Paine case, something that you did find, that stood out.”
When Morrison looked at Reed, his eyes were hard – not the intimidating kind, but the look you saw in people who struggled mightily with everyday life. “I think you’ll need to excuse me for a moment.”
Reed and Virginia traded looks, and Reed said, “Of course. Are you all right?”
“Be right back,” Morrison said. He went into the house, the screen door banging off the frame.
The two of them looked at each other but didn’t speak, only listened to the sounds coming from inside the house: a bottle being unscrewed, liquid pouring. Everything Reed and Virginia felt and needed to say they communicated with their eyes.
Morrison returned. He took his chair and launched into it: “I was going to call, actually, and talk to you. There are those cases you never could close. And they hang around. So you keep a watch on things. I was going to call you and talk about Laurie Paine. Because I knew about her sister Lois marrying Skip Hollander and their girl raped and murdered in ’98.” He took a long drink from the clay cup. “I was fifty-something in ’98 – I’d just taken retirement. Or, not so much retirement, but my second career working in security. I went out there, on my own, as a citizen, sometime in early 1999. And I talked to the parents, to the Hollanders – we all kind of knew one another a bit. I remembered Lois from when she was a girl – she was the one who reported her sister missing. So I talked to them, and they were hiding something. I don’t know what, exactly, but I smelled fear on them. Like cornered animals, ready to bare fangs.”
He took another drink. He said, “You’re all looking for a killer. You see what I’m saying? Singular. But sometimes it takes a village.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” Reed said. Though he did.
Morrison failed to elaborate – he was staring out at his property again, suddenly disconnected from the conversation.
“Mr. Morrison?” Reed gave Virginia another look.
She tried: “Mr. Morrison, two girls, maybe three, have been murdered. And connecting two of these cases – that we know of – are symbols carved into the bodies that imply a spiritual belief. Or, at least, a belief. Part of a larger ideology. Maybe a cult. So I think what you’re saying – about it taking a village – could be on the right track.”
At last Morrison turned his old, lined face to her.
She said, “People seem to need things, ways to make sense of their poverty, their hardships. The majority might find that in conventional religion. But sometimes, a particular region, a particular family history – that lends to susceptibility to something outside the conventional. Something that might seem to us to be immoral, unethical. That’s the difference.”
Morrison sipped his liquor. The grip that’d been on him, making him silent and distant for a couple of minutes, was gone. He said, “The Paine family changed after the mine closed and the father split.”
“How so?” Virginia asked.
“That boy, the only boy, the eldest child – Zach, he took over the family. And they stopped going to ch
urch, for one thing. That’s what people told me.”
Reed chewed his gum.
“And Zach would have friends over to the house,” Morrison said. “People said they’d stay up all night, partying.”
Reed confirmed, “That’s Zachary Paine? The older brother?”
Morrison nodded, looking paler. “That’s right,” he said. “They’d go all night in that house, no proper supervision. And those girls were there. Those young girls would be upstairs.”
Reed and Virginia walked back to the Ford Transit. Morrison stood on the top step, the pillars and roof framing him, and watched until they drove away.
After driving in silence for a few minutes, Reed’s head buzzing, he spoke. “So let’s say Zachary Paine and his friends are responsible for Laurie’s disappearance. Maybe they hurt her, killed her, and hid her. So, what – their sister Lois grows up and somehow brings that same situation on her own daughter? If this is some fringe belief that runs through a few towns, what’s that all about? Some mandate to kill family?”
“I’ll see what I can learn about Zachary Paine,” Virginia said. “Also, I can talk to Julia Hetfield. Maybe having a woman… you know, when it comes to that subject… Maybe that will help.”
“I still doubt she’s going to admit anything.”
“Me too. I would just see where her head is at. She got close enough to Snow to get… intimate with him at Varma’s place, maybe she knows something. Did you ever show her the symbol?”
“I showed her daughter.”
Virginia was silent. “I think we’re close, Reed.”
She settled back, as if satisfied. Or knowing satisfaction was around the corner. He wasn’t so sure.
A few moments later, she asked, “This thing have a CD player or a MP3 jack, or what’s it have?” She leaned forward and studied the dashboard. “Okay. Jack. Hang on.” She got out her phone and then fished around in her bag, came up with a cord and connected the phone to the car. “I know you’re a big music guy…”
Rough Country: A gripping crime thriller Page 21
