All Mortal Flesh (28 page)

“It’s… cleaner than I would have thought,” Clare said. Her breath plumed in the chill. “How come it’s so much colder than the barn?”

Aaron pointed to a series of narrow vents running along the top three walls. “We keep them open in the winter. Dad installed a thermostat switch, so if the temperature goes above forty-five degrees the AC kicks in.”

“It doesn’t look that much different from the butcher shop in the IGA.” She glanced at the rings on the wall where the unsuspecting animal would be chained. “Except for that, of course.”

“We can have ’em both in the same place because we’re so small. We don’t ever process more than one steer at a time.” Aaron crossed the floor to a metal locker and opened it. “In here’s the captive bolt gun and the bone saws. See, we cross-tie the steer”—he moved to the rings to demonstrate—“and then Dad uses the bolt gun in the middle of its forehead. The steel bolt punches through the skull, through the brain, the animal goes down on its knees, and then—” He made a slicing motion through an imaginary neck.

Clare looked away. Her eyes fell on the collection of knives, and she moved closer to examine them. “Your dad leaves all this unsecured? That doesn’t seem very safe.”

“You can padlock the door if you need to. But nobody’s supposed to come in here unless they’re, you know, working.”

She gave him a crooked smile. “Are you telling me you’ve never brought your friends in here to give them a good creep-out? Or maybe a girl, so she can scream and hold on to your neck? I bet with the lights out, this place is better than the haunted house at the fair.”

Aaron ducked his face, but not quickly enough to hide his grin.

“Has Quinn Tracey ever been in here?”

He looked up again. “Sure. He thinks it’s way cool. His mom and dad—they just want their meat to appear in little plastic packages at the supermarket. God forbid you see how it actually gets there. But Quinn’s not like that. To tell the truth”—he dropped his voice—“he wants my life. He’d love to be a farmer, or a soldier. Of course, he can’t tell his
p
s, because they’d have a heart attack if he didn’t go to college.”

Clare leaned on the stainless steel table. In size and height, it was not unlike the altar at her church. A chill reminder that her God had once required the blood of animals to be spilled before Him as a sin offering. “Aaron,” she said. “What was it you wanted to tell me that you couldn’t say in front of your mother?”

He folded his arms and stared at his boots. When he finally looked up at her, his face was a picture of indecision. “I’m not sure if I should tell this. Quinn’s my best friend, and I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

“You’re a smart boy, Aaron. I think you know that if Quinn’s doing something that could get him into trouble, sooner or later he’ll be found out.” Clare ran her fingers across the surface of the table. She could trace a score of fine lines almost invisible to the eye. The memory of the knife. “The question is, will he be found out before or after he hurts himself?”

“It’s not—I don’t know that he’s doing something.” Aaron blew out an exasperated breath. “Okay, this is the thing: We didn’t just drive by the Van Alstynes’ house. Quinn parked the truck and went in. He said he hadn’t been paid. He was in there for a long time.”

“How long?”

“I dunno. I listened to maybe half a CD while I was waiting.”

“So, half an hour or thereabouts?”

“That sounds right. So then he came out, and he was acting all weird. We drove off, and that was the end of it, right? Except later? At school? He told me that we had never stopped there. We just drove by.”

“Did you really see the Honda Civic in the driveway?”

“Yeah, that was there. That was why, after we found out Mrs. Van Alstyne had been killed, I thought we should say something to the police. Then Quinn told me we couldn’t, because Chief Van Alstyne had been there at the house.”

Clare went very still. “He said he
saw
the chief there?”

“Uh…” Aaron’s dark eyes unfocused as he thought. “No. The chief had been there, that’s what he said. I don’t know what he saw, but whatever it was, it scared him.”

“Quinn called the police, you know. He gave them the make and license number of the Honda Civic.”

“I know. He asked me to back up his story if anyone asked me.” The boy’s face was a mask of misery. “Have I done the right thing? I don’t want to make it sound like Quinn did anything bad. And I really don’t want to cause trouble for the police chief.”

Clare touched his arm. “You’re not. At least some of what Quinn told you was a lie.”

Aaron’s eyes widened. “How do you know?”

“Because I know the chief wasn’t at his house on Sunday afternoon.”

When he joined the force with the ink still wet on his criminal justice degree, Mark Durkee had expected some bad moments. He envisioned nighttime stops, walking up to the driver’s window never knowing if the person inside the car was armed, enraged, lunatic. He envisioned facing down the barrel of a gun. He envisioned having to take down guys who were bigger, stronger, and meaner than he was. He sometimes envisioned himself wounded (although ostomy bags, brain damage, or having his good looks destroyed never figured in these fantasies), bearing up under the admiring gaze of his brother officers and his weeping fiancée. (Six years on, the fiancée was his wife, who by that time had seen so many brutal injuries as a trauma nurse that she wouldn’t have wept if it had been her own mother on the crash cart.)

The things he didn’t envision: the interminable boredom of working the radar gun. Having to shoot a dog. (Its owner, who had almost two acres in marijuana, sicced it on Mark while trying to escape.) Telling middle-aged parents their daughter had died in a one-car crash coming home from Rensselaer Polytech. Being shunned by his brother officers for opening their department to the pitiless gaze of the BCI’s External Law Enforcement investigator. Shut out from the work of going back through the phone records and the bills and Dennis Shambaugh’s history, but unable to walk away. Useless, friendless, watching through a two-way mirror while his chief sat through an interrogation, unarmed and without a badge, in his own station house.

“We know your wife was killed sometime between Sunday afternoon and Monday afternoon,” Jensen was saying. “You were seen buying groceries Sunday right after the IGA opened at noon. After that, you don’t reappear anywhere in public until close to five o’clock on Monday, when Officer Durkee picked you up, also at the IGA.”

“My wife is not dead,” the chief said for the hundredth time.

“We know where you weren’t. You weren’t at your mother’s. Her neighbor across the way noticed her driveway was empty when he walked his dog after the eleven o’clock news.” The chief glared up at her. “Yeah, I had your man Entwhistle over there checking things out,” she said. “Funny how you and your deputy chief didn’t bother to confirm your alibi. Or maybe not. Seeing as you’re such”—she leaned over the table, her hands spread flat—“
intimate
friends.”

The chief’s face scared Mark. For a moment, he looked as though he might tear the leg off the table and beat Jensen to death with it. For the first time, for only a moment, Mark felt his faith flicker. What if… Could he possibly have… ?

“The neighbor also says your mother’s drive was empty, and the snow undisturbed, when he walked the dog before leaving for work Monday morning.”

“My wife isn’t dead,” the chief gritted.

“Did you know your mother lied for you?”

His head jerked up. Mark winced. Margy Van Alstyne had bustled into the station, angry and defensive, demanding the release of her son. As soon as Investigator Jensen started probing for information, Mrs. Van Alstyne swore the chief had been at her house all Sunday and Monday, too. Jensen had smiled like a woman getting a mink for Christmas and thanked her before regretfully refusing to let her see the chief. Mrs. Van Alstyne hadn’t wasted any time fuming. She had hightailed it out of the station, headed, Mark guessed, for either a lawyer’s office or a gun shop.

“For chrissakes,” the chief said. “Just get Emil Dvorak on the phone and see if there are any fingerprints in the woman’s autopsy file!”

“According to the secretary at the pathology department, Dr. Dvorak is in Albany today, seeing his neuropsychiatrist. I understand he has a head injury he needs to follow up on regularly.” Jensen rubbed her hairline in the same place where the medical examiner’s scar split his forehead in two. “And to tell you the truth, I’m a little leery of testimony from an ME who’s not only a personal friend of yours but who’s brain damaged as well.”

“God damn you.” The chief braced his elbow against the table and pressed his fist against his mouth. “My wife,” he finally said, “isn’t dead. You can send somebody over to Kilmer’s Funeral Home and print the body right there, for God’s sake.”

In fact, Jensen had directed the crime scene technician, Sergeant Morin, to head over to Kilmer’s as soon as he finished with the Keane house. The BCI investigator might not have believed the chief’s assertions, but she wasn’t stupid. Mark waited for her to tell the chief, but she simply hung over him, her face as professionally sorrowful as a funeral director’s.

“Russ,” she said. “You have to help me here. Now maybe, as you say, it wasn’t you who killed your wife. Maybe it was one of her lovers. From what I’ve heard already, it sounds like she enjoyed whoring around with the best of—”

The chief came out of his chair so fast that Mark, watching through the observation window, jerked away involuntarily. Jensen stood her ground, her chin out, her mouth curved in a knowing smile.

“You bitch,” the chief growled. His hands were clenched into fists. Mark could see the pulse in his neck. “When we get through with this I’m gonna—”

A racket from down the hall buried the chief’s words. Mark was grateful. He didn’t want to hear that threat. He didn’t want to feel what he did now, the wavering, sick, maybe-could-he running through his nervous system.

It sounded like it was coming from the squad room or Harlene’s dispatch center, a cacophony of angry voices, male and female, and Harlene calling for Lyle and the thud of running feet.

Noble burst out of the door and trotted down the hall. He unlocked the interrogation room door without glancing at Mark. “Investigator Jensen!” he called. “You might want to get out here!”

She twitched with annoyance. “Can’t your deputy chief handle it?”

“Ma’am, I really think you want to get out here.”

Swearing under her breath, Jensen stalked from the room. “Durkee,” she said, catching sight of him. “You have the detainee.”

Mark’s mouth formed the word
Me
? But she had already swept up the hall, Noble hopping out of her way and hurrying to keep up with her.

Mark went to the door. The chief walked over. Looked up the hall. “What’s going on?”

“I dunno,” Mark said. He looked at his shoes. Shiny. Like always. He prided himself on being a spit-and-polish cop, his crease always sharp, his fade high and tight. Not like the chief, with his hair always in need of a trim and his beat-up old boots beneath unpressed trousers. He looked at those boots now. His throat felt hot and full. “Sir,” he said, “Investigator Jensen’s sent Sergeant Morin over to the funeral home. To… to get prints. I don’t know why she didn’t tell you.”

“She’s trying to get me mad enough to confess,” the chief said. His voice was almost clinical, as if he were passing along a point of law he picked up at a seminar. “I’ve probably conducted a thousand interrogations over the course of my career. Hard and soft, sitting in with men a lot more experienced than me and running them on my own. I know most of the techniques, and I know the number one rule, which is, if you don’t want anyone to have anything on you, shut the hell up. Jensen knows that I know, and she’s decided the way to get me to forget that sound piece of advice is to rattle my cage so bad I’ll break down the bars and take a swipe at her.”

“Is there… I mean…” Mark didn’t want to know, but he was compelled to ask. “Do you have something you don’t want her to know?”

The chief looked at him.

The babble of indistinct voices that had accompanied their talk suddenly sharpened. A woman shouted, “Russell! Russell!”

“That’s my mother,” the chief said, starting forward. Without thinking, Mark threw his arm across the door.

“You gonna keep me in here, Mark?” The chief’s voice was low. “You think I did it after all?”

“No, sir,” Mark said, because where would he be if it were true? He dropped his arm. The chief brushed past him and hiked up the hall.

Harlene’s dispatch center was jammed with people, cops and civilians alike. Lyle McAuley held Margy Van Alstyne by the shoulder as she listened, pink-faced and trembling, to something he said. That shyster Geoff Burns was in Jensen’s face—the first time Mark had ever been glad to see the obnoxious little prick. Noble stood behind the BCI investigator, imitating a wall. A bleached blonde in a ridiculously skimpy jacket wept with fury, mascara running black down her tan skin, while Kevin Flynn fussed around her, trapped between comforting her and staying the hell out of her way. And Eric McCrea was body-blocking a guy with a goofy tie and a notepad. “Oh, crap,” Mark said. He didn’t know the man’s name, but he recognized a reporter when he saw one.

“What the hell’s going on?” the chief said in a voice loud enough to stir the American flag in the front hall.

“Russell!” his mother said.

“Durkee!” Investigator Jensen looked like she wanted to rip him a new one.

Geoffrey Burns broke away from Jensen and shoved through the crowd to reach the chief’s side. “Don’t say another word until we’ve had a chance to talk,” he said. “I’m your attorney.”

“I don’t need a lawyer,” the chief said.

“Be smart for once in your life, Van Alstyne. Unless you’ve got your bunkmate all picked out at Clinton, you need a lawyer.”

“Fine,” the chief snapped. “I’ll call the bar association and ask for a referral.”

Burns butted up against the chief. His clipped, dark beard pointed accusingly at his would-be client’s chest. “I don’t like you any better than you like me, Van Alstyne. But I’m doing this as a favor to Clare. Do you want to be the one to tell her you turned down my representation?”