And then the storm took them up in a cradle of snow and gale, and carried them away. Tossed in the night upon the wind and covered in snow, Oliver had never been so cold. He kept his eyes tightly shut, feeling Kitsune against him, and gave himself over to the winter man and the blizzard, wondering if he would ever be warm again.
CHAPTER 7
I
n recent years, sleep had been a reluctant visitor to the home of Ted Halliwell. Not, perhaps, so reluctant as his daughter, but near enough. Oh, he drifted off easily enough. Most nights he fell asleep during the eleven o’clock news, right between the weather and the sports, but by half-past two he would be wide-awake and staring at the ceiling or at the gauzy, dusty curtain that hung across his window, draping his view of the darkness and the stars. What happened in those lonely hours was not something upon which he liked to dwell. Truth be told, however, Halliwell saw ghosts in the wee hours of the morning, phantom shades of people who were not dead, but simply gone. The ghosts of his wife and daughter visited him as the night rolled toward dawn. He would gaze about the room at wisps of memory, of Jocelyn ironing in front of the television, of Sara using the bed as a trampoline, of lovemaking and Christmas morning and spring cleaning.
As the sky would begin to lighten, he often managed to tumble back into an uneasy slumber for an hour or two. Most nights he did not manage more than four hours of sleep in total. Halliwell had realized long ago that his house was haunted, but that he himself was the spirit wandering its halls. In so many ways, he was a ghost. There were days when he felt trapped in that house, just as if he were damned to haunt it forever, and other days when he felt free to leave and could not get out of there quickly enough to suit him.
On Monday morning, the day after he had been sent on a fool’s errand by Max Bascombe, the sheriff woke Halliwell shortly after eight A.M. with a phone call.
“Hello?”
“Ted, it’s Jackson.”
“I’m not due in till two o’clock, Sheriff.” Halliwell felt at home with the Wessex County sheriff’s department. It wasn’t the big leagues, not by a long shot, but it was real work with honest men and women who cared about the law. As comfortable as he was, though, he was not normally so abrupt with Jackson Norris. The man had hired him and told him often how grateful he was to have Halliwell around, but that didn’t make them brothers, or even friends.
Ted Halliwell had played gofer for Max Bascombe yesterday on the sheriff’s behalf, and it left a bad taste in his mouth. Waking up to the ringing of his phone after only a few hours’ sleep had also put him on edge. If Jackson Norris was bothered by Halliwell’s tone, he didn’t let on.
“I’m aware of that, Ted. Sorry to say, your day’s going to start earlier than you planned.”
Something in the man’s voice made Halliwell frown and sit up in bed. “What’ve we got?”
“Max Bascombe is dead. Murdered. The Kitteridge boys are following up right now, but it looks like the daughter is missing.”
Halliwell swore, massaging the bridge of his nose. The heat had been working overtime during the night and the air in the house was so dry it had given him a headache.
“Is she a victim or a suspect?”
“That’s what I want you to find out,” the sheriff replied.
“Won’t Kitteridge P.D. feel like we’re stepping on their toes?”
“Stomp away, Ted. I’m going to have Bascombe’s firm breathing down my neck. They have this impression that I owe them, and maybe I do. I can’t afford to have them as enemies. I assured Bascombe that you were the best around, and now they’re going to want you. Kitteridge P.D.’s idea of detective work is finding a stolen bike or filling out burglary reports so people can file their insurance claims. Now, get on over there before they’ve screwed the crime scene so badly that you can’t get anything out of it.”
The vote of confidence might have been genuine, but it sounded hollow. The sheriff needed him; that was the bottom line. And even if Halliwell was the best around, it was faint praise. It wasn’t as though every department in the state had Holmes and Watson working homicide.
“On my way,” he said, and hung up the phone.
Twenty-two minutes later he was on his way to Kitteridge. Snowdrifts were ten feet high in some places, and the mounds made by the plows were even higher. A supermarket parking lot had a mountain of white stuff right in the middle. They had nowhere else to put it. Some towns had managed to clear the sidewalks so local kids could go to school, but others had not quite gotten the job done.
When he arrived at Rose Ridge Lane he found two police cars blocking off the end of the Bascombes’ driveway. The men standing sentry there were in uniform. Only one of them was familiar to him, a broad-shouldered, thick-necked cop with a crew cut who would have looked far more at home in a state trooper’s uniform. His name was James Bonaventure, and he was the nephew of Kitteridge’s chief.
“Detective Halliwell,” Bonaventure said as Ted pulled up and held his I.D. out the window.
“Jimmy. Hell of a thing, isn’t it?”
The cop nodded grimly. “Haven’t even seen it, but from what I hear, I don’t think I want to.”
The other officer watched this exchange with curious eyes and a strange kind of disapproval. Whatever he’d heard about the rivalry between the local cops and the sheriff’s department, it wasn’t jibing with the friendly tone here.
“Want to let me by?”
Bonaventure smiled. “There a reason the county’s interested?”
Halliwell did not return the smile. “Already my case, Jimmy. I spent all day yesterday looking into the disappearance of the DOA’s son. Now the man himself turns up dead? The Wessex D.A. and the sheriff are going to want a hand in figuring out what happened here.”
“All right, all right,” Bonaventure said, holding up a hand to tell him to relax. “Don’t have to get all righteous with me, Detective. I was just busting your balls. Tell you the truth, I think the chief’s expecting you anyway. Someone with Bascombe’s influence gets taken out like this, a lot of people are going to want to know how and why.”
They moved the cars to let him through and by the time he reached the house at the end of that long, snow-walled drive, Chief Peyton Bonaventure was waiting for him in front of the Bascombe house. Halliwell waved as he pulled up behind the last of the police cars lined up in front of the house. There was a black van from the medical examiner’s office and one other civilian vehicle, a sporty little Geo that he was damn sure didn’t belong to anyone with the last name of Bascombe.
As he climbed out of his car, Halliwell felt oddly claustrophobic. There was something wrong with that, feeling more cooped up once he’d gotten out of his stuffy car than when he’d been in it. He took a deep breath and tried to brush off that strange weight, the oppressiveness of the moment. It was cold, the wind bitter, but the sun shone and the sky was a clear, crisp winter blue. He should have felt relieved to stretch his legs, to breathe fresh air. But somehow he could not manage it.
“Jimmy radioed you I was coming up?” he asked the chief.
Peyton Bonaventure smiled humorlessly. “Yep. Nice that
someone
let me know you were coming.”
Halliwell took a deep breath and regarded the man evenly. “I had to play nice and diplomatic with Max Bascombe and his ‘people’ all day yesterday, Peyton. I’d like to think that you were above politics.”
“As opposed to Sheriff Norris,” the chief jabbed.
“Is that the way it’s going to be?” Halliwell asked, disappointed.
“Nope.” Peyton shrugged. “Just had to get that one in. You’re welcome to come in and have a look around, Ted. Though I don’t know what you’re going to find. The caretaker or whatever he is, Mr. Friedle, told me about the whole wedding fiasco yesterday, the son disappearing. Got to figure he came back, right? Maybe the sister helped him, or maybe he did her, too, and threw the body off the bluff.”
Halliwell nodded noncommittally. “Got to figure.”
But he wasn’t so sure. There were a lot of things that did not make sense to him and had not made any sense from the time he had arrived here on Rose Ridge Lane yesterday afternoon. Collette Bascombe had not been angry at her brother for leaving his bride at the altar, she had been
afraid
for him, and dead certain he would not have just taken off without at least explaining things to his fiancée. Then there was the business of Oliver Bascombe’s car. It had still been in the garage, and with the snow, there was no way that anyone had driven onto or off the property. So wherever Oliver had gone, he had been on foot. Unless someone had been waiting out on Rose Ridge Lane in the middle of a blizzard, with roads barely passable, to spirit him away. But Halliwell himself had followed up with the younger Bascombe’s friends and come up with nothing.
It was a puzzle.
And now it had several new and vicious pieces.
Chief Bonaventure walked him inside. A pair of Kitteridge detectives were still interviewing Friedle in the room off to the left, the same place Halliwell himself had met with Max Bascombe the day before. He gave them a nod of greeting but Friedle thought it was meant for him and shot back a hopeful look, as though he thought the sheriff’s detective might rescue him from the scrutiny of the local boys. That was not going to happen. As far as Halliwell was concerned, it was more than likely all three Bascombes were dead, and to his mind that would make Friedle a suspect, no matter what kind of alibi he might have.
Upstairs, they found Becca Green from the M.E.’s office still working on the victim’s bedroom. Halliwell was relieved to see both Becca and the covered body of the victim through the open door. This is where the investigation would really begin. If anyone would have learned anything significant, it would be Becca. The chief rapped on the door frame and she looked up from scraping a sample of something viscous from the floor.
“Well, well, the gang’s all here,” Becca said with a wan smile. She was a small woman, no more than five feet, with an olive complexion and thick black hair. Taken individually, none of her features would have been considered admirable, but there was certainly something attractive about the whole. Halliwell thought perhaps it was the intelligence that sparkled in her eyes, or the mischief in her lopsided smile. He had no interest in Becca Green romantically— he figured that part of him was dead, or at least retired— but he admired the hell out of her.
“I see you kept Mr. Bascombe around for company,” Halliwell said, gruff as ever. No matter how highly he regarded Becca Green, he had an image to maintain.
“He’s a fascinating conversationalist. Much like yourself.”
Chief Bonaventure sighed. “You two ought to take this show on the road.”
“With or without the corpse?” Becca asked. Then she shifted gears, turning all business. “You want the rundown?”
Halliwell nodded. “Please.”
Becca turned to survey the room. “I’ve got squat, actually. The chief will confirm no forced entry—”
Which means maybe the killer had a key,
Halliwell thought.
“— and while there’s sign of a limited struggle, there are no signs of a fight. Whoever killed Mr. Bascombe overpowered him almost immediately and was strong enough to hold him off the ground, presumably with one hand—”
“Whoa! Hold on, there,” the chief said, actually holding up a hand to stall her report. “Where do you get that idea?”
But Halliwell was already looking at the floor and the rug. He saw the numbered markers that Becca had laid and was working it out in his own head.
“Marks on the rug from his feet. Blood spatter on rug and the wood as well,” he said. Becca nodded in confirmation. “That tells you where he was and that his feet weren’t on the carpet at the time of his death . . . but Becca, I’ve met Max Bascombe. This was a big man. I don’t think I could hold him up more than a few seconds with both hands, never mind just one.”
Which left out Collette as a suspect for certain, as well as Friedle, but not necessarily Oliver. Halliwell had never met Oliver Bascombe. He didn’t know how strong the younger lawyer was.
“And where do you get the one-hand bit? What makes you say that?”
Becca looked at him grimly and raised the small tube she had just capped, into which she had placed the sample she had taken from the floor. “This, if I’m not mistaken, is vitreous fluid. From the victim’s eyes. The perp was holding Bascombe off the floor when he ripped out his eyes.”
Halliwell felt his pulse throbbing in his ears. His mouth was open only slightly and he knew he was gaping like an idiot but could not help himself. He knitted his brows. Then he glanced past Becca to the thick shroud that covered the corpse, which was just waiting for the body bag that Becca would bring up from her van shortly. Ted walked over to Max Bascombe’s body, careful to step around the areas with evidence markers, and drew back the shroud that covered it.
The man’s eyes were gone, leaving only raw pits crusted with black-red blood.
