Good Day to Die (23 page)

“Why are you always in the middle of my problems, Burdette?” he asked. “Why is it always you?”

“I need a doctor,” Burdette said, without bothering to deny the central allegation. Apparently, I’d picked the right target. Or, credit where credit is due, the right target had picked me.

“Captain,” Pousson said, raising his eyes to meet Bouton’s, “allow me to apologize on behalf of the people of Algonquin County. If you’d like to press charges, I’d be glad to accommodate you.”

Bouton folded her hands across her chest and took a step back. “Well,” she said, “now that I look at the situation a little more closely, I’d have to say that Mr. Burdette has been duly punished for his big mouth. If you don’t mind, Sheriff, we’ll be on our way.”

Pousson smiled, then turned to me. “You do this all by yourself?” He waited for me to nod before continuing. “What’s your name, again?”

“Roland Means. Detective Roland Means.”

“You ever decide you had enough of the big city, Means, you come and see me.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Which is what it is. I’m only sorry you didn’t kill the bastard.”

Robert Kennedy’s home was about as far off the main road as he could get without using a helicopter. A well-built, well-maintained frame house with an attached garage and several storage sheds scattered over the property, it sat at the end of a dirt road that wound through dense forest. It was the only house on that road, and as we drove up I tried to imagine how he kept it free of snow in the winter, concluding that he probably didn’t. That, most likely, he used a snowmobile to get back and forth when the snow was deep. Even the four-wheel-drive van parked in front would be useless once the snow piled up. The brown Toyota parked next to it wouldn’t get two feet.

I stopped the car near the house, but didn’t open the door because two very large German shepherds were biting at the tires. In lieu of my leg.

“How do you want to handle this?” Bouton asked, ignoring the dogs.

“If they scratch the paint, let’s shoot ’em.”

I have to admit, I was feeling a lot better. My encounter with Mr. Burdette outside Pete’s Eats had done me a world of good.

“Get serious, Means. How should we handle Kennedy?”

I shrugged. “It’s a reasonable question, but I don’t have any idea how we
should
handle Kennedy. All I can see are negatives. We shouldn’t say anything to make him think he’s a suspect. Mainly because he isn’t; not at this point. That means we can’t ask him to provide an alibi for any of the murders. Or about his potential inheritance. Or about his personal relationship with his brother. Or about anything Seaver Shannon told us.”

Bouton nodded as I went along, patiently waiting for me to finish. When I did, she said, “Let’s just get him on the record about not having contact with his brother. After that …”

“All right, all right. King. Wolf. Enough, enough.” A tall, thickly set man emerged from the house and gathered up the dogs. He took each by the collar and half-dragged them to the side of the garage before chaining them.

“He knew we were coming,” Bouton said. “He could have chained the dogs before we got here.”

“Captain, when you’re right, you’re right.”

As we got out of the car, the man approached us, a smile spread across his long, horsey face. The smile seemed genuine, but when he got close enough for me to look into his light blue eyes, I couldn’t find a trace of warmth. I saw calculation, but nothing beyond that, not even surprise at the odd couple that’d come to interview him.

“Mr. Kennedy?” Bouton asked, extending her hand.

“Robert,” he responded, accepting a quick handshake.

“I’m Captain Bouton.” She smiled (rather graciously, I thought). “And this is Detective Roland Means.”

The introductions finished, Kennedy led us into the house and had his wife, Rebecca, pour out the inevitable coffee. She was a small, pretty woman, sturdily built and a good deal younger than her husband, with a heavy Southern accent. Her blond hair was braided and wound tightly around her head. The effect was not especially flattering, nor was her shapeless, faded housedress, nor the bruises on the side of her face.

“Well, you boys have certainly come a long way,” she said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Her husband tossed her a nasty look, but made no move to exclude her. Which, even at the time, I found strange.

“Well, how can we help you, Captain?” he asked.

Bouton gave Robert Kennedy the same line she’d given Sheriff Pousson about the possibility that Thong had had contact with his victims prior to the actual killings, then asked him if he knew anything at all about his brother’s life in the big city.

“Not a damn thing, Captain.” He responded without hesitation. “You know, when I was much younger, I spent a year with the Albany Police Department, the Vice Squad, and I saw things you wouldn’t believe.” He managed a short laugh, but his eyes remained empty. “Oh, well, I guess you would believe them. Bein’ as you’re from New York City and everything. But it sure enough disgusted
me.
Men dressin’ up like women. Practicin’ their perversions in city parks. Children havin’ to step over condoms on their way to school. And that was the least of it. There were murders
every
night. I mean I suppose I sound like an old country boy, but I got sick of it in a big hurry. We may have our troubles up here in Owl Creek, but we’re not given to perversion and murder. So, to answer your question, I didn’t have any contact with my brother after he left. No letters, no phone calls, no visits.”

“And you never saw him in New York?”

Kennedy’s wife answered before he could speak. “New York?” she drawled, laughing softly. “Lord above, I have been after my husband to take me to New York or Boston for ages and ages. But he is the most stay-at-home man I have ever known. I was born in Mississippi—I suppose that must seem obvious—and I have been to a few places in my life. But Robert never wants to go anywhere. If it wasn’t for church suppers and the like, I do believe we wouldn’t go out at all.”

There being no point in hanging around, we left a few minutes later. Bouton, naturally didn’t waste any time getting started; she began to run off at the mouth before we reached the end of Kennedy’s private road.

“The wife alibied him.” she declared, arms folded across her chest. “Why’d she do that? Nobody asked her.”

“Maybe she was just making conversation. Unless you want to make her part of it. Unless you want to make her a serial killer, too.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time a wife lied to protect her husband. I assume you saw the van?”

“I saw it. What does it prove?”

“And you saw his eyes.”

“His eyes?”

“Don’t bullshit me. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Those eyes were dead empty.” She gave me a minute to answer, but I drove on without commenting. “I thought you were supposed to be the street cop. Where are your instincts? Robert Kennedy is dirty as hell.”

“A man’s wife makes a chance comment, most likely the kind of complaint she’s been making to her friends for years. ‘My husband doesn’t take me anywhere.’ So what? A man has cold eyes. Just like the eyes of a dozen cops I’ve known. Again, so what? Look, Captain, I’ll go as far you want with it. But let’s not convict the man of seven murders without a tad more evidence.”

My sarcasm slowed her down, but I couldn’t slow the thoughts and images rolling through my own mind. The house at the end of that long, long road; the bruised, mousy wife in her old housedress jumping into the interview as if she’d been told just what to say; the dogs circling the car when Kennedy should have tied them up before we arrived; Kennedy’s eyes as they weighed and measured every syllable.

“Tell me something, Means. Didn’t you find Kennedy’s little speech about perversion in the big city a bit forced? Considering that he blew his mother’s head off and had sex with his brother?”

L
ORRAINE CHO WOKE TO
pain. And not only in her bruised body. She felt herself to be on fire, saw images of burning cities in a mind that wandered like the wind outside her cabin.

She told herself, “Get a grip, girl.” Decided she liked the sound of that. All those
g’s.

“Get a grip, girl.” She said it out loud. Then giggled. Then began to cry.

But there were no tears, and when she touched her face she remembered why. Becky hadn’t come since …She couldn’t remember. Two days? Three days?

She asked herself what difference it made. Knowing that the real question was, Do I want to live? Or, even more real, Do I want to die
this
way? To die of thirst with the sound of running water echoing in my ears?

She could hear the birds singing outside the cabin and knew that it was early morning. The birds quieted when the sun was high; they got down to the business of eating, building nests, feeding young.

Becky would come later, if she came at all.

“I’ll wait,” Lorraine said. “I’ll just wait and if she doesn’t come, I’ll do something.”

The smell of her bucket-latrine was so powerful she imagined herself a rat living in a sewer. A trapped rat.

Wondering how her body could make urine if she hadn’t taken any fluids. Garbage in, garbage out, yes. But nothing in, something out? It didn’t make sense.

She picked up the water jug and tilted it to her mouth. Looking for that single, overlooked drop. But, of course, the jug was empty; her efforts no more than ritual. Like saying grace over meals.

Thanks for the grub, bub.

“I’ll just wait. I’ll just wait for Becky to come and bring water. She’ll take me outside to bathe in the stream, to lie in the sun.”

She recalled hearing a description of the Muslim paradise somewhere. A land of running waters, cool winds, and lush valleys where servant girls served chilled sherbet. A land far, far removed from the deserts of Arabia.

But Lorraine was not in the desert. She didn’t know exactly
where
she was, but she knew she wasn’t in a desert. Knew it by the sound of the wind running between uncountable leaves, the sound of water bubbling over rocks. And by the smell of the forest which assaulted her whenever Becky took her outside. The overwhelming, invasive odor of green things growing. Of the frantic rush of spring.

She walked back to her bed and sat down. Knowing that if she waited too long, she might not have the strength to get out. Even this small effort had tired her. Perhaps if she slept …

Her eyes closed and her mind filled with water. Bottomless black lakes, pounding surf, tumbling, crashing rivers. She imagined herself a twig in a river. Dancing in the Whitewater, slithering over the rocks, curling upstream in the eddies. Tumbling over the edge of a waterfall, suddenly free and floating in the air.

It’s not right, she decided. It’s not right, and it should be. Human beings could make it right, but they make it a horror instead. They hurt each other all the time, in millions of small ways, for no good reason.

I can’t die this way.

The thought had the force of revelation because it removed the element of choice. There was nothing to decide. Nothing.

When Lorraine awakened, the air was still and quiet. No birds, no wind. No Becky.

Time to go.

She fetched the metal water jug, then crossed to the window. Forcing the lip of the jug under the sheet metal until it backed up against one of the nails, she levered the jug back and forth. The first nail, much to her surprise, loosened within a few seconds. She had no way of knowing that the window frame hadn’t been painted in a decade, that the frame was thoroughly dry and weathered. She knew only that she would soon be free. That she would soon have water.

Five minutes later, the sheet metal came off in her hands. She was working feverishly now, driven by the fire in her throat. The window stuck momentarily, and she pounded on the frame with the heel of her hand until it suddenly came free, sliding outward on ancient screeching hinges.

Warm, clean air rushed in, cutting the fetid atmosphere of the little room. Lorraine squeezed into the small opening, thrusting one leg forward. The frame dug into her naked flesh, and her bruised body cried out in protest. She hesitated, then pushed forward, letting herself drop feet first to the ground outside the cabin.

The babbling of the stream seemed as loud as the roar of an interstate, as compelling as the cry of an infant. She stumbled forward, tripped on an exposed root, fell heavily, rose, stumbled again. Nothing mattered except water, and when she finally reached the stream, when she dropped to her knees and lowered her lips to the water, the overwhelming sense of relief and fulfillment was as real to her as the liquid running down her throat.

She drank as much as she could (drank until her swollen belly threatened to push the water back up where it came from), then plunged her head beneath the surface of the stream. The water flowed through her hair, cooling her face and scalp. She remembered the first time she had bathed in the stream, how her body had resisted the cold. How she’d had to lower herself an inch at a time while Becky encouraged her with soft, motherly chuckles.

“Now, Lorraine, it won’t hurt a bit once you get used to it. You don’t want to be all yucky, do you?”

Now Lorraine sat up on the bank. She was first aware of the water running from her hair over her shoulders and chest. Then of the fact that she was naked and alone. And blind.

I’ll go back the way I came, she thought. I’ll just go back inside and cover up the window. All I have to do is line up the nails with the holes and pound them in with a rock. It won’t be that hard.

Then she added the obvious: If I stay out here, I’ll starve to death even if Becky and Daddy don’t find me. If I stay out here, I’ll die.

But she was likely to die either way and she knew it.

The June sun warmed her body, evaporating the moisture as it slowly dripped from her hair. The sensation was delicious, a pure physical delight. She cupped her hands and scooped water from the stream, holding it for a moment before letting it run onto her breasts and belly and thighs.

This is what it means, she thought, to give up life. To surrender the moment to the promise of eternity. There is no present in forever, no here and now. No pain, no release.