Habit (10 page)

He caught one last glimpse of her. She was focused straight ahead, and didn’t turn to look at him.

She drove off, and Brendan stood in the dark parking lot, the manila envelope in his hands.

CHAPTER TWELVE / THURSDAY, 10:55 PM

Brendan lived in the small community of Stanwix. The Sheriff’s Department in Oriskany was smack in between the small cities of Rome and Utica. Stanwix was close to Rome, about three miles from his office in Oriskany. He rented a two bedroom house on Toni Hill Road. It was a small colonial-style home, with a red door, and a whitewashed fence in front. Not the ideal trappings, but he’d taken it on the fly.

The job offer to work as an investigator for Oneida County had come out of the sheer blue. Seamus Argon, a lifelong beat cop in Hawthorne, had told Brendan about it one morning on road patrol.

Brendan had been doubtful. “Investigator? I’ve got three years as a cop in Hawthorne. I went to school for neurobiology, for Chrissakes, Argon. How am I going to make detective? I’d need at least two or three years in the civil office, or a stint on patrol before they even considered me.”

But Argon was insistent. He had just heard about the opening for an investigator in Oneida, specifically someone who was skilled at going door to door. “You’re good with people,” said Argon.

“I am?”

Argon was in his mid-fifties. When it all came out, he knew the Sheriff, and could pull strings. Brendan thought about it for two days – that was all the time Argon said he would have.

“You trying to get rid of me?”

Argon was a large man with a flat Irish-cop face (though the fact that he was Scottish was something the hardened cop liked to remind Brendan about) and a no-nonsense attitude. He claimed to possess a bullshit detector to rival a Geiger counter. One tremor of BS, and his sensitive instrument picked it up readily. “You hate it here,” said Argon.

“How do I hate it here?”

But Argon only raised his eyebrows, and both men knew he was right. Not that loving where you lived was a prerequisite for any job. In this case, there was more to it. Brendan was haunted. He looked at his own hangdog face in the mirror every morning and knew it. Argon had become his best friend, even his mentor, but the sight of the man constantly reminded Brendan of the day his entire life had changed. The day he had privately come to think of as The Reckoning.

“Domestic disturbances and speed traps are where I belong, not you,” Argon had said at last.

They’d been sitting in the cruiser on Elmwood Ave. Brendan remembered the day with startling clarity. It had been the tail end of winter, and icy rain had spacked against the windshield. Argon, who never liked to turn the heat up in the car, had been sitting in the driver’s seat with a steaming cup of coffee, his skin ruddy in the cold, his thick red mustache twitching as he spoke.

“You’ve watched every aspect of the investigations we’ve been around. Your head is in the detective work, my friend. Plus, all your background peering into microscopes and all that fuckin’ shit. Now this position, though, this is primarily for questioning the witnesses, getting statements. The big shit up there is an old codger named Delaney. It’s the Sheriff’s county, but Delaney thinks it’s his. He’s a nice enough guy, unless you get in the way of his agenda. He likes his pussy, too, pardon my fran-swaz, so he’s gotten himself into trouble once or twice and is on thin ice with the department. He’s got the hots for the ADA, maybe the staff shrink, whatever wears a skirt and stands upright. If IA ever comes around, you’ll see Delaney lick his palms and slick his hair back. The deps and the local PDs are gonna go door to door, too, just like we’ve done. But they had some case up there not long ago with major blowback because of how some dumb cop like us blew it getting an accurate statement from a witness, and it ended up a ragged case for the DA, who let this guy walk. Guy ended up killing someone a few weeks later. So you’ve got Delaney with something to prove, and the Senior Prosecutor, I think he’s called Skene, with a wild hair up his ass, too. You’ll be on the outside up there, but keep your head down and do the job. The Sheriff will have your back, and that’s all that matters.”

“You act like I’ve already taken the job.”

Argon had turned to look at Brendan in the passenger seat. His dark green eyes had flicked back and forth, seeing through to Brendan’s core. “You have,” he said.

Still, Brendan had taken the 48 hours Argon said he had to decide. Somewhere around the fortieth hour, with an early spring snowfall coming down outside his apartment, he had started to pack his things.

It had been three months. Brendan looked around now at the two-bedroom house he lived in. Most of his belongings were still in the mover’s boxes. There were three boxes marked “family,” and these were piled closest to the back wall of the dining area, sitting beneath the white lacy curtains that had come with the place.

Brendan set his bag down inside the front door and walked into the kitchen. The room was off the dining area, a small galley kitchen, with white flooring, mirrored counter spaces, a sink and dishwasher on one side, cabinetry and refrigerator on the other. He opened the fridge and peered in. He found the grape juice and pulled it out. He took a glass down from one of the cabinets and filled it with ice from the refrigerator’s ice machine. The machine labored and clunked and finally spat out four wedges of ice in a rush. He poured the grape juice, put the bottle back in the fridge and returned to the entrance hall where he picked up his bag. With the ice tinkling in his glass and holding the bag by its leather strap he walked into the back of the house where his darkened living room was.

The living room consisted of one small sofa, a coffee table, and end-table and a lamp. There was no stereo, no flat screen TV. On the coffee table was his laptop computer.

He set the bag down on the coffee table next to the laptop and the drink on the end-table. He unzipped the bag and started to unpack its contents. After a moment, he had everything laid out in front of him. He opened the laptop and booted it up. Then he placed a call to the Sheriff’s Department, to Deputy Benedetto, and requested that a patroller make regular passes in front of Olivia Jane’s house throughout the night. He knew that surveillance was already on the Heilshorn property, and that the Department would be spread thin. But Benedetto agreed without much protest.

After he hung up, Brendan took a sip of the grape juice, loosened his collar, and went to work.

* * *

Gentry Folwell, who lived across the street from the Heilshorn place, had been questioned by Delaney after the old farmer had gone on a shooting spree in pursuit of a woodchuck. The Heilshorn place was isolated, so there were no other neighbors to question. Brendan looked at the copy of Folwell’s statement.

The old-timer had neither seen nor heard any suspicious activity across from his home that morning. He was an early-riser, he said, getting out of bed when the cock crowed, doing his stretches. That was how he stayed fit to run the farm. There were annotations that Folwell went on about his suspicion of global warming as the reason why his corn had failed. He was afraid of the farm going bankrupt.

He had noticed the Audi in the driveway the day before. He was asked if that was the first time he’d seen the vehicle, but he couldn’t recall precisely. In other words, there was the possibility that Rebecca Heilshorn had only arrived at the house the previous day. Brendan jotted a note down in his black book that said “Timeline.” He made this the first entry. Tomorrow, he would construct a bigger version of the timeline on large sheets of paper at the office. Most detectives today used computers to build the timeline – there were several software programs – but Brendan felt he wanted to hand-write and lay everything out. It was a practice he’d begun back in the lab at Langone.

The comments Folwell made about his farm potentially folding prompted Brendan to look into the records of the Heilshorn place. He consulted the notes from Donald Kettering, the hardware store owner and ex-boyfriend of the deceased girl. Kettering had called the place the Bloomingdale Farm. Brendan found tax records for it online, and a history of its turnover on a site called Zillow. The records went back to 1962, when the farm was sold for $82,000. This particular site didn’t list who the seller or buyer was, but Brendan already felt sure that the initial sale was by Bloomingdale.

Brendan whistled through his teeth when he thought of buying that place for a $82,000. The tax maps showed it to be over 15 acres. The house was three stories with four bedrooms. There were two outbuildings, the tractor shed and a small kennel, and then there was the barn – the barn had appeared recently resurrected or rebuilt completely. Brendan checked the Kettering notes again. Kettering said it had been torn down and rebuilt.

The property sold again in 1988 for a much heftier sum. It had almost tripled in value, according to Zillow, and had been purchased for nearly $200,000. There was no other record of sale until three years ago, when the building was sold and bought once more, this time for a cool million.

The Heilshorns.

Brendan sat back and ran a hand across his face. He took another sip of grape juice. He shut his eyes and rubbed them with his fingertips. Then he continued.

Next, his mind jumped to suspects. He prepared to make a list of them. The tip of his pen hovered over the paper. Kettering had acted a little strangely, and might even have motive as an unrequited lover. But his alibi was strong.

Still the pen hung in the air.

Kevin Heilshorn had been emotionally distraught, but understandably so. In cases where someone close to the victim was the culprit, that person usually employed a different method to conceal guilt – they acted cool as a cucumber. What often aroused suspicion of a husband or boyfriend as the murderer was when they acted almost glib in their willingness to cooperate. Their lack of emotional outburst, lack of defensiveness, especially when accused of the crime, betrayed the dark truth. Kevin, on the other hand, had behaved like a grief-stricken brother who had expected to see his sister that morning and had been horribly and unexpectedly denied. Still, there was the glaring caveat of his actions later that day. Brendan could see him standing in the garden. He could feel his own finger pressing against the cool metal of the trigger, ready to squeeze. Bang. Bang.

He didn’t believe Kevin Heilshorn had killed his sister.

He turned his mind to the possibility of a break-in, of burglary, or, at least, a stranger. In certain cases he’d researched, victims of a violent crime suffered because of the misfortune of being in the wrong place. The aggressor held the grievance against someone else, or sought to steal something no longer there. Was it possible that Rebecca Heilshorn was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Brendan thought again of the arrangement of the dresser drawers and how only the bottom drawers had been open. An inexperienced thief may have started with the top drawer and had to close each drawer to get to the next one while working down the column of three, but professional thieves weren’t likely to hit places out in the middle of nowhere, especially old rundown farms. It seemed more likely that the perp was in the house in search of something specific and had killed Rebecca in the process either to keep her quiet, or for some other reason.

Brendan would continue to investigate prior ownership of the property to see if anything turned up that would hint at some discord between anyone and a previous owner, or anything to suggest something of value on the property. But, it wasn’t a priority right now.

He still hadn’t listed a single suspect.

The biological father of Rebecca’s daughter was next on his mind. He knew nothing about the man except his first name. Eddie.

Was it Eddie whose boot print was on the door to Rebecca Heilshorn’s bedroom? Had a disgruntled ex come back seeking revenge for emotional pain, for a daughter that had been kept from him?

Brendan needed to find Eddie and talk to him. The way to locate him might be through a signed paternity statement. He needed to find out the hospital where Leah was born. He needed to find everything about the little girl.

Just as much, or even more, he needed to thoroughly research the victim. Where had she gone to school? Who were her friends? What was she doing in an old farmhouse owned by her parents, miles from where she came from?

It was interesting, the parallel between him and the victim. Brendan sat back from the computer and his notes, massaging the bridge of his nose. Both he and Rebecca were from Westchester. Both found themselves smack in the middle of New York State, the leatherstocking region of flat land, a few rolling hills, and hundreds of miles of green.

He wondered if Rebecca had a past similar to his, too. Something driving her. Something she was running from. Had he run? Had Argon offered him, not the start of a new life, but an escape hatch from the pain of his old one?

Lastly, Brendan opened up the manila folder and pulled out the worn copy of
The Screwtape Letters.
He pinched the note between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it out. What was the significance of the passage? He read it again. He looked at the note. Who was Danice? Was it her nickname? Was ‘K’ actually Kevin?

Brendan’s thoughts circled back around to the young, angry brother. Kevin had lied about Rebecca having a child. Why? Maybe he was trying to protect her from someone like Eddie? If so, then why had Kevin come after Brendan and Olivia like a psychopath on a killing spree?

And why in the hell was Brendan convinced of the young man’s innocence? Maybe he felt some sort of strange kinship with Kevin Heilshorn.