Habit (17 page)

What took forty seconds?

Brendan got up from the laptop. He walked into his own kitchen and took out his phone. He activated the stopwatch function and began to time himself. He acted as though his own kitchen were unfamiliar. He started going through each drawer, each cabinet, until he grabbed a knife from the drawer next to the sink. He stopped the timer on his phone.

Eighteen seconds.

Granted, his kitchen was smaller, and granted, he was familiar with the layout of it even if he’d tried to pretend otherwise, eighteen seconds was not a long time.

That left more than twenty seconds that the killer could have been doing something.

Plus, there was that obvious sheath of knives. Even in an unfamiliar kitchen, it wouldn’t have taken the killer a full forty seconds to spot the knives on the counter and pull one out.

Had he been toying with Rebecca? Taking his time to torture her a little?

That seemed unlikely. If she had seen him when he came in downstairs, he had seen her, too. The upstairs hallway crossed over the large foyer with the open story. From that hall balcony you could see the front door, plain as day, and vice versa. He must’ve known she would call 911. Who didn’t have a phone?

A killer concerned with being identified, for one, wouldn’t have lingered.

Brendan walked back to the computer and looked at the transcript again.

911 Dispatcher: Do you recognize the intruder?

Caller: He’s downstairs.

Rebecca hadn’t answered the question, exactly. Either she hadn’t heard it, or she had been under too much stress to answer, or she had outright avoided it. Those possibilities ranged from most likely to least likely, in that order. Why would a victim want to protect her aggressor?

Maybe she had been under duress – certainly she had been addled, nervous, maybe panicked. Still, if she recognized the intruder, she’d want to offer that, even if she hadn’t heard the question.

There was no forced entry to the main door. Yet Brendan didn’t think, from what he’d been coming to learn about Rebecca Heilshorn, city girl, anti-social around the area, that she was the type to leave her front door unlocked overnight, alone in the country.

Maybe the killer had a key. Or, maybe she had been expecting someone.

So she either didn’t know the killer, or didn’t want to say that she did on the call.

Ugh. It seemed to go round and round.

And still, the fact of his being in the kitchen for forty seconds – or at least downstairs for that long – was disconcerting. And after the lapse of forty seconds, the transcriber had noted a sound like something hitting the floor, or a door slamming.

Brendan had an idea. He called up Delaney.

“You solve the case?”

There was that dripping sarcasm again.

“I need to get into the evidence room.”

“For?”

“The picture frames.”

“We left those.”

“Were they dusted for prints?”

“Of course they were, Healy. The whole house was dusted. We got very little for prints. Some might be Donald Kettering’s. One set we think may be the guy who did some handy work last month. We’re looking to clear him this afternoon. Otherwise, we have an assortment we may never match. What else you got?”

“The killer could have worn gloves. But I want those frames for another reason.”

It sounded like Delaney was eating something. Perhaps more sunflower seeds. Brendan wondered how a man grew so large eating seeds. Likely it was a cross-addiction.

“Your work is pretty cut and dried,” Delaney said.

“Looking at the frames is part of my work.”

“Picture frames related to erotic videos?”

“I’m going to the house.”

“Fine. Don’t let anyone see you or we’re all fucking screwed. Do you understand?”

Brendan winced. Delaney’s sudden vehemence was surprising, even for a man whose temperament was as capricious as the senior investigator’s.

“I do. I won’t.”

He hung up, feeling a bitter taste in his mouth.

There was no reason to link some picture frames in the house to the porn video. It was just a hunch. Brendan put on his gun and jacket, grabbed up his badge, and headed out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO / SUNDAY, 9:22 AM

The Bloomingdale house was quiet. There was a deputy parked near the sugar maple tree at the end of the driveway. Brendan pulled alongside him.

“Morning,” said Deputy Lawless.

“Morning.” Brendan could see a scratch along the side of Lawless’ face, a reminder of the struggle he’d had with Kevin Heilshorn. He suddenly felt awash in the surreal misgivings of déjà vu.

“Taking another look around?”

“Yeah. Just routine.”

Lawless nodded as if to say he knew all about routine. He tipped his hat and Brendan rolled off in the Camry towards the house.

He approached slowly, taking it in. A sense of anxiety came over him, similar to what he’d experienced when he’d first arrived Thursday morning. That felt like a long time ago now. The anxiety quickly passed. He thought about having a cigarette and sitting for a minute, but he decided against it. He got out and walked towards the house.

He pushed past the caution tape over the front door and slipped into the gloom. The day was overcast and the house had none of the regal light filling it as it had on Thursday. There were no bright spots or shadows, just an even pall of dusty gray.

He glanced up the stairs, towards where Rebecca Heilshorn had looked down and spied her killer. He turned right, as he believed the killer had, and headed into the kitchen.

Past the kitchen, he entered into the dining room. The framed pictures were there, as Delaney had indicated. Brendan stopped in front of the one depicting the happy family – Rebecca, Donald Kettering, and baby girl, Leah. The child was maybe eighteen-months-old in the image.

Brendan picked it up and studied Rebecca’s expression. When he had first seen it, he thought she had been the model of happiness. Now he saw that she had put on a convincing face, for sure. She was pretty, not in a pin-up way, but in a girl-next-door sense. Her eyes betrayed her conflict. Brendan stared into them, as he had at her eyes in the reflection. These eyes told him a story, too.
I’m not happy. Something is wrong.
She wore a manufactured smile. He tried to reconcile the woman he was looking at with the woman in the videos. The process made him uncomfortable.

He started to set the picture back down and then stopped. He hadn’t come all this way just to convince himself of something he already knew, that Rebecca had been unhappy, or to freak himself out and leave.

He flipped the picture over and undid the small latch pinning the back into the frame. He took this away and removed the cardboard backing, revealing the photo paper beneath.

There was a date in the upper right corner, laser-printed.

Then, towards the bottom, a hand-written sentence. Brendan read the words, and a cold hand settled around his heart and squeezed.

I was born under the black smoke of September.

He committed the message to memory. He put the frame back together and then left the room. He suddenly needed to be out of the house and in the fresh air.

* * *

Outside, he called Colinas. Colinas was nearby, and Brendan convinced him to come meet him.

Brendan found a spot not far from the Bloomingdale house, where there was a small gas station. He got a coffee and bagel from inside. He showed a picture he carried of Rebecca Heilshorn to the clerk.

“Yeah,” said the clerk, “like I told the cops the other day, I seen her a few times. Came in for milk, eggs, got gas.” He shrugged.

Brendan went back outside and waited for Colinas. The state detective showed up five minutes later, turning into the gas station at a good clip, churning up the dirt along the edge of the lot so that it boiled beneath his car.

The men stood talking next to their vehicles.

“I need to know about Leah, the daughter. I never had a chance to get into it.”

Colinas looked suspicious. “The Sheriff is okay with this?”

“What do you care?” Brendan snapped. He didn’t mean to be curt, but he was getting sick of being treated like the new kid in school.

Colinas gave a face like,
Your funeral, buddy.

“Let’s not get into impeding the investigation because of some rich control freak.”

“I hear you. Uhm, what I know about the daughter. Hang on.”

Colinas ducked into his black Caprice. The car was the same as the one parked in front of Olivia Jane’s house in Friday. Brendan wondered how many state police were currently active on the case, with its different components. He felt out of the loop, and he didn’t like it. But he understood that the Sheriff wanted him compartmentalized from the rest. Still, he needed all the information he could get.

Colinas reemerged with a folder. He licked his thumb and flipped through the pages. Brendan sipped his coffee. The day was cool and still. Autumn was a kind of silent promise.

“I need to know when she was born. What month, in particular?”

“Okay . . . here. Uhm, she was born in May.”

“How old is she now? Three or four?”

“Yeah. She’s three.”

“Say where?”

“Yup. St. Luke’s-Roosevelt.”

“No shit.”

Colinas raised his eyebrows and looked at Brendan. “No shit?”

“That’s where I was born. It’s in the city. In New York.”

“Huh. Small world.”

“Been a lot of that lately.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?” Colinas folded his arms and leaned back against the Caprice, clamping the folder closed in one hand.

“Like . . . well, okay, the family has someone with the same surname, maybe a relative, maybe not, who has a background similar to mine.”

“Which is?”

“A branch of biology.”

“You went to school for biology?”

Brendan nodded. He eyed the folder. “What’s her custody history?”

Colinas stood motionless for a moment, then reopened the folder. “Uhm, mother had custody all the way through. Grandparents have custody now. Well, it’s in the works. There’s something called ‘Grandparent’s
Rights.’ But the child is with them already.”

“Nothing about Eddie Stemp?”

“No. There’s no record of paternity.”

“But when you went to see him, did the subject of the child come up?”

“No.”

“You didn’t bring it up?”

“No. It wasn’t relevant. There’s no proof he’s the father.”

“Hmm. Kettering is the one who first pointed to Eddie as the father. I think it’s very relevant. We have very few leads here. You know that. This man was her ex-husband. They divorced before that child was born.”

Brendan watched Colinas consider the timeline, as he had. If Stemp and Rebecca had been together for about six months, some five years before, and the child was three and a half, there was a chance she had been conceived by Stemp and Rebecca, but it was slim.

“Maybe there’s someone else,” Colinas said. “Maybe she cheated on Stemp. That’s why there’s no record of paternity. She didn’t want one.”

Brendan thought of the videos.
Dear God
. He felt nauseous again. The coffee he was drinking was suddenly too bitter. He lit a cigarette and felt Colinas watching him.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” said Colinas.

Brendan took a long drag and let it out slowly. “Rebecca is pregnant when she proxies the buy on the Bloomingdale house for her parents, who are footing the bill. Bank records show it’s their mortgage. Maybe it’s Stemp’s baby she’s pregnant with, but our timelines suggests likely not. There’s some reason that she settles here, though. And I don’t think it’s arbitrary. It’s key.

“While closing on the place she rents a house outside of Boonville. The woman I spoke to, who is the property manager, doesn’t remember her, but it could have been because I didn’t stress that she was pregnant. I didn’t have a chance to really put together the timeline before I got shucked off the case.

“So she’s freshly divorced, maybe still in the last stages of it, and she’s going to have a baby – She goes to Kettering’s hardware store – according to his statement, that’s how they met – and then they start dating, sort of, but she doesn’t really want to commit.

“Kettering, meanwhile, sees ‘instant family.’ Or something, something really makes him want her in particular. He’s smitten by her and really tried to work her over, but she’s not into it. She comes and goes, he says, and he can’t really control her.”

Brendan took a breath and asked, “How old are his kids?”

Colinas blinked. He seemed to have been transfixed by Brendan’s narration. “Whose? Ketterings? I didn’t think he . . .”

“Stemp’s.”

“Ah, they were two and four.”

“Interesting. Stemp has a kid who’s four, too, as if he wasted no time during the divorce.”

“Maybe she cheated, maybe he cheated.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think it’s cheating on her part. In a way, but . . . not when it’s work.”

“Work?” Colinas gaped at Brendan.

Brendan realized his mouth had gotten away with him. He considered telling Colinas anyway. This was ridiculous, compartmentalizing the case like this. There needed to be total disclosure of information all round. Anyway, how else was he supposed to follow the porn lead? Chat rooms? Watch more videos? A man could take only so much – after the initial rush of hormones, repeat viewings revealed something grotesque in its mechanical, often violent, nature.

Colinas was really staring at him. “What’s going on, Healy? First you’re off the case, then you’re back on the case, but it’s all hush-hush. Delaney tells me that only me and him and the Sheriff know. I’m to give you whatever you need, but not to ask any questions. What the fuck is going on?”

Brendan pitched his cigarette away. He clamped a hand on Colinas’ shoulder.

“Come with me.”