Habit (18 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE / SUNDAY, 10:43 AM

They caravanned briefly, Colinas following Brendan’s Camry. After a couple of turns, Brendan pulled off at a fruit and vegetable stand.

The men got out and Brendan headed over and picked up a shiny red apple. He headed inside, Colinas scowling after him, scratching his head.

There was an older woman inside, sweeping. She smiled when she saw the men. Her hair was white, with a faint blue tint.

“First of the season,” she said about the apple, and got behind the counter. “Is that all? 25 cents.”

Brendan fished for a quarter. He realized he didn’t have one. Colinas saw this and stepped forward. “I got it,” he said brusquely. Then he smiled at the older woman. The two of them, Brendan and Colinas, were suddenly seminary school boys, charming the friendly woman.

“Ma’am,” said Brendan. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

He took a picture out of his pocket. “Do you recognize this woman?”

“Oh yes. Very nice young lady. Makes regular visits in the fall.”

Brendan glanced at Colinas. Clearly the woman didn’t know about Rebecca’s murder, despite the major media surrounding it.

The woman’s brow creased with worry. “Is everything alright?”

“Do you remember this woman as being pregnant?”

She nodded. “Sure. We talked about what natural foods are best for a baby. I fed all mine pureed summer squash. That’s the best.”

The men smiled in the presence of such nurturing. Then Brendan grew serious again. “Did she ever have a man with her?”

The woman thought, and then she frowned. “More than one.”

Brendan described Kettering’s appearance.

“Yes, him.”

Then Brendan looked at Colinas, who got the hint. He stepped forward and gave a description of Eddie Stemp.

“That sounds right,” she said. “Him, too.”

Brendan turned to face Colinas. He couldn’t quite conceal his expression, and Colinas read him, loud and clear. “Okay,” he said softly. “So Stemp wasn’t telling me the whole truth about his relationship with her. We’ll have another look at him.”

“Thank you ma’am,” said Brendan. He smiled and took a bite of the apple. “Delicious.”

The detectives started walking away. The woman was still frowning.

“And there was one other fellow, too,” she said.

* * *

Brendan and Colinas stood back at their vehicles. Colinas glanced at his watch. Then he looked at Brendan, and his gaze was level and direct.

“Ok. I’m at the end of my patience. Tell me what’s going on. What have you got?”

Brendan leaned back against his Camry and considered. He had a piece of apple stuck between two teeth and he picked at it with his fingernail. He could feel Colinas’s frustration mounting. This wasn’t exactly a ploy, but he knew he was hooking Colinas, getting him really interested, and he needed to. He needed Colinas – he couldn’t do this alone, no matter what the Department said.

“First let me ask you,” said Brendan. “What do you know about the case on the Kevin Heilshorn shooting? My shooting? I know your squad got involved.”

“Yeah, they’re involved, they’re investigating, business as usual. So what? The Sheriff acts like you’re in protective custody. He says IA is handling things about you and will share the info on an as-needed basis.”

Brendan considered this. He really felt like the Sheriff was in his corner.

“Okay. Thanks for that. Here’s what I’ve got. I think you need to press Delaney to take a hard look at this handyman, or whatever he is. A third guy – you heard what that woman just said. Older guy, greying around the edges. We’ve got no forced entry to the house. Think the victim left the door wide open, a city girl with a troubled past, alone in a big old country house in the middle of nowhere? I still lock my car and house, though most people I know around here don’t, except for the old, paranoid types.”

He looked hard at Colinas.

“I’m completely certain that Rebecca knew her killer. But she omitted identifying him when she called 911. That’s major. Why did she do it? I figure there are three possible reasons. Either she was too frayed in the moment, or she didn’t think he was going to hurt her, or because she was trying to protect him.”

“Trying to
protect
him?”

“And I rank those from least likely to most likely.”

“Why would she call 911 and not report the name of the person she was afraid was going to hurt or kill her? If anything I’m more inclined to your second theory, that she didn’t think he would hurt her.”

Brendan shook his head. “Maybe, but I don’t think so. Why did she call and not name him? Maybe she thought he would talk a while and the police would get there in time. Or maybe she knew that he was going to hurt her, but the reason to protect him was so important that she didn’t say his name.”

“Why? I’m still not seeing the reasoning to protect someone you think is going to hurt you.”

Brendan glanced at the vegetable market, the rows of shining apples and pears. He thought of the woman inside saying she fed summer squash to her children.
That’s the best.

“What is the one thing a woman is willing to protect above all else?”

Colinas blinked. He didn’t have the answer.

“Obviously you don’t have a family.”

“I’m engaged.”

Brendan thought of his own wife and daughter. The feeling of them was familiar, and old, and had lost some of the acuteness of its pain. It was blunt now, like something rusty. Still painful, but mostly just messy, just dull.

“Her child,” he told Colinas.

“She protected the man who killed her because she was protecting her child? How’s that work?”

Brendan shrugged. He was reminded of Kevin Heilshorn lying about his sister having a child. “That’s what I’m going to figure out.”

Colinas frowned. The wind picked up and tousled the men’s hair. Grains of windblown sand clicked against the vehicles. “That’s what you’re going to figure out?” He sighed and looked around. “That’s a lot of circumstantial stuff, Detective Healy. Lot of speculation.”

“And finally,” Brendan pressed on, “these are our suspects, as I see them. Kettering, Stemp, Kevin Heilshorn, and this handyman – who’s possibly an older guy. Do you have a name? Has Delaney checked him out?”

“That’s my next item. I’m late to meet him.”

“Who is he?”

Colinas’s looked at Brendan with hard, dark eyes. “Healy, I like you. But what this has to do with porn videos is beyond me. You’re out there, man. You need to play the hole you’re on.”

“That’s a golf analogy? That’s terrible.”

“You don’t play golf.”

“No.”

“Well, I may not have kids, but I play golf.”

“Okay . . .”

“Look, man. If I tell you who the handyman is, I don’t want you to go off all half-cocked. He’s not even really a man. So, it’s not our gray-haired guy, or whatever. He’s a young guy.”

Brendan blinked. “Okay. Tell me.”

“He works for Donald Kettering.”

* * *

Brendan showed up in Boonville half an hour later.

The clerk with the acne was not behind the counter, but instead a middle-aged woman stood at the register. She wore a flannel shirt and had broad shoulders and short hair. She looked like she could get mean if she needed to, Brendan thought.

He flashed her his badge, looking around. “Mr. Kettering back yet?”

“Back?”

“I called earlier. You said he was returning from his trip. A trade show? Hardware convention?”

“Yes. The National Hardware Show.”

“So he’s back?”

“Can I ask what this is about?”

Brendan regarded the woman who outweighed him by thirty pounds. “Ma’am, these are simple questions. Is he back? Is he here?”

She turned accusatory. “There’s just been a lot of you coming around lately. I wonder if this isn’t some sort of police harassment.”

Brendan tilted his head, and glanced at the ceiling for an instant, as if he was thinking. “Nope, it’s not.” He started away from the counter and deeper into the store. “I’ll just show myself back, if Mr. Kettering is here.”

She said nothing.

Brendan found the door Kettering had led him through three days before. He could feel the woman’s eyes boring into him. He rapped his knuckles on the door, the way Argon used to, following a domestic disturbance call.
Everyone knows the cop’s knock
, Argon liked to say.

The door gave with the knock, indicating it was unlatched, and Brendan pushed it open the rest of the way.

Kettering was there, leaning over a box. There were several boxes around. He offered a very quick smile. His eyes were dancing with anger.

“Hello, Detective.” Kettering stood upright.

Brendan looked at the boxes. He still had boxes of his own piled in a corner of his house. The ones marked “family.”

Kettering explained, “New products from the convention. Most are free samples. What can I do for you?”

Brendan stood inside the door. He didn’t ask to sit, nor did Kettering offer. The air of conviviality Kettering had possessed on the first visit was gone. Kettering looked tired.

“You lied to me, a little bit,” said Brendan. He knew it was dicey to lead off with an accusation, but on the other hand, if Kettering sensed where Brendan was going early on, he might insist on a lawyer, and take a turn down that road. If incensed, he might give up more.

“Excuse me? I did what?” He pointed, “I’ve cooperated with every policeman who’s come through that door. And counting you, there have been three. Maybe you all ought to communicate with each other, instead of coming in here one at a time to ask me the same questions. That’s what’s called a duplication of efforts.”

“Cops are like that,” Brendan said. “They duplicate all over the place. It’s interesting you bring up the idea. Maybe this is a question you haven’t been asked: Did you have a key to Rebecca Heilshorn’s house, or did you ever make a copy for her and keep one for yourself?”

Kettering looked positively furious now. His color had risen and his cheeks were flushed. He was a big man, and balding. His face was starting to look like an anti-aircraft balloon wearing a wig.

“I had a key, yes, briefly. She had me come by a few times when she was out of town. I was helping her to remodel the master bedroom.”

“You helped her add some appliances, too. Yes? Like a Maytag dishwasher.”

“So? It was a gift. Don’t you ever give gifts?”

Brendan nodded. “Ever give the gift of her key to someone else? Your employee, Jason Pert. Did he do work for her as well?”

“Only once or twice,” said Kettering. His eyes flicked past Brendan, presumably to the door.
He wants to run.

“Which? Once? Twice.”

“Two times, Detective,” Kettering nearly bellowed. “Two times he went and did some work in my stead.”

“Any reason why she would have called him? Rebecca? From her cell phone? Because we have a call placed to his number. That was why one of the other investigators came by. The call was traced to your Mr. Pert. Your employee. The young man with the . . .” Brendan passed a hand over his face to indicate acne.

“No. I have no idea why she would have called him. You’ll have to ask him.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He no longer works for me.”

“Oh, come on.” Brendan scowled at Kettering. It was too obvious.

Again Kettering glanced over Brendan’s shoulder. Brendan turned. The woman in the flannel shirt was looming just outside the open door. She craned her neck to get a better view into the room. “Everything okay, Mr. Kettering?”

Brendan slammed the door shut.

Kettering flew into a rage. “Who do you people think you are?”

“My partners are talking to your employee. Why I came here was for another reason. You never mentioned to me she was pregnant when you met her,” said Brendan. It was almost a growl.

“Get out of here.”

“Fine. I can arrest you and we can talk at the Department.”

“What do you want from me?” Now Kettering was yelling. He was standing over the same box. White Styrofoam peanuts had spilled around it. Suddenly he kicked through them, like an angry teenager. “I’ve done everything. I’ve been cooperative and patient. What the fuck more do you want?”

“I want you to tell me about Rebecca’s career in pornography,” said Brendan, in a measured, ice cold tone.

Kettering stopped all of his antics at once. The color drained from his face. “Aww, Jesus,” he said and put his head in his hand.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR / SUNDAY 12:18 PM

Kettering was brought in for questioning. He rode in Brendan’s Camry, silent the whole way. It had been a tense, awkward drive. A half an hour later they were in Oriskany, and Kettering was in a room with Colinas and Delaney. A Sheriff’s Department detail had been dispatched to bring in the employee, Jason Pert, aged nineteen.

Brendan knew he had taken a risk. It was a bit outside the circumspection of his end of the investigation. Delaney was appeased, however, when Brendan suggested that the senior investigator do the questioning himself, along with Colinas. The Sheriff was in agreement.

Brendan and Taber stood looking through the one-way glass, listening to the recorded conversation, which was piped into the viewing room through a pair of speakers.

“This is the last you can be in here,” said Sheriff Taber. He meant the department offices. “Heilshorn is coming tomorrow.”

“I understand,” said Brendan. The truth was, he didn’t like it. He knew certain situations required a kind of tact at odds with standard procedure and that, in the end, everyone’s interest was in bringing Rebecca’s killer to justice, but it meant some controlling, rich, father of the victim wanted him off the case.

“What do you know about Rebecca Heilshorn’s involvement in pornography?” Delaney was asking the questions. He stood with one leg up on a chair. Colinas was against the far wall. Kettering sat at the table. There was a video camera mounted in the corner, and a parabolic microphone in front of Kettering. Senior Prosecutor Skene was going to arrive any minute. He wouldn’t like that the questions had begun without him, but he could always watch the tape. Kettering had agreed to meet without a lawyer, claiming he had nothing to hide, but only on the stipulation that he be kept no longer than three p.m., when he had to leave for an appointment.

Brendan kept his eyes on Kettering while he answered.

“I don’t know much. I mean, I don’t know how she got involved, or why she did it.”

“Was she actively . . . pursuing that career when you met her?”

“I didn’t know if she was or not, I . . . no. She wasn’t. Well, she was active. But she wanted out.”

Kettering was nervous. Brendan was trying to get a fix on why. So far he was their front runner in the list of persons of interest. He was close to being a suspect. But Brendan had a hard time hanging the brutal crime on Kettering. He thought maybe the man was nervous for other reasons.

Delaney continued, “And she was pregnant when you met her.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you share this with the investigator who questioned you?”

Kettering took a moment to answer. Delaney seemed to grow impatient. Finally, Kettering said, “Because I didn’t want to come across as some . . . I don’t know. I saw her and just . . . I really liked her. I thought I could help her.”

“Help her get out of porn?”

“No. I mean, yes and no. She just needed someone. She didn’t really know anyone around here. She had this big house she was buying. She was pregnant, and she wouldn’t talk about the father.”

“Mr. Kettering, are you the father of Rebecca Heilshorn’s daughter?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

Watching through the glass, the Sheriff leaned over to Brendan and whispered, “We could poly him.”

Brendan nodded. He already thought Kettering was telling the truth. Then again, he’d thought Kettering was being up front when they had first met.

“You’re in a picture with Rebecca and Leah, when the baby was about twelve or eighteen months old.”

“Yes. Are you kidding? That doesn’t prove I’m anyone’s father.”

“But you wanted to be, is the point.”

Brendan felt his body temperature cooling, his heart speeding up a little. He suddenly wanted a cigarette, but there was no way he was leaving the room. He had told Delaney about the writing on the back of the framed picture. Delaney seemed like he was working it into the interrogation. Brendan felt a twinge of jealousy, but quickly dismissed it as juvenile and egotistical.

“I had an idea that I could be good to them. That I could help them.”

“Young woman, pretty, single mom of a cute baby girl, seems vulnerable. You thought, ‘instant family.’ ”

Brendan felt invaded. The exact phrase had been in his thoughts. Again, he tried to rise above any petty rivalry with Delaney. Delaney was, after all, the senior investigator, and Brendan was lucky to still be a part of the case, at all.

Not that Kevin Heilshorn was his fault.

Suddenly he saw the young man again, on his back in Olivia Jane’s garden. The dark blood on the bright green leaves. Flecks of it on Kevin’s face, his wide, open face, dead eyes looking up to heaven.

Kettering was growing agitated. “No, I didn’t think ‘instant family.’ I thought I could help them. I loved her. I loved both of them.”

“Have you made any attempts to get in touch with the daughter?”

“Absolutely not.”

“The family? Have you ever contacted the victim’s parents?”

“No.”

“How about her brother?”

Kettering hesitated for only a second. “Why would I contact her brother?”

“You haven’t answered the question.”

“No. I never contacted her brother.”

Brendan felt like Kettering had just uttered his first lie. He leaned toward the Sheriff. “Yeah, definitely a poly.”

Taber nodded. At the same time, the door opened behind them and Skene slipped in, quiet as a cat.

“Mr. Kettering, did you write something on the back of the family picture you’re in with Rebecca and Leah?”

“I was told this was going to be about me providing some helpful information about Rebecca. Okay? I’m sorry I didn’t bring it up before. I should have. That’s all I’ve been trying to do is help. I wanted to help her. Take her to the Winter Festival, bring the baby, bounce the baby on my knee. Okay? Fuck me for trying to do the right thing.”

“Mr. Kettering, it’s all right. Please, calm down.”

“And now you’re interrogating me as if I’m a suspect. I think maybe unless you are going to arrest me, I should go. I could have your badge.”

Brendan heard Skene swear under his breath. Brendan felt himself smirk. Skene was like the father who comes into the room right as the nudity or violence happens in the movie the teenager is watching on the TV.

Delaney did his best to smooth things over. “Okay, you’re right, I’m sorry.”

Colinas stepped away from the wall. “Mr. Kettering, we’re just trying to establish any connections between the evidence we have, and the life of the victim. You’re coming here today is very helpful. We know you just want to help, and that you wanted to help the victim, too. Do you think that someone would have written on the back of that photograph for a reason?”

“What does it say?”

Colinas glanced at Delaney, who nodded. “It says, ‘I was born under the black smoke of September.’ Crazy, right? Makes no sense to us. You ever heard of anything like that, Mr. Kettering?”

Everyone watched Kettering closely. “Never,” he seemed to say without guile.

Colinas seemed to get comfortable with the reins. “Think someone was jealous of you? Of what you had with Rebecca and the girl?”

“Of what we had? I had nothing but their fumes. I only saw the girl a dozen or so times; I’ve already told Detective Healy that. Mostly I chased after Rebecca. Okay? It’s a little humiliating.”

“Humiliating?” Colinas made a face. “Oh man, that’s all I know. Every woman in my life I chased over the river and through the woods. My wife only agreed to marry me after I’d run a marathon to win her over. I understand. But, see, to other people, it could have appeared effortless. You know? You’re sitting there, in a restaurant or something, and in comes this beautiful little family. That’s what you see. Handsome, successful hardware-store-owner Donald Kettering and this younger, beautiful woman with her precious daughter, all sitting down to some spaghetti. And what bliss they must be in. See? We don’t think about what might be beneath the surface. We like to feel bad about ourselves, so we make out other people to be happier.”

Everyone was quiet after Colinas’s little speech. In the viewing room, Skene grumbled something about State Detectives.

“No,” Kettering said at last. “I can’t think of anyone who might have been jealous.”

Brendan was never so sure of a balder lie. What was Kettering hiding? Who was he protecting?

Delaney piped up, his arms folded, foot still up on the chair. “What about Jason Pert?”

Kettering seemed to instantly grow upset again. “Look, I told you. Jason dropped a few things off once at the house. I was helping her remodel the master bedroom. I mean, it was brief. I was only working on it for two weeks. We broke up shortly after.”

“How did you break up? What were the circumstances?”

Brendan watched Kettering closely. The man’s face had grown long, his eyes drawn into his head, ringed with fatigue. “How does anyone break up? It’s not a lot of fun.”

“I understand, I understand. Can you tell me again, though, how you knew she was in pornography? Did she tell you? Was that why you broke up?”

“She wasn’t
in
pornography, okay? She did some videos. She never said why. She would never talk about it. We
broke up
because I proposed to her three times. On the third, I decided to give up. Okay? I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I did a lot of talking to the members of my church, and I searched my soul. In the end, I couldn’t keep chasing, couldn’t keep living that way.”

“Which church do you go to?”

“The Resurrection Life Church.”

Brendan felt a shiver of excitement. He pressed his lips together and kept listening.

“Ok, Mr. Kettering. Thing is, you’re saying a couple of things here. And I can dig it; women are complicated. You say that you chased Rebecca around trying to make her happy, but that she also needed you to help her get away from something – though she kept it a secret from you. So, what I’m especially unclear about is one thing. If she never talked about it, how did you know about the videos? ”

Kettering looked positively deflated now. His big, lunky frame seemed to try to shrink itself. It was hard, even, just to look at how uncomfortable he was. He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to: Kettering knew about the videos because he had watched them. And then one day, like a gift from the gods, the young woman shows up in the flesh.

“And was that why you didn’t say anything about this before?”

Kettering’s lower lip started to tremble. The men watched as the large, balding, small business owner began to cry.

“I didn’t want . . . I loved her. How could you tell people about something like that? About the woman you loved? I didn’t want people to know that about her. It wasn’t who she really was . . .” He trailed off, sobbing.

Skene turned to Brendan and Sheriff Taber. The prosecutor was grinning like a hyena. “He saw her when he watched one of the videos himself. Then he recognized her when she showed up in Boonville, when she came into his hardware store.”

Taber nodded. He totally bought it. Brendan thought it was partly true. Skene turned and glared through the one-way glass, scenting blood. Then the prosecutor asked, “When do we bring in the kid? The employee?”

“Right now,” said Taber.

* * *

Jason Pert, just a kid, had little to offer. His story matched Kettering’s. As for the phone call, he said that Rebecca had called him in the weeks prior to her disappearance to ask him a question about the plumbing in the master bathroom. It was a little odd, because she and Mr. Kettering hadn’t been seeing each other for a long time, Pert said. But she said she just wanted to finish the master bathroom – she’d wanted to know if it was okay to hook up a “diaper sprayer” to the line coming into the toilet tank. Pert had told her he didn’t really know too much about plumbing, and that he no longer worked for Kettering. He was preparing for college in the fall and needed the few remaining weeks of summer to get things in order. He was going to UAlbany to enroll in business classes.

Delaney and Colinas grilled Pert about the nature of the phone call. How Rebecca had sounded, anything else she may have said. Pert said it was very brief, and that she sounded “normal.” They then asked him about the key. He said he had left the key in a drawer at the hardware store, where it had been usually kept. At that point Taber stepped out of the room to contact a deputy and have an officer stop into the hardware store and verify that the key was there.

Twenty minutes later, word came back that it was. It didn’t prove anything, Skene observed, except that the kid was telling the truth about that one thing. Skene was hunting for another suspect to pin the murder on.

Pert agreed to be fingerprinted and have a sample of his blood taken and his shoe size determined. Kettering reluctantly agreed to the same tests. Then, since neither man was being charged, they were released. The whole thing had taken almost five hours.

After the interrogations were over, Brendan turned his attention to something else. He sat in his office and focused on obtaining as much medical information as he could on Rebecca. This was something else he would have done if he hadn’t been booted from the case and then brought back on in this clandestine fashion. Who was her doctor? Who delivered her baby, Leah? Did she have any conditions? He made several phone calls to area hospitals, and then hospitals in Westchester, and finally to the place of his own birth, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt. Lawrence Hospital, in Westchester, had a record of Rebecca’s birth, but nothing after that, and no information about her baby, Leah.