I Shall Not Want (28 page)

Hadley frowned. “So I shouldn’t have told him to eat shit and die?” The expression on the chief’s face was priceless. She held up her hands. “Just kidding. I was very civil.”

He gave her a withering look. “Kevin?”

“Between Mr. McGeoch and Agent Hodgden, I got a list of area farms that employ immigrant workers year round, and the names of laborers with legal permits and sponsors.”

The chief’s eyebrows went up. “Paula Hodgden just passed on that info?”

Flynn looked as if he couldn’t decide to be embarrassed or proud of himself. “I—um, may have given her the impression that I was going to be rounding up anybody I found who wasn’t on her list.”

“I see.”

“I didn’t promise anything.”

“Uh—huh.”

“Anyway, I’m ready to get out and interview people, but I have a problem. I don’t speak Spanish.” Flynn’s forehead creased, as if he were afraid his language skills were letting the department down. “I do speak some German. I took three years in high school.”

“That’s great, Kevin,” the chief said. “The next time we find a John Doe wearing lederhosen, you’re on it. In the meantime, however—”

“Hadley can go with Kevin instead of me,” McCrea said. “I’m going to be tackling the Christie relatives today, and it might be better if I don’t have someone inexperienced around.”

Well. That stung. But at least McCrea was up front with her.

The chief crossed his arms over his chest and stared into the middle distance. She was beginning to recognize it as his thinking stance. Finally he said, “Okay. But if I’m going to send the two of you out there, I want to maximize the possibility of getting useful information. I want you two in civvies.”

“What?” Hadley said.

“We’ve already noticed that the sight of a cop car and a uniform doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in these guys. Change into something you can wear with a shoulder or a pancake holster and go in one of your own cars.”

“I don’t have a pancake or a shoulder holster,” Hadley started to say, but her objection was drowned by Kevin’s excited, “You want us to go undercover?”

“No, Kevin. I want you in plainclothes. There’s a difference.” He looked at Hadley. “You can draw a holster from the gun locker.”

“Plainclothes,” Flynn breathed, in the way someone might have said, “The Holy Grail.”

“I haven’t practiced with a pancake or shoulder holster!”

A disapproving sound rumbled out of the back of the chief’s throat. He stood up. “Look. Maybe this is going too far too fast for you two—”

A clamor of noise from the front of the station cut him off. There was a flap-flap of footsteps, and a squeaky-pleased “Hel-lo!” from Harlene, and then MacAuley was ushering in Reverend Clare, whose neat black clerical garb looked at odds with her flushed face and falling-down twist.

“The Reverend here arrived near the end of the press conference,” MacAuley said. “Some of the reporters got a little overexcited.”

“Thank you so much, Lyle.” She laid a hand on MacAuley’s arm. “I wasn’t expecting to be keelhauled by the Fourth Estate.”

MacAuley’s eyes half closed, and he smiled a wide, wicked smile. “Shucks, ma’am. ‘Tain’t nothing.”

“Don’t you have a case to clear?” the chief snapped. “What are you doing here?” he asked Reverend Clare. “Is it the Christies?”

“The Christies? No. I, uh”—she glanced around, taking in Hadley, Flynn, and McCrea—“need to speak to you.”

The chief gestured impatiently.

“Privately.”

He exhaled. “My office.” He motioned for her to go through the doorway ahead of him, perhaps not noticing Reverend Clare’s narrowed eyes and set jaw. They stalked away through the dispatch room. This time, Harlene didn’t say anything.

MacAuley pursed his lips. When they heard the chief’s door slam shut, he asked, “Did he have that stick up his ass before Reverend Fergusson got here?”

Hadley looked at Flynn to see if he was going to say anything. No way she was going to answer that one.

“Nope,” McCrea said.

“Interesting.”

Flynn shook his head, as if dismissing the chief, his moods, and the minister from his mind. “I’ve got a change of clothing in my car. Do you have something here, or do we need to hit your house before we go?”

“Wait a minute,” Hadley said. “I think he was about to tell us not to go.”

He looked at her like she’d grown a second head. “That’s why we have to move now. Do you wanna take your car? Or my Aztek?”

She thought about her less-than-half tank of gas. “Your Aztek,” she said, then realized she was committing herself. “Wait!”

“I’ll get you a pancake holster. Trust me, it’ll feel just as natural as the one you’re wearing now.”

Oh, there was a great recommendation.

“Do you want me to drive you to your house or meet you over there?”

“Meet me,” she said without thinking. Flynn nodded and headed out the door. “Wait!” she said.

A bellow from the chief’s office stopped her short, but Flynn kept right on going. The baritone yell was followed by a loud and impassioned alto voice, which was drowned out by more deep and angry words, which were topped by an even more strident female response. Hadley couldn’t make out what they were fighting about, but it sounded like a doozy.

“Interesting,” MacAuley repeated.

McCrea pushed back from his desk and gathered his notepad and phone book. “I’m getting out of the kill zone,” he said.

MacAuley nodded. “You might want to think about that as well,” he told Hadley.

She groaned and shouldered her tote. Looked like will-she, nil-she, she was going to be driving around the North Country acting as Kevin Flynn’s translator. As she ducked down the stairs, the sound of her minister and her boss going at it hammer and tongs, she was already trying to come up with a civilian outfit as ugly and unflattering as her uniform. It wouldn’t do to give Flynn any ideas.

Kevin Flynn was having the best day of his life. He had the window rolled down and his arm hanging out, the late-May sun warming his skin, dry sweet air blowing through the Aztek. No heater like in March, no manure smell like in April, no blackflies like in—well, they were a plague all summer long, but they weren’t getting in at forty-five miles an hour. He was in plainclothes, his polo shirt hanging loose over his Colt .44, managing—managing!—the investigation, deciding where they would go and who they would question next.

The best-looking woman in Millers Kill sat beside him, listening to his Promise Ring CD, and if she wasn’t saying much, she also wasn’t tearing his head off. When they had stopped for lunch, she had even let him buy her a sub, after he told her it’d be her turn next time.

She had on a T-shirt and those baggy shin-high pants only girls wear, with a vest to cover up her Glock 9mm, and she looked so damn cute it was all he could do to keep from grinning at her. It was a relief, he decided, getting smacked down by the chief. Embarrassing as hell at the time, but after he’d cooled down, the no-fraternization rule started to seem like a sturdy fence along an observation post at, say, Niagara Falls. Something that let him look all he wanted at the magnificent work of nature without getting swept away and killed.

For real, it didn’t get any better than this.

“Flynn,” she said. She leaned forward and turned down the music. “I don’t think this is getting us anywhere.”

For a minute, he panicked. Was she talking about… could she be talking about… then he realized she meant the interviews.

“All we’re getting is a bunch of negatives. ‘No, I didn’t see anything. No, I don’t know anything. No, I don’t recognize the man in the picture.’ ” They’d been showing the best head shot they had of John Doe one—although even cleaned up and in tight focus he didn’t look anything other than good and dead.

“That’s what you hear in most interviews. Unless, you know, you’re breaking up a fight or something. Where everybody in the crowd saw what happened.
No
just means you’re closing off one more dead end.”

“I get that, but what are we going to learn? I mean, what if the guy we want is working on one of these dairies? What’s he going to do? Give it up to us?”

“Sometimes. Yeah.” Kevin glanced at her. She was worrying her birthstone ring. “The chief or MacAuley gets a guy into the interrogation room, they ask him a few questions, and
boom
! next thing you know, we’re calling the DA’s office because the guy’s spilled his guts. Never underestimate a perp’s need to get it off his chest.” That last bit of wisdom came from the deputy chief, but he figured he didn’t need to quote chapter and verse.

She looked at him skeptically. “We’re not the chief and MacAuley.”

“Hey, everybody’s got to start somewhere.” He pointed his elbow toward their folder. “Who’s next on the list?”

The three farms after that were repeats of the morning interviews. It was slow work, trailing after workers scattered between the barn and the field and the machine shed, assuring them and their employers that no, they weren’t from ICE and no, they didn’t have any interest in seeing visas or work permits or Social Security cards. After their first stop that morning, when Hadley told him to stop scaring the workers by towering over them like the damn Statue of Liberty, Kevin found everybody relaxed more when he got as low profile as possible. He’d taken to squatting on his haunches as if he were powwowing at scout camp. Hadley, who’d acted like she was giving an oral examination the first few times, had smoothed out her patter, even—based on the occasional laugh she got—tossing in a joke now and again.

Kevin thought they were creating about as good a rapport with the migrants as they could, but they still didn’t shake anything loose until Jock Montgomery’s place. It was after four when they pulled into the dooryard, scattering a horde of small boys who turned out to be Montgomery sons and their friends. There was a bit of confusion as to why Hadley was there, since her oldest kid was in the same class as the middle Montgomery boy. Then the babysitter, Christy McAlister, recognized Kevin from when he wrote up her boyfriend’s accident last winter, and she had to catch him up on everything going on with both the boyfriend—deployed overseas—and the car—totaled and replaced.

The good news was that it was coming up milking time. Montgomery’s three full-time year-round farmhands were all in what the dairyman called the milking parlor, which, despite its old-fashioned name, had the same stainless steel and sterilized hoses as the other farms. Back at the Hoffmans‘, Hadley had commented, “It’s all rubber and restraints. I bet there’s some serious fetish activity going on after hours in a few of these places.” He’d turned the same color as the red Ayshires in the field, but now he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

They had gathered the men in the tack room, and, since the concrete floor was stained with unidentifiable brown blotches, Kevin forsook the squatting for sitting atop a plastic five-gallon bucket of antibiotic feed additive. Hadley perched on another bucket and showed them the photo, asking—he assumed—if any of them had seen John Doe one.

The three men—short broad-faced Mayans with arms large enough to wrestle calves out of their mother’s bodies and skinny, bowed legs—shook their heads. Lined up in Astroturf-green lawn chairs, they looked like teak garden ornaments that had been stored in the barn for a season.

Hadley asked them another question, smiling, her voice inviting confidence.

The men glanced at one other. Kevin, examining the straw and manure glued to the edge of his sneakers, sat up straight. This was the first time they hadn’t gotten an almost-instant denial. “Hadley,” he said, his voice quiet, un-threatening. “Remind ‘em we’re just here for information.”

She rattled off something in Spanish, still trying to sound upbeat. One guy said something to another. The third nodded, adding what might have been an encouragement or an order. The one in the middle was still, like he was weighing what the other two had told him. Finally, he said something to Hadley. A short sentence.

“
¿Qué
?” She was obviously surprised.

“What is it?” Kevin asked.

She didn’t turn to answer him. “He says he was shot at.”

He kept his mouth shut while she asked the guy another question. Got an answer. Asked something else. Got a longer, more detailed reply, with the other two nodding along. Kevin made himself wait, not wanting to bust up the flow of the interview. After ten minutes of back-and-forth, Hadley said “
Gracias
,” and everybody except Kevin stood up.

The three men left. Kevin exploded off his bucket once the last one vanished into the milking parlor. “What?” he said. “What?”

Hadley rubbed her lips, her eyes still on the lawn chairs. “We need to take a look at Mr. Montgomery’s van. The guy in the middle, Feliz, says he was driving it to the Agway to pick up a load of feed and somebody shot at him. Put a hole through the back panel.”

“When?”

“April.”

Yes! In like Flynn
. He was out the door in two strides. “Mr. Montgomery!” he called. “Mr. Montgomery?”

Jock Montgomery emerged from the cold room, wiping his hands on a cloth. He was a Caucasian version of his workers, bandy-legged, powerful shoulders, with an up-country Cossayuharie accent you could use to stir paint. “They tell you what you needed to know?”

“Did your van get shot this past April?”

“Ayeah.”

“Why didn’t you report it?”

“Aw.” Montgomery shoved the cloth into his overalls pocket. “There’s no need to kick up a fuss. Just somebody jacking deer. I figgured if he needed the meat so bad, I wun’t gonna put trouble his way.”

“Do you know who did it?”

Montgomery rubbed the back of his neck.

“We’re not asking ‘cause we’re looking for game violations. We’re investigating multiple murders.”

Hadley piped up for the first time. “Someone may be targeting Latino migrant workers.”

Kevin winced. He didn’t think the chief wanted that theory floating around Millers Kill.

“Huh. So you think… maybe he wun’t huntin‘ after all?”

“Maybe not for deer,” Hadley said.