Ice Shear (8 page)

Pete's phone rang again. “Hopewell Falls Police Department Tip Line, this is Officer Sheehy, how can I help you?”

The women's locker room had been carved out of the men's in the seventies, when they first let women on the force. No more than two women served at any given time, and when I joined, there were zero; the last female officer had retired three years before I started. Lorraine and Lesley tended to keep their bags and coats up with them at dispatch, so I had the place to myself. They didn't put in a lot of effort, installing a wall of pale yellow lockers and showers. Rather than rewiring the lights, they cut out holes near the ceiling where the fluorescents ran from one locker room into the other. No one could see any part of the other room, even when standing on a chair; I had tested. You could, however, hear everything. Sometimes the guys yelled to me, but for the most part they forgot I was there, bragging about the overtime they were racking up, or complaining about their tanking house values, or bullshitting about how the River Rats did last weekend. Sometimes I heard snippets of other conversations: “How am I supposed to get past this? I love the kids, shit, I even still love Sue, but I don't know, I just don't know. . . .” “Is she sorry?” “She says she is, I think she is, but . . .” In those situations, I got my stuff together quietly and left. They wouldn't have had the conversation if they'd remembered anyone else could hear it.

I grabbed my purse, my red fuzzy hat, and my wool coat, so long it almost skimmed the ground, pulling things on as I walked out. I waved to Dave, who put his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone: “I'll pick you up at seven. And oh, no uniform tomorrow.”

I made my escape. My Saturn was in the back corner of the parking lot. I spied Hale resting against an SUV, its black body and tinted windows making it a formidable vehicle, even in the dark. I was too tired for conversation, especially with him, and walked faster, but Hale intercepted me. So close, and yet so far away.

“Hold up a second, Juniper.”

“The only people allowed to call me by that name are my hippie mother and the priest who baptized me. You are neither.”

“Sorry, now, June. Just trying to wind you up a little.”

He really didn't need to work to annoy me—he did just fine by existing.

“Look,” I said, “is there something you needed? I'm ready to drop.” I reached my car and yanked at the door, which was glazed over.

“Here, let me,” he said. At his third tug the ice cracked, and at the fifth the door came open. Without touching him, I slid around him and turned on the ignition, jacking up the heat after the engine had run a few seconds. I reached under the seat and pulled out both my ice scrapers. “You know how to use this, southern boy?”

“Never heard about my grand New Year's of 2002 on the Great Lakes?” Hale scraped ice off my back window. “Me and Dushawne Wilkes, the two new guys, out on Lake Superior hunting terrorists who might be swimming across to bomb Detroit.”

“Was that before or after you stopped talking to us?” I punctuated this with a broad sweep, and ice slithered past the elastic at my wrists.

Hale stopped scraping. “Look now, June, I'm sorry about that. And I'm more sorry than I can say about Kevin. Him being gone, it doesn't seem real.”

“Maybe if you responded to a single one of his e-mails you would've known the illness, the cancer, was serious.” As I moved around the car, I banged my shin on the bumper.

“Shit,” I said, rubbing my leg.

Hale walked toward me, holding his hand in a defensive position as if he thought I might launch myself at him and tear his eyes out, which was a distinct possibility. “I know,” he said, “how ugly my behavior with you, with Kevin—”

He stopped speaking as a woman's voice floated across the parking lot.

Last Christmas Eve you hung mistletoe

Right beside the door.

You kissed me under it every night

And said, “Please, baby, more.”

Barbara Merry Christmas came toward us, her feet unsteady. No one had ever coaxed her last name out of her, so we all called her by the sixties girl-group Christmas carol she sang all year round. Sometimes she belted the song and sometimes barely whispered it, and I could tell how much heroin she had taken based on the strength of her voice.

And when Christmas passed you kept it hangin',

Kept claiming all my kisses.

By Valentine's you found another girl

And by Easter she was missus.

Today was one of Barbara's good days. Her voice was full, and you could make out the former fun girl underneath the wreckage. She was wearing her lamb's wool jacket and a fox stole around her neck, more holes than fur at this point. Her eyes were lined up to her eyebrows like Cleopatra, and she'd teased the hair on her left side into a bouffant style held in place with a rhinestone barrette. Barbara lived in a basement apartment over on Congress Street, which probably cost her, at most, two hundred a month. Her landlord said she always paid her rent in full and in cash. Barbara's name appeared on the pawnshop lists every so often, selling an engraved cigarette case or a pair of earrings. She never begged for money, but rather
performed
. My dad had tried to get Barbara into Mercy House several times in the seventies and eighties, and I'd enrolled her in a sober-living environment, but her addiction and the demons in her unruly brain always drove her back to the drugs.

Hale seemed torn between helping her and keeping his distance from the obviously crazy woman. “Can we help you, ma'am?”

Barbara didn't respond to his question—she never did—but launched into the next stanza of her song. Her hips did a little shake that was more of a wobble than a shimmy, and she raised her arm over her head and brought it down into a snap.

Christmas Eve's come round again,

The mistletoe's up still.

I've got my tree, my popcorn strings,

But I don't have my angel.

Thank God for Barbara, I thought, and gave her a few dollars just for helping me escape. Barbara clasped my hand as I handed over the money.

“Thank you!” Barbara said. “I'm so honored! Thank you!” as if I had just handed her a Grammy Award.

Hale pulled out his wallet. Barbara turned toward him, her eyelids and knees drooping, seemingly falling asleep where she stood. She was on the nod. Hale reached out, but I knew she wouldn't fall: Barbara had spent the last thirty years on the edge of tipping over but never actually dropping. While Hale's attention was on Barbara I moved around to the side of the de-iced car. Barbara startled and smiled brightly at Hale, and I ducked into the car as Barbara gave her thanks. As she shuffled off, Hale approached. The car wasn't just warm, but hot, and I rolled down my window.

“I gotta confess,” Hale said as Barbara walked a series of diagonals across the lot, nodding off again near Pete's Dodge Charger, “I wasn't expecting a junkie population in Hopewell Falls.”

I couldn't listen to him for another minute. “We should have no problem working together, because you're a professional and I'm a professional.” Relief swept his face. “I do not, however, forgive you. Off hours, I hate your guts.”

I didn't roll up my window, but snapped on my seat belt and reversed the car. I drove toward the lot's exit, fishtailing a bit before righting the vehicle. In the rearview mirror, I saw Hale standing in the same spot, and he made me want to play music too loud and drive too fast. The roads, coupled with my practical car, weren't going to allow fast, but I pushed in
London Calling
, turned the volume up to nine, rolled up my window, and closed out Hale, the case, and Hopewell Falls.

S
O, EX-BOYFRIEND?” DAVE ASKED.

His question barely registered. I hunkered down in the passenger seat, reading through Norm's files before we got to the Brouillettes'. I was studying the body diagrams and Danielle's injuries noted in Norm's tight, neat script. His comments backed up what he'd told us this morning: Danielle was impaled, but prior to that suffered significant trauma. Norm had explained that she was probably struck over the head and stunned, then strangled.

“Petechiae,” Norm had said, pulling up the eyelids, exposing cherry red eyes, the blue almost gone. “All the blood vessels in her eyes are blown.”

Danielle was a bruised and battered sleeping beauty. I wanted to know this girl who liked to drive too fast with the window open.

“Time of death?” Dave asked.

“Based on the rigor, and taking into account her exposure to the elements, I would say that death was between two and five
A.M.
”

“The congresswoman and the feds are pushing for something more exact,” Dave said.

“I know, I know.” Norm waved at his instruments, most of which were stacked in a corner because they no longer worked. “And to do that, we need new equipment. But since Albany's got gangbangers, Troy's got prostitutes, and Schenectady has drugs, our little burg, with its five murders a decade and a laughable tax base, will not be funded.” He shook his head. “Anyway, rigor is more definitive.”

Norm explained all the injuries, and made sure to point out the remains of a tattoo, a heart with the name Jason in it, barely visible thanks to laser surgery. Jason Byrne's name had been called into the tip line—he was her ex-boyfriend—and we would probably be interviewing him this afternoon.

“So, ex-boyfriend?” Dave repeated, his eyes trained on the road in front of him.

“Jason? I can't tell you whether he's a real suspect until the interview. I suppose it's possible.”

Dave's voice was casual, but his shoulders were tense. “No, I mean Hale. There's something between the two of you. Like history.”

Our one-night stand hardly qualified Hale as a boyfriend, particularly after he blew me off to pursue Missy Fenwick. I decided to hedge. “We haven't talked in years. We were NATs together—”

“Gnats?”

“NATs. New Agent Trainees, at Quantico. He and Kevin were roommates.” I hoped that would end this discussion. Most people backed out of conversations about Kevin or my FBI days so fast my head spun. But Dave was trained at getting answers and kept silent until I felt forced to fill the void. “Anyway, we kind of lost touch. I was a dogsbody, going from Missouri to Nevada to L.A. to Oakland. Kevin was in the cybercrime unit in the Bay Area, and Hale did antiterrorism. We never got assigned to the same office.”

Hale had been a legacy candidate at a military college—everyone in his family had attended since before the Civil War—and was communications director for the House minority whip before going to Quantico. The FBI allowed him to ever-so-slightly rebel, since his family thought the whole enterprise was in questionable taste. I had trained my whole life for law enforcement, doing admin work at the police station in high school, getting a dual master's in psychology and criminal justice. I considered the FBI a place that would let me take the good work my father did to the next level.

Kevin was the only person I knew in the Bureau who was actively recruited. He started as a black hat, hacking the Pentagon's Web site when he was fifteen. With his midwestern modesty, his sweet black curls and thick black-framed glasses—which he claimed were “punk rock” but in fact were full-on dork—he avoided suspicion. He cut his hair, ditched the glasses, and switched to being a white hat, helping identify security holes in the CDC's Web site. I preferred him with short hair and without the glasses, where you could see his dark blue eyes, like the night sky. The FBI wanted him, and he liked the idea of outsmarting the mob and pornographers. I teased him about the big firefights during the raids on the servers, but he was doing some dangerous assignments, working with Interpol to take down some Russian organized crime figures who posted pictures of teenage “exchange students” who could be bought and shipped anywhere in the world. Those mobsters weren't afraid to kill anyone, including three agents and twenty-two fifteen-year-old girls who were no longer considered “marketable.”

I searched through Norm's notes for a topic that would derail Dave from this line of questioning.

“So the last time you saw Hale was when?” Dave asked as he stopped at a light. “Kevin's funeral?”

“No, before that. Kevin was disabled for a long time, and I was the loser who quit when things got to be too much—”

Dave frowned. “I, look . . .”

“—and people more or less washed their hands of us at that point. Or me, since I couldn't hack it.”

“Lyons.” Dave reached over and grasped my arm, sliding his hand down until his pinky rested against the skin of my wrist. “June, trust me, I know people who cut and run when things get hard. My mom did that. You didn't. You did fantastic, taking care of Kevin and Lucy. I saw you coming in, humping the job, and I couldn't even figure out how you did it.”

Dave hit the gas, but he didn't remove his hand. He tended to be casual with his affection, cuffing heads and resting his hand on people's shoulders, so I felt a flash of embarrassment when I realized we were holding hands.

“Do you want off?” he asked.

“No!”

Dave pulled his hand away. My vehemence surprised him, and me, too. “No. I like the work. And hey, this could be a way to get a little of my own back, right?”

“Right. Won't bring it up again.” He drummed a little song on the steering wheel. “You, me, and the G-man will have a strong and effective working relationship.”

“Yeah, about that . . . ,” and I explained my suspicion that Hale was holding back some of the story about Marty's father the enforcer and Danielle's adventures in Los Angeles.

That got Dave's attention. “So you think it is related to the trouble she got into in L.A.?”

“Maybe, although the Abominations shouldn't be discounted—they are nothing but trouble. Marty's patches were stripped—”