In the Bleak Midwinter (14 page)

“The girl who first identified Katie for us said she’s had a boyfriend, Ethan Stoner. Is there any possibility that he could be Cody’s father?”

“Ethan? Geez, that’s hard to imagine. They did go out for a long time in high school, but Katie broke it off senior year.”

“She broke it off? How did Ethan take that?”

“I don’t know. Probably not too well. Katie was…” she gestured widely, “… more than anything else he had in his life. I know she didn’t break up with him over any bad feelings. She just felt they had really grown apart over the years.”

“She was college-bound, and Ethan was going to wind up on a dairy farm, is that it?” Clare asked.

“Yeah. Plus, Katie is really smart. She used to like to talk about books and poetry and stuff like that. Ethan wasn’t much of a talker, and what he did have to say was usually about some TV show or the Nine Inch Nails. You know what I mean?”

Clare nodded. “Did she have any other boyfriends, then? Maybe someone more like her?”

“No. It was hard for Katie. She didn’t fit in very well. She didn’t have new clothes and money for fun things like the other college-track kids in school, but she didn’t have anything in common with the grounders, either.”

“The grounders?”

“You know, like Ethan. The kids who are hanging on ’til they graduate and then get married right off the bat and go to work for a gas station.”

Russ got up. “Anyone want some more?” he asked. The women both declined. “Kristen,” he said, his eyes on the hot coffee flowing out of the pot, “why do you think it was your father who got Katie pregnant, and not Ethan?”

She swiveled around to where she could see him. “I… I guess one is as likely as the other. She never said anything to me about sleeping with anyone. As far as I knew, she was still a virgin.” She pushed her fingers through her hair. “I guess that’s a pretty naive thing to say, isn’t it? But I’ll tell you something. I can’t imagine Ethan getting violent with Katie. But I sure as hell can picture my father doing it. He’s an evil man. An evil man. He could have killed Katie and gone home the same night and slept… and slept like a baby.”

The chief of police stared up at the windows of number 162 South Street from the relative warmth of his car. He had been to this address many times before, though never to the fourth floor apartment of Darrell McWhorter. Unlike his neighbors, who drank and partied and beat each other up where everybody could see, Darrell McWhorter did his law-breaking in private.

Russ opened the door, wincing as the cold pinched his nostrils shut and stung his eyes. From the second floor, a curtain flapped aside for a moment and then fell. Cops were not welcome to this flat-faced yellow building, and he wondered how many baggies were being flushed down the john even as he crossed the sidewalk, opened the chain-link gate, and walked up the sagging steps to the front door. He ran his finger down a double row of tarnished door buzzers.
MCWHORTER:
3
D
. He pressed the bell and waited.

“What is it?” a voice crackled indistinctly over the intercom.

“Mr. McWhorter? Chief Van Alstyne, Millers Kill Police. I need to speak with you, please.”

Russ looked at a small plastic slide and trike half-buried under the snow covering what passed for a yard in this place. On the sidewalk, a pair of teenage girls with teased-up hair were smoking and gabbing despite the cold, while two toddlers in snowsuits waited, ignored. One of them stared at Russ, slack-faced and runny-nosed. How could anyone believe in a God who let some kids grow up with everything, and other kids live out their whole lives in poverty and neglect? Or worse.

“What do you want?”

“We don’t want to discuss this over the intercom, sir. It’s about your daughter Katie.”

“Katie?” The voice, as distorted as it was, sounded surprised. The buzzer sounded, cracking the front door open. Russ climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, not holding the banister because he was resting his hand on his holster. Habit. Not a bad one.

The door was open when he reached the fourth floor landing. “What is it about Katie?” Darrell McWhorter was no more than five-ten, squared off, with the look of a high school jock run to flab. His dark hair was pretty well thinned out on top, and he had it combed over in what Linda would describe as a spider-holding-a-billiard-ball style. He looked unthreatening and unremarkable, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers, the kind of guy you’d pass a hundred times in the A&P and never think, “That one’s screwing his own daughter.”

Russ tamped down the heat behind his eyes. Kristen had emphatically refused to swear out a complaint against her father when she gave his name and address. Until he had something linking the sonofabitch to Katie’s death, Russ couldn’t touch him. Officially, he was here to break the bad news to Mr. and Mrs. McWhorter. Unofficially, he was here to see if he could shake something loose.

“May I come in?” he asked.

“Sure, sure, come on in,” McWhorter said, stepping aside. The apartment reeked of cigarette smoke, but it was well kept, especially compared to the dumps some other tenants inhabited. The furniture was mostly old, too big and too dark for the living room. It had the look of family hand-me-downs rather than Goodwill. The TV in the corner was a built-in in a blond wood cabinet, pure Danish Modern circa 1965. His mom had had one just like it. The picture was surprisingly good for something that old. He could count every tooth in the oversized smile of the game-show hostess twirling around a shiny new car.

“Great, innit?” McWhorter thumbed toward the set. “That’s what I do, TVs and small electronics. My wife says she wants one of those big-screen jobs, but I figure, as long as I can keep this one running cherry…” He took a last drag on his cigarette and stabbed it out in a pedestal ashtray.

Russ turned to face McWhorter. “Is your wife here, Mr. McWhorter?”

“Yeah, yeah, she’s in the bedroom. Brenda!” he yelled down the darkened hallway between the living room and the gallery kitchen. “Get out here! There’s a cop here with news about Katie.”

“About Katie?” An enormous woman lumbered up the hall. “What about my little girl?” She looked like her daughters, blown up to Macy’s parade size, their rounded cheeks and soft chins expanded into a fleshy mask through which once-pretty eyes peered at him suspiciously.

Get to the worst of it fast
, he thought. “I have very bad news for you folks. Your daughter, Katie McWhorter, was found dead out past Payson’s Park last Friday night.” Darrell McWhorter stared at him blankly. Brenda McWhorter screamed.

“My baby! My baby!” She staggered around like an elephant with a tranquillizer dart before slipping to the floor. Her husband caught her under her arms and hefted her onto an elaborately-carved Victorian sofa. A man would have to be pretty damn strong to help get that woman up. Russ wondered what sort of disability kept him from working.

“How did it happen?” Darrell McWhorter asked.

Russ recounted what the coroner had found out about Katie’s death. Brenda McWhorter continued wailing, punctuating her cries with, “My poor baby! My poor little girl!” Her husband listened without comment, frowning.

“There’s one more important thing I have to tell you,” Russ concluded. “Katie had a child within a week or so of her death. DHS has custody of the baby right now.”

Brenda’s wails cut off abruptly. Darrell looked as if he were trying to get the final
Jeopardy
! answer within thirty seconds. “A baby?” he said.

“A little boy. Did either of you know or suspect she was pregnant?”

Brenda shook her head, her mouth still half open.

“Do either of you know what connection Katie might have had to Saint Alban’s church?”

“Saint Alban’s?” Darrell still looked as if he wasn’t going to make the buzzer before Alex Trebeck called time. “What’s that? The fancy looking church across from the old bandstand?”

The small park at the end of Church Street was a popular summer spot. The town still put on dances and concerts there, just like when Russ was a young man. “That’s the one.”

Darrell thought for a few seconds more. “A baby,” he said. Then, “No, I don’t know nothing that Katie would of been up to involving a church. How come?”

“Katie, or someone, left the baby on the back steps of St. Alban’s, with a note directing that the boy go to the Burnses, a couple from the church that’ve been looking to adopt for several years. Would you or Katie have known them some other way? They’re lawyers here in town.”

The McWhorters looked at each other.

“A lawyer?” Brenda said. “We don’t know no lawyers. ’Cept that one who settled my dad’s estate, but that was ten years back, and he was old then. He wouldn’t be looking for no baby.”

Darrell reached for a pack of cigarettes lying atop a
Soap Opera Digest
magazine. “These lawyers go to that fancy church?” he asked.

“Yes sir, they do.”

“But they don’t got the baby yet?”

“No. There are several legal issues to sort out, from what I understand. For instance, we don’t know who the father of the child is.” Russ fixed Darrell with a level stare. “I had a long talk with her sister this morning, who told me Katie broke up with her boyfriend in her senior year. Kristen hadn’t heard of anyone else who might have been going out with Katie.”

Darrell lit his cigarette and took a drag. “Can’t put much store by what Kristen says. We wouldn’t help her out with money she wanted after she was out of school, and since then, she’s been bad-mouthing us something awful.”

“Never comes to see us,” his wife chimed in. “Not in almost two years. It was like we lost her. And now Katie…” She started wailing anew.

Russ was tempted, sorely tempted, to ask Darrell to come to the hospital right now for a blood test and cell scraping. But he didn’t want anything questioned and possibly thrown out if it went to court.

“Had either of you seen Katie recently?”

“Nope,” Darrell said. Brenda shook her head.

“Where were you two last Friday?”

“Why?” Darrell frowned. “You asking if we had anything to do with it?”

Damn right I am
, thought Russ. “I’m trying to get a fix on Katie’s movements, to see where she might have gone and who she might have seen.”

“We went out to that new Long John Silver’s at the County Road shopping center,” Brenda said. “We had coupons.”

“Then we went to the Dew Drop for a few. Met up with some friends. We must of been there until eleven o’clock.”

“We come straight home after that. I remember, ’cause it was awful cold and I was worried I had left the bathroom window cracked open and things would start freezing in the bath.”

Russ never trusted people who could recall and retell their every movement without having to stop and think about it. Most folks’ lives weren’t that memorable. On the other hand, first Friday of the month, after the social security check had come in, it might be their big night out.

“You wouldn’t happen to remember the names of the friends you were with, would you?” He tried to make his question as inoffensive as possible.

“Sure we do,” Darrell said, “It was the Jacksons, Dave and Tessa. They live out to Cossayaharie, where we used to. You wanna phone number so you can check up on them or something?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Russ said, omitting the “yet.” “While I’m here, do you have a sample of Katie’s handwriting I could take with me? Printing would be best. I’ll send it on to the state lab to see if they can match it to the note that was found with the baby.”

“Let me check her room,” Brenda said, hoisting herself from the couch.

“Why d’you need that if you know the baby is Katie’s?” Darrell said.

“Just another way of making sure. The medical examiner sent a scraping of Katie’s genetic material down to Albany for DNA testing. That will prove Cody is her son. That’s the baby’s name, by the way. Cody.”

Darrell rubbed his lips with the edge of his hand. “I heard about that DNA testing on some news report.”

“It’s one hundred percent accurate. Once we have an idea who the father is, we can do the same thing. It takes a few months to get the lab work back, but there’s no way to fudge your DNA. It either matches, or it doesn’t.” He paused, let that one sink in. “What kind of car do you drive, Mr. McWhorter?”

“Huh? An ’eighty Ford Ranger pickup.” He ground the cigarette stub out in the standing ashtray. “Look, Chief, I don’t know what Kristen told you and I don’t care, I ain’t seen Katie since she left for Albany this summer. And neither has my wife.”

Brenda hurried into the room, puffing from the exertion. “Here. It’s a college application she didn’t finish. She printed it, like it says on the form.”

Russ took the thin sheaf of papers from Brenda. “Thank you.”

“What do you need to find the father for, anyway?” Darrell asked.

“In the first place, the father has rights to the child. Either to take custody of the boy, or to consent to adoption. Understand, we were looking for Cody’s parents before we discovered Katie’s body. More important, now we’re working on the theory that the man who fathered Katie’s child either killed her, or has knowledge that could lead to her murderer.”

“And if the father ain’t found, we’re the closest relatives of the baby, right?” Darrell’s eyes lit up with the greatest interest he had shown so far during the interview. The thought of placing a baby with this pair started the acid sizzling along the nerve edges in Russ’s stomach. The Burnses would be Parents of the Year material compared to these two.

“Right,” he said.

“So, we should get custody of the boy, right?”

At this, Darrell’s wife frowned. “Honey, we’re kinda old to be having a baby around again.”

“Naw, naw, that baby belongs to us. How do we get ahold of the people who got him now?”

Russ pulled one of his cards out of his breast pocket. “I’ll write down the number at DHS you can call.” He leaned over an oblong table reeking of ashes and dusting spray, fishing for his pen. “The other side of this card has my number on it. Call me if you think of anything that might have slipped your mind. I know it’s been a shock.” Though they seemed to have recovered mighty quick.