In the Bleak Midwinter (40 page)

“Of course. The last thing I want to do is be intrusive.” She impulsively took one of his hands between hers. “If I can do anything, please. Please give me a call.”

From the hallway, Mrs. Fowler wailed. Vaughn Fowler jerked his hand from Clare’s grasp and strode toward the sound.

“No, no, no,” Wesley’s mother said, clutching at her parka-clad son. “You can’t take him! You can’t take him!”

“Edith!” Vaughn Fowler grasped her upper arms firmly and tugged her away from Wesley. “Edith.” He spoke quietly, almost intimately. “I’m calling the lawyer right now. Wes will be back home with us tonight.”

“Mom, I’ll be okay. Please.”

“This can’t be happening, not to us, not to our son—” Edith Fowler pressed one hand over her mouth, shuddering. She blinked hard, but no tears fell.

Her husband glared at Russ. “If anything happens to my son while he’s in your care, I’ll have your job.”

Russ bristled. “I don’t allow police brutality in my force, Mr. Fowler. Come on, Wesley. Clare, are you riding with me?”

She snatched her coat from the hall closet.

“Don’t say anything until our lawyer gets there, Wes. Understand me?” Wesley nodded to his father as Russ led him down the steps toward the squad car.

Clare stood on the threshold. She spread her hands, miserably aware of how much she had contributed to these people’s unhappiness and how little she could do to comfort them. “I’m so sorry. At times like these, it’s tempting to feel as if you’ve been abandoned, by God and by your friends. Please remember that’s not true.”

Edith Fowler blinked again and wiped her eyes. “This whole thing is like a nightmare.” She looked at her husband. “My God, Vaughn, do you realize we’re grandparents?”

“I guess you’re right.” His face tightened. “Clare, will we be able to see the child? Or do we have to jump through some bureaucratic hoops now that he’s in foster care? Where is he?”

“I don’t know what sort of requirements the Department of Human Services will have. I suspect that if you two feel up to it, they’d be happy to have you serve as Cody’s foster parents. His caseworker’s name is Angela Dunkling, and right now he’s fostering with Deborah McDonald, out toward Ft. Henry. I’ll call you with their phone numbers as soon as I get back to my office.”

Behind her, Russ tapped on the horn. “Meanwhile, I hope you’ll reach out for some support and not try to go it alone.”

Edith nodded. “I’ll call Barb and Mitch. After all, they’re involved too, in a way.”

Clare opened her mouth and closed it again. If she got into exactly how involved the Shatthams had become last night, she could be here all afternoon. They’d find out their son’s latest attempt to get out from under his problem soon enough.

“You do that.” She retreated down the steps. “We’ll speak soon.”

She tugged on the car door, only to find it locked. Russ leaned over and let her in. Sliding into her seat, she glanced through the clear Plexiglas screen at Wesley, sitting perfect-postured in the back. The small sliding door that allowed for communication between front and back was latched shut. Clare reached for it.

Russ shifted the car into gear. “Clare, I’d rather not have any more questions until we get to the station. I want to do this by the book.” He backed slowly out of the Fowler’s drive. “I want his voluntary statement on the record, not in a car where his lawyer will be able to get it thrown out at trial.”

She cast one more look back at the young man. He met her eyes, bleak and hopeless. She had wanted to feel a sense of triumph, of justice, when they caught up with Katie’s killer. Instead she felt an ache in the pit of her stomach. So much damage. To so many lives. And it wasn’t over yet.

At the station, Russ escorted Wesley into the interrogation room and latched the door behind him. “I’m going to make a pot of coffee,” he said to Clare. “I don’t knowabout you, but I could use a cup right now.”

“Please. What happens now?”

“I already talked with Kaminsky last night, so he’ll be expecting my call. He’s going to be here to listen in to the questioning. I want to charge this kid some bad, but I want it to stick.” He squinted into the distance. “We’ll need a cross-jurisdiction warrant to search his room at the Academy. And I want his truck…”

Clare cut him off. “Can I speak with him now? Not as part of this, but as priest to parishioner?”

Russ frowned. “You just met him this morning. How much of a pastoral relationship can you have?”

“That’s not the point, Russ. I want to help him if I can. He’s obviously very troubled.”

“He’s very troubled because he carefully planned and executed two cold-blooded murders and now I’ve caught his ass, excuse my French. And let’s not forget he would have done the same to you if you hadn’t escaped him. Jesu—um Crow, Clare, you’d try to make excuses for Charles Manson!”

“I’m not making excuses for anything he may have done.” She crossed her arms. “No one is beyond forgiveness, Russ. Or beyond asking for forgiveness. I have to believe that.”

He pulled off his glasses and polished them on his shirt front. “I don’t even know why you’re here. After I speak with Kaminsky, I want you to take my truck and go home.” He rapped on the door to the interrogation room. “Wesley? Reverend Clare here would like to speak with you as your—” he glanced at Clare, “—spiritual advisor. You want to talk with her?”

There was a pause. “I guess so. Okay.”

Russ unlatched the door. “There’s an alarm buzzer on the wall. If he makes any moves on you, use it. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Clare nodded. The room was a smaller version of the meeting room, albeit without windows. Heavy, well-worn wooden table and chairs, tired institutional green walls. She had thought there would be one of those two-way mirrors like in the movies, but it looked like the Millers Kill police department wasn’t quite up to cinematic standards yet.

Wesley was standing at the far end of the room, his back against the wall, his eyes shadowed and suspicious. She tugged at a chair. It was bolted to the floor. She sat down and propped her chin in her hand. “I’m the one who found Cody, you know.”

Wesley looked at his boots. “Yeah, I know.” He darted a glance at her. “My dad says you’ve been working hard to see that the Burnses get to adopt him.”

She nodded. “You could help with that. As his father, you can authorize a legal adoption just by signing over the papers. They wouldn’t have to wait and wonder the way they are doing now.”

He brushed the speckled vinyl floor with the toe of his boot. “I guess we never realized that you couldn’t just give away a baby. I didn’t mean to have them wait. We just—it was easier to not think about it. The fact that there was a baby on the way. We never exactly planned any of it.”

“What about the motel? The fake I.D.? That must have taken some planning.”

“I already had an old I.D. I had doctored up so I could, um, get into bars.” He looked at the wall opposite him. “I met her at her school—she had her roommate’s car—and we stopped at the first place that was open. We weren’t even sure if she was going to have the baby then or not. She’d been having those, you know, fake contractions.” He tilted his head back. “It all seemed so unreal. Being there, the baby, everything. I just wanted things to go back to the way they were. Without our parents finding out.”

“Why did you leave the baby at the church instead of at the Burnses’ house?”

“They weren’t home when we drove by. Then I remembered my parents talking about the reception for the new priest that night. We figured somebody would find the baby and read the note and hand him over to the Burnses. Pretty dumb, huh?”

She bit her lower lip. “It wasn’t the smartest thing, no.”

He glanced at her. “Hey, do you think if I help the Burnses adopt the baby quickly, it’ll help me with the cops?”

“I don’t think so. It might help you with your own conscience, though.”

He dropped into a chair opposite her. “What we’re talking about here, you can’t tell that to anyone, right?”

“No, I can’t. What we say here is just between you and me and God.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“Wesley…”

“Reverend, I didn’t kill her. Or her rotten father. And it’s been driving me crazy, because I don’t know who could have done it. She was so… she was so special. Sweet. Funny. She didn’t like me because of my family or my car. She didn’t care if I got into student council or West Point. She liked me because of who I was. Not who I was supposed to be. You know?” He rubbed his hands back and forth against the tabletop. “I didn’t want to have a baby. And I didn’t want to get married. But it wasn’t her, it was just… it was too soon. You know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“And I don’t think she really wanted to get married and keep the baby, either. She sent me a long e-mail about how she did, after we had both gotten back to school, but I don’t think it was something she had thought out. My dad said that after-pregnancy hormones can make a woman kind of crazy, and if I just let it be for awhile, she’d realize that rushing into marriage would be a bad idea.”

“Your dad said that?”

“Yeah. I figured, if she really couldn’t stand not having the baby, I could transfer from the Academy to SUNY Albany. Forget the whole military thing and go for a business degree, something so I could support them as soon as I graduated. But I didn’t know how I’d swing it financially.” He looked up at her. “You don’t have to pay to go to West Point, you know, so I didn’t have anything saved. I didn’t know if my parents could help us out. I wanted to talk about it with Dad before I suggested it to Katie.”

She took a slow, deep breath to keep her voice even. “You offered to leave West Point? You spoke with your father before Katie was killed?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to let him know how bad I screwed up, but I had to. I mean, if we had taken Cody back and gotten married, Katie would have had to drop out if she joined me at the Academy. Lose her scholarship. That would have been a total waste. She was so smart. God, I can’t believe she’s actually dead.” Wesley buried his face in his hands.

Clare sucked in air and held her breath for a moment. “Wes? This is going to sound strange, but can I touch the back of your head?”

He looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “Uh… this isn’t some sort of faith-healing thing, is it?”

“No.” She rose partway from her chair, extending her arm toward his close-cropped hair. “May I?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

She ran her hand lightly over the crown and back of his skull, then pressed more firmly with her fingers. Nothing. No bump, no swelling, no soft spot. “Does this hurt anywhere?”

“No. What are you doing, Reverend?”

“Feeling my way toward the truth.” She sank into her chair again. “You weren’t out in the woods last night trying to kill me.”

He reared back. “Are you crazy? Of course I wasn’t out trying to kill you. I wasn’t trying to kill anyone! I was in my dorm room, studying.”

“What time did your dad pick you up to bring you home?”

“Early this morning. There must have been a dozen guys who saw me there last night, in my room, in the hall, in the john. You can ask them. I wasn’t out trying to kill anyone. I’m not a killer!”

Clare looked at her hands, flat on the table. She flipped them over and studied her palms. “Anyone can be a killer, Wes. All it takes is the right training. And enough motivation.” She blewout her breath. “Could your father access your e-mail account?”

“Huh? Not my account at the Academy. He could send stuff from my old address at home, he knew my password for that.” Clare stood, wrapping her arms around herself. “Why? What the hell does this have to do with—” his face changed suddenly.

“Your father,” she said.

“No,” he said.

She felt as if she had just flown into a strong thermal and gained a thousand feet of altitude in a few seconds. Dizzy. Disoriented. From where she was now, everything was the same, but everything looked different. “Your father, Wesley.” She looked down at the young man. His face was a mask of absolute denial. “Your father is so proud of you. And so determined that you go to West Point and have a brilliant military career. What wouldn’t he do to protect you from ‘ruining your life’ with some white-trash girl and her baby?”

“No,” he said.

“He must have contacted her and invited her to Millers Kill. Maybe he tried to bribe her into forgetting about you and Cody first. But that didn’t work. He wouldn’t have known that that wouldn’t work with someone like Katie. So he got rid of the problem another way.”

“No!”

She paced around the table, talking as much to herself as to Wesley. “We assumed that Darrell McWhorter threatened to blackmail Cody’s father. But why go to a kid in college when you can tap into so much more money from his dad?” She leaned over the table. “He saw you two together, didn’t he? Darrell.”

Wesley hesitated, then nodded. “I drove her home from the library late once. She used to have me leave her at the intersection, but it was dark and starting to snow, so I took her right to her apartment house instead. She was always scared that her dad would find out about us. He was just getting back from a bar or something that night, and got a real good look at me.” He leaned back in his chair and scrubbed at his face with his hands. “Katie said he asked her a lot of questions about me, but she convinced him I was just a guy in her study group.”

“Darrell was smarter than any of us gave him credit for. As soon as he saw your family photo on the parish bulletin board, he put all the pieces together. When he called your father, they must have agreed to ride down to Albany to get any incriminating stuff left in Katie’s room as part of the deal. And when your father saw his chance to get rid of Darrell, he acted quickly and decisively.” She straightened. “Wesley, your father’s been methodically removing every person who might interfere with you becoming the fifth generation of Fowlers to graduate from West Point.”

“This is insane. My dad wouldn’t kill anybody! And if he’s willing to do anything to protect me, why the hell wouldn’t he confess instead of letting the cops cart me off to jail?”