Judgment of the Grave (18 page)

The Beloits lived in a giant house out on one of the roads heading back toward Route 2 that Quinn had passed one day when he’d gotten lost on the way back to the inn. The street was thickly lined with houses that he assumed were supposed to look old but were clearly new construction. The big three-car garages and horseshoe driveways gave them away.

“Nice place,” Andy said as he pulled into the driveway and parked in the middle, right up against the path leading to the house. “Isn’t it funny how you’d think being a cop would mean that you spend all your time with lowlifes and criminals? But I’ve been in more houses like this since I’ve been working homicide than the rest of my life put together.”

“I know what you mean,” Quinn said. “I guess it goes to show that the rich don’t get to be immune from all the bad stuff or something. Sounds like they must have had a pretty fucked-up relationship with their son if they didn’t even know where he was.”

“Yeah, seems weird to me too. Anyway, we’ll get the basics and then you can ask if there was any relationship with Churchill.”

“Sounds good,” Quinn said. He had been playing with Megan when Andy called. “We’re back from the gas station, Quinn,” he’d said, his voice excited as a kid’s. “I’ll tell you all about it, but get this. A guy called this morning to say his wife recognized the drawing in the newspaper of the man found in the woods as possibly being of their son.” Andy explained that Don Beloit had identified his son’s body and when they asked how long he’d been missing, he had said that he really needed to talk to someone, to explain the whole thing, he said. Andy had told Quinn that he could come along if he wanted, in case there was some connection between these people and Churchill.

Now Quinn pushed the doorbell next to the huge front door and they listened to a series of medieval-sounding gongs go off somewhere in the house. A few minutes later the door was opened by a small, neat woman with short, frosted blond hair wearing black pants, a green sweater, and a silk scarf patterned with what looked to Quinn like horse’s bits and reins.

“Come in,” she said without introducing herself or asking for identification. She led them into a large formal dining room and motioned for them to sit down at the table. As they sat, a heavy, middle-aged man in red corduroy pants and a blue sport jacket came into the room. He was almost completely bald, with a delicate fringe of close-cropped white hair making a half-inch circle around his head. It almost made him look like one of those monks you saw in old movies.

“I’m Don Beloit,” he said. “This is my wife, Ann.”

“Can I get you some coffee?” Ann Beloit asked, looking as though the last thing she wanted to do was actually get them some coffee. Quinn and Andy said no thanks.

“Could you tell us what led you to call the Concord police this morning?” Andy asked. It was a good question, open-ended, and it would probably elicit more information than something like “who do you think killed your son?”

“We’d been away, you see,” Ann Beloit was saying. “That’s why we didn’t realize until yesterday, when we saw the paper. He didn’t…call us very often, so we didn’t know where he was living or anything.”

“Your son’s name was Tucker, Tucker Beloit?” Don Beloit nodded. “Date of birth?” Andy asked.

“Two-fourteen-seventy.”

“Thank you. So when you saw this police sketch in the newspaper, you recognized your son?” Andy passed the folded newspaper, and Quinn glanced down at the line drawing of what the man’s face would have looked like if it hadn’t been eaten by whatever it was that had eaten it.

“Yes,” Ann Beloit said, not looking at the picture. “Not right away, but the more I looked at it, the more it seemed sort of familiar, if you know what I mean. And then I…” Her voice broke. It was the first emotion she’d shown, and Quinn found himself surprised by it. “And then I showed it to Don and he agreed that we should call you.”

“Thank you. And you last heard from Tucker, when?”

“I’d say January,” Don Beloit said. “Right?” His wife nodded.

“So, it wasn’t strange that you hadn’t heard from him in a while?” Andy asked.

“No. We weren’t in touch with him,” Ann said.

As though she knew there was more to be said, she went on. “Tucker was mentally ill. We had tried to get him into treatment programs, tried to get him to take his medication. But he always ended up leaving, stopping the meds. So finally we just realized there wasn’t anything more we could do. We had to just…let go. He got in touch with us sometimes, maybe every couple of months, but this time it had been much longer.”

Quinn looked out the window over Andy’s shoulder. Was it his imagination, or had the trees grown suddenly brighter since yesterday? That always happened in the fall. You weren’t paying attention, and then suddenly it was over.

“So the last time you were in touch with him, where was he living?” Quinn asked.

“Duxbury. He had been homeless, then he’d been living in this awful apartment building. We gave him money, but we don’t know what happened to it. He would just give it away.”

Andy asked them, “He didn’t tell you he was coming to see you?”

Don Beloit spoke up. “There weren’t any messages on the answering machine, but we’d been away for two weeks, so it’s possible he called and hung up when no one answered.”

“Well, the body had been there for about a week and it’s been another week now, so that’s unlikely,” Andy said quickly. Quinn winced. He didn’t need to be quite so graphic.

“And the other thing,” Ann Beloit said, “is that we’re not entirely sure he knew where the house was. We only moved in two months ago and, of course, we hadn’t heard from Tucker during that time. He knew we were moving to Concord and we left the new phone number at the old one, in case he called.”

“But it seems like he must have been coming to see you. Unless there was some other reason for him to be in Concord,” Quinn pointed out.

For the first time since she’d walked into the room, Ann Beloit looked upset. “Yes, that was the first thing I thought of when I saw the picture, that he must have been coming to see us. And that makes me feel awful. I…” She choked back a sob and Quinn and Andy waited for a moment before she reached into her purse for a pack of tissues. “I hope you don’t think that we’re heartless or…but when he was younger we really tried to make things better for him. We spent a lot of money and…none of it seemed to do any good, really.”

Don Beloit looked embarrassed at his wife’s show of emotion. “Darn right we did,” he said.

“As you know, the body was found wearing a Revolutionary War–era British soldier’s uniform,” Andy said, looking down at the notes in front of him. “Was that something he owned, that you knew of?”

Ann and Don Beloit glanced at each other, and Quinn saw her nod imperceptibly at him.

“Tucker always liked things related to war and…soldiers,” Don said finally. “When he was little, he didn’t just play with toy soldiers, he would read about real battles and then re-create them in the basement. He was obsessed. All the books he got out of the library, well, they were all about war and weapons. We just thought he was precocious, but then when he was eighteen, he became very sick. We found, well…weapons. In his room. Grenades and things like that. He’d been buying them from army surplus stores, from dealers. We didn’t know what to do. In retrospect, we should have gotten him help then, but it’s so hard to know. Anyway, he joined the Marines. We thought it would be good for him. Give him some discipline.”

Quinn sat up, paying attention now. The Marines. Why were the Marines ringing a bell?

“They allowed him to join up?” Andy asked. “With his history?”

Don Beloit nodded. “Well, we didn’t know what was the matter with him. If we had known, we would have gotten him some help, and it would have been on his record. But he was so excited about joining and it seemed like it might be a good thing for him. Might make him grow up, you know.”

“When was this?” Quinn asked. “How long ago?”

“Nineteen-ninety,” Don Beloit said. “He was in the Marines for a while and it was a really good time for him, or it seemed to be, anyway. He liked the training. But then came the Gulf War.”

That was it. Now he had it. Kenneth Churchill had been a Marine and he’d fought in the Gulf War. That had to be the connection. He thought about waiting until they were done, but there were questions they needed to ask the Beloits.

“Andy,” Quinn said, leaning forward in his seat. “Churchill was a Marine. Gulf War vet too.” He could feel his heart speed up.

“Who’s Churchill?” Don Beloit asked, looking confused.

“There’s another man who may be involved in your son’s death,” Andy said quickly, giving Quinn a look that said,
Not now
. “What else can you tell us about—”

“Did he kill Tucker?” Ann Beloit looked very sad all of a sudden, and Quinn was afraid she was going to start crying.

“We don’t know anything at this point. What else can you tell us about Tucker’s time in the Gulf War. Where did he serve?”

“He was machine-gun specialist, something like that,” Don Beloit said. “He was in Saudi Arabia and then Kuwait, and everything seemed to go okay for the first couple of months, but then things really went wrong. There was some kind of accident. We never got the details, really. He shot someone. Another Marine. It may have been an accident and it may not have been. There wasn’t a court-martial or anything, but even if he hadn’t meant to do it, he had been negligent, so they sent him home. He was dishonorably discharged and he came to live with us. But that was when things got really bad. He started talking about these guys we’d never heard of, Colonel this and Colonel that. Our daughter, Allison, she looked them up and said they were famous military men, but from the French and Indian War and the Crimean War and all these crazy things.” He looked up at them and Quinn could see tears in his eyes. “He talked about them like they were real people, like they were his friends. That was the hardest thing for us to take.”

“Who was the man he killed?” Quinn asked.

“I don’t remember. We could find out.”

“Okay,” Andy said. “Did you know any of his friends? Was there anyone he talked about or stayed in touch with once he got back?”

“He talked about people, but with Tucker it was hard to know what was real and what wasn’t.”

“Does that name, Kenneth Churchill, does that sound familiar to you?” Andy asked them. Both Beloits shook their heads.

“Okay, thank you. That’s all for now. We’ll have more questions for you in the next couple of days. But for now we really appreciate your being willing to come in. And we’re sorry for your loss.”

Don Beloit showed them to the front door, and as they started to walk away, he called after them, “I don’t know what you can do, but if there’s any way you can keep this, you know, kind of quiet, I’d really appreciate it. We just moved out here and we haven’t met a lot of people yet. I hope that doesn’t sound bad. Of course we want to find out who did this, but Tucker was, well, the Tucker we know died a long time ago, if you know what I mean.”

Quinn didn’t know what to say. Andy just nodded. “We’ll do our best,” he said.

When they were pulling away from the house, Andy turned to Quinn and said, “You thought that guy was an asshole, didn’t you?”

“It’s his son. I mean, his son’s dead and all he can think about is what his new pals at the country club will think? Yeah, I thought he was an asshole.”

“Thousand people would be thinking the same thing he was thinking,” Andy said. “They just wouldn’t have said it. Anyway, you shitting me about Churchill?”

“No. He was in the Marines. He went to the Gulf.”

They drove for a few minutes in silence and then Andy said, “Okay. I want you on this military thing. I’m going to keep following up on the credit card. I’ll get clearance from my guys for you to help me out on this. Do you need me to get the okay from your lieutenant?”

“No,” Quinn said. “It’s okay. He sent me here to find out what happened to Churchill, so he oughtta be cool with it. Thanks, Andy. I really appreciate it, you know.”

Andy grinned and took the turn into the driveway of the station a little too fast and Quinn heard tires screech against gravel. “We’re going to get Kenneth Churchill and we’re going to arrest him for the murder of Tucker Beloit and I want you to find out why he did it.”

After her conversation with Will Baker, Sweeney had gone straight to the Minuteman Museum. There were a few tourists around, and when she asked the elderly volunteer at the ticket desk if she could talk to Cecily, she was told that she had the day off.

So Sweeney bought a ticket and decided to see what more she could learn from the exhibit on the spies of the Revolution. As she had remembered, the exhibit featured profiles of a few of the more prominent spies operating in the colonies in the 1770s.

“There were many spies operating during the American Revolution,” the text read. “Information about the size and strength of troops and the movements of the whereabouts of General Washington and other military leaders was always in demand, and as much as Revolutionary fervor had taken hold of the colonies, there were always people willing to betray the fledgling country for financial gain. There were also so-called loyalists who spied for the Americans.

“The first American traitor was Boston’s own Dr. Benjamin Church, a prominent member of the Committee of Safety and a friend and fellow conspirator of Paul Revere, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Dr. Joseph Warren. In September of 1775, a young woman, Church’s mistress, was found to be carrying letters from Church to General Gage. The letters were coded but upon further examination were found to contain information about the number and size of the provincial forces. Church claimed that he had been conducting a double cross, that he had grossly exaggerated the size of the American force in order to trick the British. But his story was not believed and Church was locked up in a Connecticut jail. He eventually sought release on the grounds of his poor health and sailed to the West Indies on a ship that disappeared without a trace.”

Sweeney read through the text of a display on the most famous spy of them all, Benedict Arnold, about how the pompous, greedy hero of the battle for Fort Ticonderoga, only just court-martialed, sought a promotion to the command of West Point. Of course, all along Arnold was secretly planning on turning West Point over to the British and was stopped only because of the untimely capture of his intermediary, John André, who was caught carrying suspicious letters from Arnold in his boot. The letters were forwarded onto General Washington, who had just arrived at West Point to find the command in a state of disarray and Arnold nowhere to be found. Sweeney read about the poor, unfortunate André, who was hanged for his crime while Arnold escaped to Britain, where he lived out the rest of his life.

She read through the information about the women who had spied during the Revolution and the different kinds of codes that were used, but there wasn’t anything new that she hadn’t seen the other day when she’d been to the museum.

Of course, she hadn’t expected that Josiah Whiting’s name would magically appear, but she had hoped there would be some kind of a clue. But when it came right down to it, the exhibit was fairly basic, directed at schoolkids and people who were just learning about Revolutionary history.

She needed something much more in-depth. It was Sunday, so the Concord Public Library wouldn’t be open, and she doubted they’d have an extensive enough collection, anyway. It would have to be the university library.

She was in Cambridge in under thirty minutes and she found what she needed and stopped by her favorite Thai place to get takeout. She was on her way back to Concord just as it was starting to get dark, and she rolled down the windows in the Rabbit and smelled the chill in the air.

Hungry now, Sweeney watched CNN while she ate her Pad Thai and then turned off the TV, put on her pajamas, and spread the books out across the bed.

The Spies of the Revolution
gave her a more detailed account of Arnold’s treachery, and she read a vivid account of André’s hanging, penned by a young surgeon who was present for the event.

She flipped through the indexes of all of the books, checking references to “spies” or “spying” for names she recognized, but came up empty-handed.

But what was it that she was looking for, anyway? George Whiting hadn’t told her who Kenneth Churchill suspected of being a spy. It could have been Whiting, or it could have been Baker or anyone in Concord. Maybe Whiting had suspected someone else of being a spy.

And then there was Will Baker’s response. He had been really nervous when she’d told him she knew about Kenneth Churchill’s work, but she was pretty sure that her question about spies had been a complete surprise to him.

If Baker and/or Whiting had been a spy, she assumed that they would have been retained by the British administration in Boston to inform about the activities of the local Sons of Liberty they were involved in and about the preparations of the country people and the Minuteman groups. After all, someone had told General Gage about the stores of munitions in Concord. It stood to reason that there were loyalists who were passing information back to Boston and that there were local people who were doing it too.

What would either man’s motivation have been? Was it possible they were secret loyalists? Sweeney supposed so, but it would have been an elaborate hoax, to be involved with all of the Revolutionary causes they were involved in, to train as Minutemen, to actually fight on the bridge on April 19.

She took out her notebook and looked through the sketches she’d made of Whiting’s gravestones. Were these the gravestones of a man who was betraying his country? She looked carefully at the increasingly manic-looking death’s-heads. It was as good an explanation as any, she supposed. And if Whiting had been a spy, it provided a possible explanation for his body never having been found. What if the attack by the Redcoats was all a front and he had in fact been spirited away?

She was thinking about what to do next when she happened to catch sight of a blurb on the back of one of the books. “A tour de force. Henkels illuminates the lives of some of the most colorful characters of the American Revolution.” The praise was credited to Henrietta Hall, an American history professor at the university whom Sweeney had gotten to know last spring after Brad Putnam was killed.

She got the number through Information and when Henrietta’s precise, Brahmin-toned voice answered on the fourth ring, Sweeney identified herself and asked Henrietta how she was.

“Fine, I suppose. I need to have hip-replacement surgery and I’m dreading it, but I must count my blessings. For eighty, I’m quite spry, really. Now, what can I help you with, Sweeney?”

“I’m looking at the gravestones of a guy named Josiah Whiting,” Sweeney told her. “He was kind of a hero in the Revolution and he fought at the bridge in Concord on April 19, 1775, and then he disappeared. The story I’ve gotten from his descendants and people around town is that he was killed by the Redcoats—there’s an eyewitness to his being bayoneted—and must have dragged himself into a pond or into the woods to die. The eyewitness account comes from John Baker, who was a good friend of Whiting’s. Anyway, the possibility has been mentioned that Baker or Whiting or someone around them was actually a spy. So I started thinking, what if Whiting had turned and what if he slipped away during the fighting? It would have been a good way to disguise the fact that he’d fled. Maybe, like Benedict Arnold, he even got out of the country altogether.”

“Well, I guess the first place to start would be to find out a bit more about the family. Did they have any sudden change in fortune? What happened to them after he was gone?”

“Good point,” Sweeney said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.”

“As far as the spies of the Revolution go,” Henrietta went on. “It’s hard to say how many there really were. And people spied on all different levels. It could be as organized as Benedict Arnold’s deception and as simple as someone casually mentioning troop movements in the tavern. I’ve written a bit about some lesser-known spies, but I definitely haven’t come across Whiting’s name. I know about Baker, of course, but again the name hasn’t come up in the context of anything other than heroism. As for other Concord spies, I can’t think of any who traveled in those circles.”

“How would you try to find out whether or not someone was a spy? If it wasn’t someone who had been caught spectacularly like Church?”

Henrietta said, “It’s difficult. Most of these meetings and arrangements were made secretively and so we don’t have records of them, except in a few cases when British soldiers gave accounts of their service and mentioned this or that colonial spy. I have a friend at the University of London who’s doing some work in that area. When he’s finished, his work may be very revealing. But generally speaking, there’s not much out there.”

“What’s your friend’s name?” Sweeney asked. “Would it be okay if I got in touch with him?” She was thinking about Kenneth Churchill’s trip to London in May. Perhaps he’d had the same idea that Henrietta had.

“Certainly. His name is Hamish Jones. Let me look for his e-mail. Here it is.” She gave Sweeney the address. “Can I help you with anything else?”

“Actually, Henrietta, I was just wondering. Do you know a guy named Kenneth Churchill? He’s at BU?”

“Yes, of course.”

But there was something snippy in her voice that made Sweeney ask, “What do you think of him? He’s not a friend, so you can tell me what you really think.”

“I respect him as a scholar and not as a person,” Henrietta said. “I’ll leave it at that.”

Sweeney thanked her for her help and said she’d be in touch. She composed a quick e-mail to Hamish Jones and just as she was about to get ready for bed, her phone buzzed and she checked the display. It was Ian.

“Hello,” she said. “I was hoping it was you.”

“Good,” he said, sounding pleased. “How are you?”

“I’m fine. And I’m sorry about the other night.”

“I’m sorry too. It was stupid. I’m not a very political person, but there’s something about talking about the victories of you uppity colonials that just gets our backs up.”

“So we’re made up then?”

“We’re made up.”

“It’s kind of a historic thing, you know. Our first fight.”

“That’s true. It’s also our first makeup.”

“And wouldn’t it be so much more fun to do it in person?”

Sweeney stood up and went over to the window. The moon was nearly full and she watched the patterns it made behind the swiftly moving clouds.

“Sweeney?”

“Yeah?”

“What do you think about, you know…a real visit. No more of this phone stuff. It’s too easy to have misunderstandings.”

Her room seemed cold. “You’re right,” she said. She felt dizzy all of a sudden and she sat down in the desk chair. “You’re right.”

“But…?”

“But nothing. You’re right.” But she forced herself to say it and she was sure he could hear it in her voice.

“Well, good.” He sounded uncertain. “I’ll look at my calendar and see what works. Maybe around the first?”

“Okay, I’ll look too.” She wanted to get off the phone. Her stomach was suddenly pitching around as though she were on a cruise ship.

After they had hung up, she lay down on her bed, feeling sick.

They had just pulled out another little block of wood.