Pray for Silence (27 page)

It takes us twenty minutes to cover the half-mile trail. I check every tree along the way, but the initials
M.P.
are nowhere to be found. The woods open to the dam. I netted a total of six items, none of which is promising. My brain keeps telling me to stop wasting time and get back to the station where we can work an angle that might actually pan out.

I’m sweating profusely as I take the steep bank to the pond. The body of water covers about two acres. A big cottonwood tree and two huge rocks mark the north end. A derelict dock sags on the south side. On the west side, the water is shallow and green with moss. Two long-dead stumps twenty feet from the water’s edge act as lace-up benches in the wintertime. Beyond, the cornfield rattles in the breeze.

“You ever skinny-dip here as a kid, Chief?”

I glance over to see Tomasetti come up the dam. His face is damp with sweat. A mosquito bite stands out on his jaw. But he looks good when he’s mussed. Details I shouldn’t be noticing.

“Never skinny-dipped. Did plenty of ice-skating, though.”

“Hot enough to swim today.”

“Water will be cold. We had frost the other night.” I smile. “Are you asking me to skinny-dip with you?”

He grins back. “Water looks kinda mossy.”

“City slicker.”

“We could forget about the water and get naked in that cornfield over there.”

I laugh.

He smiles, but I can tell by the way he’s looking at me he’s not kidding. One nod from me, and he’d be all over me. The realization conjures a weird flutter in my chest.

He looks at the bag I tied to my belt loop. “Find anything?”

“Not really.”

He holds up his Wal-Mart bag. “I found a SpongeBob Lego and a chewed-up dime.”

Disappointment presses into me as we start back down the dam. The incline is steep and both Tomasetti and I skid part of the way. We enter the woods, and the mosquitoes descend on us like hyenas on prey. I’m going to need a shower by the time we get back. Of course, there won’t be time for it.

We walk in silence. I’m only keeping half an eye on the path now, glancing occasionally at the larger trees we pass. I’m anxious to get back to the station. I want to run through the vehicle registrations a second time. I need to talk to Barbereaux’s girlfriend to verify his alibi. I want a DNA sample from James Payne. Rob Lane, too.

I pick up the pace. The path curves and then straightens. The parking area comes into view twenty yards ahead. I see the hood of the Tahoe and dented steel of the guardrail. The telephone poles that run along the road. The trees open up and we step into bright sunlight. Heat slams down on me like a hot cast-iron skillet. I feel wilted and dirty as I head toward the Tahoe. I’m stepping over the guardrail when I notice the bottle propped against the shady side of a post.

I bend, pick it up using one of the tissues. The lower half of the bottle is basket covered. The label is crinkled, peeling and stained, nearly indecipherable. My brain pings when I see the word
Chianti
.

“I think I found something,” I hear myself say.

Tomasetti comes up behind me, looks at the bottle. “If you’re thirsty, I’m more than happy to take you to McNarie’s.”

“Mary and her lover drank a bottle of wine right here at Miller’s Pond a few weeks ago. She mentioned it in her diary. I’ll have to check, but I think she mentioned the wine was from Italy and said something about the bottle.”

He looks skeptical. “Kind of a long shot.”

“There’s only one place in town that carries this kind of Chianti,” I tell him. “Hire’s Carry-Out, a little place out on Highway 83. I’ve got a date, in the diary. If they can identify the buyer, we might get a name.”

“Worth a shot.” But he doesn’t look too excited. Maybe because it’s not a crime to drink cheap Chianti here or anywhere else.

Still, it’s worth a try. I drop the bottle into the bag, and we start toward the Tahoe. Without realizing it, we’ve picked up the pace. Two bloodhounds that have caught a scent, however faint.

Neither of us speaks again until we climb into the Tahoe. Tomasetti starts the engine, throws the vehicle into reverse. “So how do we get to Hire’s from here?”

I call T.J. from the road and ask him to get Mary Plank’s journal off my desk and skim through it for an entry that mentions wine. After several minutes, he finds it.

He reads, “ ‘September 22. He came to my window! I shouldn’t be, but I was so happy to see him. I sneaked out and we bought some wine. Then he took me to Miller’s Pond. We watched the stars and he gave me my first wine lesson. The bottle was in a cute little wicker thingie and came all the way from Italy! He’s so sophisticated. Later, we made love. I told him I want to marry him. I want to tell Mamm and Datt about us. He got a little angry and told me they wouldn’t understand. But I need their blessing, even if I am to leave the church. I’m so confused. I don’t know what to do!’

“Jeez.” T.J. sighs. “Poor kid.”

I tell him about the bottle. “Tomasetti and I are going to swing by Hire’s Carry-Out.”

“Anything I can do on my end, Chief?”

“Let’s just hope they keep decent records.”

Hire’s Carry-Out is located near the intersection of Highway 83 and Township Highway 62. The store carries staples like milk, bread, soda and cold cuts. But the brunt of their business is derived from the drive-through where they sell cold beer, wine and cigarettes. When the nearby speedway holds a race, the drive-through line has been known to back up traffic for a quarter mile.

I busted Art Hire a couple of years ago for selling a six pack of Little King’s Cream Ale to a fifteen-year-old girl. He claimed she looked like an adult. Since he’s old enough to know a size-C bra cup doesn’t necessarily signify the legal drinking age, I threw the book at him. As I pull into the parking lot, I know it’s probably optimistic to hope he doesn’t hold a grudge.

The bell on the door jingles when we enter. The first thing I notice about the place is the smell. Old wood and dust with an underlying hint of freezer-burned meat. We make our way past shelves filled with bread and packaged pies. Art Hire sits behind a counter next to the drive-through window cash register. Above him, a baseball game blares from a small television mounted on the wall. He’s smoking a brown cigarette that looks inordinately thin in relation to his bratwurst-size fingers.

He’s a heavyset man with small, piggish eyes and full, feminine lips. He looks up from a copy of
Muscle Car
magazine as I make my way toward the counter and gives me a what-did-I-do-now look. Something tells me he hasn’t forgotten about the selling-beer-to-a-minor incident.

“Mr. Hire, if you have a few minutes I’d like to ask you some questions,” I begin.

His teeth are the color of ripe corn. “You’d think with seven murders on your hands, the police in this town would have better things to do than hassle law-abiding citizens.”

Ignoring the jab, I pull the bottle from the bag and set it on the counter. “Is this from your store?”

He squints at the bottle. “How would I know?”

“Because you’re the only place in town that sells this kind of Chianti.”

Looking put out, he pulls a pair of readers from his shirt pocket, slides them onto his nose and leans forward to squint at the label. “Runs about five ninety-nine a bottle. Don’t sell a whole lot. Most of our customers prefer plain old Bud.”

“I need the customer’s name.”

“The only way we’ll have that is if they paid with a check or credit card. If he paid with cash, you’re shit out of luck.”

“Can you pull the records?” I ask. “I believe I have the date it was purchased.”

“Maybe.” He lifts a beefy shoulder, lets it drop. “How far back?”

“September twenty-second.”

His expression turns smug. “We only keep records for a month.”

“What about security cameras?” Tomasetti asks.

“Can’t afford cameras.” He sneers at me. “Not with the cops in this town breaking my balls. That fine cost me five hundred bucks.”

I try again. “What about credit-card receipts? Surely you keep transaction records longer than a month.”

He returns his attention to the magazine, turns the page, ignoring us. “Nope. Sure don’t. That would be against banking rules.”

Annoyed, I look at Tomasetti and sigh. He gives me a small smile, then turns and walks down the narrow aisle toward the rear of the store. “Do you smell something?” he asks.

He’s standing next to the walk-in freezer door. Only then do I realize what he’s doing, and I withhold a grin. “As a matter of fact, I do. Smells like rotten food.”

Hire sits up straighter. “What are you talking about? I just cleaned the freezer. There’s nothing rotten anywhere in this store.”

“You sure?” Tomasetti jabs a thumb at the freezer door. “Smells like you’ve got a dead cow in there.”

“That isn’t really a police matter,” I say reasonably. “Maybe we ought to call the Health Department and let them handle it.”

“Health Department?” Hire looks alarmed now. We have his full attention. “You have no cause to do that.”

“They’ll shut this place down in a New York minute,” Tomasetti mutters.

I look at Hire. “That would be a shame. There’s a race at the speedway this weekend. You’d lose a lot of business.”

Hire raises his hands. “All right! I’ll check to see if I have the damn name!”

Muttering beneath his breath, he stubs out his cigarette and slides off the stool. He glares at me, and then comes out from behind the counter. Without speaking, he heads toward the rear of the store. He’s midway down the aisle when a buzzer sounds, signaling a customer at the drive-through. Hire stops and turns. “I gotta get that.”

Tomasetti points at him. “I’ll do it. You get the information Chief Burkholder needs.”

“You don’t know how to run the cash register.”

“I’ll figure it out.”

Hire’s face turns bright red. I see sweat on his forehead. He looks at me as if he wants to throttle me. “You cops aren’t allowed to do stuff like this.”

I don’t like Tomasetti’s tactics, especially since he’s not here in an official capacity. But if it gets me the name, I’m willing to look the other way. “Just get us the name and we’ll get out of your hair.” I glance past him to see Tomasetti hand a carton of Virginia Slims cigarettes through the window.

“He’s going to screw up my inventory,” Hire whines.

“In that case, you’d better hurry.”

Cursing, he takes me past a rattling refrigerated display case. Traversing the place is like walking through a camper jam-packed with enough food for a decade. At the rear of the store, he opens a narrow door. A pretty young woman with burgundy hair and big doe eyes sits behind a steel desk. She’s drinking a Budweiser and smoking the same brand of cigarette as Hire.
A plaque on the desk tells me her name is Cindy Hire, but I can’t tell if she’s his wife, daughter or sister.

“Can I help you?” She asks the question in a way that tells me the last thing she wants to do is help. That cooperative spirit must run in the family.

“I need the name of a customer who purchased a bottle of Chianti on September twenty-second,” I say.

“We don’t keep credit card info,” she says. “It’s against the rules.”

I look at Hire. “Remember, the race this weekend.”

Growling like a cross dog, Hire says to the woman, “It’s in there. I haven’t purged the records in a while. See if you can query by date. Get her the name and address of this customer.”

For a second, Cindy looks like she wants to argue, then acquiesces. “I think the computer just keeps the number, expiration and name.”

“All we need is the name,” I tell her.

Putting the cigarette between her lips, squinting against the smoke, she begins pecking at the computer keys.

If my memory serves me, I’m pretty sure card processing rules mandate that merchants destroy or purge all credit-card information every so often due to the threat of data leaks and hackers. I find myself hoping Hire’s computer system is in as much disarray as their store.

I watch as the computer screen turns blue, then data entry boxes appear. Squinting at the screen, Cindy types the date into one of the boxes.

“Got it.” She hits Enter and waits. “Looks like the guy used a Visa. Card stolen, or what?”

Tomasetti peeks his head in. “Guy wants to know if you sell Cherry Berry ice cream.”

“No.”

He looks at me and raises his brows. “They get it?”

The woman gives a phlegmy cough. “I got it,” she says. “Guy’s name is Scott Barbereaux. Expiration date December next year.”

Twenty minutes later, I’m sitting behind my desk, mentally sorting through my growing list of suspects. The newest addition is Scott Barbereaux. Of course, the bottle I found isn’t incriminating in itself. All it does is place him
at Miller’s Pond near the date that Mary Plank was there with her mystery lover. It’s a nebulous connection. But combined with the diary and his link to the shop where Mary worked, it’s worth pursuing. I’ve been around long enough to know those kinds of coincidences don’t happen without a reason.

But why would a man like Barbereaux risk everything to be with a fifteen-year-old Amish girl? He’s good-looking, relatively successful and financially established. The kind of man who could have his choice of females. Why would he choose Mary Plank?

That makes me think about motive. If Barbereaux was involved in an illicit relationship with a minor female, he would have a lot to lose if the relationship ever became public, especially if she turned up pregnant or appeared in pornographic photos. If she’d told her parents and they threatened to take the information to the police, he would be facing time in prison. But is that enough motive to wipe out an entire family? And what about the torture aspect?

I remind myself that Barbereaux has an alibi. But lovers have been known to lie to protect the one they love. I decide Glenda Patterson is the next stop on my list. I also make a mental note to check Barbereaux’s finances. A lot can be learned by the money people take in and spend.

I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something important. It’s there, floating around somewhere in my subconscious. But all I can see at the moment is white noise. My brain is tired and distracted. This case has reawakened some personal baggage I don’t want to deal with. Maybe because I see too much of my own past in some of the choices Mary Plank made, and that’s skewing my objectivity.