Winter at the Door (24 page)

No one checked ID in here, one reason he liked the place. Another was the number of single girls it attracted. He didn’t know why; the music was awful, just a garage band playing Nirvana covers, and the decor was worse, cheap tables and metal chairs.

Still, somehow the place was catnip for chicks; a dead man could probably hook up in Blackie’s, Spud thought as he drank some of his beer and surveyed the action, patiently waiting.

Soon his patience was rewarded. “Hi!” said the girl with the little mole on her cheek, smiling brightly. “You wanna dance?”

Spud put down his beer, smiling back. She was just his type: young, female, and already pretty drunk.

“Well, I don’t know.” He glanced around. Most of the tables were empty, the dance floor packed with bouncing bodies. Flaring strobe lights keeping time to the music’s thudding beat turned faces into unrecognizable masks, and the noise was stunning.

He leaned down, noting her glassy eyes and her loose-limbed state of inebriation. Lipstick stained her plastic beer cup.

“You with somebody? I don’t want to get in trouble with your boyfriend. Or even your girlfriends.”

She let her head loll back, giggling. “Naw, no one’s with me. I’m a big girl, I’m allowed out by myself.”

Myshelf
, slurring the word. “I’m Alison,” she added.

Alishon
. Spud chugged his beer, glanced around once more. But of course no one was watching; you could fire off a cannon in here and nobody would notice.

Alison took his arm, her smile slackly dreamy. “C’mon, big guy,” she said, putting her face up for a kiss.

He bent to comply and saw that she’d bitten her lip sometime during the evening.

She tasted of blood and Juicy Fruit.

The cop cars’ flaring cherry beacons stained the falling snow blood-red in the predawn darkness by the side of Route 1 just outside Bearkill, where the wrecked car’s glowing taillights peeked up over the edge of the embankment.

It was snowing hard; the two long tire tracks at the side of the road were already filling up again. The guys with the gurney huffed and puffed, straining to haul the victim strapped to it back up the steep slope.

When they got near, Lizzie smelled beer even out here in the open air. “Empties on the floor, lots of them,” one of the EMTs reported.

He thrust the victim’s wallet at her. Inside she found a State of Maine driver’s license and a college ID.

“Looks like somebody’s going to miss a few classes,” Cody Chevrier said sourly, reading over her shoulder.

“Yeah.” She handed them back to the EMT, who zipped them into the property bag. Someone at the hospital would be calling this kid’s parents. “He say anything?”

The pair of EMTs hoisted the gurney into the boxy emergency vehicle’s lit-up interior. “Nope. Out for the count.”

She’d set up flares and a row of orange flashers to warn oncoming traffic. Now the wrecker from the little gas station in Bearkill backed slowly across the deepening snow and the driver hopped out, scrambling down to attach the towing cable to the wreck.

“What was he doing out here at this hour?” According to the home address on his license, the victim’s obvious route would’ve been this way, along Route 1, so he was in the right place.

Just at the wrong time. The wrecker’s winch engaged with a metallic whine, pulling the mangled vehicle up from the ravine.

From the rear, the car looked fairly normal.

But from the look of the older sedan’s demolished front end, it was
anyone’s guess whether or not the crash victim would be able to tell them why he had chosen to drive through Bearkill so late.

“No idea,” said Chevrier, shaking his head.

The tow truck’s driver leaned down from his window. “I’ll put it in the lot out behind my place, okay?”

Since arriving in town, her purchases at the Bearkill Gas-o-Mart had included a set of tires and one of windshield wipers, several tanks of gas, and an air freshener; Rascal’s Eau de Hound had returned soon after his bath at Trey Washburn’s place and now battled a pine-scented cutout Christmas tree dangling from the Blazer’s rearview mirror.

“Yeah, thanks, Bradley,” she began. The Gas-o-Mart’s owner-operator was so glad for the steady patronage, he’d given her a free set of floor mats.

But then she thought again. “Hey,” she yelled as he pulled away, “Brad, wait. Run it down to the impound yard in Houlton for me, will you?”

Ordinarily, leaving the wreck in Bearkill overnight would be no big deal. It wasn’t as if the vehicle had to be secured as evidence. But—

“Problem?” Chevrier asked, hearing the exchange and coming up beside her.

“Excess of caution, that’s all,” she said, not ready to admit she didn’t know why she wanted the car in custody, only that there were still questions about the accident.

And if the car sat out in an open lot, all chance of getting them answered—or using the answers in court, should that be necessary—would be gone.

After the wrecker departed, Chevrier helped gather the flares and flashers and scan the travel lanes for debris. One of the other deputies left for the hospital to finish writing up the accident; a third headed to Houlton to check the injured driver’s record from a nice warm office instead of out here in the snow.

She aimed the flashlight, making her way through the piled snow to the edge of the embankment. Below, a massive old spruce had taken a direct hit, a deep gash in it marking the place of impact.

Maybe the kid had simply been visiting a buddy around here and got started back to school late. But in that case …

She frowned back up the embankment. In that case, he’d been going in the wrong direction. She blinked flakes from her lashes, peering down the steep slope again, then caught a glint in her flashlight beam at the base of the big tree.

“Lizzie,” Chevrier protested as she started down the rest of the way. He’d only called her out here, she knew, so the other officers wouldn’t imagine her home in bed and get resentful.

But even the deputy in charge of the scene hadn’t slid down to slop around in the slush, so why should she? The driver had smelled strongly of beer; maybe he’d just been drunk and/or asleep.

Case closed, probably. But chewed-up grass and muddy ruts marked the trail the errant car’s tires had cut through the snow, and at the end of it something—

Twinkled
. Crouching to reach for the object in the snow, she stopped herself. Small, metallic, with a round, shiny ball at one end and a thin metal stem at the other …

“Hey, Cody?” she yelled back up the embankment. He stood at the top. “Got any evidence bags?”

She waited while he vanished for a moment, then made his way down to hunker beside her. “What?” he demanded irritably, holding open the plastic bag.

She plucked it up with the plastic tweezers from the kit and dropped it in. “It’s a nose stud. Like the kind for pierced ears, you know? Only you wear it in—”

There were millions of them in the world, probably. But her new helper Spud Wilson had one, didn’t he? And Dylan Hudson had a case, the one about the dead girls in Bangor …

And one of the victim’s friends had mentioned that some guy from the County might be involved, Dylan had said.

“You wear it in your nose,” she finished. “And I hope that I don’t know who it belongs to.”

When she got back to the house, the sky was getting light, the overnight snow diminishing to a sprinkle of flakes tiny and dry as salt, and Dylan was gone.

A rumble from the utility room unnerved her until she found he’d stripped the bed, started the sheets in the washer, and put on fresh ones. A pot of coffee waited in the kitchen.

Thanks
, he’d scrawled on the notepad by the phone.

She tore the page off and crumpled it into the trash; no time now for any worrying about Dylan Hudson or who might’ve been waiting for him at the motel or anywhere else.

That was his business, she instructed herself. Hers was figuring out how Spud’s nose stud got into a drunk driver’s crashed car …

If it really was his, a question she considered answered an hour later when she arrived at her little storefront office on Main Street to find him already there.

No nose stud. Without the bit of jewelry, the hole in the crevice of his right nostril was a tiny dimple, unnoticeable if you didn’t already know about it.

“Spud,” she began. She could just ask him about it, of course. But then on impulse she decided not to; if he lied, she’d have no way to prove any different. And—

Don’t spook him
, she thought, again out of an excess of caution. But you didn’t get do-overs on these things. “How was your evening?” she asked instead.

He’d come in to put up bookshelves; she’d decided to store her library of textbooks and other law-enforcement reading here at the office.

“Not great,” he replied. His face looked drawn and tired, as if he’d been up all night, but his hair was freshly washed and no longer twisted up into those silly-looking dreadlocks.

“Had a big fight with my dad,” he said. “I threw,” he added, “a beer can at the TV.”

He sounded sheepish. “Busted it. Had to go out with my mom and get a new one.”

“I see.” The rest of his jewelry was all in place: a lip ring, a silver loop through his earlobe, and a small silvery eyebrow ring she hadn’t seen before. “That must’ve been inconvenient. Was your father angry about it?”

Bent over his lumber—she was going with painted planks laid on brackets fastened to the wall studs, and he was measuring the planks’ length—he grimaced dismissively.

“I guess. He started it. They find that missing kid?”

“No.” By now the whole town probably knew about the baby vanishing from his crib. “Why, do you have some insight to offer?”

It came out more sarcastically than she’d intended; she didn’t like the uncertainty she was suddenly feeling about this young man. But he just shook his head.

“Uh-uh. You want these second-coated?”

The shelves with paint, he meant. “Yes, please.”

She’d heard enough alibis in her life to know that he’d just given her one for the early part of his evening. The later part, though, was still anyone’s guess. She found cash in her wallet.

“Here, you can use this to pay for the extra paint.”

He nodded, meanwhile drawing a thick, dark pencil line on the plank with the aid of a carpenter’s rule. She wondered what he’d say if she asked what he’d done after buying the TV.

Instead: “So listen, remember when you approached me in the Food King?”

Just over a week earlier, but it felt already as if months had passed. “You asked if I paid for tips. And I was wondering, what did you mean by that?”

Probably he had nothing to do with Dylan’s case, himself. What were the odds, after all? But he might know someone who did, might have been in that little car with them last night before it crashed and lost his jewelry item in it.

Spud looked up warily. “Yeah, well. Just forget about what I asked you, okay? It was stupid. Sometimes I’m a real dumb kid.”

He lumbered to his feet, absently shoving his sweatshirt sleeves up over his tattooed forearms, then hastily pushing them down again. It was as if he hadn’t wanted her to see the twining dragon, eyes bright with yellow ink and scales deep green, that wrapped sinuously around his flexor and snaked up to his biceps.

Or the livid red scratch that ran through it, from his elbow nearly to his wrist. As she considered this, the Bearkill squad car pulled up outside.

“Hey, Lizzie.” The redheaded officer’s name, she had learned, was Ralph Crandall; the other one was Fred Willette.

And Crandall was indeed a decent cop. “Hey, you want to ride out and see a meth lab bust? DEA’s gonna bring the hammer down on ’em—”

He glanced at his watch. “Any time now.”

Spud kept his head down, intent on his work. Lizzie thought about staying, noodling a little more at the kid.

Because that scratch bugged her. She’d seen a few like it in the past, mostly on people who’d been in fights.

You clutch your attacker’s forearms, he pulls away … but it was Dylan’s case, she decided finally. She’d tell him about all of this and let him decide what he wanted to do about it.

It was what she’d want if their situations were reversed, and Spud wasn’t going anywhere, after all. He never did.

“Sure,” she told Crandall.

In the past couple of weeks, she’d seen some of the best that Maine had to offer: good food, decent people, pretty scenery, and weather that yet hadn’t turned quite as viciously wintry as she’d feared, though she supposed it still would.

Grabbing her jacket to follow Crandall out, she figured she might just as well also get a load of some of the worst.

Unmarked sedans with beacons on their dashboards lined the road outside the suspected meth lab, which from the look of it as Lizzie made her way up the dirt driveway was no longer merely suspected.

“Aw, man,” complained a weedy-looking little guy as he was escorted downhill past her. Then as he caught sight of Crandall:

“Hey, Ralphie, come on, man, can’t you do something for me here? I thought we were pals!”

“Yeah, we’re pals, all right,” Crandall muttered, keeping pace with Lizzie. “If you want to call arresting someone about a million times being
pals
.”

They continued up the driveway until they reached a sort of compound laid out on a rough lot. Kids’ plastic toys, a fifty-five-gallon drum overflowing with charred trash, a rusting car up on cinder blocks, its doors hanging open and stuffing spilling out of its torn seats.

Most of the mobile homes she’d seen here in Maine were just that: homes, with well-kept yards and interiors. This was way out of the ordinary, and so were the people now being escorted from various outbuildings:

Six in all, they marched glumly in single file, not one of them wearing any kind of warm clothes; the two girls wore fuzzy bedroom slippers, and one of the guys was barefoot.

Lizzie looked away, spotted Cody Chevrier across the trash-strewn yard, and picked her way through it to join him.

“No hazmat?” she inquired, not seeing any hoods or suits on the technicians swarming the place. Meth labs were toxic waste dumps of chemical by-products; a site where the stuff had been cooked could be unsafe to live in for years.