The Kind to Kill, page 8
‘I can help you, Shana,’ Cunningham said. ‘Let me help you be the architect of your own story.’
There was a coin newsbox in front of the building, and I watched as a woman who was walking her dog leaned over to read the headlines. My name was in that paper in the box – mine, and that of my cousin. Estella Lopez and Javier Barba were only the beginning. Shana Merchant was no longer a senior investigator with the state police. She was the cousin of a killer who failed to save a fellow cop’s life and concealed information about a notorious suspect. Shana Merchant could no longer be trusted to do the right thing.
Lifting the toe of my shoe, I dug my heel into the hard-packed dirt.
It didn’t give.
THIRTEEN
There were three text messages on my cell when I got back to my car, all of them from Tim.
Just checking in. You OK, hon?
This isn’t as dark as it seems.
Call me, OK? I’m here for you. Always.
I pictured him in my office, soft and eager. Breathe, OK? Just like Carson taught you.
I didn’t want to think about Carson, especially after talking with Cunningham. I couldn’t do that without picturing Carson as portrayed by Robert Pattinson in a Hulu Original series about Bram’s decades-long killing spree. So instead, as I started the ignition, I found myself thinking about Gil Gasko.
Gasko and I had bonded last year over cream-no-sugar coffees, black tea, and murder. As my state-appointed counselor, he’d guided me through my lingering PTSD and fresh pain toward recovery, and single-handedly got me reinstated post-probation. I owed Gasko a lot, and he’d been overjoyed when I contacted him again after Bram’s death. Especially once he got a read on my mental state.
‘I don’t want to call it a relapse,’ he’d said gently, stabbing at the log jam of ice in his sweet tea. With his face lowered like that toward his cup, the widow’s peak in his hair had looked like the beak of a large, black crow. ‘Recovering from a trauma-induced condition isn’t a linear process,’ Gasko told me. ‘There are triggers – sounds, smells, images – that can take you back to that place. Think of PTSD as a bad case of eczema. Yes, there are treatments, but it can always flare up again – so with all this publicity, when you’re so exposed, trust is more important than ever.
‘It would help to have friends’ – here, he gave me a meaningful look – ‘who simply listen without trying to shelve your feelings or dish out easy answers. You should feel safe to share as much as you need to, over and over again, without worrying that you’ll bore or annoy them. Do you have people like that in your life, Shana?’
I thought about that question on the drive from Watertown back to A-Bay, the landscape a blur of electric green. Do you have people who make you feel safe? I did. I had Mac, always willing to lend an ear. But I didn’t have my family anymore, and I didn’t know when – if ever – I’d be getting them back. I had Tim – but the vision of him stroking my hair or my hand and telling me it was ‘going to be OK’ loomed large in my mind. Bram’s last victim had been someone Tim and I both knew well, who’d once meant a lot to us. Many a night we’d awoken to dueling nightmares about Carson’s murder and mashed our chests together, waiting for the drumbeat to slow. That’s how I pictured our hearts in those moments: as kettledrums. Tim’s youngest stepbrother played percussion in the school band, and he’d explained about something called sympathetic resonance, where one drum could be made to vibrate by striking another nearby. Time and time again, Tim and I would absorb each other’s pain – but with the speed of a hammer strike, it always came back again.
As close as we’d gotten, and as much as I cared for him, I sometimes wondered if Tim would ever really understand how I felt. Tim was a fixer. When I was sad, he asked what he could do to make it better. When I was frustrated at work, he’d blithely brainstorm possible solutions, his eyes lighting up at the challenge. There was a lot to love about his white knight personality. Tim cared about people, and genuinely wanted to help. But Gil Gasko had another theory about him, one that had been needling me since my tantrum in the office.
Gasko hadn’t come right out and said it – Tim was a fellow employee of the state police, after all, and he and Gasko had never met – but I got the distinct feeling that he didn’t think Tim was good for me. I’d told Gasko I was seeing someone, and that the guy was so determined to help that it sometimes left me feeling suffocated and even more alone. Gasko said he knew the type. ‘People like that, the rescuers of the world, often can’t grasp that there are those who just need time to heal at their own pace and on their own terms. To your boyfriend, that lack of happiness means something’s defective. In need of repair.’ Gasko didn’t fail to point out that a fixer mentality was sometimes indicative of insecurity. Those driven to patch up pain were often carrying around some of their own.
Tim hadn’t had it easy, either, with a childhood best friend determined to derail his life just for kicks, who then returned as an adult to torture him all over again. I knew the guilt Tim felt over Carson’s death would linger. Which begged the question: could two people with so much competing pain really find a way to heal together?
You’re not alone in this, though it may feel that way.
At least Cunningham was half right.
FOURTEEN
It was just past eight a.m. on Thursday morning when the call came into the barracks, minutes after I’d stepped through the door. Tim was the one who answered, immediately arranging his face in an expression of grave concern.
‘There’s been a development,’ he said. There was no more talk of Estella Lopez or my panic attack, just as there hadn’t been when, upon returning to the barracks the previous day, I’d told Tim I was sleeping at my place. There was no time for any of that now.
As soon as he lowered his gaze, I knew.
‘Where?’
‘LaFargeville,’ Tim said. ‘The quarry.’
Quarry. Whenever I hear that word, I picture a craggy, prehistoric pit punched into a rock shelf, a place miles from civilization and abandoned by time. I see the eerie teal gleam of the quarry lake from Stranger Things, a show Henrietta, my niece, introduced me to a couple of Christmases ago, and the abandoned granite quarries that feature in Dennis Lehane’s Gone, Baby, Gone. In that novel, Lehane refers to their holes as a dumping ground for everything from stolen cars to bodies, and that description always stuck with me. The terrible image pushed itself to the forefront of my mind once more as Tim and I made our way to the Cape Quarry in LaFargeville, New York.
The view that appeared before us as our car lumbered over cracked, crumbly earth was a flat expanse of clear-felled forest dotted with towering mounds of gravel, sand and stone. The piles looked like giant anthills from a sci-fi movie, home to overgrown alien insects with bulbous bodies and legs that were longer than Bogle was tall. We drove, then walked, between them, boots crunching on the dense gravel under our feet. I swatted at flies as I breathed in the earthy, mineral scent of morning-damp stone and prepared myself for what we were about to see.
‘Coroner got delayed, but he’s on the way. A mason found her first thing this morning.’ Bogle had been working an assault case at Fishers Landing, and had beaten us to the scene. ‘A customer showed up bright and early,’ he explained, ‘looking to fill his truck with stone dust for a patio project. The mason pointed the guy to this pit, and as soon as he dug in, he found this.’ Bogle swallowed, the bulge in his neck bobbing like a river buoy.
I could see it even from a distance. Fabric mottled light and dark, splashed with colorful lettering. The kind of shirt you’d find at one of the souvenir shops in town. Tim and I ducked under a taut strip of crime scene tape and made our way toward the mountain of stone dust as high as Tim’s cottage, and the T-shirt black with blood. Sticking out of it now, a slack human limb. Rigor mortis was complete. She’d been dead at least a few days. Probably since the night she disappeared.
‘All that time spent looking at the river,’ I said, my mouth a grim line, ‘treating this like a suicide, and she was here all along.’ All that time wasted.
‘We were playing the odds,’ said Tim. ‘We didn’t know. We couldn’t have.’
Maybe not. But it still felt like failure.
‘Where’s the mason now?’ Something I knew about stone workers: they had strong hands, strong enough to overpower a grown woman.
Bogle blinked a few times before jerking his head in the direction from which we’d come. ‘The office. It’s in the building you passed on your way in. He was pretty shaken up – a little green, if I’m honest. I thought it would be best to keep him close, though.’
Bogle looked a little green himself. ‘Nice work,’ I said as, absurdly, I heard my mom’s voice in my head telling me to give credit where credit was due. Between Jeremy Solomon and Bogle, Bogle was the one with brass while Sol was built to observe and react, but I wouldn’t have accused Don Bogle of being overconfident. Though he got the job done and knew how to follow orders, he wasn’t proactive, often needing a nudge.
Bogle had done a good job of protecting the crime scene, though. Defending against the creation of artifactual evidence – footprints, fingerprints, matter that hadn’t been present before – was crucial. It was clear someone had tried to move the victim; the customer or the mason, probably, to check if she was alive. Whoever it was, they’d let her body fall back against the dust, causing it to shift and cascade back over her like a mini avalanche. Visible now was her torso, half her face, and her right leg, the latter jutting out of the black matter like the twisted appendage of a discarded doll.
‘Those look like stab wounds to me,’ I said, drawing a circle in the air above the motionless body.
‘You OK? Do you need to sit or something?’ Tim’s hands were busy, roaming the space between us. He cast a glance around us and added, ‘You need to be careful. Something like this, the similarity to Bram’s victims, it could give you flashbacks.’
Bram’s victims, all of whom were stabbed. ‘I’m fine,’ I said, a little too harshly, and returned my attention to the woman.
Discovering a homicide victim isn’t something you get used to. Most often, the violence of the act is etched in every square inch of the victim’s body, from the unnatural angle of their head to the pallor of the skin, so waxen and lusterless it would be right at home at Madame Tussauds. Chamber of Horrors was right. My first time finding a body wasn’t on the job, but it was in New York City. I’d been walking through Chinatown in search of bubble tea and had paused at the mouth of an alley to answer a text message on my phone. I didn’t intend to linger for long. The alley stank of hot garbage, sour milk, and something especially rank that rushed my mouth, filling it with so much saliva I thought I might choke. Funny, how the body reacts the same way to the cloying stink of decay as it does to the aroma of a good meal. It didn’t take me long to realize there was something very wrong about that smell. Because I was a new rank-and-file member of the NYPD, still feeling self-important and invincible, I took it upon myself to investigate.
Not three steps into the alley, the floor of which was wet despite the lack of rain, I saw him. Back propped against the wall of the shop with the Hello Kitty purses in the window that I had just passed. Head flopped over to one side. There was a gash on the man’s forehead so ferocious I saw exposed bone, a ghastly sliver of white. No doubt inflicted by the unidentifiable hunk of metal left next to his thigh. His face was red and black and sticky. His hands too, from hopelessly groping at his deadly wound. The man looked homeless, and I guessed his attacker was, too. The few possessions that remained had tumbled out of a dirty shopping bag on to the ground. A few items of stretched-out clothing, a bent spoon, a water-damaged paperback, its pages curled up like a pill bug.
I’d stared at him for a long time before dialing 911, forcing myself to look. I was days into a lifetime of police work, and I knew I’d see hundreds of bodies like this one, many of them more gruesome still. There was something else that rooted me to that alley floor, too. Like his belongings, this man had been cast off. Most likely, he had died alone. As hideous as he looked, and as hard as I had to fight not to compromise the crime scene by bringing up my shrimp fried rice, I had an innate understanding that I needed to stay. To be with him, even though I suspected his broken face would haunt my nights for months.
I was wrong. It had haunted me for years. But had I known that would be the case, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.
I peered down at her face now, the woman in the dust. Dark skin, those curls skimming her shoulders that rock powder had dulled to the color of river silt. The hollow of her exposed eye was filled to the brim with dirt, but even without confirming eye color, I knew the woman matched Godfrey Hearst’s description of his missing wife.
‘Let’s get Charlie out here,’ I said, motioning to the tread marks on the ground. ‘Looks to me like someone drove right up to the pile to dump her.’ Tire tread impressions were invaluable in scenes like this one. A forensic investigator could use them to determine everything from tread design, wear and the make of the tires to the dimensions of a suspect’s car and possibly even the vehicle model. The morning dew was drying fast, the impressions clean. It would take too long to hear back from the lab in Albany, which sent its reports as certified documents that didn’t usually come in for weeks, but we had a trooper in our unit who was trained as an evidence tech. In addition to collecting evidence and photographing the marks, I hoped he’d be able to make an unofficial determination on the spot.
We got busy then, taking notes and photographs while we waited for the coroner to arrive. As we moved, Tim shook his head and said, ‘Chet Bell is going to lose his mind.’
He hadn’t raised his voice. He didn’t mean to be insensitive. In fact, Tim was probably right. Four months since the murders of three locals, ten since the death of two others up river from Alexandria Bay, and now this. There was no way to keep another homicide in Jefferson County under wraps. Tourists making plans to travel upstate this weekend would learn about it on the news, and those who’d already arrived would startle at the whispers. Another woman was dead. Bram was in the ground, and somehow people were still losing their lives. ‘Doesn’t mean this place is safe,’ Godfrey Hearst had said, and he’d just been proven right. But nothing was farther from my thoughts in that moment than pompous Chet Bell, and as I looked down at the body of Hearst’s wife, Tim’s words soured my stomach.
Our focus now was to find out who did this. Bram’s death was supposed to set this place free, return it to the peaceful village it had once been. Instead, yet another person had lost their life on Jefferson County soil. And I couldn’t help but wonder if that was a bellwether of the trouble to come.
FIFTEEN
Godfrey Hearst III cried when he ID’d the body, the kind of full-body sobs you feel in your own gut. He made no effort to stifle his emotions as he wore a rut into the morgue’s hallway floor, fists clenching and unclenching against his thighs, hopelessness yanking every nerve in his body taut as wire.
‘Start again,’ I said. ‘Why did you and Rebecca come to Alexandria Bay?’
Hearst had calmed down a little by the time we reached the barracks. He’d declined legal counsel, opting instead to sit rigid in a chair and answer our questions for hours. There was much about Hearst’s story that still flummoxed me.
‘Whose idea was it to come upstate? Why the Admiral Inn?’
The trip, the motel – according to Hearst, it was all his wife’s doing. She’d picked the place and booked the room, acting on a recommendation from a friend. When I asked for the referrer’s name, he said he didn’t know it. Rebecca hadn’t told him, and he hadn’t asked.
Tim had questions of his own. He inquired about Rebecca’s friend group, whether she’d recently talked about anyone new. Hearst’s job was scrutinized as well, because this was a man who ran a small empire, a thirty-three-year-old with considerable power. Godfrey Hearst maintained there was no jealous lover who might have seen Rebecca as an obstacle to his fortune. He insisted that he’d loved his wife, despite the occasional arguments. That they’d been happy together.
‘There are three ways of looking at this,’ I said later that evening, once Hearst had been released and Tim and I were gathering our things, preparing to leave work but not wanting to look like we were leaving together. ‘It could be the husband, for any number of reasons. Rage or distrust. Jealousy.’
Tim took the empty cup from his desk and spun it on to the mouth of his Thermos. There had been chili in there earlier, leftovers from the dinner we’d shared a few nights ago. ‘Hearst wasn’t seeing someone else,’ Tim confirmed. ‘Don made the calls, talked to everyone in the guy’s orbit. Isn’t that right, Don?’
Bogle nodded, bobbling the cigarette that was pinched behind his ear. I’d delegated assignments at the scene, and our investigation was well underway, with Sol taking depositions from witnesses: the quarry worker, and a neighbor who’d since surfaced. She lived behind the Admiral and had heard the squeal of tires on Sunday night. Despite the help we were getting from the troopers in Utica, who were following leads down there, Bogle had put our incendiary questions to Rebecca’s parents and sister, Hearst’s family, and their coworkers. ‘It doesn’t look like this was an attempt to end his marriage and start fresh with someone new,’ he said. ‘And no. As of now, there’s no evidence that Hearst was having an affair.’
I said, ‘No evidence linking him to the crime scene, either.’ Charlie, our resident evidence tech, had analyzed the tire tracks both at the quarry and behind the motel, and determined they were Goodyears belonging to a truck. Either the truck was new, or the tires were; the tread showed minimal wear. Hearst drove a 2016 Lincoln Aviator from his own lot. A luxury SUV outfitted with Pirelli tires that were three years old.
‘OK, second possibility,’ I went on. ‘Our perp followed her up here, and when she went out for a walk like Hearst said, she was taken. It’s conceivable that someone was watching her, waiting for their chance. Rebecca was on the sales floor in Utica, right? That’s a very public position. Maybe she had a secret admirer who couldn’t stand that she was married to the boss, or she rubbed a customer the wrong way. Look into that, will you, Don? Check out the sales Rebecca made in June, July and August. Maybe we’ll find a link that way.’
