Idyll Threats (25 page)

I'd uncovered another secret of small-town life. Don't shop for groceries on the weekend. Everyone and their granny shops at that time. And despite the fact that the grocery, or “market,” as locals say, is the size of Giants Stadium, on a weekend you can't navigate its two-lane aisles because people park their carts to stare at the nutritional labels on boxes of Twinkies. As if they need to read the label. There shouldn't even be a label on Twinkies. Just a warning sticker like they have on cigarettes and alcohol.

The best time to shop is weekday evenings. Place is a ghost town. But I'd missed those due to work, so I settled for a weekday afternoon. When my only competition was the elderly and some stay-at-home moms and their kids. No problem.

There was a problem. In the form of an unattended toddler whose cart was parked sideways next to a salsa display. Effectively cutting off the entire aisle. The kid sat in the cart's seat, tugging at his truck T-shirt. Revealing a flash of whale-white belly when he pulled it up. When he noticed me, he stopped tugging and stared. He had a stare most corner boys would envy.

I looked for his mother, but there wasn't anyone in the aisle. I felt strange about moving him out of the way. The kid didn't know me from Adam. I was just a big, strange man in civvies. I could back up and go to the next aisle, but the milk I wanted was right at the end of this one. And I'd already walked a half mile just to get my six items. I grabbed the cart's handle and steered it so that it was facing lengthwise, opening up a walking path.

“Gavin?” a woman cried from behind me.

The child's chubby face split into a gummy smile. He kicked his legs and squealed.

“Gavin!”

I stepped away from the cart. The mother, dressed in sweats, ran to her child and patted his downy blond hair. “You okay, sweetie?” She turned to fix me with a look.

“You left him parked in the middle of the aisle,” I said. She didn't get to glare at me. This was her fault.

“Baby, did that man touch you?”

Gavin clapped his hands and said, “Touch! Touch!”

Oh, God. She turned around and said, “I'm calling the manager.” Her ponytail bobbed with each word.

I would never shop during the day again. “I moved your cart. It was blocking the whole aisle.”

She pointed her finger at me. “I don't know what kind of world we live in, where a mother can't leave her child for two seconds without a stranger trying to—”

I was about to tell her exactly what sort of world we lived in. Throw some cold data on her fiery speech. About how many kids are abducted each year, and how little time they're out of sight when they're snatched. But before I could, I heard, “Chief Lynch.”

Mrs. North stood a foot away.

“Mrs. North,” I said.

“Chief?” the mother said, her hand on Gavin's chubby ankles.

“Police chief,” I said.

“Oh.”

“You want to call the manager?” I asked. “Have a conversation about parental negligence?”

Gavin watched us with his wonderful, unblinking stare.

“No.” She wrapped her hands around the cart, so tightly her knuckles whitened. “No, we'll just be on our way.”

“Bye!” Gavin yelled, opening and closing one hand as his mother half jogged away.

Mrs. North watched them. When they were out of sight, she said, “At that age, Cecilia was such a charmer. I'd take her shopping, and she'd make eyes at everyone, especially men. I'd look back, and there'd be a trail of men who'd been lured into waving at my baby.”

Her cart had fewer items than my basket. Paper towels, pancake mix, butter, and corn on the cob. Grief has a way of tumbling the mind. It makes sustained concentration impossible.

“We haven't heard anything,” she said. “About the case.”

“We're pursuing leads.” I couldn't say more. Didn't dare. Hope is a terrible gift. The return policy is heartbreak.

She looked at bags of pretzels. Touched a few but chose none. “I just don't get it. Cecilia was sweet. Not perfect, of course. When she was a teenager, there were days I wanted to give her away. She had a temper, and stubborn!” She picked up a bag of honey-mustard pretzels. “But she was a good girl. Sometimes I'd find things she left around the house as surprises. Flowers or drawings she'd done.” She hugged the pretzels. “I just don't understand why anyone would kill her.”

A man with tortilla chips edged past us, whispering, “Sorry.” Either he'd caught her words or he'd figured out that this wasn't a moment for interruption.

Mrs. North looked at me. “Some days I find myself looking at people and thinking, ‘Did you do it? Did you shoot my baby?'” She released her hold on the pretzels. Set them in the cart as if they were eggs. “The other day, I found myself thinking that of the minister. The minister!” She tilted her head and asked, “Am I going crazy? Will I always think this way?”

I set my basket on the floor. “You're not crazy. You've experienced a terrible loss and you're trying to make sense of it. But it's just—” I stopped.

“Just what?” she said.

“It will never make sense. If we catch who did this and bring him to trial, if you find out every detail of what happened, it still won't make sense. I'm sorry.”

She blinked. A tear fell. She wiped her cheek. “Thank you, for
telling the truth. So many people keep saying, ‘It will get better' and ‘God has a plan,' and I want to scream at them. I want to ask, what kind of awful plan does God have that involves murdering my daughter?”

“Some people give God too much credit.” I took her hand and squeezed it. “Or too much blame.” She squeezed back.

Beside the crime board, Wright sat at his desk, muttering as he stacked papers. At his elbow was a
Sesame Street
video. “What's that?” I asked.

He glanced at the video. “Present for my daughter. Her birthday's this Thursday. She loves Elmo.” He tapped the video. A red, furry creature with arms wide open stared at me with eyes as big as tennis balls. He grunted. “Could be worse. She could like that stupid purple dinosaur.”

I wasn't up-to-date on children's television, so I said nothing.

Wright pointed to his papers and said, “There's nothing in there. Not one damn thing. A woman is killed on a golf course. A golf course! And we can't find the guy.” He wasn't sold on Chris Warren as our suspect. None of them were. He emptied Finnegan's overflowing ashtray. “Damn case. I sneaked a few smokes last night. Figured they might relax me.” He said, “The wife smelled it on me. Made me shower before bed.” He rolled his eyes.

So I wasn't the only stress-smoker here.

“We need the serial number off that damn gun. I'm going to the lab,” I said.

“Want company?”

“Sure.” I hadn't planned on a partner, but maybe he'd come in handy.

In the car, he asked, “You ever have an unsolved murder before?”

“You kidding? I was a New York City homicide detective for twelve years.”

“How many cold cases?” He tapped out a rhythm on the dashboard
with his long fingers. His nail beds were shiny. Did he buff them? Rick had done that.

“Forty or so, I think.”

“You think?”

“The eighties were rough. Lots of drugs. Gangs looking to establish territory. More guns. Some of it was accidental. Those could be bitches to solve.”

“You still think about them?”

“No. Most of the vics were likely to end up on the wrong end of a knife or a gun the way they lived. Their murders didn't come as surprises, not even to their mothers. There was only one. An old guy who ran a bodega. Nice man. Knew the kids in the neighborhood. Gave them candy on their birthdays, that sort of thing.”

“Holdup?” he asked.

“No. That would've made sense. He was tied to his kitchen cabinet and beaten to death.”

“Beaten?”

“With a brick. It lay a few feet from the body.”

“You never found the killer?”

“No. But we found things in his bedroom under a floorboard. Some money, pictures, papers.”

“And?” he said.

“He'd been some sort of fighter in Spain during their civil war. He'd kept records, had killed a lot of men. Not just men. Women, children.”

“You think someone from Spain offed him?”

I scanned the horizon. Traffic was moving. The sky was the color of a robin's egg. “Don't know. The brick had no prints. A few people had spotted a repair van that day, but it turned out to be legit.”

“And it doesn't haunt you?” He seemed surprised.

“No.” Those late-night theories I'd had about the old man's death? Those were just exercises in curiosity.

“Well, this one's getting to me.” He stopped tapping on the dashboard. Pulled out a cigarette. I tensed. He noticed. He swapped the cigarette for a piece of gum.

“You buff your nails?” I asked.

He looked straight ahead. “Why?” Was he turning pink under his cocoa skin? Had I made Wright blush?

“They look like my old partner's. He told me a man's hands were a reflection of his inner self.” Which explained why Rick had let his nails go to shit after he'd developed a taste for drugs.

“Your partner?” He glanced at his fingernails. He said, “My mother used to say dirty nails were a sign of sloth.” He tapped the dashboard. “Just about everything relates back to sin with her. She's big on the Bible.” I thought of what Finnegan had told me about Wright's mother. Her getting hit when he was a kid. Him developing a hatred for men who hit women. We carry so much with us on this job. It's a miracle they give us guns.

I said, “Everything relates to literature with my mother. Specifically nineteenth-century English literature written by women.”

He grinned. “Must have made for great bedtimes stories.”

“What young boy doesn't love
Pride and Prejudice
?”

He laughed and said, “At least the Bible has lions and fighting.”

My radio crackled. “Chief Lynch?”

I answered, holding the radio in my right hand and steering with my left.

“We got a call from the lab.”

I cursed. We were ten minutes away.

“They got the serial number. It's a match for Browning's stolen gun.”

My hand squeezed the radio. “You're sure?” My fingers tingled.

“They are.”

“We're coming to the station. Have Donny Browning picked up.”

“10-4.”

“Son of a bitch,” Wright said. “You think he did it?”

“No.” Donny wasn't smart enough to have killed her. And he'd been on shift all night.

“So what then?” he said.

“I think he took the gun and never told his dad. He's afraid of his
old man.” I pressed my foot down and started up the siren. “So let's find out when Donny last saw the gun.”

They were still looking for Donny when we returned to the station. They'd checked his house, his job, and a couple of his friends' places. No joy. I stared at the board, at a photo of Cecilia's corpse. We had the gun. We were almost there.

Inside my office, I called Elmore Fenworth. Maybe he knew something about Donny's whereabouts. But Elmore's phone rang and rang. So my feet led me to my second largest source of local information. She looked up from the mail, a lethal letter opener in hand.

“Good morning, Mrs. Dunsmore. I need your help.”

Her frown wavered. “What can I do for you, Chief?”

“I'm hoping you can help me find Donny Browning.”

“Now, Chief, I warned you about that family.”

“His gun killed Cecilia North. Mr. Browning's gun.”

She smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the kind evil witches make before handing you a poisoned apple. “Well, well,” she said. “The devil will be paid his due.” She reached for her phone. “Give me a few minutes.”

She located Donny Browning in twenty-five minutes. She didn't say how. He'd bought a ticket to see
The Game
, a movie starring Michael Douglas, at the theater in Manchester. He was one of about twelve people in the theater at this hour.

I sent two patrolmen to fetch him. “Disregard the speed limit as much as you can,” I told them. They smiled, happy to oblige.

Wright had been checking area hospitals. He saw my smile and hung up the phone midsentence. “You found him?”

“Mrs. Dunsmore,” I said.

He grimaced. “She's goddamn spooky sometimes.”

“Sometimes?”

“Maybe Mr. Browning did it,” he said. “Our vic had a thing for older men.”

“I don't know.” As far as we knew, she'd only dated one older man. Gary Clark.

“So, what, their gun was stolen and used to kill her? And that's it? Or you think Donny had a hand in it somehow?”

We both glanced at the clock. Another four minutes gone. To kill time, we drank coffee. Thought out loud. We were abuzz with caffeine by the time the patrolmen brought Donny in. He looked bad. We let him stew, alone, in the interview room for a few minutes. Then we went in. I cleared my throat. Wright adjusted his narrow tie. Donny removed his cap. “I'm ready,” he said. We hadn't even sat down yet.

“Ready for what?” asked Wright. His tone was curious, with a strong hint of impatience.

“To tell the truth.”

“We're all ears,” I said.

“Do you have to tell my father?” He picked at a hangnail.

“He'll probably find out, sooner or later,” I said.

Donny thought on that. Too long. So I nudged him. “You stole your father's gun.”

He didn't shake his head or meet my eyes.

Wright looked at me. I jerked my head toward Donny. Wright circled him, slowly. Donny didn't like that one bit. “Let's hear it,” Wright said, his voice low.

Donny said, “I took his gun, four years ago.” We waited. He rushed to fill the silence. “I just wanted to check it out. But he always kept it locked up. So one time he went to New York for this case, and he was going to be gone a few nights. So I borrowed it. Just to shoot cans and stuff.” He'd stolen the gun to shoot cans. Some stories are so mundane, they have to be true. No one would invent them.

“And?” I prompted.

“He got back early. The trial got settled, and he came home. I don't know why he checked the safe that day. I hadn't had time to return the gun. He discovered it was gone and flipped out.” He cringed.

“Did he ask you if you took it?” Wright said.

He frowned. “Of course. If anything went wrong, he asked me about it, even when stuff wasn't my fault. It was always, ‘What's Donny done now?'”

“So you lied,” I said.

“He would've gone ballistic if I'd told the truth. He'd have tossed me out of the house, no question. So I said I hadn't touched it. I actually stood up to him. For once.”

“And then your father blamed the cleaning staff,” Wright said.

“I felt bad about that.” He stared at his sneakers. “But I knew they'd be okay. They hadn't stolen it, so they weren't going to get into trouble.”

Wright exhaled, hard. He looked ready to make a speech. But I didn't care about the past or the cleaning ladies. Not now. “What happened to the gun?” I asked.

Donny scratched his head as if it were covered in bug bites. “When I moved to my apartment, I took it with me. I worried my father would find it.” He was still worried about his father. What he wasn't worried about was that he'd just claimed ownership of a murder weapon.

“Donny, did you shoot Cecilia North?” Wright asked.

“What? No!” He quivered like a wet dog. “I didn't have the gun when she died.”

“Who did?” he asked.

“I rented it.” Donny munched on his bloody hangnail.

“You what?” Wright's voice bounced off the bricks.

Donny looked at me. As if I'd protect him. I would, for now. I approached him and said, “Rented? What do you mean?”

“I got this idea. You can rent movies and even video games. So I thought, why not rent the gun?”

Wright palmed his face and struggled not to answer.

“So you rented the gun. How?” I asked.

“I let some friends know they could borrow it. If they bought me stuff. They told some friends. Word spread.” He smiled. “Homies as far away from Hartford asked to rent it.”

“Homies?” Wright said, his voice one hundred percent disdain. Donny wilted under his gaze.

“Who'd you rent it to last?” I asked.

“A kid from here. But he lost the gun.” He blew a short blast of air at his scruffy hair. “Now he owes me.” I looked at Wright, who had one
shoulder leaned against the bricks. His eyes were wide. Donny thought the kid was going to pay him? He was in for a world of surprises.

“Who lost the gun?” I asked.

“I'd rather not say.”

I crossed the room in two seconds and shoved my face so close I saw a whitehead ready to erupt on Donny's nostril. “Who?” Our foreheads almost touched.

“Kevin Wilkes! He rented it for target practice.” I stepped back and he slumped in his chair. “Kevin's a good kid. Hell, he's a Boy Scout.” I remembered Kevin. He was short. Not the standing man. But he could've been the second man, the one kneeling.

Donny said, “If you found the gun, I wasn't worried, cuz I'd filed the serial number off, but then I watched a cop show. They raised a filed number. I knew I was in trouble.”

“But you still didn't come forward,” Wright said.

He shook his head. “I knew my dad would lose it if he found out.”

I gestured to Wright, and he followed me out of the room. “Kevin Wilkes was one of the golf-course kids. Call Finnegan. Get him in. But first, what's the restriction on interviewing minors here?”

“If he's under sixteen, a parent must be present.”

“Kevin is fifteen. They all were, except Chris. He's sixteen.”

He said, “In Connecticut, sixteen ages you out of juvie. You commit a murder at sixteen? You do adult time.”

“In an adult prison?” I'd thought New York was tough on kids. Seemed like Idyll wasn't any friendlier.

“Yup.”

I said, “Call Mr. Browning. Tell him we're charging his son with illegally selling a gun to a minor, defacing the serial number, and obstruction.”

“But he's terrified of his dad.”

I cracked my knuckles. “Well, I guess it's not Donny's lucky day now, is it?”

Wright chuckled. “I guess it isn't.”

1525 HOURS

Kevin Wilkes's mother answered the door, holding a clarinet. Wright introduced himself. I didn't. She'd met me once, and I doubted she'd forgotten the event. I asked if her husband was at home. Best to deal with both parents at once.

“Jim? He's in Southbury. He teaches piano.” She held up her instrument. “We give lessons.” Her words came fast. There were two cops on her door. She had every right to be nervous.