In the Clearing (33 page)

Read In the Clearing Online

Authors: Robert Dugoni

Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Police Procedurals, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Murder, #Series, #Thrillers, #Legal

BOOK: In the Clearing
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When Tracy arrived at Jenny’s home that evening, where they’d agreed to meet, Jenny answered the front door looking harried. She held Sarah, who was in a bathing suit, her eyes distorted behind swim goggles, and holding a red plastic squirt gun. Tracy heard Trey laughing and shrieking somewhere in the house.

“Sorry,” Jenny said, stepping back to allow Tracy inside and then shutting the door. “Neil’s stuck at work. He said to eat without him.”

“That appears to be the least of your troubles,” Tracy said, watching as Trey came running down the hall in his bathing suit, also wearing swim goggles and holding a water pistol. He came to a halt when he saw Tracy, then dashed, shrieking and laughing into another room. “I’m just trying to get him into the bath so I can get dinner on for us. The nanny fed them earlier.”

“Let me give you a hand.” Tracy held out her arms for Sarah, who smiled and went willingly.

“I’m free,” Sarah said, holding up the correct number of fingers.

“I know,” Tracy said. “May I borrow your squirt gun?”

Sarah gave it up. Trey made another appearance, and Tracy said, “Halt right there in the name of the law, mister.” Trey froze. “I am a Seattle police officer, son, and I am about to arrest you for failure to stop at a four-way intersection.”

Trey looked uncertainly to his mother, who kept a straight face but arched an eyebrow.

“Now, I’m going to give you until the count of three to march up those stairs into that bathroom before I arrest you and put you in the back of my police car.”

Trey wanted to smile, but with Tracy and Jenny poker-faced, he dashed up the stairs in a bear crawl.

“I think you have everything under control,” Jenny said with a smile. “I’ll get dinner going.”

After baths Tracy supervised Trey and Sarah slipping into their pajamas, and she tucked them into bed. They had separate bedrooms, but Sarah preferred to sleep in her brother’s trundle bed, which was adorned with a bedspread to make it look like a NASCAR stock car.

She read them each a book of their choosing, held firm when they tried to negotiate a third book, and kissed Trey on the forehead, which made him scurry quickly under the covers. When she went to kiss Sarah, the little girl popped up, gripped Tracy around the neck, and gave her a peck on the lips.

“Do you have babies?” Sarah whispered, as if sharing a secret.

“No,” Tracy whispered back. “No babies.”

Sarah poked at Tracy’s stomach. “What about in there?”

“Nope. Nothing in there,” Tracy said.

Sarah released her grip and lay back, scrunching down into the covers.

Tracy went back downstairs and found Jenny in the kitchen, pouring what smelled like a potent lemon-and-garlic sauce over breasts of chicken on beds of rice with a side of broccoli.

“Smells incredible,” Tracy said.

Jenny set the pan down on the stove. “An old standby. Simple but healthy. You don’t look any worse for wear.”

“They’re great kids.”

“They can be a handful, especially when one of us works late.” Jenny handed Tracy a plate and a glass of wine, and they carried them into the dining room and sat at the table. Jenny let out a breath and sank into her chair like a balloon collapsing. “These are the moments of peace I treasure.”

As they ate, Jenny updated Tracy on the investigation into the death of Archibald Coe. “No sign of a forced entry or struggle, and the coroner didn’t find any marks on the body to indicate that Coe didn’t act willingly. Nothing to indicate he didn’t kill himself.”

“Except the timing.”

“Except the timing.”

“Any note?”

“No,” Jenny said.

Tracy took a sip of wine. “What about his employers? Did they notice anything out of the ordinary?”

“Nothing except you coming to speak to him, which was beyond rare. Coe didn’t talk much to anyone—just came in and did his work and went home. It was actually amazing how little they knew about him.”

“Nothing in his apartment?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Jenny said. “We found an entire medicine cabinet—Vicodin, Zoloft, sleep aids. But he didn’t have a computer or a laptop, and he didn’t own a cell phone or a car. Apparently, he rode his bike everywhere.”

“Further confirming he’s the man I saw in the clearing that night.” She set down her utensils, frustrated that she’d been that close and now the opportunity had evaporated. “Did you get ahold of his ex-wife and kids?”

“The ex-wife thanked us. She sounded saddened but not surprised and said she’d call their children. I have their numbers if you decide you want to talk to them after this dies down a bit.”

“I’d sure like to ask them if their father ever confided in them about what had caused his problems.”

Tracy thought of the moment upstairs when Sarah kissed her lips and asked,
Do you have babies?
Tracy didn’t, but she knew enough to know you couldn’t truly appreciate what others went through, their joys or their sorrows, unless you had experienced it yourself, or something similar. If her current working hypothesis was correct and the Four Ironmen had something to do with Kimi’s death, Tracy suspected that neither Darren Gallentine nor Archibald Coe had fully appreciated the pain Earl and Nettie Kanasket had gone through until they had become fathers themselves, especially when their daughters had reached the same age as Kimi. That appeared to be what put them both over the edge.

Jenny pushed aside her plate. Neither she nor Tracy had finished. “Tell me about your conversation with Eric Reynolds.”

“I’ll tell you as we clean up.” They took their plates to the kitchen, and Tracy ran them under the faucet and handed them to Jenny, who put them in the dishwasher. “He was very polished,” Tracy said. “Professional, polite. If he was anxious or nervous, he didn’t show it.”

“And full of shit?” Jenny asked, finishing what was left in her wineglass and handing it to Tracy.

“Maybe. He told me a deputy came by the house to talk to him about a week or two after they found Kimi.”

“My father?”

“He didn’t say that, but if it happened, it had to be.”

Jenny set down the glass and dried her hands on a towel. “I don’t recall reading anything about that in the file.”

“It isn’t in there.”

“Did he say what my dad wanted?”

“He said a deputy came by to ask him where he’d been the Friday night Kimi disappeared, whether he’d been out.”

“So my dad suspected him?”

“Maybe. Reynolds said he had the impression the deputy was just asking if anyone might have seen Kimi that night.”

“What did Reynolds tell him?”

“He said he’d been at home in bed resting for the big game and that his father would vouch for him. If you think about it, if it was a lie, it’s very low-risk because it’s simple, it’s believable, and it’s unlikely to be refuted.”

“Why would Reynolds lie about something like that and potentially draw attention to himself? It seems counterintuitive.”

“I thought about that also. It could be he’s using it to let me know someone already went down that path and nothing came of it. Or it could be that he knows, or at least he
believes
,
that someone already removed that report from the file, so I can’t prove him wrong or question him. And like I said, his father is still alive to vouch for him.”

Jenny filled the tea kettle at the faucet. “I wonder if that’s why the system indicates the file was destroyed—if my father wanted whoever did go looking for it to believe the file no longer existed. He puts ‘Destroyed’ into the system and takes the file home and locks it in his desk.” Jenny set the kettle on the stove atop a blue flame. “Why wouldn’t he have just duplicated the report?”

“Maybe because it wasn’t something that he could duplicate.”

“Like what?”

“Photographs. He could have taken photographs of Eric Reynolds’s car—or, more specifically, the tires.”

“He was interested in whether they matched the treads he’d photographed in the field.”

Jenny handed Tracy a box of assorted teas. She chose chamomile, not wanting caffeine. She was amped enough and knew she’d have difficulty sleeping.

“Can we go after Eric with what we have?” Jenny asked.

“Unfortunately, the crime lab said there isn’t enough in the photograph we sent to be definitive about whether the tire treads match the treads made in the clearing. The medical examiner said the same thing about the bruising on Kimi’s back and shoulder. Without more, I seriously doubt we could get a charge to stick. After forty years, there’s just too much uncertainty.”

“So where do we go from here?” Jenny asked, opening another cabinet and pulling out a sugar container and bottle of honey.

“That’s what I’ve been thinking about. My focus has been on the mechanics of what happened. Maybe I need to change focus and consider
why
it happened.”

“What about the animosity over the mascot?” Jenny said.

“There were a few articles about it in the newspaper,” Tracy said, “but it didn’t seem to be that controversial, and I don’t see high school kids getting too worked up about it. That’s one thing Eric Reynolds said that I do believe. He said the parents were more concerned about it than the students. I taught high school. Some of the students couldn’t even tell you the school mascot, and those who could really didn’t care. They’re more concerned about who they’re taking to the formal, where they’re going after the game on Saturday night, and how they’re going to get alcohol and get laid.” Tracy leaned back against the counter, thinking. “Something else had to have happened that night.”

The kettle whistled. Jenny poured hot water into two mugs and handed one to Tracy. “If Eric Reynolds is orchestrating this, maybe there’s something on his computer or his cell phone—a text message with Lionel or Hastey. We have enough to get a judge to issue a subpoena, which would allow us to take a look.”

Tracy had considered that course of action. “I don’t see Reynolds being that careless. Again, if we’re right, we’re talking about someone who’s not only managed to keep a forty-year secret but also got the others to keep it.”

“Agreed, but Hastey’s a drunk and Lionel’s no rocket scientist. One of them could have sent Reynolds an e-mail or a text.”

“Maybe,” Tracy said. “But if we do look and we’re wrong, we’ve alerted Eric that he’s a suspect.”

“He already knows he’s a suspect, Tracy.”

“True.”

“What other option do we have?” Jenny asked. “He’s had forty years to cover his tracks. And unless we can come up with something else, it feels like we’ve hit a dead end.”

CHAPTER 29

T
he rooster did not crow in the morning, and Tracy wondered if the bird had met its doom in the jaws of a coyote or a raccoon. That was the problem with crowing too loudly. You gave away your position and made yourself vulnerable. It made her think of Eric Reynolds and his proactive decision to invite her to interview him. She’d love to find a way to use it to make him vulnerable.

She put on her running clothes and laced up her shoes, hoping the cool air would invigorate her and the endorphins would help her to think of something she hadn’t yet considered.

She took the longer run to the clearing, starting to feel a connection to it. Far from being scared of ghosts there, Tracy found the place peaceful. When she arrived, she noted that the leaves of the shrub Archibald Coe had most recently planted had already started to turn brown and now were looking wilted, and not for a lack of rain.

“I can’t help you without something more,” she said to the spot where Kimi Kanasket had lain. “I wish I could. You don’t know how much I wish I could—for your father and for so many others like you. But I need something more.”

She looked up the hill, half expecting the leaves to begin to shake and the branches to sway and the wind to sweep down the hill and hit her in the face as it had that first night. But the wind didn’t come, and neither did any inspiration.

When Tracy got back to the farmhouse, she sat down at the table and wrote out her thoughts on possible motives, including romantic relationships, petty jealousies, some conflict between the Ironmen and Élan and his crew, or with Tommy Moore. She hoped that getting the possibilities on paper and out of her head would give her a new direction, but like the wind that morning, inspiration did not come.

She unplugged her phone from the charger, started up the stairs checking messages, and noticed that she’d missed a call.

The number was not associated with a name, and Tracy didn’t recognize it, though it had a Seattle area code. The caller had left a message, so Tracy played the voice mail. When the caller identified herself, Tracy stopped climbing the stairs. The voice was tentative and unsure, nothing like the strong businesswoman Tracy had spoken with days earlier. Tracy didn’t wait for the message to finish. Halfway through, she pressed “Call Back” and hurried up the remainder of the stairs and into the bathroom.

Sixty minutes later, Tracy was back in her truck driving north on I-5, a trip she felt like she could now make blindfolded. Her hair remained damp and felt greasy. In her rush, she’d failed to thoroughly rinse out the shampoo. She called Jenny on the drive and explained what had happened, letting her know that she would not be going into the sheriff’s office to prepare the affidavit in support of the subpoena to search Eric Reynolds’s home.

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