Murder on the Lunatic Fringe (Jubilant Falls Series Book 4) (13 page)

Judson motioned to a white vehicle at the end of the driveway; Dr. Bovir had arrived in the coroner’s van. He would also have investigators with him who would record the crime scene details and take photographs. As they went to work, Judson motioned Duncan and me over so he and Peppin could grill us on the details of what happened. Another marshal took Katya to the back of his black Suburban.

“So, Mrs. McIntyre, you want to tell me what you know?” Peppin asked. “I don’t care what your sheriff buddy says, you’re a suspect until I say you’re not.”

Duncan and I started at the beginning, with the original story on the tapestry, to how Duncan had stood up for Jerome at the feed store, how they’d come over for lunch on Sunday and how I’d heard from Graham Kinnon about the animals being killed. He didn’t need to know Gary McGinnis and I had just about figured out everything we’d been told was a cover of some kind. Judson corroborated the story about the dead animals.

“That was probably a warning—” Peppin began.

“But from who? McMaster or the Russians?” Judson interjected.

Peppin shrugged. “Does it matter? It’s not safe for her to be here now.”

“The man who killed Jerome was named Luka, Katya told me,” I said.

“So the Russians found her.” Peppin shot me another nasty look.

I shrugged. Nobody was going to accuse me of keeping information from law enforcement.

Dr. Bovir approached, with Jerome’s badge and Ohio driver’s license on his clipboard. Judson waved him into our circle. Bovir handed the badge and the license to the sheriff before he spoke. I caught a glimpse of his license as it passed from hand to hand. If it was a fake like Gary thought it was, it was a good one.

“Your victim died of a single gun shot at close range to the back of the head,” Bovir said solemnly.

“Any shell casings?” Jud asked.

Bovir held up an empty shell casing balanced on the end of his pen. “Investigators are picking these up now. This looks like an automatic weapon of some sort.”

“Not a double-barreled shotgun?” I asked sarcastically, shooting a nasty look at Peppin.

“No,” Bovir answered. “But there is also some other evidence—I would rather not go into that in the presence of the press.”

I nodded. “I understand.”

Duncan looked to the east, where the sun was beginning to come up.

“Do you still need us here?” he asked. “I got Holsteins to milk.”

Judson shook his head. “No. You guys go on home.”

“Just don’t leave town. Until further notice, you’re still a suspect to me,” Peppin said.

Roarke rolled his eyes.

“Thanks,” I said. “What about Katya?”

“She stays with me,” Peppin said.

“What about the animals?” I asked. “Who’s going to feed them?”

“You don’t need to worry about that. We’ll take care of them,” he said.

“Tell her I’ll be back to check on her later this afternoon,” I said, walking toward my car.

“I think you’ve done enough, Mrs. McIntyre,” he said.

I started to spin around on my heel, but Duncan grabbed my elbow.

“Keep walking Penny, just keep walking,” he whispered.

We got in the car and drove back down toward the road, where television station remote trucks were beginning to gather. A female deputy sat inside a sheriff’s cruiser, parked across the driveway entrance.

The story would be fodder for their morning newscasts, if Judson came out to talk to them.

If not, they would be forced to cool their heels and babble conjecture and possibilities through their segments until they got confirmation of anything.

The investigation could take several hours; the most they would have would be when the sun came up and they got shots of the cruisers and the coroner’s van. I could have my story—the complete story—done and up on the website before that. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea—TV could have it then before my paper hit the streets.

The wild card would be Peppin. Would he speak to them before Roarke? What would he say, outside of ‘no comment?’ That would make my decision. If he said anything beyond ‘no comment,’ I’d be forced to put the story on the website. If he didn’t I could hold it off the web until the presses ran.

I stared straight ahead as TV reporters, mikes in hand, some with cameras on their shoulders, approached the car, pummeling us with questions through the car windows.

“What’s happened in there?”

“Can you tell us anything?”

“Why is the coroner’s van on scene?”

“Do you know who lives there?”

“How many victims are there?”

Fortunately, none of them recognized me. If they had, it would have been ugly— there would have been allegations that I got preferential treatment over and above other news outlets on the scene. That would have made my life a living hell—and made the crime scene investigation rough. I didn’t want to explain how and why the property owner showed up at my house to tell me about a murder—at least until I had the chance to put it on the front page.

Hopefully no one at the TV station would see the video and recognize me.

God knows how Earlene would deal with it.

I began to consider how to place the story on the front page as Duncan nosed the Taurus through the reporters and onto the road. I didn’t have any photos, but that was OK. There were shots from the original story I’d done on the tapestry, but they weren’t relevant; there were no photos of Jerome. Maybe Gary would get me Jerome’s BMV photo—I could always ask. What would my headline be? What else did I have for page one?

Shit,
I thought to myself.
I wish I could count on Graham right now. He’s in Indianapolis. Well, I’ve at least got Marcus I can lean on. I’ll have him get the other police reports from Gary and have Elizabeth check on the court records. What other local stories do I have in the can, ready to go?

I jerked forward in my seat as Duncan slammed on the brakes.

“Do you not hear me?” Duncan asked.

“Huh?” I cleared my head with a sharp shake.

“I’ve asked you three times,” Duncan began. “I know you, Penny. You’re the only one who knows this entire story and you’re dying to get to the paper. You want me just to take you straight there? I could have Isabella help with milking this morning. We can drop your car off later.”

I looked at the clock on my cell phone: it was going on four-thirty. Duncan had only half an hour before we normally started milking. When Katya had come pounding on our door, I had grabbed a pair of dirty jeans from the bedroom floor and a tee shirt—certainly not the most professional attire to wear into work and I had that stupid focus group meeting at two.

Maybe there would be time for me to run home and change, if Isabella or Duncan picked me up and brought me home after deadline.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

Nodding, Duncan put the Taurus in gear. He turned left at the next road, one that would lead us straight into Jubilant Falls.

Nobody
was going to beat me on this story.

Chapter 23 Graham

It was nearly ten o’clock Wednesday morning when I saw movement inside the motel room where I figured Benjamin was staying.

It wasn’t difficult—the other pick-up truck I’d seen the night before pulled out at six, just as I was parking beside the wooden Travel Inn sign and the minivan I’d seen was gone. That left one room with a truck parked in front, an old rusting blue and white Ford with Indiana plates that I could now see in the full light of day.

I made a note of the plates— I’d hand them over to Roarke to run them, in case he hadn’t already gotten them. It was the only thing I’d done in four hours and, as the sun warmed the car, it was getting harder and harder to keep my eyes open behind my sunglasses. Then a tall, gaunt man in jeans and work boots stepped from the motel room and I sat up, suddenly alert.

I recognized him instantly from the police photo as Benny Kinnon. An unlit cigarette hung from his lips; his face was unshaven, but despite the homemade tattoos across his arms and neck he didn’t look like any of the junkies I’d seen over the years. He seemed alert, sober, almost feral in his body movements.

He locked the door and, cupping his hand around the cigarette, lit it, raising his head toward the sky as he exhaled. He jerked open the truck’s rusty door; the ignition made a grinding sound as he turned the key and the engine finally sputtered to life. The transmission clunked as he put the junker in gear and pulled from the parking lot, staring at me as he passed.

A shiver ran down my spine—I was that little boy again, cowering in fear behind my bedroom door, listening to my mother scream as he beat her.

No, I told myself. This all ends today. Today I get my answers.

I turned the ignition on the Mustang and pulled into traffic behind him, following him six blocks to a run-down convenience store.

Benny parked the truck, watching me from the rear view mirror as I parked my vehicle at the other end of the lot. He shook his head and walked into the convenience store, returning in a few minutes with a forty-ounce bottle of beer. He leaned through the driver’s side window to deposit the beer and began walking toward me.

He circled the Mustang twice, first from a distance, then closer, running his hand across the trunk, not speaking. Sweat beaded on my upper lip as I watched him go around the rental car: knowing Benny’s history, he could be armed and, here I sat, with nothing but a notebook and a pencil.

He stopped at the passenger window and inhaled on the stub of his cigarette.

“You’re obviously not a cop,” he said, flicking the butt into the center of the parking lot. I could see he’d lost his lower front teeth and most of his upper right molars and wondered if that happened in a prison fistfight. “A cop would do a better job tailing me.”

“No, I’m not a cop.”

He went around the car again. I felt like he was taking stock, appraising the car, singling it out for his next motor vehicle theft, while trying to figure out what I wanted. I took off my sunglasses as he made his way back to the passenger window and met his foxlike eyes.

“Ahhh,” he said. “I see now. So the bitch finally had her fucking little whelp come find me, huh?”

“Get in,” I said. “We need to talk.”

“No. There’s a park down the road. Meet me there.” Benny pointed west and sauntered back to his truck.

***

The park wasn’t much more than a metal swing-set and a couple of picnic tables that backed up to some scraggly woods before ending at a high fence that circled a junk yard. It didn’t look like any of the parks the city still maintained, but no one told that to the children from the housing project next door who were beginning to wander over to play. Benny and I parked our vehicles and walked toward a picnic table. Benny carried the forty-ounce, still in the brown paper bag, in one hand, and took a swig from it periodically.

“So why did she send you?” Benny asked as we sat at opposite ends of the picnic table’s top, our feet resting on the bench seat, facing the road.

“She didn’t send me. I wanted to see you.”

“How’d you track me down, then?”

“Does it matter?”

He shrugged. “What the fuck do you want?”

“I want to know about you and my mom.”

Benny took another swig from his beer bottle and rested his tattooed arms on his knees. His knuckles were scraped and scabs were beginning to form over wounds on his fingers.

Had he been in a fight?
I wondered.
Was he responsible for killing Jerome Johnson? Or the livestock on Katya Bolodenka’s farm?

“Why? She’s a whore. I’m a thief. We did a lot of smack, and we got arrested. I did four years in the joint. She did two. What else is there?”

“Why’d you hit her?”

“I was cleaning my fist and her mouth went off, maybe? Junkies do a lot of stupid shit, kid, a lot of stupid shit, and your mother was the stupidest junkie bitch I ever saw.”

So, the man who was reputed to be my father was an arrogant, self-absorbed bastard with no compunction about hitting women. Good to know. Bill, despite his repeated use of checkbook parenting, was beginning to look a lot better as a stepfather.

“Why was she so stupid?” I asked.

“She’s a woman — they’re all stupid. They all need to be put in their place, like a lot of other folks. They need to know that somebody— a man— is in charge, because they aren’t smart enough to do anything themselves. Why is any of this shit important?” Benny sounded irritated.

I was a gnat flying around his face, one he couldn’t swat away and he didn’t like that.

“Why do you care? You’ve obviously done all right— you’ve got a nice car, you dress halfway decent. I’ll bet you’ve even got some sort of fancy-ass job. What are you, like a bank manager? Insurance salesman? Why fucking worry about what I’m doing or where I’m living?”

“I had a girlfriend. We thought she was pregnant for a little bit, then we broke up. The whole thing got me thinking.”

“About what? That I wasn’t the kind of daddy you wanted me to be? That I didn’t play baseball or take you to the goddamn movies?” Benny sneered. “Let me tell you, none of us get the parents we want. You waste a lot of time wanting that, kid, because that isn’t ever going to happen, whoever you are. Just like your mother wasn’t fucking Cinderella, I’ll never be Prince Charming.”

He struck a wound I hadn’t opened in a long time. In my first year of boarding school, I had a fantasy of my ideal father, mostly based on television sitcoms we were allowed to watch before lights out. I would lie on my single bed in my room, wishing for a father who came to visit me on weekends like the other boys, a father who took the time to throw a ball in the wide green campus commons with me or cheered me on from the sidelines as I, the star of the football team, scored yet another touchdown.

Mother and Bill didn’t seem to want me within their orbit. Why else would they send me here? Lonely and homesick for a family I never had, I’d built the dream of an ideal father who didn’t exist to cover for a father who disappeared and a stepfather who wanted me gone.