Secrets of Eden (18 page)

THINGS BEGAN TO
move quickly after that. We went back to the Haywards’ house and found that the fingerprints on the diet-soda bottle we had seen in the hands of the preacher man matched those on the headboard in the master bedroom. They matched prints in the bathroom off that bedroom and on a little blue bottle of massage oil in Alice’s nightstand. I now had all I needed for a judge to approve my affidavit to get an official set of Drew’s prints and a swab of DNA from his mouth. I could subpoena his laptop. I might have a while to go before I could connect him to George Hayward’s murder, but it wasn’t going to be hard to prove that he had been intimate with his parishioner.

Emmet put in another call to Drew, but this time the reverend didn’t call back. Instead it was his lawyer who rang, and he didn’t call my detective sergeant, he called me directly. His attorney was a guy named Aaron Lamb. I like Aaron, though he has represented some real scum. And, invariably, real rich scum. Aaron’s the guy who the head of the power company will call when he accidentally runs over a bicyclist on Route 7A while passing in a no-passing zone. Aaron’s the attorney you want if you were just snagged for embezzling a few hundred thousand dollars from the hospital or if you’re a psychiatrist who’s found it easier to sleep with your sexy young patients once you’ve drugged them. And, clearly, he was the lawyer you wanted if you were an aristocrat from Westchester who had chosen to go slumming as a country pastor in Vermont and then went ballistic one night and decided you would take vengeance into your own hands and shoot your now-dead lover’s husband.

“I hear you and Detective Emmet Walker are thinking of joining
the Haverill United Church,” Aaron said, his voice its usual silky-smooth icing with just a dollop of boredom tossed in. He was a tall man who had thinning dark hair and rimless eyeglasses with titanium earpieces. He always moved in my mind like a diplomat: His posture was extraordinary, and the world seemed to part before him. He was one of the few men I knew in Vermont who could get away with a ventless Armani suit—no small accomplishment, since a lot of the guys here dress like farmers at a funeral. My sense is that when we beat him—and with the sorts of cases he handled, his clients were convicted as often as they were acquitted—his principal emotion was frustration: He knew that most of his clients were guilty as hell, and he really didn’t care that at least half the time they were going to wind up in prison. Mostly he wanted to win because winning was such a fundamental part of who he was.

And when we lost to him? At least his clients weren’t likely to be repeat offenders.

“Well, I can’t speak for Emmet,” I said, “but Haverill’s too friggin’ long a drive from my house. I try not to spend that much time in the car on a Sunday morning.”

“So then why in the world would you want to talk to Reverend Stephen Drew? This can’t possibly have anything to do with that Hayward fiasco.”

“I know, I know: I just love my dead ends. But I am nothing if not thorough. And Drew was one tough guy to reach for a while there.”

“You know, he helped clean up the Hayward house. That’s the kind of man he is.”

“Yeah, I saw him. I was there, too.”

“Of course you were.”

“I gather you’re going to be his lawyer?”

“Yes indeed. Frankly, you seem to be hanging a lot on a pastor’s crisis of faith and his decision to take a break from the pulpit. The
minister—and understand I am using this word sarcastically—fled about three and a half hours from Haverill. He was in the Adirondacks, across the lake from Vermont.”

“He’s not going to be dropping by the barracks again anytime soon, is he?”

“Nope.”

“Nor take that polygraph.”

“I think not.”

“But you know what he
is
going to do? He’s going to give us a finger print and a mouth swab.”

“Not without a nontestimonial order from a judge.”

“Which shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, because I knew I had Alice Hayward’s journal. I would’ve loved to have told him about it that moment on the phone, but it wouldn’t have made sense to share its existence with the guy’s defense attorney at that point in the investigation. All I needed to do then was share the material with the judge. Still, I’m human, and that was one of those times when I wish I could have dropped that little IED at his feet and seen his face when it exploded. In my mind I could see Aaron actually recoiling in the massive, ergonomically perfect Herman Miller that he called a desk chair but I thought, the one time I visited his office, looked more like something he’d wrestled from the Cathay Pacific first-class cabin. I was pretty confident that the reverend either hadn’t known that Alice Hayward kept a journal or hadn’t yet told his attorney. Either way, it was going to be very bad news for Aaron.

Besides, soon enough he would get to see the journal for himself. But by then Stephen Drew would be what we tell the press, when they ask, is “a person of interest.” Not yet a suspect. But someone we need to spend a little quality time with.

ALMOST OVERNIGHT, IT
seemed, everyone was aware that Stephen Drew had been sleeping with Alice Hayward. I spent my life telling reporters from three states that I couldn’t possibly comment on an ongoing investigation. But the more folks we interviewed in Haverill and at the bank where Alice worked, the more our suspicions got out. People would had to have had their heads in the sand or been schoolmates of Marcus or Lionel not to have figured out what we believed had most likely occurred that awful night at the Haywards’. Some parishioners, I imagine, clung to the possibility that there was a killer (or killers) out there who had murdered both Alice and George—preferring, apparently, random horror to the idea that their pastor was capable of sleeping with a part of his flock and then murdering a neighbor. And, I guess, indiscriminate savagery was still a not-inconceivable option—as was some weird love triangle involving Mother Seraphim. But the laws of reasonable inference suggested that George had strangled Alice and then Stephen had shot her husband. Let’s face it: It might be sunny when you wake up in the morning, but if the lawn is sopping wet and there are puddles in the driveway, it’s pretty likely that it rained in the night.

And those parishioners were in the minority: The absolute last thing that most people wanted—especially the fine, upstanding citizens of Haverill, Bennington, and Manchester—was for this to have been some arbitrary slaughter committed by a third party who was still lurking undiscovered in the lengthening shadows of the Green Mountains. The local chambers of commerce and the state representatives grew real antsy at that prospect, and I could see early on that they were going to make my boss Jim’s life hard if it turned out that George Hayward had been murdered by anyone other than the local pastor in Haverill.

I FELT ESPECIALLY
bad for Katie Hayward. The amount of crap she was having to shoulder just boggled the mind. She hadn’t been at the house on Monday morning, and so I hadn’t met her, but it was clear this poor girl’s nightmare was only getting worse. She wasn’t merely an orphan now whose father had probably killed her mother; her mother was sleeping with the town pastor, and the newspaper, TV, and Web stories just kept coming. A couple of times, I called the social worker who was assigned to the girl to check in, and it sounded like Katie was doing about as well as could be expected. So far there had been relatively little (and I honestly don’t know what to make of this expression) “acting out.” But there had been a few days of near catatonia. And she’d gotten a tattoo (illegal, but harmless), which didn’t surprise me because her social worker was known for her tattoos. Katie’s was an open rose on her left shoulder that she had gotten in honor of her mother; Alice loved roses and had bushes of salmon-colored wild ones along the wall of the house that faced the vegetable garden. School had finally started, and everyone seemed to think that this was a good thing for Katie. The teenager had gotten over the awkward—now, there is an understatement of a word—moments that had surrounded her like a fog her first days back in the classroom.

Still, Emmet had to go back and talk to her some more, and as a mother I felt like a ghoul asking him to do that. But I had to. I also had him talk to some of Katie’s friends, including Tina Cousino. Katie said she knew that her mom kept a journal, but she had never read it. She wasn’t even sure where her mom kept it. And she said she didn’t believe that her mom was involved with Stephen Drew:

K. H
AYWARD
: I know some people think there was, like, something going on between my mom and Stephen. But that just seems too weird.

W
ALKER
: By Stephen, you mean Reverend Drew?

K. H
AYWARD
: Yeah. He likes us to call him Stephen. I think the only time I ever heard him called Reverend was when there was some visiting minister in the church who was all weird and formal. He kept saying Reverend Drew this and Pastor Drew that.

W
ALKER
: What do you mean by “something going on” between your mother and Stephen?

K. H
AYWARD
: You know. Like having an affair.

W
ALKER
: Was Stephen ever at your house that you know of?

K. H
AYWARD
: I guess. I know he helped my mom with my dad.

W
ALKER
: Counseling her.

K. H
AYWARD
: Uh-huh.

W
ALKER
: When was he there?

K. H
AYWARD
: I don’t know.

W
ALKER
: Did you ever come home from school and find him there?

K. H
AYWARD
: No.

W
ALKER
: Did he ever have dinner at your house?

K. H
AYWARD
: I think so.

W
ALKER
: You think so?

K. H
AYWARD
: It was a long time ago.

W
ALKER
: So he did?

K. H
AYWARD
: I guess.

W
ALKER
: Just the one time?

K. H
AYWARD
: Yes.

W
ALKER
: When was this?

K. H
AYWARD
: Winter, maybe? Or, like, spring.

W
ALKER
: Can you be more specific as to a month?

K. H
AYWARD
: No. I’m pretty sure it was after Valentine’s Day and there was still some snow. But not much.

W
ALKER
: But it was definitely when your father was living out at the lake?

K. H
AYWARD
: Uh-huh.

W
ALKER
: Were there other times he was at the house?

K. H
AYWARD
: Probably. But I don’t remember any.

W
ALKER
: Then why do you think that?

K. H
AYWARD
: Maybe because everyone says he was there now. I don’t know.

W
ALKER
: But you do not recall ever seeing him at the house other than that time he was there for dinner.

K. H
AYWARD
: No.

   According to Alice’s journal, it had been a Monday night in early March when Drew had had dinner with her and her daughter. This is what I mean about teenagers being harder to interview than spies. It’s
not necessarily that they’re trying to mislead you or withhold a key piece of evidence. It’s just that their hardwiring is so freaking different from a grown-up’s or a child’s.

W
ALKER
: So he never came by for…I don’t know…a quick bite to eat after church? A lunch, maybe?

K. H
AYWARD
: Definitely not after church. While the kids are in Sunday school, the adults have this thing called Second Hour. They’re supposed to sit around and talk about Stephen’s sermon in the big common room, but whenever I would pass through there to get juice or something when I was in Sunday school, they were, like, talking about muffins and stuff.

W
ALKER
: Muffins?

K. H
AYWARD
: You know, stuff that isn’t important. They’d be talking about the muffins that some old person had baked for the Second Hour. Grown-ups like snacks, too.