Too Close to Home (7 page)

“The location works, Brooke. A big tree. Though I suppose the forest is full of them. But the ravine…remember? He told the cops that he threw the gun into a ravine. Though as drunk as he was and as dark as it was, how he managed not to fall over the edge is anyone’s guess. Anyway, I know it’s a long shot, but I can’t help but think that maybe—”

Then, suddenly, Chad must have heard something in his
own voice that he disapproved of. Or that scared him. And I suspected…no, I
knew
it was hope.

Chad snapped his mouth shut, tightened his lips, then noisily pushed his chair back from the table. He stood, turning away as he took a step—

I put my hand over his wrist, stopping him.

“Forget what I just said, okay?” he said flatly, his back still to me. “I’m just being stupid. Acting like a damned fool rookie. There’s no way anyone’s going to know anything before we process the remains.”

“There’s nothing stupid about what you’re saying. Or feeling,” I said quietly. “Talk to me, Chad. So we can deal with it.”

Together. Just as we always did. Friend to friend. Cop to cop. That was what I thought and didn’t say.

He looked back toward me, hesitated for another moment, then found his voice. A deep, unwavering voice that didn’t even hint at the scars that a murderous father had left on a son’s soul.

“I think maybe you and Possum finally found my mother. Just like you said you would.”

We left the house together, each snatching a uniform cap from the hooks beside the door. I pulled on my tan ball cap and Chad put on the less comfortable billed hat that matched his blue uniform. We walked across the little porch with its sturdy built-in bench and down several steps to the gravel path that crossed a patch of lawn. Midyard, the path split. Several yards to the right, it ended near the dogs’ kennel area. Go left for about twice that distance, and the path merged with the end of a wide, U-shaped gravel drive where two official police vehicles were parked. One bulky and white. One sleek and blue.

Possum barked and bounced against the chain-link of his kennel the moment it became apparent that we weren’t headed in his direction. Highball barked, too, but with less urgency, less hope. He understood the early-morning owner-goes-to-work routine.

“Quiet, you silly dogs,” I said.

But I said it halfheartedly, more from habit than conviction. Not unexpectedly, I was ignored. The nearest neighbor was almost a mile down the road, so no one was going to be disturbed by dogs barking. And I knew that Highball and Possum would stop as soon as we got into our vehicles. Denied the possibility of playtime or more food or a car ride, they would occupy themselves by gnawing at a tough rawhide bone or chewing the softer rubber of a tennis ball until it popped.

Chad and I had reached the driveway and the dogs were still barking when Chad turned toward me, put his hands on my shoulders and leaned in to kiss me goodbye.

He caught himself almost immediately.

“Sorry,” he blurted, “bad habit—”

Then he realized that didn’t sound really good, either.

Embarrassment was rapidly staining his cheeks when he salvaged the awkward moment by giving my shoulders a quick little shake, then releasing them.

“Do as I say, not as I do,” he said. “Don’t you go spending your time speculating about our victim or forming any opinions that aren’t supported by fact. And until forensics is done at the site, we don’t have any facts. Got it, rookie?”

“Got it,” I said, grateful that he was too rattled to realize how very close I’d come to returning his kiss as heedlessly as he’d offered it. A bad habit, indeed.

I climbed into my SUV. As I pulled away, Chad was already sliding into his car. He followed me to the end of the
wide gravel drive and pulled up beside me. Just before I turned right, in the direction of the highway that would take me into Maryville, I lifted my hand in a casual wave. He returned it, swung left, heading farther into the forest toward Camp Cadiz.

For a moment, I watched his dust in the rearview mirror. I thought about his desire to mark the trail to the crime scene on his own, and realized that I knew why he wanted to go without me. Last night, after I’d left the forest with Tina, a handful of rangers and other cops had remained with Chad. They’d undoubtedly stayed within eyeshot of him the entire time. Later today, he knew the crime-scene techs would arrive, remove the remains and take them to the state forensics lab for processing. So this morning would be his only opportunity to be out there by himself.

I braked at the stop sign that marked the intersection with the highway, and waited for the traffic to clear as I thought about Chad and the hope that I’d seen in his green eyes. Hope, and a hint of reflected light along his lower lashes that suggested something more tangible, but expertly controlled.

Chad had a right to be alone, I thought as I stepped on the accelerator and made my turn onto the highway. A right to some small measure of privacy. Because even the possibility that the remains belonged to his murdered mother was enough to make a grown man cry.

E
d Statler was an insomniac.

The sign posted in the front door of Statler’s Fill-Up announced that business hours were from 6:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. and that absolutely no personal checks would be accepted. In fact, the store was generally open for business from predawn until past midnight, and if Ed knew you—and you’d never stiffed him—he’d take your check. Or, in a pinch, extend you credit. Between customers, Ed would sit at the counter looking out his big plate-glass window, watching the traffic on the highway.

It wasn’t quite 6:00 a.m., but the lights were on inside the convenience store and the sign in the heavy glass door was turned so that it read Open. I was confident that inside the store, the coffee would already be brewed and the doughnuts that Ed made every morning to sell to his customers would be hot out of the fryer.

Outside, there weren’t any vehicles in the lot except Ed’s. Which wasn’t unusual at almost any hour of the day, except for Wednesdays. A chain of convenience stores had opened up and down 146, their uniformity and predictability luring all but the locals away from eccentric little places like Statler’s. But I suspected that, for the past several years, running the place was more hobby—or perhaps habit—for Ed. Talk in town was that his wife’s stock-market investments had guaranteed the couple a comfortable retirement. In any event, Ed seemed content with the business he had, even if that meant going for hours without seeing a customer.

The gas pumps at Statler’s offered diesel, premium and a ten-percent ethanol blend that—according to a corn cob–shaped sticker near the credit-card slot—supported the local farm economy. I pulled under the aluminum canopy that sheltered the pumps, turned off my engine, slid a city of Maryville credit card into the usual slot and watched the numbers on the pump flip as I poured gasoline into the less-than-fuel-efficient SUV. As usual, I felt a twinge of gratitude that I wasn’t out of pocket for the fuel. After that, I headed for the store to make a purchase with my own money.

I intended to begin my investigation of the remains up near Camp Cadiz with a bit of gossip. And Ed Statler was just the man to provide it. Ed always bragged that most days, if asked, he could tell you where half the town was based on who’d stopped in or driven by. Add to that the fact that Ed was an easy man to talk to and, like many such men, was also a good listener. And the fact that for the last thirty years, Ed had sold homemade ham and beans and corn bread at lunchtime every Wednesday.

Ham and beans had always been a particular favorite in small-town southern Illinois, and Ed’s missus did a particularly good job with that old favorite. So anytime after about
ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, a sizable segment of the local population drove up the highway to Statler’s. Those who couldn’t spare the time or preferred not to eat elbow-to-elbow with other customers at one of the long, oilcloth draped folding tables at the back of the store carried away warm, heavy foam containers.

Beyond the opportunity to eat good food, Statler’s on Wednesdays was a regular social event. Even folks who just stopped long enough to pick up food greeted neighbors and gossiped with friends. And Ed listened. But unlike a good part of Maryville’s population, Ed only passed that information on to a select group. Fortunately, Chad and I—even before we’d become cops—were among Ed’s chosen.

It was too early for the rush. Too early, in fact, for Ed’s missus to drive over to deliver the big iron pots and battered baking pans that would fill the convenience store with a smoky smell of ham overlaid with a sweet, toasty whiff of corn. And although Mrs. Statler was probably in the midst of frenzied food preparation at their home near the center of town, Ed was sitting at the counter with Maryville’s weekly newspaper spread out in front of him.

Ed lifted his head and a broad smile split his dark face when he saw me come in. For as long as I could remember, he’d favored Hawaiian-print shirts—he said they made him feel cheerful. Today’s shirt was a retro masterpiece of cherry-colored gardenias with bright yellow stamens against a background of lime-green.

The shirts were cheerful. Like Ed. And I had no problem admitting to myself that, most days, Ed’s upbeat attitude was more important to me than keeping abreast of local gossip. It was, in fact, the real reason I made a habit of stopping by to chat with Ed almost every morning. But not today.

“Nice shirt,” I said.

His smile expanded into a grin that revealed a single gold front tooth bisecting a row of bright white.

“Bought it on e-Bay. Man, I
love
technology.”

I twisted off the lid of my thermal cup and began filling it with coffee. Like no one else in town and probably few in all of southern Illinois, Ed understood that coffee should be something more than brown-tinged water. He ground the beans for every pot, even brewed his decaf dark, and had probably addicted more than a few Maryville residents. I’d discovered coffee—real coffee—sitting in the Statlers’ kitchen when I was in fifth grade. He’d fixed me and his daughter, who was about my age, a big cup cut with sweetened, condensed milk. She’d grown up and moved to Chicago. I’d stayed in Maryville and discovered I preferred my coffee bitter.

I lifted my chin in the direction of Maryville’s weekly paper.

“Anything interesting?” I asked.

I figured that Chad and I had discovered the remains near Camp Cadiz late enough in the evening that we hadn’t made the local paper. And a crime scene that was a decade old wasn’t likely to get much more than a paragraph or two in any of the regional daily newspapers.

“Nope,” Ed said.

But then he thumped the tip of a knobby, black finger on the black-and-white photo of the state’s current governor. A man so hopelessly a big-city northerner that he refused to leave Chicago to live in the governor’s mansion in Springfield, a town that was significantly larger and farther north than Maryville. As far as I knew, no one in Maryville had ever admitted voting for him.

“Unless you consider the latest thing those Chicago Democrats are proposing to make life difficult for us folks down here,” Ed added.

I leaned against the counter, sipped my coffee and idly considered the tray of doughnuts just a few inches from my elbow. You know you’re a cop if you consider doughnuts a food group, I thought with a smile and awarded myself a point. I had a particular weakness for the ones coated in chocolate, but I was too full from breakfast to be tempted.

“Aren’t you feeling well?” Ed asked, real concern apparent in his voice.

“I had a big breakfast at home.”

One of Ed’s grizzled eyebrows crawled up his forehead as his dark brown eyes slid in my direction, making his face a human question mark.

If he asks me how Chad is, I’ll scream, I thought. Ed, like most of Maryville, knew that Chad and I had lived together. It was the kind of arrangement that raised eyebrows in conservative Maryville and, I supposed, kept us very much in the prayers of our local Baptist congregation. But they’d been praying for marriage, not separation, and I doubted anyone had celebrated when Chad had moved into an apartment over one of the businesses on Main Street.

Now the locals could only guess about our relationship, which inspired more gossip than merely living together had. Except for Ed, who didn’t need to speculate because he could use the number of doughnuts I ate to gauge the state of my personal life. And there was no doubt that I ate fewer doughnuts when Chad—and his hearty breakfast habit—were in residence.

Even Ed, as astute as he was, could sometimes put two and two together and come up with five. But I’d apparently misjudged the man. He didn’t ask me about Chad or tell me how pleased he was that we’d gotten back together. Instead, his
eyebrow slipped back down into its usual location and his expressive face grew serious.

“A ranger stopped by here for coffee real late last night. On her way home from an emergency call out. She said you and Possum went searching for a little, lost girl and got her back to her parents safe and sound.”

I nodded, thinking of the number of people on the scene last night. Multiply that by colleagues, families and buddies, and a significant part of Maryville had probably been buzzing with the news of the search—and the newly discovered remains—before I’d gone to sleep last night. Just as well, I thought cynically, that the crime scene was as isolated as it was. Otherwise, it’d quickly become a local tourist attraction.

“Possum’s a good dog,” I said.

“Yeah, he sure is,” Ed said. “There was also some talk about a climb down into ravine—a climb that the gal I was talking with said no one else she could think of would have attempted solo and in the dark. Suppose it just wouldn’t do, though, to call the handler heroic.”

“No,” I said, though I smiled at the compliment, “it wouldn’t.”

“Coming from a Tyler, I’m not surprised. You folks have always been real quiet about all the good you do. And the risks you all take doing it.”

Except for the risks, which I supposed might have been thrown in to describe my day job or search work, Ed might have been talking about all of the volunteering Aunt Lucy and Gran did in our town. Or he might have been talking about something else altogether. Something like the Underground.

Despite the precautions our family took to keep the organization secret, I suspected that there were people in town—especially old-timers like Ed—who had caught on. Who knew
that not all the guests at the Cherokee Rose were paying customers and noticed the disproportionate number of scared and battered women who stayed with us for just a night or two. And who had figured out that the occasional bruises that Gran or Aunt Lucy or I couldn’t hide weren’t, as we always claimed, the result of clumsiness or bad luck.

Before I could muster a denial or come up with a response that contradicted or deliberately misinterpreted him, Ed shifted to a new subject.

“Heard you also found some old bones buried up near Camp Cadiz. You figure it’s Chad’s momma?”

Though it was unusual for Chad to jump to that conclusion, that was usually the first question asked when any body was discovered within a hundred-mile radius of Maryville. Chad’s father hadn’t remembered exactly where he’d left his wife’s body. In the forest somewhere, he’d said. But he did remember that he’d made her kneel and beg God aloud for forgiveness that he’d assured her wouldn’t be forthcoming. Then he’d put a bullet in her head.

“Don’t know yet,” I said. “Is that what folks think?”

He shrugged.

“You of all people should know…folks hereabouts like to talk. Not much else to do, I suppose. Doesn’t really matter if they’ve got anything to say.”

I couldn’t argue with that. If gossip were illegal, most of Maryville would be jailed as chronic offenders.

“What do you say?” I asked.

“I say, it’d be good if that boy could bury his momma proper after all these years. And Lord knows, those bones might just be her.”

Then he picked up the tongs that shared the tray with the doughnuts, lifted a white paper sack from the stack next to
the tray, and tucked a chocolate-iced doughnut into it. Handed it to me.

“For later,” he said. “So, do you think this weather’ll be breaking soon?”

End of discussion, I thought with a stifled sigh. I knew from experience that Ed couldn’t be bullied into saying one more word than he wanted to and, unlike so many others in town, wouldn’t talk about what he didn’t know about. So I didn’t bother pushing him. Maybe tomorrow or the day after, when I had a little more information and Maryville gossip had cranked up another notch or two, Ed would have more to say. But until then…

We talked about the weather for a bit, then moved on to speculate about the price that local farmers would be getting for a bushel of corn this season, then got down to our usual argument. He thought that my doughnut and coffee should be on the house. I told him, as I often did, that I wouldn’t come by anymore if I couldn’t pay.

“I’d sure miss your coffee,” I added. Then I patted my waist, which was made considerably thicker by my bulletproof vest. “But I could probably do without the doughnuts.”

I won as I sometimes did, handed Ed a couple of dollars and got back change. As I left the store with coffee mug and doughnut bag in hand, it occurred to me that not only had I managed to pay for my purchases, but I’d actually just had a conversation with Ed where he didn’t have the last word.

I congratulated myself too soon.

The door hadn’t quite swung shut behind me when I heard his voice.

“You be sure to say ‘hey’ to Chad for me. He’s a real nice boy. ’Bout time you two got back together.”

I raised my hand in a wave, but didn’t look back. As I climbed
back into my SUV, I was still shaking my head and laughing. Mostly at myself. How could I have believed, even for a moment, that my personal life wasn’t everyone else’s business?

A quarter mile down 146, I pulled into a used-car lot at the northeast edge of town, tucking my SUV in between a rusted El Camino that I doubted had ever seen better days and a once-blue Chevy truck with oversize tires and a jacked-up frame that I doubted was street legal. The curb in front of me was fairly low, and the location put my radar gun in the right place to catch early-morning commuters speeding toward the ferry.

I spent the next hour making money for the city treasury and keeping the roads safer for the good citizens of Maryville. It was the kind of task I usually enjoyed because it gave me time to think. Today was no exception. And, like so many of my thoughts lately, I couldn’t help thinking about Chad. But today, I thought not of us and the immediate past, but of the circumstances of his mother’s murder.

The trial had been such a popular topic around town that sometimes I felt as if I’d actually witnessed it rather than simply eavesdropped on adult conversations. Like everyone else in Maryville, I knew that Chad’s father was a mean-tempered drunk. And the night he murdered his wife and tried to do the same to his son, he’d been drinking heavily. That was something he’d admitted in court, prompted by a defense lawyer who wanted to blame the alcohol, rather than the man, for what had happened. When the bars along Dunn Street closed at 2:00 a.m., he drove his battered pickup back home.