Turn to Stone (8 page)
“It isn’t true,” Kelli told him.
She sat on the sofa with her hands in her lap, and she was an oasis of calm. Her perfume, an essence of spring flowers, rose from her skin like a whisper. The house was cold as night air screeched through the broken window. She’d just had a woman fire a gun past her head. Her husband was dead and a suspect in a horrific murder. And yet Kelli Andrews was zen-like in her patience. She seemed to gather strength as events closed in around her.
Stride had secured Hope’s revolver. His uncle had taken Hope back to his own house and was sobering her up with coffee. Stride was alone with Kelli, but that wouldn’t last long. The police would be here any minute, and he wanted answers from her before Sheriff Weik arrived.
“Hope Hamlin says she called the number on her husband’s cell phone statement,” Stride told her. “You answered.”
Kelli nodded. “Yes, she called me today. I had no idea what it was about. The next thing I knew, she showed up at my house, screaming and threatening me with a gun.”
Stride watched her face, looking for a lie. “Did Greg Hamlin call you a month ago?”
“No.”
“The statement says he did.”
“Well, if he called, it must have been a wrong number. I get unwanted sales calls all the time. I usually don’t even answer.”
Stride shook his head. “If Hope is right, this was the last call Greg made before he disappeared. He called
you
. No one will believe that’s a coincidence or a mistake. You have to be honest with me, Kelli. Is Hope right? Were you having an affair with her husband? Did Percy find out about it?”
Kelli stood up from the sofa. She shivered as the breeze touched her skin. She retrieved a photo of Percy from a nearby table and cradled it in her hands. She didn’t duck her head or avoid his gaze. “I wasn’t having an affair, Mr. Stride. Not with Greg Hamlin. Not with anyone. I loved Percy.”
“The police will be here soon. They’re going to search this house from top to bottom. Computers, too.”
“Let them search. There’s nothing to find.”
“You need to understand that this isn’t just about Percy. Not anymore. It’s about you, too.”
Her forehead wrinkled with confusion. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“You’re going to be a suspect in Hamlin’s murder,” he said.
“What? That’s crazy!”
“No, it’s not. Percy was the cop investigating Hamlin’s disappearance. Now it looks like Percy dragged Hamlin’s dead body into the woods to hide it, and Hamlin’s wife is suggesting that you and Greg were having an affair. If I’m Sheriff Weik, here’s what I’m thinking. Either Percy killed Hamlin himself—or you did. Then Percy covered up the crime to protect you, but he couldn’t live with what he’d done.”
He saw something in Kelli’s face now. A stirring of concern. Her calm had begun to fracture. “That isn’t what happened.”
“Weik is going to ask you about that phone call. He won’t believe it was a wrong number.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t explain it.”
“Did Percy ask you about the call?”
“He didn’t,” she said. “He never mentioned it.”
“Did he ask you whether you knew Greg Hamlin?”
Kelli nodded. “Actually, yes, he did, but he didn’t make a big deal of it.”
“What did you tell him?” Stride asked.
“I said no. I didn’t know him.”
Stride thought about the woman in front of him and what she’d been through. She was strong—to do the work she did, to survive what she had at the Novitiate. There was steel inside her, and yet steel also locked out emotions. She had to be immune to pain. He assumed there was no other way to deal with the people she met. The abusers and the abused. The bullies and the bullied.
He remembered what his uncle had said about Greg Hamlin. Hamlin was a hard man. A hot-tempered teacher who didn’t belong in the schools. A husband in a combustible marriage. Recently, however, he’d changed. He’d softened. As if he’d gotten help.
“Was Greg Hamlin a client of yours?” he asked Kelli. “Did he come to you for counseling?”
Her eyes widened with surprise. “I—I can’t say anything about my clients. You know that.”
“Did Percy ask the same question?”
Kelli chewed her bottom lip. “Yes.”
“What did you say?”
“Just what I said to you. I can’t confirm or deny that anyone is a client. If I did that, you could assume that I’m counseling someone simply because I won’t give an absolute denial about it. Even so, I had already told Percy what I told you. I never
met
Greg Hamlin.”
“Except if he was a client, would you acknowledge knowing him? A lot of therapists won’t say hello to a client on the street.”
“Oh, God.” She held up her hands in exasperation. “Don’t you see the impossible position I’m in? I’m trying to deny something I can’t ethically deny.”
Stride wanted to believe that Kelli didn’t know Greg Hamlin. That his death was a mystery to her, even if her husband was at the heart of it. He felt an urge to help her, but that urge had betrayed him in the past. Sometimes he’d let his sympathy for victims get in the way of his better judgment. He was getting mixed signals from this woman.
Trust her—but don’t trust her.
“If you didn’t know him, Kelli, explain the phone call,” Stride said.
“I’m telling you, I can’t. I don’t understand it.” She shook her head and searched for an answer. “Look, I don’t know, maybe Hamlin
wanted
therapy. Maybe that’s why he was calling me. Everyone in town knows what I do.”
Stride stood up and put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m not trying to accuse you, but I want you to understand the questions you’re going to face from the police.”
“I realize that. I appreciate it.”
“Nothing you tell me is privileged. If the sheriff asks, I have to tell him everything you say.”
“I know that.”
Stride eyed the window and the quiet Shawano street. “We don’t have a lot of time. I want to be gone before the sheriff arrives.”
“Of course.”
“You say you didn’t know Greg Hamlin,” Stride said. “What about Percy? Did he know him?”
“He never mentioned him to me.”
“Could they have known each other in the past? Before you met Percy?”
Kelli shook her head. “I don’t see how. Percy wasn’t from around here. He grew up near Janesville. I’m telling you, Greg Hamlin was as much a stranger to Percy as he was to me. This was a missing persons case for Percy. Nothing more.”
“Did he talk about it?” Stride asked.
“No, but he never talked about his work with me. Just like I never talked about my work with him. Neither one of us really
liked
what the other did, Mr. Stride. I hated the danger of him being a cop. He hated the kind of people I had as clients. It was sort of an unspoken rule between us. We didn’t go there.”
“Except you said he was obsessed with Hamlin’s disappearance. How did you know?”
She pointed at the hallway that led to the house’s small bedrooms. “Percy spent hours in his office. He brought home boxes of papers and pored over them. Whenever he wasn’t there, he locked the door. That was unusual. He had never done that before. He was being really secretive about it.”
“Show me,” Stride said.
Kelli hesitated. “I can, but it won’t do you any good.”
“Why?”
“There’s nothing left,” she said.
Stride saw the discomfort in her face and didn’t like what it meant. He headed down the hallway, which was lined with family photographs, and he paused to study them. Percy and Kelli were an odd couple in the pictures, not really looking like they belonged together. Percy didn’t smile. Kelli smiled, but it looked like the nervous smile of someone whistling in a graveyard. He saw their master bedroom on the left, which had an unmade king bed. He passed a narrow bathroom with a frosted window leading outside. Opposite the bathroom was a small bedroom crowded with an oak desk and lacquer bookshelves.
The desk was empty. Swept clean.
He took a step into the office. Kelli was behind him.
“I unlocked the room today and found it like this,” she said. “There’s fresh ash in the fire pit outside. I think he burned all of his notes before he killed himself.”
Stride turned around and stared at her. “Or did you burn them?”
“I didn’t.”
“Weik will think you did.”
“I swear I didn’t. This is the way I found his office. I hunted through the desk, and it’s empty. The only thing I found was a piece of paper that had fallen behind one of the drawers.”
“What was it?” Stride asked.
“It was a page copied from a credit card statement. Percy had highlighted a couple entries.”
“Was it Greg Hamlin’s?”
“I didn’t look that carefully.”
“Do you still have it?”
She nodded. She left the room and went into their bedroom, and she returned a moment later with a folded piece of paper in her hand. He studied the page and saw that it was an excerpt from an American Express bill. The accountholder was Greg Hamlin. Two entries from the previous month had been marked in yellow: a charge from a locksmith in Appleton and from a Green Bay restaurant named Kroll’s.
Percy had also scrawled an acronym in the margin:
FOB
.
“Do either of these charges mean anything to you?” he asked.
“No.”
“What about FOB?”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“Hope Hamlin told me that one of her customers saw Greg with a woman in Green Bay. Was it you?”
“It wasn’t. I told you, I didn’t know him.”
Stride was frustrated. “Kelli, can you think of any reason at all why Percy would have killed Greg Hamlin?”
“No, because I don’t believe he did. That’s not the man he was. Whatever happened to him, you’ll never convince me that Percy was a killer.”
Stride studied the rest of the office. Percy had been thorough in cleaning up. He’d left nothing in the desk, nothing in the wastebasket. Only the bookshelves had been left behind. He saw an unsorted collection of hardcovers and paperbacks. Mysteries. Law books on criminal procedure. Religious fiction. On one shelf, he also spotted several books with titles in German. The German volumes were a mixture of textbooks and Thomas Mann novels, as well as a collection of Grimm’s fairy tales. Stride pulled the book off the shelf and noted the contents. The collection included a story that Neal Gandy had mentioned:
Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren.
“Did Percy speak German?” Stride asked.
“No, he didn’t.”
“Then why the books?”
“They’re mine. I learned German for my degree. Many of the best psychologists were German, so I wanted to be able to read their theories in the original language, not in translation.”
“So you speak German?”
“Yes.”
Stride closed his eyes. She sensed his anxiety.
“I don’t understand,” she went on. “What difference does that make?”
When he opened his eyes again, she’d already backed away from him. She was in the doorway of the bathroom across the hall, and her face was white. Somehow, he thought she knew what he was about to say, and that was a bad thing. A very, very bad thing.
“Hamlin’s body,” he said.
She swallowed hard. She touched the tattoo on her neck, as if the snakes were alive. “Yes?”
“His killer carved a word into his chest. A German word.”
Her lips moved. She spoke, but she barely spoke at all. Even so, he knew the word that escaped her mouth. “
Teufel
.”
“How did you know that, Kelli?”
She slammed the door of the bathroom shut without answering him. He heard the twist of the lock. The ceramic lid of the toilet seat banged open, and he heard the unmistakable noise of Kelli Andrews vomiting out the contents of her stomach. He heard something else, too. Down the hallway, through the broken window, sirens rose in the distance. The police were coming for her.
“Kelli?”
She was quiet. He listened at the door.
“Kelli, are you okay?”
She didn’t answer, and he grew concerned. He pounded on the frame, and when there was still no sound from inside, he lurched his shoulder heavily into the rickety door, which gave way under his weight. He punched it open.
The bathroom was empty and freezing. The aroma of sweet sickness blew toward him. The window was open, its curtains flying like the cape of a witch sailing across the moonlit sky.
Kelli was gone.
In the morning, Stride faced a choice.
He got out of the bed in his uncle’s attic at dawn. Richard was still asleep downstairs. He made coffee and poured a large cup into a travel mug, then grabbed a bran muffin and ate it standing up. He left a note for his uncle—thanking him, saying goodbye, telling him he was welcome to visit in Duluth. With his suitcase in the back of his truck, he followed the dark, empty streets of Shawano to the east-west ramps of Highway 29.
With one turn, he would be on his way home.
Stride stopped on the overpass near the westbound ramp. There was no one else on the road. The morning was gray, and the woods were a nest of shadows. He tried to turn the wheel. He told himself that it didn’t matter what had happened to Greg Hamlin. It didn’t matter where Kelli Andrews was. It didn’t matter that Percy Andrews had put a gun to his head while he was standing only twenty feet away from Stride.
He didn’t belong in Shawano. This was someone else’s problem.
He told himself all of that, but then he took the opposite ramp, heading east on Highway 29. Not toward home. Not toward Duluth.
The cop in the cemetery deserved another day of his life.
Stride used his cell phone to call his partner, Maggie Bei. He reached her voice mail, which was fine, because he didn’t want to talk to her. Things had been awkward between them since the break-up of their affair over the winter. They still worked together every day, but it was hard to call them friends. Not enemies, not lovers, but not really friends anymore.
“Mags, it’s me. I’ve been delayed another day in Shawano. Something came up with my uncle. I’m hoping to be back tomorrow. Call me if you need me.” He didn’t provide details or admit that he was marching onto land that had been clearly labeled
No Trespassing
by Sheriff Weik.
A few miles east on Highway 29, he headed south toward the town of Appleton.
Percy Andrews had highlighted a charge on Greg Hamlin’s credit card statement for a locksmith in Appleton. One hour later, Stride found the home of Buddy Crown, owner of Buddy’s FastLocks. The locksmith lived in a quiet neighborhood near the shore of Lake Winnebago. His white van was parked in the driveway.
He caught Buddy as the man was heading out of his house to drill a safe deposit box at one of the local banks. The locksmith wasn’t in a mood to chat. He didn’t remember Hamlin—“I average a dozen calls a day every day”—but he did remember Percy Andrews making the same inquiry as Stride. After expressing his annoyance that the left hand of the police didn’t know what the right hand was doing, Buddy retrieved his log book and gave Stride an address where he’d opened a locked car for Greg Hamlin on a Tuesday evening nearly two months earlier.
Tuesday.
Stride remembered what Hope Hamlin had said.
For months, he’s been disappearing on Tuesday evenings. He told me it was to play tennis at the gym, but that was a lie.
In reality, Greg Hamlin had been an hour away in Appleton. Why?
Stride used the GPS navigator in his Expedition to find the address that the locksmith had given him. He imagined Percy Andrews following the same trail to the same place, and he knew what he expected to find. A home. A condo. A motel. A woman who was intimate with Greg Hamlin, or a get-away where they’d met for their affair.
He was wrong.
The directions took him to an unassuming Baptist church in a building that could have been an auto repair shop in a previous life. It was about the last place that Stride expected to find a commercial real estate millionaire like Greg Hamlin. His first thought was that Hamlin had parked here and walked to his real destination, but when he got out of his truck, he didn’t see any obvious alternatives in the neighborhood.
There was one other vehicle, a tan Buick, in the small church parking lot. As Stride studied the building, a man emerged through the two glass doors and locked them behind him. He was in his forties, medium-height and burly, with thinning black hair and glasses. He was dressed in a business suit and wool jacket. He saw Stride and approached him with a polite smile.
“Can I help you?”
Stride shook the man’s hand. “I’m not sure. Do you work here?”
“I’m on the church board. My name’s Rich Johnson.”
Stride introduced himself. “This is in conjunction with a homicide investigation,” he explained. “The victim’s name was Greg Hamlin. He’s from Shawano, but he appears to have spent some time here. ”
“The name isn’t familiar,” Johnson replied. “He’s not a member of the church. And there’s a Baptist church in Shawano itself, so I’m not sure why he’d come here.”
“This man locked his keys in his car a couple month ago. The locksmith gave me this address. It was a Tuesday evening.”
Johnson adjusted the glasses on his face. “Ah. Tuesday.”
“Does that mean something?”
The man hesitated. “We rent out our space on Tuesday evenings. It’s not a church gathering.”
“What kind of gathering is it?” Stride asked.
“I’d rather not discuss it, Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”
Stride didn’t understand the man’s reluctance, but then he remembered the acronym that Percy Andrews had scrawled in the margin of Hamlin’s credit card statement. FOB. The abbreviation took on new meaning in a church parking lot.
FOB. Friend of Bill.
Greg Hamlin had been going to AA. He’d been trying to get sober.
“My girlfriend goes to the same kind of meetings,” Stride told the church board member. “She’s been sober for more than a decade.”
The words were out of his mouth before he remembered that Serena was no longer his girlfriend. She’d walked out months ago. He hadn’t adjusted to his new reality, and he missed the way things used to be.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Johnson said, “but then you understand why I can’t reveal any information about the people who attend our gatherings.”
“I do, but I hope you understand that one of them was murdered in an extraordinarily brutal way. I need to know whether his alcoholism was somehow connected to what happened to him.”
Johnson frowned. “What was the man’s name again?”
“Greg Hamlin.”
“Greg H,” Johnson murmured. “Okay, yes, he hasn’t been here in a few weeks. I was concerned. And yes, you can draw the obvious conclusion. I’m part of these meetings, too. I’ve been sober for four and a half years.”
“Congratulations.”
“I don’t deserve any praise. If I consider myself done, then I’m halfway to relapsing. It’s a day-to-day thing.”
“Of course.” Stride added: “There may have been a Shawano policeman here recently asking about Mr. Hamlin. His name was Percy Andrews. He followed the same lead I did. Do you remember him?”
Johnson shook his head. “No, but he could have talked to someone else at the church. It wouldn’t really be hard to figure out what we do on Tuesday nights. We post it on the bulletin board. He may have guessed that Greg H was a part of our group, but I doubt he would have learned anything about him. No one would have breached the confidences shared by another member.”
“Did you know Greg yourself?” Stride asked.
Johnson looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know who he really was. I only knew him as the man in the chair next to mine.”
“I think that means you knew him pretty well,” Stride said.
“Unfortunately, sitting in the chair means you take a sacred oath not to reveal what someone else says.”
“Greg Hamlin is dead.”
“Then he would probably want his secrets to die with him,” Johnson said. “I know I would.”
Stride ran his hands back through his hair in frustration. “Mr. Johnson, it pains me to ask these questions. Really. All I can say is that if you sat next to Greg Hamlin in these meetings, you probably have some measure of sympathy for who he was. Frankly, you’re the first person I’ve met who has stood up for him in any way. It sounds like he was trying to turn his life around, but instead, someone killed him. He was tortured, Mr. Johnson. Terrible things were done to him. I’d like to know why.”
“Tortured?” Johnson asked.
“In unspeakable ways.”
The man in the suit looked sick. He braced himself against the hood of his Buick and held a clenched fist against his mouth. He stared at the ground and took a slow breath. Then he looked up at Stride.
“How much do you know about the twelve-step program of AA?” he asked.
“I’m familiar with it, but I couldn’t recite it.”
“Some people, especially newcomers, feel a need to rush the steps. They think they can get through them in a few months, whereas for most of us, it’s a question of years. A lifetime even.”
“Greg Hamlin was in a rush?” Stride asked.
Johnson unzipped his wool coat and removed it, as if he were warm now. His face was flushed. “The death of Greg’s father prompted him to re-evaluate his life. He saw how a strong man can be brought low. I think Greg genuinely wanted to change, but when you take that first step, it can be like staring into a well that has no bottom. It’s the well of all your past sins, and you need to lower yourself slowly, because otherwise, the sheer enormity of regret can overwhelm you. Unfortunately, some people jump.”
Stride felt as if Johnson were speaking of his own sins. He had an image of himself and Maggie, together, in a sexual way that never should have happened. He saw Serena leaving and the hurt in her face. The weight on him was just as Johnson described—
the sheer enormity of regret
. Sin was a deep well, and you could fall into it and hear your own voice echoing all of your failures.
“Hamlin jumped?” Stride asked.
“Yes. Greg believed he could bull his way through the steps. That just makes them harder. He didn’t seem to realize that the very strength of his personality was one of his problems. It’s very common. These are people who think they can do everything themselves, with no help from others. That’s the antithesis of what we do here. After all, step number one is to admit you are powerless, and that goes against the grain for someone like Greg.”
“Where was he having difficulties?”
“He wanted to make amends to the people he’d harmed,” Johnson said.
“That sounds like a good thing.”
“Of course, but there’s a reason it’s the
ninth
step out of twelve. It’s fraught with peril, not only for yourself but for others. To get to that point requires an extensive reassessment of who you are as a person. It involves finding faith, acceptance, humility. If you go to someone you’ve harmed and you can’t truly show that you’re a changed man, you’re likely to be bitterly rejected. What’s worse, you can open up old wounds and victimize people all over again.”
“Who did Greg feel he’d harmed?” Stride asked. “His wife?”
“Yes, we can’t help but hurt our families. I gather in Greg’s case they were co-dependent, each making the other worse. I don’t think he’d even told her he was in the program. He thought she would have ridiculed it.”
“Did he mention anyone else?”
“Greg told us one painful story,” Johnson replied. “He used no names, of course, but the incident seemed to gnaw at him more than anything else. I think he’d been harboring guilt about it for a long time.”
“What was the story?” Stride asked.
Johnson looked as if he had to dig deep for the courage to talk about it. Stride knew how he felt. One person’s mistakes always made you think of your own. “He said that he had harmed someone in a previous career and that that person had gone on to commit a grievous crime.”
“Did he talk about the nature of the harm he’d done?”
“Greg was a teacher,” Johnson said. “The boy was a student. I gather he was deeply cruel to the boy on many levels. Greg was troubled by his own responsibility for what the boy did years later. He asked us our thoughts about when an innocent man becomes responsible for what a guilty man does. He wondered: If you make someone into a monster, does that make you a monster, too?”
Stride knew who Greg Hamlin had harmed. He’d lit the fire in a boy who later took out his fury on his wife. His son. His counselor.
Jet Black.
He’d brought back to life a man who should have remained dead.
“Did Hamlin say what he planned to do next?” Stride asked.
“Greg said he couldn’t make amends directly, but there were other ways. Other people who’d been hurt. He said he was going to talk to the boy’s victims. Seek them out. We advised him to tread carefully, because it was a dangerous path. When you open up old wounds, you never know what people will do.”