A Fountain Filled With Blood

He was a good fifteen yards away from the scene, twist-tying tape to a flexible plastic pole, when a flash of light in the corner of his eye made him look up, just in time to see the camera trained on Clare. Even from that distance, he could see her body language had changed from shocked and horrified to…well, righteous indignation was probably the right description, seeing as she was a priest. Their conversation in the hospital corridor outside the waiting room resurrected itself: Clare, arms akimbo, swearing to march on the police station if there was one more attack. “Oh,” he said. “Oh no. No, no, no.” The Reverend Clare Fergusson on a crusade was likely to say anything.

He dropped the tape and strode toward the small cluster of trees where Clare, now gesturing widely, was making her point. God, why hadn’t he put duct tape over her mouth and locked her in the squad car when he’d had the chance? He kept himself from breaking into a jog, but double-timed his steps until he was close enough to hear, “lack of respect for common humanity and basic civil rights—”

“Clare!” he said. Clare and the reporter both jerked their heads in his direction. He propped what he hoped looked like a smile on his face and tried again in a less threatening tone of voice. “Reverend Fergusson? I hope I don’t have to remind you that giving out some information could jeopardize this investigation.”

“How?” she asked.

He sucked in air between gritted teeth, but before he could reply, Bevin and the cameraman had pivoted toward him. “Chief Van Alstyne, we’ve heard that tonight’s murder victim and the victims of the two assaults in Millers Kill this past week were all gay men. Can you comment on this?”

“No,” he growled.

“Are the police investigating this as a hate crime? Are you linking it to the other assaults?”

“We pursue any murder to the fullest extent of our resources, whether you label it a hate crime or not. I’m of the opinion every murder is a hate crime, and I’m not going to treat one differently from another because of who the victim was.”

“So tonight’s victim was gay?”

He wanted to strangle Bevin. No, he wanted to strangle Clare. The camera light pinned him like an interrogation lamp.

“I can’t comment on the victim until we’ve notified the next of kin.”

“How about the assault victims?”

“Look, I’m not going to comment on this. I’m not going to out anyone on the eleven o’clock news.”

“Would you advise area residents who might be homosexual to take extra precautions?”

“Whoever did this tonight is on the loose until we bring him in. I’d advise all area residents to take extra precautions. Now, I need to wrap things up and make sure Reverend Fergusson gets home.” He smiled at Clare in a way that conveyed she might arrive in several pieces. “So we’ll have to cut this short.”

Bevin slid a finger along her throat in exactly the same line that the garrote had taken when it cut through Ingraham’s neck. The cameraman killed the light. “We know that the dead man is the president of BWI Development,” the reporter said, “and we’ll sit on his identity tonight. But I’ll give you fair warning that we’re going to run it on the five-thirty show tomorrow. This is going to be a big story.”

He waited until Bevin and the gorilla had decamped before taking Clare’s elbow. “You,” he said, his voice barely audible. “In the car. Now.”

“What about the dogs?”

“In the back.” He steered her toward the squad car. “I’m going to sign out with MacAuley and Durkee.” He reached through the window on the driver’s side to unlock the back doors. “Then you and I are going to have a little talk.”

Things were winding down. Dr. Scheeler was gone, the mortuary van was pulling out, and the Channel 6 news team was loading their equipment. Durkee was bent over the electrical cords running from his car to the lamps. All but a few hard-core spectators had drifted away.

“Make sure you clear out the last of those,” he said to Lyle, jerking his thumb at the remaining handful of gawkers. One of the tungsten lights blinked out, and the thicket was suddenly half-dark, heavy with mist and shadows. The pole clattered as Durkee telescoped it down. “I’m taking Reverend Fergusson home.”

“Hey, you’ve had a long day,” Lyle said, folding his arms across his chest. “Why don’t you head on home and let me take care of her? I want to go back to the station anyway, to get my report down.”

“Do you know what she did? She told that reporter it was Ingraham. And she told her he was gay. And that the other guys were gay. It’s gonna be all over the news that Millers Kill is running rampant with hate crimes. God! I could…” He wasn’t sure what he could do.

“Let me handle it, then. Give yourself a chance to calm down.”

“Oh no. I want to tell her exactly how bad she’s screwed us. When I get done, she’s not going to pick up her newspaper at the front door without running it past me first.” He exhaled.

Lyle opened his mouth and then shut it again. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

“Yeah. G’night.” He stalked back to his squad car, got in, buckled up, turned on the ignition, and threw the car into reverse without saying a word. He looked over his shoulder, ignoring the woman in the passenger seat, and discovered two hairy heads blocking his rear view. “Down!” he said. The dogs whined briefly and then lowered themselves, paws pitter-pattering on the cruiser’s vinyl upholstery as they arranged themselves on the backseat. He rolled backward between two trees, turned around, and drove slowly over the grass to the park entrance. He nosed through the gates, looked both ways, then bumped the car over the curb onto Mill Street.

“Well?” Clare said. “Say something!”

“You broke your promise to me.”

“I did not!”

“Yes, you did. You stood right in front of me and promised you wouldn’t talk to the press about this.”

“That was when there were only two attacks. For God’s sake, Russ, a man has been murdered! That’s more important than some exercise in spin control.”

He turned on her at that. “Damn it! Do you really think that’s what I’m worried about? Bad press?” He snapped his attention back to the road. “You insult me.” She glanced at him and then looked down. “You think my job is about solving crimes?” he continued. “It isn’t. Solving a crime means I’ve already failed. My job is preventing crimes. And you and Sheena, Queen of the Reporters, have just made that more difficult.”

“By telling the truth?”

“Your version of the truth.”

“Oh, come off it. If you mean to tell me you still don’t think these attacks are connected, I will laugh in your face. I swear I will. It’s time to speak out, Russ. It’s past time.”

He swung the cruiser onto Main Street. “Fine! Preach against prejudice. Start a voter initiative to change the state’s constitution. Get up a gay-pride parade and march it down Main Street. I don’t care so long as you have a permit. But don’t compromise my investigation and start a panic because you’ve decided the three cases are connected!”

“I don’t need your permission to help people! And I don’t need your permission to speak out against hatefulness! If you had warned the press Saturday that someone was going around beating up gay men, maybe Bill Ingraham wouldn’t have been caught in the bushes with his pants down!”

The light at Main and Church turned red and he slammed on his brakes, throwing them both against their shoulder harnesses. The dogs barked and scrabbled against the seat for purchase. He twisted so he could look at her head-on. Her hazel eyes were glittering in the light from the dashboard and he could see patchy red spots high on her cheeks.

“Is that what you think? Is that what you really think?” His rage, which had been feeding on each exchange like a fire consuming logs, died out. She opened her mouth, closed it again, and compressed her lips. Her eyes shifted away from his. “It is,” he said, a part of him surprised at how much the realization hurt. “You think I’m responsible for Ingraham’s death.”

“No. I said he might have acted differently if…if he had been aware…” She sounded strange as she tried to backpedal. It wasn’t like her.

The light turned green, and he faced forward, his eyes fixed on the road. They traveled the length of Church Street in silence. He turned onto Elm and drove up the rectory drive, then put the car into park.

“Russ,” she said, “I didn’t mean it like that. Please.”

He popped the locks and got out. He released the grateful dogs, who tumbled over themselves exiting the back seat.

“Russ…”

He looked at her over the cruiser’s roof, thought about tossing off some line about cops always having critics, then found he couldn’t. He didn’t have the energy to playact with her. He shook his head. “Never mind. It’s been a long day. Just…never mind.”

Clare stood at the edge of the drive, looking at him, twisting the bottom of her sweatshirt. The dogs were already nosing at the front door, whining to be let in. He got back into the cruiser and started it up.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she blurted out. “Russ, please. I’m sorry….”

He waved a hand in acknowledgment as he pulled out of the drive. He could see her face as he drove down the street, a white oval in the darkness. The image stayed with him for a long time.

Chapter Twelve

When Clare opened her front door the next morning to let Bob and Gal out, the air was clear, the grass and leaves were sparkling in the sunlight, and she felt rotten. Guilty. Lower than a worm’s belly, as Grandmother Fergusson would have said. She leaned against one of the columns on the front porch, her hands thrust in the pockets of her seersucker robe, and tried to take some pleasure in the sight of two happy dogs sniffing out every corner of a perfect morning. But all she could envision was Russ’s face, changing from anger to pain as she fumbled and missed her one chance to take back her hurtful words.

Well, she had gotten what she wanted. She had taken a stand against homophobic violence and had raised the red flag against hate crimes. And all it had taken was eviscerating her best friend.

She walked barefoot down the steps and across the lawn to the newspaper box to retrieve Monday’s Post-Star. She took the paper back to the porch and sat on the steps, but she couldn’t bring herself to open it. She didn’t want to deal with murder, protests, arrests, real estate developments, and PCBs. Since when is Russ Van Alstyne my best friend? she wondered. It’s not like we go out bowling together or anything. Still, it rang true. She groaned and beat herself over the head a few times with the newspaper. It didn’t make her feel any better. She dropped it in her lap and bent forward, burying her face in her hands.

“God,” she said, “I believe you brought me here to Millers Kill for a reason. But so far, I mostly seem to be screwing up my own life. Please help me out here. I need to know what it is I’m supposed to be doing.”

Somewhere beyond the open double doors, the phone rang.

Clare raised her eyebrows and rose from her seat on the porch steps. In her experience, God didn’t respond to prayer with a phone call outlining His thoughts and expectations, but she was willing to keep an open mind. She tossed the newspaper on the sofa and went into the kitchen to pick up the phone.

“Hello, Reverend Fergusson? This is Peggy Landry.”

Clare couldn’t have been more surprised if it had been the Almighty. “Ms. Landry,” she said. “Um…how can I help you?”

“We haven’t met, but I believe you know my niece. Diana Berry? She’s getting married July Thirty-first.”

The whirl of speculation snapped firmly into place. Diana Berry and her fiancé, Cary—what? Wall? Ward? Wood, that was it. She remembered wondering how anyone could name a child Cary Wood. Diana had been in twice, once in February to reserve the church and once in April with her fiancé in tow for the first of the mandatory three counseling sessions. She had mentioned that her family was from the area.

“Yes, of course. I’ve met Diana and Cary. Although I haven’t seen either of them for quite some time.” In fact, the pair needed to get back in touch with her about the rest of their counseling if they wanted to tie the knot in her church.

“Diana lives in the city”—by this, Clare presumed she meant New York—“and her mother, my sister, lives over in Syracuse, so I’m helping out with organizing on this end. I’ve been running myself ragged lately with business, and I’m really falling behind on this wedding thing. But! Things have happened this weekend, and that’s why I’m calling you.”

Clare thought for a moment that Peggy was referring to Bill Ingraham’s death. She blinked. No. The jaunty tone, the brisk speech—Peggy Landry had no idea that the man who was developing her property had been bloodily murdered the night before. Good Lord. She clapped her hand over her mouth. Should she say something, or just let the woman rattle on?

“We always have a family get-together over the Fourth of July, and this year a bunch of people decided to stay on for a few days. I thought, What a perfect time to get all the last wedding details pinned down! So I was wondering if Diana and the florist and I could drop by the church sometime today to work on the floral design.”

“The floral design,” Clare echoed.

“Yes, well, evidently you can’t just order up flowers in vases and have someone set them here and there anymore. Nowadays, the florist wants to design the site, so we need to get her in to take a look.”

Clare weighed her options. Monday was her day off. Also Mr. Hadley’s day off, since the sexton worked all weekend, cleaning up before and after the services. She wouldn’t be able to pass the buck by having him open the church for Landry and company. She would have to be there herself. Talk with Peggy Landry. Find out more about Bill Ingraham.

“Of course, Ms. Landry. I’d be happy to meet you at the church and let you all in. When’s a good time for you?”

They agreed on ten o’clock. Clare decided not to use her two hours lead time to go running—she still felt yesterday’s race in the slight stiffness in her thighs—but instead dressed quickly and put in a call to Robert Corlew’s office. Corlew was a member of St. Alban’s vestry. He was also a prosperous local builder, whose work ran to small developments with names like Olde Mill Town Homes and the occasional strip mall. Clare figured he might have some information on Ingraham and the Landry property, seeing as how he was in the same business. He hadn’t arrived at his office yet, but she left him a message.

She let herself consider her sudden interest in Ingraham’s background while she was scrambling eggs and brewing coffee. After all, if she had been right last night when she cut Russ down, his murder was more or less random, the result of being the wrong man in the wrong place. Her time would be better spent organizing that march Russ had suggested. But as soon as Peggy Landry had identified herself, Clare had felt a powerful impulse to take a closer look at Ingraham. What had Russ said to her last night? “Your version of the truth”? There’s ‘I’m right’ and there’s ‘you’re right’ and there’s ‘what’s right’, her grandmother Fergusson had always said. You can’t have but one of them. Which one will it be? The only way she was ever going to be able to face Russ again was if she let go of “I’m right” and went looking for “what’s right.”

The great Gothic doors of St. Alban’s, polished by the sun and framed by masses of summer flowers, seemed preferable as a spot for getting married, rather than the cool and shadowed interior of the church. Of course, Clare thought as she unlocked the doors, the florist couldn’t charge for the design if that were the case. She had just emerged from the sacristy, where the light switches were, when she heard the clatter of sandals on the tiled floor of the nave.

“Hello? Anybody home?”

“Over here,” Clare called.

Diana Berry resembled her aunt—angular, tanned, no-nonsense. Her fair hair was long and loose, where Peggy Landry’s was cropped close to her head, not a strand out of place. But Clare could envision her at her aunt’s age, a tough businesswoman or one of those relentlessly efficient wife-mother-volunteer types who ran their communities. Or both. She and Peggy were dressed much as Clare was—sleeveless blouses and chinos or jeans. The woman accompanying them was obviously the florist, an Asian woman of perhaps forty, whose thick, bobbed hair swung along her jawline as she glanced around and then approached the altar.

“Fabulous space,” she said.

“Thanks,” Clare replied.

“Reverend Clare!” Diana said. “It’s great to see you again. Thanks for letting us in on such short notice. This is Lin-bai Tang, our floral designer, and my aunt, Peggy Landry.”

Clare shook hands all around.

“What is it,” Tang asked, her eyes taking in the ornate woodwork, “mid-nineteenth century?”

“Started in 1857, completed just after the end of the Civil War.”

“Wonderful. I adore Gothic churches. Come here, Diana, let’s start at the altar rail. I see faux-medieval swags with flowers that look as if they’ve been gathered on the riverbank by the Lady of Shallot….” She whipped out a notebook and a measuring tape.

“Wow,” Clare said. “She’s good. I don’t know what her flowers look like, but she’s good.”

“She’s the hottest floral designer in Saratoga. We were lucky to get her at the height of the season. My brother-in-law’s dropping a fortune on this thing. For the amount he’s spending, the bride and groom ought to give him a money-back guarantee.”

“Where’s the reception?”

“At the Stuyvesant Inn. Do you know it?”

Clare blinked. “I do, yes.”

“Of course, we think of it as Grandfather’s house. It used to be ours before my grandmother sold it. Enormous old place, impossible to keep up.”

Clare got the distinct feeling Ms. Landry wouldn’t mind trying, though. “The inn’s lovely,” she said. “How nice for you that it’s available for a family celebration.”

“Well, it’s been a pain to try and handle the latest owners, I can tell you.” Landry sat down in a pew, tipped the kneeler into position with one sandal-shod foot, and propped her feet up on the red velvet surface. “Fussy little pair. All these rules we have to work around. ‘No drinks in the parlor. No high heels in the music room.’ They’re trying to make it a historically correct tomb. They’ve been running it as an inn for a year, and I can’t imagine how they’re managing to stay in business.”

Clare sat down sideways in the pew in front of Landry’s, crossing her arms over the smooth, age-darkened wood. Ron Handler’s unflattering description of Peggy Landry suddenly made sense. Why hadn’t he and Stephen mentioned that Landry’s niece was one of their clients?

“It’s a shame you couldn’t have seen it in its heyday, when my grandfather was alive. It had real elegance then, and comfort, and dash. I still have quite a few family pieces at my own house.” She stretched a well-toned arm along the back of the pew. “If I ever manage to get the place back in the family, I’ll have a head start on furnishing it properly.”

Clare, who had been trying to fit Emil Dvorak, the Stuyvesant Inn, Peggy Landry, and Bill Ingraham into some sort of logical picture, snapped back to attentiveness. “You’re hoping to own the inn someday? But the new innkeepers just bought it a year or so ago, from what I understand.”

Landry snorted. “That pair are the third owners in the last decade. So far, the Landry house has proved too expensive for a summer home and too distant to be a retreat from New York City. I’m not particularly confident that it’ll be any more manageable as an inn.” She snorted. “I suppose the fact that I still refer to it as ‘the Landry house’ gives my feelings away. Up till now, I’ve never had the wherewithal to make it more than a pipe dream.”

“You must be delighted about the new spa being built,” Clare said, keeping her voice as casual as possible.

“Delighted? Yes, I suppose you could say that. It makes it sound as if it’s a piece of good fortune that happened by chance, though.” She crossed her arms over her chest, crinkling the smooth white cotton of her blouse. “I’ve worked like a dog for three years putting this thing together. Not to mention all the time before, keeping my ear to the ground, building up my capital, forgoing the income I could have made if I had done what everyone said and put a campground or a couple of rustic cabins at the site.” She smiled in a satisfied way. “I knew the potential that was there. I knew that land could be used for something much, much bigger. I played my hand out, and now I’ve got the pot, metaphorically speaking.”

“You must be worried about the protests and all. I mean, if the resort doesn’t go forward…”

“Won’t happen. I guarantee it. The protesters are just a bunch of tree-huggers blowing smoke. They have no real political clout.”

What if the head of the development company is dead? Clare thought. She absolutely did not want to be the one to break that piece of news to Peggy Landry. She cast about for an innocuous response. “Um…I confess I don’t know how it works, but what if the state looks at the site again because of this new pollution problem?”

“We’ve gotten an absolutely clean bill of health in all the site surveys up to now. I don’t expect that will change.”

Landry sounded utterly sure of her statement. Clare raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you worried that an inquiry, or recertification or whatever, would bring the development to a halt for however long the DEP was poking around? I thought Mr. Ingraham”—the name recalled the image of what she had seen in the scrub at Riverside Park, and her breath caught for a moment before she could go on—“said he would withdraw from the project if they even got involved.”

“John Opperman and I agree that’s unnecessary. We have a perfectly legal right to proceed full speed with the development, which means the bulk of the work would be done before the DEP finished with its initial evaluations here in Millers Kill. The workers are supposed to be on site today. We need to pick up the pace in order to get all the outside work done before winter.” She looked distracted for a moment and reached for her purse. “In fact, I need to speak with John.” She retrieved a cell phone. “If you don’t mind, Reverend Fergusson?”

Amusement won out over amazement at the sheer brass of being asked to remove herself from a pew in her own church so that Landry could use it as an office. Clare slid out of the pew and wandered to the back of the church, where the great double doors were open to a warm breeze, the smell of roses, and the faint sound of children playing in the gazebo across the street. It seemed strange to be planning for winter at the delicious peak of summer. It also seemed strange to think of death in the middle of such a cornucopia of life. She thought of the old words from the graveside committal service, which she had always disliked for their fatalistic view: “In the midst of life we are in death.”

Behind her, Diana Berry and Lin-bai Tang had descended to the center aisle, exclaiming over the possibilities of sprays and ribbons and candelabra. Tang’s measuring tape snapped briskly as they made their plans. If the rest of the celebration was anything on the scale of the flowers, this would be the wedding of the century. Peggy Landry’s brother-in-law was either rolling in it or about to go broke. She wondered how much Landry had sunk into the development. Would she be ruined if the deal didn’t come off? What about the construction workers and everyone else employed by the project? She shook her head. Anything she might think was sheer speculation at this point. Maybe Ingraham’s partner would simply carry on without him. Of course, that begged the question of whether the construction at the location of the old quarry was indeed responsible for the rise in PCB levels.

She was suddenly struck by a thought. What if someone who wanted to stop the project knew that Peggy Landry and Ingraham’s partner were planning to proceed full steam ahead? Would the death of the president of BWI slow things down? Long enough for the DEP to address the environmental concerns and halt the development for a re-testing of the site? She reached up to her hair and twirled her ponytail into a bun, thinking furiously. She wished she had paid closer attention to the business end of her parents’ small aviation company. She might know more about what happens when a company’s principal owner dies.

“Reverend Clare? Is everything all right?” Diana Berry’s voice broke her concentration. Clare let her impromptu bun fall back into a ponytail and dropped her hands. “You look a little upset,” Diana continued.

“No, I’m fine. Just thinking.” The florist was standing next to the young woman, tucking the measuring tape back into her purse. Clare glanced toward Peggy Landry, who nodded and raised her hand, then said something into her cell phone. “All set?” Clare said. “Did you get everything you need?”

“Yes, thank you,” Lin-bai Tang said. “It’ll be a real pleasure working in your space.”

Peggy Landry finished up with her call and replaced the phone in her purse. She rose and joined them. “Sorry, everyone. Business before pleasure.”

Diana grinned. “Business is your pleasure, Aunt Peggy. I’m amazed I could tear you away today.”

“I have to run,” the florist announced, looking at her watch. “Diana, I’ll write up the plan and fax a copy to you and to your mother, along with the estimates.” She held out her hand to Clare. “Thank you again for letting us in on such short notice, Reverend Fergusson. Bye, all!” With a final swing of her heavy hair, she was gone.

Clare unclipped her key ring from a belt loop. “Are you two all set?” she asked.

“I am,” Diana said. “Next stop for me is the mall near Glens Falls. I’m checking out tablecloths and napkins for the reception.”

“Doesn’t the Stuyvesant Inn supply the linens?” Clare asked.

“Oh, of course. But you know how it is with a hotel or caterers. You can get any color you want, so long as it’s white. I’m going to have pale floral undercloths with a filmy overcloth caught up around the rim of the table with tiny clips of flowers. And solid napkins picking up one of the floral colors. Doesn’t it sound stunning?”

Clare thought it sounded criminally extravagant, but she held her tongue. “Mmm,” she said.

“Aunt Peggy, is Mal going to be able to pick you up?” Diana continued. “I don’t mind running you, but we’ll be all day trying to fit everything in.”

Her aunt pointed to her purse. “I called him. He’s on his way. He just got out of bed. You know Mal.”

Diana gave a look that said that she knew Mal very well. “All right. I’m off. But look, I’ve got my phone, so if he bails out on you for whatever reason, call me.” She shook hands with Clare. “Thanks again, Reverend Clare. I’m so glad I picked your church for the most important day of my life.”

She was through the door and halfway down the walk when Clare remembered, calling after her, “I need to see you two for more counseling sessions!” Diana waved in acknowledgment but did not pause. Clare sighed.

“Do engaged couples still have to do counseling?” Landry said. “I thought that went the way of ladies wearing hats in church. It’s not like they haven’t already done everything already.”

Clare was reminded of her mother’s response when her brother Brian had said the same thing during his girlfriend’s first visit: You haven’t done it in my house.

“If the Episcopal church is going to put its official stamp of approval on a couple, it wants to be satisfied the pair knows what they’re doing. Priests can refuse to marry a couple who seem unready for the responsibilities of marriage.”

“Really? Does that ever happen?”

Clare shook her head. “Not much. What’s more common is that the priest might schedule more premarital counseling, or direct the couple to other professionals who can deal with the problem areas—a sex therapist, a financial planner, what have you. It’s weird, really, when you think about it. An engaged couple will spend months picking out menus and flowers and clothes, but only three hours sitting down and talking about what happens after they make a lifetime commitment.”

Landry smiled cynically. “Well, it’s hardly a lifetime commitment anymore, is it?”

“It should be,” Clare said. The words made her think about Russ, and she felt a sting. Enough about marriage. She wanted to know more about Bill Ingraham. She shoved her hands into her pockets and encountered her key ring. “Look, Peggy, if you have to wait awhile for your ride, why don’t you come over to the rectory? It’s just next door.”

Landry slid her purse strap over her shoulder, her long, thin fingers caressing the leather. “My nephew is supposed to pick me up. Mal is nothing if not unreliable, but he did say he was getting into the car as soon as he hung up, so I ought to stay here. If he doesn’t find me where he expects, he’s likely to get distracted, and then I won’t see him again until Tuesday morning.”

“Does he live in Millers Kill?”

Landry let out a short laugh. “He doesn’t live anywhere right now. No, that’s not entirely true. He’s staying at my house until either he can get his act together or I lose all patience and throw him out.”

“Did he lose his job? Or is it that he just doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life?”

“I think he knows what he wants to do. He’s just having trouble living a life of wealth and leisure without any visible means of support.”

Clare grinned. “Yes, I’ve heard that can be tricky. Are you sure I can’t get you to—”

“My God, I can’t believe it. He’s broken his land speed record.” Landry gripped Clare’s arm and tugged her through St. Alban’s great double doors. Stepping into the sunshine from the thick stone interior was like being released from an ancient prison, going from dimness into light, from cool to warm, from stillness to life. Clare couldn’t help closing her eyes and lifting her face to the sun for a moment before turning to secure the antiquated iron lock. She could hear Landry striding across the lawn toward the parking lot on the opposite side of Elm Street. Clare dropped the keys back into her pocket and trotted toward the lot, where Landry was standing beside a Volvo sedan.

“Don’t worry, I won’t keep you all day,” Landry was saying to the driver. She turned to Clare. “Thanks, Reverend Fergusson. Look, about Diana and Cary’s counseling. I’m throwing a party for them out at my place this Friday. Seven-thirty. Come an hour early and I promise I’ll lock the happy couple in the den with you and let you go at it.” Her gaze flicked over Clare’s outfit. “We’ll be dressing. Oh, let me introduce you to my nephew. Mal, come out of there and say hi.”

The young man who reluctantly got out from behind the steering wheel could have stepped just as reluctantly from the pages of a glossy magazine. He was beautiful, in the full-lipped, thin-bodied, blank-eyed way of models. His shining hair fell in an artless tousle that could only have come from frequent and expensive attention, and his five o’clock shadow was more of a statement of style than a missed shave.

“Malcolm, this is Clare Fergusson. She’ll be officiating at Diana’s wedding. Clare, Malcolm Wintour.”

Upon closer viewing, Clare could see he wasn’t quite as young as she had thought. Telltale lines framed his eyes, which were extremely dilated. It looked as if this exotic hothouse specimen had taken some sort of pepper-upper before breaking that land speed record. “How do you do,” she said, shaking his hand. His grip was stronger than she would have guessed from his fashionably wasted frame. He dropped his gaze and mumbled like a shy adolescent. It sounded like “Pleasameetcha.”

“I’m afraid we have to get going. Come along, Mal, lots of stops to make before I can turn you free.” Malcolm got back behind the wheel and leaned over to unlock the passenger door for his aunt.

Clare bit the inside of her lip in frustration. She had spent all her time talking about weddings and the development, and now Peggy was leaving and she didn’t know a thing more about Bill Ingraham than she had sitting on her front porch. Weddings. The development. The development.

“Peggy, I’d love to visit the site and see where the new spa is going to be.”

Landry paused in the act of sliding into the passenger seat. “What?”

“The development. I’d like to drive out and see the development. There’s been so much talk about it, pro and con, I’d really like to get out there, see what it’s all about, get a feel for what sort of jobs are going to be created. So I can convey that to my congregation.” She flushed a little at that instant fabrication. Now she would have to write a sermon about the development to keep herself honest.

Landry frowned again. “It’s pretty much a bunch of rough-plowed roads, holes in the ground, and big piles of dirt, Reverend Fergusson. I don’t think you’d get much from it at this stage.”

“Please?” She copied her mother’s wheedling voice, like sugar syrup over crushed ice. “It’d mean so much to me.”

Landry gestured with her hands, half in puzzlement, half in surrender. “Okay. Sure. When?”

“Today? It’s my day off, and I don’t have anything scheduled. You did say they were working today.”

Landry checked her slim watch. “It’ll take me at least another three hours to hit the tent rental, the craft store, and the lighting place. Then I need lunch…. Shall we say three o’clock? That should give me enough time.”

“Three o’clock it is.”

“Do you need directions?”

“No, no,” Clare said. “I’ll just follow the road until I hit the dirt pile.”

Chapter Thirteen

The road leading up to the future Algonquin Spa was dirt and gravel, narrow, marked by switchbacks every quarter mile as it made its way up the mountain. It put Clare in mind of a hunting-camp road, so when she reached the end, she had to blink three times in order to reconcile what she had been envisioning with what was actually before her.

An area the size of two football fields had been denuded of trees, terraced into four levels, and scraped flat to the yellow-orange soil. Several openings had been cut into the trees surrounding the building site, all but their first few feet hidden from view by the dense forest. She could see pallets of lumber covered in clear plastic tarps and barrels of steel rebars, waiting for the start of construction. Dump trucks, excavators, bulldozers, and a half dozen other machines she couldn’t name dotted the site like dinosaurs grazing, but the only engine she could hear running was the Shelby’s, purring quietly after its chug up the mountain. Nothing was moving. In fact, the place seemed unpopulated, with the exception of a few hard-hatted men clumped in front of a long trailer. There was an uneven line of pickups, interspersed with a token car or two, to her left. She pulled in next to a Ford truck with a toolbox in the bed and a gun rack in the window. Probably not a lot of Sierra Club members here, she thought as she got out of her car. The sense of openness and clear sky was dazzling after the tunnel of trees that was the road. It smelled good, earth and oil and the wet odor of new concrete, like the small airfields around her parents’ place. It had heated up since morning, but despite the strength of the sun beating the soil into powder-cake dryness, there was enough of a cooling breeze from the surrounding woods to make it comfortable. Clare pocketed her keys and walked over to the trailer.

The cluster of men loosened a little as she approached. There were five or six of them, in dirt-stiffened jeans and well-worn T-shirts featuring NASCAR racing, a plumbing company advertisement, and the Desiderata. One man wore an illustrated catalog of sexual positions on his chest. She decided, all things considering, to address the Desiderata guy.

“Hi, there. I’m supposed to meet Peggy Landry at three. Can you tell me where to find her?”

“Dunno,” the man said. “She was here for about five minutes and then took off again.”

“You ain’t here with Leo Waxman, are you?” the NASCAR-shirted man asked. “From the state geologist’s office?”

“Nope,” she said, “I’m just here to get an eyeful of the site. Peggy told me I could have the three-dollar tour.”

The one with the educational shirt grinned at her, revealing that while he may have known all about sex, he had a way to go with dental hygiene. “Well, we’ve all been taken off duty for now, so I can show you around, baby. You wanna see my big machine?”

The big guy in the plumbing shirt whacked him. “Shut up, Charlie.” He looked at Clare. “You a friend of Ms. Landry’s, ma’am?”

Clare smiled beatifically and gave them what she thought of as her Touched by an Angel look. “I’m her priest,” she said, stretching the truth. “Reverend Clare Fergusson of St. Alban’s Church.”

The leer vanished off the face of Mr. Sexual Positions, and his eyes darted around frantically, evidently looking for a rock to crawl under. The big guy whacked him again, grinning. “Ha! Ya mook!” He nodded to Clare. “Pleased to meet you, Reverend. I’m Ray Yardhaas. Like Charlie here said, we were called off duty ’bout an hour ago, after Ms. Landry had gone. We’re just waiting to hear if we’re going to work again today or if we can go home. I’m afraid if you came out to see the big dig, you’re out of luck.”

“Actually, I was interested in seeing the grounds,” she said. “Not that I don’t have enough of the kid in me to enjoy great big construction machines.” She glanced at the long trailer, which could only have been the field office. “Just this morning, Peggy told me work would be going on as usual. How come you all were pulled off the job?”

“They don’t tell us why, ma’am.” The big man sounded more amused than offended. “Something’s up, though. Ms. Landry no sooner gets here than she gets a call and takes off; then the geologist shows up to meet with Opperman, but he ain’t—isn’t—here; then we get a call from him, telling us to lay off until he gets back to us. Last time I saw so much telephoning back and forth on a job, the bank had pulled the financing. Sure hope that’s not what’s happening here.”

“I’m betting that one of the guys who didn’t show up today’s called in a fake bomb threat, so’s we can all take off,” said the Desiderata guy. “We should have gotten a vacation day anyway, since the Fourth was on Sunday.”

“Knock it off,” Ray said. “You’re getting paid to hang around and tell lies about fish, ain’tcha? If he closes down the site, we can all go home on full pay. Better than the mooks who never showed up today.”

Clare had a pretty good idea of what it was that had caused the flurry of telephoning and the work stoppage. “Is Bill Ingraham usually here while you’re working?”

Ray thumbed at the trailer. “Right in there. He’s a hands-on kind of boss, Bill is. Hasn’t been in today, though.”

The guy in the sexual positions T-shirt sniggered. “Maybe he’s found some cute young—”

“Cut it,” Ray said, spearing the other man with a look. When he spoke again to Clare, he raised his voice slightly so everyone could hear. “Bill’s a good guy. He knows the building trade from the ground up and he always treats us fair. His personal life’s his own business.” He glanced at Mr. Sexual Positions. “Me, I kinda wonder about guys who spend a lot of time thinking about it, you know?”

The other men hooted. Within seconds, Ray’s target was the eye of a hurricane of jokes about his own proclivities. They were moving past men and getting to sheep when Ray cupped a hand beneath Clare’s elbow and drew her a few feet away.

“Sorry you had to hear that, ma’am. These guys, they’re not used to having”—he looked as if he were struggling between the words lady and priest—“to watch their language.”

Clare compressed her lips to keep from grinning. “Thank you, Ray. I appreciate your concern. So, what about the tour I was promised? I’m guessing I’m not supposed to clamber about all on my own. Can you spare me a few minutes to show me around?”

Ray frowned, looked back at the trailer, then at Clare. “I don’t know, ma’am,” he said finally. “Without an okay from one of the bosses—they’ve been keeping a tight watch on this place since the tree-huggers started kicking about PCBs and all that. Not that I think you’re here to cause trouble,” he added quickly.

She wasn’t as sure as Ray was. “What do you think about the PCB talk? Do you have any worries, working here day in and day out?”

He shook his head. “I think it’s a load of bull puckies. Bunch of hysterical women who don’t know anything about construction and who’d like to make it a federal offense to cut down a tree. I’m here, moving dirt and sucking dust five days a week, and I’m as healthy as a horse.” He jerked his head in the direction of the other men. “And those guys were already brain-damaged.”

Clare grinned. “So there’s no danger to me if I look around, right?”

Ray looked unhappy. “Well, no, but I still think you need to wait until Ms. Landry is here herself. Why don’t you come back tomorrow? I’m sure everything will be back up to speed then. You’ll get a better idea of what we’re doing, anyway.”

“Ah, but today’s my day off,” she said, taking a few casual steps farther away from the trailer. “C’mon, Ray. Help me out.” She looked up at him, radiating sincerity and innocence. “It’s not my fault Peggy didn’t make our date. I’m here, just like she said, and this may be my only chance to see this place before the buildings go up. Show me around.” She waved her arm to indicate the whole site and followed her own gesture toward the nearest hole in the ground.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake—ma’am! Reverend!”

“What’s this going to be? Is this the main building?” She strode briskly around the edge of a rectangular excavation, trying to think of an intelligent question to ask. What do you think you’re going to find here? was the only one that came to mind. Russ’s voice, his face last night, seemed fixed in her consciousness. “Your version of the truth,” he had said. Maybe he was right. Maybe she wanted him to be right.

“Look,” Ray said, catching up with her. He gave an exasperated sigh, which she ignored. “Okay, I’ll show you around. But the rules say you gotta have a hard hat. So just stay there, okay? Just stay there while I get you one.”

“Absolutely. Anything you say.”

He dashed back to the trailer, banged inside, and emerged a few seconds later with an orange hard hat, which she dutifully strapped on. It made her hotter, but it wasn’t as bad as walking around a tarmac in a flight helmet, so she couldn’t complain. Then, true to his word, Ray showed her the site.

It wasn’t much to see, a bunch of half-finished foundations and trenches laid with pipes. Ray pointed out where the main lodge was going to be, the guest wings and the health club. She tried to envision the lawns and gardens as Ray described the layout, but it was hard to see anything except the raw gash in the forest. Ray was very fond of numbers, so she heard about the tons of cement, the gallons of sewage, the meters of piping, the square footage of the buildings. She listened and made appropriate comments, all the time waiting for something that would reveal more of Bill Ingraham to her, trying not to analyze the impulse that had made her jump on Peggy Landry for this chance to see the man’s last work in this world. Thinking too hard about her impulses always made them seem a little stupid. Better just to trust in her unconscious—or whoever it was directing her inner voice—and go with the flow.

Ray was going on about the inflow and the outflow to the whirlpools when she realized she hadn’t seen something she would have expected. “Where’s the pool?” she said. “I mean, they’re not just going to have hot tubs, are they? On a day like today, you’d really want to be outside, soaking up the sun.”

Ray pointed toward one of the openings cut into the forest. “That way.” They went up the earthen ramp linking one terrace to the next and walked out of the heat and into the coolness of the trees. “The pool for this place is something else. Bill designed it around the quarry. You come here as a guest in the summer, you’re going to feel like you’re back at the ole swimming hole”—he grinned at her—“except the ole swimming hole didn’t have a bar.” The road, two ruts of bald dirt sunk between overgrown grass and delicately stemmed wildflowers, curved and headed slightly downhill. “Best thing about it is, we’re killing two birds with one stone. Right now, the quarry’s set up as our cement works; plus, we’re getting all our stone for the paving and the walls out of it. So we’re digging out the pool just by working there. When we don’t need it anymore, we cement in the bottom, tile it, and there you go, just like the real thing, only better.”

“Wasn’t Mr. Ingraham”—she caught herself—“isn’t he worried about the PCBs? I assume this is the same quarry that was used for storage back in the seventies.”

The road opened up to a breathtaking view. They were at the upper end of the quarry, to one side of a curving cliff of pale rock that fell dramatically to the working quarry below. It sloped as it reached the lowest point and was riddled with ledges and dotted everywhere with stubbornly surviving plants. A narrow crevasse split the cliff, and Clare was delighted to see a thin waterfall pouring out of it, splashing over the scree and filling a wide, dark pool. “Water from the cleft,” she said, grinning at Ray. “Very biblical. Is that going to flow into the swimming pool?”

“Naw. That stream comes from up the mountain, and it’s too unreliable. When we started, it was gushing so fierce, you wouldn’t want to go near it, but by the end of July, it’ll just be a damp spot. Besides, there’s no way to guarantee the quality of the water. We’re gonna build a catch basin and channel it off the property. Put a screening wall of natural stone in front of it, so the guests can still see the water falling. It’ll be real pretty.”

Below, in the work pit, a rock crusher and a cement mixer squatted amid a tumble of rocks and enough bags of sand and chalk to stop a flood. The road Ray and Clare were standing on wound down in a curve to an earthen staging ground plowed out between the quarry and the trees. Three dump trucks, idle now, sat on the dirt, flanked by an excavator and someone’s Jeep. She took off her helmet to let the breeze cool her head. Ray was right: It would be pretty. If you didn’t worry about carcinogenic chemicals floating around with you, that is.

“Hey, there’s Leo Waxman,” Ray said, pointing. Clare squinted. She could make out a man approaching the natural pool across a field of scree. Wearing shorts and a backpack, he looked like a hiker. “Leo! Hey!” Ray headed down the steeply angled road in long strides Clare had to hop to keep up with. “Sorry,” Ray said, “you were asking about the PCB stuff, right? This place was cleaned out in the eighties by the feds. Leo Waxman here, he’s from the state geologist’s office. He’s been over this place two, three times now for the certifications. It’s clean. I’d take my grandkids here for a swim”—he grinned at her again— “except once the place is built, I won’t be able to afford to get through the gate.”

The peculiar flat tang of rock dust rose to meet her as they neared the quarry floor. “Hey! Leo!” Ray yelled again. The man in shorts stopped, reversed himself, and began picking his way down a rubble-strewn trail toward the machinery.

Leo Waxman was surprisingly young, with a goatee and ponytail that made him look more like a grad student than a state employee. He wiped his hands on his rumpled, sweat-stained shirt, hitched his backpack more comfortably on his shoulders, and reached for Ray’s hand. “Hiya, Ray. What are you doing down here?”

“Showing this lady around. Leo, this is Reverend Clare, um…”

“Fergusson,” Clare supplied.

“Leonard Waxman,” he said, shaking her hand. He glanced back up the curving road, as if to see if any other tourists would be emerging from the woods.

“Peggy Landry kindly said I could see the place. Since she’s not here, Ray volunteered to be my escort.” She raised her eyebrows at Waxman’s backpack. “I hear you’re the state geologist for this project. Are you here for business or pleasure?”

He shifted the backpack again. Clare could hear things clanking inside. “Business. Getting soil and water samples.”

“Again?” Ray asked. “Jeez, how many tests does it take to satisfy the government?”

Waxman smiled briefly. “You know how it goes. Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die. I get paid whether I think it’s necessary or not.”

“I thought the testing was all done and the site had been cleared,” Clare said. “I was under the impression that the protests in town were to try to persuade the aldermen to get the state to take another look, not that the certification process wasn’t complete.”

Waxman blinked. “Well, yes, you’re right. I’m doing ongoing monitoring—because of the local concerns. Actually, John Opperman asked me to do the testing. To be prepared if the case reopens.” He looked at her warily. “You aren’t with the Clean Water Action group, are you?”

“Me? Nope. I’m with the Episcopal church.” She opened her hands. “I’m just curious. I only moved to Millers Kill last November, so I don’t really have a good grasp of what the issues are.”

Waxman’s closed-off expression eased, and he hitched the backpack off his shoulders and set it on the ground. “It’s pretty straightforward. From the early fifties to the mid-seventies, General Electric made PCB-filled capacitors at their Hudson Falls and Fort Edward plants. The wastewater from cleaning the capacitors went into the Hudson and settled into the sediment, where it sits, waiting for the state, the EPA, and the Fish and Wildlife folks to figure out whether to let it lie and degrade or dredge it up in the hopes of getting it out.”

Clare waved a hand at the mountainside. “This is pretty far away from the Hudson.”

“Not as far as you might think. The river originates in these mountains. Adirondack aquifers feed the Hudson and—this is why the folks in your town are up in arms— Millers Kill.” He pointed to the rock cliff rising in front of them. “By the late sixties, the companies producing capacitors and the companies in charge of cleaning ’em up and disposing of them realized they had a problem on their hands. The usual technique—rinsing them—produced contaminated wastewater, which, when you released it into the environment, made a kind of toxic sludge. They were trying out different containment techniques, and one of the companies involved with solid-waste disposal came up with the idea of soaking the water into cellulose-filled containers—sort of like a giant sponge—and then capping them off and putting them someplace high and dry. Peggy Landry’s dad struck a deal with them to use this quarry as a storage site. Landry and the town split the profits. Of course, they didn’t really have the technology back then to safeguard adequately against seepage.” He wiped his hands on his shirt again. “That particular company went belly-up in ’seventy-four, G.E. stopped making the capacitators in ’seventy-seven, and the state cleaned this place up in ’seventy-nine.”

“So you don’t think the rise in PCBs in the town has anything to do with the digging going on here?” Clare said.

He shook his head. “Nope. No way.”

“How about the water coming from that crevasse? Does that go into the aquifer?”

“Yeah, it does. But that’s from a stream that originates way up. That gorge it runs through knifes right down the mountain. It’s never been used for storage or anything. Too inaccessible.”

“So where do you think the pollution’s coming from, then?”

“There was a fresh contamination site discovered in ’ninety-one,” he said, “if fresh is the right word to use. An abandoned mill that had been used by G.E. Tons of sediment, seepage into the rock and groundwater—very high percentage of the stuff. Some of it was almost pure PCB. This area has had some heavy winters and rainy summers since then, which causes the contaminated sediment and water to travel through the aquifers in ways it didn’t before. The PCB contamination in Millers Kill is coming from the Allen Mill site.” He nodded in a satisfied way.

“You sound pretty sure of yourself,” Clare said.

“I am.”

Ray laughed. “See why I’m not worried, Reverend?”

Waxman hoisted his backpack. “I was just about to take my Jeep back up. Why don’t I give you two a ride? It’s an awful steep road.”

“You done already?” Ray looked impressed. “You just got here a little while ago.”

Waxman popped the back gate of the Jeep and lifted his backpack inside. “You’re just used to the rate your guys work at, Ray. Fifteen minutes, coffee break, another fifteen minutes, cigarette break…”

Ray let out his short, explosive laugh. Waxman opened the passenger door and gestured for Clare to get in. She squeezed past the flipped-down front seat and climbed into the back, pushing aside crumpled shirts and shorts, empty soda cans, back issues of Science magazine, and an oily box containing unidentifiable engine parts. “Sorry about the mess,” Waxman said. Ray got in the front, the Jeep sagging to one side beneath his weight. Waxman hopped in and slammed the door. The Jeep’s ignition sounded as if it needed new spark plugs, and from the sound of the exhaust, a new muffler, as well. As Clare peered into the box, they lurched, and the Jeep began chugging up the hill.

“This is a bear to climb.” Waxman spoke loudly over the noises coming from the Jeep. “They’re going to have to regrade it if they expect to have regular traffic here.”

“Bill’s plan is to have a bunch of those little golf carts,” Ray said just as loudly. “People will be able to drive themselves all around the complex if they want to.”

Clare leaned forward. “How have you found working with Bill?” she asked Waxman.

There was no reply. For a moment, she thought she hadn’t been speaking loudly enough, but then Waxman said, “I don’t know him very well. Peggy, the landowner, is the person I deal with usually. And sometimes John Opperman. He’s responsible for the permits.”

A pothole jarred the Jeep, flinging Clare back into her seat. She jabbed at her hair, which was falling out of its twist in earnest now. She wasn’t going to get many insights from Waxman, evidently. “Are you used to large developments like this?” she shouted toward the front seat. “Or is this the first big project you’ve worked on?”

“This is the first I’ve soloed on,” Waxman yelled back. “I assisted on several surveys while I was getting my doctorate.”

Which couldn’t have been all that long ago, Clare thought. Everything about Waxman screamed graduate school poverty. He was probably still living off peanut butter sandwiches and Ramen noodles. The Jeep bumped hard again and let out an alarming rattle. “It must be gratifying, working for the state. I can’t imagine there are a lot of teaching jobs out there.”

“You got that right.” Waxman twisted the wheel and downshifted. “State and federal agencies hire a lot more geologists than universities do. Private’s really the way to go, though. You get a berth with an oil company, and you’re set for life, man.”

The Jeep heaved over the top of the hill and Waxman shifted into park. The sudden drop in noise level left Clare’s ears ringing. “Are you two headed back, or what?”

Ray turned around in his seat. “Anything else you’d like to see, ma’am?”

So far, the only thing she had gotten from this venture was a coating of dust and a couple of mosquito bites. She didn’t have any more of a feel for Bill Ingraham’s life than she’d had when she started out that morning. “What else is there?” she said, stalling.

“Well, up that way is going to be the waste-reclamation plant and the power plant,” Ray said, pointing to where the rutted track led up and out of sight between the trees. But there’s nothing there now but a dump. It’s a pretty-enough walk, if you like that sort of thing.” The tone of his voice revealed that he hoped she didn’t. “You can get real close to that gorge Leo was talking about. See it from above. Along this way.” He gestured back toward the way they had walked. “We’ve cleared land for a garage for those golf carts I was telling you about. There’s a helipad farther along the—”

“Whoa. Did you say helipad?”

“Yeah, but it’s only temporary. For bringing in cargo that’s too delicate to hump over the road, and for the VIPs to fly in and out. When construction finishes up, it’ll be converted to a tennis court.”

“I want to see the helipad.” Something in her voice must have been different, because Ray and Waxman looked at each other. Ray shrugged.

“Okay,” Waxman said. “The helipad it is.”

Chapter Fourteen

“We have to backtrack to the central complex and get on the other road there,” Waxman said.

The road leading back to the main site had been a pleasant walk but was a terrible ride. They lurched through the trees into the blinding sunlight of the construction area, then bounced along a beaten dirt track running along the uppermost terrace and plunged back into the forest. The Jeep jumped and jolted, until Clare thought she would suffer permanent kidney damage. The sample bottles in Waxman’s backpack clinked together violently.

“You okay back there?” Waxman shouted.

“Just great!” she said, grabbing the seat to avoid her head smashing into the roof.

“We’re going to pave all this over before they start rolling out those golf carts,” Ray explained loudly.

“That’s g—ouch!”

“Sorry,” Waxman shouted. “Rock. Here we are.” The tree-shrouded road opened into more brilliant July sunshine. Waxman stopped the Jeep. Ray hopped out, flipping his seat forward and extending a hand to Clare.

She staggered out of the backseat, feeling a sudden kinship with airsick passengers she had seen over the years. Her gratitude at touching the ground must have been the same as theirs. She took a deep breath.

The air was heavy with the smell of pine, warm asphalt, and oil. “Oh my,” she said. “I was expecting a little touch-down space. This is…professional.” The clearing was the size of a house lot, squared off and leveled. It had been fitted out with four pole-mounted lights in each corner for night landings, with a remote refueling tank parked next to a prefab shed, which she guessed held tools, compressors, and other maintenance requirements. Smack in the middle of the clearing was a tennis court–size asphalt square painted with directional markings that glowed whitely in the sun. Taking pride of place was—

“There it is,” Ray said. “It’s a helicopter. You seen one, you seen ’em all, if you ask me.”

“It’s a Bell Four Twenty-seven.” She prowled around the edges of the pad, taking it in from all angles. “A real classic. You can configure it in a half dozen ways. Very versatile. Like here, they’ve opted for a cargo door and boom.” The cargo door was shut, but the boom, a pair of struts holding a cigar-shaped winch pod, was still rigged with a net, which puddled on the tarmac like abandoned rigging from a long-ago sailing ship. Just the sight of it made her long to be up and away.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Waxman and Ray exchange glances. Waxman tugged his baseball cap farther down over his eyes. “Are you a big, um, helicopter buff?”

“I was a pilot in the army,” she said. “And my folks have a small aviation company.” She ducked under the tail boom and peeked into the cabin window. There were two comfortable seats backed against the partial bulkhead separating the cockpit from the cabin, with a curtain of wide webbing to protect traveling VIPs from shifting cargo in the rear. She moved up a step to look into the cockpit and rested her hand on the handle of the pilot’s door. It turned in her grip. It was unlocked! She hissed in excitement and twisted the door open.

“Oh, hey, Reverend!” Ray protested, but she had already hiked herself over the lip into the cockpit.

“Hello there,” she said. She dropped into the seat. The controls were neat and streamlined, much simpler than the bulky instrument displays she had been used to. Must be the new digital systems. She hadn’t ever flown a 427, but she had logged a lot of hours in its military version, the Kiowa.

“Reverend! You shouldn’t be in there!” Ray’s voice came from behind her, through the open cargo door.

“I just want a peek at the cockpit,” she said. “Then I’ll get right out, I promise.”

“Reverend!”

The windscreen was huge, much larger than the ones she had seen in the army. The view from the air would be fantastic. She tapped at the key snug in the ignition, then looked at the fuel gauge. It was reading half-full.

The old ache to fly rose in her chest. She knew exactly what it would feel like to bring these panels to life and begin the preflight check, each movement as much of a ritual as those she used when consecrating the Host during the Eucharist. She could imagine the moment when the rumble and whine grew muffled, her headset connecting her to a world that turned and centered on the machine. The fierce vibrations through metal and bone, her eyes and hands moving over the instruments, and then, at that moment when she lifted away from earth, frustrated gravity pressing her into her seat as she broke its grip and soared into the sky.

She suddenly thought of a verse from Matthew: “Lay down all you have and follow me.” She smiled one-sidedly. God certainly shouldn’t have any complaints in that department. She had given up all this, every lovely leaping moment, to follow Him to Millers Kill, and for what? A congregation that was largely nonexistent in the summer and a man she shouldn’t try to be friends with. She let her head drop back until it almost touched the edge of the passenger seat behind her. A man whose feelings she had unexpectedly lacerated with her big mouth and her insistence that she had a monopoly on truth. The only truth was that a man was dead. And two men had been beaten. And she had no business with any of it.

Make whole that which is broken. Her head came up again. She wrapped her hands around the steering yoke. What was that? Was that a verse from Scripture? Along with the words came a memory of Paul Foubert’s face in the flashing emergency lights. Todd MacPherson’s brother in the waiting room, holding back tears. Russ’s expression when she blindsided him in his patrol car. Make whole that which is broken. “Is that it?” she said. “Is that for me? Does this come from You, or am I just remembering something? Are You there, or am I talking to myself?”

Of course, there wasn’t any answer. Just the rising heat in the cockpit and the familiar comfort of the pilot’s chair. But it wasn’t familiar. This was someone else’s ship, and she didn’t belong here. She suddenly felt stifled by the small enclosure. She kicked open the door and jumped out, nearly landing on Ray Yardhaas.

His big, broad face was crinkled with worry. “I don’t think you should have done that, Reverend.”

She laid her hand on his arm. “I know. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry, Ray.” She turned, shut the door, and twisted the handle, sealing it tight. “Let’s head back, shall we?”

Waxman was looking at her with a peculiar expression. Remember, wherever you go, you’re an ambassador for the United States, her grandmother used to tell her. As an ambassador for the Episcopal church, she was evidently working without a portfolio. “I like to bless flying vehicles,” she said in an attempt to reassure him that she really was a priest and not an incipient thief. “Want me to do your Jeep?”

His face twitched with the strain of not showing what he thought of that offer. He shook his head. “Um, I’m headed back now, if you want a ride.”

She didn’t, particularly, but Ray was already opening the door for her. She stifled a resigned sigh and climbed back into the battered vehicle. “So why does BWI keep a fully equipped heliport out here? That costs a lot to maintain.”

Ray grunted as he took his seat. “The way I heard it, they install one of these at every one of their project sites. Most of their resorts are in pretty hard-to-reach places. That’s Opperman’s strategy: buy up good land before the roads get put in and everyone and his brother catch on to it. I guess it’s not worth their time to drive to a local airport.”

Waxman shifted, reversed, and they shot forward onto the rutted road. “Plus, there are a lot of advantages to having a helicopter when you’re in the planning stages of a major project. Mapping, surveying, bringing in the first crews fast…”

They went over a rock and everyone levitated for a moment. “Ooof!” Clare clutched at her seat. “Do they have a full-time pilot?”

“John Opperman flies it,” Waxman shouted over the grinding noise of the Jeep’s clutch. “He’s the one who needs the flexibility, because he’s traveling between here and Baltimore so frequently as well as to other developments.”

“He’s the bagman,” Ray yelled, grinning.

They lurched into a rut that almost overturned the Jeep and then they were out again on the dirt track at the upper edge of the main site. Waxman roared down the earthen ramps and came to a neat halt beside the collection of pickups and old cars that constituted the crew’s parking lot.

“I have to get to the lab with this stuff,” Waxman said as Ray clambered out and tipped the seat for Clare. “Nice to meet you, Reverend. Ray, I’ll see you around.” He barely waited for Clare’s sneaker to clear the door before throwing the Jeep into gear and disappearing down the forest road.

“That’s a man in a hurry,” Clare said, waving some of the Jeep’s dust cloud away from her face.

“Yeah, well…From what I’ve seen, when Mr. Opperman says, ‘Hop,’ Leo Waxman asks, ‘How high?’ Remember how he was talking about all those good-paying jobs with private companies? I think he’s hoping BWI will take him on permanently.”

Clare handed Ray her hard hat and brushed dust off her shirtfront. “I may be naamp2;¨ve about how these things work, but doesn’t that create a conflict of interest?”

Ray smiled, stacking her hard hat on top of his. “It kind of seems like it would, doesn’t it?” He tucked the hats under his arm and turned toward the office trailer. The crew had abandoned their vigil in front of the steps and had retreated to a pair of wooden picnic tables under the fringe of trees behind the trailer. Clare could see a couple of coolers on the tables.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing else to see, Reverend. Sorry Ms. Landry hasn’t shown up. You can use the phone in the office to give her a call, if you want.”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t have the number for her cell phone.” Her mind churned furiously. Her last chance to find out anything about Bill Ingraham was about to come and go. Aw right, ladies, it’s time to fly or die. Msgt. Ashley “Hardball” Wright used to say that during her survival training. Male or female, he had called all his trainees “ladies,” unless he was calling them something much worse. She tended to recall his aphorisms in situations her grandmother would never have found herself in—like pumping Ray Yardhaas for information about a man he didn’t know was dead.

“I want to ask you something.” She shaded her eyes from the sun’s glare when she looked up at him. “You seem to think highly of Bill Ingraham. Does the rest of the crew feel the same way?”

Ray shifted the stacked hard hats from one arm to the other. “Pretty much, I guess. There’s always a few who see management as the bad guy. But the new guys on the crew are making fourteen bucks an hour, and the senior guys are making up to twenty, so most of ’em don’t have a problem with the boss taking his profit. I figure, you want everybody to earn the same, go to Cuba.”

“Actually, I was thinking more about his…personal life.” She wiped a trickle of sweat off her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Does anyone have a problem with Mr. Ingraham, um, being, you know…gay?”

Ray frowned. “Why?”

“Well, because sometimes straight men don’t relate well to—”

“No, I mean why do you want to know? You’re not one of those preachers who go around telling folks God hates queers, are you?”

She recoiled. “Good Lord, no!” She wiped her hands against her jeans reflexively. “That’s a…sick perversion of God’s work. No. Just the opposite. I’m trying to get a handle on who might be propagandizing that kind of hate around here. I don’t know if you’ve kept up with the news, but there have been two assaults in Millers Kill recently. Two decent men beaten half to death because they’re gay.” She caught herself. “At least that’s the most likely explanation for the attacks. I want to understand where that rabid homophobia comes from, do what I can, as a priest, to stop it.” The image of Bill Ingraham’s savaged body came to her, causing her words to get stuck momentarily in her throat. Too little too late, she thought, and took a deep breath. “I can’t exactly waltz into the nearest pool hall and say, ‘Hey, guys, what do you really think of homosexuals? And be honest now!’ ”

Ray snorted.

She tilted her head toward the picnic tables at the edge of the construction area. The guy in the Desiderata T-shirt had opened one of the coolers and was passing out cans. It looked like it was Miller time. “Here you are, a bunch of manly men doing manly construction work, and your boss is a homosexual. An out-of-the-closet gay man. How do your coworkers feel about that? Have there been any problems?”

“You think maybe some of the crew could have been involved in those beatings?”

“You tell me. You’re the one who knows them.”

Ray looked over at the men sprawling in the shade and then glanced at Clare. “You’re not running back to Ms. Landry with any of this, are you?”

“No.”

“Or some kind of reporter?”

“I’ve told you the truth, Ray. I’m the rector of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church.”

He crossed his arms, obscuring the plumbing company ad on his chest. “I guess the reaction’s been mixed. I don’t think it really makes any difference to most of the guys, although you hear a whole lot more pansy jokes than at the last job I worked. Most guys figure what you do in your private life is your own business, and so long as nobody prances through playing the Sugar Plum Fairy, they don’t say much.”

“I hear you saying ‘most’ of the guys. What about the rest of them?”

Surprisingly, Ray grinned. “We got one Gen Xer, I guess you’d call him, thinks it’s totally cool to be working for someone like Bill. Of course, Carter’s got both ears pierced and these weird tattoos around his biceps.”

“So not only is he out of the mainstream but he’s got enough self-confidence to wear earrings on the job. Is there anyone else on the opposite end? Maybe some older guys? Or somebody who has to spend all his time proving what a jock he is?”

Ray’s smile faded away. “There are a few who just can’t seem to let it alone. Like Charlie back there. They always gotta have some snotty remark about Bill and his ‘lifestyle.’ ” Ray made quotation marks with his forefingers. “You work on a construction site, you expect to hear some pretty raw stuff. And the guys like to rib you. If I had a dime for every ‘dumb Dutchman’ joke I’ve heard, I could retire to Florida right now. But there’s a difference between making queer jokes to be funny and garbage-mouthing someone personally.”

Clare, who had endured way too many sexist jokes during her years in the army, thought the difference might not be all that apparent to the person who was the butt of the joke. But she knew what Ray was trying to convey. The former was the casual cruelty of ignorance, like the major who had been truly baffled when she took offense at his endless string of dirty jokes. The latter was viciousness, designed to fence someone off from the group with a line as subtle as barbed wire. She thought of the Hustler babes she used to find taped up in her cockpit. “Yeah,” she said, “I know what you mean.” She swiped away another trickle of sweat. “So who is it doing the trash-talking? And does it stop at talk?”

Ray squinted up at the sky, frowning in thought. “Well, there’s Charlie; you met him. Matt Beale and Toby, they have a pair of potty mouths on ’em, but they’re both so lazy, I can’t imagine either of ’em working up the sweat to beat on somebody. Elliott McKinley, him I can see doing it, but not on his own. He’s like a dog that slinks around on the edges of a pack, whining. He wouldn’t dare come out to bite until another, bigger dog had done it first. Gus Rathmann is the sort who could definitely do it. You should hear the way he talks about his wife. I’ve never met her, but I’ll bet good money he’s beating up on her.”

“Could he be the big dog that this McKinley would follow?”

“Nah. Gus can’t stand Elliott. The thing I’m wondering is, Would he risk it?”

“Gus or Elliott?”

“Gus. He’s on probation. I don’t know what for. But I’ve heard him turn down offers to go out for a beer after work. I got the impression he was trying to keep straight for his probation officer.”

“Either of these guys here today?”

Ray looked at her, alarmed. “These are not people you ought to be hanging around with, Reverend.”

“I know. But are they here?”

Ray sighed. “Gus Rathmann was here this morning. He took off when we were told to stand down until further notice. Which wasn’t unusual—half the guys left after Opperman called.”

“Did Elliott leave, too?”

“He had to. Whitey Dukuys was leaving, and he’s Elliott’s ride.”

“Are they roommates or something?”

“Nah. Elliott’s truck broke last week and he’s been bumming rides with Whitey ever since.”

Clare blinked. “His truck?”

“Yeah. Whitey lives out in Glens Falls, and he drives right past where Elliott—”

“What kind of truck? What color?”

Ray looked at her as if the heat and the bouncing Jeep ride had scrambled her brains. “I don’t know. Let me think. It’s a Chevy two-ton. Red. Why?”

Chapter Fifteen

The first thing Russ saw when he turned into the construction site was Clare’s car. He was following Opperman and Peggy Landry, who were undoubtedly a hell of a lot more comfortable in Landry’s well-sprung Volvo sedan than he was in a five-year-old cruiser that needed new shocks bad. He hadn’t been real gung ho on the idea of the two of them alone in their car, able to coordinate their stories, but since they had both shown up promptly at the station when asked and were about to open their office for a voluntary search, he was willing to extend himself a little.

Then he saw her car.

What is it with her and tiny red cars? More important, why was he stumbling over her every time he made a move on these cases? Next thing he knew, he was going to start seeing her in the urinal when he went to take a leak.

He rolled in beside Landry’s sedan and threw his cruiser into park. He sucked in a lungful of air-conditioned air. The hell with it. He was here for background on Ingraham. Clare had nothing to do with it, or with him, or with this case.

Except, of course, that she had found Ingraham’s body. For a moment, he allowed himself to think of her sitting on the damp ground, barricaded behind those two dogs. Then he snorted. She was about as weak and vulnerable as a Sherman tank. And about as subtle. He turned off the engine and stepped into the midafternoon heat.

Bill Ingraham’s business partners were waiting for him. John Opperman, who looked like the kind of guy who took his suit and tie off only to shower, seemed awkward and out of place standing in dust and scrub grass, framed by construction machinery. Landry could have stepped off the cover of one of his wife’s Martha Stewart books. Although, as Linda liked to point out, Martha ran her own billion-dollar empire. He suspected he ought to keep that in mind when dealing with Peggy Landry.

“The site office is this way, Chief Van Alstyne,” Opperman said. “Though as I told you at the station, I doubt there will be much of use to you there. It’s used strictly for work—I don’t know of Bill ever mingling his private and professional life.”

Russ followed the pair up a slight incline to a trailer set up on a concrete foundation at the edge of the work site. Several men sprang up from picnic tables set in the shade behind the trailer. Opperman stopped and pointed at them.

“Go home,” he said. “You’re off for the rest of the day. You’ll get a call about tomorrow.”

“Do we get full pay today?” one man shouted.

“Yes, yes, you’ll get your full eight hours today.” Opperman turned to Landry and gave her a look as if to say, See what I have to put up with? “Right in here, Chief,” he said over his shoulder, mounting the trailer steps and opening the door. He disappeared inside, and Russ could hear him speaking to someone in the office. With a sense of inevitability, Russ shouldered through the narrow aluminum door and saw exactly whom he expected, Clare Fergusson. She was seated beside a metal desk with a fake wood top, and her eyebrows tried to climb off her forehead and hide in her hair when she caught sight of him. Opperman was talking with a heavily muscled man in his fifties. The man, who had the easy stance of a crew chief who knew what he was worth, folded his arms and nodded toward Peggy Landry.

“Yes, sir, I understand. But Reverend Fergusson was invited here by Ms. Landry,” he said.

Landry stepped forward. “He’s right. I’m so sorry, Clare, but this afternoon has turned out to be”—she shot a glance at her surviving business partner—“the worst-possible time to show you around. Let me walk you out and we’ll reschedule.”

Russ intended to ignore Her Holiness, but he couldn’t help it. “You know her?”

Landry frowned, probably at the irritated tone in his voice. “Reverend Fergusson is marrying my niece Diana in August. Well…not marrying. Officiating. You know what I mean.” She braced her hand on the Con-Tact-paper wood and gestured to Clare. “This really isn’t a good time, Clare.”

Clare opened her mouth and closed it again. She rose from the folding chair she had been sitting in and obediently followed Landry toward the door, giving Russ as wide a berth as possible in a single-width trailer crowded with tables and chairs.

She paused at the exit, framed by a stack of soda cans in cartons and a flimsy-looking water cooler. “I’d like a chance to talk with you at some point, Chief Van Alstyne,” she said in a fakely chirpy voice. Russ grunted noncommittally, and Landry practically dragged the priest onto the steps. Opperman swung the door shut behind the two women. “Ray, we’re shut down for the rest of the day. Peggy or I will give you a call to let you know when we’re starting up again.” Ray nodded and headed for the door. “And Ray?” Opperman kept his hand over the doorknob, denying access for a fraction of a second. “Don’t let an unauthorized person onto the site unless one of us is here. Ever.” He smiled. “Insurance, you know.”

“It’s your site, Mr. Opperman,” Ray said, shrugging. He let himself out.

“Okay,” Opperman said, clasping his hands in front of him. “What is it you’d like to see?”

Russ looked around at the suddenly empty office. A large drafting table with an elaborate CAD setup occupied one end of the trailer. A messy desk flanked by filing drawers and a fax machine filled the other end. In between were folding tables layered with rolled blueprints, manila envelopes, and torn-open FedEx packages. “Like the Supreme Court justice said, ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ ” He pointed to the desk. “Was that Ingraham’s?”

“Yes.” Opperman dragged aside two folding chairs and pulled out a sturdy metal chair upholstered in vinyl. “Bill wasn’t one for show. Function—that’s what he wanted.” He pressed his lips together for a moment, then let out a cross between a snort and a smile. “He had this old chair for as long as I knew him. I was ribbing him about it once, telling him he should get something more ergonomic. He said it performed perfectly—it kept his ass off the floor. Anything else was just bells and whistles.” He looked out the small window set horizontally beside the desk.

“Was he like that about his construction projects? Did he build just enough to function?”

“God no. When it came to BWI Developments, he was a true perfectionist.” He waved at the cramped interior of the trailer. “He always spent as much time as possible at or near a site. Got to know the contractors, the subcontractors, the workers. I swear, he probably knew the name of the quarryman who chiseled the marble for the bathroom floors. And God help him if those tiles were anything less than top-quality.”

“And what’s your role in BWI? Did you work for Ingraham?”

“Not for him. I’m his partner. Bill handled the physical plant, and he did so beautifully. I handle everything else: land acquisition, limited partnerships, permits, financing, insurance.” Opperman smiled faintly. “Which is why, unlike Bill’s, my office fits inside a laptop.” His smile faded. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now that he’s gone.”

“Will this project have to fold? Or will you be able to replace Ingraham?”

Opperman gave him a sharp look. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to replace Bill. If I can find a sufficiently skilled construction manager, we can proceed. I hope we can. It would be a damned shame if his final project were left unfinished.”

“What happens to BWI if you do have to abandon the project?”

Opperman rubbed his knuckles against the bottom of his chin. “It’s going to be tough. We’re insured for any catastrophe that might cancel the project. But our reputation will take a hit. Then again, our reputation will take a hit just because Bill’s gone. He was the driving force behind BWI. He was the reason people invested in our projects.”

“What about Peggy Landry? How would she fare if you had to cancel?”

“Peggy? She’s one smart businesswoman. Part of our deal was primary partners’ insurance and a pay-or-play clause.” Russ’s blank look must have given him away. Opperman laughed. “I won’t bore you with the legal details. The end result is, she’s a beneficiary of our partners’ insurance policy. And if the Algonquin Spa doesn’t get built, she still receives rental on her land for five years. Or until she finds another developer.”

“She gets a payout from insurance? Insurance on Ingraham?”

“That’s correct.”

“How about you?”

“The death benefit for either Bill or myself goes directly into the business. That’s the purpose of having partners’ or principals’ insurance—to cover the business losses when one of the key players dies.” He sat down in his late partner’s chair and spread his hands. “To be blunt, if you’re looking for a financial motive for either Peggy or myself to have…have”—he looked away, then back at Russ—“butchered a man we respected, you’re going to come up blank. We both relied on Bill.”

Russ leaned back, catching the edge of a long folding table under his thigh. It felt too insubstantial to sit on. He folded his arms across his chest instead. “Seems to me you’ll do okay. She gets a big insurance payoff and money for her property, and you get sole control over the business. It’s not public, right? So all the profits go back to whoever owns it.”

“In the first place, I can show you projected net and gross earnings of the future Algonquin Spa for the next ten years. Peggy Landry stands to make considerably more money if the project goes through. To address your second point, yes, I am the sole surviving partner of our privately held company. But not for long.” Opperman pushed himself out of Ingraham’s chair. “Despite the fact that we do very upper-end, high-margin projects, this is still fundamentally a construction company. And I don’t do construction. I can quote you the cost of bricks and the provisions of our contract with the bricklayers’ union and the amortization rates of the equipment needed to haul them here, but I couldn’t lay one brick on top of another to save my life. I’m a lawyer. And if I’m not going to become a retired lawyer, I need to find another partner who can step into Bill’s shoes.” He leaned over and turned on the desk computer. “I understand why you need to pursue this line of inquiry.” He tapped in a name and password. “I just hope you aren’t letting whatever scum took Bill’s life slip away while you’re digging through our old files.” He stepped back from the desk. “It’s all yours. Hard copies and correspondence are in the filing cabinet. There’s no diary. As far as I know, Bill kept his schedule on his computer and in his Palm Pilot.”

Russ made a mental note to ask Lyle MacAuley if he had found a Palm Pilot after searching Ingraham’s room at the inn. He looked at Opperman. “Thank you. And I can assure you that Bill Ingraham’s killer isn’t going anywhere. We’ll find him.”

Which was bold talk, since the initial autopsy and the early-morning search of the crime scene hadn’t given them anything new. Ingraham had had a meal and some booze a couple of hours before his death. He hadn’t engaged in any sexual activity—or at least none that left any traces on him. MacAuley’s and Durkee’s search of the grounds down to the river had turned up several cotton threads that might be helpful to the state prosecutor, if they ever found a viable suspect and if they could find a matching article of clothing belonging to him.

“If you don’t need us to be here, I’m going to have Peggy take me into town to retrieve my car.” He handed Russ a business card. “Here’s the number for my cell phone. “I’ll be heading back here afterward to close up, so we can talk again if you need to.”

“Okay,” Russ said. “That’s fine by me.” He had originally planned to question Landry and Opperman while he was going through the files, but one look at the office had told him he would need several hours just to get a grasp on what he was reading. “I understand you frequently travel back and forth for your business, Mr. Opperman.”

“That’s correct.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d stay in the tricounty area for the immediate future. I want to be sure I can reach you if anything comes up.”

Opperman didn’t even blink. “Of course.” He thrust his hand at Russ, who shook it perfunctorily. “I’ll leave you to your investigative chore, then. Contact me as soon as you have any questions.” Then he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him with a dull aluminum clank.

Three hours later, Opperman still hadn’t come back. Which probably wasn’t a loss, as Russ had been wading through the history of the project and still didn’t have any information he could use to hook a line of questioning to. If there was a money trail leading to something that stank, he sure as hell couldn’t find it. He could stand in line for one of the state’s forensic accountants—a description that conjured up an image of a guy with a scalpel and eyeshades—but their backlog of work was so huge, he’d probably be retired before they could fit this case in.

He stood and stretched, cracking his back. God, that felt good. People thought you were getting old when you couldn’t run around the way you used to. But the really depressing thing about middle age was not being able to sit as long as you used to. He checked his watch. Seven o’clock. He had called Linda an hour ago to tell her not to hold dinner, and she had gotten ticked off and told him if he couldn’t manage to get home to spend some time with her, she might as well eat out with her friend Meg. Now his stomach growled. He needed to eat something, even if only leftovers. And his brain was fried. No matter what else he read tonight, he wasn’t going to absorb it. He turned off the computer and the desk lamp, walked to the door, stumbling slightly as he shook feeling back into his legs, and let himself out.

The long shadows cast by the setting sun softened the hard angles of the construction site and turned the tangled northwoods pines into a hazy dark cloud. He cracked his back again and strode down to his cruiser, the sole remaining occupant of the parking lot. There was something tan beneath his windshield wiper. He sighed and slid it free.

It was a program, one of those things they handed out in churches. Beneath an etching of St. Alban’s Church, it read “Holy Eucharist—the Sixteenth Sunday of Pentecost.” There was a list beneath the heading, presumably stuff they did during the sixteenth Sunday of whatever: the greeting, Sanctus Spiritus, a Bible reading. He flipped it over.

The message was in bold black letters, written with a felt-tip pen in the wide margin of the program. “Please call me. It’s urgent. Clare.” She had drawn a long scraggly arrow, which pointed to an underlined sentence from one of the Bible readings: “He is near that justifieth me, who will contend with me? Let us stand together; who is mine adversary? Let him come near to me.”

“Gosh, Marty, it’s a secret code,” he said. “Let’s go to the old abandoned mine and see what’s up!” He stuffed the program into his pocket and got into the car. He felt like the Pillsbury doughboy being slid into the oven. He turned the cruiser on and cranked the air conditioning, sticking his face in front of the blast from the vent. She had some nerve, he’d grant her that. It wouldn’t get him to make a side trip out to her place, but he had to admire her willingness to come right back to him, even after last night. The car interior had cooled enough for him to sit back in his seat without sticking to it. He shifted into gear and headed down the shadow-dark road through the forest. Unless, of course, it wasn’t bravery, and she was just oblivious to what she had said. No, she knew. She had probably been wallowing in it all day, dying to make an apology. The dirt road turned onto pavement in a crunch of gravel. Sooner or later, he would get in touch with her. Let her say she was sorry, accept it in good grace. But he sure didn’t need any distractions while he was working a homicide, not to mention the two assaults. He swung onto River Road, heading into town. Besides, he didn’t want to give the impression that he put too much weight in what she said. He knew damn well he wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass if any other person in that park had accused him of lying down on the job. In fact, the only opinions that mattered to him were those of the men on his force. And his wife, of course, who cheerfully acknowledged she knew next to nothing about police work and therefore kept out of it.

Traffic was light on Main Street, but he had to stop and go for the pedestrians jaywalking left and right as they went from art gallery to antique store to ice-cream shop—or SHOPPE, as the fake-old sign proclaimed. When he was a kid, the upper end of Main Street had had real stores, like Woolworth and Bilt-Rite Shoes and Biretti’s, which his mom had always referred to as “the Eye-talian bakery.” Then, while he had been traveling from post to post, building his career in the military police, one by one the old stores closed, victims of the Aviation Mall and the shopping centers that sprang up on Route 9. In the late eighties, while he had been looking at the world through the bottom of a bottle, the Board of Aldermen had gotten a major grant for downtown revitalization. Now the street was full of folks again, at least in the summer. You could buy pastries and etchings of Fort Ticonderoga and fancy clothes just right for a garden party in Saratoga during the racing season. What you couldn’t buy was a razor or a pair of shoes or a cheap sandwich.

He turned onto Church Street, where the shops were older, considerably less glamorous, and the pedestrian traffic a lot lighter. The thought of Biretti’s put him in mind of his mother. He hadn’t even called her to see if she had gotten home all right. His sister Janet had reached him that morning at the station, and she had given him an earful before letting him know she would be picking Mom up at the courthouse. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and scowled, causing the man who was in the crosswalk in front of the cruiser to sprint across to the other side. All he was trying to do was his job, as best as he knew how, and every woman in his life was dumping on him for it.

He swung around the small park at the end of Church Street and drove onto Elm. The rectory was dark, but a few of the stained-glass windows of St. Alban’s Church were glowing, the ones farthest from the door. He frowned. He didn’t think there were any services on Monday.

He parked the cruiser in Clare’s drive and walked back down the sidewalk to St. Alban’s entrance on Church Street. He decided not to think about the fact that he knew the Episcopal church’s worship schedule, even though the last time he had attended any religious services regularly was back in junior high. And then only because he had had a crush on a girl in the Methodist Youth Group.

He pushed against one of the great wooden doors and it swung open silently. He stepped through the narthex into the body of the church and paused to let his eyes become accustomed to the dimness. The sky outside was still orange and red, but the twilight glow couldn’t pierce the stained-glass windows that punctuated the stone walls. There wasn’t a single electric light on anywhere. He walked forward in a few more steps, hesitant about trespassing in the middle of a service. But there was no one sitting in the rows of pews. His eyes followed them, rank on rank, to the front of the church. Past the gilt and mahogany altar rail, past the plain rectangular table draped in embroidered linens, past the choir’s gleaming pews and Gothic arches was Clare. White-robed, on the steps leading up to an ornately decorated high altar, where a mass of candles provided all the light in the world. Her back was to him, her head bent over what he guessed was a book.

“Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the hours of this night, so that we who are wearied by the changes of this life may rest in your eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”

Her voice wasn’t pitched to carry, but whoever had shaped the space had known what he was doing. In the cool silence of the empty church, Russ could hear her as well as if he were standing next to her.

“Keep watch, dear Lord, over those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous, and all for your love’s sake.”

He walked up the center aisle quietly, as the place seemed to demand, although not trying to hide his presence. He wondered if she really believed in angels swooping around, watching over people, or if that was just the company line.

She started singing in a clear alto voice: “Lord, you now have set your servant free, to go in peace as you have promised; for these eyes of mine have seen the Savior, whom you have prepared for all the world to see….” It wasn’t a song exactly, more like a chant, rising and falling from one line to the next, even though there wasn’t any rhyme and only scant rhythm. She dropped back into speech to conclude, “Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace. The almighty and merciful Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”—he could see the movements of her arm as she crossed herself—“bless us and keep us.”

He joined in on her “Amen.” It seemed like the polite thing to do. She stilled for a moment, then pivoted. She squinted. Facing the candles as she had been, the rest of the church must have looked pitch-black.

“It’s me,” he said, stepping up to the first cloth-covered altar.

“Russ?” She sounded as if this were the last place on the planet she would expect to find him. “What are you doing here? I mean”—she glided down the steps from the high altar, her robes lending a sober grace to her usually athletic movements—“I would have thought you’d be at the station.”

“I’m not on call,” he said. “I wasn’t actually scheduled for duty today.” He shrugged. “But you know. Murder knows no overtime, or something like that.”

“But didn’t they call you on the radio? Earlier today, at the construction site, I found out—well, I wanted to tell you in person, so I left you that note, but then after I got home, I figured it was irresponsible to wait, so I called the station and spoke to Officer MacAuley—that is, Deputy Chief—”

“I know who he is, Clare. Get to the point.”

She grinned. “The man who owned the red truck. I told him I knew who he was.”

Chapter Sixteen

It was faster to call the station from Clare’s office than to retrace his steps and use the radio in his car. She had shown him to her desk and then excused herself to change out of her vestments. He was talking to Lyle MacAuley when she slipped quietly back into the office.

“We ran the registration, and sure enough, it’s a ’ninety-four Chevy pickup, registered to one Elliott McKinley. He’s got a few arrests on his sheet: one obstructing, a couple drunk and disorderlies, never anything that went anywhere. He pled out to everything. Eric remembered him from his last arrest, which was about two years back. He thinks this guy is a hanger-on. He was one of half a dozen guys: Eric and Noble and Nathan Bougeron—you remember Bougeron, right?”

Russ did. He was one of the several promising young officers who had headed south to the state troopers’ barracks in Loudonville during the five years Russ had been chief of the department. He’d worry that there was something wrong with his style of management, except every one of them had cited the same reason for leaving: better pay and more chances for advancement.

“Anyway, they broke up a fight outside the Dew Drop Inn. McKinley got picked up for obstructing, along with everyone else. But get this—he was there with Arnie Rider, who was the one who had started the fight.”

“Hold on. Is this the same Arnie Rider—”

“Who’s doing twenty years in Comstock for stabbing Chhouk, that Cambodian immigrant, yep. Get this. The Dew Drop brawl was a week before the stabbing. According to McKinley’s sheet, he was brought in and questioned about the Chhouk murder, but he didn’t turn anything useful.”

“Do you have McKinley?”

“Not yet. Eric and I went over in civvies right after Reverend Fergusson called. He lives in a rooming house on Raceway Street, down past the mills. No truck in sight, and there’s no parking provided by the landlord, so he would have had to keep it on the street. It must be stashed somewhere. He wasn’t home, and the landlord didn’t know when he’d be in. Eric’s there now on stakeout, waiting for him to show up.”

“I’ll bet whoever is holding that truck is up to his eyeballs in it.”

“I’ll take that bet.”

“Can we ID any known associates?”

“The rest of the crew who was picked up two years ago at the Dew Drop. I did a quick look at their rap sheets, but none of ’em look particularly promising. I didn’t want to start picking people up for questioning and scare off McKinley. Especially since there’ve got to be others involved.”

“No, you did good, Lyle. This is exactly the way I would have set it up. As long as we don’t shake the bushes too much, he’ll come home. And then we grab him. I want to be ready to move fast on any names he turns. If we need to, we’ll call up a few of the part-timers to cover patrol.”

“You know that’ll involve—”

“Overtime, yeah. I’m sure the Board of Aldermen will eventually have my—” Russ glanced over his shoulder, remembering Clare in the nick of time. She had settled into one of two leather chairs placed in front of the empty fire-place. “My feet to the fire. You can reach me at St. Alban’s if anything happens in the next few minutes. Then I’ll cruise over to the station before going home.”

“When are you going to get a cell phone like the rest of the world? Docs get ’em. Vets get ’em. Even Lithuanians and Letts get ’em.”

“Don’t quit your day job, Lyle. Bye.”

He hung up the phone and spun around. “Yes!” He pumped one arm like a hockey fan witnessing a beautiful slap shot. “Looks like your Elliott McKinley may be one of our boys. A few years back, he hung around with a bad guy named Arnie Rider. Arnie had some wrong strong views about racial purity in the United States, which he expressed by getting into fights with Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees in the area. Eventually, he got carried away and stabbed a young man named Chhouk.” The name made him think of the kid’s mother, a tiny woman who knew maybe ten words of English and who had keened incessantly, a high-pitched, barely audible wail, when she identified her son’s body. He shook his head. “They put him away for manslaughter, but I thought it should have been murder one. Who picks a fight while carrying a bowie knife in his jacket unless he’s itching to use it?”

Clare pulled her legs up so she was sitting tailor-style in the chair. “Are you saying McKinley is attracted to extremists? He’s a kind of hate-crime groupie?”

“Well, we don’t know enough yet to take it that far. But it certainly drops a few more pieces in place.” He strode to the bookcase-covered wall opposite her desk, then to the sagging love seat, then back to the desk, too charged up to sit. “You say the foreman at the spa site told you McKinley has problems with his boss being gay. Maybe he gets together with some of his buddies who were left behind when Rider took the long trip out of town. They piss and moan about gays, just like they used to about Asians, until somebody gets the great idea to go out cruising and get themselves a homosexual.”

“Emil Dvorak.”

“And they take McKinley’s truck.” He paused at the bookcase, standing in front of a clock shaped like an Apache helicopter. Its rotors were ticking the seconds away. “Okay, we don’t have confirmation yet that it was McKinley’s truck. I’m just speculating.”

“No, no, I see what you’re driving at.” She leaned forward in her chair, her cheeks slightly flushed. “You’re thinking they were working themselves up to attack Bill Ingraham.”

“Maybe. Emil’s attack seems the most like sheer opportunism. Maybe they were driving by the Stuyvesant Inn, hoping to catch Ingraham himself, not knowing he was at the town meeting.”

“But then they succeed at that one. They don’t get caught. That eggs them on to the next attack.”

“MacPherson. Which strikes me as being more carefully planned out than when they went after Emil. Like they had set on a definite target.”

“So what about Bill Ingraham? Was he targeted? Was he what they were working up to with the other two assaults? Or did one of them just get…carried away?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “We’re way out in cloud cuckooland here. Once we bring in McKinley, I expect the missing information will fall into place extremely quickly. These sons of scumbuckets fall apart under questioning. I’ve seen it before. He’ll give up his own mother to knock a few years off his sentence. It’ll just be a matter of rounding ’em up.” He threw himself backward onto the lumpy love seat. “And thank God for it, too. Between this case and my own mother disturbing the peace in the park, I’m about tapped out. And then there’re the news stories. If I don’t have ten messages from the mayor and the Board of Aldermen waiting for me on my answering machine, I’ll eat my hat.”

She pulled a long strand of hair between her fingers and fiddled with it. “Look, I need to apologize for running my mouth off last night in the park. Sometimes I have this tendency to speak before I’ve had a chance to think everything out.”

He laughed. “No kidding? I never would have guessed that about you!”

“Cut it out! I’m trying to say I’m sorry here.”

He waved a hand, erasing her words from the air. “Don’t beat yourself up. We were both tired and had had too much to do on a very long day. I should have thought about what you had just been through before I snapped your head off. You weren’t saying anything I wasn’t already telling myself.” He was surprised, as he said it, to find it was true.

“That’s part of why I feel so bad,” she said, leaning forward again, her elbows on her knees. “I know how personally you take your responsibilities to this town. For me to accuse you of lying down on the job was just…jabbing you in your weak spot.”

He was still trying to figure out where that little confession had come from. “You know, I was still ticked off at you when I came over here. I didn’t even quite know I was coming over here until I pulled into your driveway.” He leaned against the back of the love seat, crossing his arms over his chest. “You just said what lots of other folks would have said in the same situation. I gotta ask myself why it bothered me so much when you said it.” He watched as she pulled her knees up until her sneaker-shod feet were resting on the chair seat. “I guess I’m afraid that, deep down, all my reasons for not issuing a general warning or going to the press with the gay-bashing idea are because of…who the victims were. Because I don’t, you know, feel comfortable around gay guys.”

She let her knees drop back down and crisscrossed her legs again. “But Dr. Dvorak was—is—a friend of yours. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“We were friends at work. I knew who he was and what he was, but it never impinged on our relationship. He never talked about Paul, just like I never talked about my wife. The fact that he was gay was like having a friend at work who’s Jewish, or vegetarian. You know about it, but you don’t have to think about it, because what you do together never intersects with that other part of the person’s life.” He looked away, focusing on the framed and matted aeronautical sectional charts covering the wall next to Clare’s desk. “But then all of a sudden, there’s this reality—that my friend sleeps with a big bearded guy. And hangs out with the prissy innkeeper and his limp-wristed boyfriend.”

“Ron Handler is not limp-wristed.”

“He’s very obviously gay. Which made me uncomfortable. Then I meet Bill Ingraham, who I knew was gay but who never gave off a single clue, which made me even more uncomfortable.”

“Why do you think that is?”

His mouth quirked in a half smile. Her voice had the tone of a professional counselor now. He glanced back at her. He didn’t know how she managed to concentrate, listening until it seemed as active as speaking, but her focus on his words made him feel as if he could say anything and it would be okay.

“I’m a straight guy? Someone who spent twenty-five years in the army? As you yourself said, it’s not exactly a hotbed of tolerance for sexual diversity.” He snorted. “Furthermore, I was military police. And with cops, God forbid you ever touch another guy in any way except a slug in the arm.”

“You don’t strike me as someone who indulges in groupthink.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You don’t base your decisions about what you’ll believe and who you’ll be on what the people around you think.”

“No, no, I’m not saying the army made me prejudiced against gays. But I don’t feel comfortable when some guy is rubbing my nose in it.”

“Bill Ingraham didn’t rub anyone’s nose in it.”

He twitched in his seat. “I know. Which makes me worry that maybe I am prejudiced against gays. Maybe Emil Dvorak is like my trophy friend, somebody I can point to in order to prove what a cool, open-minded guy I am. And maybe somewhere inside me this…dislike, distrust, distaste of homosexuality influenced my decisions about notifying the press and warning the town.” He looked down at his hands. “Maybe all that stuff I thought I believed about businesses and outing people and copycat hate crimes was just a smoke screen, hiding what was really inside me.”

“Russ.”

He looked up at her.

“If you have enough self-awareness and insight to ask yourself these questions, I believe you’ve already proven that you didn’t act out of some deeply buried homophobia.” She opened her hands. “I’ve never known you not to confront your thoughts and feelings head-on.” Her cheeks flushed again, and he wondered if she was thinking about last Christmas Eve, the two of them in this office, him holding her tightly in his arms. He felt the tips of his ears getting hot. She smiled a little. “You are a very congruent personality, to throw out some jargon. Who you are on the outside is the same as who you are on the inside.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I thought you were wrong when you decided not to notify the press about the pattern of gay-bashing. I still think you were wrong.”

He opened his mouth. She held up one hand. “But despite my disagreement with your decision, I believe—I absolutely believe—that your motives and reasons were exactly as you stated them and that you were acting in the best interest of everyone involved.” She grinned suddenly. “And you can bet if I thought you were snarking around, I would have called you on it then and there.”

“Huh. You didn’t know how I felt about gays then.”

“Oh please. I was there at the Stuyvesant Inn, remember? I saw you with Stephen and Ron. You were like a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs, as my grandmother Fergusson would have said.”

“I was?”

“Yes.” She twirled the single strand of hair around her finger and attempted to poke it into her twist. “In all honesty, I have to say there was a lot right with your decision, too. Especially if McKinley and whoever else were working their way up to attacking Bill Ingraham. You very well may have prevented those other things you were worried about—having a sort of witch-hunt for suspected homosexuals going on in the name of protecting them. You put a lot more thought into your approach than I did when I spoke with whats-her-name, that reporter—”

“Sheena.”

“Was that her name? Good Lord. What were her parents thinking of?” She paused for a moment before getting back on track. “My point is, you think about things before acting. And the way you think is well reasoned, informed by your experience and your morals. So stop worrying that you’re subconsciously in cahoots with creeps like McKinley.”

He crossed his hands behind his head and worked his shoulders into a more comfortable position against the love seat’s uneven back. “You know, it’s true. Confession really is good for the soul.” At that moment, his stomach rumbled loudly.

“Hungry?” she asked, pinching back a grin.

“Starved. You don’t—” He stopped himself before asking her if she had something to eat at home. He could barely justify being here with her in her office after hours. He’d come here on police business. He had found out what he needed to know. He had no call to invite himself into this woman’s house for a meal. Better his own abandoned kitchen and an intact marriage than a three-course dinner followed by divorce. He heaved himself out of the love seat. “You don’t have a bathroom around here, do you?”

“Down the hallway, right before you get to the parish hall.”

After he had used the facilities and washed up, he wandered back down the narrow hallway that ran from the huge parish hall past Clare’s office, the church office, and something labeled “the Chapter Room” and then doglegged into the church. This time, the lights were on. Clare was at the high altar again, putting out the candles with a four-foot-long brass snuffer. As it died, each candle sent a ribbon of smoke streaming up toward the gloomy reaches above, veiling the elaborately carved wooden reredos mounted on the wall behind the altar. The air was full of the smell of smoke and beeswax and stone.

“So, nobody came to the service tonight?” he asked, stepping hard on the floor so as not to startle her.

“Hmm? No, I hadn’t scheduled Evening Prayer. I just wanted to read the office of Compline for myself. I could have done it at home, but every once in a while I like to come here without it being a job requirement.” She finished the snuffing and swung the gently curved brass pole over her shoulder. “I’m discovering that I have to work at making this my place of worship, and not just my place of employment.” She descended the steps from the high altar and slid the end of the candle snuffer into its wooden stand near the wall. “Sometimes, when I’m leading the whole congregation in the Eucharist, I find myself thinking about what I have to do next—whether I remembered to tell the crucifer to stand up before the final hymn, and if I’ll able to get Mrs. so-and-so to volunteer to lead the white-elephant sale. I didn’t expect that when I became a priest.”

“Huh. I never thought about it like that. I imagined someone could easily get burned-out doing the social-work part of the job. I guess I always figured priests and ministers kind of entered another world when they did their”—he stopped himself again, this time before saying “mumbo jumbo”—“worshiping thing.” Lame.

She dug into her chinos and pulled out a jangle of keys. “I wish. Maybe there’s something to be said for religions that engage in ecstatic rituals.”

He wasn’t sure what that was—it sounded sort of sexual. He figured it was better not to ask.

“As for me, I get charged up by the social-work side of it, as you aptly put it. I love counseling and visiting and helping people. Ah, here it is.” She dangled the key ring from an old-fashioned long key that looked as if it had been cast a century ago. “Main doors. No, for me, it’s the sacramental side I have difficulty with.” She headed off down the center aisle. He fell into step beside her. “I wish I could be more like some of the students I knew at the seminary. You could just see the Holy Spirit working through them. Like it came out of their eyes. Makes me feel like a ‘sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.’ ”

He wasn’t sure what that meant either, but he could guess it wasn’t someone with spirits shining from their eyes.

She swung one of the great double doors open. “Get the lights, will you? There, on the right.” The air outside was warm and flower-sweet. She tugged the door into place and locked it.

“I’m glad to see you lock something,” he said.

She looked up at him as she pocketed the keys. There was just enough twilight to see the prim expression on her face. “The church,” she said, “does not belong to me.”

“I’ll walk you back to your place before I go.”

“The rectory is the first house on this street. It’s all of fifty yards down the sidewalk.”

“Yeah, well, I also parked my cruiser in your driveway.”

“Ah. Okay, then.”

They walked in silence to the rectory. He opened his cruiser door, and she stopped on her lawn, halfway to the front porch. “Good night, then,” he said. “Thanks for letting me use your office. And you did right, letting Lyle know right away about McKinley.”

She shrugged. “I just hope you don’t find he’s loaned his truck to his aged mother and has been spending his nights working at the food pantry.”

“I don’t think there’s much chance of that.” He leaned on the door frame a moment, instead of sliding directly into the car.

She looked down at her sneakers. “So.” She looked up at him, her face faintly etched by the light from the corner lamppost. “Am I forgiven?”

“What, for speaking your mind?”

He saw the flash of her grin. “No, I can’t honestly say I’ve ever repented speaking my mind. I meant for how I did it. Hurting your feelings.”

He was going to say his feelings didn’t matter one way or another, that you take a hit and you keep on going, but he realized he would sound like an outtake from a Knute Rockne biopic. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are.”

A flash again in the darkness as she smiled. She turned toward the porch. “Hey, Clare,” he said. She turned back toward him. “You know that Holy Spirit thing?”

“Yeah?”

“I think you’ve got a little shine, too.”

Chapter Seventeen

Russ was parked behind number 2 Causeway Street when Elliott McKinley finally made it home. Russ’s squad car was strategically wedged between the sagging two-car garage moldering at the rear of the lot and the rooming house Dumpster behind it. No one had emptied the Dumpster in a long time. He tried rolling his windows up to keep the smell to a bearable level, but as the sun rose and the morning heated up, he began to feel like a hunk of grizzled beef in a slow cooker. He wound up opening his door and praying for an upwind breeze.

He had been there since their shift change at 6:00 A.M. The neighborhood had been emptying out when he arrived, since even those who had had Monday as a holiday were back to work today. He had listened as the Chevy Camaros and the ten-year-old Skylarks and the occasional tiny import fired up and headed off for the first shift at the G.E. plant in Hudson Falls, or the software-packaging plant in Fort Henry, or to construction sites and auto-repair shops. Causeway Street was a neighborhood that worked in shifts, round the clock. At 4:00 P.M., all the bartenders and waitresses and bouncers would be off to the honky-tonks or the fake rodeos that lined the roads up to Lake George, or to hushed white-linen restaurants that had been serving the summering rich since Teddy Roosevelt’s administration. Finally, at 10:00 or 11:00 P.M., the cleaning women and the night clerks would leave, returning too sleepy-eyed in the morning to give much thought to a few cop cars passing them in the streets.

Russ, Noble Entwhistle, and Eric McCrea had taken over from Lyle and Mark. Eric and Noble were in an unmarked car parked a few doors down from the rooming house. Eric made a radio check religiously every fifteen minutes, reporting that nothing had happened in the last quarter of an hour. That, the bluebottle buzz of flies feasting at the Dumpster, and the occasional shriek of children in danger of toppling rickety swing sets were the only company Russ had.

At 9:45, his radio buzzed. He reached for the mike, wondering why no one had invented a noiseless air conditioner that you could run while still hearing what was going on outside the car. “Yeah, Eric, I’m here.”

“So’s our boy.”

Russ sat up straight. “What’s happening?”

“A burgundy Ford Taurus wagon just dropped him off. A guy and a girl are in the front seat.”

“Call in the plates and tell Harlene I want a unit on them.”

“Already did.”

“You guys get any better at this, I’m going to have to retire. What’s he doing?”

“He’s just entered the front door. He didn’t check his mailbox.”

“Has the postman been by?”

“Nope. Either he doesn’t care what he gets or he was home yesterday in time to get the mail.”

“Somebody must have reached him in the afternoon to let him know that the BWI construction site’s closed today.”

“Okay, I think he’s had enough time to get to his room. Noble and I are gonna go in.”

“Be careful.” This was the thing Russ liked least about his job: sitting and waiting while his men stood on the wrong side of a door, behind which lay—what? A resigned perp who went without comment, or a nutcase with an arsenal? He held himself motionless, listening, waiting.

There was a noise from inside the rooming house, the sound of confusion, an indistinct shout. Then the back door banged open, and he got his first look at Elliott McKinley, skinny, with the thick, ropy arms of someone who breaks his back for a living. McKinley bounded down the four back steps in one stride and jackrabbited to the fence marking the end of the lot.

Russ tumbled from his seat, yanking his weapon from its holster as soon as he was clear. “Stop! Police!” he shouted, taking two steps forward to be clearly seen and dropping into a marksman’s stance. McKinley didn’t spare him a glance. He vaulted the waist-high fence, a ramshackle collection of wire and lathing, and tore off under the neighbor’s laundry-heavy clothesline.

Russ spat out a curse as he jammed the gun back into its holster and heaved himself over the fence, which wob-bled alarmingly under his hands. He was too old for this crap. He plowed through the laundry, board-stiff jeans and towels whacking him in the face. Behind him, he could hear Eric and Noble clattering down the rooming house’s back steps. “Get the car,” he screamed. “Go around the next street!”

He pounded down the short driveway to the sidewalk and spotted McKinley to his left: he was running like an Olympic contender toward the intersection. Russ didn’t waste breath on a warning, just tore off after him, his hard footfalls slapping on the asphalt. Sneakers. Should have worn sneakers, he thought, and God, please don’t let me have a heart attack, and then, What the hell is he doing? as McKinley abruptly veered off the road between two houses and disappeared.

Russ streaked after him, pulling hard with his elbows tucked to keep his pace up, his heart bludgeoning his chest. It was a beaten-down path that ran between the houses, vanishing into a row of dense bushes. He would have slowed down, but he could hear the thudding of McKinley’s feet up ahead, so he plunged through the shrubbery at top speed, only to rebound violently against a chain-link fence.

“God! Damn!” Russ said, clapping his hand to his stinging face and reeling backward. He blinked tears from his eye. He ran down a dusty rut between the fence and the bushes until he spotted a place a few yards down where the chain link had been pried away from a support bar. He pulled the sharp-edged fencing away and squeezed himself through.

On the other side was a wide swath of overly long grass tipping gently downward into the featureless end wall of the old Kilmer Mill. Russ pushed himself into a trot, loping down the lawn toward the old brick pile below. There was no sign of McKinley. He stopped at the corner of the building and leaned against the cool brick while he clawed at the two-way radio on his belt.

He sucked in air. “Fifteen oh three? This is Van Alstyne.”

Instantly, the radio crackled on. “Jesus, Chief! Where the hell are you?”

“I’m inside the Kilmer Mill grounds. On, um”—he pictured the town map in his head—“the western end.”

“How did you wind up there?”

“Shortcut. Listen, there’s no way you can get to where I am in the car. I think he’s run into the mill, but I’m not sure how stoppered up he is in there. The other end flanks the park. I don’t know of any way to get through, but there’s the big gate on Mill Street, and I suppose he could go into the Kill. You two put a call in for the boat to patrol the river. I want you to block off the Mill Street entrance. I’m going in.”

“Not a good idea, Chief.”

He wasn’t wild about it himself. “The kids in this neighborhood have had fifty years to discover hidey-holes on and off this property. If somebody’s not right on his tail, he could vanish.”

“We’ve already turned around. We can be there in five minutes.”

“That leaves the street unguarded. Call in some more backup, whoever’s available. But don’t leave that street clear for him to beat a retreat to. You got me?”

“I got you. Don’t like it, but I got you. Fifteen oh three out.”

Russ pushed himself away from the wall and scanned the grass around him. He wasn’t great as a tracker—his hunting technique in the fall consisted more of ambling around and drinking coffee from a Thermos than actively looking for any deer—but even he could see a few faint indentations in the grass. Lush and green, it would be springing back into place within minutes. McKinley did go this way, then. He walked along the side of the mill, casting back and forth, trying to spot some indication that McKinley had broken for the river. Then he saw it, bolted into the red brick—a rusting fire ladder running from a large third-floor window to five feet above the overgrown grass. It was a pre–World War II relic, from the days when the mill had employed a quarter of the town and occupational safety meant a straight three-story climb to the ground, if you could reach one of the windows before smoke or flames overcame you.

He jogged over to the ladder, reached up, and tugged on it with both hands. It creaked, but there was no shifting or shower of brick dust. He wrapped his hands around the lowest rung, chinned himself up, and pulled his legs to his chest, curling forward until his head was pointing toward the ground and he could get his knees over the iron bar. He balanced there for a moment, waiting to see if his two hundred pounds would shake the ladder, but the old bolts held true—for the moment anyway.

He climbed without looking down. The faded brick wall was punctuated by small granite-edged windows at the first-and second-story levels, oddly placed rectangles just big enough to let in some light and air. None of them were close enough to grab hold of if the rungs beneath his feet gave way or if the bricks holding the ladder’s bolts crumbled. He breathed evenly and looked up. The window above the iron ladder was wide open.

He had to go headfirst through the window, a horribly vulnerable position, which made him feel like a hunting trophy mounted on a wall. He wiggled forward and flipped himself gracelessly onto his feet, thudding loudly enough to cause him to freeze in a crouch below the window. He breathed through his mouth, noiselessly, as if that would make a difference.

He was on a sturdy wooden platform encircling a vast area below. Railed and banistered, it had two steep staircases descending to the work space. What light there was came from windows hidden from his view beneath the walkway. There was machinery down there, behemoths of black iron, and a forest of chains and block and tackle hanging from runners in the ceiling.

A noise from below froze him in place. A scrabbling sound. And a clank. Too loud for an animal. He closed his eyes for a moment, straining to hear. The air stirred with the scent of iron and dry rot and mouse droppings. He listened harder and dropped to his knees and then to his belly on the walkway floor. He crawled forward to the opening between the railings that signaled the nearest stairway.

It was steep, like the gangway on a ship, built to occupy the least amount of productive space. The workroom floor was cleared for several feet around the final step. Descending would make him a sitting duck vulnerable to potential gunfire. He scanned the rest of the platform. The only other way down he could see was another staircase, equally open, at the end opposite him. He thought he could make out doorways there, too, but he had no doubt that McKinley had headed down to get out. Which meant he would have to go down, as well.

He suddenly thought, for the first time in years, of an argument he had had with a lunatic second lieutenant while squatting in the brush below a heavily fortified hill. He couldn’t recall the hill’s number. All the hills in ’Nam had had numbers, never names. They were supposed to take the damn thing, and he had been telling the FNG that it was idiocy to charge upward through the open into enemy fire. “It’s not idiocy,” the lieutenant had said. “It’s our job.”

He reminded himself that he had picked this job over running a security firm in Phoenix. He wiggled himself around, slid his legs over the edge, found the first step with his foot, and took it, hands loose on the railings, barking his shins as he scrambled down the ladderlike steps—one, two, three, four—and then there was a loud crack and his foot gave way, the step splintering beneath him as he plunged, then caught himself on the railings with a dislocating jerk to his shoulders. He was spread open like a wishbone, one leg dangling in space and the other stretched painfully behind him. A swirling cloud of dry rot made him cough. He hauled against the railings and tried to gain a footing on the step below, feeling a gun sighting on him as if it were a pointer pressed against his spine, trailing up to the back of his head. He flopped between the steps, hair prickling and the cold sweat of fear under his uniform shirt, and heard another noise from somewhere among the silent machines below. He remembered now that the second lieutenant hadn’t lived very long. He let go of the railings, sagging still deeper through the broken stair tread, braced his hands atop the step in front of him, and pushed forward, just as he had done at the window outside, levering himself up, freeing the leg that had been trapped against the lower step. He didn’t stop to think. He let both legs hang through the stair, gripped the step he had been braced on, dropped his torso and shoulders through the last of the splintery remains, and let go.

He fell far enough to regret his impulsiveness, but he had been taught how to land from a fall when he was young, and his body remembered the lessons, even if, thirty years later, he lacked the natural bounce that had once enabled him to jump up and keep running. He didn’t spring up from the wooden floor where he had crumpled and rolled, but he did manage to keep rolling toward the nearest loom and tuck himself under its shadowed side.

“Elliott McKinley!” he yelled. “Police! Lay down your weapon and come out into the open with your hands raised!” The effort of shouting made his ribs hurt. Now he heard the clear sound of footsteps thudding, but he couldn’t orient himself enough to discover the direction the sound was coming from. He rolled away from the loom, staggered to his knees, and rose cautiously, easing the Glock out again. Nothing in sight but rows and ranks of antiquated machinery and chains and block and tackle that would never be used again. He walked forward lightly, rolling from his heels to the balls of his feet, trying to make as little noise as possible. He heard another scuffle and a clank—ahead of him. They had to be close to the river by now.

“McKinley!” He crouched again, making himself less of a target. “We’ve got squad cars sealing off the other entrances to the mill, and a boat on the water to pick up anyone who goes in. You understand me? You’re not getting out of here. Come on out and we’ll wrap this up and nobody gets hurt.”

Nothing. He stood up. There was a clank and a rattle, and he turned just in time to see an iron hook and a chain as thick as his wrist swinging straight at him, slithering through its pulley, sounding like the creak of the gates of hell opening. He lunged to the side, missing the hook, but the chain lashed across his shoulder and arm, hurtling his gun out of reach, knocking him off balance. He bounced off the nearest loom, staggered, then scrambled backward out of the way as the last of the chain tore through the pulley and fell over the iron machines and the wooden floor in a shattering clang that left him half-deaf. He looked around frantically for his gun, for McKinley, for another sign of movement among the chains and ropes hanging like malignant seaweed from the rafters. He caught a flash out of the corner of his eye. McKinley broke cover and bolted toward the far door, his head bobbing above the machinery in a weird, disembodied way.

Russ took off after him, any aches and pains wiped out for the moment in a surge of anger and adrenaline. He ran like a linebacker through an offensive field, dodging this way and that, trying to keep away from the machines. He could see the top of the door fling open, reached it on McKinley’s heels, and made a flying tackle. He hit McKinley square across his midsection and they both went down, skidding and twisting across the wooden floor. The younger man struggled, lashing out ineffectually with his hands and feet, but Russ had at least thirty pounds and several inches on him. He rolled McKinley beneath him, facedown, and straddled him, his elbow pressing hard into the nape of McKinley’s neck while he yanked at the pair of lightweight handcuffs snapped to his belt.

McKinley bucked, trying to throw him off. “Lie still or I’ll smash your head into this floor, you little scum sucker,” Russ roared. He hauled the young man’s wrists together and cuffed him, then sat straddling his still-flailing legs. He patted his waist, grateful to feel the radio still clipped to his belt. He didn’t relish the idea of wrestling McKinley out of the mill unaided. He keyed the mike. “Eric? Noble?”

“Chief? What’s up? Where are you?”

“In the mill. First floor. I’ve got McKinley, but I could use some help moving him.”

“I sent Mark to get the keys from the town offices.” Russ knew the town kept copies of keys to all the abandoned mills, in case the police or the volunteer fire department needed them. “He just got here. We’ll be right in.”

“Bring Mark on in, too. We’ll need two people for McKinley here. And I”—he pushed the bridge of his glasses against his face—“I think I’m going to need a little help finding my gun.”

Chapter Eighteen

“He wants a lawyer.” Lyle MacAuley reached across a litter of mugs and crumpled napkins and grabbed the coffeepot.

“Of course he wants a lawyer. They all want lawyers. It comes from watching too much television.” Russ started to take a mug, winced, and shifted it to his left hand.

“You oughtta get that looked at.”

“I’m a little banged up, that’s all. I’ll look like an Oriental rug in a couple of days, but I’ll live. Who’s he called?”

The deputy chief grinned. “Geoffrey Burns.”

Russ choked on his coffee. “That asshole? Since when does he pick up work from a bottom-feeder like McKinley?”

“I guess there aren’t enough car wrecks in the summer to keep him busy.”

Russ put his mug on the dispatcher’s desk and painstakingly poured the coffee wrong-handed.

“Careful with that,” Lyle warned. “You leave a spill on Harlene’s desk and she’ll eat you for lunch.” Their senior dispatcher was taking two days off after working on the Fourth.

Russ scooped McKinley’s paperwork off the desk. “I’m going to talk to him.”

“Chief, he’s asked for his lawyer.”

“I’m not going to question him. I’m going to talk to him.” He grinned at Lyle’s expression. “Don’t worry. I won’t violate his rights any. I just want to give him an idea of what he’s facing.”

The Millers Kill police station had been built in the days when suspects were booked at the desk and interrogated—without much thought at all to constitutional rights—in the holding cells below. Now the old cell block held an evidence locker and munitions lockup, and suspects in custody were questioned in a spacious, if windowless, room that had been carved out of two interior offices. Russ buzzed himself in and nodded to Noble Entwhistle, who was propping up the wall while keeping an eye on Elliott McKinley.

McKinley was seated at a rectangular steel table. His hands had been uncuffed, but his ankles were in restraints attached to his chair. The table and its six chairs were bolted to the floor. McKinley looked up from a close examination of his knuckles. “Can I get a smoke?” he said.

“Maybe later,” Russ said, throwing the paperwork down and easing himself into one of the chairs. His knees were beginning to ache, a deep, throbbing pain that would only intensify as the day wore on.

“I heard there’s no smoking at the county jail no more.”

“That’s right. It’s a smoke-free zone. The county doesn’t want anybody contracting lung cancer on its watch.”

“Oh, man.” McKinley’s hands twitched. His face was lined and leathery, the prematurely old face of someone who had been hitting the booze and the cigarettes since he was a boy. Despite his full-tilt attempt to avoid capture, he didn’t look defiant. Merely resigned to another turn in what was probably a lifelong string of bad luck.

“So I hear you’ve asked for Geoff Burns,” Russ said. “How’d you get his name?”

“Friend of mine. Burns repped him for a drunk-driving charge. Got him off, and he took a payment plan from my buddy, too, ’cause he didn’t have all of his fee up front.” McKinley knit his brows. “How come you want to know?”

“I was just wondering. I know Geoff. He and his wife have what you might call a general practice. You know, divorces, sue somebody for a dog bite, an occasional DUI. I would have thought you’d want more of a criminal specialist. Facing a murder charge.” He didn’t feel at this point he had to let McKinley in on the fact that the state usually supplied a capital defender when prosecutors went for the death penalty.

McKinley’s face drained of all color. “What?” he squeaked. He looked wildly toward Noble, who was still stolidly planted against the wall. “They didn’t say nothing about murder! They said assault!”

Russ glanced down at the sheets of paper in front of him. “Oh, yeah, that, too. Two assaults. One of those’ll probably be a felony assault, since it was committed while you were robbing the video store.”

“We did not!”

Yes. Russ felt an electric pulse surge through his body. He forced his hands and face to remain relaxed, his eyes on the paper in front of him. “Resisting arrest, assaulting an officer of the law, breaking and entering—that would be the mill. There’s a warrant out on you for failure to report to your parole officer. You’ve also got three unpaid speeding tickets, you owe back child support to DHS in the amount of fifteen thousand dollars”—he titch-titched at this—“and we’re charging you with capital murder in the death of Bill Ingraham.” He looked up at McKinley, his voice calm and matter-of-fact. “And if you’ve been working under the table to avoid that child support, you may be in trouble with the IRS.”

McKinley tried to stand up but could only manage to list drunkenly across the table because of the leg restraints. “I didn’t have nothing to do with no murder! I never laid a hand on Bill Ingraham!”

Russ leaned back in his chair. “I really can’t discuss it with you, Elliott. Seeing as how you’ve got a call in to your lawyer.” He took off his glasses and polished them on the front of his shirt. “Geoffrey Burns. I think he did a breaking and entering once. That guy who was stealing drugs from the local pharmacies. You remember that case, Officer Entwhistle?”

“Fuck the lawyer!” McKinley’s color had come back now. His face was blotched with red and purple. “I didn’t kill Bill Ingraham! I never went near him!”

Russ glanced up at him. “Well, that’s what I had figured originally. ’Cause when we picked you up in the Chhouk case, we only wanted you for a witness. To tell the truth, I never figured you for the kind of guy who would do the deed himself. Just that you had some rowdy friends.”

“That’s right! That’s exactly right!”

“But when we come to pick you up to ask you about these assaults, you take off. Then you try to kill me by dropping that chain on me. And when we finally get you in to talk, first thing you do is call a lawyer.”

“Chris said to! Chris said if anything happened, I should call a lawyer and let him handle it.”

Even Noble shifted at that. Russ carefully replaced his glasses, not looking at McKinley. “Yeah? Well, Chris’s not here, is he? You are. And you’re the one sitting in the hot seat. So to speak.” He glanced at Noble.

“Actually, it’s a gurney now, Chief,” Noble said. “Lethal injection.”

“That’s right.” Russ turned to McKinley, who had collapsed back onto his chair. “You’re a good friend, Elliott. I knew that when you wouldn’t give up any information on the Chhouk case. But it takes one hell of a friend to be willing to go to the death house in Clinton.”

“It’s called the UCP now, Chief. The Unit for Condemned Prisoners.”

“Thanks, Officer Entwhistle. I guess my head’s still stuck in the sixties, when they used to send ’em to Sing Sing to fry.”

McKinley made a sound deep in his throat.

“Hmm? I’m sorry, did you say something, Elliott?”

“You guys,” he whispered, then coughed and spoke more loudly. “You guys are just messing with my head. To get me to talk.”

“You’ve already expressed to Officer Entwhistle and Deputy Chief MacAuley that you decline to make a statement without representation. Isn’t that right? I don’t want you to talk with us. That might be violating your rights, Elliott. I’m sure Geoff Burns will be able to give you real good advice. I think he got the pharmacy burglar off.”

“Two years, plus two probation,” Noble said.

“Thank you, Officer Entwhistle.”

McKinley leaned forward. “Chris Dessaint,” he said hoarsely.

Russ leaned forward as well, opening his hands over the papers on the table. “Elliott,” he said, his voice very quiet, “if you want to tell us your side of the story, it’s got to be on the record. ’Cause I’m not going to waste my time chasing down another suspect if your statement is useless when it comes time to go to court. Now, if you’re willing to put it on tape after being readvised of your right to have attorney’s counsel, I sure would like to hear what you have to say.”

Elliott peered into his face. “I still get to talk with my lawyer?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Okay, then.”

Russ rose, unlocked the door, and strode down the hall to grab a tape recorder from the squad room. He spotted Lyle. “Run the name Chris Dessaint. Anything we’ve got.”

“What’s up?”

“Elliott’s giving us a statement.”

Lyle’s response was lost as Russ reentered the interrogation room. He turned on the machine, read McKinley his rights again, and had him state he understood and was voluntarily making his statement without the presence of his lawyer.

“Okay, Elliott, I don’t want to put any words in your mouth. Why don’t you tell me how you and Chris got into whomping on gay guys. Start at the beginning.”

Russ expected to hear about Emil Dvorak, so he was surprised when McKinley said, “We went up to Lake George to party. Me and Chris and our friend Nathan. Then we decided to go barhopping. Anyway, we were outside some place—I think maybe it was the Blue Lagoon, or the Blue Parrot, something like that—and we went out back to smoke a joint. This guy comes out. You know, perfect teeth, nice clothes. He starts talking, and right away I know he’s a fag.” He frowned. “The guy starts hitting on us, wanting to know if we want to party with some of his buddies, bragging that they got some good stuff. Man, it was like, you know, all day long I gotta take orders from some rich fag, and now here I am on my own time, having to listen to the same bullshit. And Chris, he’s a real good-looking dude, always has girls falling all over him, and I’m thinking, This queer’s hitting on Chris! Anyway, I can see Chris is thinking just the same as I am. So we tell this guy off and punch him around.”

“Nathan, too?”

“Naw, he just kept bleating about getting out of there. Like the fag’s buddies were going to come out and take us on. Anyway, it felt good. You know, like we were standing up for our right not to have all that fag stuff shoved in our faces. We didn’t really talk about it until almost a week later, when Chris asked me if I’d like to do it again.”

“Find someone to rumble with?”

“Yeah. ‘Go on a queer-hunt’ was how he said it. Then he said there might even be a few bucks in it for us.”

Russ blinked. “How so? You were going to find someone loaded and roll him first?”

“No, Chris had a friend. Someone who felt like we did, about the fags getting way too pushy and out of control. His friend couldn’t get out and do anything about it, but he wanted to bankroll us. To make a statement.”

Russ felt as if he had gotten on the Northway to Albany and had suddenly looked around and seen Kansas instead. He inhaled and exhaled slowly. “Chris’s friend—you ever meet him?”

“Nope. Just Chris did. He lived up to his word, though. We got the money, and some bonuses, too.”

The way he said the word bonuses was a tip-off. “Drugs?” Russ asked.

“Yeah. Chris handed it out—ecstasy, meth.”

“Did Chris work with you? Had he ever met your boss?”

“Nah. He works at the Shape warehouse, doing inventory. You know, punching in the numbers on a handheld.”

“How do you know him?”

“We went to school together.”

Russ nodded. “Okay. So Chris said you could get paid for finding a gay guy and beating him up. Then what?”

“Chris said we needed to find someone else to help us. That we needed three all together.”

“Your friend Nathan was out, I take it.”

“Oh yeah. Anyway, I knew this guy Jason Colvin, from when I hung around with Arnie Rider. I thought Jason might be game. So I talked with him, and he was down with it, so we were ready to go.”

“What happened next?”

“Chris told us about the fags running the inn on Route One Thirty-one, down a ways from where I work. He thought that would be a good place to find somebody. He told us he would let us know when. We made a couple drive-bys on nights when we had been partying, just jerking them a little. And then Chris gave me a call that Wednesday and told me we were on for that night.”

“He picked that night particularly?”

“Yeah, which I thought was kinda weird, since we all had to be at work the next day.”

“What did you do?”

“We got together in the woods first, partied a little. Chris passed out some meth, so Jase and I were feeling pretty pumped. Then we drove by, and we saw a bunch of guys out in front. One of ’em was getting into this Chrysler convertible—you know, your typical old rich dude car. So we went down to Route One twenty-one and pulled off to the side, figuring he had to come that way and we’d be able to see him in time. I was at the wheel, ’cause it was my truck, and Jase and Chris were keeping watch. We all were smoking a little more. My idea was to force the guy off the road, but Jason yelled that the lights were coming and it was too late to get all the way back on the road. I was backing up, so he wound up hitting my truck, which really burned me. I put a lot of money and time into that truck.”

Russ’s throat tightened. He nodded for McKinley to go on.

“So we did him. It felt kind of righteous.” He stopped. “Man, can I have a cigarette?”

“Officer Entwhistle, bring Elliott a pack and an ashtray.” Noble unlocked the interrogation room and disappeared around the corner.

“You know,” McKinley said in a confiding tone, “I probably wouldn’t have done all this stuff if I hadn’t been high while I was doing it. Chris was handing out shit like it was candy. He was calling the shots. I was, like, just along for the ride.”

“Yeah.”

Noble reappeared and handed Russ a pack of Marlboros and a disposable aluminum ashtray. Russ slid them across the table to McKinley and fished in his pocket for his dad’s Zippo, circa 1945 and still working great.

“You smoke?” McKinley asked, proffering the pack.

“Not anymore. But I always carry this lighter. Comes in handy.” He lighted McKinley’s cigarette and clicked the Zippo closed, running his thumb over his father’s initials, which were engraved on the case. A tiny reminder linking him to a world where beating men half to death wasn’t part of anyone’s recreation. “Go on. You were saying you did the man in the convertible. Did you know who he was?”

“Nah. But Chris said he knew he was gay, because there wasn’t anybody but queers staying at the inn that week.” “Did Chris tell you that Bill Ingraham lived at that inn when he was in town?”

McKinley sucked hard on his cigarette, his eyebrows wrinkling together. “No, he didn’t. Ingraham was there? No shit?”

“You didn’t know?”

“How the hell would I know? It wasn’t like we socialized.”

“Okay. What happened next?”

“Chris said I probably ought to keep my truck out of sight until I could fix it. I got a cousin who does his own bodywork out of his barn over to Fort Henry. I parked it in there. Haven’t had a chance to straighten out the fender yet.”

“Who came up with the idea to hit the video store owner?”

“That was Jason,” he said quickly. “Jason had known him in school and knew he was queer. He said it would be easy, ’cause we would know right where he would be. Chris said he’d check it out, and then that Friday we all got together. His friend had said okay, but we couldn’t rob the place. And we were supposed to wear gloves so we wouldn’t leave any fingerprints around.”

Russ thought of the prints they had left on Emil Dvorak’s Chrysler. “Did you?”

McKinley made a face. “Hell no. It was a video store, for Chrissakes. There would be, like, hundreds of fingerprints all over the place. And there we’d be, walking in with rubber gloves on. Might as well come in and announce, ‘Call the cops,’ right? That’s when I knew his friend with the money was an amateur.” He glanced at Russ. “Not that I’m, like, a professional. I’m not.”

“It’s just your hobby,” Russ said.

“Hey, man, do you like queers? Do you like ’em shaking their booty everywhere, demanding their rights to make out in public and wear dresses? It’s sick. It’s a sick thing. I probably wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been so stoned all the time on Chris’s shit, but I just done what a lot of people would if they weren’t afraid.”

Russ looked down at the table. His hands seemed relaxed, except for the white pressure points under his nails. He reminded himself that wiping the floor with McKinley was simply not an option. Stay calm. Control, he told himself.

“So you hit Todd MacPherson’s video store.”

“Yeah. But we didn’t rob it!”

“You just gave MacPherson a lesson in straight pride.”

McKinley looked confused. “Huh?”

“Never mind. What did you do afterward?”

“We went back to Chris’s place. He gave us some poppers and then Jase and I each got five hundred bucks.”

“You three talk about your next hit?”

“A little. Jase thought we ought to go down to Saratoga. But Chris said to cool it, that he’d let us know. ’Cause why do it for free when we could get paid?”

“Weren’t you curious about who was bankrolling Chris?”

“Hell yeah. But he wouldn’t say nothing. Chris is way big into all that fake militia, need-to-know stuff, like he was the general and we were the grunts. Screw it. I figured Chris was probably taking his cut off the top, but why should I complain?”

“Did Chris make any suggestions as to a target? Say anything that made you think he knew something you didn’t?”

“Nah. He was mostly talking about getting out and buying some new gear with his money. He likes camping and all that healthful shit. Vitamins.”

“But he also deals?”

“Chris? Not normally. He smokes, but everyone smokes. He mostly stays away from the other stuff. He does steroids sometimes, ’cause he lifts weights.”

“Okay. What did you do after the meeting at Chris’s place?”

“Are you kidding? It was the weekend and I had five hundred bucks. I took off. Just got back this morning.”

“Have you seen the other two since Friday night?”

“Nope. Chris already had plans for the weekend, and Jase wanted to hole up with his new girlfriend.”

“Where did you go?”

“Lake George. Around. I crashed with friends, mostly.”

“You have any of that money left?”

McKinley laughed.

The door clicked open. Lyle MacAuley stuck his head in. “Burns is here. He wants to see his client.”

Russ slid sideways out of the bolted-down seat. “Elliot, I want you to give Officer Entwhistle a detailed account of where you were and who you saw this weekend. I mean a minute-by-minute account. This is going to establish your alibi, so I don’t imagine your lawyer will object.”

Actually, he figured Burns would be screaming his head off in five minutes. He just didn’t plan to be around to listen to it. He ducked through the narrow back corridor that was their supply closet and emerged by the squad room. He stuck his head in. There were voices raised by the reception desk, but he didn’t see Lyle anywhere. He slunk toward Dispatch and stuck his head in. “Lyle?” he whispered.

Lyle appeared in the doorway. “What are you doing? Why are you whispering?”

Russ tilted his head toward the sound of expensive shoes marching down the hall to the interrogation room. Lyle’s bushy gray eyebrows rose in comprehension. He thrust a manila folder into Russ’s hand.

“Chris Dessaint. Twenty-five. He’s been up on D and D, disturbing the peace, assault—a few fistfights. Small-scale stuff. He’s got a juvie record, but it’ll take some time to get that unsealed. Nothing to indicate he’s suddenly likely to step up to the big time.”

“Got a current address?”

“It’s in there. His next of kin’s listed as Alvine Harp-swell; you’ll remember her.”

He did. Alvine had been in on numerous domestic charges, both as batterer and victim, and the speed with which she ran through her partners was astounding, considering her less-than-stellar looks. Lyle went on. “There’s a bunch of Dessaints living in Cossayuharie and in Warren County. I figure he’s related to them.”

There was a rising noise from the direction of the interrogation room. Lyle jerked his thumb toward the front doors. “Paul’s waiting in a black-and-white, and Dave’s out on patrol. You better hightail it out of here before Geoff Burns gets hold of you.”

Russ nodded, tucked the folder under his arm, and hobbled down the front steps and out the door as fast as his swollen knees would let him.

There was no problem finding Chris Dessaint’s trailer in Lyon’s Gate Mobile Home Estates. There was also no problem gaining access; taking a cue from McKinley’s flight, Russ and Paul went through the tiny front door to make the arrest while Dave stood out back, weapon drawn. There was no problem with a resisting suspect. There was no suspect. The place had been cleaned out. Dessaint was gone.

Chapter Nineteen

Clare wasn’t surprised when the office phone started ringing promptly at nine o’clock. She was kneeling atop her desk, struggling to open the window. She knew it could be done, because Mr. Hadley, the sexton, had taken down the forties-era storm windows and hung screens in their place. When she had asked about an air-conditioning unit, he looked at her as if she had suggested installing a hot tub in the bathroom. “Waste of money,” he said. “Won’t get so hot an open window and a fan can’t handle it.”

And she had to admit he had been right, up until last week. The June temperatures had been balmy, and she had simply cranked open the narrow casements at the bottom of her diamond-paned windows for a little fresh air. But after the dismal Fourth, July had moved in like Sherman through Georgia. This morning, walking from the rectory to the church, she had already felt the heat rising from the pavement under her feet. Her sunny office would be an oven if she couldn’t get some cross ventilation.

Unfortunately, the rise in heat and humidity seemed to have caused the window to swell. Knees sliding on loose papers, Clare braced her hands under the sash and heaved. Nothing.

Her speakerphone buzzed. “Reverend?” Lois, the church secretary, hadn’t looked hot this morning. Lois never looked hot, or frazzled, or unkempt. Somehow, she managed to have two fans blowing vigorously in the main office without stirring a single strand of her perfectly cut bob. “It’s Robert Corlew on the phone.”

Corlew had taken over as the head of St. Alban’s vestry since the beginning of the year, after former president Vaughn Fowler had…permanently resigned. When replacing him, the vestry had decided Corlew should use the more traditional title of warden, perhaps to encourage the idea of stewardship, rather than Fowler’s approach, which had been more like Alexander Haig in crisis mode.

Clare grunted, trying the sash again. “What’s he want? And can we get Mr. Hadley in to pry this darned window up?”

“Maybe Mr. Corlew could do it for you. He sounds as if he’s ready to rip a window right out of its frame.”

Clare sank back onto her calves. “He read the newspaper.”

“He read the newspaper.” After the Monday-night broadcast that outed, as it were, Bill Ingraham, the Post-Star had taken the story and run with it. Yesterday, they had a piece on Ingraham’s death and the effect it might have on the Algonquin Spa development. Today, the Wednesday Post-Star featured a prominently placed story linking Ingraham’s murder and the Dvorak and MacPherson beatings, including comments from leaders of gay organizations. Clare’s name, and St. Alban’s, had also been mentioned in both the Tuesday edition and today’s. Lois had already cut out the articles for the church scrapbook. “It makes such an interesting change from all those community news stories about the Saint Martha’s Group tea and white-elephant sales,” she had said.

Clare clambered down from her desk. “Put him through,” she said with all the enthusiasm of an early Christian asking to meet the lions.

“Try not to sound so eager and upbeat,” Lois said before she clicked off and Robert Corlew came on the line.

“Reverend Clare?”

“Good morning, Robert. How nice to hear from you. I don’t think I’ve seen you in church more than once since Memorial Day. I’ve missed you.” She grinned to herself. Maybe she could land a preemptive strike and take the field before he recovered.

“Ah. Well, you know how it is—summertime, grandkids visiting, houseguests, sailing. And business is nonstop.” She could hear him collecting himself. “I’m calling about the article in the paper today.”

“Yes, I saw that. It mentions St. Alban’s. Did you notice? We’re really starting to get our name out.”

“That’s what I mean. I don’t think we want to ‘get our name out’ in a story about gay guys who get killed while cruising for anonymous sex!”

Clare leaned back in her old-fashioned office chair. It let out a satisfying snap. “Are we talking about the same article? The one that describes how a doctor and a video-store owner were assaulted and then a highly respected businessman was killed?”

“In the bushes in the park, yes, that article. I can read between the lines as well as the next man. Gay man plus dark, secluded area in a park means one thing.” His voice dropped into a confidential tone. “Look, I can understand. You happened to be there; your name got into the paper as a result. What’s done is done. What I’m thinking of now is damage control. I want to make sure you aren’t getting involved, that’s all.”

“ ‘Involved’?” Clare’s resolve to treat Robert Corlew with teasing good humor was cracking under the strain of his conversation. “Can you expand on that?”

“Reverend Clare, we can’t afford to have St. Alban’s name linked to any more…scandals. Not after last December. I’ve seen how you can get with these little pet projects of yours. The unwed teenage mothers. Those old drunks. Right? Let’s all get on the same page with this. Homosexuals getting attacked while cruising is unfortunate, of course, but it doesn’t have anything to do with us. I’m sure I’m speaking for the whole vestry when I say we sincerely don’t want to see you in the news again unless it’s the annual ‘What Is the Meaning of Easter?’ story.”

Clare felt the phone go slippery in her grasp and realized she had been squeezing it too tightly. “So this means you don’t think I should ride down Main Street buck naked, calling for all lesbian, gay, and transgendered people to join us in an interfaith service at St. Alban’s?”

There was a heavy pause. “That’s a joke, right?”

“Robert, are you deliberately trying to be offensive, or is it just accidental? My ‘little pet projects’? Do you really believe it has nothing to do with us? Since when does hatred and prejudice breaking out in our own community not concern us?”

Over the line, she could hear him groan. “I knew it. I told Terry Wright. I said you were probably chomping at the bit to save the gays.”

“You were talking about me with Terry Wright?” Terence Wright, senior vice president in the corporate loan department of AllBanc, was another vestry member. “Who else?”

“A few phone calls were made between members of the vestry. The situation was discussed. Some concerns were expressed.”

The passive voice was used. Clare rolled her eyes. “I’m curious. Was Sterling Sumner included in these discussions?”

“I didn’t happen to speak with him.”

“Ha.”

“What do you mean, ‘ha’?”

“I mean, ha, he’s the only gay member of the vestry.”

“Sterling is not gay! He’s just artistic!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Robert. Do you think he wears that scarf year-round because he’s cold?”

The developer, who was a good twenty-five years her senior and probably did think the flamboyant Sumner had an ‘artistic’ temperament, sputtered over the phone.

“Look,” she went on, “I had been concerned about the issues raised by the assaults on Dr. Dvorak and Todd MacPherson. But to tell the truth, I’ve been so swept away by events that I hadn’t been thinking about anything in any coherent fashion. Now I will.”

Corlew started to speak, but she steamed forward. “We’ll have a meeting. We haven’t gotten the whole vestry together since May. We’ll talk about what it means to live in a community where homophobia rises to the point of violent hate crimes and what we, as Christians, ought to do about it.”

“There’s no way you’re going to get everybody together at the church in July. Lacey Marshall and Sterling are both ensconced in their camps at Lake George, and I can guarantee you they won’t leave before September. Norm Madsen is off on one of those Elderhostel trips, picking up old pottery shards in Greece.”

“You and Terry are in town, aren’t you?”

“We hardly comprise the whole vestry. And Terry’s actually on vacation from the bank this week. I was going to take him sailing—”

“Okay, let’s do that. Where is it you sail?”

“What? Where? Lake George, of course. But—”

“Great. Let’s all meet at the lake and have our discussion there. We can do it before you and Terry go out, at either Mrs. Marshall’s or Sumner’s summer house, or—how big is your boat?”

“Forty-two feet. Are you proposing a floating vestry meeting?”

“Sure! That way, no one has to be dragged away from their summer fun.”

There was a dead silence for a moment. Then he said, “That’s a joke, right?”

“No, the transgendered liberation parade was a joke. This is a proposal. The alternative is that we drag everybody in here for a nice long un-air-conditioned meeting. I don’t want to discuss this over the phone, one person at a time. We’ll never get anywhere. And the issue needs addressing now, not in September. When were you going to meet Terry?”

“Friday,” he said.

“Great! Friday would work well for me. I’ve got home visits in the morning and then the noontime Eucharist, but I’m free the rest of the afternoon. Look, I’m going to pass you back to Lois. You let her know where and when to meet at your boat, and she’ll notify everyone else. I’m glad you called and brought this up, Robert. This will really help clarify where we, as a church, stand.”

“Reverend Clare…” She could hear grinding noises from the other end.

“Yes, Robert?”

There were some more noises. Finally, he managed to say, “I’ll see you on Friday.”

“See you then. Bye.” She pressed the transfer button before he could reply. She was getting a handle on the different personalities on her vestry. Robert Corlew was a well-intentioned bully, a man who knew he was right in most everything he held an opinion on and who didn’t hesitate to wield his big voice and brusque manner like a blunt instrument. She thought of Msgt. Ashley “Hardball” Wright, her survival school instructor at Egeland Air Force Base. He had been big on turning other people’s weapons against them. You spot someone hunting for you with a gun, you remember: That’s not his gun. That’s your gun.

She punched the main office button. “Lois? Mr. Corlew is holding. We’re having an impromptu vestry meeting on his boat Friday. You get the time and place to meet and notify everyone who isn’t out of the country. He may want to wiggle out of it. Don’t let him put you off.”

“As if,” the secretary said. Clare hung up and looked at the window in front of her desk with an expression of smug satisfaction. Now. If she could deal with one old fossil stuck in his tracks, she could surely deal with another.

That afternoon was her weekly hospital visit, but she would have gone anyway, to look in on Todd MacPherson. She sat and visited a while with Mr. Ellis, who was in for his second hip replacement, and with Mrs. Johnson, who was getting a biopsy after she had started bleeding from her uterus. The seventy-year-old already had diabetes, a pacemaker, and high blood pressure, and her surgeon, a sympathetic woman Clare’s age, was cheerfully upbeat in front of her patient and considerably more cautious when speaking to Clare. The unvarnished truth about Mrs. Johnson’s chances put Clare in a somber mood as she entered Todd MacPherson’s private room.

She had expected to see family—and there was, his sister Trish—and perhaps someone from the police department—there wasn’t—but she was surprised to see two men whose expensive clothing firmly stamped them as not from Millers Kill, as well as a photographer carrying fifty pounds of cameras and light meters around his neck.

Trish, sitting in a corner chair, noticed her first and waved her in.

“I don’t want to interrupt,” Clare said, hesitating.

“No, it’s all right,” Trish said. “Todd, you remember Reverend Clare. She’s going to marry Kurtis and me. She came and stayed with us while you were in surgery Saturday.”

Todd, lying propped up on a stack of pillows, was a patchwork of bruises, but already he radiated more energy than Clare would have expected. One of the benefits of being twenty-four, she guessed. “Hi, Reverend Clare,” he said.

“I just wanted to pop in and see how you were doing,” she said, taking his proffered hand. “You gave your family quite a scare there.”

“It gave me quite a scare, too.”

One of the well-dressed men, a fair-skinned blond who had been staring at Clare, snapped his fingers. “Clare Fergusson,” he said.

She looked at him, surprised. “Yes.”

“You’re the one who found Bill Ingraham’s body,” he said.

“Oh, that was just—”

“Nils Bensen,” he said, extending his hand and grasping hers. “This is my colleague Adam Coppela.” Coppela was also blond, although from the coloring of his skin and eyebrows, this was more a monumental act of will than anything to do with his genetic heritage.

“They’re from the Adirondack Pride team,” Todd said, beaming as much as his battered face would allow. “I’m going to be on the cover of their next magazine.”

“That’s right,” Bensen said. “Todd here illustrates the terrible trap of simply conforming to the strictures of the straight establishment.”

Coppela clapped a thick-fingered hand on Todd’s shoulder. “The kid tries to fly under the radar, giving no offense—”

“A promising young businessman, paying his taxes—”

“And what happens? Wham!” Coppela smacked his fist into his palm. Clare and Trish both started. “He gets the crap pounded out of him because he’s queer. You can hide, but you can’t run.”

“I’m going to speak at the next regional meeting,” Todd said.

“You’re going to be our star,” Bensen said, smiling down at Todd like a coach looking at his first-round draft choice. He glanced up at Clare. “Since the story broke, we’ve already gotten triple our usual volume of calls asking about donating.”

“Ah,” she said. “That’s wonderful.”

“Maybe we can do an interview with you as a sidebar to Todd’s article,” Bensen said. He framed a headline in the air. “The church’s official representative speaks out against homophobia.”

Clare raised her hands. “I’m not the church’s official representative. I’m not even sure I’m St. Alban’s official representative. If you want a statement, I suggest you contact the diocesan office in Albany.”

“Yeah, but that’s not as sexy as a young hip priest with—” Bensen broke off, his eyes thoughtful. “You aren’t a lesbian, by any chance?”

“No!” she said, and immediately regretted denying it so fervently. “What I mean is, my sex life is private.” Bensen looked very interested. She felt her cheeks getting pink. “That is, if I had a sex life. Which I don’t. I’m practicing celibacy.”

“You any good at it?” Coppela asked.

“I hate to interrupt this fascinating conversation, but I need to ask Mr. MacPherson to spend a little time with Ms. Nguyen from the district attorney’s office.” Clare spun around and discovered she had been right to expect the police to be here. Chief Van Alstyne was standing in the doorway, eyebrows raised. He looked at Todd. “She’s going to show you some photos for possible IDs.” He speared the Adirondack Pride pair with a look and gestured toward the door. Clare waited until they had cleared the room before she left, passing a petite woman lugging photo albums on the way.

She waited outside the door, hoping to catch him when they were done. She was surprised when he emerged alone only a few minutes later. “Did he make an identification that quickly?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No, I just made the introductions. We don’t handle the actual viewing. Someone from the DA’s office who doesn’t know who we’ve tapped shows the pictures. That way, the guy’s lawyer can’t get the ID thrown out because maybe a cop breathed a little too hard when the victim pointed to the right one.”

“Do you have the Elliott guy from the construction job?”

He looked up and down the hall, as if someone might be listening in. Except for an elderly man shuffling along with his IV bag on a pole, they were alone. “Yeah.” He shifted his shoulder and winced. “He’s in custody. He gave up the two guys he says did the jobs with him. One’s a loser named Colvin; we’re trying to track him down through his girlfriend. The other’s more interesting.” He cupped her elbow in his hand and led her farther away from MacPherson’s door. “According to McKinley, the ring-leader was a guy named Chris Dessaint. He’s a guy with a job and a short list, the kind of arrests that happen when you’re young and stupid and get drunk Saturday nights. He and McKinley were up to Lake George a couple of weeks ago and they beat up some gay tourist.”

Clare winced. Suddenly, she felt a lot more sympathy for the Adirondack Pride team.

“Then Chris comes back to McKinley and—get this—says there’s money in beating up gays.”

“What? But Dr. Dvorak wasn’t robbed.”

“Not that kind of money. Payroll. Someone was passing along money and drugs in exchange for assaults on homosexuals.”

“You’re kidding. That’s weird.” She looked up at him. “You think there’s some sort of supremacy group going on? A militia?”

“I’ve never heard of them paying a bunch of losers to front them. They usually manage to recruit their own losers.”

The door to MacPherson’s room swung open. Ms. Nguyen stepped into the hall. “He’s done,” she said, passing them on her way to the elevator. “You can question him now.”

“Be right there,” Russ said. He looked at Clare. “This stays between you and me, right? Even if you get outraged by the injustice of life, et cetera.”

She crossed her heart. “Even if.” He glanced toward the door and she suddenly wanted, more than anything, to keep him there for a few minutes longer. Just because talking with him was easier than talking with anyone else. “Have you seen your mother? I took the dogs back. She seemed pretty cheerful about the arrest and all.”

“Not yet. I’m going over there Friday to do some work on the porch. Or at least that’s the excuse. Mostly, I’m going over for dinner and the game. Linda’s redecorating the living room this weekend, and I need to be out of the way Friday. I can’t stand tripping over ladders and breathing paint fumes.”

“Your living room? Was that the room with the comfy chairs?” Clare had been to his house last winter—once. “But it was so pretty. I liked it.”

“Me, too.”

Trish MacPherson stuck her head out the door. “Chief? Are you—”

“I’m coming,” he said. He paused before entering the room, his hand on the edge of the door. He looked at Clare. “Hey.”

“Hmm?”

“Are you any good at that celibacy thing?”

Chapter Twenty

The first thing that struck Lawrence Robinson was the quarreling of crows. A quarrel of crows—wasn’t that what they were called? “Hey, Donna,” he called back to his wife, who was methodically tramping up the steep trail behind him. “What’s the collective noun for crows?”

She stopped beside him, breathing hard, and pushed her auburn hair out of her eyes. He handed her his water bottle. Two week’s hiking in the Adirondacks had been his idea for their summer break from Cornell, and he was grateful she was being such a good sport about it. Alternating camp nights with bed-and-breakfast stays had been her idea. It meant they never got very far into the wilderness, but the promise of a good mattress and a shower every other night kept Donna gamely walking forward.

She swallowed the tepid water and rubbed her hands dry on her T-shirt. She squinted into the trees. The raucous cries of the birds increased in volume, and then a wide-winged black shape rocketed through the forest cover, breaking the air over their heads and diving down, swooping through the cleared space of the trail. It skimmed overhead, so close that Lawrence could have jumped up and caught a tail feather, and then disappeared over the next rise, like a supernatural messenger from an Edgar Allan Poe tale.

His wife, who taught biology to premed students and was not the sort for fanciful imagery, said, “The collective noun for ravens, you mean? That was a raven. Crows are much smaller.” She eased her pack off her shoulders with a grunt. “They’re making God’s own racket down there, aren’t they?”

Lawrence jerked his attention away from the raven’s flight path. After twenty-eight years of marriage, he could take a hint. They had left the bed-and-breakfast in Millers Kill over four hours ago, and Donna was ready for a break. He unbuckled and dropped his backpack. The ravens couldn’t be seen, but they certainly could be heard, guttural cries and sharp knocking calls that sounded as if they were demanding, “Talk! Talk!”

Donna fished a granola bar out of her waist pack. “Probably fighting over a carcass.”

“Yeah? Cool! You think there might be bones? Some bones would be a great prop for my class next semester on ritual and imagery in premodern societies.”

Donna stuffed the rest of the bar into her mouth. “I fawt you were gon’ have ’em paint rocks,” she said around a mouthful of oats. She rolled her eyes at him and swallowed. “Okay, let’s go have a look. It’s probably just a raccoon. I can’t imagine too many premodern societies worshiped raccoons.” She struck out toward the sounds. He followed after, occasionally slowing himself on a tree trunk as the angle of the mountainside increased. She was a good sport, his wife.

This part of their hike was through mature forest, tall trees and little underbrush, thick dark humus composted from decades of fallen leaves quieting their steps. The day was hot and heavy, even here underneath the shade of the forest cover, and no breezes stirred the crowns of the beeches and maples. The ravens’ screams sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness.

“Whoa! Honey!” Below him, Donna scrambled back, her legs kicking against the downward slant of the forest floor.

“What? Are you okay?” He let go of the trunk he had been clasping and jogged down the slope sideways until he could reach her.

“It’s a drop-off. Not terribly high, but it startled me.” She pointed to where the rich earth of the forest floor crumbled into air. Lawrence leaned against the pebbled trunk of an old black-cherry tree whose roots thrust through soil and rock into the air. “Be careful, honey,” Donna said.

He could see the striated rock beneath him, a gash in the mountainside maybe ten or twelve feet high. Below them was a brook, brown and speckled as a trout, running between two narrow banks of shaggy grass, the closer side growing right up to the rock, the farther side petering out into the deeply shaded hardwood forest.

At the water’s edge, a small tent was staked out next to a stand of paper birch gleaming in the midday sun like fragile polished bones. The flapping, quarreling ravens nearly obscured its dun-colored fabric, perching on the aluminum ridgepole, strutting on the ground, plucking at the window flaps. “You’re not going to believe this.” Lawrence glanced back at Donna. “It looks like The Birds down there. I think someone’s in trouble.”

To her credit, Donna didn’t think twice. “How can we get down?”

He took in the lay of the land. “This drop narrows down to just a couple feet if we follow it west a few more yards. We can jump from there.”

“West?”

“Go left.”

They trotted as fast as they could along the gash in the mountainside until they reached the area Lawrence had spotted from above. Donna jumped first and was splashing through the shin-deep water of the brook before he had eased himself over the rocky ledge. “Shoo! Shoo!” she yelled, windmilling her arms as she charged the ravens. With a chorus of croaks and calls, they lifted into the air in a dark whirlwind and settled in the stand of birch trees. Their shiny black bodies tipped the thin branches down, and they looked so much like a caricature of vultures that Lawrence would have laughed if it hadn’t been so damn creepy.

“Honey…” Donna’s voice was uncharacteristically hesitant. “I smell something.”

The tent, the narrow one-person kind ideal for long hiking trips, was zipped up tightly. But Donna was right. As he got closer, he could smell it, too, sickly sweet. He wrinkled his nose. They looked at each other. “I’ve got my cell phone in my backpack,” she said. “We could…”

Lawrence shook his head. “We can’t just leave.” A few feet in front of the tent, ashy stones enclosed a scorched circle. He bent over and placed his palm on top of the crumbled charcoal. “It’s cold.”

Donna took a deep breath. “Okay, then. Let’s open it up and see.” Before he could say anything or stop her, she unsnapped the flap covering the zipper and unzipped the front of the tent.

“Oh, my God!” They both recoiled—Donna turning her head, eyes watering; Lawrence covering his mouth and nose with one hand. The smell from the confines of the overheated tent was like the worst-ever rotten egg. Inside, in the dim, dun-colored light, he could see—

“Mmmmmph!” Donna spun away and retched.

The only dead people Lawrence had ever seen were his own parents, antiseptically clean and laid out in satin-lined coffins. They had been made up, their sunken cheeks padded and rosy, looking bizarrely as if they had fallen asleep while dressed for church. They bore no resemblance to the smoothly bloated body in the tent, but Lawrence knew he was looking at death, the real thing, without any prettying up or euphemisms.

“We should—” he started to say, and then he watched, horrified, as a single greenfly buzzed through the overheated air, entered the tent, and settled delicately on the dead man’s open eye.

Lawrence grabbed his wife’s arm and hauled her away, their stumbling steps turning into a run, and they splashed across the brook and clawed themselves up over the low rock ledge.

Running through the forest toward the trail, Donna’s hand clutched tightly in his, he remembered the collective nouns he had been searching for earlier: A conspiracy of ravens. A murder of crows.

Lights in the darkness. Heat radiating off the tarmac. The inescapable thwap-thwap-thwap of rotors and the dust devils rising in the downdraft. Russ folded his arms across his chest, aware of the damp fabric clinging to his skin and the hopelessly sweaty patches under his arms. Last Wednesday night, he had been watching one of these damned machines take off, and now here he was this Wednesday night, only a week later, watching and waiting as the chopper eased down and its skids touched the sticky black asphalt of the landing pad at the Glens Falls Airport.

Only this time, he didn’t have Clare’s exhilaration to distract him. Instead, it was Kevin Flynn and Mark Durkee leaping out in a display of youth and machismo, followed more slowly by Lyle MacAuley and Dr. Scheeler, who, Russ was pleased to notice, eyed the slowing rotors above his head and walked bent nearly in half until he was well beyond their range.

“You should have come, Chief! It was great!”

Russ sighed and fixed Flynn with a baleful glare. “I keep telling you, Kevin, we don’t describe felonies as ‘great.’ ”

“The helicopter ride! That’s what was great. You ever been on a helicopter?”

“Yes, I have.” Russ turned to Lyle and Dr. Scheeler. “Well?”

“He was carrying a driver’s license and cards that ID’d him as Chris Dessaint. Looked sort of like the picture on the license. Kind of hard to tell,” Lyle said.

“Two days sealed in a hot tent will do that to you,” Dr. Scheeler commented. His sardonic tone reminded Russ of Emil Dvorak. Maybe it was a pathologist thing.

“Wait till you hear what we brought back with us,” MacAuley said. From around the corner of the nearest hangar, Russ could see the meat wagon pulling up to the now-quiet chopper. “Kevin, Mark,” MacAuley yelled at the pair, “you two collect the evidence bags and meet us at the cars.” The two younger officers ambled back the way they had come, dancing out of the way of the two mortuary attendants, who were sliding a shiny black body bag out of the belly of the beast.

Don’t go there.

He turned on his heel, forcing Lyle and Dr. Scheeler to accelerate to keep up with him. “Why don’t you two fill me in on the whole picture?” he said. “From the beginning.” He knew he should have been there that afternoon. He wouldn’t have needed a hand-holding briefing from Lyle and the medical examiner if he had just been able to get into the chopper and go with the rest of them. Lyle frowned at him from under his bushy gray eyebrows but didn’t comment on his abrupt departure. They headed toward the squad cars, which were parked behind a chain-link fence near the North Country Aviation hangar. “We were able to put down a half mile or so from the scene. The two Cornell professors who found the body showed us where it was. Kind of an out-of-the-way spot. If there hadn’t been a bunch of birds attracting their attention, he could have been there for a lot longer.”

“You get statements from them?”

“Yeah. They didn’t have much that was helpful. They were shook up pretty bad, as you can imagine.”

Yeah, he could imagine it.

“We offered to fly them back,” Lyle went on, “but they decided to walk out. I’ve got contact numbers for them if you want to talk with them yourself.”

“What was the scene?”

“Looks like Dessaint hiked in and pitched camp. I’m guessing he knew what he was doing. His equipment was top-of-the-line, but a few years old, well used. He was ready to travel light. A single-man tent, a bedroll, a couple changes of underwear. But he had a lot of food with him—that fancy dehydrated crap—and two bottles of purification tabs for water.”

“He was going to disappear into the mountains?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

MacAuley was right. Any number of people had hiked into the Adirondack State Park and disappeared, intentionally or not. An experienced camper with enough food and water could stay out of sight a long time in the summer. Dessaint might have hoped to lie low until things cooled down. Or hike west to Route 30, the narrow road running more or less north through the million-acre park, and from there hitch and hike his way over the Canadian border. The Adirondacks were a wilderness, but a wilderness with small towns, camps, and settlements.

“Any money on him?”

“A little over three hundred bucks.”

Russ snorted. “That’s not much to start a new life with. Even with the Canadian exchange rate.”

MacAuley shrugged. “He had maybe another four, five thousand in drugs—meth and coke, and enough OxyContin to fill one of those economy-sized vitamin bottles.”

They reached the chain-link fence. The shadows from the hangar swallowed them as they went through the gate into the parking lot. Russ unlocked his car and opened the door, spilling light onto the gritty asphalt below their feet. “So what was the cause of death, Doctor?”

“Obviously I don’t have either a toxicology screen or an autopsy to go by. But I feel safe in giving you a first opinion that he shuffled off this mortal coil due to an overdose.” Scheeler beeped his car with his remote key. Russ could hear a dull thunk as the doors unlocked. “Based on the fact that he had a needle in his arm and his works spread out on the tent floor next to him. I’m guessing—and it’s just a guess, mind you—that he gave himself a highball.”

Russ leaned against the top of the squad car. Out of sight of the helicopter, he felt more relaxed, more thoughtful. “That doesn’t jibe with what his weasely little friend McKinley told me. He described Dessaint as a sort of fitness buff. Hardly the kind of guy to shoot up heroin and in-jectable cocaine.”

“Yeah,” MacAuley said, “but according to McKinley, Dessaint was the one handing out the goodies as well as the cash after they’d had a party.”

Russ frowned. “Were there any signs he was a regular user?”

“I didn’t see any tracks on his arms,” Dr. Scheeler said. “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t an occasional user.”

“Wait till you see the real jackpot item, though,” MacAuley added. “Remember I told you that it was a flock of birds that brought the Cornell folks down for a look-see? Well, most of ’em got scared off when all of us arrived and started working the site. But there were five or six of them, big buggers, that kept hopping around and pecking at one spot nearby, underneath a tree. So I went to take a look at it, and it’d been dug up recently and smoothed over. It was shaped like a drop pit. You know, for—”

“I camp, Lyle. I know what a drop pit is. But birds aren’t going to be pecking at someone’s latrine.”

“That’s what I thought. So we dug it up. Guess what we found.”

“Jimmy Hoffa.”

MacAuley crossed his arms and leaned back. Russ had an idea what he was going to say, but he wanted to give him his moment. Lyle loved a little drama. “No, really, I don’t know,” Russ said. “What?”

“Clothes. They had been rinsed out, but there were still visible bloodstains on ’em. And a tear in the sleeve that looks like a match to those threads we found at the scene.”

Russ looked at Scheeler. “Could they be what Ingraham’s killer was wearing?”

The medical examiner spread his hands. “Could be. I didn’t want to examine them at the site, for fear of losing possible hairs, fibers, or skin flakes. The blood traces we could see were very faint, which would certainly be the case if the killer went into the river after he garroted Mr. Ingraham. Most of the blood would wash away in the cold water, but not all.” He clasped his hands together like a man savoring the prospect of a good meal. “I think going over those clothes with a microvacuum and some Luminol will be very informative. First thing I’ll do is type the remaining blood, of course. If I were a betting man, I’d put money down that it’ll match Bill Ingraham’s.”

Russ reached under his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “So it looks good that Dessaint is our killer.”

“Yep,” MacAuley said.

“And that he conveniently offed himself while sampling his wares.”

“Yep.”

“We can pretty much look forward to marking this one closed.”

“Yep.”

“Except”—Russ looked at MacAuley over the tops of his glasses—“we still have McKinley’s story about Dessaint’s mystery contact, handing off drugs and money in exchange for beating up on a few selected targets.”

“Maybe he was making that up for the benefit of his audience. Dessaint, I mean. Covering himself in advance by putting the blame on some evil overlord. He might have guessed that McKinley or Colvin would turn him in within five minutes of getting picked up.”