All Mortal Flesh

NINE

Russ Van Alstyne loved his house. After a lifetime of living in base housing or rental apartments, he had embraced the pleasures and pains of home ownership like an ecstatic embracing a demanding god. He restored the kitchen woodwork to its origins in the Second World War. He converted the cavernous walk-in attic into an all-modern-conveniences workspace. He reinforced the sagging barn floor so it could be used as a garage. He repainted it, clapboard, trim, and shutters, one side every summer.

Now he sat in his truck, in his driveway, looking at his house. Afraid to get out. Afraid he might throw up the moment he crossed the threshold.

“A cleaning crew’s already been in.” Lyle sat in the driver’s seat, waiting for him to get his act together. He had seen Russ in the station parking lot, fumbling with his keys, and roughly bumped him out of the way. “Shove it over,” he had said. “You’re not in any condition to drive.” Now he continued, “After the CS techs finished last night. The kitchen was cleaned.”

“That was fast.” There was a service in Albany that provided crime scene and biohazard cleanup, but it usually took a couple of days for them to make it to a job.

“I called in a few chips.”

“Oh.”

There was a silence.

“Russ, you have to go in sooner or later. And if you want the investigation to go forward, it’d better be sooner.”

“I know. It’s just-”

“I know.” Lyle nodded. “Look, how about we go in the front door?”

Except in the summertime, when they opened it to circulate air through the house, the formal front door was never used. In the winter, Russ didn’t bother to shovel it out, and he and Lyle would have to wade through several weeks’ worth of accumulated snow to reach it. But it was at the other end of the house from the kitchen. In fact, if he went in the front door, he might never have to set foot in the kitchen. He didn’t worry about later. He was living minute by minute now.

“Okay. Let’s.”

Lyle grabbed one of the guys and asked him to unlatch the double doors from the inside. The snow was as bad as Russ had feared, but the challenge of breaking a trail through knee-deep crust and powder distracted him sufficiently so that it wasn’t until he whacked his boot against the first granite step that he realized he was there.

He stomped up the steps-two, then a rectangular slab, then another two-shedding snow as he went. He pulled open the doors-tug, sweep, a kick of the boots against the jamb-and he was in.

Inside.

“You okay?” Lyle was crowding in behind him, forcing him to move forward in order to shut the doors behind them.

“Yeah.” And, in some way, he was. The awful blankness of the kitchen awaited him, but in the tiny hallway, with the stairs he climbed to bed every night in front of him, he was okay. Not great, but he wasn’t going to get sick all over the oriental carpet.

“What do you want to do first?”

He had decided on the way over that he would have to be methodical to get through this task. Take it one step at a time. “The workroom,” he said. “End of the hall at the top of the stairs.” Farthest from the kitchen. Although it was Linda’s space, it was also the most impersonal as far as Russ was concerned. She designed and cut and sewed for her custom drapery business there; a workplace and nothing more. When he flicked on the lights he saw what he expected to see, the worktables clear, the racks and shelves of fabrics and hardware neat and organized.

Lyle hovered in the doorway while Russ walked around. “Everything look good?” he asked.

“I gotta be honest with you,” Russ said. “Unless the place was tossed, I wouldn’t be able to tell. Once I finished the renovation, I didn’t come in here except to ask her if she was coming to bed.” Regret squatted like a heavy toad on his breastbone. All the time and energy she had spent on her business, and the extent of his interest had been to find out when she was getting home from her fabric-buying jaunts. Why hadn’t he put more effort into appreciating what she was doing? He turned toward Lyle. “Let’s check the guest rooms,” he said.

The two extra bedrooms were just as they always were, lavishly decorated and sterile. Once in a while they entertained couples from their army days, but most of the year they were alone. His closest relationships had always been among the people he worked with-relationships that closed Linda out without meaning to. Work had defined him and owned him. No wonder her friends were hers, and not theirs.

“Anything?” Lyle asked.

He shook his head. Stepped across the hall. Paused.

“This is your bedroom, right?”

He nodded.

“You ready to go in?”

“Hell, no.” That earned him a half-smile from his deputy chief. Christ, Lyle was looking almost as cut up as Russ felt. He had always liked Linda, had been one of the few guys on the force she could talk and laugh with. Russ wasn’t the only one who had suffered a loss. Not by a long shot.

Their bedroom was heartbreakingly normal. The bed neatly made. Several empty dry cleaner’s bags tossed on Linda’s side-she never used wire hangers. Her closet door open, a pair of high heels tumbled in front of the full-length mirror. He could see her, standing there, scrutinizing herself. Frowning, shaking her head, kicking them off. “Not these,” she would have said.

“Russ?”

Lyle’s voice shook him from his reverie. He forced himself to cross the plush carpeting to Linda’s vanity, where she kept her jewelry in a drawer.

The first thing he noticed was her wedding ring, sitting next to her engagement diamond and the diamond and sapphire eternity band he had gotten her on their twentieth anniversary. When had she taken them off? She had been wearing them at the therapist’s office.

The rest of the contents of the drawer were intact, a fact he could have told without further search. No one after easily shopped swag would have passed up those rings. He paused for a moment, trying to exorcise the ghost sitting at the vanity, examining her skin, dipping her fingers into the expensive little pots littering the mahogany surface. What else would thieves possibly take?

His gun safe was usually in his closet, but he had taken it to his mother’s when he left. Linda’s passport? No, it was still in her bedside drawer-always within reach for a quick getaway, she used to joke.

Lyle came out of the connecting bathroom. “It doesn’t look like anything’s been touched in here,” he said. “Did she have any prescriptions that might have tempted somebody?”

“Not unless estrogen’s suddenly become a black-market commodity.”

Lyle’s mouth quirked upward, and Russ found himself half-smiling, thinking of Linda cracking jokes about hot flashes, and in the next instant his eyes filled with a rush of tears and he had to turn away, fumbling for the doorknob. “Better get to the rest of the house,” he said, when he could make his throat work again.

He knew before they went downstairs that nothing would be missing, and he was right. The stereo, the DVD player, the silver collection she had amassed over the years-all of it was there. He and Lyle were headed for the small office off the parlor, where Linda paid the bills and managed her paperwork, when Kevin Flynn poked his head in from the living room. “Chief?” he said tentatively. “I’m sorry to disturb you…”

“What is it, Kevin?”

“It’s just-where did Mrs. Van Alstyne keep her purse?”

“Her purse?”

“I was going over the barn, and looking into her station wagon, and it made me think about my mom, who likes to keep her keys in the ignition in her car, so when I came back into the house I was sort of looking to see if you had some of those hooks for keys like folks sometimes have, you know, in the kitchen or the mudroom, except you don’t, so then I got to thinking where do ladies keep their keys if they aren’t in the car or on a hook and I figured their purses. Right?”

Russ didn’t want to contemplate the amount of lung power it took for Flynn to get that sentence out. One of the advantages of being twenty-three. “Mrs. Van Alstyne hangs her purse on one of the coat hooks on the mudroom wall, Kevin. It probably has a coat tossed over it.”

“No, sir, I thought of that. There aren’t any purses on those hooks. I checked.”

Russ was through the living room, across the kitchen, and in the mudroom before he remembered to be afraid of the room in which Linda had died. He tossed the barn coats and parkas and rain slickers on the floor, one after another, until they blocked the door to the summer kitchen and the old-fashioned iron hooks gleamed dully in the morning sun streaming through the diamond-shaped window in the mudroom door.

There was no purse.

He swung toward Lyle. “AllBanc,” he said.

“I’m on it,” Lyle said, fishing in his jacket for his cell phone.

Russ headed back through the kitchen, all his dread evaporated in the heat of a possible lead. “I’ll get you the account numbers,” he shouted over his shoulder.

“You think the perp might have taken her bag?”

Kevin’s voice surprised him. He hadn’t noticed the kid tagging along in his wake.

“Yeah,” he said. He wanted to scream, Why didn’t you notice this last night, you idiots?! but he knew recriminations wouldn’t get him results. He opened the door leading from the kitchen into Linda’s office. Two file towers flanked her desk, one for home and one for her business. He yanked open the top drawer of the home file. He might as well use this as a lesson for Flynn. “The perp leaves behind fenceables but takes the purse. What does that tell you?”

“He’s an amateur,” Kevin said promptly. “An opportunist. He doesn’t know anyone he can palm stolen goods off on, but he can use debit and credit cards.”

“Good.” Russ opened a folder marked BANK STATEMENTS/CHECKS. It was empty. He bit back a curse. She was so organized, she had already moved last year’s statements to the next drawer down. He slid it open. And there they were, along with folders marked VISA and MASTERCARD and oh, shit, he had to look in her business drawers, too, because she had a corporate American Express and MasterCard and checking account.

“Here, hold these,” he said, thrusting the folders into Flynn’s hands. He tore open the other drawers, rifling through tabs marked OROCO FABRICS and SOCIAL SECURITY and ACCOUNTS PAYABLE-SEAMSTRESSES until he found the financial materials, which he pulled without examining and laid in Kevin’s arms. He was consumed with a sense of urgency. Linda’s murderer had already had nearly twenty-four hours. What if he had already emptied their accounts and vanished?

“Take those to Lyle,” he said.

Kevin sprinted out of the tiny office, leaving Russ alone with the paper trails of his life together with Linda: mortgage payments and electrical bills, credit card statements and snowplowing receipts. It struck him how oddly impersonal their house was without her actual presence, the office organized but not personalized, the rooms decorated but not inhabited. His mind flashed on the St. Alban’s rectory on Elm Street-tabletops cluttered with photographs, books, and mementos spilling off the shelves to sit heaped by squishy armchairs. A note of longing hummed through him, the urge to go to that house and drop into one of those chairs and lay his sorrow before the woman who lived there…

He jerked upright. God, what sort of a monster was he? His wife was on the medical examiner’s slab, and he was comparing her to another woman? He scrubbed at his face as if he could wash his guilt away, knocking his glasses askew. He steadied them, looking more intently at the files. He pulled open the desk drawers. There must be something personal here. Something connecting him to his wife and the two of them to the world at large.

Her computer. He pushed the on button, riffling through more files while it booted up. He never used the thing-he preferred taking phone calls at the station and being left alone at home-but Linda e-mailed friends, her sister, everybody.

The screen, which used to feature a slide show of fabric designs, now came up with a mostly naked guy who had more than the usual number of muscles. O-kay. Maybe that was part of the process her therapist wanted her to go through. Getting in touch with who she was in addition to being a wife. His mouth twitched upward. He’d wanted to find something personal. Well, here it was.

He sat in the rolling desk chair and clicked on the e-mail icon. A sign beneath the window informed him he was downloading mail, and a pulsing bar flashed on and off for almost a minute. When it finished, multiple windows popped up, one laid over the other. One said DEBBIE-her sister. One said SEAM-STRESSES, one IN, one MEG, one eSBW-he clicked on that; it seemed to be a mailing list for the Small Business Women’s Association she belonged to.

Suddenly, he understood. Organized in cyberspace as well as in the real world, Linda had her e-mail filtering into multiple mailboxes. He clicked on DEBBIE. It looked as if she and Linda had been e-mailing several times a day since November. The most recent one-the one she would never read-was titled “You go, girl!”

There were a number of e-mails going back and forth that he guessed concerned him; they had subject lines like “That dickweed!!!” and “Men are bastards.” He sagged against the back of the chair. What the hell did he think he was going to find in here? He had told his wife of twenty-five years that he was in love with another woman. What did he think she would be saying to her sister and girlfriends? What a swell guy he was?

With a masochistic sense of deserving whatever abuse he got, he clicked on the last e-mail from Linda to her sister. The subject, which appeared on a whole slew of e-mails, read “Mr. Sandman.”

D-

I’m going to do it. 1. Don’t care 2. Don’t care 3. Don’t care. Give me a call!

Love, L

A few messages down, there was one from her sister to her.

Hi, Lin,

You need to ask yourself this: 1. Am I doing this just to get back at Russ? 2. Am I ready to be considered a bitch when I slap down Mr. S’s pass? (yes, he will, and yes, you will) 3. Is having some man validate my attractiveness really going to help me figure out what I want?

You’ve been down this road before, cupcake. Be careful!!

Love, Deb

Who the hell was Mr. S, and what was he doing making passes at Russ’s wife? He found the next previous e-mail from Linda.

D-

Mr. S knows all about what’s going on with me and R. (In fact, he knows and respects R, which helps.) He’s not going to cross any lines. Meg says I should go for it-escaping from my problems with the help of a handsome man;) should be good for what ails me.

Love, L

Russ sat back in the chair. Someone who knew him. Who knew and respected him. He double-checked the date of the correspondence. The e-mails had all been written during the middle of last week.

Hi, Lin,

I think it’s too soon to be dating, if that’s what you mean. Yesterday you were bawling about what you need to do to get your idiot husband’s attention back. Mr. S is looking for love in all the wrong places and he’s pegged you as ND and D (Newly Divorced and Desperate). Except you aren’t divorced and don’t think you want to be. I know you want to give Russ a kick in the teeth but this isn’t the way to do it.

Love, Deb

The part of him that was a husband was trying to fit the words “Linda” and “date” together. Even tossing aside their therapist-mandated separation agreement-how the hell could she be thinking about dating? The last time either of them had been out on a date, the Village People had been at the top of the charts and Tug McGraw was telling the Mets “You gotta believe.”

D-

Remember the guy I told you about? He’s making me an offer. The kind that’s too good to be true. What do you think?

Love, L

The part of him that was a cop was envisioning a scenario that blew MacAuley’s the-chief-was-the-target theory out of the water. “Hey, Lyle,” he yelled. He heard a thwap of files hitting the kitchen table, and then Lyle strolled through the door.

“AllBanc says no activity on the checking account or the credit cards.”

Russ waved the information away. “Take a look at these e-mails.” He stood, gesturing for Lyle to take his place. “Linda and her sister, writing to each other.”

Lyle brought out his reading glasses and leaned toward the monitor.

“Try this on. There’s an evening or an afternoon out. This guy brings Linda home. Maybe he was tight, or stoned, or maybe he was just the type who liked hurting women.”

Lyle, engrossed in the screen, made a go ahead noise.

“He pushed himself onto her. Linda said no. Probably-and I can just imagine her doing this-she handed him his head on a platter. And then the bastard pulled out his knife and-”

Where did he get a knife? If they had been on a date? Not that it was a date, of course. Just that the guy, Mr. S, had thought so. But Russ knew Linda, and she wouldn’t have stepped out the door with Mel Gibson himself if he wasn’t dressed right.

“We don’t have the knife, do we?” he asked Lyle, who had finished with the e-mails Russ had highlighted and was scrolling down the other entries in the mailbox.

Lyle shook his head.

Oh, Christ, Russ thought. Oh, Christ, let it not be-“Kevin,” he yelled.

The kid appeared in the doorway too fast not to have been listening to every word.

“I’ve got a gun locker in the barn. It’s where I keep my hunting stuff, in the old tack room-”

Flynn nodded, his red soul patch bobbing up and down hypnotically. “I looked at it, Chief. There are two rifles and a shotgun. All locked down. I thought that was the right count.”

“It is. What about my knife?”

“Your knife?”

“It’s an old military issue K-Bar.” Russ gestured, approximating the size. “I use it for field dressing. It should be wrapped in a flannel cloth, lying on the little shelf next to where I keep my recycled shell casings.”

Kevin paused. Russ was so used to the young man blurting out whatever was on his mind that it took him a moment to realize Kevin was weighing his words.

“I saw the shell bucket,” he said carefully. “You can go take a look yourself, but Chief, there’s no knife there.”