Maid of Murder

Chapter Thirty

I stopped at Mark’s apartment to pick up a few of his things, then headed into town. Police cruisers and a few automobiles speckled the Justice Center’s lot. I parked near the library. I grabbed my shoulder bag and the canvas sack I had brought from Mark’s apartment.

I jogged up the stone steps. The front room of the police department was deceptively small. A glass wall and doors behind the front desk closed the majority of the department off from the public. The room resembled a waiting area in a family doctor’s office. Two groupings of uncomfortable chairs book-ended the desk. The four side tables held collections of back issues of magazines. A ficus plant languished in the far corner beyond the reaches of natural light. The department was not the typical Stripling-chic to which most public buildings in the town aspired. It is one of the few town structures where function trumped form. The Stripling Historical Society bemoaned this fact.

The front desk was a four-foot-high counter bolted to the linoleum floor, similar to the reference desk at Ryan Memorial Library. Behind the desk sat Officer Knute, who didn’t appear pleased to see me.

“May I help you?” he asked, offering nothing of the kind.

“I’d like to speak with Detective Mains, please.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you think it’s a little late to be speaking to the detective?”

I glanced at my wristwatch. It was just after nine. I hadn’t realized the time. Mains had probably gone home hours ago. But maybe he hadn’t. Maybe Officer Knute just didn’t like me.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Is he here?”

Officer Knute grumbled that he was.

“Then may I speak to him?”

“Your name, please.”

“India Hayes. I’m Mark Hayes’s sis—”

“Yeah, yeah,” he interrupted. He’d heard it before. Knute made an in-house call. “This is Knute at the front desk. . . . There’s a woman here to see you . . . about the Hayes case. . . . She claims that she’s his sister. India. . . . If you’re sure, sir. . . . Right-oh.” He hung up the phone. This time when he addressed me, he was much more polite. “Please take a seat, it could be a few minutes.”

I sat on one of the chairs on the desk’s right flank. It was as uncomfortable as it looked. I shifted on the hard plastic surface, so that it didn’t hit me directly on my tailbone.

I didn’t wait long.

Mains stepped through the glass doors. His tie and jacket were gone, his shirt collar open at the throat, and his brown hair stood on end as if he’d been pulling on it throughout the day. He raised his eyebrows at me.

“Hi.” I greeted him as if it was ten o’clock in the morning and we were old pals.

He stood waiting for me to continue.

I stood up and hefted my bag to my shoulder. “I’m sorry to bother you so late.”

Knute snorted from his station at the desk.

“I want to apologize for any problems my parents and Carmen caused today.”

He laughed. “I felt like I was back in high school. Your sister hasn’t changed a bit.”

“I’m afraid not,” I replied.

“I appreciate your apology, but I doubt that you came all the way down here just for that.”

“I, um, I—”

“Spit it out,” he said.

“Can I see Mark?”

For a half second, I thought Mains looked disappointed, but it must have been my imagination. Whatever his first reaction was, it was immediately superseded by doubt. “We don’t usually allow a suspect’s family member to visit our jail cells this late in the day.”

Knute clicked manically on his mouse, probably playing Solitaire. The clicking slowed as he eavesdropped.

“I won’t take long. I want to make sure he’s okay.”

“I can assure you that we take fine care of our wards here,” he commented, as if offended.

“I’m not implying that you’ve mistreated Mark in any way.”

Mains scratched the stubble on his chin. “I suppose a few minutes can’t hurt. I’ll take you down.”

Knute stopped clicking altogether.

Mains slipped a magnetic key card through the scanner bolted to the glass door’s frame. A buzzer sounded, and I followed him through the door. Through the glass wall, I glanced at Knute. I was wrong. He wasn’t playing Solitaire; it was Free Cell. He glanced from my gaze to the screen and back. I winked at him.

The duty room was a conglomeration of green and beige metal desks placed in islands like a fourth-grade classroom. Mains and I were the sole occupants. I rubbed my eyes; the lights were grotesquely bright. Mains stopped at a desk. Unlike the other work stations about the floor, which were sprinkled with personal possessions and family snapshots in inexpensive frames, Mains’s desk held a soup can of pens and pencils, an ancient black telephone, and two large stacks of file folders. The bottoms of the file folders ran perfectly parallel with the edge of his desk. If the cop thing didn’t work out, Mains would make an excellent librarian.

Mains made a call. I was pretending not to overhear when I spotted Mark’s name on one of the files. It took all my will power not to grab the manila folder and flee the building. Mains told whoever was on the other end of the line, “We’ll be down in a minute. . . . Uh-huh. . . . It’s his sister . . . the other one . . . right.” Mains laughed, and then glanced at me. He followed my line of sight to Mark’s file and stopped laughing. “Ten minutes tops,” he said and hung up. “Find anything of interest?” Mains asked me.

“Nope,” I replied with a sweet smile.

“You’ll see your brother. I can only give you a few minutes.”

Mains walked across the room to a secure steel door leading to the stairwell. I followed him down steep steps. Our footsteps echoed in the hollow space, and the stairwell smelled like the inside of a freezer.

As a Western Reserve municipality, Stripling connected itself with civilized New England and distanced itself from its Midwestern-ness. The small city had a three-volume tome of building codes that emphasized Western Reserve construction, a mishmash of nineteenth-century New England architecture carried west by Connecticut businessmen. The city council enforced the building codes with an iron fist, which forced the jail level of the Justice Center to be built underground. I thought about Mark shivering deep in the pit of the building. My stomach tightened. He was alone and scared, wondering why no one had gotten him out of there yet. Mark was far too sensitive to be angry about the injustice of it all. It was my job to be angry, and I felt myself become more furious by the minute as we walked down the stairs. I was glad that I was following Mains, and he couldn’t see my face. I didn’t want him to know how I felt. I needed to be on his good side to help my brother.

We walked down another flight of cement stairs, and the temperature plummeted.

“Is Kirk down here?”

Mains glanced back to me. “We let him go.”

I stopped dead. “What?”

“Regina Blocken and the mayor’s wife are on the Garden Club, the library board, and the Women’s League together. If that guy he clocked wouldn’t press charges, I couldn’t hold him without the department’s backing.”

“I didn’t know the Blockens even liked Kirk.”

“The family is not one for scandal of any kind. I got the impression that she plans to send Kirk back to Virginia as soon as possible.”

We reached a third steel door. I wondered if it was inlaid with lead or maybe kryptonite. The stairwell emptied into a damp hallway. The temperature dropped another twenty degrees. Goosebumps crawled across my bare arms. I touched the tip of my nose; it felt like an ice cube. At the end of the hallway was another steel door that had a card scanner. Who did they have down there anyway? King Kong?I wondered.

Mains swiped his card through the scanner. The officer who had arrested Kirk at the protest waited on the other side of the door. Her name plate read V. Habash. Her curls were barely restrained into a ponytail at the nape of her neck.

“Evening, Detective,” Officer Habash cooed. Maybe I imagined the cooing.

Mains gave the officer a broad smile and a wink. I hadn’t imagined anything. “Officer Habash.” Mains nodded.

Mains turned to me. “India, Officer Habash will search you. It’s protocol.”

“Uh, right, of course,” I said as if I was an old hand at this.

“Step over here, please.” Officer Habash directed. “Hold out your arms.”

She worked swiftly, starting at my armpits, and patted down the length of my body.

“She’s clean,” Officer Habash told Mains. As if I could hide anything in a tank top and a pair of nylon shorts, I thought.

I was carrying my shoulder bag and the canvas bag from Mark’s apartment. “I’ll have to search those too, ma’am,” Officer Habash stated.

Ma’am? Come on, I thought.

I reluctantly handed her the satchels. She rummaged through my shoulder bag.

She then moved to the canvas bag, unzipping it. “Huh?”

Mains sidled over and took a peek inside the bag. “What are these for?” he asked.

“Well, I—”

“I know you’re a librarian, but . . .” He dumped the bag on a metal tabletop with a succession of muffled thuds. Half a dozen paperback books fell out of the bag, some were mathematics texts, but most were mystery and fantasy novels. A half-realized smile played on Mains’s lips.

“He’s stuck in that cell with nothing to do. With nothing to read. I hoped I could give him some of his books to take his mind off things.”

Mains’s face broke into a full-fledged smile. “So having nothing to read is the worst punishment you can think of?”

“Just above Chinese water torture and thumb screws,” I remarked with, what I hoped, passed for an endearing smile.

Officer Habash watched our exchange with a bemused expression.

“Officer Habash, search the books, please. Make sure she’s not hiding any box cutters between the pages.”

I stopped just short of rolling my eyes.

Officer Habash flipped through the books.

I watched her with a sigh. I was anxious to see Mark, and I was becoming colder by the minute. “I don’t know what I could possibly hide in those books.”

Mains looked at me. “You’d be surprised. With your upbringing, I’m sure you have a lot of tricks up your sleeve.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

Mains grinned. “I dated your sister, remember?”

Like I could forget.

“They’re clean,” she said. I wondered if Officer V. Habash watched a lot of crime show reruns.

“I’ll allow the books, Miss Hayes, but only three. Pick three.” Mains said.

I looked down at the titles scattered across the desktop. The request was similar to, “If you were stranded on a deserted island and could only take one thing, what would it be?” But the scenario was worse. “If you could only read three books for the rest of your life, what would they be?” I chose Mark’s favorites: a calculus book that he’d owned since he was eleven, The Two Towers—don’t ask me why that’s his favorite fantasy novel—and Travels with Charley.

“Fine,” Mains said after I had made my selection. “Leave your other things here.”

I followed Mains into the holding block with the books clenched tightly to my chest.