Out Of The Deep I Cry

Chapter 26

Monday, March 27

Russ came out of the handicapped elevator to thunderous applause. “Elvis is in the building, repeat, Elvis is in the building,” Deputy Chief Lyle MacAuley megaphoned the announcement with his hands.

“Yeah, thanks, I missed you all, too,” Russ said, swinging forward on his crutches. “Now stuff it.”

“I bet Linda forced him to come back to work,” Lyle said. “One week of him stuck at home and she threw his ass out of there. You can tell he’s a bad patient.”

“All men are bad patients.” Harlene Lendrum adjusted her headset over her springy gray curls. “You should see my husband Harold. What a whiner. The last time he got the flu, I told him I was sending him to the Quality Inn out on the Northway. I was perfectly willing to pay so long as it meant someone else fluffing his pillows and fetching him room service.”

“Welcome back, Chief!” Kevin Flynn had gotten a regulation haircut while Russ had been on sick leave. Now the kid looked even more like Opie from The Andy Griffith Show. How was he going to do credible traffic stops when he didn’t look old enough to have a learner’s permit? Clearly, a week away was too long.

Russ thumped up the corridor toward the squad room, an overblown, big-city name for the station’s central work area. “How ’bout you guys show me what you’ve gotten done on the Rouse case while I’ve been at home making life difficult for my wife?”

Noble Entwhistle, bless his plodding, methodical soul, followed Russ through the squad-room door and went straight to his desk. “We’ve just gotten the CIS results back on the Clow woman’s car.” He swept up several papers that had been scattered over the desk’s metal surface and held them up for inspection.

“In one week’s time?” Russ said. “It’s a miracle.”

“You must have a special in with the Almighty,” Lyle said, hiking himself up onto his desktop. Russ shot him a look. Lyle grinned.

“What’d they find?” Russ asked, turning his back on MacAuley’s amusement.

“Rouse was in the car.” Noble couldn’t have looked more pleased if they had found the doctor’s body stuffed in the trunk. “They got hairs and a blood sample from the passenger-side headrest.”

“Shee-it.” Russ whistled. “Any prints?”

“A couple of partials along the outside edge of the roof, just above the door. It’s not anything that’ll hold up in court, but it looks like he propped against the car with the door open or maybe reached up while he was inside, sitting down.”

“Now that’s more like it.” Russ tilted toward Noble. “I want Debba Clow in here for questioning like, five minutes ago. Lyle.” He pivoted on one crutch to catch his deputy. “Get the paperwork together and fax it over to the DA’s office. I want a warrant for her house and I want us out there looking before she leaves the station.”

Lyle slid off his desk and took the CIS results from Noble. “This is what I live for,” he said, strolling toward the file cabinet where the application forms were stored. “Pulse-pounding action.”

Forty minutes later, Russ gimped up to Harlene’s operations board for his fifth check-in of the morning. “Anything yet?”

She swiveled her chair around to face him. “Aren’t you supposed to be keeping that leg up? Go to your office! Sit down! I will let you know when Noble calls in.”

“My office is a pain in the ass to navigate,” he said. “There’s not enough room around my desk and the damn chairs get in my way. Last time I went in, I knocked over a pile of Law Enforcement Quarterlies.”

“Serves you right for not ever picking up in there.” Harlene swiveled back toward her board.

“What the hell’s keeping him so long?”

She swiveled toward him again. “Deborah Clow has little kids, remember? Maybe she has to arrange for someone to sit with them.”

“Oh.” He knew he sounded like he needed someone to sit with him. “I thought her mother-”

Harlene held a hand up, cutting him off. She clipped the microphone back in place in front of her mouth. “Go ahead, fifteen forty-six.”

Russ propped one crutch under his arm and leaned forward to snap on the intercom button. Harlene swatted his hand away and flicked the switch herself. “-with an ETA of twenty minutes,” Noble was saying. “Ms. Clow has agreed to accompany me for questioning. Sus LU’d prior so expect a suit shortly. Fifteen forty-six over.”

Suspect lawyered up before leaving, so expect her attorney shortly. Damn. That was not what he wanted to hear.

“Who do you think she called?” Harlene asked.

“We’ll know soon enough,” Russ said.

As it turned out, Debba Clow’s mouthpiece arrived before she did; not such a surprise, considering his office was a five-minute walk away on Main Street. Russ could hear him before he saw him, badgering Ed at the reception desk. “I want to see my client before she’s processed, and I want a copy of any and all warrants extending to her arrest and any searches of her property.”

Russ thumped down the hall toward reception. “Your client’s not under arrest, Mr. Burns. She’s coming in of her own accord to help us locate a missing person.”

Geoffrey Burns looked Russ up and down. Mostly up. He was a little guy, maybe five and a half feet, and Russ figured “little” described him in more ways than one. It would go a long way toward explaining his bantam-cock attitude toward the world. Compensatory something, it was called.

“I’d heard you broke a leg. Reverend Fergusson included you in the prayers yesterday.”

“She did? Huh.” He’d lay good money Geoff Burns hadn’t been praying for his quick recovery.

“Where’s Ms. Clow?”

Evidently they had met the minimum daily requirement of chitchat. “She’s not here yet. Officer Entwhistle is driving her in.”

“What’s the basis of your warrant?”

“I told you, we’re not arresting her. She was the last person to see Dr. Allan Rouse alive.” Or dead, he thought.

“She told me you impounded her car last week and had it searched. What did you find?”

Russ smiled pleasantly. “Let’s wait until we’re all together before we discuss that, shall we?”

“Are you planning on a search of her home?”

He had to give it to Burns, he knew how to stick you like a butterfly on a pin with his questions. “If necessary.” He was saved from further disclosures by the sound of footsteps echoing up the marble stairs in front of them. Noble Entwhistle and Debba Clow appeared, the latter with an angry pink flush high on her cheeks and her kinky hair flying every which way. It was not shaping up to be a promising questioning.

“Deb, thanks for showing up,” Russ said. “Let’s all go back to the interview room.” Aka the interrogation room, but that didn’t sound so friendly. He gestured down the hallway with his head. The department’s small briefing room was where they usually interviewed friendly witnesses or victims. It had windows, tissue boxes, a plug-in coffeemaker. The interrogation room had audio-and videotaping feeds. He knew which one he wanted when talking with Debba Clow. “Noble,” he said as they reached the interrogation room, “will you see if Ms. Clow or her attorney needs anything? Coffee, water…”

“Let’s get down to business,” Burns said. “First order is, I need a minute in which to confer privately with my client.” He cast a glance at the interrogation room’s reinforced door. “Not there.”

Russ smiled, a bit less pleasantly. “We don’t eavesdrop on attorney-client discussions, Mr. Burns.” Burns simply stared at him. Russ breathed in on a slow three-count and turned his head toward Noble. “Officer Entwhistle, will you please escort Mr. Burns and Ms. Clow to my office? You can wait outside to make sure they don’t get lost on their way back.” He bared his teeth at Burns, who bared his in return.

“Thank you. That will do nicely.”

Russ crutched up to the squad room as Burns and Debba Clow disappeared into his office. “Lyle?” he said.

Lyle rounded the corner from the other end of the room. “Sorry. I was in the can.”

“You got anything on that warrant?”

“Amy Nguyen from the DA’s office is in with Judge Ryswick right now. As soon as she’s got it signed, she’ll hand it off to Kevin and me and we’ll split for Clow’s house.”

“Remember, Clow lives with her mother and she has two little kids. One of ’em autistic. So use your good manners and play nice.”

“I always play nice. I’m like the real-life version of that Jerry Orbach guy on Law & Order.” Lyle stroked his bushy gray eyebrows.

“Except that Jerry Orbach is a lot better looking than you.” Russ stumped back down the hall to the interrogation room. Balancing on one crutch, he unlatched the door and pushed it open. He wanted to be sitting when Debba Clow and Burns came in. He figured the sight of him balancing precariously as he lowered himself into a chair wouldn’t do much good for his image as the Guy in Charge.

He had just stowed his crutches under his chair when Noble escorted Debba and Burns in. Russ watched her as she took in the room’s windowless, institutional green walls and the steel case furniture bolted to the floor. Her eyes widened and she turned to Burns. That’s right, honey, this is the real deal, Russ thought. Scary, isn’t it?

Burns looked at him coolly. “Don’t be intimidated, Debba. You’re here doing them a favor.” He took the chair across the table from Russ. Debba checked the seat beside Burns before settling in it, as if there might be something waiting to bite her.

“Just to avoid misunderstandings, we like to run tape when we’re asking questions.” Russ smiled in what he hoped was an easy, nonthreatening way. “It’s easy to forget who says what, and this way there’s a record for us all to refer to. So, Debba. Do we have your permission to tape you?”

She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Okay,” she said.

“And we will want a copy within twenty-four hours,” Burns added.

Russ nodded at Noble, who had taken up his position by the door. Entwhistle pressed the recording button set in the wall. “Okay, then,” Russ said. “For the record, this is Russ Van Alstyne, and I’m interviewing Deborah Clow-”

“I prefer Debba,” she said.

“We need your legal name on the record,” he said.

“Deborah Clow. Today is Monday, March twenty-seventh, and it’s”-he glanced at his watch-“nine-forty A.M. Deb, we have your consent to tape this, right?”

“Yeah. Yes, you do.”

“Deborah Clow is accompanied by her attorney, Geoffrey Burns.” Prick. “Debba, I want you to think back two weeks ago to Sunday night, March nineteenth. You met with Dr. Allan Rouse. Did he call you, or did you call him?”

She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Dr. Rouse called me,” she said.

“Were you surprised? Since you two had a run-in just a week before?”

She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Yeah. I was. Surprised.”

“What was the subject of his phone call?”

“Pardon?”

“What did Dr. Rouse want to talk about?”

She looked at Burns. Christ, this was going to take forever if she had to get his okay for every word out of her mouth. “Mr. Burns, you’re pretty quick on the up-take,” Russ said. “Maybe you could tell your client that you’ll interrupt if there’s anything you don’t think she should answer. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll be here for a very long time.”

Burns nodded to Debba. “It’s okay. Rest assured, I’ll jump in if he goes over the line.”

Sentence by sentence, Russ led her through the events of that evening. Her language was stilted, the way some people got when they knew they were being recorded, but her account was substantially the same as the one she had given him that Friday in Clare’s living room. She had agreed to meet him because he had kept insisting he was going to show her the truth about vaccines, and she thought anything he said to justify himself might be ammunition in her custody fight. No, she didn’t think her lawyer for the custody dispute would approve. No, she didn’t know where the directions he gave her would lead to. No, she didn’t see him until she arrived at the spot along the county road. Yes, they were each alone. Dr. Rouse had led the way through the trail to the tiny cemetery. He had a flash-light. She didn’t. No, she hadn’t been afraid of him. “I’m at least as big as he is,” she said. “I figured if he got weird on me, I could take care of myself.”

“Were you contemplating having to use force to defend yourself?” Burns asked before Russ could get his next question in.

“No,” Debba said. “I believe in nonviolent resolutions. Discussion, not disruption.”

Russ thought he remembered seeing the same sentiment on a bumper sticker on her car. It hadn’t impressed him then, either. “How does that jibe with your breaking into Dr. Rouse’s clinic and trashing one of his examining rooms two weeks ago?”

Burns’s arm shot in front of Debba like a parent holding a kid back at a stop-light. “That’s irrelevant to Dr. Rouse’s whereabouts,” he said. “You don’t need to address that, Debba.”

Russ waited a beat, and when it became apparent she was going to follow counsel’s advice, he went on. “What did Dr. Rouse say to you when you reached the graves?”

She looked at Burns. He nodded. “It’s hard to remember,” she said. “It was cold and dark, and I was thinking that I had made a major mistake, because obviously, he wasn’t going to tell me anything about the vaccines he had been using on the children of Millers Kill.” She caught a strand of her long, curly hair and wrapped it around one finger. “He told me to look at the dates on the headstones. He wanted me to understand how deadly and contagious some of the epidemic diseases were. Please. Like I hadn’t already spent two years reading up on them.”

Burns laid his hand on her arm. “Just stick to the question.”

“Oh. Okay. He had this idea that the epidemic wasn’t just the disease, but the effects of the disease. He said the parents of those four children died when their kids did.”

“What?” Those kids died in 1924, and he knew that whatever had happened to Jonathon Ketchem, he had been alive and kicking until 1930.

“I think he was speaking metaphorically. You know, they died inside. For a supposed scientist, he used a lot of metaphors. He was going on about links in the chain, about how each death sent ripples across the water, until more and more lives were swamped.” Russ must have been giving something away in his expression, because she nodded to him, her long corkscrew hair bouncing up and down. “Yeah, I didn’t know what to make of it, either. You can see what I meant when I said it was hard to tell what he was talking about.” She pushed some of her hair away from her face. “Then he said that if anything happened to my children, I would never forgive myself. Now, up to that point, I was feeling a little sorry for him, because I could tell he meant well, and he seemed to be in total denial about the role his vaccinations have played in screwing up kids’ health. But when he said that, I got mad.”

Geoff Burns was on her statement before she had time to draw breath. “When you say you got mad, Debba, do you mean you attacked the doctor?”

“Of course not.”

“You shouted at him? Threatened him in some way?”

“No. I got mad. I told him I thought between the two of us, he was the one who needed help, not me. Then I told him he should either give me the flashlight or escort me back to the road, because I was going home.”

“What did he do then, Deborah?” Russ leaned forward slightly. This would be the meat of it.

“I turned to go, and I took a few steps, and he must have tried to follow me, because I heard him kind of yell-you know, that noise people make when they’re falling on ice?”

He nodded. Oh yeah, he knew that noise.

“When I turned back toward him, he was laid out in front of one of the stones. I grabbed his flashlight and I could see that he had whacked himself pretty hard, he was bleeding and all.” She glanced over at Burns, as if to check if she could use the word blood.

“What did you do?”

“I helped him up the trail, back to where we had parked the cars. I took a better look at his gash, and I offered to drive him into town, but he turned me down.” She spread her hands in appeal. “How was I to know? He was the doctor, not me. Besides, if you’re a parent, you see plenty of head cuts over the years. They always bleed like crazy, but they don’t amount to anything.”

“So what happened next?”

“I watched him get into his car and turn it on. It was running, I saw the exhaust. Then I took off. That’s the last I saw of him.”

“Where did you drive to, once you left?”

“I needed gas, so I drove over to the Quik-Fill that’s by the Kmart. I was seriously shaken up by the weird stuff that had happened. I didn’t want to go straight home. So I went to Clare’s house.”

“Why Reverend Fergusson?”

Debba tilted her head, twisting another strand of hair around her finger. “She had told me, when we… during that thing at the clinic”-she glanced over at Burns, checking to see if she was on dangerous ground-“that I should come talk to her anytime. I thought… I had a lot of stuff in my head, and I thought she could help me sort it out and make sense of things.”

Russ nodded. “When you say that’s the last you saw of Dr. Rouse, do you mean alive? Have you seen his body at any time after you left him Friday?”

“Ugh. No.”

“Have you seen him alive any time after you left him Friday?”

“I told you, no.”

Burns tapped the table. “Don’t badger my client, Chief Van Alstyne.”

Russ ignored him. “You say after you reached the trailhead, you took a closer look at Dr. Rouse’s injury. How did you do that? With his flashlight?”

“Yeah. He sat in my car and I turned on the lights and took a look. He had a handkerchief, a real cloth one, and he kept it pressed against his cut.”

Crap. “How long was he in your car?”

“A few minutes, maybe. He seemed really exhausted. That’s when I tried to get him to let me take him home, or to the hospital or something.”

This was not what he wanted to hear. Rouse taking a breather in the car was totally plausible. There wasn’t any other sign of him in the car-no indication that she had stuffed him in the trunk or laid him out in the backseat. If Lyle and Kevin didn’t find anything in her house, there was no way they were going to connect Clow with Rouse’s disappearance. The DA wouldn’t even bother with their paperwork-it would go straight into the circular file. “What time was it when you left Dr. Rouse?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe seven-thirty or so?”

“And it took you an hour to get gas and reach Reverend Fergusson’s house?”

“I guess. I wasn’t in any hurry.”

“Did you make any other stops?”

“Nope.”

“What time did Dr. Rouse contact you?”

“It was after dinner, so… between six and six-thirty.”

“Which?”

She looked at Burns before answering. “Closer to six, I guess.”

Burns placed both hands on the table. “I think that just about covers it, don’t you, Chief?” He stood up. “Ms. Clow has covered all the events of that night in which she played any part. She’s been nothing but cooperative, both today and during the night Dr. Rouse disappeared. I trust there won’t be any need for further questioning.”

Debba glanced at Russ, then at Burns, checking to see if she really could just get up and leave.

“I’m sure Debba here understands that we need to do everything that we can to find Allan Rouse,” Russ said.

Burns hooked a hand under Debba’s arm and levered her out of her seat. “Then I suggest, Chief, that you stop hounding my client, get off your butts, and start tracking the man down.”