“One of them decided to escalate,” he said. “My guess is Wilma, but the details of the picture are still hazy. Apparently Wilma went over to Nettle’s while Nettle was visiting Polly this morning. Nettle must have left without locking her door, or even latching it securely, and the wind blew it open-you know how windy it was today.”
“Yeah.”
“So maybe it started out to be just another drive-by to keep Nettle’s water hot. Then Wilma saw the door standing open and the drive-by turned into something else. Maybe it wasn’t quite that way, but it feels right to me.”
The words weren’t even out of his mouth before he recognized them as a lie. It didn’t feel right, that was the trouble. It should have felt right, he wanted it to feel right, and it didn’t. What was driving him crazy was that there was no reason for that sense of wrongness, at least none he could put his finger on. The closest he could come was to wonder if Nettle would have been careless not only about locking her door but about shutting it tightly if she was as paranoid about Wilma jerzyck as she had seemed… and that wasn’t enough to hang a suspicion on. It wasn’t enough because not all of Nettle’s gear was stowed tightly, and you couldn’t make any assumptions about what such a person would and wouldn’t do. Still…
“What did Wilma do?” Norris asked. “Trash the place?”
“Killed Nettle’s dog.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Jesus! What a bitch!”
“Well, but we knew that about her, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, but still-”
There it was again. Even from Norris Ridgewick, who could be depended on, even after all these years, to fill out at least twenty per cent of his paperwork bass-ackwards: Yeah, but still.
“She did it with a Swiss Army knife. Used the corkscrew attachment and stuck a note on it, saying it was payback for Nettle slinging mud at her sheets. So Nettle went over to Wilma’s with a bunch of rocks. She wrapped notes of her own around them with rubber bands. The notes said the rocks were Wilma’s last warning.
She threw them through all of the jerzycks’ downstairs windows.”
“Mother-a-God,” Norris said, not without some admiration.
“The jerzycks left for eleven o’clock Mass at ten-thirty or so.
After Mass they had lunch with the Pulaskis. Pete jerzyck stayed to watch the Patriots with jake Pulaski, so there was no way he could even try to cool Wilma out this time.”
“Did they meet on that corner by accident?” Norris asked.
“I doubt it. I think Wilma got home, saw the damage, and called Nettle out.”
“You mean like in a duel?”
“That’s what I mean.”
Norris whistled, then stood quietly for a few moments, hands clasped behind his back, looking out into the darkness. “Alan, why are we supposed to attend these goddam autopsies, anyway?” he asked at last.
“Protocol, I guess,” Alan said, but it was more than that… at least for him. If you were troubled about the look of a case, or the feel of it (as he was troubled by the look and feel of this one), you might see something that would knock your brain out of neutral and into one of the forward gears. You might see a hook to hang your hat on.
“Well, then, I think it’s time the county hired a protocol officer,” Norris grumbled, and Alan laughed.
He wasn’t laughing inside, though, and not just because this was going to hit Polly so hard over the next few days. Something about the case wasn’t right. Everything looked all right on top, but down in the place where instinct lived (and sometimes hid), the Martian warlords still seemed to make more sense. At least to Alan.
Hey, come on! Didn’t you just lay it out for Norris, A to Z, in the length of time it takes to smoke a cigarette?
Yes, he had. That was part of the trouble. Did two women, even when one was half-nuts and the other was poison-mean, meet on a street-corner and cut each other to ribbons like a couple of hopped-up crack addicts for such simple reasons?
Alan didn’t know. And because he didn’t know, he flipped the cigarette away and began to go over the whole thing again.
2
For Alan, it began with a call from Andy Clutterbuck. Alan had just turned off the Patriots-jets game (the Patriots were already down by a touchdown and a field goal, and the second quarter was less than three minutes old) and was putting on his coat when the phone rang.
Alan had been intending to go down to Needful Things and see if Mr.
Gaunt was there. It was even possible, Alan supposed, that he might meet Polly there, after all. The call from Clut had changed all that.
Eddie Warburton, Clut said, had been hanging up the phone just as he, Clut, came back from lunch. There was some sort of ruckus going on over in the “tree-street” section of town. Women fighting or something. It might be a good idea, Eddie said, if Clut were to call the Sheriff and tell him about the trouble.
“What in the blue hell is Eddie Warburton doing answering the Sheriff’s Office telephone?” Alan asked irritably.
“Well, I guess with the dispatch office empty, he thought-”
“He knows the procedure as well as anyone-when dispatch is empty, let The Bastard route the incoming calls.”
“I don’t know why he answered the phone,” Clut said with barely concealed impatience, “but I don’t think that’s the important thing.
Second call on the incident came in four minutes ago, while I was talking with Eddie. An old lady. I didn’t get a name-either she was too upset to give me one or she just didn’t want to. Anyhow, she says there’s been some sort of serious fight on the corner of Ford and Willow. Two women involved. Caller says they were using knives. She says they’re still there.”
“Still fighting?”
“No-down, both of them. The fight’s over.”
“Right.” Alan’s mind began clicking along faster, like an express train picking up speed. “You logged the call, Clut?”
“You bet I did.”
“Good. Seaton’s on this afternoon, isn’t he? Get him out there right away.”
“Already sent him.”
“God bless you. Now call the State Police.”
“Do you want CID?”
“Not yet. For the time being, just alert them to the situation.
I’ll meet you there, Clut.”
When he got to the crime scene and saw the extent of the damage, Alan radioed the Oxford Barracks of the State Police and told them to send a Crime Investigation Unit right away… two, if they could spare them. By then Clut and Seaton Thomas were standing in front of the downed women with their arms spread, telling people to go back into their homes. Norris arrived, took a look, then got a roll of yellow tape marked CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS out of the trunk of his cruiser.
There was a thick coating of dust on the tape, and Norris told Alan later that he hadn’t been sure it would stick, it was so old.
It had, though. Norris strung it around the trunks of oak trees, forming a large triangle around the two women who appeared to be embracing at the foot of the stop-sign. The spectators had not returned to their houses, but did retreat to their own lawns. There were about fifty of them, and the number was growing as calls were made and neighbors hurried over to view the wreckage. Andy Clutterbuck and Seaton Thomas looked almost jumpy enough to pull their pieces and start firing warning shots. Alan sympathized with the way they felt.
In Maine, the Criminal Investigation Department of the State Police handles murder investigations, and for small-fry fuzz (which is almost all of them), the scariest time comes between the discovery of the crime and the arrival of CID. Local cops and county mounties both know perfectly well that it is the time when the so-called chain of evidence is most often broken. Most also know that what they do during that time will be closely scrutinized by Monday-morning quarterbacks-most of them from the judiciary and the Attorney General’s Office-who believe that small-fry fuzz, even the County boys, are a bunch of Deputy Dawgs with ham hands and fumble fingers.
Also, those silent bunches of people standing on the lawns across the street were goddam spooky. They reminded Alan of the mallzombies in Dawn of the Dead.
He got the battery-powered bullhorn out of the back seat of his cruiser and told them he wanted them to go inside, right away.
They began to do it. He then reviewed the protocol in his head one more time, and radioed dispatch. Sandra McMillan had come in to handle the chores there. She wasn’t as steady as Sheila Brigham, but beggars could not be choosers… and Alan guessed Sheila would hear what had happened and come in before much longer.
If her sense of duty didn’t bring her, curiosity would.
Alan told Sandy to track down Ray Van Allen. Ray was Castle County’s On-Call Medical Examiner-also the county coronerand Alan wanted him here when CID arrived, if that was possible.
“Roger, Sheriff,” Sandy said self-importantly. “Base is clear.”
Alan went back to his officers on the scene. “Which one of you verified that the women are dead?”
Clut and Seat Thomas looked at each other in uneasy surprise, and Alan felt his heart sink. One point for the Monday-morning quarterbacks-or maybe not. The first Crime Investigation Unit wasn’t here yet, although he could hear more sirens approaching.
Alan ducked under the tape and approached the stop-sign, walking on tiptoe like a kid trying to sneak out of the house after curfew.
The spilled blood was mostly pooled between the victims and in the leaf-choked gutter beside them, but a fine spray of dropletswhat the forensics boys called backsplatter@otted the area around them in a rough circle. Alan dropped on one knee just outside this circle, stretched out a hand, and found he could reach the corpses-he had no doubt that was what they were-by leaning forward to the very edge of balance with one arm stretched out.
He looked back at Seat, Norris, and Clut. They were clustered together in a knot, staring at him with big eyes.
“Photograph me,” he said.
Clut and Seaton only looked at him as if he had given an order in Tagalog, but Norris ran to Alan’s cruiser and rooted around in back until he found the old
