The chief blinked and straightened slightly. “Yes, sir, I was in the Eighty-ninth.” Clare bit back a smile. Evidently she wasn’t the only one to have a hard time treating the colonel as a civilian. “I’m surprised you’d remember something like that,” Russ went on.
“Military service is something I always look for. It’s what makes a man.” He frowned. “Or woman.” Clare felt her cheeks flush. Fowler pointed to the folder. “You ready to start this, Chief?”
“Yessir,” Russ said.
“Then I might as well be the first. Set an example, let everyone know what’s expected of them. Nothing to be afraid of, after all.” Russ looked at Clare. She nodded. He flipped open the folder. Clare had avoided looking at the photographs when she had been saying good-bye to parishioners at the front door, but now she took a long, steady look at the face of the unknown. Four shots, face front, profiles, and full body, covered with an institutional green sheet. She was struck by how much less real the girl looked, laid out on a steel table, lit by fluorescents and flashbulbs. Not at all like the sleeping princess, leaves frozen into her long hair, that she had stood over on the bank of the creek.
“Sorry,” Fowler said. “Don’t know her.” He frowned. “Where did you say it happened?”
“I didn’t,” Russ said. “We found her body just upstream from Payson’s Park.”
The colonel glanced at Russ. “Kids still go there to get away from their parents?” He shook his head. “I used to skinny dip in the river there. Jump off the old trestle bridge and swim downstream. It was a more innocent time. . . . Sorry I can’t be of any help.”
“Thank you anyway,” Russ said.
Fowler nodded, slipping on his overcoat. “Reverend, I’ll be seeing you at the next vestry meeting. Chief Van Alstyne, good to meet you.” When he opened the door, the sunlight and snowlight flooded the parish hall, drawing glances from the rest of the room.
Clare held up her hands. “May I have your attention, please? For those of you willing to help with the police investigation, Chief Van Alstyne is ready to have you look at the photographs. If you could give him your name before leaving, he’ll be able to keep track of which members of our congregation have seen the pictures. I know it’s an unpleasant task, but it’s important that we all do our part to help the police catch whoever is responsible for this crime. Thank you.”
There was a surge of bodies toward them. “Good heavens.” Clare murmured. “They don’t seem to be too horrified at the prospect of autopsy shots, do they?”
“Reality TV,” Russ whispered. “If you’ve seen all those specials on serial killers, this is pretty tame.” He raised his voice. “If you could form a line there, we can get you all out of here quickly.”
It was a repeat of the earlier scene in the vestibule of the church, with more people. The same exclamations, expressions of sympathy, philosophical mutterings. No one recognized her. There was a moment of excitement when Mae Bristol’s turn came up. She held two of the photos in her hands, looking slowly from one to the other. “I feel as if I should know her,” she said. “I just can’t place her. But I’m sure I’ve seen her before.” She shook her head and smiled apologetically at Russ and Clare. “Too many years of too many young people, I suppose.”
The tedium of the whole process reminded Clare of how she had felt waiting on the trail for the evidence to be photographed. Police work was a lot like combat, she decided, hours and days of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
“Oh! My! God!” The squeal brought her mind back to the scene at hand. Alyson what’s-her-name stood in front of Russ, flanked by two well-dressed adults who were presumably the parents who had spoiled her. “I know her! That’s Katie McWhorter! I know her!”
CHAPTER 8
Clare had offered her office to the Shatthams, figuring it would be a comfortable spot for their daughter to talk with the police chief, but they were insistent that Clare be there for Alyson’s statement, so the five of them wound up clustered at one end of the massive oak table in the vestry meeting room. Clare wasn’t sure what role the Shatthams wanted her to play. Counsel? Witness? Maybe they hoped she would put the fear of God into Alyson, who, after her first emotional outburst, had reassumed her pose of pseudo-sophistication and contempt. Clare was out to sea when it came to adolescents, which she’d freely admit if anyone bothered to ask. The only teens she had known in recent years had been in the army, and she didn’t think telling Alyson to keep her weapon grounded and her hands inside the bird would be useful in this situation.
The girl sat in a chair facing away from one of the windows, her hair a blond nimbus, her face shadowed. Her parents had dithered for a few moments before taking up seats on either side of her. Russ sized up his choices and sat down directly opposite Alyson, leaving the chair at the head of the table for Clare. She took it, wishing she had brought her glass of sherry along, wondering how Russ could let the seconds roll on by without demanding Alyson tell them everything she knew.
He flipped open the folder again, arranged the photos against the creamy manila, and slid it across the table to Alyson. The teen’s eyes flickered to the pictures and then returned to the chief. Russ reached inside his shirt pocket, removed a pair of sunglasses, and swapped his glasses for the shades. They were mirrored. Clare rested a finger against her lips to keep from making a crack about Cool Hand Luke.
“Katie McWhorter,” he said. “What can you tell me about her, Alyson?”
“She was just a girl who went to school with me, that’s all. She graduated last year.”
“Did she stay in town after she graduated? Or did she move away?”
The girl shifted slightly in her seat. “She went off to college. Somewhere. I’m not sure. It’s not like we were friends or anything.”
“No?”
“No. She was like, living somewhere around Depot Street? My parents sure don’t want me going there. And she didn’t exactly hang out at Smoky Joe’s drinking cappuccino.”
“Who did she hang with, Alyson? Before she went to college.”
“Nobody much. She was a brainiac, really smart, so she knew a lot of the geeks. I know she had a job at the Infirmary.” She paused, frowning. “She had a boyfriend.”
Clare wanted to yell, “Yes! Now we’re getting somewhere!” Russ didn’t twitch. “A boyfriend?” he asked, with no particular emphasis.
