was, was after her, wouldn’t she?”
“You never saw any signs of her pregnancy?” he asked.
She shook her head. “She went to Albany in June, right after she graduated. The university had given her a work-study job in the computer center, and they needed her there for the summer. At least, that’s what she told me. We talked on the phone at least once a week. She sounded so good! I never guessed. I never would have guessed.” She released Clare’s hand to pick up her coffee.
“The girl who first identified Katie for us said she’s had a boyfriend, Ethan Stoner. Is there any possibility that he could be Cody’s father?”
“Ethan? Geez, that’s hard to imagine. They did go out for a long time in high school, but Katie broke it off senior year.”
“She broke it off? How did Ethan take that?”
“I don’t know. Probably not too well. Katie was . . .” she gestured widely, “. . . more than anything else he had in his life. I know she didn’t break up with him over any bad feelings. She just felt they had really grown apart over the years.”
“She was college-bound, and Ethan was going to wind up on a dairy farm, is that it?” Clare asked.
“Yeah. Plus, Katie is really smart. She used to like to talk about books and poetry and stuff like that. Ethan wasn’t much of a talker, and what he did have to say was usually about some TV show or the Nine Inch Nails. You know what I mean?”
Clare nodded. “Did she have any other boyfriends, then? Maybe someone more like her?”
“No. It was hard for Katie. She didn’t fit in very well. She didn’t have new clothes and money for fun things like the other college-track kids in school, but she didn’t have anything in common with the grounders, either.”
“The grounders?”
“You know, like Ethan. The kids who are hanging on ’til they graduate and then get married right off the bat and go to work for a gas station.”
Russ got up. “Anyone want some more?” he asked. The women both declined. “Kristen,” he said, his eyes on the hot coffee flowing out of the pot, “why do you think it was your father who got Katie pregnant, and not Ethan?”
She swiveled around to where she could see him. “I . . . I guess one is as likely as the other. She never said anything to me about sleeping with anyone. As far as I knew, she was still a virgin.” She pushed her fingers through her hair. “I guess that’s a pretty naive thing to say, isn’t it? But I’ll tell you something. I can’t imagine Ethan getting violent with Katie. But I sure as hell can picture my father doing it. He’s an evil man. An evil man. He could have killed Katie and gone home the same night and slept . . . and slept like a baby.”
The chief of police stared up at the windows of number 162 South Street from the relative warmth of his car. He had been to this address many times before, though never to the fourth floor apartment of Darrell McWhorter. Unlike his neighbors, who drank and partied and beat each other up where everybody could see, Darrell McWhorter did his lawbreaking in private.
Russ opened the door, wincing as the cold pinched his nostrils shut and stung his eyes. From the second floor, a curtain flapped aside for a moment and then fell. Cops were not welcome to this flat-faced yellow building, and he wondered how many baggies were being flushed down the john even as he crossed the sidewalk, opened the chain-link gate, and walked up the sagging steps to the front door. He ran his finger down a double row of tarnished door buzzers. MCWHORTER: 3D. He pressed the bell and waited.
“What is it?” a voice crackled indistinctly over the intercom.
“Mr. McWhorter? Chief Van Alstyne, Millers Kill Police. I need to speak with you, please.”
Russ looked at a small plastic slide and trike half-buried under the snow covering what passed for a yard in this place. On the sidewalk, a pair of teenage girls with teased-up hair were smoking and gabbing despite the cold, while two toddlers in snowsuits waited, ignored. One of them stared at Russ, slack-faced and runny-nosed. How could anyone believe in a God who let some kids grow up with everything, and other kids live out their whole lives in poverty and neglect? Or worse.
“What do you want?”
“We don’t want to discuss this over the intercom, sir. It’s about your daughter Katie.”
“Katie?” The voice, as distorted as it was, sounded surprised. The buzzer sounded, cracking the front door open. Russ climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, not holding the banister because he was resting his hand on his holster. Habit. Not a bad one.
The door was open when he reached the fourth-floor landing. “What is it about Katie?” Darrell McWhorter was no more than five-ten, squared off, with the look of a high school jock run to flab. His dark hair was pretty well thinned out on top, and he had it combed over in what Linda would describe as a spider-holding-a-billiard-ball style. He looked unthreatening and unremarkable, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers, the kind of guy you’d pass a hundred times in the A&P and never think, “That one’s screwing his own daughter.”
Russ tamped down the heat behind his eyes. Kristen had emphatically refused to swear out a complaint against her father when she gave his name and address. Until he had something linking the sonofabitch to Katie’s death, Russ couldn’t touch him. Officially, he was here to break the bad news to Mr. and Mrs. McWhorter. Unofficially, he was here to see if he could shake something loose.
“May I come in?” he asked.
“Sure, sure, come on in,” McWhorter said, stepping aside. The apartment reeked of cigarette smoke, but it was well kept, especially compared to the dumps some other tenants inhabited. The furniture was mostly old, too big and too dark for the living room. It had the look of family hand-me-downs rather than Goodwill. The TV in the corner was a built-in in a blond wood cabinet, pure Danish Modern circa 1965. His mom had had one just like it. The picture was surprisingly good for something that old. He could count every tooth in the oversized smile of the game-show hostess twirling around a shiny new car.
“Great, innit?” McWhorter thumbed toward the set. “That’s what I do, TVs and small electronics. My wife says she wants one of those big-screen jobs, but I figure, as long as I can keep this one running cherry . . .” He took a last drag on his cigarette and stabbed it out in a pedestal ashtray.
