He nodded.
She frowned. “Are you all right?”
He cleared his throat again. “Yeah,” he said. And he was surprised to find, as he said it, that he was all right. Not great, not happy-he wasn’t sure if he would ever be happy again-but… all right. “Yeah.” His voice was stronger. He stood up, his back cracking along with the old desk chair. “That’s a good plan.” He bent over the desk and scribbled Oliver Grogan’s address and phone number on a scrap pad. “Here.” He handed the paper to her. “Call me after you’ve checked him out. If anything seems off, if anything at all trips your wire, get out first and call me later.”
She nodded. “Are you going to be okay driving around? What with being a wanted man and all?”
“I switched vehicles when I was at home. I left my truck in the barn and took the station wagon.”
“Won’t they be looking for that, too?”
“If whoever Jensen sent to check my house reports seeing tracks going in and out of the barn, yeah. I’m gambling it was someone inclined to cut me a break.” His mouth twisted. “Gamble being the operative term. Somebody from the department complained to the staties about the investigation.”
“Ah,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“So’m I.” He folded up his notes and stuffed them into his inside pocket. “We’d better get going.”
“Where are you parked?”
“Up the street, tucked in tight in the Balfours’ driveway.” He flashed a grin. “They’re in Florida for the season.”
“That’s very sneaky of you,” she said. “I admire that in a man.”
Coat over her arm, she poked her head out of the door first. She nodded to him. He followed her, not toward the parish hall, where he had come in that morning, but toward the church. She heaved the inner door open, and they entered the dim space of the sanctuary. She led him down one of the side aisles, all the way to the rear of the church. “Wait in the narthex for me. I’ll be right back.”
“The what?”
She pulled open a pair of double doors, revealing a square, towerlike space fronted by the great doors of the church, palisade-high wooden structures faced with enough ironwork to repel the Norman invasion. “The foyer. The vestibule. The narthex,” she said, then disappeared back into the church.
The doors swung silently shut behind him. Four arrow-slit windows let in what light there was, through their narrow, stained glass depictions of a lion, an eagle, a man, and an ox. Cold radiated from the stone walls. He shivered. What the hell had possessed the architect of this place? Even back in the 1850s, they had known there was more effective insulation than a square foot of dressed stone. But they went ahead and erected the cutting edge of eleventh-century technology. He shuddered to think how they heated this anachronism in the decades before the radiators were installed.
The interior door opened, slowly and silently, and he backed himself against the wall. “It’s me,” Clare said. She had a paper sack folded beneath her arm and was holding an ancient buffalo-check coat that looked like it had been doing duty as a rug. In a garage. She had a greasy flap-eared cap to go with it. “These are our sexton’s.”
“For God’s sake, give the man a raise so he can afford something better.”
She thrust the coat at him. “These are what he wears for dirty jobs. He’s off today, he won’t miss them.”
“No lie.” Russ shrugged out of his department-issued parka and slipped on the coat. It reeked of cigarette smoke.
Clare wadded up his coat and squeezed it into the sack. “Here. Take the hat, too.”
He tipped it and looked inside. “This isn’t going to give me lice, is it?”
“Mr. Hadley is a very nice man.”
“I’m walking a half block down the street. This isn’t really necessary.”
“Says the man who parked behind the snowbirds’ empty garage. You’re not exactly inconspicuous, you know.”
He grunted but put on the disgusting hat.
Outside, the same wind that was shoving a mass of gray, snow-laden clouds across the sky pushed against their backs, giving them both good reason to bow their heads and bury their faces in their coat collars. St. Alban’s walkway was well cleared, but the sidewalk running along Church Street and up Elm was icy. Russ reached out instinctively to take hold of Clare’s arm and steady her, but she twitched out of his grasp. “Mr. Hadley wouldn’t touch me,” she said, her voice barely audible in the sighing of the wind.
He wasn’t so sure anyone would mistake him for the church’s janitor, even with the coat and hat. “Isn’t Hadley, like, six inches shorter than I am?”
“Hunch harder,” she said.
He wasn’t that worried-not yet, anyway. The department didn’t have enough men on this morning to lay down an effective beat presence and run an investigation, too. The moment he was in trouble was the moment Jensen decided she had enough to upgrade him from party-of-interest to suspect. He wondered how long it would take her to get an arrest warrant from Judge Ryswick. Russ had annoyed the old coot with enough middle-of-the-night and dawn hearings over the past seven years to likely make the judge quick on the draw. Once Jensen had a warrant, every cop, sheriff, and trooper between Plattsburgh and Albany would be looking for him.
They had come to the rectory drive. “I’ll call you with what I find out,” Clare said, handing him the bag with his parka. Her cheeks were red from the cold. “Don’t forget to call your mom.”
He nodded and forced himself to continue up the sidewalk instead of watching her make her way up her drive.
He retrieved the station wagon. He quite carefully named it in his thoughts, to avoid the words “Linda’s car,” and was grateful beyond words that she had been a meticulously neat person who never treated her vehicle like a mobile closet. There was nothing personal to haunt him, no commuter mug or discarded shoes or overdue library books to tell the story of the woman who, until a few days ago, had driven this car. Only two fifty-pound bags of kitty litter in the back-for weight and traction, not for the cat she had acquired as soon as the door had shut behind him-and the emergency kit he packed her every winter: thermal blanket and flares, collapsible shovel and gorp, battery and phone recharger.
He chucked Mr. Hadley’s smelly garb in the backseat and headed out toward Cossayuharie, driving the long way round, avoiding the town and the stretches where Ed and Paul, despite his directions to vary locations, habitually camped with their radar guns.
Bainbridge Road, like all of the roads through Cossayuharie’s dairy country, rose and fell across ridges and hollows, running past well-tended farms and abandoned barns alike, past brook-threaded fields marked out by modern barbed-wire and ancient stone fences, past distant, dilapidated houses more likely to produce meth than milk. He knew two families who lived on the road, the Montgomerys and the Stoners, both of them still hanging on with their herds of forty or fifty cows, following in the manure-edged boot prints of their fathers and their fathers before them. Probably the last generation to do so-the two Stoner kids and the Montgomery boys would likely have long shaken the barnyard dirt off their feet by the time their turns came.
Audrey Keane he did not know. At 840 Bainbridge Road, he found a small two-story house, with an enclosed front porch sagging away from the foundations and two cars in the dooryard of a Depression-era garage. One was a late-eighties Buick Riviera, whose half-deflated tires and crust of snow indicated it hadn’t been driven in some time. The other was a 1992 Honda Civic, with New York State plate number 6779LF.
The drive was a combination of scraped-clear ruts and hard-packed snow. He eased the Volvo up behind the Civic and put on the parking brake. He pulled his service weapon out from beneath the passenger’s seat and checked the clip. Leaning forward, he snapped his belt holster in place and slid his gun in, heavy and snug against the back of his hip. He shrugged into his parka and slid out of the station wagon.
He strolled slowly past the Honda, checking it out. It was the opposite of Linda’s car, littered with crumpled fast-food bags and empty soda cans, glittery Mardi Gras beads hanging off the rearview mirror, a Dunkin’ Donuts mug wedged between the two front seats. There was no K-Bar knife or blood-saturated clothing. At least not where Russ could see.
There was a buzzer next to the door to the enclosed porch. He pressed it, once, twice, three times. No response, either human or animal. He tried the door. It was locked. The wooden frame and the lock made it just one step up from a screen door, rickety enough that a good hard kick would open it. He pursed his lips thoughtfully and walked around the side, where the wind whipping between the house and the garage had scooped out most of
