“But you did tell him,” I said. “After she died.”
Winters gazed at me, his expression searching, his pupils overlarge in the unlit room. “How the hell did you know that?”
Because my own father had also been a cruel man, I thought.
The sheriff and I waited for Winters to finish closing up the shooting range, but Rivard had to leave for a meeting with the Warden Service colonel in Augusta. Marc clearly relished the excuse to sneak off. By leaving, he could forestall an awkward conversation with Rhine about how Tommy Winters had never entered his head as a suspect when we were hunting for the imposter.
The sheriff and I stood in the blistering parking lot. Dog-day cicadas whined in the treetops. The air smelled of pine bark drying to tinder in the sun.
“No wonder the kid killed himself,” she said. “With a father like that.”
“You’re thinking now it was suicide?”
“I didn’t before we came here. Now though—?”
Winters emerged from the door with a trash bag full of discarded bullet casings he’d brushed up from the range. He dumped the shells into a steel bin and then padlocked it shut. I wondered how much money the club made from recycling the thousands of cartridges left behind by shooters. The last I’d seen spent casings were going for a dollar fifty a pound.
The Mustang belonged to Winters. We followed it out to the main road. We had to wait for Winters to close the heavy gate behind our vehicles. The elaborate process involved a bolt, a chain, and a padlock.
It took us half an hour to drive to the village of Aurora where Winters lived.
I could easily identify the Winters residence by the state police and sheriffs cruisers waiting for us. It was a big clapboard farmhouse with a yawning barn that no longer sheltered livestock. I recognized a K9 team from the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency. The German shepherd had been trained to sniff out narcotics.
Winters pulled the Mustang into the shadows of the barn and came out to meet us, still wearing the .45 on his hip.
Rhine said, “We appreciate your opening your home to us, Mr. Winters.”
“I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“All of us want an answer to what happened to Tommy.”
“Like I said.”
Without Rivard to keep tabs on me, I took the liberty of following the others inside the moldering, old house. The curtains were drawn, and the darkened rooms stank of cigars and uncleaned dishes. Winters led us down to the basement, which smelled even muskier.
Tommy’s bed was unmade, the sheets ripe with body odor. There were empty pizza boxes and soda bottles, magazines that weren’t pornographic per se but featured female bodybuilders on their covers or babes in leather chaps straddling Harley-Davidsons.
The only noteworthy aspect of the room was the abundance of personal photographs. There were framed pictures on the walls. Others in stands on shelves. All the photos were of the same person: a middle-aged woman with a blond perm, a prominent underbite, and the sunken eyes of someone who rarely enjoyed a full night’s rest.
“That’s Karen,” Winters explained. “My late wife.”
Rhine rested her hands on her gun belt. “Would you mind waiting upstairs for us, Mr. Winters? It’s difficult to work when there are people crowded around. Why don’t you keep him company, Mike?”
I expected Winters to put up a fight. Even though he had expressed a willingness to cooperate, few homeowners are comfortable letting cops poke around their residences. If anything, the man seemed too compliant.
I followed him into the kitchen, where he grabbed a can of Coors from the refrigerator, and out onto a porch overlooking the second-growth woods that had sprung up where the farm fields had once been. He cracked his beer and removed a cigar stub from an ashtray on a table and lit it.
“Did Tommy know anyone who drove a yellow sports car?” I asked.
His reaction was to cough out some smoke. “What kind of question is that?”
“A yellow car seemed to be following him the night he pulled over those girls on Route 9. Did your son have a friend who—”
“Tommy didn’t have any friends.” He narrowed his eyes. “You sure this yellow car was following him?”
“According to witnesses, it was.”
“What witnesses?”
“I’m not allowed to say.”
“So he was pretending to be you, huh?”
“It seems that way.”
“You ex-military?”
“No.”
“I served in Desert Storm. You have the look of a vet.”
I’d heard the comment before and had come to the conclusion that killing people in the line of duty had left me with scars visible to those who had themselves taken the lives of other human beings.
“My father was a Ranger in Vietnam,” I said.
He studied me with pupils that had constricted down to mere pinpoints. “And you didn’t want to follow in his footsteps?”
“That was the last thing I wanted. But you know how it is, I never asked to be his son.”
Winters, I was fairly sure, recognized the jab for what it was. He took a long pull from his beer can. His gaze drifted to the tree line.
“The man your son ripped off,” I said. “He’s going to want his drugs back. Or he’ll want the money Tommy might have made selling them.”
“And?”
“He might come out here. Now that he knows your son’s real identity. He might expect you to make good on what Tommy stole.”
Winters patted the holstered firearm. “Let him come.”
“Dylan LeBlanc put his own cousin in the hospital because of the stunt your son pulled.”
A trooper appeared on the porch. “Mr. Winters, the sheriff would like to see you.”
Back inside we went.
Rhine stood waiting at the top of the stairs. She held a sheet of paper pinched between her gloved fingers. “Is this your son’s handwriting?”
The letters were large, blocky, and scrawled in pencil. Even from a distance I could read the words of the suicide note:
BURY
