I saw Morrison ambling down the hill toward his police cruiser. “Skip!”
He turned to wait for me. “Can I borrow your phone?”
Grinning, he offered me his cell. “You’re not going to call one of those phone-sex numbers, are you?”
It occurred to me that if I called the sheriff and mentioned Hutchins’s name as a suspect, I’d be incriminating him without any evidence-exactly what Ozzie Bell and the J-Team did to half the men in Seal Cove. For whatever reason, the trooper had allowed me to drive home the previous night. It seemed pretty low to repay his leniency by making him the subject of a homicide investigation based on nothing but Guffey’s hearsay.
“Maybe you can tell me,” I said to Skip. “Is Hutchins on duty today?”
“I heard they put him on paid leave while Internal Affairs finishes its proctological exam.”
“Ouch.”
“You got that right, brother.”
The only fair thing to do was talk with Hutchins man-to-man. I owed him that courtesy at least. I said good- bye to Morrison and started my Jeep.
But as I drove north along the crooked peninsula, I began to wonder about the wisdom of confronting the man in his own home when I was suffering from a broken hand and acute Vicodin withdrawal. If Hutchins really had murdered two young women, what did I imagine would happen-that he would just admit his guilt and accompany me to the Knox County Jail for booking?
As had been the case the previous week, I saw a state police cruiser parked in the drive. The Dodge Durango wasn’t there, but a set of wet tire tracks led across the asphalt to a closed garage door. The lawn was the same muddy mess, although a few green shoots were pushing up in random places and the red buds of the sapling maples had started to swell.
I climbed out of the Jeep and took a deep breath. Behind Hutchins’s house, mauve-colored hills rose in the distance. A kettle of turkey vultures-I counted twenty-one birds soaring in tight spirals-wheeled overhead.
When I looked down again, Hutchins was standing on his front step with the door swung open behind him. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt with stained underarms. He was barefoot and unshaven. He didn’t look well. There was an unhealthy pallor to his skin.
“You didn’t have to drive all the way over here.” It sounded like he’d been expecting me.
“I thought I should.”
He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Let me go get it.”
Then he disappeared inside the house.
Get what? I felt as if I’d wandered into the middle of a Shakespeare play.
There seemed to be something different about the place. Then I realized that all the shades were drawn. It made me think of the Driskos’ trailer. Lonely men liked to live in caves.
But Hutchins was married. I tried to remember the name of his wife. Katie, was it? I remembered her skittishness at meeting me, the sunglasses, the way she kept her face turned away when we spoke. Had she been hiding an injury?
I marched up the flagstone walkway to the front stoop and ran smack into Hutchins. I kept forgetting how big a bruiser he was until I found myself looking up at the cleft in his chin. Standing so close, I could tell he hadn’t applied any deodorant that morning.
“Here.” In his enormous hand was my cell phone.
“Where did you find it?”
He frowned, as if this question was one he’d already answered. “On the roadside after you drove off.”
“If you had the phone with you last night, why didn’t you just drop it off at my house? I know you followed me there.”
“I got a call from my troop commander, telling me I was suspended. I just called your house to tell you I’d found it. If you didn’t get the message, what are you doing here?”
“I just spoke with Dane Guffey.”
His smile was wide, and I detected the smell of beer on his breath. “‘Dane the Stain!’ That’s what we called him in high school. Where did you run into Dane? The guy’s a fucking hermit.”
“This morning, at the Drisko fire. It turns out Guffey’s a volunteer firefighter.”
“What Drisko fire?”
I realized that Hutchins hadn’t heard the news. From his disheveled appearance, he looked like a troglodyte who’d just emerged from a cavern. “The Driskos are dead. They burned to death in their trailer this morning.”
The look he gave me was pure, unadulterated surprise. “No shit?” He rubbed his stubbled skull. His crew cut was so short, he might have appeared bald from a distance. “Hey, do you want a beer?”
Before I could answer, he turned and disappeared back into the darkened hall. Did he expect me to follow him? My good hand drifted into the pocket of my coat and felt the reassuring heaviness of the Walther. After a long hesitation, I stepped inside the shrouded house.
Something about the place was different all right. And it wasn’t just the drawn shades.
The last time I’d visited, the rooms had felt empty, but now they literally were. Most of the furniture was missing. Nothing was hanging on the walls, and the floors were bare. I’d thought Hutchins and his wife were moving in. Now I realized that they were moving out. It was the second time that day I’d walked through a building in the process of being vacated in a hurry.
I found the trooper in his den, seated on a sofa in front of a huge flat-screen television. The sofa and the TV were the only furnishings in the room. The screen showed college basketball players racing up and down a parquet court. It was the NCAA tournament again. The sound was muted.
“Want one?” He held up a six-pack of dangling cans held together with plastic.
The room flickered with the bright red-and-blue light coming from the television. He unsnapped a beer from the plastic ring and held it out to me. I took the can and opened it, but I didn’t drink.
Hutchins cracked one for himself and continued staring at the screen. “On top of everything else, I’m losing a bunch of money on this game.”
“It looks like you’re moving out,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere.”
That’s when the realization belatedly arrived. “Where’s Katie?”
“Who knows and who cares.”
I studied the scene in front of me carefully. Hutchins had his long legs stretched out in front of him on the bare floor. I noticed that the arm of the couch had been gnawed down to the wood. “She left you?”
“I kicked her out.” He swiveled his head around on his thick neck, giving me a heavily lidded look. “She was cheating on me. Can you believe that?”
“How did you know?”
“She kept denying it, but I knew she was lying,” he said. “Sometimes you just know things. You see it in their eyes. Like when you pull someone over and ask them if they’ve been drinking, and they say, ‘Yeah. I had two beers.’ Why is it that every drunk always claims to have had two beers? You ever wonder that?”
I remained motionless.
“I always knew Katie was going to be my downfall,” he said. “We should never have gotten married. I don’t think I ever loved her. But somehow we ended up getting married. I can’t even remember why.”
“What do you mean, she was your downfall?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t.”
He gave me a look, like I was an imbecile. “I followed her. That’s what I was doing that night. She told me she was going to the movies.”
On the night Ashley Kim was abducted, Hutchins claimed he’d had car trouble-that was why I’d been rerouted to the crash scene-when in reality he’d been stalking his own wife. “I drove to the theater in Thomaston, but Katie’s SUV wasn’t in the lot. When I got home that night, she was asleep. I woke her up, and she gave me a bullshit story about the movies. That’s how I knew she was cheating.”
That explained the bruise on her face the next morning. I felt a sudden urge to pistol-whip the wife beater.
But Hutchins gave me an imploring look. “What would you have done, Bowditch?” He honestly seemed to
