All Mortal Flesh

  “The neighbor also says your mother’s drive was empty, and the snow undisturbed, when he walked the dog before leaving for work Monday morning.”

  “My wife isn’t dead,” the chief gritted.

  “Did you know your mother lied for you?”

  His head jerked up. Mark winced. Margy Van Alstyne had bustled into the station, angry and defensive, demanding the release of her son. As soon as Investigator Jensen started probing for information, Mrs. Van Alstyne swore the chief had been at her house all Sunday and Monday, too. Jensen had smiled like a woman getting a mink for Christmas and thanked her before regretfully refusing to let her see the chief. Mrs. Van Alstyne hadn’t wasted any time fuming. She had hightailed it out of the station, headed, Mark guessed, for either a lawyer’s office or a gun shop.

  “For chrissakes,” the chief said. “Just get Emil Dvorak on the phone and see if there are any fingerprints in the woman’s autopsy file!”

  “According to the secretary at the pathology department, Dr. Dvorak is in Albany today, seeing his neuropsychiatrist. I understand he has a head injury he needs to follow up on regularly.” Jensen rubbed her hairline in the same place where the medical examiner’s scar split his forehead in two. “And to tell you the truth, I’m a little leery of testimony from an ME who’s not only a personal friend of yours but who’s brain damaged as well.”

  “God damn you.” The chief braced his elbow against the table and pressed his fist against his mouth. “My wife,” he finally said, “isn’t dead. You can send somebody over to Kilmer’s Funeral Home and print the body right there, for God’s sake.”

  In fact, Jensen had directed the crime scene technician, Sergeant Morin, to head over to Kilmer’s as soon as he finished with the Keane house. The BCI investigator might not have believed the chief’s assertions, but she wasn’t stupid. Mark waited for her to tell the chief, but she simply hung over him, her face as professionally sorrowful as a funeral director’s.

  “Russ,” she said. “You have to help me here. Now maybe, as you say, it wasn’t you who killed your wife. Maybe it was one of her lovers. From what I’ve heard already, it sounds like she enjoyed whoring around with the best of—”

  The chief came out of his chair so fast that Mark, watching through the observation window, jerked away involuntarily. Jensen stood her ground, her chin out, her mouth curved in a knowing smile.

  “You bitch,” the chief growled. His hands were clenched into fists. Mark could see the pulse in his neck. “When we get through with this I’m gonna—”

  A racket from down the hall buried the chief’s words. Mark was grateful. He didn’t want to hear that threat. He didn’t want to feel what he did now, the wavering, sick, maybe-could-he running through his nervous system.

  It sounded like it was coming from the squad room or Harlene’s dispatch center, a cacophony of angry voices, male and female, and Harlene calling for Lyle and the thud of running feet.

  Noble burst out of the door and trotted down the hall. He unlocked the interrogation room door without glancing at Mark. “Investigator Jensen!” he called. “You might want to get out here!”

  She twitched with annoyance. “Can’t your deputy chief handle it?”

  “Ma’am, I really think you want to get out here.”

  Swearing under her breath, Jensen stalked from the room. “Durkee,” she said, catching sight of him. “You have the detainee.”

  Mark’s mouth formed the word Me? But she had already swept up the hall, Noble hopping out of her way and hurrying to keep up with her.

  Mark went to the door. The chief walked over. Looked up the hall. “What’s going on?”

  “I dunno,” Mark said. He looked at his shoes. Shiny. Like always. He prided himself on being a spit-and-polish cop, his crease always sharp, his fade high and tight. Not like the chief, with his hair always in need of a trim and his beat-up old boots beneath unpressed trousers. He looked at those boots now. His throat felt hot and full. “Sir,” he said, “Investigator Jensen’s sent Sergeant Morin over to the funeral home. To . . . to get prints. I don’t know why she didn’t tell you.”

  “She’s trying to get me mad enough to confess,” the chief said. His voice was almost clinical, as if he were passing along a point of law he picked up at a seminar. “I’ve probably conducted a thousand interrogations over the course of my career. Hard and soft, sitting in with men a lot more experienced than me and running them on my own. I know most of the techniques, and I know the number one rule, which is, if you don’t want anyone to have anything on you, shut the hell up. Jensen knows that I know, and she’s decided the way to get me to forget that sound piece of advice is to rattle my cage so bad I’ll break down the bars and take a swipe at her.”

  “Is there . . . I mean . . .” Mark didn’t want to know, but he was compelled to ask. “Do you have something you don’t want her to know?”

  The chief looked at him.

  The babble of indistinct voices that had accompanied their talk suddenly sharpened. A woman shouted, “Russell! Russell!”

  “That’s my mother,” the chief said, starting forward. Without thinking, Mark threw his arm across the door.

  “You gonna keep me in here, Mark?” The chief’s voice was low. “You think I did it after all?”

  “No, sir,” Mark said, because where would he be if it were true? He dropped his arm. The chief brushed past him and hiked up the hall.

  Harlene’s dispatch center was jammed with people, cops and civilians alike. Lyle McAuley held Margy Van Alstyne by the shoulder as she listened, pink-faced and trembling, to something he said. That shyster Geoff Burns was in Jensen’s face—the first time Mark had ever been glad to see the obnoxious little prick. Noble stood behind the BCI investigator, imitating a wall. A bleached blonde in a ridiculously skimpy jacket wept with fury, mascara running black down her tan skin, while Kevin Flynn fussed around her, trapped between comforting her and staying the hell out of her way. And Eric McCrea was body-blocking a guy with a goofy tie and a notepad. “Oh, crap,” Mark said. He didn’t know the man’s name, but he recognized a reporter when he saw one.

  “What the hell’s going on?” the chief said in a voice loud enough to stir the American flag in the front hall.

  “Russell!” his mother said.

  “Durkee!” Investigator Jensen looked like she wanted to rip him a new one.

  Geoffrey Burns broke away from Jensen and shoved through the crowd to reach the chief’s side. “Don’t say another word until we’ve had a chance to talk,” he said. “I’m your attorney.”

  “I don’t need a lawyer,” the chief said.

  “Be smart for once in your life, Van Alstyne. Unless you’ve got your bunkmate all picked out at Clinton, you need a lawyer.”

  “Fine,” the chief snapped. “I’ll call the bar association and ask for a referral.”

  Burns butted up against the chief. His clipped, dark beard pointed accusingly at his would-be client’s chest. “I don’t like you any better than you like me, Van Alstyne. But I’m doing this as a favor to Clare. Do you want to be the one to tell her you turned down my representation?”

  Mark could hear the chief’s teeth click, the hiss of his breath releasing. “No,” he said.

  “Good.” Burns turned toward Jensen. “No more questions until I’ve had a chance to confer with my client,” he said.

  “Russell.” Mrs. Van Alstyne waded toward them. “The man from the state police came to Kilmer’s—”

  “They’re desecrating my sister’s body,” the bleached blonde said. Her voice shook with anger. “This bastard killed my sister and now he’s sending storm troopers over to pry open her coffin and . . . and . . .” She choked on tears and spittle.

  “Goddammit, I didn’t kill your sister! That woman—”

  “She says you can’t account for where you were!” the blonde screeched, slashing her finger toward Investigator Jensen. “For almost twenty-four hours! Twenty-four hours! My sister was killed! Whe
re were you, you sanctimonious bastard? Where were you?”

  “He was with me.” A woman’s voice, pitched to carry over the crowd. Heads turned. People pushed each other for a better view. The reporter pivoted, his face alight with interest.

  “He was with me,” Clare Fergusson said. “He spent the night with me.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  He arrived at the cabin just as the last streaks of orange and red were fading from the sky. He had a bag of groceries in each hand, and he balanced his steps carefully as he crunched up the snow-packed drive to the door. Maple and alder and birch trees cast pale violet shadows on the snow. Behind them, the forest thickened into the darkness of hemlock and eastern pine. He paused, one boot on the deck stairs. Above the cabin’s deep-eaved roof, he could see the first star of the evening glimmering through a thin veil of chimney smoke.

  She opened the door, spilling golden light. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  “What are you doing?” She bent down—slipping something on her feet, he guessed—and stepped onto the deck.

  “First star,” he said.

  “Did you make a wish?” He could hear, more than see, her smile.

  “I don’t know what to ask for.”

  “Ah.” No smile now. “That’s the problem, isn’t it.”

  He trudged up the steps. “I brought dinner.”

  “You didn’t have to do that. I overcompensated and carried a ton of food up here with me.” She opened the door for him. “Trust me, we could be snowed in until spring and we wouldn’t run out.”

  He paused in the doorway. Looked down at her. “And isn’t that a tempting thought?”

  He could see her cheeks flush before she turned away. She pushed him into the cabin. “C’mon, don’t let all the heat out the door.”

  He let her relieve him of the groceries as he took off his boots and parka. “This is nice,” he said. The cabin was one big room, with an assemblage of living room furniture to his left and a dining table to his right. A glowing wood-stove set on a platform of riverstones divided the front of the cabin from the kitchen. Russ followed the line of its broad stone chimney to where it vanished through the roof. “What’s upstairs in the loft?” he asked.

  “The bedroom,” Clare said absently, pulling a box of soba noodles and a jar of natural peanut butter from one of the bags. “What were you thinking of?”

  What was I thinking of? Bedrooms. Firelight. Skin. Teeth.

  “Pad Thai?” she went on, lifting a clove of garlic.

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Pad Thai.” He shook himself like a dog emerging from a river. “Mom’s still on the high-protein, low-carbs diet. I need a pasta fix some bad.” He went around the woodstove, shucking his sweater over his head as he did so. There were a pair of spindle chairs pulled up to a small kitchen table, hard against the back of the chimney. He tossed it over the back of one and rolled his sleeves up.

  “How is it going? Staying with your mom?”

  He grabbed the tray of chicken breasts and ripped off the cling wrap. “It’s okay, I guess. It helps that she got that house after Janet and I had flown the nest. If I were back in the same room I had in high school, I think I’d feel like even more of a failure than I do now. As it is, it’s more like being a houseguest than like moving back home.”

  Her hands stilled over the peppers. “Oh, God, Russ. I’m so sorry.”

  He wiped his hands on a dishrag and took hold of her shoulders. “Listen. I know we have to talk. When you asked me up here, I knew it wasn’t a date or an invitation to a seduction. But, dammit, before we get to the part where we tear our guts out, I’d like to enjoy a nice meal with you. How many times have we ever had dinner together?”

  “Three,” she said.

  “Okay.” He shook her gently. “Can we put all that other stuff aside for an hour or two? Can we just put on the radio and talk about our jobs and the weather and the idiots in Washington like a real couple would do?”

  She nodded. Slowly, she smiled. God, he loved seeing her smile. “So,” she said. “How ’bout them Patriots?”

  She dug up candles in the pantry. Their light reflected in the glass-front bookcase behind the dining table. “I’m worried about Kevin,” he was saying. “He has the potential to be a good officer, but he’s still awfully immature. He needs to broaden his experience. I think the farthest away from Millers Kill he’s ever been was the senior class trip to New York.”

  She speared a bite of sauce-soaked chicken. “Is there any way you could get him into a more urban police department for six months? Like a temporary detached duty?”

  “Yeah. Except then I’d lose him. You can’t keep ’em down on the farm—”

  “Once they’ve seen Paree.”

  He poured himself another glass of cranberry juice. “As it is, I give Mark Durkee another year or two, tops, before he jumps ship. The talented ones, the ones with brains and energy, they all go off to bigger and better things. The ones who stay are the ones like Noble, who’d be dogmeat in a larger unit, or like me and Lyle, too old to change anymore.”

  She snorted. “Yep, that’s you. Doddering off to the Infirmary. Don’t forget to give my office a call. We’ll put you on the visitation list.”

  “Watch it, youngster. We’ll see what you say a few years from now, when your knees have given up the ghost.”

  “Given it up for the Holy Ghost, more like.” She took a sip of her wine. “I think you may be wrong about Mark Durkee, though. His wife has family here, doesn’t she?”

  “Bains. There are dozens of ’em between here and Cossayuharie.”

  “And they’ve got a kindergartner, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Hard to just up and abandon grandparents and school and all.” Ignoring her manners, she propped an elbow on the table. “It’s Mark you should get a TDD for. He’s got something to come back to.”

  “And Kevin?”

  She picked up her wineglass again and looked at him over the rim. “He needs to broaden his experience, all right. I suspect that there’s nothing wrong with Kevin Flynn that getting laid wouldn’t cure.”

  He nearly choked on his noodles laughing.

  They washed the dishes together.

  “My parents used to do this when I was a little girl,” Clare said, scrubbing at a sticky spot where the peanut sauce had scorched on. “Mama would wash and Daddy would dry.”

  “That’s the natural order of things,” Russ said, putting a final gloss on a plate before replacing it in the cupboard. “Women wash. Men dry.” He picked a glass out of the drainer. He hadn’t done this in years. He and Linda ate a lot of prepared meals, or he would throw something together out of cans if he got home too late or she was working on an order. The dishes would go in the dishwasher, sometimes hours apart. “ ’Tain’t natural the other way round.”

  “And why, pray tell, is that?”

  “Women have a mystical affinity to water. It’s a tidal thing, you know, the pull of the moon.”

  “Uh-huh. And men?”

  “Oh, men just like the repetitive motion of rubbing something up and down.”

  Fortunately, his glasses protected his eyes when she sprayed water in his face.

  They got down to business in the chairs in front of the woodstove. She had blown out the candles and turned off the lights before they sat down. “Sometimes, it’s easier to talk in the dark,” she said.

  Of course, it wasn’t dark. They were lit by the leaping red-orange of the fire. But she was right. There was something about the heat of the woodstove, and the shadows dancing off in the corners of the cabin, that unloosened the constraints of the soul. He wondered if there might not be something to the idea of racial memory, if a thousand generations of humans sitting before a fire were making him feel this way: open, balanced, neither dreading nor expecting what was to come. He looked into the face of the woman sitting opposite him.

  Or maybe it was Clare.

  “What does your mar
riage counselor say?” she asked.

  “What everybody else does. That I need to make up my mind. Except she says ‘I need to discern my inner goals and bring them into congruence with my stated intentions.’ ” He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “What does your spiritual advisor say? Deacon Wigglesworth?”

  “Aberforth. Willard Aberforth. He hasn’t been advising me so much as listening to me blather on. It helps to unload some of the garbage that’s been accumulating in my heart.”

  “Garbage?”

  She smiled humorlessly. “You think I’m so all-forbearing and even-tempered about this. You have no idea. How many times I’ve caught myself thinking, Well, maybe his wife will drop dead of a heart attack or Maybe her plane will go down on the next buying trip.”

  He winced.

  “I know. It’s awful stuff, and I hate myself for it. The times I literally sit on my hands to keep from calling you and inviting you over to my house and into my bed. The nasty, gut-churning jealousy when I think of the two of you doing the ordinary, stupid things couples get to do. Eating together every night. Watching a video.” Her voice dropped. “Sleeping together. God, when you two went off for the Christmas holidays, I was a wreck. A total wreck. That’s when I knew I had to take this time. I knew I needed to be alone to think and pray.”

  “Oh, darlin’.” He sighed. “That was supposed to be a rekindling-the-marriage trip.”

  “How did it go?”

  “I think it would have worked better if I could have stopped thinking about you for more than five minutes at a time.”

  She smiled a little.

  “Ever since I told her about us, Linda’s been trying her damndest to reach out to me. First it was shopping bags full of sexy lingerie and silk sheets and massage oils.”

  Clare winced.

  “Then it was the trip to Montreal, then the marriage counselor. Even kicking me out of the house. I don’t think she’s as interested in exploring the non-marital side of herself, which is what the therapist recommended, as she is in making me see what I’ll be missing.”