Very Bad Men Read online

  “You haven’t been able to identify them?”

  He hesitated, looking down into his coffee cup. “You need to understand the situation. My deputies had their hands full. Rhiner hated having to shoot Dawtrey. After he’d done it, he climbed over the fence and tried to perform CPR. Tillman had a crowd of mourners to deal with. He got on the radio and called for backup. Neither of them had time to chase after a pair of teenagers on bikes.”

  “And none of the mourners could help you identify these kids?”

  Delacorte looked up from his coffee and sighed.

  “I don’t know how to say this without offending you, Detective Waishkey.”

  “Just go ahead and say it.”

  “We’ve got a bay near here called Waishkey. It’s named after a Chippewa chief. Are you part Chippewa, Detective?”

  “Waishkey is my ex-husband’s name.”

  “That’s not an answer to my question,” Delacorte said, “but I don’t mind. Charlie Dawtrey was half Chippewa. His son Terry was a quarter. I’d wager that everyone at the funeral had some Chippewa blood. I deal with Chippewa people all the time, and most days they’re as cooperative as anybody else. But in this case a white deputy shot a Chippewa man—never mind that he was a prisoner trying to escape. That makes people angry. And then the sheriff comes to them asking for help tracking down a couple of Chippewa kids? Nobody at that cemetery was willing to tell me anything.”

  “So no one told you they saw a man with a rifle on the hill?”

  “No.”

  “And no one said they heard an extra shot, apart from the one Rhiner fired at Dawtrey?”

  The sheriff’s face took on a pained expression. “You ask around, you’ll hear all kinds of talk about extra shots. Some people confused the sound of the fireworks for the sound of gunfire, and some people would just like to stir up trouble. There are rumors that Rhiner emptied his clip into Dawtrey. But I can tell you there was only one shot fired that day.”

  “So neither of your deputies heard a second shot?” Elizabeth said. “It might have sounded like an echo.” She gestured toward the manuscript. “According to this, the man with the rifle pulled his trigger just as he heard the sound of Rhiner’s shot.”

  “That cemetery is surrounded by hills on three sides. Anybody who thinks they heard an echo probably did.” Delacorte patted the table with his open palm—a sign to let us know he was ready to wrap things up. “We could go back and forth about this, but I’ve got business to attend to and you’ve got better things to do with your time.”

  He reached for his wallet and started counting out bills. I did the same. The waitress had left the tab midway between us.

  “Long as you’re here,” Delacorte said, “you owe it to yourselves to see the Soo Locks. Busiest locks in the world: ten thousand ships go through every year. And if you get a chance to cross over to the Canadian side, I recommend the train tour through the Agawa Canyon. Can’t beat the scenery.”

  He slid out of the booth and got to his feet.

  “Far as this other thing goes, it’s like I said. There’s no question about what happened to Terry Dawtrey. He tried to run and he got shot. Your man on the hill and his rifle—I don’t need them. I can make sense of what happened without them. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the true one. There wasn’t any man on the hill.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Outside the diner Walter Delacorte slipped on his sunglasses and walked us back to our car. The last we saw of him he was strolling along Court Street. As soon as we got in the car Elizabeth said two words. “Rod Steiger.”

  It took me a second, but I understood. “In the Heat of the Night,” I said.

  “He played the chief of police. That’s who Delacorte reminds me of. Rod Steiger, only with more charm and less integrity.”

  She started the car and pulled out into the street.

  “He reminds me of William of Occam,” I said.

  “What was he in?”

  “The Middle Ages. He was an English philosopher.”

  After the briefest pause, she said, “Occam’s razor.”

  I nodded. “Occam’s razor. You should never multiply entities beyond necessity. So if you can explain what happened without positing a rifleman on the hill—”

  “—then there was no rifleman.”

  “Exactly. Sheriff Delacorte just gave us a lecture on metaphysics.”

  “Then I guess our trip to Sault Sainte Marie wasn’t entirely wasted.”

  “I think we’ve still got time to see the locks.”

  She lowered the driver’s window and the wind caught her hair.

  “I hate to disappoint you, David. But I don’t think we’re going to make it to the locks.”

  WE SPENT THE NEXT hour and a half taking in the sights of Sault Sainte Marie. Our first stop: the office of Arthur Sutherland, Kyle Scudder’s attorney. Elizabeth gave Sutherland a composite sketch of the man in plaid and a copy of the manuscript describing Charlie Dawtrey’s death. And though he interrupted her five or six times—because his phone kept ringing and he kept answering it—by the end of the meeting she had convinced him that he might actually have an innocent client on his hands.

  Next we drove by Deputy Rhiner’s house, a tidy place with a granite birdbath in the front yard. There was a Buick parked in the driveway beneath a walnut tree, but no one answered to our knock. Elizabeth left her card in the mailbox beside the front door.

  We had about the same luck with Deputy Tillman, who lived in a woodframe house on the west side of town, between the interstate and the railroad tracks. A dog barked at us from the side yard as we climbed onto the porch. The woman who came to the door looked frazzled. She had a baby on her hip and a toddler clutching the hem of her skirt. Both were girls, both had ribbons in their hair. Looking past them, we could see a third girl inside, maybe around six. She was running in circles and singing along with a song from a CD of children’s music.

  The woman—Tillman’s wife—had no patience for Elizabeth’s questions. She told us her husband was out and she wasn’t sure what time he’d be back. Then she took the card Elizabeth offered and closed the door on us.

  We made it to Whiteleaf Cemetery around midday. Drove through the open gate and left the car in the only shaded space in the lot. It took us a few minutes to find Charlie Dawtrey’s headstone. We strolled along the path where Terry Dawtrey had walked and found a stone engraved with the name AGNES DAWTREY—his grandmother’s grave, the one he had told the deputy he wanted to visit.

  The vase of roses had been taken away, but this was where Terry Dawtrey had knelt in the grass and picked up the handcuff key. Then he had made a run for the fence.

  We could see where he had ended up. There was a patch of ground on the other side of the fence edged with remnants of police tape. On a bar of the fence, someone had knotted a strip of yellow cloth, which looked to have been torn from a bath towel.

  “That’s a marker,” Elizabeth said.

  She took a sheet of paper from her pocket and unfolded it—a map printed from the Internet. It showed the cemetery and the surrounding roads.

  “The roses showed Dawtrey where to find the key,” she said, “and that strip of cloth told him where to run.” She glanced down at the map. “If he ran in a straight line and over the hill, he would have come out on Portage Road. That’s where the stolen Camaro would have been waiting for him.”

  I stood with Agnes Dawtrey’s grave at my back and started walking toward the section of fence marked with the yellow cloth. Elizabeth walked along beside me.

  “In the manuscript, the man in plaid says Dawtrey was running toward his position on the hill,” I said. “He would have been up there under one of those pines with his rifle.”

  As we neared the fence Elizabeth took my arm to stop me. “He fired one shot down at Dawtrey and missed,” she said.

  It wasn’t a question, but I answered her anyway. “That’s right.”

  She pointed at the ground ahead of us, whe
re a hunk of turf had been torn up and then replaced.

  “Someone dug up his bullet.”

  THE WIND MADE RIPPLES in the wild grass on the slope of the hill. From the ridge above, I looked down at the crime-scene tape snaking through the grass.

  “This is the spot,” I said.

  Elizabeth stood close beside me. We had walked the long way, out through the cemetery gate, around the fence, and up to this point on the hill.

  A white pine, and needles thick on the ground underneath—just like the setting the man in plaid described. If you were to lie on your stomach under the pine, you could see everything down below, and no one would see you unless they were looking very carefully for you.

  Elizabeth knelt and ran her palm over the needle-covered ground. She said, “According to the manuscript, the rifle jammed the first time, and he had to clear the round from the chamber. It landed in the pine needles. The rifle fired on the second try, and the shell casing would have ejected and wound up in the needles too. He doesn’t say that he picked anything up afterward.”

  “No,” I said.

  I got down there with her and we searched the ground. We didn’t find anything.

  “Maybe he picked up the round and the casing,” she said. “That’s what a pro would have done. He might have thought it wasn’t worth mentioning in the manuscript.”

  “Do you think he’s a pro?”

  She shook her head. “He acts like someone who’s making it up as he goes.”

  “If he didn’t take the round and the casing, someone else did. Delacorte, or one of his deputies.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “But we think it, don’t we?”

  She didn’t say anything for a while. We were back on our feet, looking down at the wind-blown grass.

  “It’s possible the deputies never knew anyone was up here,” she said eventually. “The rifle shot could have been mistaken for an echo. The bullet missed Dawtrey and buried itself in the ground. But once I faxed the manuscript to Delacorte, he would have come here to look things over.”

  “He could have dug up the bullet,” I said, “and collected the round and the casing.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “But what’s the point? Why the cover-up?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe Delacorte just wants to put this all behind him. It’s bad enough his deputies had to shoot a prisoner. If he admits there was a rifleman on the hill, that makes things worse. It raises questions he can’t answer.”

  Her voice trailed off as if she’d been distracted by something below. I followed her gaze and saw a car passing in through the cemetery gate.

  It looked familiar. Beside me, Elizabeth said, “Is that Paul Rhiner’s Buick?”

  The car came to a stop and the driver’s door opened. The man who got out had on blue jeans and an untucked shirt. He went over to our car and looked through the windows, then started off across the cemetery lawn toward Charlie Dawtrey’s grave.

  “What’s he doing?” I said.

  “He’s checking up on us.”

  Rhiner—if that’s who it was—paused near Charlie Dawtrey’s headstone and turned in a slow circle.

  “He couldn’t have followed us here, could he?” I asked Elizabeth.

  “I doubt it,” she said. “Delacorte probably sent him.”

  “You didn’t tell Delacorte we were coming here.”

  “He didn’t need to be told. I’ve got questions about Terry Dawtrey’s death. Of course I’m going to come here.”

  Rhiner finally looked up. He stood staring at us, with a hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun.

  “Should we head down?” I said.

  “Let him come up.”

  It looked like he might. He started walking toward the gate, as though he intended to go around the fence and up the hill. But as he reached the parking lot another car drove in: a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. He gave it a wide berth, but the driver, a young woman, got out and began to follow him.

  “Who’s this now?” I said.

  Elizabeth answered in a low voice. “A nuisance.”

  Down below, Rhiner and the woman had a conversation we couldn’t hear. Before long, Rhiner turned his back on her and got into his car. We heard the engine come to life and watched the tires roll over the gravel. When the Buick got to the road Rhiner punched the gas and roared away.

  Elizabeth pulled me back from the ridge and bent to scoop up a handful of pine needles. Before I could ask her why, she said, “Let’s go.”

  WE TOOK THE LONG ROUTE again down the hill and around the fence. We found the woman waiting for us, leaning against her car. She seemed to have dressed to blend in with the locals: denim and twill and sturdy canvas boots.

  Elizabeth made introductions. “David, this is Lucy Navarro. Lucy—David Loogan.”

  We said our hellos.

  “Lucy’s a reporter,” said Elizabeth. “She’s with the New York Times.”

  The woman flashed a grin and shook her head. “The National Current.”

  “Really?” Elizabeth said mischievously. “Are you positive?”

  “Just about. Is there any chance you might tell me what you were doing up on the hill?”

  Elizabeth had taken my arm as we crossed the parking lot, and now she rested her head on my shoulder and said, “David, she wants to know what we were doing on the hill.”

  I plucked a pine needle from her hair. “Missed one,” I said.

  Lucy Navarro ignored our playacting and soldiered on. “Paul Rhiner just left. Did he come here to meet with you?”

  Elizabeth turned to look toward the road. “Is that who that was?”

  “Rhiner’s the one who shot Terry Dawtrey. Are there any new developments in that case? Anything that might shed light on the murder of Henry Kormoran or the attack on Sutton Bell?”

  “She asks good questions, doesn’t she?” Elizabeth said to me.

  “And such a lot of them,” I said.

  “Maybe you’d care to answer one,” said Lucy Navarro.

  “I would,” Elizabeth said, “but we’re running late. David, what time is the train?”

  I glanced at my watch. “If we leave now, we should make it.”

  “What train?”

  Just before we turned to head back to our car, Elizabeth leaned in toward Lucy Navarro and said, “I shouldn’t tell you this, but if you cross the border into Canada, there’s a train you can ride through the Agawa Canyon. Off the record, just between us, I hear the view is spectacular.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The fastest way to Brimley would have been via I-75 and Route 28. Elizabeth took a more scenic route, driving through the wooded countryside on county roads, picking up West Six Mile Road and following it through Brimley State Park. Lucy Navarro trailed along behind us in her yellow Beetle.

  We drove south through what passed for the center of town and turned west on an unpaved lane that took us out to a converted farmhouse with a thick square chimney and a long sloping roof. We turned into the driveway; Lucy drove on past.

  Elizabeth had phoned ahead and Madelyn Turner greeted the two of us at the door and ushered us into a front room dominated by a fireplace built of fieldstones and topped with an oakwood mantel.

  She offered us a seat on a leather sofa and brought us lemonade, but before she could sit down a boy of about fifteen drifted in from another part of the house. Five foot six, black-haired and freckled. She introduced him as her son, Nick, and whispered something in his ear, and he went out again. A moment later a door clapped shut, and I could see, through one of the room’s broad windows, that he had gone into the side yard.

  His mother settled into an armchair and said, “I don’t want Nick to hear us talking. He took it hard, what happened to his father, and then to Terry. It’s more than a boy should have to bear.”

  Elizabeth leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “I understand he’s the one who found his father’s body.”

  “I wish I hadn’t let him g
o over there alone,” said Madelyn Turner. “But he loved Charlie. I couldn’t have stopped him from going if I tried. That boy rides everywhere on his bike, and Charlie only lived two, three miles away.”

  “How did you and Charlie Dawtrey meet?”

  Madelyn reached for a pack of cigarettes on a side table, then thought better of it.

  “It happened after the bank robbery,” she said, “when they put Terry on trial. Charlie went to the courthouse every day, and when they took a break at noon he would go out and sit on a bench in a park nearby. I had a job then at a boutique in Sault Sainte Marie, and I used to eat lunch in the park when the weather was nice. One day we struck up a conversation, and then it became something more.”

  “I understand he was quite a bit older than you were,” Elizabeth said.

  “I’ve always been attracted to older men,” said Madelyn. “They generally have much more to offer. I had some fine times when I was young, and they usually involved a man who was older than I was. If I had a mind to, I could tell you stories, my dear.”

  It wasn’t hard to believe. Her dark hair showed some gray at the roots, but her eyes were lively. She had strong cheekbones. Her jawline had gone soft, but not too soft. The clothes she wore—knitted blouse, knee-length skirt—fitted her too snugly, but their snugness hinted at the figure she must have had when she was younger.

  “Now Charlie was a lovely man, and very sad,” she said. “Worried for his son, of course. In the beginning, I felt sorry for him. I wanted to save him. But I needed something from him too. I was a widow. Charlie and I helped each other.”

  “But you didn’t stay together,” said Elizabeth.

  “No. When they sent Terry to prison, it broke Charlie’s heart. I thought I could change things by giving him another child. After Nick came along, I kept waiting for Charlie to be happy. But some wounds don’t heal.”

  Madelyn gazed off through the window. Out in the yard, I could see her son playing on an old tire that hung by a rope from the bough of an elm tree.

  “Charlie and I divorced, and I got married again—to Alden Turner, who helped raise Nick and left us this house. But Charlie was always part of his son’s life, especially after Alden passed away.”