Judgment of the Grave (9 page)

“Great. Well, thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it.”

“No problem. It sounds like an interesting project. And thanks again for your concern about Pres.”

“How’s he doing?”

“He seems okay. Actually, he doesn’t want to talk about it at all. I still can’t figure out what he was doing in the woods, why he decided to walk home that way. He hasn’t told you, has he?”

Sweeney shook her head.

“It’s hard to know what’s going on with him. He’s twelve and he doesn’t want to tell me anything. I’ve tried to let him have as much freedom as possible, but it’s been hard with him being sick. I don’t know. This is what’s hard about being a parent. You don’t know if you’ve done the right thing until after the fact.”

Sweeney stood up. “Well, as I said, he’s a great kid. Where would I find your…George?”

“He’s usually at the shop. Whiting Monuments on Lowell Road. If he’s not there, Bruce can probably tell you where he is.” As she said her ex-husband’s name, Cecily Whiting’s face changed, her eyes suddenly angry, her mouth turning up in a little sneer.

Sweeney suddenly felt that she wouldn’t want to cross Cecily Whiting.

Whiting Monuments was a squat brick building located at the end of a short driveway just off Lowell Road. A low stone wall flanked the driveway and an odd little garden, featuring perennials and various shrubbery interspersed with examples of the monuments on sale inside, sat next to the part of the building labeled “Office.” The other side was more industrial, with a wide driveway housing a truck with a flatbed and an attachment for lifting heavy stones into place.

The walls of the waiting room were covered with tasteful French impressionist paintings and embroidered Bible verses. The sun had come up high in the October sky and the room was stuffy and overwarm. A bell on the front door rang as she came in and after a few seconds French doors at one end of the waiting room opened and Lauren Whiting entered, already pasting a sympathetic look onto her face.

“Hi,” she said softly, a soothing half smile on her face. “I’m Lauren Whiting. Can I help you?”

Sweeney studied Pres’s stepmother, seized with a sick desire to pretend she was actually looking for a gravestone, then said, “Actually, we met the other day, at the police station. Sweeney St. George. I’m here to talk to your husband and your father-in-law too, if he’s available. I’m doing some historical research and I was told they might be able to tell me about their ancestor Josiah Whiting.”

“Oh,” Lauren Whiting said. “You’re the one who…you’re Pres’s friend. Hang on. Bruce is here, but I don’t think George is.” She flashed Sweeney a warm smile as she went back out through the French doors. “Just as well, probably. Once he gets going on Josiah Whiting, it’s hard to get him to stop.”

A couple of minutes later, Bruce Whiting came out and sat down in a chair across from the couch.

“You’re Pres’s friend,” he said.

“That’s right. We met at the station. I was talking to Cecily about Josiah Whiting and she thought your father might be able to tell me a little bit about him.”

He studied her for a moment, then said, “Can I ask you why you’re interested in him?”

Sweeney wasn’t taken aback as much by the question as by his tone. He seemed suspicious, almost hostile.

“Well, I was out here because I’m trying to track down a stone carver I call the round-skull carver. No one knows who he is, so I’m trying to figure it out. Anyway, I was looking for more round-skull stones when I met Pres and he told me about Josiah Whiting. I’ve kind of come to a standstill with this other guy and I got really interested in the way that Whiting’s stones change over time. They start out kind of typical and then get really, really strange. I have this theory about him reacting to political developments.”

That seemed to relax him. “Leave it to my Pres to pick up a pretty girl talking about gravestones.” He smiled and then his eyes seemed very sad. “Yeah, the death’s-heads are amazing, aren’t they?” He motioned for her to sit. “His parents were Puritans, you know. I always thought that was why. But he takes them in some pretty unusual directions, doesn’t he? It’s actually kind of a thrill to talk to a real expert. I make the things, but I don’t really understand them.”

“That’s not true,” Lauren Whiting said, coming back into the waiting room. “Don’t believe a word he says. He’s always studying, looking for ways to make his work better.” She walked past her husband, hesitating for a minute in front of him, and he put a hand on her rear end before she sat down. It had been an overtly sexual gesture and the room was suddenly charged with a tension that hadn’t been there before.

“Are you inspired by his work?” Sweeney asked Bruce Whiting, embarrassed.

“Well, as I’m sure you know, it’s a completely different world now. Most of our customers come in and choose something that’s already been made. I do the text, I help them choose a cross or a Star of David or whatever, but I’m not creating much original art. I started doing custom stones a few years ago, though, and that part of the business is actually really growing. I hadn’t thought much about it, but I suppose he does inspire me. Here, let me show you some of the things I’ve been doing lately.” He took a small photograph album from a drawer in the coffee table and handed it over.

Sweeney flipped through the pages, looking at his work. The shapes of the stones reminded her of the three Josiah Whiting stones she’d seen.

“Your shoulders look like his shoulders,” Sweeney said, tracing the design of a stone decorated with a classic willow-tree-and-urn design. “Look at them. You’ve taken the idea of them—the skinny shoulders and the sharply rounded tympana—and you’ve kind of modernized it, but they still have the same feeling.”

Bruce Whiting grinned and said, “Yeah, although this is going to sound crazy, but I hadn’t thought of it until just now. I must have internalized those stones somehow.”

“Anybody ever asked you to do a death’s-head?” Sweeney asked him.

“Not yet. Actually, I think I’d be a bit concerned if they did.”

“Hon,” Lauren said. “There was that guy who wanted you to make a gravestone with his tattoo on it.”

“That’s right. It was a hula girl or something.” He laughed, a deep, husky laugh that made him suddenly handsome. “I told him it was too hard to do and he got really pissed off at me.”

“I once saw this biker guy on the T who had a huge tattoo of a skull and crossbones and the words ‘memento mori’ underneath,” Sweeney told them. “I thought I might get a paper out of it or something, but the guy looked at me like I was insane when I started asking him about it.” She handed the album back. “Thanks for your help.”

“Let me know how you make out.”

“I will. It was really fun seeing your work. Oh, I was hoping to talk to your father sometime. Your ex-wife said he had a complete listing of the Josiah Whiting gravestones.”

“Yeah. He’d probably be a big help, actually. He and my mom aren’t around today, but they should be tomorrow. Just stop by. I’ll tell him you’re coming.” He gave her the address on Monument Street.

“Thanks for your help. I really appreciate it.”

“Hey, if Pres has you as a friend, that’s good enough for me.”

And again, she saw something sad in his eyes.

“How’s Toby?” Ian asked her that night during their phone call. He hadn’t asked about Sweeney’s best friend, Toby DiMarco, in a while and Sweeney wondered what had brought on the sudden interest. She was sitting, talking to him, curled up in the armchair in her room, the quilt from her bed wrapped around her shoulders.

“He’s fine,” Sweeney said. “He’s decided that he’s going to finish his novel by the beginning of Lent.”

“Lent? I didn’t know he was…”

“He’s not. He’s half WASP and half Italian Jew. He chooses these days. He’s so weird.”

“Have you ever read the novel?”

“Just parts. He’s pretty secretive about the whole thing, but from what I can tell, it’s a loosely veiled autobiographical account of the year he lived in Italy, trying to establish a relationship with his dad. The main character is staying in this villa out in Tuscany somewhere, and his father, who lives with his family about an hour away, keeps coming up with excuses for why he can’t come stay with him. There’s a kind of
Waiting for Godot
thing going on, and in the meantime he starts sleeping with this girl who lives down the road from the villa. Her name is Isabella and she is eighteen and gorgeous and naive and all that. But she…well, she likes”—Sweeney lowered her voice—“she likes domination or something. And Toby—or the main character, I think his name is Tad or something—finds out later that she’s been abused, by her brother or her cousin. And after that he refuses to sleep with her anymore. But he loves her.”

“Is this all true?”

“Basically. Toby is one of those people who strange things just
happen
to. This is when I was living in Oxford and he would send me these long letters. They were so entertaining.”

Suddenly Sweeney had a flashback to the sight of those long air-mail envelopes sitting on the kitchen table of the flat she and Colm had shared. He had been jealous of Toby and when she came home to find those letters on the table, her enjoyment of Toby’s adventures. She was suddenly flooded with images: Colm’s tight face as he drank alone in the tub while she read the letters. The way Toby’s face had looked when he’d left for Italy. She had been thinking of those letters as fun, informative missives from a friend, but now that she thought back, she realized they had been obsessive, an attempt to make her jealous, maybe. No wonder Colm had been suspicious. He had been good at picking up on things like that.

“Are you in the book?”

“God, yes. There’s a character named Susan who comes to visit him and ends up OD’ing in this seedy apartment in Rome. I’ve never quite forgiven him for that. She’s beautiful, though, so that part I liked.”

“And is he dating anyone?”

“No. He was dating this woman I really liked back in the spring. But it just kind of fizzled. Now he’s making himself a monk for his art. He actually said that. He’s sworn off women.”

“Well, I’m glad he’s well.”

“Yes, he said to say hello, actually. Well, he said to say hello weeks ago, but I forgot.”

There was a long silence and Sweeney listened to the faint static that came across the air. “Sweeney?” Ian said softly.

She panicked, but he rushed ahead. “So, I was thinking that you’ve never told me much about Colm. Other than that time…in Vermont, when you told me how he died. But you’ve never told me what he was like. I’m sorry. If it’s hard, I don’t want you to. I was just thinking that he was an important part of your life, is all, and I don’t really know very much about him.” She could hear the fear in his voice and she knew that he was asking because he wanted to know if she was over Colm. She could hear it. He wanted to know if he would always be competing with the dead fiancé. He had asked her if Toby was seeing anyone because he wanted to know what was going on with her and Toby. He was trying to figure out where he stood.

She forced herself to say something, her heart slowing. “No, no. You’re right. He was, he is, an important part of my life. He, uh, he was one of those larger-than-life people, you know? Everybody knew him. He played the Irish flute and you would walk into any pub in Oxford or Dublin or anywhere and people would remember him and say hi. He was the kind of person who you would agree to meet for a cup of coffee and three days later you’d be coming back from a weekend in Scotland.”

He was silent, so she went on. “It was fun, you know, being with someone like that, but there were times when it was awful. I used to get left alone a lot and you couldn’t count on him. He was always late and he would get bored easily. We were working on that when he died. We were planning the wedding and everything, and he was trying to be better about showing up for things. I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t have gotten tired of it.”

But as she said it, she remembered Colm holding her after one of their fights. “We have to make it work,” he’d said. “It’s you and me. This is the real thing.” And it had been the real thing. That was about the only thing she knew.

“Thank you,” Ian said softly.

“No, no. It’s okay.” But she was shaken and even after she’d hung up the phone, she couldn’t get rid of the image of Colm, holding her as though his very life depended on it.

Beverly Churchill stared at Quinn as though he had blood dripping down the front of his shirt.

“What do you mean, it’s not him? How can it not be him?” She had answered the door in a bathrobe, her dark hair wet and glossy from the shower, and before he had even been able to make it in the door, she had started crying. “It’s him, isn’t it? I know it’s him,” she’d demanded. He’d noticed that while her voice broke as though she was about to cry, her eyes were only slightly moist.

“No, Mrs. Churchill. It’s not him. It’s someone else. We didn’t get a match.” He didn’t touch her, because of the bathrobe, because it was gaping open in front and he could see the full swell of one breast, a hint of pinkish nipple.

She didn’t seem to notice. “Who is it, then? What do you mean, it’s not him?”

“Here, let’s go sit down and I’ll tell you what we know. Is that okay?”

She seemed to realize that her bathrobe was open then and she tied the belt tight around her waist.

“Okay, Mrs. Churchill? Come on, let’s go sit down.”

He took her arm and led her over to the living room couch. The room was subtly different and it took him a moment to realize what it was—it was messier. She had let the place go since the last time he’d been there.

“Who is it?” she screamed at him. “If it’s not my husband, then who is it?”

“We don’t know. The Concord police and the state investigators haven’t been able to make an identification. They don’t know who it is, but it’s not your husband.”

That seemed to satisfy her because she leaned back on the couch and closed her eyes and was quiet for a moment.

“We’re still looking for your husband, Mrs. Churchill. Is there anything else you’ve thought of since we talked the last time? Did you check with your bank?”

“Yes, there haven’t been any withdrawals or anything. Just what I’ve taken out of the ATM.”

“Okay, good. No strange phone calls? Hang-ups?”

She shook her head.

“Okay. The next thing is to look a little more deeply into what your husband was doing out in Concord. Do you know who he was talking to, that sort of thing? I’d like to be able to trace his movements the last few days before he disappeared.”

“He didn’t tell me anything. All I know is that he was researching this guy Josiah Whiting and he kept saying the book was going to be explosive.”

“That’s the word his department chairwoman used too. What do you think that meant?”

“I don’t know. Kenneth wrote a book a few years ago about the socioeconomic demographics of the Minutemen and how it impacted the development of the modern American military. Something like that. He said that was explosive too, but I doubt you’d think it was if you read it.”

“I’d like to look at his office. See if there are any references to his research among his things.”

She looked exasperated and then said, “Fine. If you have to. It’s the second door at the top of the stairs.” She sat down at the table again, her hands worrying in her lap.

There was a large landing at the top of the stairs, and hearing the sounds of a television, Quinn glanced into the first room on his left, a large master bedroom painted dark blue. Marcus Churchill, who was sprawled on his stomach on the bed, glanced at Quinn, didn’t acknowledge him, and went back to watching television. Quinn checked his watch. It was 10
A.M
. What was he doing home?

Kenneth Churchill’s office was painted a brick red that almost matched the leather couch and armchair sitting across from the wide, dark wooden desk. A matching coffee table was cluttered with books and old newspapers. One of the newspapers was stained with brown, as though someone had spilled a cup of coffee on it. The desk, on the other hand, was very neat, dust-free, with piles of papers decorated with Post-its in precise piles. Quinn shut the door and went over to study the framed diplomas hanging on the wall behind the desk. There was one from the University of Missouri and another from the University of Illinois. There were a couple of Marine Corps citations as well, and another framed picture of Kenneth standing next to a tank in the desert.

Quinn started looking through the piles of papers, scanning for “Josiah Whiting” or “Concord,” but all he found were student papers in various states of being graded and a few bills and letters from other professors. He opened the drawers of the desk and found paper clips, pens, stacks of canceled checks, and, in the bottom drawer, hidden underneath a red bandana, an older-looking Colt Diamondback .38 Special. He took the handgun out and checked to make sure it wasn’t loaded, then left it on top of the desk.

Next he moved on to the coffee table, but as long as it took Quinn to look through the mess, it yielded only a variety of books on American history and a good three weeks’ worth of
Boston Globe
s. Quinn browsed through the bookshelves, pulling out the volumes to make sure there wasn’t anything hidden behind them, then shut the door behind him and went back downstairs. This time, Marcus Churchill didn’t look up from the TV.

She was still sitting at the dining room table, and he dropped the gun in front of her. It thudded against the wood. “This should be in a locked gun case,” Quinn said. “You have a teenage son and it’s really dangerous to have it lying around the house.”

She looked surprised for a minute, then said, “You can take it if you want. I’d like to get it out of here. I hate his guns and weapons.”

“Why did he have it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was he afraid of someone? Sometimes people obtain weapons after being threatened or having some kind of an experience that makes them feel as though they’re in danger.”

She was surprised at that. “He never told me about anything like that. He just liked guns.”

“Okay,” Quinn said. “There isn’t anything related to your husband’s work in his office. Would he have taken everything with him?”

“I don’t know. He must have.” She looked very tired. “Do you think Kenneth had something to do with this man’s death? Is that why you’re trying to find out what he was doing in Concord?”

Quinn waited a beat, then said, “Do you have some reason to believe that that’s the case? Was he violent? Was there anybody he was angry at?”

Beverly Churchill blinked and looked away. “No, of course not. I just thought since you were…Sorry.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me? Had he done anything unusual in the last few months? Gone on any trips, other than the ones out to Concord?”

She looked up at him. “He went to London. In May.”

“For vacation?”

“No, for business. Something about his book. I don’t know why. He didn’t tell me anything about it.”

“How long was he gone?”

“Four days, not long.”

He waited, but she didn’t say anything else. “Okay. I’m going to get out of your hair. Let me know if you hear anything. I’ll be in touch. Oh, and I’d like to check his office at BU. See if there’s anything there that would help us. Is that okay with you?” She nodded. As he reached past her to pick up the gun, his hand grazed her shoulder and she jumped, as though he’d burned her. She turned very slightly in her chair and looked up at him. Her eyes were very slightly turned, catlike. She watched him. “Good-bye,” Quinn said, his heart pounding. And holding the gun, he fled.

After searching Churchill’s office at BU and finding nothing more exciting than what he’d found at the guy’s home, Quinn headed back to the station and checked in with Havrilek, telling him about Beverly Churchill’s reaction.

“So, you think she knows something?”

Quinn sat down and ran a hand over the top of his head. Christ, he was tired. “I don’t know, boss, she was pretty torn up about him not being dead. It’s weird. I can see how she might be almost, I don’t know, sad that she didn’t have the closure or something. But this was different. It was like she was surprised he wasn’t dead, or something like that. I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s keep an eye on her. Stay in touch.”

“I just can’t help thinking that this body out in Concord’s got to be connected somehow.”

“You think Churchill did it and took off?”

“I don’t know what I think. I guess we’ll know more once the state guys get all the evidence back from the scene. I could get DNA from the house and we can compare. It’s just weird that it’s been over a week now and there isn’t a trace of him, not his car, not his fucking bank account, nothing.”

“The state guys have taken over, right?”

“Yeah. I can get in touch and see who’s working on it. See what they can tell me.” Quinn closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. When he opened them again, Havrilek was watching him.

“You okay? You look a little tired.”

“Yeah, yeah. The baby was up last night. She’s had that cold for about a week. I’m fine. I’ll get a good night tonight.”

“Yeah? You sure you’re handling all this okay? You’ve got some time off coming to you, you know. You didn’t take very much after…after Maura. And if you need more, we can arrange it.”

“No, no. I’m fine. Look, why don’t I get on the phone to whoever’s working on things out there and see if there’s anything new.”

John Tyler didn’t sound all that happy to hear from Quinn. “You have anything on your missing guy?”

“Not yet. I’m beginning to wonder, though, if he might not be connected to your body in the woods. It just seems like a little bit too much of a coincidence that my guy disappears right around the time your guy got his lights put out permanently, you know?”

“Well, you better talk to the state guys. They seem to be going off on some scent or another. They’ve been out in the woods all day.”

“Who’s the detective in charge?”

“Guy by the name of Andy Lynch.”

“No shit. Andy Lynch? Tall guy? Red hair?”

“That’s him. You know him?”

“Yeah, we grew up together.”

“Well, I’ll tell him you called. Hey, there’s another one of those whaddyacallit, encampments, this weekend. You might want to check it out, ask around about your guy. And I was thinking that it might be a good idea to get in touch with our local paper here, say you’re looking for information about the whereabouts of this man, et cetera, et cetera. It’s pretty well read and it might turn up something.”

Quinn said he’d do that, thanked him, and hung up the phone, then sat back in his chair, thinking about Andy Lynch.

Andy Lynch. From the time they were old enough to play cops and robbers, Quinn and Andy Lynch had been best friends. Andy had been a scrappy little red-haired kid with a saddened, always-sick mother and a father who liked to give Andy a hiding if he looked at him the wrong way when the father came home late from the bars. As they’d gotten older, Andy had spent more and more time over at Quinn’s house until Quinn’s mother had started setting a fourth place setting for supper without asking if Andy was staying. But then in high school they’d kind of lost touch. Quinn had never been sure why, but Andy had dropped him. After high school, Andy had joined the Marines, gone to the Gulf in 1991, then gone to the academy, and when Quinn ran into him on the street, there was something in Andy’s eyes that made Quinn think Andy didn’t like being reminded of what Quinn knew about him, about his father’s belt, his mother’s sad forays down from her bedroom. It had been years now since Quinn had seen him.

But somehow Quinn was glad it was Andy.

He was thinking about the time that he and Andy got drunk off his mother’s Bailey’s Irish Cream and puked all over her new sofa, when his cell phone rang.

“Quinn,” he said.

“Mr. Quinn, this is Lindsey at Megan’s day care. I’m sorry to bother you, but she’s running a fever again and we’d like you to come pick her up.”

“But…she was doing much better this morning.”

“Well.” She sounded a little exasperated. “She’s got a fever now.”

“Look, couldn’t you just…I’m at work and I can’t really leave.”

There was a long silence and then she said, “According to the agreement you signed when you enrolled Megan at Little Treasures Day Care, you are responsible for picking her up when she’s sick. It isn’t good for her and she could infect the other children.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll be there soon. Thirty minutes at the most.”

“We’ll be here.” He tried to remember which one Lindsey was and couldn’t.

“Shit!” He took a deep breath and went to knock on Havrilek’s door.

When he heard “Come in,” he pushed the door open and stood there awkwardly for a moment, watching Havrilek signing one paper after another, methodically turning them over in a pile.

“You talk to the guys in Concord?”

“Yeah. State guy in charge is an old friend of mine, actually.”

“Great, that’ll smooth things along. So, what do you think about this thing? What’s next?”

“Well, there’s one of these encampments out in Concord this weekend. I could go out and interview some of the people who knew him. They may have an ID on the body by then. The state police are taking over this thing. Course, if it turns out that Churchill had something to do with this guy’s death and that’s why he took off, then they’ll have jurisdiction, but if Churchill’s still missing, I may need to liaise with them, anyway.”

“Yup. Sounds good.” He kept signing, his pen scratching along the paper. “Anything else?”

“Look, boss. I hate to ask. But my daughter’s day care just called. She has a fever—I thought she was better when I dropped her off this morning, but I guess she’s…anyway, I have to go pick her up. I’ll come right back, though. She’ll sleep this afternoon and I can make some more phone calls. I’ve got paperwork to do too, so I can—”

But Havrilek cut in. “Quinn, I got five kids, I love kids, but I’m not really so into turning my station into a nursery, you know? If she’s sick, she should be at home. Look, you got yourself some child-care issues, Quinny.”

“But, it’s just the…the…,” Quinn stammered.

“No, no. I want you to get your situation sorted out, go out to Concord, and interview some people at this reenactment thing. Stay at the hotel the guy stayed at on our dime so you don’t have to drive back and forth with the kid. Follow his tracks. See if you can find anyone who knew this guy. Trace his last couple of days, so to speak. I’m willing to be patient for another week, but if you haven’t got things taken care of by the time you’re back, we’re going to have to talk about your job.”