The year She Fell (56 page)

I started to object. But then I said, “Takes a few weeks, you know.”

“Yes, I know. Just contact me when the results are in.”

Well, I know mild paranoia when I see it. And she was at that age that Alzheimers got started. So I took her home and dropped her off and the next day I called Merilee Knight, her housekeeper, and asked as casually as I could if Mrs. W. was all there.

Well, I didn’t put it that way. But Merilee understood. Mrs. W? Sharp as a tack. So, I probed, nothing weird going on?

“Oh, well, you know her type. Everything’s a production. Got to be a big deal. But she’s fine.”

“She got something going up at the college?”

“Yeah. Planning to make a big donation. The deans and presidents over here every week, courting her and her bucks.”

I thanked her and hung up, figuring that explained it. Well, it didn’t explain it in a way that I could understand. But if Mrs. Wakefield was going to give a lot of money to the college, she probably had some reason for looking through the faculty trash. Not a reason that’d make sense to me, but then, I’m not giving my money away. Maybe she was looking for dirty magazines. Love letters from lady faculty members to the deans. Something that would disqualify these guys from receiving the funds.

I wasn’t sure about that dental floss. But just in case she asked, I stuck it into the samples we sent that month to the DNA lab in
Charleston
. I mean, I’d given up a secure detective position with union wages and protection down in
Tennessee
, not to mention consigned myself to long drives every weekend to see my daughter. I wasn’t going to lose this job because of dental floss.

When the
Charleston
lab report came back a couple weeks later, I glanced at the results. Without another sample as comparison, Mrs. Wakefield’s sample yielded nothing but an incomprehensible string of letters. Still, I was impressed. Might be crazy, but she was clever. Who would have thought a civilian would know that a string of floss would yield actual DNA information?

I made a conscious decision not to speculate about what use she planned to make of this information. Discretion again. Anyway, she never called and demanded the report, so I let myself forget about it. There were enough weird things in this town without worrying about an old lady’s curiosity.

I had about another year to prove myself and restore the department. This was a secretly demoralized town. Wakefield was precarious enough in the best of times, trying to be a nice pretty middle-class college town in the middle of a state full of backwoods hollers and abandoned coalmines and industrial waste. And since the “middle-class” part was dependent on the ability of outsiders to pay for private college tuition and expensive ski vacations, the recession had hit hard.
Wakefield
was hanging on, but it was like an old widow trying to keep up appearances by taking the ‘87 Caddy for a weekly carwash.

I didn’t help matters much, I reckon. Took the job on the condition they spend a couple million on a new police station and lockup and seven new squad cars. But I had them at a disadvantage. Something else no one in town was talking about was the last police chief, the one who spent the second half of his twenty-year career helping a local car dealer transfer heroin up the line to
Pittsburgh
. Both his lieutenants were implicated, and so the city needed someone from the outside, someone untainted. That was me. (Everyone politely pretended not to remember the five years my family had lived here—let’s just say, my dad has always been the entrepreneurial type.) I had good credentials from a larger town, and all the cutting-edge training their own force lacked. They needed me. And I made them pay.

But now it was time for their investment to start showing results. Not enough that I’d cleaned up the department, gotten rid of the good old boys whose major talent was ignoring what their buddy the former chief was hiding in the evidence lockers. Not enough that I’d got three new recruits who’d already passed through the state training academy so that their tuition didn’t come out of our budget. I had to restore confidence, and that meant officers out there patrolling every day and every night, visible, high-profile, pulling over the speeders and the drunk drivers and rousting the teenagers from the parking lot behind the minimart. And it meant keeping any more serious crime outside the city limits.

Once school was out in
June, I took my daughter on vacation for a week— Disney World for her and Cape Canaveral for me—and when she went back to Bristol, I was preoccupied trying to trap the teenaged graffiti artist decorating all the bridges with Japanese letters. Impressive talent—if I found him, I’d write a letter of recommendation to some art school—but cities up to and including New York have learned that ignoring graffiti ends up encouraging other more violent teen crime. So I or one of my officers spent every night cruising up and down
River Road
, looking for movement under the three bridges. No sign of the artist—except, occasionally, a stone newly decorated red or black ideogram that an officer would dutifully photograph and my secretary would excitedly look up on some website: “It’s the symbol for the moon!” or flower or fire or peace or whatever.

This was
West Virginia
. Mountain
West Virginia
. We didn’t have any Asians here. The high school didn’t teach Japanese. The college didn’t teach Japanese. I blame the Internet.

Anyway, that was what passed for a major crime wave in
Wakefield
.

I never expected the next crime would be initiated by the homecoming of my high-school sweetheart and her two religious sisters.

I’ve never been the type
to look back. So it wasn’t like I spent the last twenty years wondering what might have been with Laura. I can’t say it should have turned out differently— that would be dishonoring my marriage and the love that created my daughter. Maybe that marriage didn’t last, but I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t real.

By the time I married Michelle, I was over Laura. Oh, I still cared enough to leaf through TV Guide to see when she might be appearing on some show. I wasn’t so stupid I’d actually watch—Michelle would not have taken that well, to say the least. But I was glad when Laura was nominated for that Emmy, and felt a little better about the end of us.
 
In the unlikely event that we’d stayed married, she’d have been stuck in
Bristol
,
Tennessee
, maybe doing Community Theater in the evenings. And she had too much talent to be trapped down home.

No need to speculate what sort of life we might have had together, because I knew the life I got was a good one, even with all the trouble. I had those first years with Michelle, especially after Carrie was born, which were the happiest of my life—there’s nothing like watching a child grow, with the one other person in the world who enjoys it just as much as you do. Like everyone always says, we grew apart, but those early years were worth the pain that followed.

So when finally—finally—we stopped trying to resurrect that lost time, I was in the mood for something uncomplicated. A relationship without weight. Not sure why the high-school sweetheart seemed to be the answer, except that high school, in retrospect, seemed so simple, and so did the Romeo-and-Juliet conflicts we faced then, none of which would matter much now.

And Laura made it sound so easy. What did I have to do, after all, but what I wanted to do? Every man’s dream, right? A beautiful
Hollywood
star shows up, swearing that you and only you can restore her sexuality, through your uniquely healing passion. And then you both move on, with sweet memories and no obligations.

Hey, works for me. It would work for you too, I bet.

Only it didn’t. Oh, we had our interlude, and she conquered her fear, and . . . yeah, by transferring it to me. I’d hardly gotten out of bed before I started obsessing about the guy who hurt her.

I stopped myself from pushing her to report the crime. She was right—after so long, there was no way an investigation could end well.
 
It’s hard enough to get an indictment and conviction on a date-rape case, even with physical evidence. But a year later? No way.

But that didn’t mean I could let it go. If he was still out there, still walking around, still dating, that probably meant he was still raping. Silence might save Laura’s career, but it might doom other women.

There had to be a way . . .

I’d half-formulated a plan—needing only the identity and location of the rapist—when the entire
Wakefield
family followed the matriarch down that path to madness.

It was a weird coincidence
that Tom O’Connor, the journalist, was kidnapped while I was in bed with his sister-in-law. For a day or so, I thought maybe it wasn’t a coincidence—I don’t know, like they wanted a potential witness out of the way, or wanted me distracted. But pretty soon I acquitted Laura of conspiracy, at least pre-crime.

Still from the first, there was something off about this kidnapping. First thing—no one gets kidnapped in
Wakefield
. A non-custodial parent might keep a kid a couple extra days, requiring a visit by an officer, and, if things are slow at the courthouse, the assistant prosecutor, just to subtly remind the offender that this is a crime.
 
But a real kidnapping? Of an out-of-towner? I have to say, of all the crimes I’d anticipated when training my officers, this didn’t even register.

As I drove to the crime scene, I ran through the possibilities. Means, motive, opportunity. A foreign correspondent might have made a few enemies, but why wait till he comes to this remote mountain town to strike? You practically have to be a native to find your way here through the hills, and getting out in a hurry—well, the nearest major highway is forty-five
 
miles away along sharply graded twisting roads. And strangers, especially foreign strangers, get noticed in
Wakefield
. The arrival of an Arab or even a European would occasion a few calls to the police station, and we’d gotten none of those.

It didn’t take me long to conclude that it was an inside job.

I stood in Tom O’Connor’s motel room, trying not to choke on the chloroform fumes, surveying the scene. CNN was on the TV; the laptop was powered up and connected wirelessly to the Web. I used a pen to punch a key on the laptop, and saw that the victim had been answering his email and broken off mid-sentence—something about a student’s spring semester grade, nothing interesting. Next to the keyboard was a glass, half-full of whiskey. I bent to smell it. Good whiskey. Strong enough to momentarily overwhelm the sweet-sick smell of chloroform. But there was no liquor bottle on the desk or dresser, or in the wastebasket.

The door was clean. No sign of a break-in. Looked like he let the assailant in.

Now granted, this was
Wakefield
, and even an out-of-towner would know that the crime rate was pretty low. Still, this O’Connor guy, by all accounts, had worked in the most dangerous places in the world, and already lived through one kidnapping. So would he have opened the door to a stranger? I didn’t think so.

We had a good little crime-scene team, a regional group fresh off training at the FBI. I stepped back to let them do their work, and continued my line of thought. What was he doing in a motel anyway? He was married to a
Wakefield
, and the
Wakefield
mansion had plenty of room for guests. Like his wife’s room, to start with. There was no sign of a woman’s presence here in the motel room, and anyway, I’d seen Ellen in the grocery store a few days ago, buying perishables. No refrigerator here, just a bucket of melting ice. And Laura had sure made it seem like she and both her sisters were staying with their mom in the big house.