Very Bad Men (11 page)

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, where 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.”

T
he 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 go 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.”

“And was he part of your life too?” Elizabeth asked.

“Charlie and I would get together from time to time for a drink and a laugh. He had mellowed over the years. He could be good company when he wanted to be.”

“Is that what happened the night Charlie died—you got together for a drink?”

“That's right.”

“But Kyle Scudder didn't approve.”

Madelyn pursed her lips. “Kyle has a jealous streak, and a bad temper. He didn't understand about Charlie. And Charlie didn't help things. He never liked Kyle. He thought Kyle was too possessive.”

“I spoke to Sheriff Delacorte this morning,” Elizabeth said. “He told me you changed your story about what happened that night. First you said Kyle followed you home but didn't stay, then you said he spent the night here.”

A dark look passed over Madelyn's face. “When I found out about Charlie—” Her voice broke and she started again. “Nick called me when he found the body, and I went there and I saw . . . It's not something I'll forget. It was hours later when the sheriff asked about Kyle, and I'd had time for a few drinks. I was angry with Kyle about the way he'd treated Charlie at the Cozy Inn. I wasn't thinking straight. But the truth is Kyle stayed here all night. He couldn't be the one who killed Charlie.”