A Bat in the Belfry (15 page)

Then what Bob had said hit me. “What do you mean? You’re not really thinking of quitting, are you?”

There’d already been rumors. His wife, Clarissa, and their little girl had been spending a lot of time in Arizona; the child was asthmatic, and the air in the desert agreed with her. And I knew Bob had thought of moving; lucky for us, though, he’d always reconsidered.

Now as he drove he kept slowly swiveling his head from left to right, matching what he saw of the houses and parked cars with what he’d seen last time, noting the people he saw and what they were doing, and with whom. Looking, in other words, for anything out of place, which he always said was 99 percent of small-town police work. But it was the other 1 percent that was bothering him now.

“What, me worry?” He answered my question with a quip. But there wasn’t any humor in it, or any real answer, either.

Nor was there any amusement in his eyes when he glanced at me again in the squad car’s rearview mirror. “So, d’you know your little pal has a criminal record?”

Chip, he meant. “Oh, Bob, he does—”
Not
, I’d intended to finish. But then I stopped, because Bob wasn’t asking.

He was telling. Ellie shot me an incredulous look. “What kind of record?” she asked as he turned onto High Street, then down Washington Street back toward downtown.

“Kid’s a peeper.” Bob’s inspection took in Spinney’s Garage, the enormous old white-clapboarded Baptist church, now home to the Eastport Arts Center, and the apartment building just uphill from the post office, where a work crew hurried to put a lot of new lumber and other construction materials for the building’s rehab under blue tarps. “I mean, the kind who peeps in windows.”

I looked at Ellie, and she looked at me:
Wha-a-at?
The idea was absurd. Then I found my voice. “Bob, there must be some mistake. Chip’s not that kind of—”

Bob had never liked Chip, even though on Chip’s previous visit here he’d acquitted himself heroically, in my opinion, when a combination con man/killer pretty much scared the wits out of the rest of us. But Bob just thought Chip had enjoyed better luck than he deserved in the con man/killer department.

Between the granite-block post office building and his own new headquarters, Bob turned right: back onto Water Street again but this time in the opposite direction. Here small businesses and offices crowded both sides of the street: a flower shop, two galleries, a bakery, the water company, some gift stores, and an attorney’s storefront. Hurrying to beat the weather, storekeepers hauled down their awnings, pulled in “Open” flags, and retrieved merchandise from the big plate-glass front window displays.

Workmen were even screwing plywood sheets over the windows; the whine of electric drills and circular saws echoed between the buildings. Bob slowed for a guy balancing a stepladder on one shoulder and a bundle of two-by-fours on the other.

“What exactly are we talking about here, Bob? With Chip’s criminal record, I mean. And”—it occurred to me that I hadn’t asked this yet—“where’s Chip now?”

We could talk about Bob maybe quitting his job later; I had a feeling that trying to convince him not to while he was driving a squad car whose transmission sounded like a banshee was being ground up in it—his departmental budget was even tighter than the collar around his fleshy neck—wasn’t exactly strategic. He popped a hard candy from the car’s cup holder into his mouth and crunched it, looking as if he would rather be crunching the bones of whoever had killed Karen Hansen in the church last night.

“State boys’ve got him at the command post they’ve set up, at the Youth Center.” Yet another reason for Bob’s sour mood, I realized; a small wood-frame community building with a kitchen, restrooms, and a meeting area with cafeteria-style tables and metal folding chairs, the Youth Center on County Road was used mostly for bingo—or as they called it around here, beano—on Wednesday nights.

Despite its name, no self-respecting “youth” would be caught dead in the place. But the state cops were using it, instead of running their operation under the same roof as Bob’s department. He caught my eye again in the mirror, grimaced.

“Yeah, that’s right. I’m good enough to find the girl. Fell right down outta that trapdoor onto me, got so much blood on me I hope to hell the poor kid didn’t have hepatitis.”

She could have; from what I’d heard, Karen Hansen’s living situation with her neglectful dad was just this side of criminal. But of course I didn’t say so to Bob, who went on fulminating.

“Good enough to secure the scene, best I could considering it was all four flights in a stairwell, plus a belfry. Grabbed up the witnesses, got all the right people here …”

We passed the wide parking lot that led out onto the wooden fish pier, with the colorful statue of a bearded, slicker-and-sou’wester-clad fisherman clasping a silvery codfish sticking up from the middle of it. The statue resembled a cartoon character dreamed up by a chain of seafood restaurants, but everyone else in Eastport liked it, so I’d kept my mouth shut about it, mostly.

“… even closed down the port and the airstrip,” Bob went on. “Which I’ll hear about, and not in a good way, at the next county commissioners’ meeting.”

At the far end of Water Street, the business part of town gave way to wood-frame houses set close together right up against the street, their front doors almost touching the sidewalk. Bob turned at the corner, downhill toward the island’s south end.

“Not that anyone tried getting in or out, anyway,” he added. “But you know those yahoos’ll have to chew my tail about it, just ’cause they can.”

I did know; in Maine, county commissioners had lots of odd-seeming powers, left over from when the county seats were even more remote and difficult to travel to than now. Also, politics was part of it.

“Exceeding my authority, my fanny,” Bob grumbled. “Let them see how they’d handle a goddamned bloody—”

“Bob. What’re they doing with Chip?” Because if he’d been arrested, as Sam had said, he should’ve been getting transported somewhere else by now, and if he wasn’t—

“Questioning him,” Bob said flatly as outside the car two seagulls clashed over what looked like a fish head. One of the seagulls speared the fish head with its long orange beak and flew off with it, leaving the other gull looking around peevishly.

We crested the next hill onto the bluff overlooking Prince’s Cove and out across Johnson Bay.

“And there’s no mistake about the peeping charge, Jacobia.” Bob used my full name, which meant he was really serious. His tone, despite his own personal dislike of Chip, was grudgingly regretful.

“I ran my own check for warrants and priors on him, since the state cops aren’t sharing anything with me. I am,” he added a little huffily, “allowed to do that. So I did, and saw the faxed arrest records myself.”

I could still barely believe it. “But …”

“Look,” said Ellie, pointing across the bluff to the edge of a field overlooking the sea. The bluff ended sharply in a forty-foot drop to the beach, though the cliffs weren’t visible from here.

The two men at the edge of them were, though. One was Karen Hansen’s father, Hank, I could tell even from here by his wild head of flame-red hair, sticking out in all directions like like a fright wig.

But that wasn’t the only frightening thing about him: with one hand thrust out toward his companion in an angry warding-off gesture, he held the other hand close to his head. And although I couldn’t see it clearly, from his desperate-looking stance and the way the other man seemed to be pleading with him, I’d have bet anything that in
that
hand was a gun.

“Hell,” Bob pronounced in disgust at the sight. Hansen was a fixture around town, a foolish talker and a mean drunk who’d been rumored to smack his wife around when she was alive. But even a guy like Hansen could have a come-to-Jesus moment, I guessed, the kind that made him feel he’d be better off dead.

That, or he was the kind of guy who thought everything, even his own daughter’s bloody murder, was really about him, and it was this latter theory that I tended right now to subscribe to. Meanwhile, the other man was my husband, Wade Sorenson.

Spotting the pair, Bob pulled the Crown Vic over onto the shoulder and slammed on the parking brake. After hauling himself from behind the wheel, he shoved the door closed hard behind him and without hesitation lumbered against the wind across the bumpy headlands toward Wade and Hansen.

“Hey!” Bob yelled. “Hey, put that damned gun down! Damn it, Hansen, I’m talking to you!”

Which might’ve been enough to put another man over the edge. But unlike Wade, Bob was an authority figure. Also, he made it his business to know and understand the subjects of his policing, the people it was his job to protect.

So he knew Hank Hansen. Still yelling, Bob went on motoring across the grassland. But by the time he got halfway to the now-wavering man, his step grew ragged, and although he went on shouting out orders, his voice was wheezy, with long pauses between the words.

I looked at Ellie. “Not doing so well,” I said, meaning Bob.

She nodded gravely. If you didn’t know Bob, you’d think he was having a heart attack; maybe him quitting his job wasn’t such a bad idea after all. But the idea was still hugely unwelcome; if only, I thought, he’d take better care of himself.

Not that he was getting the chance right this minute: nearly to Hansen’s side, Bob stood bent over with his hands propped on his knees, catching his breath. Still, he hadn’t given up.

“Damn … you … Hansen. Now … get over here … and … give … me … the … damn …
gun
!”

The final word was almost all air, like a whistle. Hansen, though, heard it. He stood indecisively a moment before letting his hand fall. Then, turning his back firmly on Bob, he raised both arms as if about to leap over the edge of the cliff—

And sank to his knees abruptly, burying his face in his hands; as Bob had known, when push came to shove, Hansen followed orders. The onshore wind that had carried Bob’s shouts to us now brought the ragged, tearing noises of Hansen’s sobbing.

Wade approached the car, brushing his big hand sheepishly over his blond crew-cut hair. Tall and solidly built, with a big square jaw and eyes that were either blue or gray depending on the weather, he had a smile that still made my heart go pitter-pat, but he wasn’t smiling at the moment.

“Hansen got away from me,” he explained when I opened the car’s door. “Slippery as a bucket of eels, that guy. I tried the bars first, of course.”

Of course. Where else would you go the morning after your daughter was murdered? My sympathy for the guy dropped another notch, and what had a fourteen-year-old been doing out at that hour, anyway?

“But I couldn’t find him in any of them, and then somebody said they’d seen him heading out here,” Wade said.

He peered into the car and spotted Ellie. “So, are you two okay?”

I assured him we were just ducky. That is, unless having your houseguest suspected of a ghastly crime counted; the guest with the previously unknown police record for spectacular ickiness …

Out on the bluffs, Bob put his hand on the grieving man’s shoulder and just stood there with him, not talking. Eventually Hansen got up and the two men came together across the grassland toward us, the dark storm clouds looming behind them as huge and solid looking as a giant hammer getting ready to slam down.

Wade looked troubled, his eyes now the exact same gray as the clouds lumbering monstrously toward us. “My knife was the weapon,” he said, confirming my earlier suspicion.

Because, of course, there’d been another reason to pick Chip Hahn up; no one gets taken in for questioning just for carrying a rabbit’s foot. There had been a customer visiting in Wade’s shop earlier in the day, I seemed to recall.

But whoever that customer was, he hadn’t been spotted near the crime scene later, as Chip had been. And Chip had also been up there in Wade’s workshop with Sam that afternoon. Probably he had seen the knife then, or he could have.

That’s what a prosecutor would say, anyway.

“Somebody,” said my husband, while Hank Hansen pushed the toe of his boot disconsolately into a clump of earth, “used my knife to slit that poor little girl’s throat.”

  
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