All Mortal Flesh (25 page)

“I’m not implying anything. I’m stating outright that this investigation has been tainted from the beginning. Your men left the goddam kitchen door open for hours, dropping the temperature and hopelessly muddling the time of death. Despite the fact that you were separated from your wife and have no alibi for the hours during which she might have been killed, you’ve refused to submit to questioning.”

“I have not—”

“You steered the investigation toward a mysterious ‘released felon’ ”—she air-quoted with her fingers—“who killed your wife out of spite. When I showed up asking questions, you disappeared. Now you pop up again with a new theory, supported by a conveniently absent pair of scam artists who—surprise, surprise!—have a knife identical to the murder weapon in their underwear drawer.”

Rage rendered him nearly inarticulate. “Are you saying I tossed a throw-down? You saying I framed this perp?”

She looked at Mark. “Officer Durkee, were you with Chief Van Alstyne at all times when he was upstairs?”

“Uh… mostly.”

“At all times, Officer Durkee.”

Mark stared at the floor miserably. “No, ma’am.”

“Did anyone witness this alleged assault?”

Russ broke in. “You can’t deny that. The bastard rammed right into Ethan Stoner’s car trying to get away.”

She stared at him, her eyes narrow. “For all I know, this unknown man fled the house after you threatened him. You have your service weapon, don’t you?”

He couldn’t speak. He jerked his parka to one side, revealing his holster.

“Officer Entwhistle, take custody of that sidearm.”

“Oh, for the love of Mike,” Lyle said.

“No!” Mark lurched forward. “The chief didn’t do it. He couldn’t have! For God’s sake, we needed your help because nobody was looking at Reverend Fergusson as a suspect. Not because anybody suspected the chief!”

“
We
needed her help?” Lyle hitched his thumbs over his belt. “You were the one who called the staties down on us?”

Mark flushed red. Russ’s heart sank. Oh, no. Oh, crap. He had just about convinced himself it must have been Lyle. Not his best and brightest. Not the one he thought of as his protégé.

“Chief…” The naked pleading on Mark’s face was painful to watch. “I didn’t do it because I thought you were involved. I just thought… Reverend Fergusson had the means and the motive and no alibi and Lyle refused to even consider questioning her… and I thought, maybe if someone not so close to what was happening came on board…”

Noble stood stock-still, walleyed, a kid witnessing his parents’ marital meltdown on Christmas Eve. Lyle just shook his head, his face screwed up into an expression of disgust. “I’ve heard some stupid rationalizations for screwing someone over before, kid, but this takes the cake.”

The hypocrisy was more than Russ could bear. “He may have finked me out to the staties, Lyle, but at least he didn’t fuck my wife.”

Lyle’s face bleached white. Out of the corner of his eye, Russ could see Mark and Noble imitating widemouthed bass, and Investigator Jensen’s perfectly plucked eyebrows crawling into her hairline. But all his attention was focused on his deputy chief. His right-hand man. His
friend
.

“Aren’t you going to say something? Maybe a stupid rationalization? Let me guess. You couldn’t resist. Wait, I know. It didn’t mean anything. No, no, I got it. She came on to you.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jensen said. Her rounded, modulated voice had given way to a broad, flat central New York accent. “This is the most fucked-up department I’ve ever been sent to. It’s like a fucking Peyton Place.”

Lyle ignored her. He looked at his hands. At the ceiling. Finally, he looked at Russ. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s it? You’re sorry? For what? Me finding out? I mean, if you were sorry about screwing my wife, you might have mentioned it some time in the last seven years, right?”

“I—”

Someone cleared his throat in the doorway. They all turned. Sergeant Morin stood there, holding an old-fashioned rolled fax flimsy in one hand, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “Unh, sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Not that I heard anything. I mean, I just got here.”

Russ pinched the bridge of his nose. “Did you find anything?”

“Yeah.” Morin thrust the flimsy toward Russ. “Got a hit on one set right off. Nothing yet on the other.” He pointed toward the stairs. “I’m just going to go back up there and take my photographs, okay?”

Russ nodded. Morin bolted up the stairs. No one else moved. The flimsy curled in Russ’s palm, so light a breath of air could carry it away. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to remember his way back into being a cop. Trying to give a damn about whatever information Morin had uncovered.

“Chief?” Noble’s voice was tentative. “What’s it say?”

Russ breathed out. Opened his eyes. Unscrolled the flimsy. “Prints belong to Dennis Shambaugh. Why does that name sound familiar?”

“Dennie Shambaugh,” Lyle said, his voice thin. “You remember him. The Check Burglar. Must have been six, seven years ago. Right after you took over from Chief Brennan.”

“Oh, yeah. Didn’t he go up to Plattsburgh?”

“Was he from the Czech Republic or something?” Jensen asked.

“Not that kind of Czech,” Russ said. “His specialty was jimmying the locks on houses and camps and making off with extra checks and a signature sample. The victims didn’t even know they’d been ripped off until they got their bank statements. Sounds a lot like the operation you described here.” He held the scroll at arm’s length, trying to read the tiny print containing Dennis Sham-baugh’s record. “He got ten years. He must have been squeaky clean to get out this early.”

“He got a dime for theft by breaking?” Jensen said.

“Assault,” Lyle told her. “He accidentally picked a house where the owner was home. The guy had a gun and thought he’d go all self-defense on Shambaugh. Who yanked the weapon away from the homeowner and pistol-whipped the hell out of him.”

“Didn’t he have a fiancée?” Russ said. “I thought the DA’s office tried to get his girlfriend to roll on him.”

“She claimed she didn’t know anything,” Lyle said. “Just thought he was a well-paid arborist.”

“Arborist?” Jensen said.

“That’s a tree cutter,” Lyle said.

“I know what a goddam arborist is.”

“Anyway, there wasn’t anything that linked her to the burglaries or the money. I think she dumped him. I don’t recall her even being at the trial.”

“What was her name?” Russ looked at Lyle, then at Noble, who, while slow off the block when it came to original thinking, had a prodigious memory for names and dates.

He shook his head. “Sorry, Chief, I wasn’t involved with that one.”

“You thinking Audrey Keane may be the former fiancée?” Lyle frowned.

“She wouldn’t be the first woman to forgive and forget,” Russ said sourly.

“Is she working with him? Or just giving him bed and board and closing her eyes to whatever’s going on?” Lyle looked at Mark.

“If they’re stealing identities the way I think they are, I can’t see how she couldn’t know,” the young officer said. “Digging up passports, checks, credit card bills—that all takes time. What does she do, walk the dog unawares while he rifles the house? She’s got to be helping him.”

“Dennie’s previous offense certainly lines up with the scenario you two came up with,” Lyle said. “Mrs. Van Alstyne comes home, catches them in the act, and Dennie… shuts her up.”

“I think it lines up a little too conveniently,” Jensen said. “We still have nothing tying Shambaugh and Keane to the Van Alstyne house. Who’s to say you didn’t know about Shambaugh’s release, peg him as a perfect fall guy, and set the scene to mimic a home invasion?”

“I saw the autopsy report.” Mark bristled to the defense of his chief. “Even if you could believe the chief could kill his wife, there’s no way he could have defaced her like that.”

“That makes it more likely he did it than the Check Burglar,” Jensen shot back. “If you’re just shutting somebody up for good, you slice their throat and be done with it. Whoever defaced Linda Van Alstyne did so out of rage and hate. Does that sound like a guy rifling people’s closets for deposit slips? Or a husband whose wife refuses to fall in line?”

“Deface,” Russ said.

“I think you ought to just shut up right about now,” Jensen said.

“You both said ‘deface.’ ” He had seen a movie portraying the creation of a planet once—shards and shafts of matter and light falling inward, coalescing from a vaporous cloud to a brilliant, glowing core and a hard outer shell. That was what was going on in his head right now. “Deface.”

“Look, Van Alstyne—”

“Ssh,” Lyle said.

“What if the woman in our kitchen was mutilated deliberately? Not by someone playing with death, but by someone who wanted to disguise her identity?” He whirled toward Lyle. “Ethan Stoner said Audrey Keane was a good-looking blonde. He said even though she was his mother’s age, she had a great figure. Like Linda.”

Lyle shook his head. “Aw, no, Russ. Don’t start thinking—”

“What if that woman wasn’t Linda at all? What if it was Audrey Keane?”

“Russ.” Lyle’s voice was gentle. “It was her. I saw her, there on the kitchen floor.”

“What did you see, Lyle? A blonde with an unidentifiable face? How long did you look at her?”

Lyle turned his face away. “Not long. I couldn’t—”

“Not that I don’t appreciate the sensitive personal issues arising from the fact that her
husband
and her
lover
were responsible for investigating her murder, but Linda Van Alstyne was autopsied, for chrissake!” Jensen glared at them. “Unless you’re telling me the ME was sleeping with her, too, I’m going to take his report as definitive.”

“Don’t you get it?” Russ demanded. He felt as if a ball of light were expanding within his rib cage. “Emil Dvorak
assumed
the woman he was autopsying was my wife. Because she’d already been positively identified as Linda Van Alstyne. Why would he check her identity against dental records or fingerprints when we already all knew who she was?” The ball of light burst, and he felt himself lifted up, so light it was amazing his boots still touched the ground. “That woman in the mortuary isn’t my wife. My wife is still alive.”

Clare knew thirty seconds after meeting Oliver Grogan that he would only have killed Linda Van Alstyne if she had ruffled a swag better than he did. The proprietor of Fringes and Furbelows was charming and flirtatious, and batted solidly for the other team.

“
J’adore
Linda Van Alstyne,” he said, leading Clare between shining, spindle-legged tables piled with rolls of velvet trim and silk grosgrain. “Once you can get her away from the Little House on the Prairie look, she does some wonderful work. Have you seen the draperies and soft furnishings she designed for the Algonquin Waters? To die for. Simply to die for. At least, before it char-broiled.” He pushed a stack of fabric samples off a Victorian tête-à-tête. “Sit. Can I offer you some espresso?”

“No thanks.” Clare sat, narrowly missing pulling down a string of plump gold-and-green tassels hanging from one of the rafters overhead. “Look, I don’t want to mislead you. I’m not here looking for trimmings for some window treatment Linda’s making up for me.”

“My dear Reverend, I didn’t think you were. I expect most clergy persons are as poor as church mice and too busy doing good to bother about silly, self-indulgent things like interior décor.”

She brushed one of the fat tassels away. It was exquisitely soft, the colors in its tail flowing like water. “I’m here with bad news, I’m afraid. I have to tell you Linda Van Alstyne is dead.”

Grogan rocked back into his Louis XIV desk chair. “You’ve got to be joking.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Good God,” he said. “I’m sorry, too. She was a great gal. I considered her a friend as well as a customer.” He shook his head. His hair, in the soft light thrown by the shop’s many chandeliers, shone like the tassel threads. His face, however, suddenly seemed much older. “What happened?”

“She was found dead in her kitchen,” Clare said carefully. “The police are investigating.”

“Good heavens. And how did you get roped in?”

“Her… family is seeking some closure. I volunteered to help.”

“Well, I don’t know what I can tell you about her that you wouldn’t already have heard from them.”

“Did she ever mention seeing someone? In a romantic way?”

Grogan arched his eyebrows. “I understood she was married.”

“She and her husband recently separated.”

He laced his fingers together and pressed them against his lips, thinking for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I can’t think of anyone. We talked and e-mailed back and forth, but it was mostly just gossipy stuff. The only thing I recall her being serious about was her work. I suppose if you spend your days saving souls, it seems awfully trivial to you, but she was passionate about her draperies. She was distraught when the Algonquin Waters fire ruined so many of her pieces. She went straight back to work on them, re-creating what had been lost. No, let me amend that.
Improving
on what had been lost.”

“I thought the resort was closed for repairs until the end of January, early February.”

“
Bien sûr
. They’re going to have a Valentine’s Day extravaganza to celebrate the reopening.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Although considering what happened the last time they had a gala event, I think they’d be better off just handing out drinks coupons to the guests. But! It’s Mr. Opperman’s business, not mine.”

“So Linda was working on site, even though it’s not technically open?”

“From what she told me, she was primarily working from home. But yes, she also worked at the resort itself occasionally. With all those muscular, sweaty carpenters around, who wouldn’t?”

Clare couldn’t help herself, with a straight line like that. “I’m only interested in one carpenter, myself.”

Grogan smiled, delighted. “And why not? When you find someone divine, stick with him, I say.”