An End to a Silence: A mystery novel (The Montana Trilogy Book 1) (5 page)

Newton
arrived to see Ward leaning over McNeely, who stared at her computer. Ward waved
him over and Newton automatically looked around to see who Ward was waving at.
Ward walked over to him and said, “You’re on the case. We work it together.”

“But I’m…
I only got this week and next and—”

“I need
your help.”

“Oh, I
don’t know… it’s just that…”

Ward took
a step back. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“No, no,
I appreciate the… offer… and… but…”

“Okay,
like I said, I’m sorry to have tried to drag you into this. I just thought that
your knowledge of the old man and the Ryan case might be valuable. But I
understand. Hey, only a few more days to go and then you’re out of here. You
don’t have to fret over any of this anymore.” And Ward turned his back on
Newton and went back to McNeely.

Newton
shuffled back to his desk and stood there a while staring at nothing. Then he
walked out of the station.

Newton
arrived just in time. The mortuary vehicle had its back doors open and someone
was fussing around with something inside. Newton went straight into the
building and spoke to an assistant, who waved him through without him having to
show his badge.

There was
a body strapped to a gurney and Newton knew it was O’Donnell inside the bag.
There was nobody else in the room. He stood beside the body a few moments and
then unzipped the bag to reveal O’Donnell’s head. He looked familiar now. No
longer just a shriveled body but the man who had taken Ryan. He felt an urge to
peel open his eyelids and look into his eyes once more to see the lies that he
was sure he could see twenty-five years ago. Would the opaque veil still be
there, or did dead men’s eyes reveal the truth? He knew it was a fancy of folly
to think that, but the urge was there. He did peel back the eyelids but the
eyes were cloudy and they refused to look back at Newton, so he got in close,
but his own eyesight failed him and the eyes became blurs of watercolor
splashes. He kicked the gurney.

“Son of a
bitch,” he said. “Son of a bitch. Fucking son of a bitch.” And he grabbed the sides
of the unzipped bag like they were the lapels of a jacket, dragged O’Donnell’s
face up to his own and said, “I know. I know. You can fool the rest of ’
em
, but I know. I know.” Dropping the body back onto the
gurney, he staggered back and collided with the dissection table, then steadied
himself. Quick, short breaths came out of him and he placed a hand on his
chest, and that’s how Packham, the ME, found him.

“Adam,”
the medical examiner said, and then he saw the opened body bag. He calmly
walked over and zipped up the bag, placing a hand on Newton’s shoulder.

“I’m
okay,” Newton said. “I just needed to… I’m okay.”

The ME
nodded and squeezed Newton’s shoulder.

When
Newton arrived back at the station he went straight to his desk. Ward watched him
sit down. He saw him pick up the papers that Ward had left there. Saw him read
them. Saw a light flicker in Newton’s eyes and some color come into his cheeks.
The next moment Newton was on his feet and striding over to Ward.

“What’s
this?”

“Young
girl used to visit O’Donnell. I went to see her last night. It’s what she said
he said.”

“Confession?
What’d he say about a confession?”

“He said
the word ‘confession’.”

“You see
what this is. He’s confessing. The son of a bitch is confessing about Ryan.”

“I have
an open mind. Maybe he knew he was going to die and wanted a priest to confess
to. All I can do is let the case play out and see where we are.”

“Damn it,
let the case play out. I told you he did it, didn’t I?”

“For your
peace of mind I’ll let you know if I find anything. In the meantime I gotta be
getting on with what I was getting on with.”

Newton
took Ward’s arm firmly in his hand and said, “Okay, I’m in. Reporting for duty,
detective. Or whatever it is I’m supposed to goddamn say.”

Ward
looked up at Newton. “Okay,” he said.

Ward
stood and led Newton over to McNeely. “We were just reviewing the evidence
collected from the crime scene. McNeely ran some latents we found and we don’t
have a hit. We’ve sent hair fibers for analysis.” Ward looked at Newton and
wondered when the last time was he’d worked a homicide case. “We have Officers
Jackson
and Poynter interviewing everyone who was in the home at the time of death, an
hour each side of the medical examiner’s estimate. We have requested security
camera footage and are waiting on that.”

“Okay.”

“We also
await results on his clothes. There was a newspaper, the one that the young
girl was reading to him on the night he died. We’ve had someone over there
going through the trash but nothing.”

Newton
moved his weight to his left foot and appeared in pain. More than usual. “He
had newspaper ink on his fingers.”

“There
are a lot of unanswered questions,” Ward said. “We get the answers to some of
those and we could be in the game.” He drew up a chair for Newton to sit but he
declined with a short quick shake of his head.

“Doctor
Brookline? The girl said he called out his name.”

“Our next
port of call. You know him?”

“Retired
doctor is all I know,” Newton said. “Where are we on next of kin?”

“None
surviving,” Ward said, and he saw Newton grow an inch and then another. “His
belongings were picked up by an Alice White. Before we got there. I was going
to pay her a visit later.”

“I know
Alice,” Newton said. “Used to be a nurse.”

At that
Ward said, “A person of interest, you think?”

“More an
interesting person,” Newton said.

“She
would have access to morphine?”

“We can
go see her later if that suits.”

The truck
pulls off the highway and the road becomes uneven. He slows down as if not to discomfort
his passenger and makes steady progress up a short shallow incline, then begins
a long descent through ancient plantation woodland. The road is still used by
vacationers and it is kept clear from overhanging tree limbs, but he feels as
if he’s going through a tunnel, the headlamps of the truck carving out a hollow
in front of him, a soft red glow from the taillights following.

A thin
line of blue fire lights up the sky as it zigzags to earth and touches down
close enough, and almost immediately a booming crack of thunder shakes the air
and makes the man jump in his seat, jerking the steering wheel slightly to the
left, enough to bump the truck out of the wheel ruts in the road and take off a
bunch of tree branches with his side mirror. He straightens the truck then and
the wheels find the well-worn ruts in the road again.

He
continues for about a mile, occasionally humming an unrecognizable tune when
the road becomes lumpy, and eventually draws up in a small clearing made for
vehicles to turn. The road runs out and a wall of trees throws back light. A
gentle breeze stirs the tops of the trees and the doleful squeal of branches
kissing branches sounds to him like disagreeing violins. He cuts the lights and
steps carefully down from the truck. A gibbous moon trickles enough light down
for him to see his footing, but he takes a flashlight from beneath an
oil-stained sheet in the bed of the truck. Out of habit he taps the flashlight
against his hand before he turns it on. He walks around to the passenger side
and opens the door. His cargo is still there and his heart falls to his boots.
He gently scoops up the boy, sheet and all, and starts walking into woodland,
his flashlight cutting through the undergrowth and highlighting jutting tree
roots. A low branch snatches at the sheet and his forward motion draws away the
veil from the boy’s face. The scarce moonlight casts a cold blue wash over it.
And Bill O’Donnell cries out.

The two
of them were silent for the journey to Doctor Brookline’s small bungalow off of
the main eastward drag out of town. It was more blue collar than medical
professional and every two hundred yards a different dog was to be heard
barking.

Ward
fiddled with the heating in the car but couldn’t quite get the killer
adjustment that made the temperature inside just right. It was either sauna or
freezer. Stupid Italian engineering, he thought. In the end he pulled up his
collar and settled on freezer. Newton did likewise.

The first
thing to see at Doctor Brookline’s home was that it looked abandoned. It looked
like a repossession which was never resold. The front yard was overgrown with
weeds and decorative plants and shrubs that now looked like weeds.

“We got
the right address?” Ward said, his breath made visible in front of him by the subzero
northerly. Newton shrugged. They opened the gate which creaked and jammed
three-quarters of the way through its swing, the rust on the top of it flaking
off in Ward’s hand.

Four
steps led up to a front porch. The deck had an ancient wooden chair whose
upholstery had been eaten by weather and age. The chair was poked through with
weeds
 
which
had emerged from the deck boards. Newton was first to the entrance porch, and
he opened the screen door, which swung out unsteadily on crippled hinges. He
knocked heavily three times on the inner door. Ward let the screen door prop
against his back as he studied the yard, if it could be called that. It had the
feeling of an ill-tended cemetery, the paving slab walkway suddenly seeming
like end-to-end gravestones, and the house cast now as a derelict mausoleum.

Newton
knocked again. Before an answer could come, he was trying to peer through the
small side window, but drapes resisted his scrutiny. “Do you also have a bad
feeling about this?”

“Probable
cause?” Ward asked as he adopted a firm stance and looked for something to get
a hold of to get extra leverage into his kick. Newton nodded at him and Ward
drew back his leg.

“Hold
on,” Newton said, and he went to grab the handle.

“Gloves!”
There was a shout in Ward’s whisper as he dug into his pocket and then tossed a
pair of latex gloves to Newton.

Newton’s
eyes apologized but he was clearly annoyed at himself. Said “damn it” under his
breath. He pulled the gloves on and slowly turned the door handle. The door
opened. “Doctor Brookline,” he called. “Police officers.” There was no answer.
None was expected by either man but Newton called one more time as Ward drew
his Glock 22.

“We’re
in,” Ward said, and he entered slowly. Newton followed. They were in a corridor,
four rooms off it, two on each side, and what appeared to be a kitchen at the
end, though it was difficult to tell in the indoor twilight. Ward indicated the
first room with a nod and Newton took up a position with his back to the
opposite wall. He sniffed and Ward saw that and nodded to him. Both recognized
the pungent smell of death. Newton drew his weapon and nodded okay.

Ward
stepped across the threshold and pointed his gun into the dimly lit room,
daylight shunned by dusty purple drapes that hung apologetically over the
windows, secured by nails hammered into the walls and bent over with the last
blow. Ward pulled out his flashlight and shone it into every corner. The room
was empty save for an old couch covered with a crocheted blanket. Newton was
already out of the room, and when Ward returned to the corridor he was startled
by his call.

“Doctor
Brookline. Police officers.”

Ward
followed him through the next door off the corridor on the other side of the
house, and the smell grew stronger. Newton had sheathed his weapon and replaced
it with his cell phone. “I’ll call it in. Possible homicide.”

Ward
flicked the light switch with the knuckle of his middle finger, and light laid
bare the extent of Doctor Brookline’s decline.

This room
mirrored the first one. The only differentiating features were one dead man
slumped on the couch and a table next to him that held two discarded plastic
medical syringes and a number of vials which had spilled over onto the floor.
Another syringe hung from the man’s arm, the hypodermic needle poking into a
vein that had already dried up and collapsed.

Ward
fished out another pair of latex gloves from his pocket and dragged them on.
Newton saw him do it and said, “I guess I need to catch up, detective,” as he
picked up one of the vials carefully with forefinger and thumb and held it in
front of his eyes, so close that he was almost cross-eyed. He took his glasses
out of his pocket and slipped them on with one hand and looked again at the
vial. “Morphine.” He replaced it exactly where it had been.

“Shall we
wait for McNeely to get down here?” Ward said. “We need to preserve this one.”

“You
think they’re related?”

“You
think they’re not?” Ward didn’t expect an answer. “I don’t believe in
coincidences.”

“What does
your instinct tell you?”

“I don’t
necessarily place a whole deal of faith in that neither. I’ve been married.”

Newton
didn’t smile.

“Look at
this.” Ward’s finger drew a line joining the dotted entry marks on the man’s
withered arm. “Guess he was an addict.”

“He had
access to morphine. Is this our killer? He kills and then kills himself with an
OD?”

“I doubt
that. By the look of him he hasn’t been outside for a while.”

“At least
this scene hasn’t been cleaned up.”

Ward
looked at Newton, took off his hat, rubbed the dark stubble on his head then
replaced the hat. “I’m not so sure.”