An End to a Silence: A mystery novel (The Montana Trilogy Book 1) (6 page)

His arms
and back ache terribly but he has carried on for an extra mile. The punishing
journey has taken him through dense woodland and onto a smaller track now. He
imagines horses dragging their freshly felled cumbrous freight from out of the
forest and out of history and he feels like them. Like a ghost. He walks for
another hundred yards up this track and then he slumps to the ground with the
boy’s increasingly heavy tiny frame pressing down on his trembling legs. He
drops the dimming flashlight and casts a glance east, where the embers of a new
sky smolder. A tepid breeze blown over this looming dawn fire gathers up
whispered memories of his woodland past and swirls them all around him as trees
shiver off the last of the night. He thinks of beyond the horizon, where day is
already alight, and he knows he has to press on.

He heaves
himself to his feet, shifting the weight of the boy to one arm so that he can
lever with his other. He sees the flashlight on the ground but doesn’t bend
down to pick it up. He walks twenty more yards up the track and then he’s off
it again, blundering through thickening undergrowth and crowding trees,
steering the boy’s body between obstructions, threading and ducking in an ever
more desperate but diminishing stride. He has to stop when a huge freshly
fallen tree limb, ivory-colored sinews still showing, blocks his way. He goes
deeper into the forest to skirt it and it becomes night again briefly. He hears
the gentle footfall of two deer but doesn’t see them as they catch his scent
and tunnel into the remaining darkness.

He begins
to talk to the boy, speaking of things they will do in the future, of hopes and
dreams he holds for him. Of a future that only exists in the past. The dreams
of a caring grandfather who knows now that he hasn’t done enough. And how he
wants to be punished. How he wants to pay for his silence. And he knows that
one day he will. And he looks forward to that day.

And he
curses his weakness.

“Time of
death?” Ward said.

Packham
said, “I’d say early hours of this morning. After midnight. Up to three a.m.”

Ward said
to nobody, “That means he died after O’Donnell. So Brookline’s killer didn’t
take any morphine from here to kill O’Donnell. Could’ve been the other way
around, though. We need that inventory from Sunny Glade.”

McNeely
stood up as Newton squatted down, trying to relieve the pain in his back and
make it look like he was searching for evidence. Ward spotted it and was going
to put a hand on Newton’s shoulder but decided against it. He just said, “I
think we’re just about done here. If you want to wait in the car I’ll help
McNeely finish up.”

Newton
accepted the pity, and the look on his face told Ward he hated himself for it,
but the pain was obviously too much. He waved away Ward’s offer of help to
stand and grimaced as he straightened.

“Hey,
wait up, Adam,” the medical examiner said, closing his bag. “I’ll walk out with
you.”

“I’m
feeling a sense of déjà vu here. This look too clean to you?” Ward’s eyes
followed Newton and the medical examiner out of the room, and then he focused
on McNeely.

“It looks
like a shithole but I see what you mean. We ain’t collected a whole lot that
looks like a whole lot. Assuming this is a homicide and not a simple OD, we’re
looking at someone who knows not to leave anything behind. Someone who is clean
in his work. A professional?”

“Let’s
not make that assumption yet. Let’s just say he was very careful not to leave
any trace.”

“Same killer,
you think?”

“Well,
the first scene was clean, but then the old man’s room had been cleaned by the
staff at the nursing home. So any scrap of evidence he might have left was
scrubbed up by the cleaning lady. Assuming he left any, and my feeling is that
he didn’t.”

“Mine
too. So we are working with one killer here,” McNeely said.

“If the
good doctor was murdered, I think so. The only obvious difference is the prints
we found on the windowsill in the first victim’s room. But why would a killer
who is so meticulous leave so many prints at that scene?”

“You
don’t think the prints guy is our guy?”

“I would
say it doesn’t look likely,” Ward said.

“So who
is the guy who left the prints?”

“I don’t
know. But I would love to talk to him. And if that isn’t our guy then the
killer just walked into the nursing home unchallenged. I guess the security
video will give us some clues.”

“Could it
be that the killer was already there? A member of the staff?”

Ward
lifted his hat and rubbed a hand across his head. He didn’t answer.

“No signs
of a struggle here,” McNeely said, trying to re-engage Ward, who had drifted
off into his own thoughts. “Was the killer invited in? Was the victim too
stoned to fight back? Did he just accept his fate? His life wasn’t exactly
worth a whole deal to himself by the look of things.”

Ward
stood there like a statue.

“Or maybe
it was a self-inflicted OD after all,” she added. “Don’t need another homicide
on the board.”

Ward
thawed and shrugged. “We’ll follow the evidence. All we can do.”

Newton
was staring into the meager light of the overcast winter midday. He had
listened to Packham talking about his new golf handicap but hadn’t heard him.
He only nodded occasionally and forced a laugh in the space where he
intuitively thought it belonged. The medical examiner sensed distance and
finally made it geographical, jumping into his sports car and zipping up the
street like a youngster. His last words were “take care of yourself,” and they
were the only ones Newton really registered.

He was
left to his thoughts as he froze in the car, which didn’t have the engine
running as Ward had the key. He knew that the murders
of
the two men and the disappearance of the boy had to be linked but he couldn’t
see why. The old man had mentioned a confession before he was killed himself.
Newton was convinced that the confession related to the disappearance of the
boy. The history that he carried around with him crowded out any other rational
thought and created a tunnel which he struggled to look beyond. And that troubled
him greatly. He knew what everybody down at the station thought of him. Knew
what the new guy Ward thought. Thought he was old and past his best. But now
and forever the ghost of Ryan Novak sat on his shoulder.

And then
there he was across the road, no more than ten to fifteen yards away. A man
wearing a checked, padded lumberjack jacket and a hat with earflaps, standing
and looking toward the doctor’s house. A few days’ beard growth couldn’t hide
the familiar O’Donnell features, the large eyes of his late mother. And then
there was the engineered jaw and tumbling brow of his late father. He knew that
face. He knew that family so well. But he stared at this apparition and knew
his eyes were playing tricks on him. It couldn’t be him, of course not. A gasp
escaped him as a small inexplicable panic gripped his heart and stabbed
adrenaline into his bloodstream, and he feared he was losing it. Meanwhile, the
man still stared at the house, his hands fidgeting in his pockets and a
nervousness twitching under his clothes. And then he noticed Newton looking at
him and immediately he turned away and started to walk quickly up the street.
Newton tried to roll down the window but the electrics weren’t engaged because
Ward had the damn key and his shout of “hey, stop” only bounced around inside
the car. By the time he opened the door and climbed out, his back only allowing
slow movement, the man had begun to run. Newton tried his shout again but the
man kept running, and Newton froze and couldn’t give chase. He cursed himself
and climbed back into the car, and in his confusion he simply pressed the horn
and didn’t let go.

It was
Ward who was first out of the house and the screen door almost tore off its
fractured hinges as he descended the few steps in one leap and made it to the
car in seconds.

“What is
it?” Ward asked as he tore open the driver’s door and followed Newton’s gape up
the street.

Newton
let go of the horn and looked up at Ward almost stupidly, his face drained of
life. For a moment he was silent and then he said, “I’m sorry, I thought I saw
someone. It was no one. He just ran, that’s all, but I think he was just
keeping warm.”

Ward
regarded him with a concerned and slightly annoyed look. “You saw someone?
Maybe a witness? Someone more interesting? He ran, you say?”

“No, it
was just… he’s gone anyway. It was nothing really. I was just trying to get his
attention is
all.
” And Newton sensed Ward’s irritation
and he sensed his own sanity creaking. It was happening again. He was seeing
ghosts. Damn it. He was seeing ghosts again.

Ward
looked at Newton but Newton just stared straight ahead. “Give me two minutes,”
Ward said. “We’re finished here.” He tossed the car key into Newton’s lap and
slammed the door.

Alice
White’s time-wearied fingers knew only dainty movement here. House chores had
become a struggle, but she still knew how to dress a baby with the most
intricate care. They called her the Baby Dresser, the name as natural to her
now as her baptized one, and she was revered in the small town where people
regarded her with wonder for what she did. The tight-knit black community that
centered on the gospel church considered her an angel.

The baby
girl’s right arm was caressed into the tiny pink cotton bodysuit that her parents
had handed over. And then she threaded the left arm in. She snapped the five
fasteners. And then Alice White’s hands smoothed out unwanted wrinkles and
folds and adjusted the garment, a hand sliding under the baby and nipping a
deep pleat into the back of it to draw it into a more natural fit at the front,
the side that people would see. The side with the embroidered smiling bear on
it. The bodysuit was too large, as was usual for a baby this early, but she had
the skill to always make them appear a perfect fit. Maria was the baby’s name
and she had lived three days. Her insides were all messed up and the doctors
couldn’t save her. But they had likely saved her from an almost certain future
of pain and too many operations. She had been baptized on her second day of
life while still in intensive care and had stopped crying briefly as the
chaplain had spoken her name. And then she started up again and didn’t stop
until she fell asleep for the last time.

Alice
hummed a gospel hymn, “Softly and Tenderly Jesus is
Calling
,”
her voice achieving a low timbre that could have been a note on a distant
church organ. The viewing room that was adjacent to the hospital chapel was
where she worked, and the sparse interior offered a fitting acoustic effect.
There was one chair which was only used once the job was done and Alice sat
there and said a prayer for the little soul and shed a tear. She always cried.

She had
been a nurse for over thirty years and, although that career had ended, this
career carried on and, really, it was her only true vocation. Her God-given
gift. And with every baby she dressed, she knew in the deepest part of her
heart that she was doing His work.

She
dressed the very early premature ones in dolls’ clothes as they were the only
ones that would fit, and she worked extra hard to give some recognizable human
form to these so that the parents could recognize them as a baby. They would
bring their cameras and take photographs and weep and wail and Alice would be
in the chapel next door muttering a prayer for them, asking God to deliver
their baby to heaven and to mend the parents’ broken hearts as quickly as
possible.

She
reached for her makeup box and searched for something to put some life color
into the baby Maria’s lovely little cheeks.

Newton
jumped as Ward opened the car door. The engine was running and Newton had
whacked up the heat so that it was stiflingly hot. Ward immediately rolled down
a window and finally found the perfect temperature. He didn’t speak. Newton did
as they pulled away and headed back to the station.

“Back
there. It was nothing. Don’t be getting the wrong idea about me. I don’t spook
easily or nothing.”

“No
problem.”

When they
arrived back at the station McNeely waved them straight over. She had gotten
back just before Ward and Newton and she slurped a coffee and looked down at
her computer and some papers on her desk. She picked some up and threw them
back down onto the desk one by one.

“We ain’t
got shit from the first scene,” she said.

Ward
said, “How’s that?”

“No DNA
hits other than that of the victim. We have no fingerprint hits. We got the
second blood analysis back and it confirms the first: morphine poisoning. But
hear this. The security tapes.” She said it as a question. “There aren’t any.”

“There
aren’t what?” Ward said.

Greg
Poynter appeared by her side. “Went up there to collect it. Nothing doing. Been
out of order for weeks. I checked it myself.”

Newton
looked at Ward and Ward said, “Goddamn it. So what do we have?”

“I
brought back the guestbook.” Poynter handed it to Ward, who didn’t take it but
nodded over at Newton, who did. “And all the statements we collected.”

“It’s a
start. Okay, we check the book for previous visitors to the victim. We go over
the statements to check for any irregularities, anything unusual or out of
place. How’s the evidence looking from the second scene?” He directed that
question at McNeely.

“That
will take some processing, detective. On the face of it we don’t have a great
deal. We’ll run some prints, one or two clothing fibers. The ME will take a few
hours or so on the body. Honestly, we don’t have a whole lot.”

“Statements
from neighbors?”

“Still
being collected,” Poynter said.

“There is
one thing,” McNeely said. “The doctor had been served with a foreclosure
notice. Looks like he didn’t keep up the loan repayments. Maybe that’s a reason
for him taking his own life?”

Ward
said, “Okay. Well, we have what we have. Keep working it.” He gestured with his
head at Newton. “I guess we go back to the first scene, see if there’s anything
we’re missing. How about we go pay a visit to the owners of the nursing home?
Anybody talked to them?”

“James
Kenny,” Newton said. “Owns most of the damn town. You see any construction
works going on around here, you can bet a dollar to a dime it’s Kenny
Construction. He’s an old-timer himself but money keeps you going like some
elixir from the fountain of youth. Damn sure it does.”