Dearly Departed (5 page)

As for witnesses: The bulk of Anne’s file consisted of verbatim statements made by 137 people who had been interviewed in the course of the investigation, many of them more than once. Some of the reports were badly written and incomplete. Others were paragons of clarity and brevity. I read them all, listing the names and addresses of a dozen or so witnesses who had the most to say about the case in my own notebook. I would interview these myself.

I
was sitting at my dining room table, the pages of the file freed from the fastener and organized in front of me. Ogilvy, my gray-and-white French lop-eared rabbit, lounged at my feet, munching day-old popcorn.

A photograph was included in the file, an eight-by-ten color glossy of two women dressed in period costumes. Turn-of-the-century European, I guessed. The woman in the background, dark hair, dark visage, seemed formidable but confused—anger without focus. Her hand rested on the shoulder of a younger woman in the foreground. The younger woman was Alison.

I set the photograph aside yet found myself returning to it several times while I read the file, picking it up and studying it and tossing it down again only to reach for it a few minutes later. This was a different Alison than the woman in the black-and-white photograph. This Alison was no mysterious femme fatale, a seductress framed in shadow. This Alison was soft and vulnerable and desperate. You could feel her throat tightening around some great, indescribable pain. And her eyes, her spectacular blue-green eyes, were almost too painful to contemplate, yet I kept looking into them, couldn’t stop looking into them.

One of the women who’d been interviewed was an actress named Marie Audette. She had been close to Alison when they both toiled for the University of Minnesota theater company. I guessed that the photo was taken in connection with a student performance. I set it next to the black and white Truman had given me. Identical faces, yet it was hard to believe it was the same woman. One so confident. The other so fearful. I wondered which had been taken first.

I was debating whether to sift through the entire file a third time when the telephone rang. The Twins and Indians were on the radio, Hall of Fame broadcaster Herb Carneal doing the play-by-play, and I turned down the volume before answering the phone.

“Have it solved, yet?” Anne Scalasi asked.

“The butler did it with a candlestick in the library.”

“Now, why didn’t I think of that?”

“How’d the roundup go?”

“No muss, no fuss,” Anne replied. “McGaney’s pissed, though. The killer gave up without a struggle.”

“So you had to take him alive, huh? Bummer.”

“You believe it? He kept the gun! You
never
keep the gun. Any idiot who ever watched an episode of
Perry Mason
knows you never keep the gun.”

“The declining grade of criminal we get these days, Annie; I fear for the future of the Republic. Did you speak with Teeters?”

“I did. He agreed to let you in.”

“Great.”

“Desperate men will do desperate things. He’ll meet you at eight tomorrow morning at the scene; he doesn’t want you seen hanging around the station. Only, keep it quiet. Teeters has taken a beating over this case. The last thing he needs is for the media to get involved again. Especially your friend Beamon at the Minneapolis paper.”

“Beamon is no friend of mine.”

“Then why does he keep asking about you every time I see him? He asked about you again this afternoon when we brought in the killer.”

“He thinks we’re having an affair.”

“Set him straight, will you?”

“I have. But the more I tell him we’re just good friends, the less he believes it. I don’t know what else to do.”

“You could marry Cynthia.”

“There’s a thought.”

The other end of the phone went dead silent, and for a moment I thought we had been cut off.

“Annie?”

“I was joking,” she said.

“So was I,” I told her.

“I’m going home to bed. It’s late.”

“Thanks, Annie,” I told her.

“One thing, Taylor,” she said. “If you learn anything, anything at all …”

“I’ll tell Teeters first and then you.”

“Good night, Taylor.”

“Good night, sleep tight, and don’t let the pom-poms bite.”

“Pom-poms?”

“Just something my daughter used to say.”

four

A
lison Donnerbauer Emerton had been a loner and not always by choice. It wasn’t that she’d lacked charm or social grace; many of the 137 witnesses the Dakota County cops had interviewed testified that she’d had plenty of both. Her problem was IQ. She was tested at 172, 32 points above genius. She graduated high school at sixteen, earned her bachelor’s at eighteen and her master’s at nineteen. She was younger, smarter, and more attractive than most of her peers. What other reasons did people need to resent her?

This resentment permeated the statements made by the witnesses: “
You’d think she would have known better.” “I guess she wasn’t so smart after all.” “She was always too smart for her own good
.” Crap like that. According to the file, Alison had forged only two long-lasting friendships in her lifetime, both with women she hadn’t seen or spoken with for at least one month prior to her disappearance. Which is why I found no irony in her choice of profession. Perhaps by working in public relations she’d hoped to gain what she seemed to lack in her private life: personal attachments. But that’s just a guess, the amateur psychologist talking. And maybe I was projecting too much of my own life into the theory. I, too, was basically friendless—except for Anne and Cynthia and, truth be told, I wasn’t all that sure of Cynthia. After my wife and daughter were killed, I shed my friends the way you would change from a summer wardrobe to winter: quitting the cops to work in a one-man office, retiring from playing softball and hockey, spending my days solving the problems of strangers. But unlike Alison, who seemed desperate to connect with other people, lately I was disconnecting, keeping them at long distance. Again, the amateur psychologist talking.

What I did find ironic was Alison’s choice of homes. If you wanted to avoid people—and I don’t think she did—this was a good place to live. The house was located well outside of Hastings, about a forty-minute drive from St. Paul, on a dead-end road that I missed twice, in a forest that resembled Itasca State Park more than a simple grove of trees. Only six homes shared the cul-de-sac, built at least an acre apart. I parked in front of a large colonial with cedar shakes. The one with the patrol car in the driveway.

Sheriff Ed Teeters approached me with an irritated expression and a clenched fist. He was bigger than I am, but who isn’t? Size does not impress me, though. After nearly fifteen years of studying the martial arts, I learned that the maxim my father taught me while I was growing up small was God’s own truth:
The bigger they are, the harder they fall
.

“Late!” Teeters yelled at me. “Nothing better to do but hang around here all morning?”

“I got lost.” I informed him, and Teeters instantly calmed himself.

“Happens,” he said, and I wondered if he had once taken the same wrong turn himself.

“Lieutenant Scalasi says you have her file,” he said.

I waited for him to continue until I realized that he had asked a question. “Yes,” I answered.

“Heard the tape?”

“Yes.”

“Opinion?”

“Not yet.”

“Good man,” the sheriff said. “Lieutenant Scalasi said you were a good man. Said you worked homicide in St. Paul for four years.”

“Closer to five,” I corrected him.

“How many murders you catch?”

“Ninety-six.”

“How many you clear?”

“Ninety-one.”

“Which ones you remember most?”

“The five that got away.”

Teeters nodded, sighing like a stage actor, and leaned against my car, his eyes fixed on the colonial. “Some people, they get killed, you say good riddance—know what I mean? It’s a terrible thing, but that’s what you say ‘cuz … Hell, you’ve been a cop.”

I nodded, understanding completely.

“This time around … this is the one that haunts you. You don’t solve it, you don’t bring the killer down, it haunts you to your grave. That’s why you’re here. Normally I’d kick your PI ass back up Highway 61 for interfering in an ongoing investigation. But Lieutenant Scalasi vouches for you, and what the hell, there’s no investigation to mess up. We ain’t got squat.”

“If I learn anything, you’re the first to know, even before my client,” I volunteered.

“Be quiet about it. Don’t come by the shop. Keep the phone calls down. Had it up to here with media types. Way some of them bastards act, you’d think I did it.”

And that was all the sheriff had to say.

I accompanied Teeters to his car. He stared at the house as he walked, then lingered in the driveway. He seemed reluctant to leave.

“I became a cop after I got my honorable from the army because I couldn’t think of what else to do,” he said bitterly. “Still can’t.” Then he climbed into his car and drove away.

I peeked through a window. The house was empty of furniture. Only the bare walls and carpet were on display behind the glass. That’s when I noticed the
FOR SALE
sign protruding from the center of the front lawn. I had been there fifteen minutes, and that was the first I noticed the sign.

You’ve got a real eye for detail
, I told myself and circled the house twice, forcing myself to concentrate on every little thing.

Behind the house was a large kennel, maybe thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide, surrounded by a high cyclone fence. The kennel was empty, too. I went past it and followed a path deep into the grove. The grove was denser than I expected, and several times I was forced to wrestle with trees and bushes that snagged my sports jacket. The undergrowth was brutal, and I began to think,
Yeah, the county cops searched the grove but how thoroughly?
I finally stopped at the small pond Alison had described on the cassette and sat under the oak tree on the knoll overlooking it. “How deep is the water?” I mused aloud and then dismissed the question. The cops had dragged the pond as soon as the ice went out.

I sat under the tree a long time, thinking it over. Teeters’s investigation was solid, and whatever cracks there were Anne Scalasi had already filled in. What was left for me to do, besides waste Hunter Truman’s money? I was ready to quit the case, and I hadn’t even started.

C’mon, make an effort
, I told myself.

I began thinking about Truman. And the tape.

The tape.

The footprint.

The problems at Kennel-Up.

The report from the officers who questioned Raymond Fleck outside Alison’s house.

Fleck’s record.

It all pointed to Fleck, and in less enlightened times he probably would have been strung up by now. Still, ignore the tape and what do you have? You have Stephen Emerton. Yes, the Dakota County cops would have learned about Fleck eventually, but would he have been the number one suspect? No. It would have been the husband. At least he would have been first on my dance card. We always kill the ones we love. At least we do eighty percent of the time. And based on the cassette recording, Alison and Emerton didn’t seem all that close. Think about it.

The house.

Stephen Emerton was selling it. Alison had said he didn’t like living there. Could that be a motive for murder? Hell, I knew a guy who murdered his wife for pouring melted cheddar cheese over his broccoli. “She knows I like colby,” he’d confessed.

The timing.

Emerton had left his office at five
PM.
Say it usually takes him forty-five minutes to drive home; assume the snow slows him down, add another fifteen, twenty. During that long drive he gets an idea, or maybe he already had the idea and the snow merely gives him an opportunity. At six he meets Alison at the door, clubs her with the proverbial blunt object, tosses her body into the grove, knowing the snow would hide it soon enough, knowing he could dispose of it at his leisure, knowing the cops would suspect Fleck. Then he reports Alison missing. Could he do all that in a quarter hour? Sure, he could. And the Minnesota Twins might win another World Series in my lifetime.

Still …

He could have hired it done. Teeters had examined Emerton’s financial records, but he didn’t find any suspicious movements of money.

Still …

If you were going to clutch at a straw, Stephen Emerton was as good as any.

I
had brought Alison Donnerbauer Emerton’s photograph with me. Not the black-and-white job Truman had given me but rather the colored glossy from Anne’s file. I don’t know why I’d brought it, but I had. It was in an envelope. I slipped it out and stole a look at it, starting at the bottom, moving up over the bodice to the lace collar around Alison’s throat to her pointed chin to her thin lips to her slightly crooked nose to her brilliant blue-green eyes filled with pain and—now I saw—a kind of hopelessness. No matter how I handled the photograph, no matter what angle I held it at, those eyes seemed always to stare right at me. After a few minutes I shoved the photograph back into the envelope and turned toward the house. Teeters was right. Some cases do haunt you.