Habit (15 page)

“Who is the owner?”

“I’m sorry, you say you’re a friend? Why do you want to know who owns the house the woman you’re friends with never rented?”

“I’m really just in a bind trying to find her. I’m getting married and we were old college friends. It would mean so much to me if I could track her down.”

“Well, I’m sorry I can’t help you.”

“Maybe you could just try one more thing? Just check and see if the home was rented to anyone at that time by the name of Danice.”

An exhalation over the phone. “Alright. Hold on please.” She came back only a few seconds later. “No, I’m sorry. No one named Danice. Now, I really can’t continue with this, sir. What did you say your name was?”

“Seamus Argon,” Brendan lied. “If you could please just . . . I’m really desperate here. I need to get in touch with her. Please, the name of the owner?”

There was another sigh, and then a pause. “Reginald Forrester,” she said.

The name didn’t ring any bells for Brendan. He made a note to have Colinas run it. “Ok. Thank you so much. I’m sorry to be a trouble.” Brendan hung up.

Following up with Donald Kettering didn’t work, either. An assistant in the hardware store informed Brendan that Kettering was away for a couple of days. Out of town for the weekend on trade show business. Brendan thanked him and got off the line.

He turned his attention to his laptop. He sipped on an iced tea and lit a cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to smoke in the house he was renting, and so far had taken his cigarettes outside. This afternoon he didn’t care. He used a plastic cup with some water in it for an ashtray and pecked at the keys of his Compaq.

He tried several searches. He cross-referenced Danice with
The Screwtape Letters
, C.S. Lewis, and the names of Rebecca Heilshorn, Kevin, and the whole Heilshorn family. Nothing cogent appeared. When he entered Heilshorn alone, it drew some slightly more interesting results.

There was a Laura Heilshorn who was a faculty member in the bioengineering department at MIT. He read parts of her biography out loud in the empty living room. Her interests were described as including regenerative medicine, engineered proteins with novel assembly properties, microfluidics, and stem cell differentiation. Practical applications included spinal cord injuries, Parkinson’s disease, and strokes, in which she performed tissue engineering and designed cellular transportation scaffolds.

There were other Heilshorns as well, an artist among them. He scrolled down on one page and his breath caught. There was a hit on neuroscience in correlation with a Heilshorn. “Decorrelated Neuronal Firing in Cortical Microcircuits.” But the correlation was insignificant – the Heilshorn in the same hit was not the neuroscientist, but a man named Hung-foo. Besides, the only reason it had struck him, he realized, was because of his own field of study back in his academic days.

He cross-referenced Laura with Alexander Heilshorn. There was nothing to indicate any relationship between them, either familial or professional. He’d thought maybe that medicine ran in the family. It was still possible that they were related, but he wondered how much it would matter anyway.

Here he was, at nearly five in the afternoon, no longer on a case, trying to make something out of phantoms.

Maybe Olivia was right. Maybe he was grasping at straws.

At five o’clock, he checked the local news online, and watched the live stream. After a few other breaking stories, a feature discussed the Heilshorn murder. He winced as he saw a replay of himself talking to the reporter behind the Sheriff’s Department building. It was only a brief clip – likely they had run the whole thing the evening before, he had carefully avoided watching it – and then Senior Prosecutor Skene was standing in front of the microphones on the steps at the front of the building.

Brendan watched Skene repeat the usual rhetoric: We have strong leads. We’re working every angle and adding value to the case all the time. We’ll have it solved soon. Refer to the hotline if you have anything you think might be helpful. Be sure to vote in the upcoming elections.

The story ended and the news turned to national stories on wildfires and tornados. Brendan closed the window on the screen and sat back in the couch.

It would make sense to let it all go. Not only could he lose his job, but he could end up interfering, and be brought up on charges. As it was, he still had the whole situation with the Kevin Heilshorn shooting to look forward to. It would take up much of next week, for sure. There would be an immense amount of paperwork, and more meetings with Internal Affairs.

He sighed and looked at the book sitting next to the laptop. On the cover of this edition of
The Screwtape Letters,
was a cartoonish trident, pointing toward the sky, with flames snaking around the handle.

He studied the image for a while. He picked up the book and turned it over and over in his hands.

Something occurred to him and he set the book down. He opened the internet browser again and tried one last search.

He looked for “Danice” and added the key words “Sex, Sexual partners, Promiscuity, and Eternity.”

He took a sip of his iced tea, and clicked the button to engage the search.

When he saw the results page, he tried to set the iced tea down on the coffee table and nearly missed. The drink slopped in the glass.

Brendan put a hand over his mouth.

“Holy shit,” he said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN / SATURDAY, 5:22 PM

Sheriff Taber was diplomatic on the phone, but he couldn’t entirely conceal his excitement.

“I can’t tell you how sensitive this is going to be. How sensitive it already is,” Taber explained.

“I understand.”

Brendan had taken to pacing around his house. Some automatic bean-counting part of his brain estimated he’d done at least twenty laps already, from the living room to the bedroom, to the kitchen and back again. His laptop sat open on the coffee table. The website he’d found was still up. He found it hard to look at.

“We have to be very careful about how we present this information,” said Taber, thinking out loud. “Especially, how it was come across. Even if we say that you just happened to be surfing, and came across it completely coincidentally, it just . . .”

“I know. It’s a stretch. You can give it to anyone else. Say that Delaney found it.”

The Sheriff was silent for a moment, and then cleared his throat. “You know Delaney won’t go for that. Not with this type of . . . thing. He has . . . he has his own issues which may conflict.”

“Then say it was an anonymous tip. Someone saw the photo in the papers and then called it in. They wanted to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.”

“That may just work.”

The regional papers had run the story on Friday, front page. The New York Times had covered it that morning. The same picture of Rebecca Heilshorn had accompanied each article. Brendan had all of them stacked on his kitchen table.

It was no doubt an old image of Rebecca. She was sitting on a bench in front of a college campus. One paper claimed the source “Courtesy of Cornell University.” In truth, the reporters had dug up information on Rebecca’s history quicker than the investigation had. She had done undergraduate work at Cornell in Psychology. None of the articles mentioned where she had done any graduate studies, or if she had obtained a Masters or PhD.

“Heilshorn is arriving tomorrow.”

“I see.”

“He’s going to be more controlling than ever with this new information.”

“Mmhmm. How is it going with the Eddie Stemp lead?”

“You’ll have to talk to Colinas. He’s on it.”

“What’s Delaney doing?”

The Sheriff was silent for a moment. Brendan worried he might be pushing the Sheriff too much. But Taber came through. “He’s doing what he does. He’s gone through all her phone records, done a thorough examination of the laptop we found – not the disintegrated one, the other one – and so on. I guess you had Colinas look into the social media stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“She has no Facebook, nothing.”

“So where did the papers get the info about her undergrad at Cornell?”

“Hell if I know. But I’m friendly with Mark Overton at the Sun. It’s not uncommon for papers to get to some of the more clerical stuff first. I hate to say it, but they have better contacts, and our databases sometimes can’t compete with a simple pair of drinking buddies. Overton is friendly with the Dean at Syracuse. I guess there’s a simple way you can tap into student registries and that’s how he found her at Cornell. She didn’t graduate, though.”

“She didn’t?”

“No. Dropped out junior year. For all we know, the photo the press ran of her was at the end of her short collegiate career.”

“Makes sense.”

“What does?”

Brendan glanced at the laptop again, then looked away. “She got into something else.”

“Ah,” said the Sheriff.

“You mind if I call Colinas about Stemp? Just . . . professional curiosity.”

The Sheriff sighed. “Fine. But keep it on the . . . whatever my son says. The DL.”

“Will do.”

“Healy.”

“Yes, Sheriff.”

“Well done. Not a word about this.”

“Not a word.”

The Sheriff grunted, and then hung up.

Brendan put his phone back in his pocket. He wanted to call Colinas right away, but his mind was distracted. He kept looking at the laptop. Drawn to it, as if magnetized.

He walked slowly over to the couch and sat back down. He steeled himself and started moving the cursor around.

The site displayed thumbnails of multiple videos. There were pages and pages of these videos. The one featuring “Danice” was near the top. He had already watched it, but he clicked on it and watched it again.

After only a few seconds, he shut it off.

There was no doubt that the girl in the video was Rebecca Heilshorn. He’d already sent the Sheriff the link – and only the Sheriff – and Taber had corroborated that the girl did, indeed, bear an unmistakable resemblance. They would have to verify it, but it was her. Brendan knew it was her, and he felt that the Sheriff did, too.

Brendan saw her corpse staring back at him, reflected in the mirror on her bedroom bureau. Trying to tell him something. Was it this?

He felt a bit nauseous then. It was a very strange thing, a very uncomfortable thing, watching a murdered girl alive again. In this case, in a pornographic video.

He closed the window to the site, a porn smorgasbord called “Red Light.” He sat back on the couch, thinking for a minute.

It made sense. Whoever had sent her the copy of the book was clearly giving her a message: This kind of behavior was wrong. It was not spiritually tenable. This kind of behavior would result in an eternity of suffering.

It was a sobering thought.

Brendan found his mind lingering on the master bedroom in the Bloomingdale house. Renovations: the king-sized bed, the large bathroom with new fixtures, the furniture; dressers with empty drawers. Had Rebecca just been moving into a bigger room, stretching out a little? Or had someone been planning on moving in with her, making a cozy home of it? Had she turned a corner?

The first internet search had revealed a video with a significant date. It was three years old. Brendan had then used the search engine within the Red Light site to find other Danice videos, and found two more. Their dates were not far apart, the most recent posted two and a half years ago. Right before she met Donald Kettering.

It didn’t mean there wasn’t more pornography featuring Rebecca Heilshorn online. She could have used yet another alias at any time. And it didn’t mean that online videos were the extent of her involvement in the business. Conversely, the videos indicated something of a career. They were not amateur productions. A cursory examination of any porn videos could determine their degree of professionalism. The videos had been arranged into sections, with a “home video” cache among them. (Others tended to be categorized by fetish, by female body types, ethnicity, and so on.)

The sick feeling in Brendan’s stomach persisted.

He got up from the couch, went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. He lingered at the sink, standing with his hands on the edge of the counter and his head down.

He closed his eyes for a while, but this was no good. Images of the dead girl mingled with these fresh visions of the porn video and made for a terrible slideshow in his head.

He needed to get out. He needed to call Colinas right away.

CHAPTER TWENTY / SATURDAY, 6:47 PM

From his car, headed away from Rome and Stanwix and into the countryside, he called State Police Detective Rudy Colinas. Colinas didn’t answer, so Brendan left a message. He chose his words carefully, mentioning Taber’s approval of the inquiry. He urged Colinas to call him back at his earliest convenience. Not long after he’d hung up, his phone rang. He hadn’t yet put her name into his contacts, but Brendan thought he recognized the number.

“Olivia,” he said when he answered.

“You never told me you had a degree in neurobiology,” she said.

“Tough as it makes me seem, I try not to use it on chicks.”

“Very funny.”

She paused, and ruffled against the phone on her end. “I’m sorry about today.”

“You’re pretty hot-headed for a grief counselor.”

“Watch it.”

He found a wide spot along the shoulder where he could pull off the road. “I shouldn’t be putting you in the position I keep putting you in. I’m sorry.”

“You’re just driven.”

“Thank you for not saying what you really think – ‘obsessed.’ ”

There was a pause. “Where are you?”

Brendan actually had to look around. He had just been driving, not really paying attention. A few landmarks and he realized at once where he’d gotten himself to.

“Uhm, not far from you, actually.”

“Oh really,” she said. He thought he could hear a smile in her voice. “Checking up on me?”

“There still a County car outside your place?”

“No. I think they’ve given up worrying about me.”

“I haven’t.”

There was a moment of awkward silence. Brendan closed his eyes, wondering, as usual, if he’d gone too far. Why was he so pushy?

“We didn’t eat much of our food,” she said. “Did you take it home with you?”

“Yep. In fact, got it right here on my lap.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

She laughed. “Can you come by, then? I’ll make you something.”

“Okay.”

* * *

Something had changed. The house, only two days later, seemed to have rid itself of the specter of what had happened. It smelled, anyway, like detergent and antiseptic. The two damaged front windows had been replaced.

“Who did that?” Brendan jerked a thumb at the new glass.

“Local contractor.”

“That was fast.”

“I’ve been here longer than you. I know people.”

They were standing just inside the entrance. The lights were dim in the living room, off to the left. Pillows had been fluffed. The white half-curtains enclosing the many, classic, four-paned windows had been freshly ruffled.

“You’ve been cleaning.”

“I have. Yes, I have.” She clapped her hands together. “Drink? It’s late enough, right?”

He smiled. “I don’t drink.”

There was the briefest moment of awkwardness, something which usually came with this revelation, but it was gone in a second. Olivia was genial. “You
do
too, drink. I saw you drink a coke today.”

“If you have a coke or something like it, that would be fine.”

“Good. I’ll have one too. It will keep me up all night, but who cares. I’d be up anyway.”

“Fix yourself whatever you were thinking of. Don’t drink New Jersey chemicals for my sake.”

She looked at him with curiosity. Before he had a chance to explain his glib attempt at humor, his phone buzzed in his pocket.

“Excuse me.”

He let himself out onto the porch. The sun was still up, but buried behind a low bank of clouds close to the horizon. The world was cast in a cold steel, and the temperature was lower than the previous two days.

“Hello?”

“Healy? Colinas. Got your message.”

“Thanks for getting back to me. Any word on Eddie Stemp?”

“Oh, plenty.”

Brendan felt his heart rate pick up a little. He walked to the edge of the porch and gripped one of the posts framing the steps down. “Tell me.”

“Well, he’s a real dyed-in-the-wool homesteader, I can tell you that. Got a big place in Barneveld.”

“Barneveld? Jesus, that’s where I am now. Just outside.”

“Then you’re close. I was there earlier today.”

“You spoke to him?”

“Oh yeah. Pleasant guy. Real religious-type. Fundamentalist, ya know? Down to brass tacks, nothing rank and file. Think he said he goes to church three days a week.”

“Which church?”

“Ah . . .” Brendan heard Colinas flip some pages in his notebook. “The Resurrection Life Church.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.” Now Brendan’s heart was racing.

“You know it?”

“I was just there today.”

Silence from Colinas. Brendan closed his eyes for a second. “I mean, I went to the bookstore. I was looking for something; they have a bookstore there.”

“Right,” said Colinas. He didn’t sound convinced, but he let it alone.

“So you talked to Eddie Stemp?”

“Yep. Stemp and his wife, and their two little kids. Nice family, real polite. They were all there. Real Little House on the Prairie stuff. They had it all – pigs, chickens, the whole Old MacDonald’s Farm.”

“And what did he say about Rebecca?”

Colinas seemed to hesitate. Brendan didn’t know if it was because he was wondering how much he was permitted to tell an investigator off-the-case – Taber’s blessing or not – or if it was because he wasn’t used to referring to the deceased girl so familiarly.

“He was devastated. Really had some issues with it. Read about it in the Friday paper and was just heartbroken.”

“Was he?”

“Well, you know. Seemed genuine to me. He talked a little bit about his time with her. They were married for only a real short time. Six months. And this was a few years ago. About five years. He’s almost ten years older than her. Anyway, back then he says he was a real asshole. His words. A real asshole. An alcoholic and all of that.”

Brendan felt something twist inside of him. He swallowed and tried to listen as intently as possible. He sensed Olivia in the house behind him, near the windows, looking out. A cool breeze blew in over the front yard and ruffled the tall rows of sunflowers.

“Said he always regretted how things ended between them, but, that was life. He was making . . . um, what did he say . . . ah, ‘reparations,’ or something.”

“With her? Did he try and contact her?”

“He said he’d meant to, but he hadn’t gotten the chance yet.”

Brendan tried to unscramble the thoughts which were coalescing in his mind. “Five years ago, but he lives up here. Doesn’t make any sense. She only just started coming here two years ago. Just bought the house. Doesn’t know anybody. Did he say where they lived when they were married, or why he was here now?”

“He was evasive about most of it. He said she was out of college by then. She had dropped out. Was drifting about. That’s it.”

“Dropped out of Cornell.”

“That’s right.”

Brendan licked his lips. “Colinas, I want you to take this guy very seriously. He’s her ex-husband. The book found in Rebecca’s . . . in the victim’s home, is the same book they carry at the store his church owns.”

“I’ve looked into the book. It’s not exactly
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,
but it’s sold something like a million or more copies. That book is probably lots of places.”

“All the same . . .”

“Healy, listen. His alibi is positively fucking unsqueezable. I said he goes to church, right? Three days a week. He was at church Thursday morning. With his whole family. With an entire congregation who saw him there.”

Brendan was silent.

“So . . . I dunno. I hear you on the ex-husband thing, but. You know, this guy seems pretty ship-shape. He was emotional, yet cooperative. Nothing to hide. Loving wife and family. Relationship with the victim pretty much ancient history. . .”

“But they live a
few miles
away from one another
.
”

“I hear you, I hear you. It’s small world, though. You said yourself you happen to be not far from his place now. I mean, look. I got to go. I’m happy to talk to you more, but I’ve got to debrief with Delaney now.”

“Okay.” Brendan took a breath. “Thanks, Colinas.”

“Yup.”

“Hey . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I need to ask you one last favor.”

He heard Colinas sigh.

“Just this one last thing,” said Brendan.

“Go ahead, man.”

“I turned in all my casework. Can you get me a transcript of the 911 call? I just want to look at it one more time.”

Colinas paused. Brendan imagined the State Detective was wondering why he was interested in the call, in the light of this new information about Eddie Stemp. That was good. Brendan wanted Colinas thinking along those lines.

“You can email it to me.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Thanks.”

Brendan ended the call and put his phone in his pocket. He turned and walked back inside. Olivia was sitting on one of the living room couches. It was an open-plan room, with plenty of space and furniture to fill it. There was a closed door along the back wall. Maybe leading to an office.

Brendan felt like Olivia had quickly slipped over and sat down when she’d seen him coming. She affected an innocent face. “Everything okay?”

He remained standing. “Two major revelations in one day. And I’m not even on the case.”

She waited, perhaps having grown just a little tense.

“I think we may have found our guy. I mean,
they
may have found the guy. It will take a little work, but I have a feeling.”

“That’s great news.”

“Yeah. It’s just . . .”

He stopped himself and walked over and sat down on the loveseat adjacent to the couch. A glass of coke with ice was on the coffee table. He took a sip. The sweet, smoky, rusty taste of it was very good.

“Anyway,” he said.

“Anyway,” she echoed. “You’re a neurobiologist? Tell me about it.”

And he smiled a little and got comfortable and tried to make himself sociable.

* * *

About fifteen minutes later, they took their drinks to the porch, and he lit a cigarette. Olivia watched him smoke it.

“You ever try CHANTIX?”

“No.” He exhaled a puff of smoke, blowing it away from her direction.

“You’ve made your mind up about it, I see.”

He chuckled. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “All that I did in six years of school, all that was to eventually study habits.”

“And you did? You worked in your field?”

He nodded. “I went to school at NYU’s Neuroscience Institute and was earning my PhD while finishing up school working at the Langone Medical Center. But I only worked there for one year.”

“What did you do?”

“Like I said. I studied habits.”

“How?”

“Mice. Sometimes students.”

“I’ve never met anyone who actually did studies with mice before.”

“I preferred human beings.”

“What sort of studies?”

“Langone really has a strong emphasis on wellness. Not just treating a disease, but increasing overall wellness. Wellness is largely determined by genetics. But it’s obviously affected by habits, too. The thing is, genetic precursors have a lot to do with why a person starts down the path of this or that habit.”

“So it’s all genetics? I don’t buy that.”

He took a drag and looked at her. “You’re a ‘nurture over nature’ person.”

“I’m a therapist. Absolutely.”

“Well, you’re not alone. All the recent advances in neuroscience show plasticity to the brain that wasn’t previously considered. In fact, that was my area. Trying to ‘nurture’ positive habits, life-changing habits, even in the face of strong genetic contradiction.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, like lots of things. Like taking a person born with an exorbitant amount of fat cells, who is inclined to sedentary behavior, and getting that person more oriented for routine exercise, like someone naturally more athletic might be.”

“And?”

“It’s tough. Habits are underrated. Habits take root in one of the most ancient areas of the brain. This is why we could use mice effectively, because the basal ganglia of the brain are at work in both mice and humans. Habits are rudimentary. No species is immune.”

He was finished with his cigarette. He field-stripped it by rolling out the ember and letting it fall to the wood floor and then squashing it with his shoe.

“You can throw that out inside. Come on in. It’s getting cool out again.”