Habit (21 page)

Stemp was motionless. His voice carried over. “Yes.”

“Why did you sign the note, ‘K’?”

Stemp sighed. “My first name is Kim. I am Kim Edward Stemp. We used to joke about it. Only she ever called me Kim. We had some good times, Detective. But she was always looking for something else. Always had one foot out the door.”

It sounded like something Donald Kettering would say.

“Do you know Donald Kettering?”

In the gloaming, it was hard to make out Stemp’s features, but Brendan thought the man’s brow lifted. “Of course. He’s a member of our congregation.”

“Did Rebecca ever go with you to church?”

“Only once or twice. Now please, Detective . . .”

“Did you write a phrase on the back of a picture in her house,
I was born under the black smoke of September
?”

“No. I did no such thing. But whoever wrote that . . . well . . .”

“Do you know what it means?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“It makes me think of something. I’m not sure what. Maybe September is, you know, 9/11. Detective, I have to go. Please, I’ve been very patient. Good night.”

Stemp turned away again. His outline shrank as he moved through the night towards his country home. Brendan could see a figure in the window and assumed it was Stemp’s wife, awaiting his return.

He left the picnic table and slid into the Camry and switched on the engine. After a moment, he realized the bell for his seatbelt was chiming. He had just been sitting there, his head buzzing with all of this new information. For one thing, he needed to get the photograph with the sentence on it to a handwriting expert. But tomorrow, Heilshorn was arriving and Brendan would have to deal with the investigation around the shooting. All of this going on, and he was going to have to fade even further into the background.

He drove away from the Stemp farm into the darkness, unsure of where to turn.

* * *

Back on the road, Brendan’s thoughts churned.

Who wrote the phrase on the back of the photograph? He leaned heavily toward the idea that the author and killer were one and the same.

On the other hand, it always could have been Rebecca herself.

He realized how little he still knew about her, the woman central to this entire investigation. He had learned some information, but felt like her personality was a mystery. For all he knew, she had untreated mental health issues such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

He wondered about Stemp’s interpretation, that it had something to do with 9/11. That felt like an entirely new can of worms, though. A thought occurred to him: he needed to go back to the house, yet again, and examine the rest of the photographs. To see if there was writing on any others.

He pulled over and did a hasty three-point-turn. A vehicle blared its horn at him and drove past. He ignored it and headed to the Bloomingdale farm.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN / SUNDAY, 10:23 PM

He pulled in to the quiet farm. The big house lurked in the dark. He stepped out of the Camry. Overhead, the moon was just a sliver, occasionally disappearing completely behind the clouds.

The clouds looked like smoke.

He slipped into the house and went to the dining room, off the back of the kitchen. He used a flashlight instead of turning on the lights, and he put on his gloves.

He went through the framed pictures one at a time. His heartbeat accelerated as he did. His breathing quickened.

He found four photos with cryptic phrases written on the back.

He didn’t need a handwriting expert to confirm that they were written by the same person. He could see that with his own eyes. In fact, he wondered if he even needed an expert to compare the phrases to the victim’s own penmanship.

His blood chilled by what he was reading, he set the photographs down momentarily and darted into the unlit kitchen.

Everyone had a “junk drawer.” A catch-all drawer with old birthday candles and forgotten candy, wine openers and little notes with phone numbers. The drawer had already been gone through by CSI, and most of it had been bagged, but Brendan figured they were likely to have left something behind.

He found the drawer and searched through it with his flashlight. There wasn’t much, and there were no notes, no pieces of paper of any kind.

He turned to the rest of the kitchen. He looked at the fridge. Nothing stuck to it, not a single magnet. He then moved towards the pantry, which was a closet-sized room next to the kitchen table in its little breakfast nook.

He found what he was looking for. There was a notepad with a pen on a string. A little gimmick for grocery lists. There were two words written on the top page.
Parsley
and
Sage.
He flipped to the pages after it, but there was nothing. Just those two words were enough, however. While the phrases on the backs of the photographs had been written in bold, architectural style, these here were penned in a kind of juvenile cursive.

Nevertheless, he ripped off the top sheet and returned to the back dining room. He held the small piece of paper next to the photos. No way were they written by the same person, unless the person had split personalities.

It was a possibility, but a remote one. So was the chance that someone else had written the names of the herbs, someone other than Rebecca, and that the difference didn’t clear her at all.

These unlikely scenarios notwithstanding, Brendan felt a rush of excitement. He was even more sure that the sentences on the backs of the photos were written by the killer.

They were haunting. In the cool, drafty farmhouse, he shuddered as he read them. He placed them in a logical sequence and looked them over once more, together. After the original phrase, a kind of darkly poetic message formed.

I was born under the black smoke of September

I was born to you, and your infinite forms, and now I have come for you.

To steal your children, to break you under the moon.

There I once was cradled in that autumn wind, a human as unsympathetic as the winter which follows, with its starving creatures, coming in low through the howling cold.

It wasn’t Edgar Allen Poe, by any stretch, but the poetic prose indicated a couple of things. One, that someone who had access to Rebecca’s home – or had broken in, granted – had premeditated doing her harm, or at least conjectured about it. Two, that the author, the killer, had some degree of education, tainted as it might be by a skewed version of the world.

In the mind of this killer, the world was a cold, haunted place. He seemed to place himself in a superior position. “Born to you, and your infinite forms.” It was kind of pompous.

It was also potentially filial. But Rebecca had no children older than Leah. She would’ve had her daughter at 24 or 25 years old, and while having children younger than that was certainly possible, to have one who was capable of writing this kind of message on the backs of pictures, would have made Rebecca sixteen or younger when she gave birth.

Brendan hesitated. Well, that wasn’t completely unheard of either. Was this message written by another child of Rebecca’s? Someone she’d had at a very tender age who was now twelve, thirteen, even fourteen years old?

He would need to check hospital records again. Problem was, it was like finding a needle in a haystack. So far he hadn’t even been able to turn up where Rebecca had given birth to her daughter, three and a half years ago. He had begun to suspect she hadn’t had the child in a hospital at all, but perhaps had had a home birth.

He would need the little girl’s social security number, her birth certificate, but those might be out of reach. She was the ward of Rebecca’s parents, and the chance of them turning anything over like that was slim to none, controlling and protective as Alexander Heilshorn seemed to be.

Brendan sighed and ran a hand across his mouth. He winced, tasting the rubber of the gloves he’d forgotten he was wearing.

It was all so speculative. He was on the outside now. Pushed out of the investigation by the victim’s own father. He felt so close to something, and yet he didn’t have the proof, the inarguable evidence to connect the dots in his mind.

The killer wrote these words. He was sure of it, but he couldn’t prove it, and it didn’t tell him much about the killer’s identity except for possibilities, interpretation: maybe he had an inflated sense of self, maybe he was Rebecca’s child, maybe he was fucking crazy. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

He would have to turn in the pictures. For one, the handwriting could still be matched to anything else forensics had taken from the house, or anything still left in the house, which may have similar writing on it, and may serve up the author. A long shot, but totally necessary.

The third man that the woman from the vegetable market had seen with Rebecca had hair greying around the temples. He was older than the others, the woman had said. Colinas had later gone back to the elderly woman and shown her pictures: from Kevin to his father, and a slew of others, but she had been unable to identify any of them.

Who was this man? Did he like to write on the backs of photographs?

There was nothing else to go on.

He put the photos together on the table and headed back out to his car. He thought he had an evidence envelope in a box in his trunk.

He left the house and walked through the dirt dooryard. Headlights suddenly blinded him.

Brendan stopped immediately and raised a hand to shield his eyes. Whoever had just flipped on the lights had their brights on, and the lights were fairly high from the ground. They were just sitting there in the driveway, as if they’d been waiting for him. Chances were, whichever deputy was watching the house was going to chew Brendan out for being there. Not because they would know he was off the case, necessarily, but because protocol was to notify the deputy on surveillance, and because whoever it was, Brendan had apparently slipped by them.

He resumed walking, a little smile on his face, and started down the dirt driveway toward them. The vehicle sat with its stunning lights. A second later, the engine came to life.

Brendan slowed and shielded his eyes again, but didn’t stop.

The vehicle dropped into gear – Brendan could hear the transmission. It took a second for him to register what was happening. There was no reason for him to suspect anything. When the vehicle lurched forward, its tires spinning in the dirt, Brendan was shocked.

It came at him full bore. He had the chance to involuntarily utter one phrase – “Oh my God” – before he started to run out of the driveway.

He ran away, taking to the large front yard. He realized only after he had gone this way that the vehicle, with its bright lights shining high from the ground, was a big truck or SUV. It turned and followed him into the yard with no problem. The engine growled as it clunked off the dirt and into the grass, and then it gained speed.

Brendan turned and sprinted towards the house. His only chance was to get inside.

The vehicle was right on top of him, closing in too fast. He wouldn’t make the front door in time. At the last second, he leapt to the right, and the vehicle roared past him – almost. It caught his left side and spun him like a top.

Two revolutions in mid-air, his body twisted like a rag doll, and Brendan came down on his back. Thoomp. The air burst out of him – every last cubic centimeter.

He could hear the vehicle come to a stop and the gear shift into reverse as he struggled to take a breath. No air was getting into his lungs. The vehicle started to back up – it was only a few feet from the front door, and then it turned to the left, prepared to circle around and come at him again.

Finally he sucked in a huge whooping breath of air. He scrambled to his feet, completely unaware of his injuries at first. Then his left leg and hip were white hot with pain, and he almost passed out. He had to put all of his weight on his right foot. His lower back was a mass of agony as he turned and started limping toward his Camry.

The vehicle was a big truck. The crescent moon, visible now in the sky, painted the truck blood red. There were roll bars on top. It grumbled and thrummed and came around in a wide circle, going a ways out into the yard before it was able to aim at Brendan again.

As he ran, hopped, towards the Camry, his lower body a symphony of pain, he realized that the truck was bound to get him again. By the time he got to the Camry, opened the door, got in, started it up, and pulled away, the truck would be upon him.

He turned then, changing his trajectory to the shed, on the other side of his vehicle.

The truck finished its wide arc and started coming.

Brendan ran as fast as he could. His hip threatened to give way completely on the left side, spilling him helplessly to the ground. He gritted his teeth. He could feel bones crunching each time he brought weight down on his left leg. The truck bore down on him, its engine as loud as thunder.

He bypassed the Camry, bracing himself temporarily on the hood as he slipped past. A few more feet and he would be inside the shed.

He realized that the maniac in the huge pick-up could just plow into the fragile building. It was mere board and batten, nothing that could stand up to a steel beast ramming it at full power. Still, he slipped into the darkness of the shed.

It was only dark for a moment, and then the truck lights illuminated it like the sun.

The lights fell on the tractor, shining off its metal hide, and Brendan, making a snap decision, started to climb up to its seat.

The truck slammed into the shed. Boards burst into a million shards and splinters, instantly reminding Brendan of Kevin Heilshorn shooting out the window.

The entire structure screamed and groaned and listed hard to the left, away from the blow of the truck. Wood squealed against metal as the truck started to back up. It had approached at an angle, and so had taken a huge bite out of one side of the open entrance to the shed. The next time, Brendan knew, the truck would come straight on, and straight in.

He reached the leather bucket seat in the tractor. He looked around for the key.

It was all just coming to him in the moment. There was no plan. All he knew was that as rundown as the old farm was, he was grateful that this John Deere tractor was in good condition. He wondered if he had Donald Kettering to thank.

These were the only coherent thoughts Brendan had for a while. He was distantly aware of his incredible luck that the last person to have driven the tractor had left the keys in the ignition. Outside, the truck withdrew, dimming the light Brendan could see by, but there was time to grab the keys and turn.

Nothing happened.

Brendan remembered about diesel engines. You had to prime them. There was a toggle on the dashboard that he flipped up. An orange telltale lit up above the toggle after a few seconds. Then he tried the key again.

The engine grumbled to life.

He was a city boy, and had never ridden a tractor. But he knew where the gas was. When that truck appeared again, he would slam down on the pedal and ram that motherfucker.

* * *

The truck stopped. Its headlights flooded the shed with blinding light. Brendan’s foot hovered over the gas pedal. A second later, he pulled out his gun.

The lights made it nearly impossible to see anything other than the shape of the truck. The tractor rumbled beneath him, and the truck’s engine idled. The air throbbed with the combined machinery; Brendan felt it vibrating his bones.

There was a
thunk
and Brendan cocked his weapon. Had the driver just got out? A second later, this suspicion was confirmed when a figure stepped in front of the bright lights.

Brendan aimed his gun at the silhouette with both hands. He hadn’t expected this. He was now a sitting duck. If the driver had a weapon too, there would be no contest. Brendan was nearly blind looking into the flood of bright lights, but he would be perfectly illuminated and an easy target for the driver.

“Stop right there, don’t move!’ He had to shout over the noise of the engines. “Don’t move, or I’ll mow you down. Who are you? What are you doing here?”