Ice Shear (17 page)

“The wake's canceled,” I said.

That actually brought him up short, but he recovered quickly. “Then I'm going for a walk. Hell, I'm going to go drown myself in the river.”

“Marty,” I said.

“And if you try to stop me, I'll—”

“You'll what?” Hale said. “C'mon, tell me what you'll do.”

“Man, you won't even see me coming. Trust me.” And with that, Marty slammed the door behind him.

FOR A FEW SECONDS
the slam echoed. We could hear a few of the agents in the main room protesting, and the crash of the front door.

I turned on Hale. “What the hell was that?! Could you have fucked that up for me any more?”

“He needed to understand this was no joke.”

“And you don't think he picked that up from the ten guys tossing the living room?”

“June, you deserve respect. You aren't just some Barney Fife—”

“I don't demand respect from a witness and possible suspect who barely trusts us! Really!” I was one step away from name calling, and I worked to get myself back under control, lowering my tone. “Way to misread the situation. You backed him into a corner.”

“I was backing you up. We're team.”

“No,” I said. “We're not team. The fact that you won't tell me what's really going on says it all. We're collaborating, right here and right now. But as several people in the next room would be happy to remind you, I washed out.”

“You didn't.”

“I did. I am no longer on your team. And you need to respect me in my new role.”

“I do.”

“You don't.” I hated losing control, and I wasn't going to accomplish anything if I couldn't think. “If you respect me so goddamned much you need to follow my lead in these interviews. He didn't trust you. And after this little performance, I'm pretty sure I don't, either.”

Hale took a step back, dropping into parade rest, a habit left over from his military school days. “I take full responsibility for what I did.”

“So tell me what's really going on.”

“June, you don't have clearance—”

I walked quickly out of the room and past the agents tossing the house. No one protested when I left.

I
STOPPED HOME BRIEFLY
, staying in motion while I was there: shower, clothes, food, admiration of Lucy and her grandpa's paper snowflakes and promises to play later this afternoon, more food, and back to the station. Everyone who could be spared was doing cleanup at the Brouillettes', and the civilians of Hopewell Falls had decided to forgo their life of crime, at least until the streets were plowed.

At the station I found Dave at the conference room table poring over a file. A platter of subs sat in front of him, half picked over. But he'd been doing more than eating and reading. On the wall were two trees of evidence. A picture of healthy and smiling Danielle topped one. She sat in the passenger side of a car, kissing her wedding ring. From there, lines of tape branched off to pictures of the river, the house, and its backyard. At the bottom were autopsy photos, clinical and gray, of her back, her neck, and her torso.

The picture of Ray alive was taken by an FBI agent in the funeral home's parking lot, Ray checking his cell phone while Craig and Jackie walked a few feet ahead. In the corner of the frame Jason Byrne was climbing into a vehicle while Denise Byrne buttoned her bulky jacket, her eyes trained on the back door as if on the lookout to make sure no one saw her wearing such an ugly coat. I hadn't known the FBI was there. Much more gruesome lines threaded from there: a picture of the ax handle, stained red in places; the clothes we found in the creek; Ray's vehicle by the side of the road; Ray's body, twisted in the snow; and several close-ups of his face with the ax head embedded in it. I ran my finger along the tape that connected the picture of Ray's body to the one of him walking. Only a few hours had passed between one point and the next. While the wall helped clarify our thinking, we needed to ensure that no one who loved either of the victims, or even hated them, would see these pictures.

I waved at the room. “Well, this is . . .”

“‘Nice' isn't the word.”

“No, it's not. You set this up?”

“I needed visual aids.”

“Well, it's certainly visual.”

There were three loud knocks on the door.

“Come in!” Dave called. The door rattled. Locked. I walked over and opened it, and Annie darted past me, shouting, “What took you so long!” over her shoulder.

“The same might be asked of you,” Dave said. “Pokey with that evidence, aren't you?”

“You are about to eat your words,” Annie said, shoving the file Dave was reading across the table and thrusting the phone we'd found at the scene of Ray's murder under his nose. “I am a genius.”

Dave touched the screen, which came to life, watery but legible. There was a prompt for a password.

“Y-O-L-O,” Annie said. Dave entered in the code and breasts greeted us. The face above the shapely torso was cut off, and we were lucky that a few well-positioned icons kept it from being full frontal nudity.

“Whoa,” Dave said, blushing slightly. “I really hope that's not Jackie.”

“Yes, yes, very exciting,” Annie said. “Wait until you see this.” She tapped the phone and I watched her flip screens, hit the camera icon, and open the photo album. She punched one picture and handed the phone back.

It was the same photo, but uncropped. This time, our focus was not on the breasts, but instead a smile: Danielle smirking at the camera. Sitting on an unmade bed, crimson sheets twisted around one leg, she held her hair up and loosely back, showing off her breasts and, more important, a pair of diamond earrings.

“Ho-lee . . .” Dave said, his voice trailing off.

“Her breasts aren't
that
nice,” Annie said.

“Does this mean what I think it means?” I asked.

“Oh, read the texts,” Annie said. “Ray wasn't the suavest lover.”

Dave and I read the messages. Ray's were blunt: “I want to fuk u now,” “I am hard for u,” and more simply and sweetly, “I luv u.” Danielle's were more complicated, going from adoring to demanding and back again, messages begging him to slip away, bend her over a table and give her what Marty couldn't, interspersed with commands for him to pick up the beakers at her parents' house and bring them to the new location.

“That came in the night she died,” I said. “It's her last message.”

There were no texts from Jackie or Marty, and only four other numbers were logged. A number in California—his parents, I guessed—sent a few vaguely worded notes that all said essentially the same thing: “Plans going good?” A Canadian texter sent a sequence of numbers and letters—a code, or possibly a bank account.

Two other contacts were the meth cooks. The first had sent messages in late December, setting up meeting times, listing supplies needed to produce meth, exacting payment of twenty-five thousand dollars before he or she would finish the job. The second started texting a few weeks ago, demanding to know when production would get started and asking for the new location. Yesterday Ray had requested a meeting, with a string of back-and-forths finalizing the plans to meet at the Brouillettes'.

“Our killer,” I said.

“Same person as the December texter?” Dave asked. We asked Annie to make a transcription of the texts as soon as possible, and after reminding us that she wasn't our secretary, she left.

I nodded at the closing door. “Ready to go take a crack at Jackie?”

“After all this, I'm exhausted. When it comes to Jackie, it's got to be all you. I'm just going to be furniture.” He nodded at the food. “Want some before we leave?”

I shuddered. I hated subs. The only thing worse than subs was leftover subs. The shop's owner was Lorraine and Leslie's brother, so I knew petitioning for pizza or, God forbid, Chinese was a losing battle.

“You can stare down death,” Dave cracked, “but pimento loaf brings you to your knees.”

“It's against the laws of God and nature,” I said. “C'mon, let's get to the DeGroots before they have a chance to toughen up.”

“How about we both take our weight class? I'll do Chuck and you do Jackie.”

WITH HIS BROAD SHOULDERS
and big belly, Chuck DeGroot filled the doorway of his Cape Cod house.

“Jackie!” he yelled up the stairs, and then more quietly to us, “I cleared a space in the dining room.”

I cataloged the living room as I walked past. The couch was plaid and covered in plastic. In the corner, closer to the TV, sat a beige recliner, not in plastic and decidedly not protected from stains. A TV tray stood next to the chair, which also included seven remotes. The TV played ESPN classic, some baseball game from the seventies when men were not afraid of mustaches and sideburns.

Chuck apologized as he came into the dining room.

“Jacqueline had a big shock this afternoon, with the boy. Her boy?”

The two of us nodded.

“I told her she could put her face on, but she had to come down—no dodging the cops. Want some coffee? A beer? Some water?”

In a few minutes he returned with our drinks, my water in one hand and two mugs of coffee in the other, his meaty fingers barely fitting through the handles.

“We had those.” I pointed to the china cabinet that displayed a set of plates with Washington playing the drum, Lincoln playing the fife, and Franklin carrying a flag, under a “1776–1976” banner. “My dad collected all the grocery receipts for six months and managed to earn the full set from the A&P. They were from the bicentennial.”

Chuck smiled. “Those're my mom's. She passed a couple of years back. I haven't got around to moving all her stuff.”

“I wondered about the figurines back there,” Dave said. “You don't seem like a Hummel kind of guy.”

Chuck laughed. “I bought those. For Jackie. Gave her one on every birthday.”

The Hummels were all girls with brown ringlets, the younger ones in lederhosen doing things like chasing butterflies, the older girls demurely combing their hair in front of a mirror.

“Jackie's mom around?” Dave asked.

“Eh, sort of,” Chuck said. “She lives over in South Albany, but Sandra's got some problems. Cocaine, you know, for fun, when Jackie was a kid. Never could put it down, and once stuff started to get out of control . . . well, now it's crack. She's been ruled unfit.”

“That sounds hard,” I said.

Chuck shrugged. “Sandra's out of the picture nowadays. Easier than when she was coming and going, but harder now my mom's gone, and Jacqueline being seventeen.” Chuck smiled at us. “Should've locked her in the house when I had the chance.”

“She in trouble?” Dave asked.

Chuck clasped his hands. “Nothing too bad. You know, boys. And I have to force her to go to school these days. She's not dropping out, not like I did. She saw what happened to me, and she knows there's nothin' you can do without a college degree nowadays.”

I pulled out a notepad. “What do you do?”

Chuck described how he'd worked at Brouillette's factory as a dye handler until it stopped producing paper. He was now a stock clerk and cashier at the Freihofer's day-old store.

“No kidding?” Dave said. “My dad delivered bread for Freihofer's for years. I was never short of chocolate chip cookies.”

“Oh, lemme get some.” Chuck hustled his bulk deftly around the chairs and into the kitchen. He returned and dropped an open box in the middle of the table.

Dave popped a cookie into his mouth whole. “So was it weird, Jackie hanging out with the daughter of your boss?”

“Nah. He wasn't my boss no more, and it's not like Jackie and the girl were friends before that—that girl, Danielle, was expelled from Cohoes High before Jackie was a freshman, and Jackie? She was angry at the Brouillettes from when I got laid off. I was lost for a while, I gotta tell you, and if it weren't for my mom, we would have been homeless. Jackie thought it was all the Brouillettes' fault. But Phil was always decent. He was always willing to pitch in out on the floor, and he put in a good word for me at Freihofer's. It doesn't pay like BPC did, but I get by.”

“So Jacqueline got over her anger?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. Until a couple weeks ago now Jackie was over there every day, mostly 'cause of the boy, Ray.” Chuck munched a cookie contemplatively. “But the girls were friends. Jackie brung home new clothes every night, boots and dresses Danielle gave her, expensive things. Me and Jackie had it out when she tried to wear the getups to school.”

“Afraid her nice new clothes would get ruined?” I asked.

“Nah, but these outfits were too . . . too . . . too mature for a teenage girl.” He grabbed another cookie, avoiding eye contact. As a teenager I'd had my own fights with my father, who thought my acid-washed jeans were too tight or my hair was too big. If Jackie was anything like me, she shoved the clothes in a backpack and changed before school.

I grabbed a cookie of my own. “Can you tell us where she was last night, what time she arrived home?”

“Eh, she needed some time with her friends, you know, after the funeral, but ten on school nights is curfew, and she was home by nine thirty. She's got work over at the ice rink, and some special program in the mornings, something for her college applications.” Dave tapped my foot under the table. It would seem that Jackie and Ray's early morning trysts had been going on for a while. Chuck continued: “She was in on time, which's good. The roads were pretty snowed under. I'm pretty protective of her since she was meeting the Brouillette girl that time. I mean, that maniac could've killed both of them.”

“Which maniac?” Dave asked.