In the Bleak Midwinter (13 page)

Russ held out his hand for the receiver. “Let me talk with her,” he said. Kristen surrendered the phone. “Hello, this is Russ Van Alstyne, Millers Kill Police. Who is this, please?”

“I’m Emily Colbaum. Katie’s housemate.” The voice on the other end of the line was shaky. “Has something happened to Katie?”

“I’m sorry, Miss Colbaum. We believe she was killed Friday night. Can I ask you a few—”

The sound of wailing cut him off. He waited. Kristen was leaning against the branch manager, mopping her eyes with a wad of damp tissues. She had black makeup smeared on her cheeks and her dried-blood-red lipstick had come off entirely. “Emily? Miss Colbaum?” he tried again. He was answered with more sobbing. He put his hand over the receiver. “Kristen, will you come over to the morgue with me now? Or do you need more time?”

She shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “If it’s her, I want to know. Let’s go.”

He tried the phone again. “Miss Colbaum? Emily, do you think you can talk with me? Or do you need some time to get yourself together?” She sobbed out something about feeling light-headed. “Emily, listen to me. Are you listening? Is there anyone else there at the house with you? Another roommate?”

There was a confusing sentence about Heather, who had missed an organic chemistry final.

“Good. I want you to give her a yell—” he held the phone away from his ear as she did just that. “Uh… good girl. You make sure she stays with you until you’re feeling calmer, okay? If you need to, you go on over to the university clinic and tell ’em what happened. There’ll be someone you can talk with there, maybe fix you up with a sedative if you need one.” Wet, weepy snuffles. “I’m going to give you the number of the police station here in Millers Kill. You got a pen and paper? Good girl.” He told her his direct office line. “I’ll be calling you to talk later, Emily, but in the meanwhile, if you think of anything, anything at all, call that number. If I’m not there, you can talk to our dispatcher, Harlene.”

Emily blubbed a watery thank you and hung up, promising to call with any information she might have.

Kristen was gamely struggling her way into her long black coat, crying soundlessly, mopping her face with the ineffectual tissues. “Would you like me to come with her?” the manager asked, her face creased with what Russ judged to be equal parts worry over her employee and the prospect of leaving the bank unattended on a Monday morning.

“No, I have a, um, grief specialist waiting for us at the morgue. We’ll make sure Miss McWhorter’s taken care of.”

He held the office door open for the women. “Kristen, don’t worry about coming in to work tomorrow,” the manager said. “I’ll make sure your shifts are covered. Take all the time you need, honey.” She hugged the girl awkwardly.

Outside, it was another bitterly cold and clear day. Kristen rubbed her gloved hands over her cheeks as they drove. The heater wheezed and complained and started warming the car minutes before they reached the county morgue’s parking lot. Clare was already there, waiting in an older-model cherry-red MG that was going to give her more trouble than she could imagine on the winter roads. She got out as he parked the cruiser.

“Let’s get inside before we do introductions,” he yelled across the lot. She nodded and disappeared into the building, climbing the steps two at a time. He held Kristen’s arm to steady her until they got into the waiting room, then released her to help her out of her enormous coat. She had stopped crying and was looking around her with the same absorption she would have shown watching a fascinating movie. Not that there was anything fascinating about the dun-colored walls that someone had attempted to brighten with scenic travel posters. He had seen that look before, many times. It was the look you got when the bottom fell out of your world, and your own life seemed as distant and unreal as any big-screen fantasy.

“Kristen?” Clare took the girl’s coat from Russ and tossed it on a chair next to her own. “I’m Clare Fergusson.” She held out a hand to Kristen, who took it mechanically. “I was there when your sister’s body was discovered.” Kristen’s lips flexed and quivered. “I’m also a priest.” Given the clerical collar peeking out from underneath her black sweater, Russ thought that was pretty self-evident. He went to the window separating the waiting room from records storage. Tapping the bell three times brought the morgue assistant, who took in the scene in the waiting room and went to unlock the inner doors without a word. “Would you like me to come with you?” Clare went on, gently leading Kristen to the hallway. “Sometimes, it can make it less scary to be with someone else.”

Kristen stopped, looked into Clare’s face. “I’ve never seen a body before,” she said. “Isn’t that strange?”

“No, not strange at all,” Clare said, linking her arm through the girl’s. “It’s not bad, like you might think. Death looks different from life, from sleeping, but it’s not ugly.”

Russ had seen more than a few ugly deaths in his time, but he knew enough to keep his mouth shut. The attendant paused at a small desk outside of the body storage room. “We’re here to identify the Jane Doe,” Russ said quietly.

The attendant made a note in the log book. “She’s in number three,” he said, looking at Kristen’s black-smeared face. “You can go in alone, miss, or I could come with you, or… ?”

She shook her head at the young man and tightened her hold on Clare’s arm. “Will you come?” she asked. “I forgot your name.”

“I’m Clare. Yes, I’ll come with you.”

The attendant opened the dull metal door. Russ caught a glimpse of white tile and harsh florescent lighting before the door closed again, Clare and Kristen on the other side. It was a lousy place for a person to end up, laid out naked in a stainless steel drawer. Of course, there were worse ways to finish it. Zippered inside a body bag and hustled into a refrigerated cargo hold, for instance. He shut his hand reflexively. At times like these, he could still feel the material they made those bags from. He stilled his breathing, forcing himself not to get impatient to leave Death’s waiting room. What the hell was taking them so long?

Clare pushed the door open, letting Kristen pass through first. The girl looked into Russ’s eyes, her own dazed, full of clouds. “It’s her. It’s my sister.” She bit down hard on her lip. “I thought… I thought she’d finally be safe once she was in Albany. Once she was away. Why did she come back?” Fresh tears rose in her eyes. “Why did she come back?”

“Kristen, what did you mean when you said you thought your sister would be safe once she was away at school?” Russ handed Kristen black coffee in a mug decorated with fat country sheep and geese, part of a set his sister had given them one Christmas that he and Linda had agreed were too damn cutesie-poo to keep at home. He hated Styrofoam cups: too small, too fragile, and too wasteful.

Kristen bent over the mug until her face was almost obscured by ink-colored hair and steam. “Nothing. I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

He dumped three teaspoons of sugar into another mug and handed it to Clare. She was sitting kitty-corner to Kristen, a Millers Kill P.D. tape recorder at her left hand. After Kristen had identified her sister’s body, the girl couldn’t get out of the morgue fast enough. She had agreed to give her statement at the police station, where Harlene, in full mother-hen mode, had fussed over her, fetching coffee and strudel from the dispatch room, opening the shades in the briefing room to let in the sunlight.

“You know, sometimes, the first thing that comes to mind is the right thing, no matter how bizarre or improbable it seems,” Clare said. “It could be your intuition was trying to tell you something. What was it, Kristen?”

The young woman put down her mug and smoothed her hands over her face. She had washed up in the station’s unisex bathroom—unisex by virtue of having both urinals and a tampon machine—and without her black and purple and red makeup, she looked like one of the pretty country girls from up the hills past Cossayaharie. Katie must have borne a strong resemblance to her sister before her death.

“Can you tell me how she died?”

Russ sat down in a red leatherette chair, cradling his coffee to warm his hands. “She was hit in the back of the head by something heavy and blunt, hard enough to make her unconscious. Then she was rolled off the trail downhill, to the edge of the kill. The medical examiner believes she died of hypothermia, that she never woke up.”

“How did she get out there? Do you know?”

“Only that it was a four-wheel-drive vehicle with all-weather tires. The wheel width indicates a truck or a sports-utility vehicle. We don’t know if your sister was conscious when she reached the trail, or if her killer drove her there after she had been knocked out.”

Kristen closed her hands over her face again for a moment. “What a weird thing to say,” she said. “Her killer. Like, her sister, her teacher, her boyfriend. Her killer. Somebody with a relationship to her.” She frowned. “Was she molested? Had she been, you know…”

“No,” Russ said. He glanced at Clare.

“What? What is it?” Kristen’s gaze flickered between the two of them. He tilted his head, passing the job of telling about the baby to the one who had found him.

“There is something else, Kristen,” Clare said. “According to the medical report, Katie had a baby within the past two weeks. We have strong reason to believe that she, or someone, left the baby on the back steps of St. Alban’s church a week ago. He’s in foster care right now.”

“He?”

“A little boy, yes. She left a note, naming him Cody.”

Kristen’s face contorted. “Oh… she always loved that name. She used to say if she had a boy, she’d name him Cody, and if she had a girl, she’d name her Corinne.” She squeezed her nose and eyes, trying to stifle more tears. “I can’t believe Katie would give her baby away. I just can’t believe it. Unless he made her!”

“Who made her, Kristen?”

She was crying openly now, shaking her head. “Our father.”

Clare and Russ looked at each other. “Your father would’ve made her give up her child because she wasn’t married?” Clare asked.

“No, no…” Kristen blew her nose on one of the paper napkins Harlene had piled next to the strudel. She took a shaky breath. “My father would have forced her to give up a baby if he was its father.”

Russ felt as if someone had thrown a bucket of the kill’s icy water over him. Clare was pale, but calm. “Kristen, what are you saying? Did your father sexually abuse Katie?”

Kristen pushed her hands through her short hair. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. But he used to do it to me.”

“Jesus,” Russ exclaimed, under his breath.

“Can you tell us, Kristen?”

The girl looked at Clare, indecision and grief warring on her features. “It’s hard. It’s hard to talk about.”

“Listen, Kristen,” Russ said, “You don’t have to be afraid of your father. Give me his name and address and he’ll be in the county jail before five o’clock.” With maybe an unscheduled stop on the way, where the bastard could fall down a few flights of stairs by accident. Nobody at the jail would make a comment.

“No, please!” Kristen said. “I don’t want to press charges. I got away, and that’s all I wanted. I thought Katie had escaped, too…”

“Tell us, Kristen. You don’t have to sign out a complaint against your father if you don’t want to.” Clare forestalled Russ’s complaint with a swift glance that said, “Back off.”

“I… I…”

Clare held out her hand, flat on the tabletop. “Take my hand and tell me. If it gets too hard, just squeeze as tightly as you can.”

The girl tentatively placed her hand in the priest’s. She took another breath heavy with unshed tears. “Okay. I’ll try.” She shut her eyes. “My father started in on me when I was around fourteen or so. Katie would have been twelve. I wasn’t dumb, I knew that what he was doing was wrong. But I was afraid to tell anyone, because without him, how would we live? He had his business—and he’s got disability and social security money. Mom was useless. Worse than useless. She would have denied he was fooling with me up one side and down another. Besides, she would have fallen apart without him. So I just… hung on. I knew girls who dropped out of school, or got pregnant to get a boy or the state to take care of them, but I wanted something more than that. I knew that if I could just last until I finished high school, I could get a decent job, make enough money to live on. So that’s what I did.”

“For four years?” Clare asked quietly.

“Uh huh.”

Russ felt sick. His muscles shook from the effort of sitting still and not pacing around the room, pounding on the walls.

“I started working at the bank the day after I graduated, and as soon as I had my first paycheck, I was out of there. I begged Katie to come with me, but she wouldn’t. She said Mom needed her.” She bit down on her lip. “I think she was worried that it would be too much, me trying to support the two of us until Katie finished high school. And she was really ambitious, too. She was so smart, her teachers all said she could get a scholarship. She wanted a college degree more than anything.”

“That’s how she got to the State University at Albany? A scholarship?”

“For her tuition, yeah. She’s been covering her room and board with student loans, and working for her book and spending money.” Russ could see Kristen’s hand tighten over Clare’s. “I didn’t know—before I left home, he never touched her. And she didn’t mention anything to me. But maybe she wouldn’t have. She was, I don’t know, sort of distant her last semester in high school. We didn’t get together as much. But I knew she was busy, working at the Infirmary and studying and all that.” She looked at Russ, pleading. “I mean, she would have told me if he was, was after her, wouldn’t she?”

“You never saw any signs of her pregnancy?” he asked.

She shook her head. “She went to Albany in June, right after she graduated. The university had given her a work-study job in the computer center, and they needed her there for the summer. At least, that’s what she told me. We talked on the phone at least once a week. She sounded so good! I never guessed. I never would have guessed.” She released Clare’s hand to pick up her coffee.