Judgment of the Grave (17 page)

“Oh, one other thing,” Sweeney said. “When I was talking to George Whiting, he said that Kenneth Churchill seemed very interested in the possibility of there being an unknown spy in Concord. He even seemed to think it could be Whiting or Baker. Is this anything you’ve ever heard about?”

Will Baker turned to look at her and Sweeney saw that he was genuinely surprised. He had not been expecting the question.

“No,” he said, looking strangely at her. “No, I never heard anything like that.” He drew himself up and held the dahlias out as though they were a weapon. “But if you don’t mind, I have to get back to my work.”

Quinn was browsing through vintage pajamas, trying to figure out how men could ever have worn such hideous things, as he tried to keep an eye on Megan, who was playing with a used teddy bear in the toy section of a thrift shop in a Lexington church basement.

He had woken up Sunday morning feeling stymied on the Kenneth Churchill front and figured that it might be worth following up on Sweeney’s thrift-store idea. He didn’t want to mention it to Andy until he knew there was anything in it, but if he got a lead on the uniform the guy in the woods had been wearing, he might be able to offer up a good clue. He’d be doing Andy a favor and it would probably get back to Havrilek too.

So he’d looked in the Yellow Pages and made a list of the thrift shops within a twenty-mile radius. A lot of them were closed on Sunday, but he’d found a few that weren’t, including one in Lexington.

He looked through the rack of Halloween costumes, flipping through gorilla suits and old prom dresses and Cleopatra outfits, but there wasn’t anything resembling a soldier’s uniform.

“Do you ever get Revolutionary War uniforms?” Quinn asked the woman behind the counter. She looked up from the magazine she was reading—
News of the World
—with barely disguised contempt.

“Not that I’ve ever seen,” she said, turning a page with a lime green fingernail, though Quinn wasn’t entirely sure she would know what a Revolutionary War uniform looked like. She so clearly wanted him gone that he decided not to press the point.

“Okay, thanks.”

He tried the next thrift shop, this one back in Concord and found an even more meager assortment of costumes, a few of those plastic kids’ Halloween costumes you bought at the drugstore and, again, a rack of old prom dresses. One of them reminded him of a dress Maura had once had to buy as a bridesmaid. It had been an ugly dress, he remembered, a kind of peach color, with a big bow over one shoulder. She had tried it on for him before the wedding and they had laughed about it.

When he asked the kid behind the counter about Revolutionary War uniforms, though, the kid said, “Not Revolutionary War, but we had a sort of a Civil War uniform. This really scruffy-looking guy came in and bought it. I was never sure if it was because he had a thing for Civil War reenactments, or if it was just warm.”

“Would you have any way of tracking down a customer, if you had sold something like a Revolutionary War–era uniform?”

“Not really. A lot of our customers pay cash, so we wouldn’t really be able to find them. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. I was just curious. That’s probably true of most thrift shops, right?”

“I’d say so. Unless you’re talking high-end consignment shops.”

Quinn got Megan buckled into her car seat and sat in the driver’s seat for a minute, thinking. He hadn’t been able to prove Sweeney’s theory, probably wouldn’t be able to, but he could suggest it to Andy. They’d been assuming all along that the man found in the uniform was a Revolutionary War reenactor, but Sweeney’s idea about the thrift shops was a pretty good one. What if the guy was someone who had just bought the uniform at a thrift store because it was warm? If it was a homeless person, it might explain why there didn’t seem to be any family looking for him. It might not turn into anything, but it seemed worth passing on.

Quinn stopped in at the station, and when he said he wanted to see Detective Lynch, the receptionist, her hair piled in an unlikely and unmovable beehive, glared and told him to wait. A few minutes later Chief Tyler came out into the waiting room. “You looking for Andy?”

“Yeah. I might have something for him on the uniform on the guy in the woods. Just an idea. You know where he is?”

Tyler looked around the waiting room and then said in a low voice, “Up where they found the body. Come on, I’ll take you.”

They parked on Monument Street and Tyler waited while Quinn wrestled Megan into her backpack carrier. “Normally, I wouldn’t let you bring a kid to a crime scene,” he said. “But if you keep her in that thing, it oughtta be okay.”

They followed a well-trampled path into the woods and then hiked along an older, even more well trodden path. The woods were moderately thick, the taller trees shading the sun out so that it was dark and cool as they walked along. Quinn looked around and wondered what kind of trees they were and how long they had been there. It was the kind of thing he really ought to pay more attention to, he told himself. Someday pretty soon Megan was going to be asking him questions like that, and he didn’t want to seem stupid.

After a few minutes he caught sight of a small wooden structure ahead through the trees. As they got closer, he saw that someone had put orange traffic cones around the house and there was yellow police tape strung around the perimeter. Andy Lynch was standing in front of the little house, staring at it with rapt concentration. “Hey,” he called out. “How ya doin’?”

“Okay.” Quinn introduced him to Megan. “This is the place, huh?”

“Yeah. The body was right about there.” He pointed to an otherwise unremarkable spot on the ground at the side of the building, and they both stared at it for a few minutes. Quinn ignored Megan, who was leaning out of the backpack, wanting to be taken down. All he needed was for her to eat the dirt where the poor guy had breathed his last. “Hey,” Andy said, “she can’t understand what I’m saying, can she?”

“No. Don’t worry about it.” But Quinn wondered. Would Megan grow up with a horrible memory of the day her father took her to a murder scene?

“Yeah, so, look at this, Quinn. We got blood, his blood, here, here, and here.” He pointed to spots on the ground twenty, fifteen, and ten feet from where the body had been found. “I’ve got other blood too, but not as much.”

“The murderer got cut up a little in the process.”

“That’s what I’m thinking.” Andy rubbed his crooked nose in a gesture Quinn remembered from a long time ago.

“What were you trying to figure out when we came up?” Quinn asked him. “You were pretty deep in thought.”

“Yeah,” Andy said. “I was just thinking that if you were standing over here, you wouldn’t even have seen the guy. It’s almost like he was hiding, you know?”

“Could be. The blood suggests that he was dragged or dragged himself. Maybe his killer went away and he tried to hide.”

They stood for a minute and listened to the silence of the woods. It was a nice day, the trees were pretty, yellow, and that red color that you didn’t see any other time of the year. It was hard to imagine how someone could have been killed there.

“So, what did you get from the girlfriend?” Andy asked after a minute.

“She says nobody else knew about them and I basically believe her, though she may be fooling herself. At least I believe that she believes it, if you know what I mean. They’d been seeing each other since February, kept saying that they shouldn’t anymore, et cetera, but the really interesting thing is this: Guess where they had their little meetings?”

Andy looked interested.

“Right here,” Quinn said. “Right here. The clubhouse, she called it. She said that Bruce Whiting used to meet his mistress here too. I think she liked that. I think she thought it was kind of a ‘screw you’ to her ex.”

“No shit?” Andy looked at the clubhouse. “So, how does it all fit? Maybe this guy, our John Doe, maybe he found them in the clubhouse going at it and maybe he threatened to tell his wife and Churchill killed him. How’s that?” Andy looked proud of himself.

“Yeah, except she seemed genuinely surprised that he was missing.” He thought back, remembering his impression that she had almost been relieved that something seemed to have happened, that it wasn’t just that he didn’t want her anymore. “I don’t know. I don’t think I buy it.”

“Well, listen to this. We checked on the bayonet thing. You were right. A bayonet attachment of exactly that size almost definitely caused the wounds on our John Doe. The guy says he made about twenty-five similar ones, owned mostly by people who were also at the reenactment on George Whiting’s land. So, it’s not definitely down to Churchill, but it narrows it down a lot. Say we get a match on Churchill for the other blood at the scene, doesn’t it look like Churchill killed this guy, got hurt in the process, and took off because he knew that his injuries would incriminate him?” Andy said.

“It’s gotta be,” Quinn said. “Of course, the other possibility, if it’s his blood, is that someone else attacked both of them, but then where’s Churchill? He couldn’t have hauled his own body off.”

“You’re right.”

“Hey, I was thinking. What about the ex-husband?”

“Bruce Whiting?” Tyler had been quiet up to now, listening to them. “Bruce is a good guy.”

“Yeah, but what if he found out his ex-wife was getting it on with Churchill? How do you think he’d feel?”

Tyler said, “No way. He left her. His new wife is…well, let’s just say she’s a little bit younger than Cecily Whiting. He’s a happy man.”

Quinn looked over at him. He decided he liked John Tyler just a bit less. “Still, maybe he found out and told Churchill that he’d…I don’t know. Maybe he threatened him or something. I was thinking I should talk to him. Just about Churchill’s disappearance. Get a sense of whether or not he knew.”

“But how are you going to do that without telling him?” Andy asked. “If he doesn’t know.”

“Would it be the worst thing? I mean, it’s got to come out sooner or later. The guy’s missing. I’m going to have to tell his wife about it when I talk to her. I’ve got evidence of foul play and if he’s not a suspect, then I have some pretty good reasons to suspect something bad happened to him. Whatever the guy wanted to keep hidden, he lost control of it when he didn’t come home.”

“Nah. Not yet. Let’s see what happens with your guy. See if he shows up. We’re working on the ID for our John Doe. There was a cleaned-up photo in the papers today. We’ll see if anybody knows who he is, and our guys are trying to get us some more stuff from the scene too.”

Quinn wanted to pursue his idea further, but Andy seemed to want to move on. “Andy, I had kind of an idea about your John Doe. I mean, we’ve been looking for a connection between the guy in the woods and Kenneth Churchill and maybe there isn’t one. Maybe he was just a homeless guy or something. Maybe he found the costume at a thrift shop.”

“But why would Kenneth Churchill kill him if he didn’t know him?”

“I don’t know, but sometimes people are killed by accident. Hang on…” Quinn’s cell phone rang and he rummaged in his jacket pocket, losing the phone amid the teething rings and pacifiers. “Quinn here.”

There was a raspy breath and he thought he heard a sob.

“Hello?” he said.

There was a long silence and then, “Detective Quinn?” He recognized the voice, though he couldn’t place it. “It’s Beverly Churchill.”

“Mrs. Churchill.” For some reason, her voice caught him off guard. “I was just going to call you, to update you. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any leads, but I’m out in Concord and I—”

“No, I…I’m calling because I just got a call from the credit card company. Kenneth used his card in Lexington yesterday. A McDonald’s and gas station off Ninety-five.”

Andy moved into action. “All right, get me her number and the credit card info and we’ll get out there and see what we can find.”

“Great,” Quinn said. “If it was yesterday, then he might still be around. God, I wonder where he’s staying? You want to ride with me?”

But Andy grinned at him.

“You kidding me, Quinn? You can’t come out with us,” Andy said. “We’re going to be interviewing witnesses. You have the kid.”

“But I can put her in a stroller. You won’t even know she’s there. Come on, this is it. We’re going to bring him in.” But even as he said it, he knew he couldn’t bring her.

“Timmy, no can do. Sorry. I’ll call you later and let you know what we get, okay?”

“Come on, Andy. I need this.”

“If it turns out that Churchill killed our guy, you’ll get credit for making the connection. Don’t worry about that.”

“But…”

“Nope. Get a babysitter and meet us up there. I’m sorry, Quinn.”

But his face, which Quinn studied for a minute before he turned away, didn’t look sorry at all.

Cecily Whiting waited for a moment before crossing the street at the crosswalk. She wasn’t sure why, but she had experienced a quick moment of caution, maybe sensed that someone was watching her. But all she saw was the group of thirty or so high school kids who had just gotten off the bus in the parking lot at the Old North Bridge.

She walked along Monument Street, her head down, trying to avoid being recognized by anyone walking by. It wasn’t that she was doing anything wrong, it was just that she didn’t want to have to stop and have a conversation with anyone. She knew that Bruce and Lauren were taking the kids to some pumpkin festival, so she wasn’t worried about seeing them.

She waited to cut into the woods until she was almost to George and Lillian’s house. Through the woods ahead, she could see Bruce and Lauren’s house on the second lot. At first, after the divorce, she had sometimes gone up to look at their house, hoping to catch a glimpse of them, she realized, hoping to see something that would indicate that Bruce was unhappy. That he might be coming back to her. But it was just a house. Sometimes she’d seen Lauren walking outside in her bathrobe in the morning; sometimes she saw Bruce getting into his car. None of it revealed much of anything.

She was at the clubhouse in a couple of minutes. She had half expected the police to be there, but it looked as though they were done. There were orange traffic cones and the yellow police tape was still wrapped around the clubhouse. She stopped and listened. It was very quiet. She had to strain to hear anything but the quiet.

This was where Pres had found the body. She had tried to talk to him about it again on Friday. Worried because he’d seemed withdrawn for a couple of days, she’d sat across from him at the breakfast table and said, “Pres, at some point we’re going to have to talk about what you saw in the woods that morning. Would you like to go talk to someone about it? The doctors gave us the name of a therapist who’s supposed to be really good with kids.”

He had looked up at her with contempt. “Well, I don’t really think of myself as a kid,” he said cruelly. “And I don’t need to talk about it because I’m okay with it. He was dead. Big deal. Lots of people are dead.” Then he had delivered the final blow. “I’m probably going to be dead.” She had barely been able to hold it together, and after he’d left for school she had gone upstairs and had a good cry before going to work.

She felt the tears start to come and she sat down on the ground by the side of the walking path. Kenneth. She wanted Kenneth, wanted the comforting feel of his tall strength that reminded her so much of Bruce’s body. The tears flowed and she began to sob as she looked at the clubhouse. It had been a long time since she had cried about anything other than Pres’s leukemia. It felt odd, this kind of self-indulgent emotion. Kenneth. Where was he? The police seemed to think he’d had something to do with this guy’s death.

If he had killed this man, it must have been for her, because of her. She wasn’t sure what she meant, really, but the fact that the man had been killed here had to mean something. What if Kenneth had come here to meet her as usual, thinking she would just show up, without his calling her. It had happened once before, she realized with a start. Why hadn’t she remembered that when the cop was asking her questions? There was that time when he had ended it, saying that his son had gotten into trouble in school, something about bringing a hunting knife with him on a field trip, and he felt guilty because he was gone so much. He hadn’t called that weekend, but then she had gone to the clubhouse and he had been there.

What if he had…? What? That was the question. What had he done? Perhaps he had found the man, and the man knew her and had threatened to tell, and Kenneth had attacked him. He had a temper. She had seen it once, after the last time Pres had gone into the hospital, and she had told him she couldn’t see him anymore, that it was taking too much of her energy away from Pres. He had slammed the wall next to her in the clubhouse and screamed that he needed her, that he was getting closer to leaving his wife and she couldn’t do this to him, not now.

Thinking about it, she got angry. Of all the selfish, sonofabitch things to say to her. But then she remembered how he had cried and apologized and said that he loved her and that was what made him do these things. She had made love to him, told him it was okay.

Cecily stood up and walked out into the afternoon. The trees were on fire with red and yellows and golds. The air smelled of smoke.

The things people do for each other, she thought. It is terrible the things people do for those they love.