The Lesson of Her Death (20 page)

Corde stops his cruiser at the Main Street light.

A sudden crack on the window makes him jump.

Gail Lynn Holcomb—a high school classmate of his—knocks again with red knuckles. He cranks the glass down and looks up at her frowning overly powdered face.

“Bill, how’s this thing
going?”
There is no need to be more specific. She continues, “Should I keep Courtney out of school? I’m thinking I ought to.”

He smiles to reassure her and says she doesn’t have to worry.

But he sees that the words are pointless. She
is
worried. Oh, she’s terrified.

And as he tells her that he thinks the Gebben killing is an isolated incident he observes something else too. He sees that she resents him.

Corde has been a small-town deputy for nine years, which is about eight years longer than it takes to understand the ambiguous status of cops in towns like New Lebanon. People here respect him because they’ve been taught to, and what small-town people are taught when young stays with them forever. People knock on his windows with fat, nervous hands and ask his advice and invite him to Rotary Club lunches and buy peanuts from him at the PTA fall fund-raiser. They josh and nod and shake his hand and cry against his solid shoulder.

But there’s a distance that’s real and it’s big and it never shrinks. Because if Bill Corde stands for anything it’s that the long arm of malice can reach into the center of this safe little town, where it ought not to be; New Lebanon doesn’t deserve the same fate as East St. Louis or the South Side of Chicago or the Bronx, and Bill Corde is uniformed proof that its fate is different in degree only, not kind.

What Corde sees now in this agitated blond bundle of Gail Lynn, gone heavy on potato chips and cola and cello-wrapped cookies, unskilled with the makeup brush, but a good mother and a good wife, is this very rancor.

Oh, how she resents him!

Because she now must fight daily, amid the noise of soap operas and sitcoms, with her husband and daughter about locking doors and latching windows and chaperoning dates and which routes to take to and from jobs and shopping centers and schools …

Because tomorrow morning Courtney with her thick wrists and bright blue eye shadow might walk uncautiously into a Middle School girls’ room, where a man
waits in a stall, holding a narrow wire destined for a young girl’s throat.…

Because life for Gail Lynn Holcomb is already a relentless series of burdens, and she surely doesn’t need this one too: this murmur of utter fear that grows louder and louder each day that Bill Corde, sitting calmly in his safe and secure black-and-white Dodge, fails to catch this lunatic.

“We’re doing everything we can,” Corde concludes.

The light changes.

“Don’t you worry now,” he adds, and pulls into the intersection. She does not respond beyond pressing her flecked lips together and staring at the car as it turns onto Main Street.

C
orde dropped the
Register
on Jim Slocum’s desk and said, “How’d this happen?”

Slocum rubbed his cheek. “You got me. Steve had an idea to have me go up to Higgins and talk to the state boys. Just a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

“Didn’t you check out the roads and the mall, like I asked?”

“Did that too. Put nearly two hundred miles on the cruiser. Didn’t find diddly.”

“Well, did you talk to a reporter?”

“Why would I talk to a reporter?” He frowned and slapped the newspaper with his hand. “Where I was maybe a little careless was I wrote up a memo after I talked to the State Police and circulated it to everybody on the case. It’s in your in basket. Didn’t you see it? You know what I’ll bet happened is something got leaked from the state.”

Corde was angry. He shouted throughout the office, “No reporters! Nothing goes to the press without clearing it with me. Understood?” Four deputies nodded, stiff-faced with unjust accusation.

“But Bill,” Slocum said, “there’s a lot that adds up. Look at this moon thing. The ‘lunatic’ message, the knife—”

Corde snapped, “Damned coincidence.”

“Everybody knows about the full moon. Remember Ed Wembkie?”

Corde said, “This is not some guy got foreclosed out of his farm and went crazy.”

“Ed killed that banker on the night of the full moon.”

“Was also the day the marshal tacked up the auction notice. And what’s this talk about Biagotti? Who brought that up?”

Slocum shrugged. “We
are
looking into it. Or at least you said you were going to.”

“Jim, I don’t care that it’s
accurate,”
Corde said in a low voice. “I care that it’s being talked about in the press.” He punched the newspaper. “There’s nothing we can do about it now. But in the future—”

“In the future I won’t trust them state boys,” Slocum said earnestly. “That’s for damn sure.”

Corde stared at the article for a moment. He clicked his tongue. “Okay, what’s done’s done. Now, I’d like you to get out to the truck stops and along 116, put up some fliers asking for witnesses. That route’s a feeder for the interstate if you’re coming from Hallburton.”

“That town’s mostly dead, Bill. I doubt there’d be any truck traffic.”

“Do it just the same. Fast-Copy’s delivering them this afternoon.”

“Uhn,” Slocum said.

Corde continued into his office. He cracked open the window. Before he could sit down T.T. Ebbans walked up to his desk, carrying his own
Register
.

Ebbans said angrily, “We got ourselves a leak, looks like.”

Corde snorted and swung his door shut. “It’s not a leak if the sheriff doesn’t mind.” He dug into his in box and found Slocum’s memo. It presented most of the same information that was in the article. Across the top Slocum had scrawled:
Something to think about
. Corde handed the memo to Ebbans, who read it and said, “Watkins knows what he’s about but it’s too darn early for this sort of profile. He should know better.”

Corde nodded toward Ribbon’s office. “You know something, T.T.,” he whispered. “Steve’d look like a genius, he stops a cult killer in his tracks, don’t you think? Especially if he could tie the Biagotti killing to this guy.”

“I guess,” Ebbans said, “but he wouldn’t, you know, hurt the case just to do something like that.”

Corde shrugged. “We catch this guy, five’ll get you ten Ribbon mentions Biagotti at the same press conference. Also with this Moon Killer poop he’s taking a lot of focus off the school, which is where he doesn’t want the focus to be.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t live in New Lebanon, T.T. Hell, the school damn near pays our salaries. If Auden goes, what’ve we got? Precious little. Farms. A few dealerships. Insurance.”

Corde tossed the
Register
into the trash. He began pacing slowly and then stopped abruptly. “You know, I can’t let that go.”

Ebbans looked at him quizzically.

“Woman came up to me today and she was mighty spooked, like she had the killer on her tail. Some paperboy or milkman comes to somebody’s front door and he’s going to get himself shot. Who’s going to come forward with evidence if they think they’re going to get gutted by a werewolf or something?”

Ebbans said, “The stories’ve run already, Bill. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Yeah there is.”

Corde picked up the phone. He called the
Register
and then WRAL, the local TV station in Higgins. He asked them about deadlines and if they’d be interested in a statement about the Auden co-ed case by the chief investigator. He took down some information then hung up. After Corde hung up Ebbans glanced toward Ribbon’s office and raised an eyebrow. He sang, “He ain’t gonna like it.”

Corde shrugged and proceeded to spend an agonizing half hour composing a release. After a dozen rewrites he slipped it over to Ebbans.

“You spelled sacrificial wrong and also it doesn’t sound like a newspaper story. They write things different. Smoother or something.”

“Well, I don’t care about that. They’ll doll it up. What do you think about
what
it says?”

Ebbans read it again. He shrugged. “I think you hedged pretty good—at least so’s Ribbon won’t get too bent out of shape. But you know one thing, Bill. If we keep playing it up that we’re after a cult killer the real perp might be, you know, lulled into thinking he’s safe. He won’t be as likely to carry out those threats against you. You run this, well, he may come looking for you.”

Corde had not considered this. He smoothed the copy of his release in front of him. “It’s a risk, true. But
it’s
my
risk and I think I have to take it. We’ve got to get ourselves some witnesses.”

Returning to work from lunch Corde parked in the Town Hall lot and saw Steve Ribbon climbing out of his cruiser.

The sheriff grinned a vacuous smile and motioned to him. Corde walked over to the car. They leaned butt-first against the fender.

“Howdy, Steve.”

The sheriff nodded.

The sunlight hit Ribbon’s face and revealed a speckle of red on his cheeks. It reminded Corde that Ribbon volunteered every Christmas to play a Jaycee’s Santa and slogged around in the snow and mud on New Lebanon’s east side, visiting trailers and maimed bungalows occupied mostly by single parents and their kids.

Whenever he formed opinions about Steve Ribbon, like the one he’d shared with T.T. Ebbans that morning, Corde tried to temper them with the memory of how the man spent December 24.

“Say, Bill, there’s a situation I’ve got to let you know about.” The
Register
was tucked under Ribbon’s solid arm.

“Shoot.”

“I was just over at County. Hammerback’s office. Last night he got a call from Dean Larraby over at Auden. You know her, right?”

Corde grunted affirmatively.

“Well, here’s the scoop.” Ribbon cleared his throat. “I seen that report on the burnt-up letters. The Gebben girl’s letters?”

“Yup.”

Ribbon exhaled long through closed teeth, stopping the breath with his tongue every second or so.
Thup thup thup
… When his lungs emptied he took another
breath and said, “Somebody saw you coming out of her room the day they were stolen.”

Corde looked down at the pebbly asphalt.

“Wednesday afternoon,” Ribbon said. “The day after she was killed.”

“Wednesday. I was there, yeah. I wanted to talk to Jennie’s roommate.”

“Well, you didn’t
say
anything about it. When Lance told us the letters were missing and—”

“Steve, I was there without a warrant. The door was unlocked and people knew the girl was dead. I was afraid evidence would start to disappear. I took a fast look around the room and that was it.”

“Did you see—”

“The letters weren’t there, no.”

“Well, Jesus, Bill.” Ribbon chose not to mention the most serious offense, the one that would be filling an uneasy ninety percent of his thoughts—that Corde had destroyed the letters himself. Instead he said, “Anything you’d picked up wouldn’t’ve been admissible. That would’ve thrown the case all catercorner.”