The Lesson of Her Death (32 page)

“Okay, what’s up, Steve?”

“I got a call from Ellison.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Bill, this is a damn difficult thing to say to you.”

Corde laughed without humor. “Then spit it out fast.”

Ribbon said, “The county’s taking over the Gebben and Rossiter cases.”

It took several seconds for the fire to burn across Corde’s cheek. “The county.”

“T.T.’s going to be heading her up.”

“Well, Steve, legally, I suppose, the county can take over any murder investigation it wants to. But the point is it’s never—”

“Bill.”

“The point is it’s never happened before. All right. I’m a little angry. That’s what you’re hearing. I don’t think we’ve done anything to make Ellison feel this way.”

“It was that situation at the dorm.”

“What
situation?”

Ribbon surveyed the rocket pencil’s crash site. “They think you burned her letters and her diary, Bill.”

Corde said nothing.

“They’re thinking it was curious you flew to St. Louis so fast after the killing. When you didn’t find anything there you went to her dorm room and took them and burned it all up. Don’t look that way, Bill. They think you were trying to cover up something between you and her. There’ll be an inquest next month and you’re off the case till it’s over.”

W
ynton Kresge’s great-great-great-grandfather, whose name was Charles Monroe, had been a slave, one of two, on a small farm near Fort Henry, Tennessee. The story goes that when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on New Year’s Day in 1863 Monroe went to his master and said, “I am sorry to tell you this, Mr. Walker, but there is a new law that says you can’t own slaves anymore, including us.”

Walker said, “They did that in Nashville?”

Monroe answered, “No, sir, they did that in the capital, that is to say, Washington, D.C.”

“Blazes,” Walker said, and added that he’d have to look into it. Because both he and his wife were illiterate they had to ask someone to tell them more about this law. Their charming innocence was demonstrated by their choice of Abigail, the Walker’s second slave, to confirm the news. She did so by reading from an outspoken abolitionist penny sheet, which printed the text of
the Proclamation while avoiding an inconvenient discussion of Lincoln’s jurisdiction to free slaves located in the Confederacy.

“Damnation, he’s right,” Walker said. Then he wished Monroe luck and said by any chance you be interested in staying on for pay and Monroe said he’d be happy to and they negotiated a wage and room and board and Monroe kept on working on the Walker farm until he married Abigail. The Walkers gave them their wedding and Monroe named his first son Walker.

Family history.

And probably as embellished and half-true as any. But what Wynton Kresge thought was most interesting was how his children responded to the story. His eldest son, Darryl, eighteen, was horrified that he had been descended from slaves and never wanted the fact mentioned. Kresge felt bad the boy was so ashamed and grumbled that since he was black and had grown up in the United States and not on the Ivory Coast, how come that was such a shock?

Kresge’s eldest daughter, Sephana, sixteen, on the other hand often talked about Monroe’s plight. Which was how she referred to it.
Plight
. She hated Monroe for going back to work for Walker. She hated him for not putting a Minié ball in his master’s head and torching the farm. Sephana had posters of Spike Lee and Wesley Snipes on her wall. She was beautiful. Kresge had put all serious talks with his daughter on hold for a few years.

Kresge’s fifth child, named after the ancestor in question, was eight and he loved the story. Charles often wanted to act it out, insisting that Kresge take the role of Mr. Walker, while Charles did an impersonation of someone probably not unlike his namesake. Kresge wondered what his youngest son, Nelson, aged two, would say about their ancestor when he learned the story.

These were the thoughts that kept intruding into Kresge’s mind as he sat trying to read in the massive bun-buster swivel chair. He felt all stifled and bouncy with nervous energy so he stood up and walked to the
window in the far corner of his office. He reached out and rested his hands on the windowsill and did a dozen lazy-boy push-ups then twelve more and twelve more after that until he smelled sweat through his shirt.

The window overlooked not the quad but a strip of commercial New Lebanon, storefronts and flashing trailer signs and a chunk of the satellite dish on the Tavern. He was anxious and his muscles quivered from using them the wrong way, in a soft office, in a soft university, a soft
white
university, where you had to keep your temper and give reasons and all the suspects were good students and were trying hard and were just out for some fooling ’round.

He sat on the windowsill, his huge shoulders slumped.

Thinking of his ancestor (perhaps because Walker had ultimately gotten
his
freedom) had put Wynton Kresge in mind of his essential problem—he was not what he wanted to be.

Which was a cop.

He would be a cop in Des Moines. He would be a cop in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. In Sandwich, Illinois. He’d be a cop taking tolls on the interstate if they also let him spend a good portion of the time cruising around in a souped-up four-barrel Dodge, tagging speeders and hunting down child molesters and stopping DUIs.

What was ironic—no, what was bitterly mean—was that every day Kresge got résumés from cops all over the country. From real COPS! They wanted to work for him.
Dear Sir: As a law enforcement officer of ten years standing, I am seeking a position in private security services and would like to be considered for any positions you might have open
.…

Knock me upside the head. I mean, this is too much!

Kresge would have dropped down on his massive, linebacker knees to kiss the police academy graduation ring of any one of those applicants and trade jobs in a minute. Gold shields, GLA supervisors, Ops-Coordinators, portable patrolmen, CS technicians. They all
wanted to sit in Kresge’s cracked leather chair and swivel back and forth and spend the three hours between start of business and lunch deciding how to allocate guards for the homecoming game.

And what did Wynton Kresge want to do but walk a beat?

He wanted to drive an RMP (remote mobile patrol, a squad car to everybody else; Kresge had learned this), he wanted to kick in doors of murder suspects, he wanted to pin drug dealers up against jagged brick walls and scream at them:
WHERE’S THE STASH?
(Was that what they called it? He’d learned a lot but there was much he had not learned.)

He had a very real problem however. Wynton Kresge’s first goal in life was to be a cop. But his other goal was to make sure his salary exceeded his age. He now made fifty-three thousand dollars a year (being forty-two he was proud of this accomplishment). He was therefore in the Loop. Hooked. Hung up. Wynton Kresge received a salary not unattainable by senior detectives or police administrators in large cities but a complete rainbow for a rookie. It’d be back to school at no pay then a grunt pulling twenty, twenty-five even with overtime. Kresge alone would be able to cope with a career change of that magnitude. Kresge married might be able to.

But not Wynton Kresge father of seven. He loved cops but he also loved being a good father. He thought about reeducating them. He thought about having a family conference and telling them they were going to have to buckle down. Dad was about to take a fifty percent cut in salary and become a cop. (Man, he could
taste
the silence in the living room after dropping that news.)

So he watched
Miami Vice
reruns and led his men in drills for dealing with students who’d gone ED (the cop word for emotionally disturbed) and with demonstrators who might try to burn down the stadium (none so far) and he kept his thirteen-shot 9mm automatic loaded and
ready on his hip waiting for the chance to draw down on a crazed assault-rifle-wielding sniper (none of them either), picking him off from fifty yards on the knoll of the quad.

This was all Wynton Kresge had for police work.

This, and thinking a lot about the murders of Jennie Gebben and Emily Rossiter, which is what he had been doing most of this hot afternoon. He now walked to his desk and balanced a book on his hand then flipped it lightly in the air as if he were tossing a coin to help him make a choice. That was in fact exactly what he was doing and when he caught the book, cover up, Kresge walked abruptly out of his office.

She died two weeks ago tonight. It took me all of fourteen days to lose the case
.

Corde spent five minutes looking for change in front of the vending machines, waiting for the jolts of anger that never came. He dropped in thirty-five cents and pushed
coffee milk and sugar
. The steaming liquid poured in a loud stream into a fragile cardboard cup. It sounded exactly like a man taking a leak.

T.T. Ebbans walked up next to him, digging in his pockets. Corde held out a handful of change. Ebbans picked out some and bought himself a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. “I’m sorry, Bill.”

Corde sipped the coffee. It tasted salty. The machine’s spigot dispensed both coffee and chicken bouillon.

“This’s real bushwah. I don’t know what’s going on. What’d Ribbon say?”

“I’m off the case. He’s going to fight the inquest. But I hardly believe him. He didn’t fight worth diddly to keep me from getting the boot.”

“The burnt letters?”

“Yup.”

“Did anybody
see
you take them? They have a witness? Any fingerprints? What’s their probable cause?”

Corde said, “We’re at the witch-hunt stage now, T.T. The due process comes later—
after
my name’s been drug through the dirt.”

After they find out about St. Louis. When it’ll be too late
.

When Ebbans spoke again, after a pause, the flinch in his voice was unmistakable. “Hammerback ordered me to look into every escape and recent release from the hospital at Gunderson.”

“I’ve heard this before.” Corde shook his head.

Ebbans continued, “Yep and then talk to school counselors and psychiatrists in town here and see if they had any patients with, you know, dangerous tendencies.”

“They won’t say anything. It’s all privileged. Hammerback oughta know that.”

“There was some mention of it in a book that Ribbon keeps loaning to people.”

Corde pointed in the general direction of Blackfoot Pond. “Well, Emily was Jennie’s
roommate
. It’s pretty damn odd for a cult killer to pick her for the second victim, wouldn’t you say?”

“I just tell what I been told.”

“I know that, T.T.”

Ebbans took a long time staring at the copy of the
Register
sitting in the lunchroom. The front page had a headline:
Terror Continues with Stapleton Girl Cult Threat
.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the story.

“Turned out to be the boyfriend she dumped. But the paper had to, you know, put it in terms of the Moon Killer. Damn. Good God damn.… Well, the case’s yours now, T.T. I told you what I found most recent, about Jennie having that girlfriend and a fight with somebody who wasn’t too happy about it. And about them maybe being killed because they were gay. Oh, and
don’t forget Gilchrist. He could tell us some good stuff about Jennie.”

“I don’t know. Word is we gotta concentrate a hundred percent on the cult thing. Forget the university connection, forget her personal life. Those’re orders.”

Corde closed his eyes for a moment, rubbed them. “Son of a gun, this’s great. First I lose the investigation. Then it’s forget the school. Then they don’t want to hear that the victim might’ve had a girlfriend.… I don’t know what’s going on, T.T. The biggest problem in this case isn’t the
killer
, it’s us. It’s the good guys.”

“Seems that way.”

Corde poured the coffee out then said, “You know, I was thinking. You’re in a tough spot.”

“How’s that?”

“Let’s say it’s what you and me think, that it’s not a psycho. That’ll mean a lot of wasted time and a lot of panic and news stories about the departments’ going in the wrong direction. You’re walking point on this whole case.”

“Well that’s true, Bill. I hope you won’t be offended if I tell you that if it turns out right—”

“You’ll be in the catbird’s seat, and more power to you. But with Ellison and Ribbon right beside you especially come November.”

“I hear what you’re saying. But I just want to get that guy, whoever he is. That’s all I care about. I’m no good at this politics stuff. It’s like people’re using those girls’ deaths for themselves. They’re twisting things around. Makes me sick.”

Ebbans finished his candy and rolled the wrapper into a tiny wad, pitched it out. He looked around and said in a low voice, “I know you’re off the case and everything and you’ll be doing a bang-up job keeping the roads free of gin-drunk felons but since you’re giving me all your notes and leads it’s only fair I give you something in return.”

“What’s that?”