Turn to Stone (12 page)

18

The caller ID on Stride’s phone read
KARL
WEIK
. He tapped the Ignore button and slid his phone back into his pocket. It was the fourth call he’d ducked in the last hour and the second since he’d arrived at Anna Bruin’s house. The sheriff was getting impatient.

“You’re a wanted man,” Anna told him with a smile.

“Sometimes.”

Her child Mya gurgled through the baby monitor. Her daughter was asleep, but she made happy, innocent noises, as if she were having good dreams. Mya’s babysitter Sophie hummed and sang through the speaker, too. Her vocal playlist had shifted from Lady Gaga to Pink.

Anna turned the volume down. “Bad news travels fast,” she said. “I’ve been getting calls all day since people found out that the murder took place in Tom’s camper.”

“What have they been saying?” he asked.

“The rumor is that Kelli murdered Greg Hamlin,” Anna replied, with a note of wonder in her voice. “Percy found out and covered it up. That’s why he took his own life.”

“Do people around here think Kelli is capable of murder?”

“Honestly? People don’t know what to think about Kelli. They’re curious. They feel bad about what she went through, but they wonder how it changed her. You can’t go through something like that and come out the same on the other side, can you? You have to be a little off. Fragile. Capable of anything.”

“So it doesn’t shock you,” Stride said.

“Oh, it surprises me. And yet? I told you before that Tom was wary of Kelli. He was always strange around her. Distant. It took a toll on his relationship with Percy. Me, I like Kelli. She’s obviously got tremendous courage, and I respect that. She does good work, too. It’s not just abusers. She counsels a lot of kids through tough things. Loss of parents, loss of siblings, divorces, abuse, whatever. As a nurse, I know some of the kids she works with. They love Kelli.”

“That means something.”

Anna had a delicate smile, like china. “I gather
you
think she’s innocent.”

“I really don’t know.”

“Well, you’re helping her, aren’t you? Even though the sheriff obviously doesn’t want you to. It sounds to me like you don’t believe she did this. If that’s true, then I’m glad she has an ally. Around here, once people decide you’re guilty, then you’re guilty.” She paused and added: “I’m not sure why you came back to me, though. I don’t know how I can help you.”

“I’d like to know what you remember about the events at the Novitiate,” Stride said.

“The Novitiate?” Her chin tilted downward, and she studied him over the tops of her glasses. Her neck was long and slim. “That was four years ago. Why does it matter now?”

“Your husband and Percy were both involved. I’m curious what they told you.”

He watched her face. He really only had one question, but it was a question he couldn’t ask her.
Did you know?
Anna and Tom Bruin had been in love. She’d been at his bedside as he wasted away and died, just as Stride had been with Cindy. Those were moments without secrets. Times of confession. He wanted to know if Tom Bruin had divulged his guilt to his wife.

Did you know?

Did you know that Kelli killed Jet Black?

Did you know that your husband helped Percy cover it up?

Anna listened to the soft sounds of Sophie singing on the baby monitor, but he thought she was buying time to calculate an answer. He also thought she was wondering what his motive was in asking.

“Well, it was horrifying,” she said.

“Kelli never shared any details publicly about what happened to her. Did she tell you? Or did Tom or Percy?”

“Only bits and pieces. Enough to turn my stomach. Jet Black, what a despicable man. He’s no loss to this world.”

“Did Percy have any regrets about killing him? It’s typically traumatic for a cop, even when it’s a good shooting.”

Anna pursed her lips. “Percy rarely talked about what went on that night.”

“Did Tom?”

“No. Neither of them did. I respected their privacy. I think it was hard on Percy that he was
celebrated
for taking a life. To him, it was what he had to do, but he didn’t take any pleasure in it. I’m sure he would have rather seen Jet Black rotting in a cell for the rest of his life.”

Stride nodded. He had his answer. Anna believed the story that everyone else did. She didn’t know the truth, and if Tom Bruin had kept the secret from his wife all the way to his last breath, then he would have kept it from everyone else.

Percy would have kept the secret, too. To do otherwise would have been to betray his wife. No one knew. Except, if Kelli was innocent,
someone
had to know. Someone had been able to mimic the bloody details of a secret that only three people had ever shared.

“Your husband was both a medical doctor and the county coroner, right?” he asked.

“Yes. The coroner position was part-time.” Anna glanced at the upscale surroundings of her house with pride and sadness. “It was babies and school physicals and flu viruses that paid for this place.”

“I assume Tom kept records in his practice.”

Anna nodded. “He was fanatical about it.”

“Did he keep personal files off-site, by any chance? Anything connected with his county work?”

“Yes, he kept copies here of all of his office records. He wasn’t particularly trusting of bureaucrats. He assumed floods or fires or locusts or something like that would strike a government building sooner or later. He made personal notes, too.”

Stride thought about the death of Jet Black. He assumed there was an autopsy report in the courthouse but that it didn’t tell the real story. Even so, it was possible that Tom Bruin had kept personal records for himself. Tom was a doctor. A professional. What he’d done was a crime. He had to know there might come a day when he would be forced to tell the truth about Jet Black.

“Do you still have those files?” Stride asked.

Anna shook her head. “What would I want with them? I turned his professional medical files over to the doctor who purchased his practice. As for county work, I called the sheriff and asked what I should do with the records. He said he would send someone to pick them up.”

“Did he?”

She nodded. “Yes. That was soon after Tom died. In fact, as I recall, the sheriff collected the boxes himself.”

Neal Gandy was heading out of his basement office in the Shawano County Courthouse as Stride was going in.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” he said. “You still in town? I hope you don’t have any more bodies to send me. We’re running out of drawers in the morgue with you around.”

Stride smiled at the gallows humor. “You can relax. No more bodies.”

“Well, that’s good. Did you talk to the sheriff yet? He’s been trying to reach you.”

“We keep missing each other,” Stride said.

Gandy smiled. “You know, Weik said if I saw you in here, I should lock the doors until he could send a deputy over to put you in cuffs.”

“Is that what you’re planning to do?”

“Hey, I’m not a cop. It’s not my problem.”

“Am I keeping you?” Stride asked. “Are you heading home?”

“I have to pick up Sophie, but she won’t mind if I’m a couple minutes late. What’s up?”

He followed the coroner back inside the antiseptic office. It was small and sparsely furnished. The overhead fluorescents cast sterile light. One wall included a sink, equipment station, and a metal examining table. Another wall was mostly made of gray steel and included a large refrigerator door. Gandy sat down on a wheely chair, his long legs jutting out.

Stride sat down on a similar chair. “What’s the status on the autopsies?” he asked.

“The pathologist asked us to transfer the bodies to Milwaukee to have the autopsies done there. He’s got better equipment than we have. The sheriff’s dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s on these cases.”

“Hamlin and Percy both?”

“Yup. We finally got an ambulance to take the bodies off my hands.” Gandy grabbed a tennis ball from his desk and juggled it. “If you don’t mind me asking, exactly what are you up to, Lieutenant?”

“Honestly? I’m trying to figure out if a fast-moving train needs to slow down.”

“Have you talked to Kelli Andrews? Do you know where she is?”

“I’d rather not say. Sorry.”

“Yeah, I get it. Just so you know, Weik found out about your little excursions to Appleton and Green Bay this morning. You talked to witnesses about Hamlin. He blew a gasket.”

“I figured. Weik wants me on a one-way trip back to Duluth.” Stride leaned forward. “Neal, I’m curious. How well did you know Tom Bruin?”

“We were buddies. I mean, we weren’t as close as him and Percy, but Tom was a good guy. Tough act to follow in this town, because everyone loved him. He’s the one who suggested I go after this gig. He said the MD didn’t matter.”

“Did you talk to him about his work? His cases?”

“Some. I went out with him on calls near the end. He needed help, and I wanted the experience.”

“What about Jet Black?” Stride asked. “Did Tom ever talk about what happened at the Novitiate?”

“No, he was pretty sensitive about it.”

“How so?”

“Well, Percy was his friend. I think he was protecting him. The feeling around town was, let’s get past it. Pin a medal on Percy’s chest and get on with life, you know? Tom handled everything himself. When you needed somebody in town to get things done, Tom was the guy. He even arranged for Black’s ashes to be buried in the cemetery of his own church, because Ginnie didn’t want anything to do with Jet at that point.”

“Understandable.”

“Why does any of this matter?” Gandy asked.

“It may not matter at all, but Percy is dead, and Kelli’s a suspect in a murder. Everything that happened to them started at the Novitiate. I thought Tom may have had insights about it that no one else did.”

“If he did, he didn’t share them with anyone.”

“I talked to Anna,” Stride said. “She told me that Tom kept personal files. Notes and copies of work he did for the county. She said that the sheriff wanted them transferred over here.”

Gandy nodded. He poked his thumb at a wooden door behind him. “They’re still in the storage closet. Banker’s boxes. They’re not official, so I didn’t think they belonged in the regular files. I keep meaning to write to the county attorney to see if we should have them destroyed.”

“Can you do me a favor, Neal? Can you check on something? I’d like to know if there’s a file on Jet Black in those boxes.”

The coroner shook his head. He didn’t get up from the chair. “The sheriff would kill me if I let you see anything like that, but it doesn’t matter. I can tell you right now that there’s not.”

“You’ve checked?”

He nodded. “Yeah, Percy came here to see me not long after Tom died. He was looking for the same thing. Wanted to know if Tom kept notes about Jet and the Novitiate. He said he was afraid the media might get hold of them or that county employees might try to cash in by selling crap on e-Bay. He thought we should secure the records. We took a look through the boxes together.”

“And?” Stride asked.

“And nothing. There wasn’t anything to find. Tom didn’t have anything in his personal files about Jet Black. If you ask me, Percy looked relieved.”

19

Stride called his uncle’s number as he left the county courthouse. He’d parked four blocks away near the river. “Richard, it’s me. Do me a favor, will you? See if there’s a police car in front of your house.”

He waited as his uncle put down the phone. A few seconds later, Richard was back on the line. “In fact, there is. What do they want?”

“Me,” Stride said.

“Any particular reason?”

“I think Sheriff Weik wants to give me a personal escort to the county line. I’ve overstayed my welcome.”

“I guess that’s my fault,” Richard replied.

“Don’t worry about it. You were right. I was a part of this thing as soon as Percy pulled out that gun in front of me.” He climbed into his truck and headed south on the back roads. He stayed clear of Main Street. “I’m on my way over there. I think it’s better if I don’t use the front door this time.

His uncle chuckled. “Come through the back. I’ll leave the door open.”

Five minutes later, Stride parked in a dead-end turnaround at the base of Smalley Street, where a walking trail led away from the river. He tramped through a snowy, fenceless yard and reached the back of his uncle’s house from the west. The gray afternoon was losing light. He let himself inside and followed the shadowy hallway.

Richard waited in the living room with a tumbler of brandy. The curtains were closed. Stride pushed the heavy fabric aside and glanced at the street, where a Shawano police car sat with its engine running. He didn’t have a lot of time.

“So what do you think?” Richard asked.

Stride sat down. “I don’t think Kelli murdered Hamlin, but if I were on a jury and a prosecutor laid out everything I know so far, I’d vote to convict.”

“It’s that bad?” his uncle asked.

“It’s worse,” Stride said. “She told me something that no one else knows. She wanted to convince me she was innocent, but most people would say it makes her look guilty.”

“What did she tell you?”

Stride shook his head. “I can’t say. Sorry.”

His uncle shrugged. “Yeah, I get it. You got me thinking today. I was remembering Greg Hamlin back in school. I feel guilty that I missed what kind of a person he was. He always showed the world this big smile, but smiles can be deceiving.”

“Don’t blame yourself.”

“Well, I knew he had a ferocious temper when someone crossed him. I knew he was contemptuous of anyone who was weaker than he was. Those were red flags. I should have pushed harder to find out how he treated his students.”

His uncle frowned and sipped his brandy. He put down the tumbler and picked up an old vinyl-clad volume from the coffee table. It was a Shawano middle-school yearbook from his teaching days. He flipped through the pages. “Twenty years ago. Crazy.”

“They go by fast,” Stride said.

Richard propped open the book and gestured for Stride to take it. “See that picture on the left page? That’s Hamlin with Jet Black and Ginnie Porter. They look fine, don’t they? You’d never know what was really going on.”

Stride studied the photo, which was part of a collage of typical yearbook memories. Greg Hamlin stood on an athletic field. He was tall and handsome, with buzzed hair, a trimmed mustache, and the kind of lean, muscular physique you built with hours running track and chasing a tennis ball. His arrogance wafted like a bad odor out of the paper. His long arms were slung around two children, with his big hands pinching their shoulders. Ginnie was on the right; he recognized her face, which had changed little over time. And Jet Black. He was a spitting image of what his son Mike looked like now. Same long, greasy hair. Same scrawny features.

Two kids. One adult teacher. Plastering grins on their faces for the camera.

This was the first intersection. School. Their paths collided back then and would collide again in a way that neither Jet nor Hamlin could have anticipated. Two decades later, they would both be dead, tortured, with the word
T
EUFEL
carved into their skin.

“Poison gets passed down,” Richard said.

“Yes, it does.”

“Honestly, I worry about Jet’s son.”

Stride looked up from the yearbook. “Mike seems like a good kid. Ginnie seems to be working hard to give him different values.”

“Maybe so, but Jet had him under his thumb for a decade. That’s a hard legacy to get past.” Richard retrieved his brandy and swirled it, watching the amber liquid cling to the side of the crystal. “I remember something that happened a few years ago. I was having a drink in one of the local bars. Things got out of hand.”

“What happened?”

“Jet happened. He was a mean drunk, and he was hammered. Small squirt, but he made up for it by fighting dirty. He got into it with a guy who was wearing a T-shirt Jet didn’t like. Jet started hurling slurs. Homophobic stuff. It got physical, and the two started breaking chairs. Jet jumped the guy and poured hot pepper sauce into his eyes. Nearly blinded him.”

“That sounds like Jet,” Stride said.

“Me, I was watching his son Mike the whole time. The kid was transfixed. He saw everything Jet did, couldn’t take his eyes away. What does it do to a boy to see his father act with that kind of perpetual cruelty? And God knows what Jet did to the kid and his mom when they were at home. I saw a policewoman take Mike away, and I was hoping the court would strip the kid from his parents once and for all. That’s not a slam against Ginnie, but if she didn’t have the courage to walk away herself, I hated to think of her son in that environment.”

Stride shook his head. “Jet brought Mike to the bar with him?”

“Yeah, it was like he wanted an audience. Pretty sick.”

Stride studied the yearbook photograph again, drawing a mental line from the child with Greg Hamlin’s arm around his shoulder to the predator kidnapping and torturing Kelli for days at the Novitiate. Kelli had said that Jet wanted her to be impressed. He wanted to dominate her. That was what Jet wanted from the entire world, including his wife and son.

He heard his uncle’s voice in his head.
It was like he wanted an audience.

“Son of a bitch,” Stride murmured.

“What is it?”

He didn’t answer, but he realized that he’d been wrong. Kelli, Percy, and Tom weren’t the only ones who knew what had happened at the Novitiate. There was one other person who’d been there the whole time. The person who started it. The person who died there.

Jet Black. Jet was there, too.

What if Jet hadn’t come alone to the Novitiate each night?

What if he’d forced his son to watch?

Kelli Andrews sat in her car. She was parked in a grove of evergreens on a dirt road near the Wolf River. No one could see her. Darkness had begun to fall. Every few minutes, she turned on the engine to warm the interior, and then she turned it off and sat in silence until the chill crept inside her clothes again.

She was angry at Percy. Angry that he’d lost faith. Angry that he’d left her alone. Even so, she’d run out of blame for what he did. She hated to think what he had gone through these past weeks—to stare at his own wife and believe she was a serial killer. To cover up her gruesome crime and then break under the weight of his guilt. If only he’d had the courage to confront her and ask for the truth. She would have told him that what had happened in the ruins of the Novitiate was an aberration. It would never happen again. She would never kill again.

She wondered if that was true. In reality, she didn’t understand the animal she’d become then. She had no way of knowing whether the same beast was still inside her. Abuse had a way of re-shaping the mind. The unthinkable became possible, and then it became the only way out. Even when she’d gone to therapists, she had never admitted what really went on inside the ruins. Nightmares plagued her. So did flashbacks. She would spend days—weeks—withdrawing inside herself and shutting Percy out, leaving him to wonder what was happening inside her head.

The fights. The shouts.

Why won’t you let me in?

She had no answer for him. The more he pushed, the more she withdrew. He knew she was still tormented. He’d seen it. There had been that time when she’d discovered a ghost spider climbing the wall of their bathroom. He’d awakened to her screams and found her destroying the bathroom—wall, sink, toilet, mirror—with repeated blows from a baseball bat. Out of control. Unreachable. She’d terrified him.

There was nothing in her eyes, he said. Her eyes were stone.

It was a short leap for him to believe that she was capable of another episode of psychotic violence. She imagined him climbing inside the camper. Seeing the body. The blood. The same word carved into a man’s chest. He would have known in his heart that she was guilty. Greg Hamlin pushed her over the brink, back into the arms of the Devil.

But that wasn’t what had happened. Was it?

She couldn’t freeze something like that out of her consciousness. She told herself that she was innocent. She had never met Hamlin. Never talked to him. Never killed him. This was someone else’s crime.

If not her, then who?

Kelli eyed the phone on the seat beside her. There was one call she could make, but she didn’t dare open that door. Not after all this time. They’d made a pact between them—a blood promise—and sworn never to break it. Some secrets had to stay buried forever.

And yet.
If not her, then who?

She stared at her phone again. Before she could reach for it, the phone rang, making her jump. When she went to answer it, she saw a local number, but no name on the caller ID. She hesitated. This was her business phone. Only clients had this number for her.

“Hello?” she said.

“It’s me.”

Kelli recognized the voice and relaxed. “Oh, hi. How are you? Are you okay?”

“I don’t know. Not really.”

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“People are saying bad things about you.”

Kelli took a breath. “I know. I’m sorry about that.”

“I don’t like it. None of it’s true, is it?”

“No, of course not.”

“Good. I knew it. I didn’t believe any of it.”

Kelli knew there was more; she could hear it in the voice. “You don’t sound happy. Is something wrong?”

“Oh, you know. It’s the usual stuff. My Mom was going on about my dad again. How bad he was to her. The things he did. I get it, but I wish she’d just stop. It doesn’t help me.”

“I understand.”

“I really need to talk. Could we meet? Could I see you?”

Kelli closed her eyes. “It’s not a good time for me. I’m sorry.”

“Please. I need you.”

She knew she had to say no. Stride had told her to stay put until she heard from him. Even so, she couldn’t stop herself, because she needed to be a counselor again. That was what she loved to do; it was the only thing that had kept her sane. That was how she could forgive herself for what she’d done.

“Yes, all right,” Kelli said.

“The usual place? Half an hour? No one will see us.”

Kelli thought about driving back into Shawano, where people were hunting for her. She could avoid the north-south highway and stick to the country roads. The arts center was deserted at this time of year. They’d be alone. Counselor and patient. Adult and teenager.

“I’ll be there,” she said.