Waking Hours (15 page)

“Not quite,” he answered, “but they’ll be ready when we get there.”

“All right then. One hour. Check to see if you’re being followed. And, Dani,” she said, taking her aside and lowering her voice, “Detective Casey played me the threat you received. I’m assigning an officer to protect you until we figure this out. You just do what you do, but if you see someone in your rearview mirror, it’s him, so don’t worry about it.”

“Irene—” Dani began.

“This killer doesn’t like women,” the DA said. “Don’t argue with me.”

13
.

Tommy called All-Fit and told his day manager he wouldn’t be in, then donned his barn coat and headed out to gather breakfast. His property had come with a horse barn, which he’d converted to a six-car garage where he kept his cars and other boy toys. Attached to the barn was a chicken coop, which he’d left intact when he’d decided on a whim to keep exotic chickens. He’d stocked it with white tufted Sultans and green-black Sumatras, but his best layers were the French Marans, lustrous black with copper hackles and bright red combs. Their eggs, with their dark-chocolate colored shells, sold for as much as $200 a dozen. They made nice gifts for friends, but the best thing they made was an omelet. He’d recently added a rooster, a giant twelve-pounder named Elvis, hoping to increase the size of his flock.

Usually Elvis came running out of the henhouse at the first sign of Tommy’s approach, doing battle before allowing Tommy to get near the hens and their tasty eggs. Today, the coop was strangely quiet.

Inside the henhouse Tommy braced himself, expecting the rooster to rush him. Instead, he found only hens, some nesting, others rooting placidly in the feed bin.

“Elvis . . . ,” he called out.

He went outside to the fenced-in chicken yard, but the rooster was nowhere to be found. He’d had the coop professionally reinforced against predators, including an expanse of chicken wire overhead to keep out the owls and the red-tailed hawks. The wire at ground level was of a small enough gauge to keep out snakes and weasels and wood rats and obviously anything larger, like foxes or raccoons. The henhouse floor was an impenetrable slab of poured concrete. He examined the fence and gates for holes, the ground for invasive burrows, but found none. His rooster was simply gone. The only explanation he could think of was that a raccoon, with its near-humanlike hands, had figured out how to undo the gate latch.

He took the Jeep to Katonah and sat with his father at Grace Lutheran, where the local descendants of the Scandinavians who’d resisted the temptation of cheap farmland in Wisconsin and Minnesota worshipped. It was at an after-church coffee hour that Tommy first noticed his dad was failing, unable to recognize faces or remember the names of friends he’d known all his life. Now when Tommy brought him, those friends understood and introduced themselves by name and shook Arnie’s hand and let him know he was still loved, even if the people who loved him were strangers.

After church Tommy dropped his father off at the senior center, where Lucius Mills would pick him up. Lucius (pronounced “Luscious”) was Arnie’s visiting personal caregiver, a gentle black man who was bigger than many of the offensive linemen Tommy had battled when he played football. He was also a combat veteran. Tommy initially hired him as security when he’d received bags of hate mail and threats after quitting the game.

Tommy then drove to Clark’s Hardware in East Salem to purchase a padlock for the gate. Clark’s had been there since 1874, and so had some of the stock on the shelves. A clerk told him that padlocks were in the basement.

“Ideally padlocks with combinations raccoons can’t figure out,” Tommy said.

“They’re all thieves,” the hardware man said. “That’s why they wear those masks.”

The treads squeaked as Tommy descended the wooden stairs. He found what he was looking for in aisle 5, but when he turned to go upstairs and pay at the cash register, he recognized the man in aisle 4. Crazy George Gardener.

George was eighty-one years old, his white hair close-cropped and thin on top, his face tanned from the hours he spent cutting hay for the local horse farms. Tommy had driven past the Gardener Farm any number of times and seen the old man working in his fields. He was still robust enough to lift the bales and handle heavy machinery, and his posture was erect and stiff. He had large ears with tufts of black hair extruding from them like coils of barbed wire, and one of the more spectacular strawberry noses Tommy had ever seen. He was wearing dark green pants and a matching green shirt that made him look like a custodian in a public school.

He was examining furnace ducts when Tommy approached him.

“George Gardener?” Tommy said.

The old man turned, and Tommy offered his hand.

“Tommy Gunderson. I live up the road, past the country club. My dad owns the nursery. I think we’ve sold you some plants from time to time.”

Crazy George was suspicious.

“I know,” Gardener muttered, lowering his head and gazing at Tommy sideways through his overgrown eyebrows.

“Have you got a second?” Tommy said. “I was hoping maybe you knew something about chickens.”

“Strange thing to hope.”

“It’s just that yours is the only farm around here that does something other than raise pretty horses to look at,” Tommy said. “So I thought you might know.”

“What’s your question?”

“Well,” Tommy said, “I lost a rooster. A French Maran. I checked the coop, but I couldn’t find any tears in the wire or burrow holes or anything. I was thinking maybe raccoons figured out how to open the gate. They’re pretty smart.”

“Smarter than some people,” Gardener said.

Tommy laughed. “Anyway, that’s the only explanation I can think of.”

“Maybe the hens got him,” Gardener said. “Pecked him to death and ate him.”

“That can happen?”

“Anything can happen.”

“Well,” Tommy said, “anyway, I’m hoping the raccoons aren’t smart enough to pick a padlock.”

Gardener said nothing.

“Your family’s been on that farm how long?” Tommy asked.

The old man’s expression remained cautious, wary. “Since snakes walked,” he replied.

“Well, thanks for your help,” Tommy said. “Hope your mother’s okay— I was the one who called the police the other night when she got away from the nursing home. I found her in my backyard. I don’t think she knew where she was.”

“You found her?”

“Uh-huh,” Tommy said. “Middle of the night. I thought maybe she was trying to get home. My house is more or less between the nursing home and your place. Have you talked to her?”

The old man’s expression softened. “Thank you for taking care of her,” he said. “I wouldn’t call it ‘talking to her.’ She do that?” He was looking at the marks on Tommy’s throat, nearly faded now.

“No,” Tommy said. “This was a rosebush that got the best of me. Is she okay?”

“They gave her something for sleep,” Gardener said. “But she won’t take it.”

“That can’t be good,” Tommy said. “I read if you don’t get enough sleep, you start dreaming while you’re still awake.”

“One way to look at it,” Gardener agreed.

“Same night that poor girl was killed up on Bull’s Rock Hill,” Tommy said. He left the statement hanging, but the old man didn’t take the bait.

“Has she ever done that before?” Tommy asked. “Tried to come home? I gather she isn’t as clearheaded as she used to be.”

“Even salmon can find their way home,” George said. “And pigeons.”

“Maybe that’s what happened to my rooster,” Tommy said. “Maybe he went back to France.”

“Doubt it,” the old man said. “You know what I’d do?”

“What?” Tommy asked.

“Look a little harder. It’s easy to miss something right under your nose.”

When Tommy got home, he gathered the tools he needed to reinforce the gate and walked to the chicken coop where, as soon as he pressed on the latch, he heard a raucous noise from the henhouse. Elvis charged him, crowing with all his might, wings flapping in a cloud of noise and dust.

Tommy left the gate closed and considered.

He’d looked everywhere he could think of for a hole in the wire, a way a predator might have gotten in, or a way his rooster might have gotten out. He hadn’t considered that his rooster might have been hiding from him . . . maybe sitting in a nest, where a hen might sit. In his search for one thing, he had missed another thing that was right under his nose. He could have looked right at it but not seen it, because it wasn’t what he expected.

There was an important lesson in that.

George Gardener had called it.

He’d known.

He’d known about the marks on Tommy’s throat too, though Tommy hadn’t told anyone but Carl and Frank . . . and the doctor who wasn’t real.

14
.

“Well, that’s forty minutes of my life I’m never going to get back,” Detective Casey said. “Let’s hope the next one is a bit more cooperative. Thoughts?”

“Very unlikely to be a killer,” Dani said. “Terence is just a kid who wishes he knew more than he does.”

“Lying? Hiding anything? Protecting someone?” Casey asked.

“Maybe protecting someone,” Dani said. “Let’s see what the others have to say, and we’ll know better.”

Part of Dani’s role was to help investigators determine the order in which witnesses were questioned. She’d done as much research as she could into the lives of the participants, checked their academic records, scanned their Facebook pages, read their Twitter tweets, talked to their friends. On her recommendation, they’d spoken first with Terence Walker, a tall, fair-haired young man who showed up wearing dress slacks, loafers, a clean white dress shirt, and a blue-and-red-striped tie.

He struck her as easily manipulated and likely to cooperate, and if he seemed so to Dani, he would have seemed so to the other witnesses, who waited together in nervous anticipation. The others would wonder how much Terence said if he went first.

A good interviewer played witnesses or suspects against each other. “X said you did this, but Y said you did that, so which one is lying?” Casey agreed that they wanted to speak to Rayne Kepplinger last and use the threatening video she’d sent Liam for leverage.

Unfortunately, Terence’s answers were as unilluminating as Liam’s. He’d been to a party at Logan Gansevoort’s house. Logan had invited him. He’d gotten wasted at the party and passed out. He didn’t remember what happened next and woke up several hours later in the entertainment room in Logan’s basement. He thought he remembered hearing music. He walked home around four in the morning. Nobody heard him come in. It was all a blur.

“What can you tell me about Julie Leonard?” Detective Casey asked. “Did you know her from school?”

“I knew who she was, but that night was the first time I ever talked to her.”

“What’d you say to her?”

“Just stuff like, ‘Where do you live?’”

“What’d you think of her? Did you like her? She like you?”

“I didn’t really form an opinion.”

“What kind of mood was she in? Good mood? Bad mood?”

“She was having a good time. She was dancing.”

“Who with?”

“By herself.”

“Did you have a conversation with her?”