Next to Die Read online

  And Dodd would need some prior knowledge that Harriet was going to be there. Maybe he knew Gavin Fuller? Talked to him about how CPS was taking Gavin’s son, Grayson, and putting him in foster care that night?

  It wasn’t a perfect theory, but it had legs. Especially if Dodd was a racist – that would really lend to his traveling all the way to Watertown last year, after he’d gotten out of Cold Brook. Corina Lavoie would have known him, recognized him, too. Maybe he kills her as part of a broader campaign of violence – murdering caseworkers who interfered with his family – but maybe it’s her race that catalyzes the whole thing.

  In all, there were some notes there that were starting to play a tune.

  He heard the door clap shut behind him, turned, and saw Lena walking away from Pete’s house toward the Impala, thumbing her phone. She looked up the street and saw him.

  “Nice neighborhood up here,” he said, walking back.

  She pointed down the street. “My friend Maggie lived right over there. Her parents still do; her dad was a pediatrician, mother just retired from the APA…”

  When her gaze wandered back he felt that tightness in his chest, a jump in his heart. The way her brow creased when she was thinking, the sound of her voice. They’d grown up in the same small town but years apart, so had never really known each other. And now here they were.

  “What’s on your mind, Investigator Nelson?”

  He stepped a little closer. “Think we can take a break? Just an hour?”

  She glanced at Pete’s big house, looming behind her. “Well, we’ve got the league list.”

  “That can wait a minute.”

  She held up her phone. “We’ve also got the list of child protective service adoption actions through the district court. Just came into my email.”

  He leaned back, unable to see the small lettering that close. “Dodd?”

  “No, Morrissey. Charles and Gerry-Anne Morrissey. He beat her up, put her in a coma, she delivered her baby. Baby went to Child Protective Services.”

  “I remember the file.”

  “Well, then you remember that Gerry-Anne died not long after – they couldn’t stop the brain swelling, she was a vegetable, they pulled the plug. Charles Morrissey was over in Anderton, doing his time for attempted murder. The baby was adopted that fall.”

  Mike sighed. “So Morrissey gets out of prison, just like Dodd Caruthers, goes after Corina Lavoie, then Harriet?”

  Her eyebrows went up, her expression said, It’s a possibility.

  He sighed again. “I think we need more boots on the ground.”

  “I think I agree.”

  She was giving him a coy look, so he added, “And no, I’m not just saying that because you turned me down for a nooner.”

  She laughed, bright and sudden, then walked to the car and opened the passenger side door. “A ‘nooner’? What is this, 1950?”

  “I can be vulgar if you prefer.”

  She gazed at him over the car roof. The birds were chirping, light breeze stirring, a few garlands of clouds and the sun beating down. He was either growing infatuated with Lena Overton, or it was something more.

  “I prefer you the way you are,” she said. Then she dropped into her seat.

  * * *

  More boots on the ground. That meant requesting BCI send someone else out to pick up Mike’s slack, which wasn’t likely to happen. Cases that lingered unsolved were usually given fewer resources, not more.

  He was frustrated. This was supposed to be his area; he had a good clearance rate when it came to homicides, a shiny seventy percent. Not that a number mattered, but a grieving family deserved answers, and a small town that hadn’t seen a murder in nearly two decades needed to know.

  The case was sprawling. So many people, the faces were starting to blur. They had just enough manpower to interview league bowlers separately, see if anything came out about Dodd’s presence at Silver Lanes the night of. He left Lena preparing her patrol officers while he went to talk to Charles Morrissey.

  He drove through Lake Haven with the radio on for a while, the oldies station, last one left in the area; Solomon Burke wailed “I’m Hanging up My Heart for You.” As he cleared the town, though, Mike shut it off, wanting to think in silence.

  The suspects topping their list were people who’d gotten caught up in the system, lost a child because of either violence, drugs, poor choices, or all of the above. Dodd was especially interesting; he checked a lot of the boxes, and had apparent leanings toward white supremacy.

  But they had no murder weapon. Forensic evidence, all around, was sucking wind. No prints or DNA in Harriet Fogarty’s car, aside from her own. The house on River Street was splattered with everyone’s fingerprints from the neighborhood, but nothing matching Dodd or anyone else in the system that raised a flag.

  Jamie Rentz was still missing. There was no real way to tie him to the crimes except for Bobbi Noelle, and that was circumstantial. Still, Rentz was interesting; his Facebook page was loaded with more selfie shots than Justin Bieber – though he hadn’t posted in months. They could start pinging his phone with a subpoena, but that might be tough – Bobbi wasn’t able to identify him as the man outside her house, and the texts to her, on their own, were harmless.

  Like Hume had suggested, it could be worth it to show Maybelle Spruce some pictures, though, see if she recognized Rentz. For that matter, see if she recognized Dodd Caruthers.

  For now, it was all about Charles Morrissey.

  * * *

  The property looked like a tornado had come through: rusted vehicles, a couple of snowplows, snowmobiles with ripped seats, broken riding mowers, two Japanese-made motorcycles, piles of bagged trash, dunes of old tires. It was working hours and Mike didn’t expect anyone home, but a man in a ragged white T-shirt came to the door of the mobile home as Mike parked the Impala.

  “Afternoon,” Mike said as he got out of the vehicle. “Charles Morrissey?”

  “Who’s asking?” The man brought a rifle into view.

  Mike stopped in his tracks, put one hand on the gun in the waistband holster at the small of his back, and stuck the other hand out. “Hey – whoa. Mike Nelson, state police. Put that down, sir.”

  “Let me see some identification.”

  “Point that away, right now.”

  “You come up slow. This is private property.”

  “Yes, sir. It is that. I’m just here to ask a couple of questions.” Mike walked carefully, keeping his right hand behind him on the grip of his gun. Twice in one day now he’d gone for his firearm, when whole years passed without even considering it. It added to his respect for caseworkers, who placed themselves in some sticky situations, all for the good of children.

  “I’m going to reach into my jacket here with my left hand, pull out my badge, okay?” Mike eyed the rifle the man was holding, which he’d pointed down and to the side. “That a short rancher?” Mike asked.

  “Yah,” the man said. “Winchester .30-30.”

  “I think they used those on Bonanza…” He was a few yards away and held up his badge, and the unshaven, slovenly man squinted down from the raised doorway of the mobile home.

  “I never seen that show,” the man said.

  “Before your time, I guess. So, are you Morrissey?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mike slipped the badge back into his pocket. “Do me a favor, Mr. Morrissey – set that down on the floor behind you, and step on down out of the home, can you do that?”

  It took him a moment, but Morrissey finally complied. He walked down the three steps from the mobile home, sniffing and wiping his nose with his forearm. He stopped, keeping a distance between them.

  “Let’s talk,” Mike said.

  They stayed outdoors, standing, the sun beating down, Mike getting some foul odors from the various piles of junk surrounding him. Morrissey was a small engine repair guy, he said, though it didn’t seem like there was a lot of repairing going on. Finally, they got around to the
difficult subject of his incarceration, and what led him there. In order to get to the telling, Morrissey said he needed some liquid courage, and popped open a beat-up cooler with some cheap cans of beer inside, cracked one open.

  “It was an accident,” he said. “I still maintain that. Gerry-Anne, she fell. She was runnin’ from me, but I wasn’t gonna do nothin’. But the DA said that I hit her, and I pushed her, and that’s how she hit her head – the angle iron on the guardrail took a good piece of her scalp clean off. It’s one of those things like lightning striking, you know?”

  Mike tried to push away the sickening thought of a scared wife running from her husband, killing herself in the process. If, anyway, Morrissey was to be believed. “And she was pregnant,” Mike said.

  “Another case of lightning striking,” Morrissey said. “A miracle. I looked it up – I went online when I was in Anderton and read about how there’s only a few cases where a woman delivered while she was in a coma like that. Amazing what the body can do.” He took a long pull of the beer and cleaned up with his forearm again.

  “The baby went into Child Protective Services,” said Mike.

  “Yah. She did.”

  “Was there any contention over that?”

  “No… no contention. She didn’t have nobody else. Gerry-Anne’s mother, she’s got… well she had cancer then, and she died. Gerry has a brother, but he’s a real piece of work, no way he’s gonna raise a kid, so there was really no one else. And I was fired from my job, and up at county jail, waiting for my day in court.”

  “Did you get it?”

  “Pled guilty,” Morrissey said. “Public defender I had thought it was the best option to plead out, and I did my time.” Morrissey cracked another beer, took a slurp, and squinted one eye at Mike. “This is about the Harriet Fogarty murder, isn’t it? Over there in Lake Haven. ’Cause she, ah, back then she was the one, I think, to take the baby and deal with all that stuff – the adoption or whatever.”

  “You ever see your child?”

  He shook his head. “No, never. She’s better off.”

  “So you think it was a good thing; that she was removed from your custody, and that no one in your family was going to raise your child?”

  Morrissey looked at Mike for a long time, drank the rest of the second beer, crumpled up the can and burped. He was crude, Mike thought, but he wasn’t stupid – there was intelligence in the man’s eyes. “If anyone’s got to be upset by the whole thing, it’s my daughter. Some nights, well…” He tossed the can aside and fished around in the cooler for another.

  “Some nights?”

  He pulled out the beer, tapped the top of it with a fingernail but didn’t open it yet, staring off. “Some nights I dream she comes for me. You know? And I don’t blame her; I let her. I let her burn it all down, burn me right down in that trailer.” Finally, he cracked the beer and took a sip, focused on Mike. “Say hi to Terry for me,” he said, and headed back for the trailer.

  “You know Terry Fogarty?”

  Keeping his back to Mike as he walked way, he said, “Sure. That was my job back then, ’fore I got into all this.”

  “You worked for the Highway Department?”

  “Yah. Old Terry was my supervisor.” Morrissey burped and climbed the three steps, pushed in the door, and went inside.

  Mike let him go.

  * * *

  Mike drove aimlessly for a while, thinking about Morrissey, thinking about the man’s dream of his estranged daughter burning his home to the ground with him in it. He thought about Terry Fogarty, working with this guy all those years back. Their relationship didn’t indicate anything more than living in a scarcely populated area (in the Adirondacks, everybody knew somebody who knew somebody), but it made Mike feel restless. Like something was forming in his mind, a sort of mental Polaroid developing, and he couldn’t make out the image just yet.

  He chose a direction and wound up bumping down Terry Fogarty’s long driveway on the outskirts of Lake Placid. The sun was lowering toward the treetops, the day’s heat giving up a little grip, and the place looked picturesque in the fading light.

  Terry’s eyes were fuzzy with sleep when he came to the door, like he’d been napping, or just never got out of bed from the night before. There were dogs barking at his feet; Labs – one chocolate, one black. He took hold of their collars and invited Mike in.

  They moved into the kitchen, where Terry let the dogs out a side door. They raced away, happy to be outside. “What can I do for you, Mike?”

  The kitchen was charming, rustically old-fashioned. There were some upgrades, like the stove and microwave, but the old sink was deep-basin, slightly rusted around the fixtures, looking like it weighed a couple hundred pounds. “Just wanted to check in,” Mike said. Piled everywhere were bouquets of flowers, unopened boxes, and foodstuffs yet to be put away.

  “Bobbi Noelle dropped off a bunch of groceries,” Terry said, seeing where Mike was looking. “Help yourself to anything you want.”

  “Bobbi did?” Mike asked.

  They sat down at the farm-style table with a view. The dogs chased each other around in the yard.

  “Yeah,” Terry said. “She came over, ah, couple nights ago. I can’t remember which… everything is a blur.”

  “I’m sure,” Mike said, having similar thoughts.

  But Terry really meant it, and he looked dazed. “Emerson said a man is what he thinks about all day long, but I don’t know what I’m thinking from one minute to the next. I can’t seem to catch anything and… hold onto it.”

  “I understand. You like Emerson?”

  “I’m not such a huge fan of his libertarian leanings, I guess, but his essays on nature, his optimism for humankind, really something.” Terry seemed to look directly at Mike for the first time. “I wasn’t always working for the Highway Department. A million years ago I was a philosophy major at Plattsburgh State.”

  “That’s partly why I’m here,” Mike admitted.

  “Philosophy?”

  “Ha, no. I know Emerson, but that’s about it. I always liked what Keith Richards had to say. As far as quotes go, anyway, he said, ‘The blacksmith invents the iron work, the horse wears them.’ I guess I really don’t even know what it means. Or maybe it means, this is all here, this life, and we just wear it. Our names, our clothes. Anyway, I bumped into someone today who used to work with you.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Charles Morrissey.”

  “Morrissey…” Something flickered in his eyes. “You bumped into him?”

  “You ever have any relationship with him outside of work?”

  “None. He went away to prison for his wife. That was it.”

  “He’s out,” Mike said. “Been out for a couple of years.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know.” Terry looked out at the dogs and said, “He was a pretty normal guy, I guess. He was a drinker but in the winter he kept sober so he could plow. What he did to his wife was…” Another spark in Terry, like the lights were coming on inside his head. “You saw him – you asked him about Harriet? I think she might have… yeah, she handled it when his wife delivered the baby and the baby needed a place to go. Are you looking at him; is he a suspect?”

  “We’re going through all of your wife’s cases from years back,” Mike said. “His name is one of many.” He switched gears. “So, Bobbi Noelle came by, brought some groceries? That was nice of her.”

  Terry just stared a moment, like he was deciding whether to get more upset about Morrissey. Finally, he said, “I told Bobbi she didn’t have to trouble herself, people already helped out. But she insisted. Came by, talked with me and Victor, then went to the store. Yeah, I remember now – it was after Harriet’s memorial service. She went up to Price Chopper at ten o’clock at night, came back with bags full of groceries.”

  “That’s very nice,” Mike said. Terry was gaunt and Mike doubted he’d eaten a morsel from Bobbi or anyone else all week. The widower fell silent and studied his
hands, which he rested on the table.

  Mike said, “I lost my wife.”

  Terry looked up. “I didn’t, ah… I’m sorry. How did she die?”

  “First it was breast cancer. We thought we’d caught it in time, and we did, sort of. She had a double mastectomy, she did the radiation. My daughter – she was very young, but she had the presence of mind to tell us about using cannabis.”

  Terry smiled on one side of his mouth, but the humor didn’t travel to his eyes.

  “And then it came back,” Mike said. “Molly complained about her back one day, and her shoulder, and we took her in. She just had a real aggressive type. I guess it actually started in her ovaries, and it just kept coming. After that, I… we managed her pain as best we could, and she went pretty quick.” Mike ran a hand over his jaw, said, “Kristen was just a kid. Turning thirteen.”

  Terry took a deep breath, expanding his chest, let it out slowly, like a deflating balloon. “I guess there’s a small mercy in knowing that she… that Rita, she went quickly.” He frowned, and a thought seeming to cross his mind. “I’m so sorry – I don’t mean to use your wife’s death to—”

  Mike stopped him. “Please, Terry. Not at all. I know what you mean. And I think, yes, you can maybe take some comfort in that. It’s alright to do that.”

  Terry sort of blurred out again, not seeming to look anywhere or at anything in particular, his hands still limp on the table. Mike thought that there was no comparison of suffering. Even if Harriet hadn’t died a slower death like Molly, it was heartrending enough on its own. Her death had been surprising and terrible and certainly painful. And Terry was retired; he didn’t have work to help distract him, or a young child to raise. He was sixty-one, had planned to travel with his wife, maybe sell their house, begin a whole new chapter of their lives. It was all cut short. It would never be.

  “How’s Victor?” Mike asked. “He get back home okay?”

  Terry nodded, slowly, distantly. “He did.”

  “How old is he? He’s twenty-eight, right?”