Next to Die Read online

  Another slow nod.

  “Did Victor go to high school here? In Lake Placid?”

  “He did, for part of it. We bought our first place in ’79, in Lake Haven. We were there about twenty-five years. Then they changed the law, so Harriet could live outside the county, and we’d had our eye on this place. We moved in… well, Victor was in the middle of high school.”

  Mike nodded and did the math in his head – the Fogartys had moved to Placid around 2005. “This place must’ve cost you. Lot of acreage, higher comps in Lake Placid.”

  “I was able to get a loan, sell off some of the timber right away, pay some of it back. Then Harriet’s parents passed, we took the inheritance and paid off more. The rest went to Victor’s tuition.”

  After letting those facts settle in: “So how are you… are you going to be okay, at this point?”

  “You mean money? I have my pension,” Terry said. “And some investments. And in a few years I’ll get social security. Is that what you’re asking – do I benefit financially from my wife’s death?”

  Mike thought about how to respond. “I’ll be honest with you, Terry. I’ve considered it. But I have to; that’s my job. I have to look at everything and everybody where there might be a motive.”

  Terry’s gaze had become sharp. “And you think I have a motive. To kill my wife. Could you have ever killed your wife, Mr. Nelson? Even if it meant you’d get some money out of it?”

  “No. But like I said, I’d be doing your wife a disservice if I didn’t at least consider the possibility.”

  A heavy silence followed, and then Mike asked, “Was that tough for Victor when you moved? Changing schools at that age?”

  Terry took another long breath and seemed to relax. “Victor didn’t have any trouble. Always had his eye on the prize – getting good grades, getting out of the area. We’re not big sports people, Rita and me. I do a little bit of cross-country skiing, and we love to hike, but Victor really got into the team sports. He had the physique for it. He’s big, on my father’s side. He ran track, he was on the wrestling team, and he played lacrosse.”

  “Sounds like quite a kid.”

  Outside, the dogs had settled down – or, rather, they were both intent on something in the grass, their noses down, paws working. After another gap in the conversation, Mike asked, “Joe left to go to back home, is that right?”

  “Yes. Went back Wednesday.”

  “You think Joe’s not telling us something? About the place in Gloversville?”

  Terry seemed to tense, the way Mike had seen him do during their meeting earlier in the week. “The only thing Joe is doing is downplaying his brother’s menace,” Terry said. “Steve is a violent, callous son of a bitch, and I’m glad he’s locked up. He threatened Rita before, on multiple occasions.”

  Mike said, “When we were all meeting, at my office, Victor said something to Joe. He said, ‘Yeah, you’re sorry, Uncle Joe.’ Do you know what he meant?”

  “No. I don’t. He was upset.” Terry gestured with his hands. “Why is Steve just sitting there, no murder charge? He’s got a lawyer now. He’s going to get out, be out there, walking around. What does it take to put a guy like him away?”

  The temperature in the room seemed to rise. Mike said, “If Steve would’ve stood to gain something, we’d have a clearer motive. But Harriet’s share of the property goes to you and Victor. And—”

  “His motive is hate and revenge.”

  “I don’t discount that, believe me. Can you think of anyone who might… Who are Steve’s friends around here?”

  “I have no idea. I doubt he has any.”

  “Steve has someone who says he was with them during the time of death.”

  “And you believe this person? Why? Who is it?”

  “I can’t tell you that, I’m sorry.”

  Terry was becoming more aggravated, color blooming in his cheeks, lower lip quivering. It killed Mike to upset the guy, after all he’d been through. But he had to ask. “Victor seemed to… I don’t know. Do you remember it? Is there something between him and Joe? Has Victor spent a lot of time with Joe?”

  “Joe was defending Steve, who is the one who probably killed her – Victor was angry. There’s nothing between Joe and my son. Mr. Nelson, are you finished? Or are you about to insinuate Steve was in collusion with Joe, or even my son?”

  One of the dogs started barking. Mike saw that it was the black lab, and it was facing the house. The brown one joined in, both of them pointing toward the kitchen as they barked, as if sensing the tension.

  Mike asked, “Did you have a talk with Joe, after your wife died, but before coming into my office, about Joe giving up his share of the estate? After you helped Harriet decide to leave Steve out?”

  A dark vein was showing at Terry’s right temple. “That’s what Joe told you?”

  The dogs kept barking outside. Mike folded his arms, waited.

  “I talked to Joe, yes,” Terry said. “About my wife. About his sister. Before he got his flight out. We talked about her. We talked about her memorial service, her eventual burial. As soon as someone finds her goddamn killer and we can have her back.”

  “You didn’t talk about the property?”

  Terry glowered a moment, then said, “I think I’d like you to leave now. I’m very sorry to learn about your wife, but please go.”

  “Okay. But you should know – that’s what Joe has told us. That it wasn’t worth any of this – he didn’t want the place in Gloversville if it meant infighting.”

  Terry stabbed a finger at Mike. “Well maybe that’s what my son was upset about, okay? Maybe Joe should have thought of that before. About what that stupid, rundown farm was doing to Harriet’s family! Joe held onto his half, and he’s out there in Utah, and we see him once every two years. Meanwhile Steve is like a fucking beggar, coming around, threatening Rita. You want evidence? You want to know why I thought Cecilia should cut him out? Here, let me show you this—”

  Terry stood up abruptly, his chair scraping over the plank floor, then stalked off into the other room, leaving Mike alone in the kitchen. He listened to Terry slamming drawers, rummaging around for something, muttering curses. Finally, he walked back into the kitchen, sweating, looking crestfallen. “I can’t find it.”

  “What?”

  “A letter. From Steve to Rita.”

  “A letter?”

  Terry waved a hand. “Steve never got into computers, doesn’t email, nothing. He sent a letter, just after Cecilia died. Rita stuck it away somewhere – I can’t find it.”

  “What was in it?”

  Terry stood there with his shoulders drooping, his color ashen, eyes haunted. “Listen to me. Because this is everything. After this, I don’t want anyone else bothering me. Understand?”

  Mike was silent.

  “Steve wanted that property. Wanted it bad. Joe says he waxed and waned on it, but I remember Steve kept up a real effort, just wouldn’t shut up. He tried to get Rita to give up her half, to give it to him, and when she refused, he tried to get Joe to give up his. Because he thought if Joe gave his up, Rita would want out.”

  “What’s so special about this place?”

  “Nothing. You ask me, Steve never wanted to rejuvenate it, turn it back into some farm or something. He’s never done much of anything above board. But he told Joe that there were some people who wanted to lease it, all under the table. And at one point, Joe told Rita. He was considering it, just to get Steve off their backs. This all happened over the course of a few years, okay? We were all haggard, and Victor saw the toll it was taking on his mother, and so did I. I thought Joe needed to be more forceful with Steve, and Joe wasn’t. Most the time he just ignored it. And so that’s why Rita and I took action, and why Victor was upset.”

  Unburdened, Terry slumped into the chair at the kitchen table and stared into nothingness. Mike took a moment and looked at the flowers decorating the room. They were beginning to wilt.

  When Terry
spoke again, his voice was low, getting hoarse. “I heard something about homicide detectives once. I have a cousin who does what you do, down in Florida. He said to me once that a homicide detective works for God.”

  Mike waited.

  “I guess the idea is that the dead are with God,” Terry said, “and the homicide investigator is doing the work of punishing whoever killed them. God’s justice – if you believe in that. But to be honest this whole thing feels more like the Devil.”

  Mike held the man’s watery gaze, then said in a quiet, sympathetic voice, “If you find that letter, let me know, okay?”

  Terry nodded once, eyes averted, and then buried his face in his hands. Mike wanted to console the guy, but he sensed it was better to leave. He rose and headed toward the front door, hearing the dogs round the house, moving to the same spot. He opened the door and they were there, but kept a distance. They seemed to ease up a little as he emerged, and wagged their tails. “It’s alright, guys,” he said softly. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry.”

  Twenty-One

  His day off; Saturday. He might’ve worked through it but he’d barely spent any time with Kristen so far. They’d gotten up to weeding the garden together, not talking so much as just sharing time. The day was muggy, storms brewing in the east. After about an hour of pulling crabgrass, the rain came, spattering through the yard. Then the main front hit the property, and he and Kristen ran for cover.

  The towels in the linen closet had that damp, mite-ridden smell. He pulled a couple hanging from the bathroom hooks instead, tossed one to her, and they dabbed at their wetness. He got the stereo cranking next, feeling this high of being with Kristen, the storm now pummeling their little house in the country, trying to forget the broken man that was Terry Fogarty, and how he’d hurt him.

  “What’s this?” She tilted her head to the blasting music.

  “‘The Usual Place.’ Don Covay, 1960s.”

  “He sounds like Mick Jagger.” She brought a couple of glasses down from the cabinet over the sink, loaded them each with ice from the spout on the refrigerator.

  “Well, you know why? Jagger covered his songs. Chubby Checker, Jimi Hendrix – they all owe it to Covay, man. You know how he started out?”

  “I’m dying to.”

  “He was in a family choir group.”

  “You mean before taking up the devil’s music?”

  “Much to the pain and anguish of his loving parents.”

  “Uh-huh.” She ducked into the fridge, withdrew with a couple of St. Pauli Girls, poured them into the pint glasses, sprinkled a little salt.

  Mike watched, realized his mouth was hanging open. “Ice and salt?”

  She handed him one. “That’s how we roll.”

  The music changed and Ben E. King warbled, ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’

  “Is this Pandora for senior citizens?”

  “A-ha! You think I’m old.” He got next to the laptop on the shelves that was playing the music, hooked into a speaker system he’d distributed throughout the house. It was a very bachelor thing to do, something he hadn’t allowed himself until almost two full years past Molly’s death, but he hadn’t regretted it. “How about this?”

  She listened, staring. There was a smudge of dirt from the garden across her forehead, a dot of it on her nose.

  “Come on,” he said, “tell me you know Nirvana. This is the unplugged version of ‘Come as You Are.’”

  “Still old,” she said, picking up her glass of beer for a drink. She was looking at him in a funny way. “Something going on with you?”

  He tried one more track. “Soundgarden?”

  She nodded; she knew it, but she was still staring. “Dad… what’s going on?”

  He felt the façade start to crumble, but there wasn’t much he could tell her anyway. Maybe that he worried his drive to solve this case had upset a widower, a man he’d nearly accused of killing his wife. His phone vibrated on the kitchen counter before he could say anything. He’d left it inside and there were several missed calls. The incoming text was from Reggie Hume.

  Hikers found a body. Call me.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Kristen set down her beer, worried now by the edge in his tone. “Work? Thought you weren’t on-call today…”

  Mike stripped out of his dirty shirt and grabbed a dark blue V-neck off the back of the living room couch. “I’m sorry honey – I gotta go.”

  “You wore that yesterday,” she said about the V-neck as he slipped out the front door.

  * * *

  Eric O’Toole and his girlfriend Katherine Kendall had hiked the glacial esker out at Spring Pond Bog in Tupper Lake and decided to cool off with a swim on their walk out. There was a nice spot where the river going out formed a series of water slides over the rocks. And a body in the oily water below.

  “Ninety miles from Watertown, thirty miles west of Lake Haven,” Mike said on the car ride there.

  Lena was holding the handle above the passenger door because he was going fast. “Mike, easy…”

  “They think it floated a ways. It was tied down, but the rope rotted and broke, and it relocated a bit, but this is the general area where the body was sunk.”

  They turned off the main route, drove a hard side road then stopped when they reached a group of law enforcement personnel and vehicles clustered against the trees. Pierce County deputies had brought in all-terrain vehicles, and Mike commandeered one. Lena grabbed him around the waist and they headed in via the lower part of the hiking trail, rough going all the way, jumping tree roots and rocks, Lena’s grip like an iron clamp.

  They got to the lake in one piece, Mike’s hands vibrating, Lena’s hair tousled.

  Deputy Myer, the first officer on scene, pointed to where the body floated a few yards off the muddy shore. The remains of the rope was tied around its ankle, about three feet of it leading to a frayed end. “Probably a concrete block down there on the bottom somewhere around in here,” Myer said. “Divers will find it.”

  The divers were already suiting up. Above, a helicopter thundered in the air. Mike felt another rush of excitement; the rushes were coming in waves: It was Corina Lavoie. No question. Even though she’d been submerged in water all that time, she was still eerily recognizable.

  “Talk about timing,” Lena said. Her own excited, worried expression said it all: This was a huge break, the best thing for their case, but a terrible tragedy at the same time. They’d been right. All of their work to correlate Harriet’s death with Lavoie’s disappearance was vindicated. Someone had murdered at least two caseworkers, part of a series.

  Mike walked away from the water’s edge, feeling that same mix of elation and sadness, got on the phone, called Eddie Roth with the Search and Rescue team. Roth was one of the guys who usually looked for missing hikers. Mike explained the situation, having to talk over Roth, who was peppering him with questions. “Eddie, Eddie – listen: We need to look at everything around Spring Pond Bog. Signs of a guy coming in, maybe dragging a body, or maybe killing her out here, but she could be struggling along the way.”

  “Okay,” Roth said. “Then he sunk her in the bog, you said? How’s he doing it?”

  “She had something tied to her leg.” Mike looked around, remembered he was fairly deep in the woods. “Come to think of it… no, he doesn’t get her out here alive. He’s big – he carries her. Would’ve been at night. But if he parked his car off the road and somebody saw it… Maybe he stashed the concrete block, the rope, beforehand…”

  Mike realized he was getting ahead of himself but couldn’t help it. Divers were just now going in the water, the first ones slipping beneath the surface, leaving air bubbles behind.

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah… hang on Eddie… I’ll call you back with updates, but let’s get a search going, let’s find something this guy left behind…”

  * * *

  Mike spoke through the mask covering his mouth. “It doesn’t look like she’s been i
n there too long.”

  “The cold does it,” Crispin said. “The cold water encourages adipocere.” He feathered a gloved hand over the body on the gurney. “It’s this, you see it here, this waxen, soapy-looking substance all over, protecting the body against putrefaction. It coats like milk, slows decomposition. Then the constant wetness, the acidity, the anaerobic conditions, the presence of mosses – these are all antibacterial, aiding preservation.”

  “So what are we saying?” Mike asked. He looked up from the ghostly body at Lena, whose face was hidden behind her own mask. She locked eyes with Mike.

  Mike said to Crispin, “Can’t figure a time of death?”

  “Oh, no, I can,” Crispin said. “I’m just saying appearances are deceiving. No, based on what I’ve done so far, this person was in that bog at least nine months. Probably went in just before it started to get cold. September, October, maybe.”

  Mike and Lena exchanged another look. September 22 was when Corina Lavoie had disappeared.

  * * *

  So they’d found her. It didn’t exactly change things, just urged them forward a bit.

  A couple of hikers? Fucking hikers. How had they seen her? The rope must’ve snapped and she’d floated up.

  But that was okay – he wasn’t trying to hide them anymore. He wanted people to see.

  Clay popped in a cassette. He needed to get into the right frame of mind for what lay ahead. So as he wended his way along the back roads, trees blurring past, he lost part of himself to the song, and to the memory of killing Lavoie…

  * * *

  A cool autumn night. Good night to go to the movies, where the theater’s heat bakes the moviegoers like loaves of bread. The film is All I See Is You – not exactly his cup of tea, typical saccharine fairy-tale bullshit – but it’s enough to be sitting three rows back from Corina Lavoie where he can watch her, think about how he’s going to slit her throat.

  The movie goes on a long, long time, and twice he gets up to go the bathroom, practices his face in the mirror, and then enjoys returning to the theater, sitting back down behind her, envisioning her death all over again, the smell of bathroom soap wafting up from his hands.