Rough Country: A gripping crime thriller Page 3

  Griff, a big man, was humping his way up the slope. Reed caught his eye and tried to convey: You know her; help me out.

  “Ida,” Griff said between breaths. He grabbed some roots and pulled himself higher. “Ida, it’s okay. Just take it easy. Take it easy. You want me to call Daryl?”

  Ida didn’t answer, just sat on the path – legs out to the side, hands pressing against the dirt, head hanging. “No,” she sobbed.

  Everyone relaxed; the troopers looked around. Then Ida sprang up, kicking dirt as she scrambled away.

  “Hey!” Reed was the first one to catch her, hugging her as he slowed her down, trying to keep both of them upright.

  She struggled against him as he spoke in a harsh whisper: “Ida, listen to me. Seeing what’s down this path isn’t going to help you. It’s not going to help Kasey. Listen to me. Listen to me now… it isn’t going to help her. It isn’t going to change anything. It’s only going to make things worse. Ida? I need your help. And it starts right here, with you talking to me. You have to calm down and talk to me…”

  And she slowed, and then she stopped. Instead of turning into him and sobbing, Ida straightened her back. She looked off down the trail – but there was a bend and the body was still out of sight – and she stuck out her chin. Her lips worked together for a moment, and she swallowed and said, “All right.”

  Reed held his hand palm out toward the troopers closing in.

  After a few breaths, everybody settling again, Ida said, “I don’t know what she was wearing last night, because I ain’t seen her for a couple of days. She’s a teenaged girl, and she’s got her own mind about things.” Ida looked him in the eyes. “She’s fifteen – just turned in March. Ninth grade. Her name is Kasey, with a K. Blue eyes, brown hair. Now tell me. Tell me what is going on…” Her lower lip trembled, eyes quivered wet, but she had strength. Resolve. “What happened to her?”

  Reed held her eye. “Ma’am, that’s what I’m going to find out.”

  4

  The end of a long train

  The media had arrived. Half a dozen reporters from TV and print loitered behind crime scene tape at the edge of the park. Pyle was doing a good job providing sound bites, but someone saw Ida in the back of a troop car, and they all herded over and tried interviewing her through the glass.

  That kept them occupied until two people from the body unit, together with a couple of EMTs, emerged from the woods, carefully navigating the stretcher carrying the bagged body out of the downsloping trail. Now the reporters gravitated toward them.

  In their absence, Reed went to the troop car and retrieved Ida Stevens. One of the body-unit people opened the rear doors of their van and stood back as Reed approached with the grieving mother. He stuck close by, ready in case she freaked out again, but she seemed calmer. Maybe it was shock.

  When the body was raised to the rear bumper, Reed said to the closest recovery person, “Go ahead.”

  The man unzipped the bag from the top.

  Kasey Stevens was bluish now, lips turning white. She still had some baby fat, but she had been developing into a pretty young woman. A knockout, really. Just a few freckles, a small cleft at the tip of her nose. He could see a distant resemblance to Ida.

  Griff put his arms on Ida’s shoulders as she put a hand over her mouth. She hiccupped a single sob through her fingers, then lowered her head in grief.

  When she didn’t speak, Reed prompted her: “Ida? For the record, is this your daughter?”

  One more stifled sob and she said, “That’s Kasey.” She began to nod. “That’s her. Yeah. That’s my baby.” When she reached out, as if to touch the girl’s face, she turned instead and walked away toward a white pickup truck in the road.

  Reed called after, “Ida, please don’t go anywhere…”

  She kept her back to him as she walked up the road and held up a hand in frustration.

  “Whose truck is that?” Reed asked Griff.

  Griff was still staring at Kasey’s body. “Huh?” He glanced around at Reed.

  “The truck Ida came in. She said something about not having a car. Is that Daryl’s?”

  “No, not Daryl’s, I don’t think,” Griff said. “Daryl’s got a big Dodge. That little thing could fit in its bed.”

  “A few minutes ago, you asked her if she wanted you to call Daryl…”

  Griff had big saggy eyes. He looked at Reed for a few seconds, then nodded. “Daryl Snow. I guess it’s her boyfriend.”

  “You guess?”

  “Hey – none of my business.”

  Perhaps it was a sore spot for Griff, who seemed like a genuinely helpful guy. Maybe he was jealous of Daryl because he had a thing for Ida. But that was just speculation.

  Griff said, “I think the truck might be the neighbor’s? Bob Zurn. Looks like his – that silver toolbox in the back there.”

  The body-recovery people zipped up the bag and hefted and collapsed the stretcher, rolling it into the van and shutting the doors in one practiced move. Terri Shepard was waiting up the road. With the van loaded, she looked at Reed and nodded. He gave a wave. She got into her own vehicle to follow the van to the morgue, where she’d get started on the autopsy and maybe have something substantive to talk about in a couple of hours.

  Reed said to Griff, “How’d she know?”

  “Ida?”

  “She say how she knew to come down here?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  Up the road, people had gathered behind the crime scene tape. Not a lot – this was a side road in a small town – but a few. Ida shouted in their direction as she opened the door to the white pickup. “You all looking at something? Come to get an eyeful, huh? You like what you see?”

  Griff waved through some waiting traffic. First a sedan with an elderly woman driving and looking generally petrified, then a truck with an older bearded man. By the time they were through, Ida was sitting behind the wheel.

  She fired up the engine.

  “Shit,” Reed said, and started jogging. “Here we go again.”

  How would you have done things differently?

  It never left, this sense that any given day was an accident waiting to happen. One false move.

  Which was bullshit. If you knew enough, you could predict, and if you could predict, you could make the right choices. The better choices. Screw fate.

  He’d coaxed Ida out of the truck. The same group of people she’d sneered at coalesced around her, consoling. Her emotions had shifted gears again; her eyes leaked as she listened and nodded while leaning on a woman beside her.

  Pyle’s supervisor, David Kruse, was watching Reed with raised eyebrows, waiting for the next move. Both Kruse and Pyle were assigned to the Carmen station. They were straight out of Central Casting, with Kruse tall, lanky, and dark-eyed, Pyle smaller and noodly with a slight gut hanging over his belt. Reed had liked them both right away.

  Major Crimes, Reed’s unit, was different from the BCI in that there were fewer of them. BCI was the plainclothes detective branch of the New York State Police and were at every trooper station. But Major Crimes worked out of a troop’s headquarters. They were called in when and where needed.

  It went like this: When the teacher discovered the body, she called 911. Dispatch then put it out, and state trooper MacKinnon picked it up and arrived about five minutes later. MacKinnon assessed the scene and then called the “back room” – BCI. That meant she’d seen enough (a dead girl, apparently strangled, grisly carving on the body) to get an investigator there. Pyle arrived, made a determination, called in forensics. He’d relayed everything to Kruse, his supervisor, at which point Kruse called in Major Crimes because that was what BCI usually did when it looked like a homicide. The Bureau of Criminal Investigation dealt with most felonies and narcotics cases, but homicides often got kicked up to Major Crimes. It was a gut thing: this looked like a bad one.

  Finally, Overman called Reed. Like the end of a long train.

  It was all about determin
ations. One determination stacking on top of the other, each human in the chain exercising their good judgment. Now it was all his to control. His good judgment on the line.

  But Reed hadn’t yet answered the question in Kruse’s eyes, so Kruse said, “I want to start looking at Facebook.”

  “The kids don’t use Facebook,” someone else said. It was the district attorney, having arrived just minutes ago in a tiny Volkswagen, one of the new ones, her long caramel-colored coat floating around her ankles. “Instagram, Snapchat, maybe Twitter.”

  “We’ll look at everything,” Kruse said with a hint of defensiveness.

  The DA put her hand out to Reed. “Anna Tallman.” She had a smooth, firm grip and a lightly perfumed scent – lilacs, maybe.

  After introducing himself, Reed studied the increasingly crowded road. “Can we throw the TV people something, tell them when to expect a conference?”

  There was something playful in her eyes. “Well, that would be your call, Investigator Raleigh.”

  He nodded, looked at the ground a moment. He wished he could stick in his earbuds, get a little Nirvana going. Or maybe TOOL – the morning certainly called for it. A brief escape. But he couldn’t. “Let’s say five p.m. tonight. I’ll keep you updated through the day.”

  “That would be great.” She kept her brown eyes locked on his. “What are you thinking so far?”

  “Nothing. We need a statement from the victim’s mother, when she saw Kasey last, what the girl was doing. So far, she’s been avoidant.”

  He watched Ida still leaning on the other woman. Half a dozen people surrounded them, faces grim. One of the mourners caught Reed’s eyes, a young man, high school age. Ida pushed off from the woman and said something to the young man, seeming to speak harshly, the way her lips were drawn tight and his head and shoulders drooped.

  “Who’s that?” Reed asked.

  No one knew, and a moment later the young man was gone.

  Griff drifted near. “Kasey goes to Eastern Adirondack – I can confirm that. Ninth grade, like Ida said.”

  Kruse said, “Troopers have been doing the door-to-doors, asking if anyone saw anything, but there’s, like, three houses out here within a mile of the park.”

  Reed nodded. “Understood.”

  Now or never, Rally.

  He looked at their faces. “Okay, here’s how we do this. Right now, MacKinnon – if you could take Ida’s statement. Have Griff go with you; maybe he can help keep her calm. Pyle, head over to the school. Tell them to find someone who knows Kasey, knows her friends, and have them go to the office. But don’t make a public announcement. When the kids come in, interview them one at a time, separately. Tape it. And I’ll be along.”

  “Got it.”

  His gaze wandered to the woods, seeking the tangle of undergrowth below the tall, widely spaced pines, over the babbling brook, up the slope, and along the path where Kasey was found. “I want the forensic photos as soon as possible,” Reed told Kruse. “I want the photo doc of that thing on her stomach, and I want that sent to every cop. Let’s get everyone thinking about it and what it could mean. In fact, I’m going to send it to someone I’ve got who’s good with that sort of thing – Virginia Leithsceal, my researcher in Albany.”

  Reed slapped at a bug zoning in on his ear. Obscure as it had been, the carving in the victim’s stomach had been vaguely familiar. Something medical, maybe?

  No one moved. Reed said, “All right. Let’s go find justice for Kasey Stevens.”

  “What are you gonna do?” Kruse asked. It came out genuine.

  “I’d like to mill around here a little bit.” He glanced at District Attorney Tallman and saw that she understood. This was a congregation of people who knew the victim, all in one place. An opportunity that wouldn’t come again.

  Reed clapped Kruse on the back, nodded at Tallman and Pyle, and moved off alone.

  He walked past a few vehicles until he got to the Ford conversion van and hung behind it a moment, just watching. No one knew him here – not that most cops were especially known in their communities, but he was a complete outsider and could use it to his advantage, be relatively anonymous. Like an inquisitive bystander. One with a gun in a waistband holster at his back, tucked from view; one with a badge in his jacket pocket, out of sight. He didn’t look like a cop anyway, he was told ad nauseam – not with the big beard Overman kept begging him to shave. It went with the tangles of his curly, graying black hair.

  And, he figured, following that line to the end, he had the physical look of guys you saw around here. He was muscly, but not exactly lean. Especially not since he’d quit smoking two years before and gained an instant ten pounds around his belly and waist. One tooth was missing on the back left from a particularly choppy day at sea. The scar on his shoulder and the one on his knee were both from childhood – just running around and playing; he’d never been big into sports.

  Speaking of sports, Reed spotted a man pedaling his bicycle down the road toward the scene. The man stopped just outside the crime scene tape and laid his bike in the grass and started talking with one of the deputies. Reed thought the guy was wearing too many clothes for the day, like he was homeless or not playing with a full deck. Maybe both.

  The guy was on the other side of the road and up a ways. Reed would make his way there. He stepped from the cover of the van and crossed the road, then walked down into the ditch and came up to the shoulder that way, sort of flanking the scene, looking at all the parked cars. Word had definitely gotten out fast. It was because the body discoverer was a teacher who then went to work, presumably.

  He listened as he neared Ida’s truck: quiet voices and someone gently weeping. The woman who’d been standing with Ida had moved to the front of the truck, where she smoked a cigarette. She saw Reed approaching as he emerged out of the ditch, her eyes pink and puffy from the emotion.

  “Hi,” Reed said.

  “Hi.”

  The voices were louder around back of the vehicle. Ida was talking to MacKinnon, giving her statement, hands making big gestures.

  “What’s your name?” Reed asked the woman.

  “Penny Walsh.”

  He looked past her at the loose group of onlookers – roughly twenty people. “Was there a kid here a minute ago? I mean, a young man?”

  “Tyson?” Walsh looked at Reed with skepticism. “You police?”

  “I am, yes, ma’am.”

  She took a drag, kept eyeing him with her cried-out eyes. “That was Kasey’s ex-boyfriend. Tyson Wheeler.”

  “Ex-boyfriend, huh?”

  “He left. Went back to school.”

  Reed nodded. He had the kid’s name and a good mental picture from what he’d seen: a chinstrap beard and some adolescent acne concentrated on his upper cheeks, icy blue eyes. He’d been taller than Reed by an inch or two. So maybe six feet.

  “Thanks,” Reed said.

  He eased his way through the growing group of onlookers – now twenty people. He expressed how sorry he was, asked what they knew, and, if they said they understood Kasey Stevens had been found dead in the woods, inquired how they knew her.

  So far, the latest anyone had seen her was coming out of the Elliston grocery store on Sunday morning.

  The guy with the bicycle was still around by the time Reed had worked his way through. He picked up his bike and stood beside it as Reed approached him along the road’s shoulder.

  “Howdy,” Reed said.

  “Hello, sir,” the man answered. He was light a couple of teeth himself.

  “Reed Raleigh, New York State Police.”

  “Oh,” the man said. He stuck out a grimy hand. “Lloyd Cox.”

  Reed shook. “Nice to meet you.”

  The fifty-something Cox sported a handlebar mustache tweaked at the end with some kind of putty to make it stiff, and his eyes had a yellow look to them. But he had a friendly vibe; he said he knew Kasey from seeing her come into the local convenience store, where he worked.

&nbs
p; “What did you think of her?”

  Cox pinched the end of his mustache, thinking. “You know, sweet kid. Seemed like a good head on her shoulders…” He shook his head, as if common sense didn’t line up with whatever sort of predicament the poor girl had gotten herself into.

  Reed asked, “How did you hear about this, this morning?”

  “Oh, I heard it on the scanner.”

  “You keep a scanner? Police and fire?”

  Cox nodded. “Yes, sir, I do. I like to stay informed in the event of anything. You know, could be something like a disaster. Could be something like this.”

  “Sure, sure,” Reed agreed. He looked around and let out a loud sigh. “It’s a really terrible thing.”

  “Yes, sir, it is.” Cox watched Reed, then let go of his mustache. “This place can be tough on kids.”

  “This place? You mean this town?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Well… all of it, really. Modern society. Lots of pressure on young kids.”

  Reed lowered his voice. “You think there was something that, ah…?”

  “I just mean that it’s not the same as when we were young. You know, I travelled around a lot. Saw the world.” He mimicked a device in his hand, like a smartphone, and mimed staring at it. “Today the world is all right there, in this little box in your hands. Getting into your brain.”

  Reed studied Cox, and he put on a smile and nodded. “I think that’s very insightful. Did Kasey ever say anything to you about that? About the modern world?”

  Cox shook his head. “No. I never really talked to her. I’m just saying what I observed. I’m an observer of people. Always have been. They see me and I look different, so they try to pretend I’m not there. Then I can just observe.”

  “I might have a little experience with that myself.”

  “Well, there you go,” Cox said. With that, he swung his leg over the bike. He really did have a lot of clothes on. It was late May, a week past Mother’s Day, and the mornings could be cool, but Reed couldn’t imagine himself comfortable with any more garments hanging on his own body. Cox wore two T-shirts at least, a flannel shirt, old sweatshirt over that, then a waxy rain jacket, like a cowboy duster.