by Claire Booth
‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘I look forward to meeting you.’
That got her another snort and a curt hang-up. She laughed, because she hadn’t been kidding. She was quite eager to meet the errant son who hadn’t bothered to ask normal questions about where or when his father was murdered. She looked at the time and realized she was late to meet Kurt at the scene. On the way out to Nighthawk Lane, she made a call to the Des Moines PD watch commander and asked if he had someone available to do a quick observational drive-by for her. When she gave him the name, he used the term ‘low-life asshat’ and said he’d be happy to help. She finished the drive with a smile on her face.
Bill Ramsdell sat slouched in his squad car. Sam could hear some sort of podcast as he tapped on the window. The glass slid down and Bill blinked at him.
‘You OK, man? You look a little out of it.’ He handed over the coffee he’d picked up on his way out to the Timmons’s house. The poor guy’s face lit up, and he downed half of it before speaking.
‘Graveyard’s bad enough. But graveyard where you’re just sitting in one spot the whole time? Torture. Worse than waterboarding, man. I will never complain about patrol again.’ He opened the car door and stiffly climbed out, still clutching his coffee like a life preserver.
‘So I’m guessing nothing happened?’ Sam said, sipping at his own coffee. There was no breeze, so the trees were still and the house itself looked almost peaceful, if you didn’t count the crime scene tape all over the place.
‘Nah. Not a thing. I did a walk-around every hour or so. No street traffic – except two people got home about one a.m. over there.’
He pointed at the barbecue house. Sam nodded. Those must be Frank Hord’s roommates. He’d go over and talk to them this morning.
‘And about an hour ago, the lights came on there.’ Bill nodded subtly in the direction of Madge Lerman’s house. ‘Been watching me ever since. Like constantly. A little creepy, if you ask me.’
‘Yeah. I talked to her yesterday. She’s definitely the neighborhood busybody. Apparently she’s always complaining, or telling folks what to do. No one on the street can stand her.’
Bill made a scoffing sound. ‘I don’t blame them.’
They stood for a minute in the cold pre-dawn air and worked on their coffee.
‘How much longer you on graveyard?’ Sam asked.
Only another week, Bill said, then he’d be back to days. Everyone rotated through, so that no one was stuck on that duty all the time. That was the one good thing about Sheila’s overtime crack-down, he said. It was less likely that deputies would be pressured into picking up those crappy shifts for others. Some of the younger guys got taken advantage of that way.
Sam laughed. He knew all about that. Bill was a decent guy – he’d never done it. Somebody like Hoch, on the other hand, did it all the time and then somehow finagled primo day shift overtime. Sam thought about that for a moment.
‘So, uh, that’s a good point, about the graveyard overtime. What do you think about the new policy, like, as a whole?’ He cringed inwardly. What a terrible segue. Thank goodness Bill seemed too tired to notice.
‘Meh.’ Bill shrugged. ‘It looks all fine and dandy on paper. Course, that’s her specialty, isn’t it? Sitting there in her office and working stuff out on paper – not being out in the real world. What’s she going to do later this winter when people start calling in sick? How’re you going to cover those shifts without overtime?’
Sam was pretty sure that Sheila had a plan for that, but he kept quiet and just nodded as Bill continued.
‘And don’t think folks haven’t thought of that. They’re thinking it’s the way to prove their point. Turn things back to the way it was.’ He gave Sam a look out of the corner of his eye that said a lot more than his words were doing. ‘Some folks, anyways. Folks that don’t like new things. Or new people.’
He fell silent and started swishing around the dregs of his coffee. Sam stared at the ground. He hadn’t realized it was quite that bad. He knew the overtime ban wouldn’t go over well. But now it sounded like there was some kind of actual organized sick-out in the works. Which would be a direct challenge to Sheila, and to Hank. And Bill, good guy that he was, was standing here telling the deputy known to work closely with them both. He forced his gaze back up and looked at Bill.
‘That’s interesting,’ he said slowly. ‘Definitely something to think on.’
Bill nodded. ‘You should. I wouldn’t want you caught in anything.’
An engine rumble came from down the street and they both turned to see Kurt drive up in the department’s crime scene van. Bill moved to lift the perimeter tape so Kurt could get closer to the house. Sam grabbed the other end and the van crunched down the gravel driveway. Kurt was almost done unpacking equipment when Sheila pulled up. She hopped out of her cruiser and approached them with a smile.
‘Good morning, gentlemen. How is everything?’
Bill reported on his boring night of guard duty and asked when she wanted him back in the evening.
‘Oh, Lord no. You don’t have to do this two nights in a row. I’ll get somebody else. You just report for your regular patrol shift – although I might need you to also cover a little farther east than normal if I pull that deputy off to come sit here.’
‘I can do that, no problem,’ Bill said. ‘That’s a lot better than having to sit still outside a dead man’s house.’
She smiled sympathetically and told him he could go home. As he opened his car door, he looked once more at Sam, who could only respond with a tight nod as Sheila stood right next to him. Bill hung a U and sped away. Sheila turned and smacked her hands together with a grin. Sam took a step back.
‘Why are you in such a good mood?’
She told him about finding the low-life son. That put a smile on Sam’s face, too.
‘We need some context, though,’ Sheila said. ‘We’ve got to track down some friends. Somebody who can tell us something about this guy. Alice is still cataloging all the paperwork, but she did find a few mailings.’
She pulled out her notebook. The local Salvation Army, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the United States Bocce Federation.
‘Can I take those?’ Sam said. He told her about the red Cadillac that nosy Ms Lerman mentioned. ‘I can ask around at those places, see if anybody knows that kind of car.’
‘Good idea. And I’m going to go talk to his bank. See what I can wheedle out of them before the warrant comes through.’
They agreed to touch base at lunchtime, and Sheila turned to go into the house.
‘Oh,’ Sam said. He’d meant to ask her first thing, but he’d forgotten. ‘What’d Hank say?’
She stopped and patted at her hair for a little too long before she turned back around to face him. He gaped at her.
‘You haven’t told him, have you? You didn’t call him?’
‘I did not. He is on vacation.’
Sam’s mouth was still hanging open. He snapped it shut. ‘Are you nuts?’ he said without thinking.
She stiffened and her nostrils flared alarmingly. He held up his hands.
‘No, I just mean – he’d want to know. You know him. He’d totally want to know about it.’
‘I know that,’ she said. ‘And I thought about it. And decided that we can brief him fully when he gets back. And that will be fine.’
She arched an eyebrow. Which meant that the discussion was over. Sam decided the safest thing to do was hustle his ass back to the car and get started on those newsletters. And make sure he was nowhere near when Hank came home and found out there’d been a murder and nobody’d told him.
TEN
She lived in a newish condo development off Columbia’s Old Highway 63. Hank parked down the street and watched it for a bit. People in surrounding units left for work, hustling out with lunch bags and attaché cases. Lots of solitary middle-aged people. Probably divorced. The whole condo development gave off that vibe.
He watched Tina
Hardy’s quiet unit from the obscenely comfortable BMW. Jerry had offered him the Acura, and it had taken everything Hank had to say no. The coupe was less conspicuous and the majority of his day would be surveillance, so he’d quickly grabbed the Bimmer key and left before he changed his mind. Now at least he could sink into the leather headrest and cushy lumbar support while he waited for an empty street. And his aching head needed the comfort. They’d closed down the bar after so many beers, Hank had lost count. Damn Jerry. He squinted in the feeble winter sunlight and sipped his coffee. Finally, things cleared out enough and he got out of his cocoon and walked to Hardy’s door.
The potted plant on the doorstep was dead and the doormat was dusty. There was no answer when he rang the bell – he hadn’t expected there would be. He stood for a minute and then fumbled and dropped the BMW key fob. He knelt down to pick it up and quickly looked under the mat. No key. He shifted and sent the car key sliding across the step toward the plant. That let him reach for it with one hand while balancing his other on the plant stand. He felt around the bottom water dish and tilted the plant to the side. Bingo. A standard size key was taped to the bottom of the pot. He yanked it off, grabbed his car key and rose to his feet. He’d have to think seriously about whether he was actually going to use it, though. If he was in uniform, he could just let himself in. This not-acting-in-an-official-capacity approach was a pain in the ass.
He got back in the car and after tooling around the neighborhood, headed toward downtown and the county courthouse. Parking was a bitch, not only because of the government crowd, but also because the area was only a few blocks north of the university. Infringing college students always nabbed any parking spots they could get. He finally found a spot, squeezing the BMW in between a cargo van and a battered SUV and praying it didn’t get scratched.
The courthouse was too grand a setting for the grubbing he needed to do. It had soaring three-story columns along the front and a domed roof. He made his way to the clerk’s office and immediately found Hardy’s divorce case number. He requested the file and sat down to read.
It was standard in its awfulness, her divorce. It was interesting to learn about it in such a sterile way. Hank was usually right in the middle of it – taking the report of a man whose car had been keyed by an angry wife, or stepping in between yelling spouses, or calling the domestic violence helpline as a woman sat and sobbed on the curb while her handcuffed husband was bundled into a cruiser. Thankfully there wasn’t anything that bad in the file of Tina and Darwood Hardy. The divorce decree sat on the top and underneath were filings that divvied up the couple’s assets. A house in an older section of Columbia that they’d sold outright, dividing the proceeds right down the middle. A retirement account that he’d tried to hang on to, but a judge had split that in half, too.
He kept flipping through, going further back in time. And then he froze. There was a protection order. Tina claimed Darwood had threatened her, trashed her home office, and kidnapped the dog. The order required him to move out of the house and take an anger management course. This was almost a year ago. The order had been in effect for six months and hadn’t been renewed. That didn’t make much sense. Had she let the guy move back in? Or did they just amicably decide to throw in the marriage towel and go their separate ways?
Somehow neither of those possibilities felt right. Hank returned the file, extracted his car from its tiny space, and drove over to the house the Hardys had sold. This time as he parked on the street, he hoped that there were neighbors around. He got lucky immediately. A gentleman across the road and two doors down was out raking leaves. Hank introduced himself as a friend of Tina Hardy’s family.
‘She hasn’t been in touch lately, and I just thought that since I’m here in Columbia, I’d ask after her,’ Hank said. He’d decided to pretend that he thought the Hardys still lived in the nice single-story brick ranch with a detached garage. ‘Have you seen her around lately?’
‘Oh, they haven’t lived there in about six months,’ the old man said, leaning against his rake and pushing his wool hat farther back on his head.
Hank tried to look surprised and mumbled something about writing the forwarding addresses down in the wrong order.
‘I think they sold it as part of the divorce. Because then they were both gone, just like that.’ The man snapped his fingers.
‘Was she the only one living in it for a while?’
‘You mean, did she kick him out?’ he chortled. ‘She sure did. They had a huge ruckus one night. So much yelling and crashing around. Folks heard it all up and down the street. She had somebody come out the next day and change the locks. She still always looked jumpy after that, though.’
‘Did he ever come around again?’
‘Oh, we’d see him on occasion. A lot of times when she wasn’t there. Honestly’ – the old man shook his head and sighed – ‘both of them were just ripe for the divorce – always snipping at each other in the yard, or going out alone. There was no happiness in that house, I can tell you that.’
Interesting. He asked a few more questions, but the old guy wasn’t able to tell him much else. He started wielding his rake again and then paused.
‘You ought to go talk to Lorna.’ He pointed at the house right next door to the unhappy Hardys. ‘She had a front row seat to the whole thing. Didn’t much appreciate the view, either.’
Hank thanked him and immediately headed across the street. Lorna’s door opened before he’d finished pushing the doorbell.
‘I’ve been watching you through my ring,’ said the woman, who was that certain kind of slender that made her look much taller than she really was. She had perfect posture and gray hair pulled back in a loose bun. Her hands were bare.
‘Not a ring. That Ring.’ She pointed at the doorbell, which was one of those video monitoring systems. ‘It catches a fairly wide section of the street. What were you talking to Tom about?’
Hank gave her his family-friend line. Lorna Shelton, unfortunately, was a much sharper tack than Raking Tom had been.
‘If she hasn’t lived here in so long, why do you care what we’ve got to say? Shouldn’t you be asking her current neighbors if they’ve seen her?’
Hank shifted uncomfortably on the front step. His head still hurt and the piercing look she was giving him wasn’t helping. She was seeing right through him not only to his hangover but also to the pack of lies he was carting around. He looked over at the Hardys’ old home for a moment and made a decision.
‘You’re right. And I plan on it when those folks come home from work. But here’s the thing. It’s not just that her family hasn’t heard from her. It’s that no one has heard from her. She hasn’t shown up for work in weeks. There’s been no contact.’
He raised his eyebrows, hoping Lorna’s astuteness would do the rest. It did.
‘Oh, dear. So you want to know more about the ex-husband, don’t you?’
Hank nodded. Her spine straightened even more, which he wouldn’t have thought possible. She’d made a decision. She gestured around the side of the house.
‘If you’d come around the back …’
Hank stepped away so she could come out the front door. She closed it behind her and led the way toward the backyard.
‘They lived here for about six years. When they moved in, they were just normal. An ordinary couple, you know. They didn’t seem to be newlyweds or anything. They had that sense of … being established.’
‘And what were they like, individually?’
Lorna thought that over. Darwood was friendly in passing, but certainly wasn’t the chatty type. He always had his satchel and his books and that sort of thing and seemed to be more interested in getting to whatever more important place he was going than he was in talking to the neighbors.
‘He thought very highly of himself, but he’s certainly not the first college professor I’ve known who’s like that,’ she said.
Tina was the one who brought over cookies at Christmas time and ask
ed about Lorna’s grandkids. It was like she knew she needed to be the one to soften her husband’s sharp edges. She was quiet, but not shy. Just someone who came across as thoughtful and deliberate. She was originally from the St Louis suburb of Chesterfield and moved to Columbia after she met and married Darwood. That was about ten years ago. She worked a couple different places in the time she lived next door, always as some kind of executive assistant, although Lorna unfortunately couldn’t remember which places.
‘She just seemed to like to move around. Like she’d go in somewhere and kind of master it, and then need something new. So she’d switch jobs. She was looking for a new one when everything started to change. That was about a year and a half ago.’
By now, they were in Lorna’s meticulously landscaped backyard. She stopped and considered the Hardy house for a long moment before speaking again. He got the feeling she was gathering things she’d sensed during that time but had never put into formal thoughts, let alone words.
They never went anywhere together. They kept different schedules. The whole place seemed shuttered and miserable, which was a silly thing to say about a house, but it was true. Every once in a while she would hear arguments, voices that were tight and angry. But the yelling only came once. It was a Sunday night about this time last year. Chilly. But their windows were open. There was crashing and swearing and such inside the house, and then Darwood had come bursting out the back door. He was disheveled, which was quite odd. He was always fastidious about his appearance – very professorial at all times with his pressed jeans and blazers. But that night, he wore sweats and a grungy sweater and carried a baseball bat. He raged around a bit – there really was no other way to describe it – and then went back in the house. That was when Lorna went for her phone to call the police. But then, just as she was about to dial, he came out the front. Instead of the bat, he was holding the dog. It was Tina’s little Pekinese and she was going crazy. Darwood got in his car with the dog and sped off.