Death at Dawn

by Arthur Day

  Billy nodded. “Sorry. My truck got me all pissed off and I can’t say that what with everything that’s been going down around here that I’ve felt comfortable lately. Sorry if I gave you an attitude. There was a group of us kids way back then and we ran all over these woods and the lake. Jake Warren was one of the group. His family ran a dairy farm a couple of miles up the road from here and he would walk over to see if I could play when his schoolwork and chores were done. It was a working farm, so the chores were never done, if you know what I mean, but his parents were pretty good about giving their son time to blow off steam. He was real good at school too and maybe that’s why they cut him some slack. He took advanced classes in just about everything. He would be part of the group after he did his homework, but we hardly saw him in the school itself.” He sipped his coffee and made a face. “Jesus I should’a made fresh. You want to give me your cup and I’ll get rid of this battery acid.”

  “What kind of boy was he? I mean was he shy or aggressive or moody, that kind of thing. What kind of temperament and personality did he have?”

  Billy pulled a can of coffee from an overhead cupboard and began the process of scooping it into the pot with a little plastic measure that came with the coffee. “I dunno. We was kids, you know and that was a long time ago. You show me a kid who doesn’t have lots of ups and downs and I’ll show you one who never gets out of bed. We’d play the usual games of hide and seek, capture the flag and all that. We’d be running through the woods and through each other’s houses. There was me and Jake and John Rossman and Susie Bencham. Sometimes we’d get into arguments about who won and who lost. I knew I could talk with Jake and he would never tell his parents or anyone else. I told him the first time I masturbated and he looked at me as if I had just discovered the Rosetta Stone, but he told no one.” Billy laughed and watched the pot as the coffee began to perk. “Everything was new and daring back then, even that. My parents never said anything until my dad caught me one day and told me that little boys who did that would grow up twisted inside.” Billy grinned and winked at me. “I didn’t believe him though. So Jacob could keep a secret, maybe to a fault. It was hard to get him to say much and you could never really tell what he was thinking. In fact, he didn’t laugh much now that I think back on it. Sometimes he’d grin and say ‘good one’ or something like that but that was about the closest he came to laughing. He had a temper too and he would explode without warning and want to fight anyone around him and destroy whatever he couldn’t fight. His face would kinda tighten up and he would stand there silent for a second and then go after whoever made him mad and it would take at least two of us to keep him from getting himself into deep shit if you know what I mean. When he lost his temper, he was like a crazy man. I don’t think he knew what he was doing when he was like that.” Billy shook his head in a gesture of both wonder and fear at the memory. “One time we were going to go to the fair but there was only room for three with my parents, so my father took some straws from the broom and we drew them to see who came up with the short one. Well it was Jake and he ran screaming at my dad trying to pound on him and dad just picked Jake up, slapped him, told him to snap out of it and then Jake was okay and back to his usual self. I dunno if that helps you much. Every kid goes through changes and different parts of their life. When I was seventeen I was sure that I was going to be the next billionaire. Just needed a couple of breaks that I never got. Thinking back on it now I know that I failed to make my own breaks. I have no idea if Jake did that or not. Sometimes what we do and say as a kid is not the same as what we do when we grow up and face reality of adulthood.”

  “But he wasn’t a loner?”

  “Nope. He was part of the group. Johnny was the loner. Liked to walk off by himself a lot but he would show up at my house or Jacob’s house and then we’d find Susie and the group would play or just walk through the woods. Like I said, we didn’t see him in school even at recess so I don’t know if he had friends in any of his classes. We never saw anyone.” He put a cup of fresh coffee in front of me and sat down again at the table. “He went away to school and I haven’t seen or heard from him since. I dunno. You could ask the others. Maybe he stayed in touch with one of them.”

  I decided to change direction. “So let’s say someone from out of the area wanted to buy an all-terrain vehicle but didn’t want to leave a trail of paper, checks, credit cards. That type of thing. Where would he look?”

  “Well that leaves out the dealerships like Griggs Deere up by the Mass border. He would be looking at the for sale adds in places like the Yankee Flyer. Practically everything you can think of comes up for sale in the Flyer if you are patient enough. Of course, he would have to change the ownership on the registration with the Department of Motor Vehicles but I think he would have at least a week of two in which to do that.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “What about if he brought it in from another state?”

  Long as it’s a state with reciprocal laws like New York, he wouldn’t need to do anything.” Billy thought for a moment while he sipped his coffee. “If he was just driving around his own land he wouldn’t need to register it at all.”

  “Any idea who owns the land where we found the ATV or where he drove it up the creek?”

  “Nope. I’ve been all over the place. Nobody has said diddly to me, but somebody probably owns it. Not a lot of free land in our little corner of the world unless it’s a state park and this isn’t.”

  Good at keeping secrets. I pushed that thought around in my mind while I stared out the kitchen window at the shed with his now-broken pickup. Even if Jacob had brought in an ATV and driven it up the creek at night, no mean feat even with a torch or flashlight, Billy should have heard the nose. Even with mufflers those machines are not quiet, and the creek ran only about one hundred yards behind Billy’s property. Maybe Billy was a sound sleeper and wouldn’t have heard a cannon if it had gone off in his back yard. Or maybe he had been dead drunk. I had seen no bottles of liquor on the counters, but I had no reason or authority to search further. “Any idea where Susie Bencham might be found?”

  Billy scratched his whiskers and looked down into his coffee cup. “Not really. I heard she got married but I don’t know if she’s still in the area. Her folks live in a house nearer the lake. At least they used to. Haven’t seen her in years. She was the life of the party was Susie. A bundle of energy and always laughing. We never took much seriously but she never took anything seriously. Life for our Susie was one long bird song and she warbled from one day to the next.” He grinned as he remembered his childhood friend.

  This was all to the good, but it did not get us any closer to finding the killer. People change as they grow to adulthood. Things important when you are a teenager become trivial and even meaningless. In the grinding task of making a living, we forget that we once ran through the woods playing capture the flag. If Susie had married she would be hard to find, particularly if she had married out of state. I thought if I could get together with Dianne we could divide up the research and come up with something.

  “Thanks Billy. You’ve been a big help. If I have another question can I give you a call?”

  “Sure. More coffee?”

  “Thanks, but I think I’m floating already.”

  I left the house determined to somehow get Dianne back on my side.

  Fat chance.

  JACOB WARREN

  Jacob sat cross-legged behind the log so still that no one would ever see him unless they were only feet away. He thought that was unlikely to happen. There were no small children in the area. He had checked it out before scouting his present position. Just Pam’s house and the Worth house further down the hill and some renters in a house a quarter mile away. He was completely camo’d and would sit very still until that night. The rain started and, within seconds, he was drenched but did not move. It was only water and he would not melt. He had his cell phone safely dry insi
de a waterproof pouch around his waist. He watched the house and the dirt drive leading up to it. Sooner or later McCaal would show up and when he did Jacob could not help a soft chuckle at that thought.

  Ol’ Jake Warren had learned explosives in the army and had learned his lessons well. Pam was gone and good riddance to that two-timing bitch and he would soon take care of the moronic monkey who had taken Pam from him. As the water dripped off his baseball cap he thought back to Manhattan, a place where someone got whacked almost every day in one of the boroughs. When she told him that she was engaged to someone else he had flown into a rage and broken everything in his apartment. The super had called that his neighbors were complaining of the noise. He had come to his senses, thrown out all the stuff that was broken and started thinking about how he would get back at that cunt and her soon-to-be prick of a husband.

  He knew he could not do it in New York City. Too many people stacked on top of each other. Too many ears and eyes. Also, the police would quickly connect his relationship with Pam and he would be one of the first under suspicion. He did not know how long fingerprints lasted or whether the lab techs could determine their age, but he knew that his would be in her apartment. It wasn’t a chance not worth taking. Dorothy Parker said it best. Revenge is a dish best served cold. He could wait. He would wait and the pressure inside of him would slowly build.

  Jacob peered through the rain that was coming down so hard that he had problems seeing the house only twenty yards away. Thank God he’d had the foresight to put his little surprise in the perfect position before the bad weather had moved in. He thought he heard a car coming down the road, but the noise faded as it went down towards one of the other houses. Warren did not move. He blinked his eyes.

  Then it happened. He heard the grinding hum of another car and watched as it swung into the driveway and drove up just in front of the porch leading to the door. Two people got out and ran towards the door disappearing inside. One was smaller with blue jeans and a yellow shirt that was plastered to her body.

  Fuck. He was sure the big figure was McCaal but he had company. Not good. Figures, he thought, that the bastard would come up with another woman when his wife’s body was hardly cold. Revenge did not include collateral damage. He had been collateral damage and he had empathy for innocents hurt through no fault of their own. He faded slowly back away from the log until he was sure he could get to his feet and make it to his car without being seen. The package would wait and, until then, he could enjoy imagining the aftermath of his surprise. BOOM.

  BUCKMASTER

  He hated paperwork with the same passion he loved fieldwork. Buckmaster looked bleakly at his desk. Duty rosters, payday sign-offs, cruiser maintenance, a memo from the town manager, a small book of regulations by the Feds and the State. If he could spend as much time solving crime as he did on vehicle rotations and personnel grievances and union bureaucracy he would be the Dick Tracy of law enforcement (minus the holes of course). No matter how much he complained about ever-increasing regulations that sometimes restricted his job to arresting Barbie and Ken dolls and then watching them walk back out onto the streets with nothing changed. God forbid his men should even detain an illegal. There would be a mountain of paperwork, psychotic rants on social media and he couldn’t even turn the jerk over to the Feds because that would upset all the “democratic” illegal voters in the ghettos and the barrios, people whom the Connecticut politicians gave lip service to every couple of years at election time.

  It was enough to drive a sane man mad and maybe that’s why he had ended up in this job, that and the fact that he had at that time a family to take care of. Now the kids were grown and living in a galaxy far, far away and his wonderful life mate was dead years before. He felt a moment of inchoate sadness, a memory of loss so profound that the papers in front of him blurred and he turned his chair to look out his one window for a moment. He was the sheriff of the county though and was supposed to be above all such feelings. He thanked God for Nicole, she who had touched his soul and healed his body because she had been a victim of attempted rape. Her face took over his mind and soothed him to where he could look once again at this desk.

  There was something about the Pease murder that was bugging him, something that was just a little bit strange. He did not yet know who had killed her and that was a media shit-storm in itself. The Courant was braying about police inefficiency. The Waterbury paper was sure that they could have solved the crime in half the time. Facebook was full of junior sheriffs who absolutely knew what to do and how to do it. Facebook. Buckmaster suddenly realized that, like most people of his generation, he had not thought about checking online to see if Pam had a Facebook Id. Pushing the papers aside with an excited sweep of his arm, he brought Facebook up on his computer.

  Buckmaster sat nursing his tonic and lime and watching the front door of the Rockmarsh Garden Grill. He needed to meet with MJ to find out what the man had learned about Jacob Warren who was fast becoming more than just a person of interest, someone who had been asking questions about Pam and who knew that she spent summers up on Lake Compton. There was nothing to tie him to the murder, at least not yet. The lab had found not prints on the wreck of the ATV, but they had matched the scrape on the rock in the creek to a gash in the oil pan of the vehicle. It had definitely been used to drive up the creek towards the spot where her body was dumped. A scrap of cloth, identified as part of an expensive Harris Tweed jacket, had been found. That seemed to point to someone who was well-off financially although it was impossible to tell exactly where the fragment came from or who sold it. He knew of no shop in Rockmarsh that sold such upscale clothing. Harris Tweed was produced in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and the quality was controlled by a law, but many clothing manufactures used it and even more stores sold it under various labels. Probably another dead end, he thought. Would someone who was an expert on this type of cloth be able to tell where it came from? Buckmaster did not know but he made a mental note to get the lab techs working on the question. Also, if he ever came close enough to get a warrant and was able to match the fragment with the jacket it came from…

  He came out of these thoughts as the door opened and MJ McCaal came in filling both the doorway and the small diner with his presence. “Evening Sheriff. What a surprise seeing you here,” he joked as he walked over to Buckmaster’s table and sat down opposite him.

  “MJ.”

  A petit, brunette girl in a dark blue uniform came over. “What’ll it be? Can I get you s menu?”

  “Jack on the rocks. No menu Carol.”

  The waitress smiled, scribbled the order on her pad and headed towards the bar at the other end of the room. “She is one of the nicest waitresses I know,” MJ commented.

  Buckmaster nodded in agreement and then got down to business. “We need to compare information on this Jacob Warren person. I went into Pam’s Facebook today. She didn’t mention him by name, but she did a Facebook Live session while she was out walking. In the background there is what appears to be a man standing on the opposite side of the road as she passes him. I’ve got the nerds trying to identify him. Might have been Worth. He was apparently exercising with her in the mornings,”

  “I talked with Billy Black today. I figured that whoever did this and then crashed the ATV where no one would find it for a while had to have grown up in the area. Billy says that Warren grew up here and he was part of a group of kids who ran all over these woods. I’m hoping Dianne can come up with something more recent maybe through one of her connections, but she hasn’t called back yet. Probably out showing houses.”

  Buckmaster nodded. “Interesting but that does not tie him to the murder. Anyone could have ridden the ATV up the creek. We could find no prints so whoever it was wore gloves. Billy could have driven it up there for that matter. I’m not saying he did. He’s cooperated and all that, but we can’t rule him out any more than Jacob Warren. He seems unlikely though because he’s live
d in this one area his whole life. Jacob, on the other hand, ended up in New York working in publishing and doing well so I’m told.

  “Do we know how he came to know Mazzumo?”

  “I called her office and left a message. I’d like to get the details of that conversation. She said that the man knew that the Senator and Julia Pease were friends.”

  “I should probably talk with Julia again. This seems more and more as if whoever killed Pam had some link to her in her past and not her recent past at that.”

  “Okay. I’ll take Mazzumo’s aid. There’s lots of uniforms around the State Capital. It will be easier for her to talk with me.”

  The Connecticut State Capital building is a huge chunk of nineteenth century architecture with a central piece and wings on each side. It is not beautiful but it sits on top of a rise surrounded by a park so it has a lot of presence. Buckmaster looked at all the crenellations and architectural do-dads along with the obligatory central tower holding the gold painted dome. Very stately. Recently redone, the dome almost glowed in the morning light.

  Buckmaster walked through the central corridor and got directions to Mazzumo. The legislature was in session. The aide had directed him to a small conference room on the second floor of the senate wing. He knocked and then opened the door.

  “Good morning Sheriff. Come in and have a seat. I’d offer coffee, but I have to be back on the floor in a few minutes.” The woman was tall, almost statuesque with blond hair drawn back and put into an intricate knot on the back of her head. She had a narrow face with patrician features that surely belonged on a movie set including large green eyes. “I’m Jessica Torrents, Don Mazzumo’s chief of staff. You were interested in a phone call I took from Jacob Warren? She sat down rather primly, Buckmaster thought, and stared across the table at him.