All Mortal Flesh

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  Lyle never in a million years could have pictured him hunched over in the snow, crying snot-faced, unable to speak.

  Noble had made it three steps out of the kitchen door of 398 Peekskill Road before collapsing, openmouthed and weeping. He had reholstered his flashlight but forgotten to turn it off, and now a beam of light jerked up and down as his tree-sized back shook with sobs. Fat snowflakes blazed for a moment in glory and then vanished into the deepening drifts on the ground.

  None of the three police vehicles parked in the drive had its lights on. Lyle had radioed them to go dark almost as soon as he had gotten the brief from Harlene, their dispatcher. Instead, he had left the mudroom door, open when they arrived, pushed wide. Warm light spilling out. Cold air seeping in.

  “Jesus, Noble,” he said. “Try to pull it together.”

  Noble twisted his head in Lyle’s direction. “Pull it together,” he gasped out. “Did you . . . did you see her? Her face is just gone.”

  Lyle, shadowed against the bright light spilling from the mudroom and screened by the fast-falling snow, knew he was no more than a blur to his officer. And thank God for it. His self-control was hanging by a thread. One wrong word, one tiny misstep, and he was going to lose it as bad as Noble. Poor sonofabitch. He racked up his voice to make a steady shot. “I saw her.” Butchered like an animal. “You’re not going to help her by falling apart.”

  He scanned the road. A lone car drove toward them, slowed down, and kept on going. Good. He heard the muffled crunch of boots through loose and packed layers of snow. “Whaddya got, Eric?”

  “I completed the friend’s statement.” Officer Eric McCrea’s features emerged out of the darkness as he plodded toward the long rectangle of light. “Are you sure you don’t want me to run her down to the station and get it on video?”

  “No.”

  Eric leaned in closer, as if to pierce the shadow cast by the brim of Lyle’s cap. “This is not the time for shortcuts. We’re going to catch the fucker who did this, and when we do, we don’t want him getting off because we were half-assed putting the evidence together.”

  Lyle drew in a breath to ream McCrea out, but cut it short with a click of his teeth. It wasn’t his fault. He was on edge. They all were. And Lyle wasn’t going to be able to carry this off by himself. He was going to need one or two others backing him up. Containment—that was going to be the trick.

  “Well?” Eric demanded.

  A brilliant splash of light broke their stare-off. Another vehicle was churning up the driveway’s slope, its headlights bouncing through the billows of white.

  “Shit. That’s Kevin Flynn’s truck.” Lyle glared at McCrea. “Did you call him?”

  “No. But what if I did? What the hell’s the deal, MacAuley?”

  The almost-new Aztek looked like what it was, the prize possession of a boy who got his first learner’s permit seven years ago. It rumbled to a stop behind McCrea’s badly angled squad car, and Flynn jumped out. Kevin, the most junior officer of the Millers Kill Police Department, was finally getting enough meat on his bones to lessen his resemblance to a six-foot Howdy Doody puppet. In an effort to look older than sixteen, he had lately grown a soul patch, a would-be-cool square of facial hair beneath his lower lip. Unfortunately, Flynn’s facial hair was the same color as the stuff on top, and he now looked—to Lyle’s old and uncool eyes, at least—as if he had an enormous furry freckle on his chin.

  “Harlene called me! On my cell phone!” Kevin kicked through the snow, his face open and eager. “I told her I wasn’t working today, but she said to get over here. Whadda we doing at the chief’s house?” He had gotten close enough to finally make out Lyle’s and Eric’s expressions. He frowned. “Guys? What’s up?”

  Harlene called him. Lyle’s heart sank. Christ, she was probably ringing up every guy on the force to pitch in. How the hell was he going to manage this now?

  Behind him, Noble lurched upright, a messy, tear-sodden bear emerging from its den. Flynn saw him. “Noble?” He turned to Lyle. He looked scared. “Is it . . . is it the chief?”

  “No.”

  The one-word answer didn’t do anything to relieve the anxiety on Kevin’s face. Lyle breathed in and tried again. “The chief is fine, Kevin. We’re trying to . . . deal with a crime scene here without drawing too much attention to ourselves.” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Eric’s jaw swing open. “This is what you can do for me. Take your truck and park it at the intersection of Peekskill and River Road. You got your flares?”

  Kevin nodded.

  “Good. I’ve called in the state police CS unit. They’re going to be sending a van and a couple of techs, and I want you to be on the lookout for ’em. You know how it can be with people from away driving these country roads. You send ’em up here. Can you do that?”

  Kevin nodded again. His expression relaxed. The low-man-on-the-totem-pole job; this was familiar territory.

  “You need anything, you call Harlene on your cell phone. Don’t use your radio.”

  “I don’t have one in my Aztek yet.”

  “Okay, go.”

  Flynn fluffed through the snow, intent on his assigned task.

  “That’s the biggest load of bullshit make-work I’ve ever seen. There’s not a man in Troop G who couldn’t find this road in the dark, and half of ’em probably know which house is the chief’s.”

  Lyle nodded. “That’s why I put in the call to Troop D.”

  McCrea stared at him. “Are you nuts? They’re down in Amsterdam. It’ll take their CS unit an hour to get here.” He scrubbed his face with one gloved hand, dislodging the snowflakes that were attaching themselves to his eyelashes and beard.

  “Eric,” Lyle said. “Stop. And think for a moment. Forget who all’s involved. Lay it out like a domestic violence case.”

  Eric’s mouth twisted in disgust. “Domestic violence?”

  “Just do it for me.”

  “Okay.” McCrea closed his eyes for a moment. “A woman found dead in her home. No signs of forcible entry. No known history of drugs. No arrests. No known involvement with any suspicious individuals.”

  “The victim recently separated from her husband,” Lyle added. “The husband left the marital home under protest. The husband has access to weapons and is trained in their use.”

  Eric stared at him. “You can’t say . . . Jesus, you don’t think the chief had anything to do with this?”

  “Ssh. Keep it down.” Thank God, this part he had already rehearsed. He didn’t hesitate. “Of course I don’t think the chief was involved. But if you didn’t know him, if you didn’t have any stake in this investigation, who would you peg as the prime suspect?”

  Eric’s mouth worked before he could get the words out. “The victim’s husband.”

  “And if this investigation gets taken away from us and handed over to the staties, who do you think they’ll come down on?”

  Eric shook his head. “But . . .”

  “You don’t think we can crack this case without their help?”

  “No, but—”

  “ ’Cause I’ll tell you what the staties will do. They’re gonna tag the chief as it, and the entire rest of the investigation is gonna be devoted to proving them right. If we don’t want that to happen, we need to keep this as quiet and lowkey as possible. We need to control any information, starting right here and now. Are you with me?”

  Eric stared down at the snow beneath their boots, packed by the footsteps of everyone who had already crossed this dooryard and gotten involved. “I gotta tell you, Lyle. I been a cop ten years now, and four as an MP before that. And this . . . this gives me a bad feeling.”

  “Christ almighty, don’t you think I feel the same way? It’s making me sick to my stomach. If you think it’d go down a different way if the staties took over, please, convince me. I’d love to hear I’m wrong.”

  “You aren’t wrong.” Eric squinted toward the neighbor’s house, a good quarter-mile away on the ridgeline. L
ights had come on in the windows. Lyle thought he could see someone’s silhouette. Watching them. “Okay,” McCrea said. “I’m in.”

  “Good. I want you to run the crime scene. You know to expect the Troop D CS.” A mournful yowl wound through the sky from somewhere behind the barn. “For God’s sake, get ahold of her cat and get it to a shelter.”

  “Will do.”

  “I’m heading back to the station. I’m going to call the ME when I get into town.”

  “You sure you want to wait that long to get the medical examiner out here?”

  “Yes. Control. That’s our motto here. Control. I need to tell Harlene to clamp down on the phone calls.” His gut churned, acid and fear and regret all mixed together. “And I need to tell the chief.”

  SIX

  Russ Van Alstyne was really, really pissed off. It surprised him; he had figured he had hours, if not days, of leaden, white-noise numbness ahead of him. Of course, he hadn’t counted on getting picked up—picked up! Like he had a warrant out on him!—by one of his own officers. At the meat counter of the IGA.

  He had to admit, Mark was good. He had hustled Russ out of there and into his squad car almost before he knew what had happened. It wasn’t that Russ minded getting called in on a moment’s notice. Lord knows, that had happened more than once in his life. Although he couldn’t recall a time when he had had to abandon a half-filled basket of groceries.

  No, what hacked him off was Mark’s refusal to tell him what was going on. “I can’t say” became “I really don’t know anything,” which turned to “Your guess is as good as mine, chief.”

  Russ knew he was being a pain in the ass, but he couldn’t figure out anything that would require Mark to drag him in to the station with zero intel on the situation. Even if the unthinkable had happened, and one of his men had been wounded or killed, it would be squawking all over the radio.

  The radio. It was part of a nifty computerized information system, currently dark, mounted below the edge of the dash. The whole computers-in-the-cars thing still amazed him. Probably more evidence that he was rapidly approaching the age where they could push him out into the open sea on an ice floe.

  He started pressing on buttons. Computer, radio, monitor.

  “Uh.” Mark turned toward him. “I don’t think you ought to do that, Chief.”

  “Keep your eyes on the road. I don’t want to wind up in the ditch.”

  Mark snapped to front, but his attention was all on the small screen, running its boot-up sequence. “Uh. Deputy Chief MacAuley told me to maintain radio silence.”

  “Did he, now?” Russ unhooked the mike. “Did he say anything about me maintaining radio silence?”

  “No . . . but I think he—”

  “Were your orders to put me under arrest, Durkee?”

  Somehow, Mark managed to come to attention while sitting behind the wheel of a moving car. “No, Chief!”

  “Then let me explain how it works. Lyle is the deputy chief. That means he gets to tell you what to do. I’m the chief. That means I get to tell him what to do.” The computer screen was asking for an officer number before allowing access. Russ tapped his own into the small strip of keyboard bolted in beneath the screen. The system happily blipped him in.

  He keyed the mike. “Dispatch? This is—” He turned to Mark. “What’s your car number?”

  “Fifty-four-ten.” Mark was either defeated or disgusted. Russ couldn’t tell which.

  “This is fifty-four-ten inbound. I’d like to know why I’m not at home making soup right now.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Dispatch?” He pulled the mike higher, checking for a loose connection.

  “Chief? Is that you?” Finally. Harlene sounded odd.

  “Yes. It’s me. And I want to know what the hell is going on.”

  Another pause. “It’s . . .” A crackle. “I think . . .” A staticky beat. “Just get here as soon as you can. Dispatch out.” Harlene clicked off from her end.

  He stared at the computer. Harlene never hung up on him. Never. He keyed the mike. “Dispatch. Dispatch? Harlene?” She wouldn’t come back on the line. “Well, if that’s not the damndest thing I’ve ever seen.” He frowned at Mark. “Is this some sort of elaborate practical joke? ’Cause if it is, I can guarantee you I won’t be laughing.”

  “Honest, chief. I got the call, MacAuley said to bring you in, and that’s all I know.”

  Christ on a bicycle. Russ prayed that Lyle hadn’t taken it into his head to cheer him up. He could just imagine what his deputy—a long-divorced, self-proclaimed ladies’ man—would consider a picker-upper. Probably a pair of strippers dressed as beat cops. One word leaked about something like that and Russ would be handing his head to the Millers Kill aldermen on a silver platter.

  “We’re here,” Mark said helpfully, bumping over the strip separating the police department’s parking lot from the road.

  “Thanks,” Russ said. “I might not have recognized it with all the pretty snow.”

  Mark flushed red and jammed his cap on his head. They both got out. Russ scanned the parking lot as he tromped toward the front steps. He recognized Lyle’s Pontiac Cruiser and Eric McCrea’s Subaru station wagon. Noble’s nondescript Buick and Harlene’s Explorer. Nobody who shouldn’t be on duty right now, thank God. That ruled out the stripper party. Unless Lyle was planning on wrestling him over to the Golden Banana in Saratoga?

  He mounted the unswept granite steps carefully, Mark at his back, and stomped down the hallway toward his office, shedding snow as he went. The Millers Kill police station was state-of-the-art law enforcement construction—in 1880. Lots of granite, marble, and frosted glass. Very few spaces convenient for large electronic dispatch and routing boards. A great big holding tank in the basement, from the days when judges rode the circuit in buggies. A warren of small offices above stairs.

  Harlene’s communications center had been knocked together from two small rooms and straddled the space between the officers’ bullpen (formerly three offices and a storage closet) and Russ’s office (original, but with much uglier furniture than his predecessors had a century ago).

  “I hope someone has an explanation for me,” Russ said, entering the dispatch room. Harlene looked at him, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy. She silently pointed toward his own door like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—if the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had had a tightly curled iron-gray perm and a purple MKHS Minutemen sweatshirt on its rotund form.

  Sighing, he went in. Lyle was standing there waiting for him. Big surprise.

  “Okay, what is it?” Russ crossed to his battered metal desk and plunked himself into his chair. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at his deputy.

  Lyle shut the door. Tested the handle. He bit the inside of his cheek. “There’s been—” He stopped. “I have to—” He seemed genuinely disturbed.

  Russ leaned forward, bracing his elbows on various pieces of half-completed paperwork. “Just tell me, Lyle.”

  MacAuley sat down. Russ always thought of Lyle as a contemporary, but in the unkind fluorescent light, Russ realized his friend and sounding board was closer to sixty than fifty. His bushy eyebrows had as much white as gray in them, and the folds beneath his eyes, which normally gave him a deceptively lazy look, were sunken and settled, as if the skin had been pulled away from his bones and left to lie.

  “Lyle?”

  Lyle ran a hand over his face. “There’s no easy way to say this, Russ. Your wife has been killed. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  In Russ’s head, the usual clatter of thoughts and concerns fell absolutely silent. Everything within eyesight took on an otherworldly clarity: the damp sheen of Lyle’s face, the thin coating of dust on the straggly philodendron in the corner, the faded, felted spines of the Police Gazettes stacked on his extra chair.

  “Linda?” he said.

  MacAuley nodded.

  Russ snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Russ, I
know it’s hard to—”

  “Linda’s a good driver. A cautious driver. As much snow as there is on the road—that wouldn’t throw her. And her car. A late-model Volvo wagon? I can’t even imagine how many of them must be registered in the three counties. You guys have tagged the wrong car.”

  Lyle was shaking his head no, swinging it back and forth like a bell, and the look on his face was the look of something terrible trying to be born. Russ was suddenly afraid. Terrified of what was coming.

  “There hasn’t been any car accident. Russ, she was killed. Stabbed to death. In your—in the kitchen.”

  “Killed,” he echoed stupidly.

  “Entwhistle and McCrea and Flynn are all over there right now, along with the state CS team. We’re going to find who did it, Chief. I swear to you, we’re going to find who did it. And when we do, he’s going to spend the rest of his life regretting he was ever born.”

  The terrible thing was here. He felt himself crack open, his jaw unhinge, his lungs constrict. His field of vision shrank, and his head filled with a loud, dry-edged shuffle as his mind laid down every card in its deck. Linda relaxing in her favorite chair at the end of the day. The two of them shouting at each other over the hood of her car. A funeral—he had never planned a funeral, didn’t know how to do it, didn’t know who to call. Oh, God, he was going to grow old and feeble alone, without his wife, his beautiful wife . . .

  The way it would feel, his finger tightening on the trigger as he pumped onetwothreefourfive rounds into her killer. Just like that.

  Memory. Guilt. Confusion. Self-pity.

  Rage.

  He held on to the rage. All the rest flapped and fluttered around him, and he knew that if he stopped to consider them he would fall apart. He couldn’t fall apart. He had a job to do.

  He held on to the rage.