All Mortal Flesh

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

“Audrey Keane?” McAlistair looked surprised. “Not much. She moved in a couple, three years ago. The house was empty for a year after old Mrs. Williamson died.”

  “Does she live alone?”

  “I think so—”

  His daughter cut in. “Not anymore.”

  “This is my oldest, Christy,” McAlistair said. “Christy, don’t interrupt when grown-ups are talking.”

  “Daddy!”

  Russ held up his hand. “I’d like to hear. You say Ms. Keane doesn’t live alone anymore?”

  She nodded, her cheek making a whispery noise against Ethan’s jacket. “Since about October. There’s been a man living there, too. First he was driving, like, a white Buick, then I started seeing him in her car.”

  “Balding guy? Mustache?”

  She nodded again.

  “Do you know anything else about him, Christy? Or about her?”

  “Not really. We said hi a few times at the IGA. She was always nice. Not, like, pushy or anything. But nice.”

  Russ glanced at the father. “Do you know what she did for a living?”

  McAlistair shook his head. “She was quiet. She didn’t go out much, and she didn’t have many folks over, as I could tell.”

  “Not even since October? When this man came to live with her?”

  “Nope.”

  That cut down on the possibility that she was dealing.

  “Sometimes she’d go away for days,” Christy said. “Like, over a long weekend, or for a week.”

  He tried to fit that together with the computers. Porn? Procurement? Maybe she was just a fanatic eBayer.

  “When was the last time either of you saw her?”

  “Ummm,” McAlistair said.

  “Friday,” Christy said. “I saw her drive past in her car. Her and the guy with the mustache.”

  “You see a lot.”

  She flushed. “I babysit the Montgomery boys afternoons. They always want to play outside. So I spend, like, a lot of time in their front yard.”

  A siren’s shriek cut through the heavy, cold air. Christy McAlistair shivered.

  “That’ll be Officer Flynn, to take your report,” Russ said to Ethan. “Thank you for the information,” he said to the farmer.

  “Welcome. Sorry I didn’t have any more.” He touched his daughter’s shoulder. “C’mon, Christy. Let’s wait inside and let Ethan finish his business with the police.”

  “I’ll come in as soon as I’m done,” Ethan promised the girl. She reluctantly released him and followed her father up the long, rutted drive.

  “So,” Russ said. “You signed on with the marines.”

  Ethan straightened. “Yessir.”

  “I’m surprised. Pleased, but surprised. I figured the closest you’d get to fighting was Death Match 3000 at All TechTronik.”

  The young man flushed. “I had sort of a wake-up call. Between Katie’s death”—his high school girlfriend, killed over two years ago now—“and September 11, I realized nobody knows how long they got. And I thought, do I want to piss my life away working part-time at Stewart’s and helping my dad steam-clean the milking equipment?” He ducked his head. “I can’t blame you for being surprised and all. I was pretty wild for a while there.”

  Russ thought of himself at eighteen, two years younger than Ethan was now. Drinking and getting stoned and pulling stupid pranks. Desperate to get away. “Are they sending you over?”

  Ethan glowed. “Oh, man, I hope so. I’m going for further training soon as I get back. Sniper school. That must mean I’ll be seeing action, don’tcha think?”

  “I’d think so, yeah.” Had he really ever been that young? Yes, he had. He had been chomping at the bit to get to Vietnam. God, boys were stupid. In his day, the town’s chief of police had said good-bye and wished him well. Probably wondering, like Russ was now, if he’d ever see that wild young man again. Certainly never imagining that one day Russ would be standing in his shoes, wearing his badge.

  Crimson lights splashed over the top of the far hill. Kevin Flynn’s squad car. Russ smiled a little. Maybe thirty-some years from now, Chief Ethan Stoner would be watching over Millers Kill. He laid a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Take care of yourself. Come back safe to us.”

  Ethan gave him a look of disbelief. Russ wasn’t sure if it was for the idea that anything might happen to him, or the idea that he might make his way back to Millers Kill once he had escaped it. “Hey, I thought of another thing about Audrey Keane,” he said. “I’ve seen her around a time or two since she moved out here. I didn’t want to mention it in front of Christy and all, but have you seen a picture of her?”

  “I don’t know. I saw a bunch of pictures up in her house. Maybe.”

  “You’d know it if you had. She’s a total babe. I mean, I know she’s old and all, but she’s hot. I was thinking, when Christy said about her going away and all? She might have been going with guys. If you know what I mean.”

  “You think she might have been working as a prostitute?” How would that fit in with three computers and a fleeing boyfriend? Internet dating? Meeting men and rolling them?

  Ethan shrugged. “I dunno.” He rubbed his nonexistent hair. “I’m just saying, she may be my mom’s age, but she sure didn’t look nothing like my mom.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Mark Durkee broke his own record, Millers Kill to Cossayuharie in under fifteen minutes—and that included stopping for a train rumbling its long, slow way into Fort Henry.

  He swung wide around where Kevin was writing up the accident and gave the gas one last touch, surging up the hill and fishtailing into the rutted driveway of 840 Bainbridge Road. His was the first car there. Thank God.

  He had been up and down so many times this morning it was a miracle he hadn’t snapped something in the process. First, elation at finding Captain Ireland had believed him, had agreed with him enough to send a top investigator to take a look at their murder case. Mark had sweated out a sleepless night after calling the state police, worried Ireland would interpret his concerns as whining from someone rightfully passed over by his superiors.

  Then, disappointment, as he realized Investigator Jensen, like Deputy Chief MacAuley, had a pet theory to account for the murder of Linda Van Alstyne and was no more amenable to Mark’s suggestions they look at the priest than MacAuley had been. Only it was worse, because Jensen thought the chief had killed his wife.

  Then a giddy glee as the chief came up missing, out of reach of Jensen’s questions or orders. Sly glances and swiftly hidden grins shared with his brother officers.

  Followed by the uncomfortable realization that, with nothing more than what evidence they’d already gathered, Jensen was prepared to request a warrant for the chief’s arrest. And that he, or one of the others, would have no choice but to hunt the chief down, as if he were no more than some scum-sucking lowlife to be hauled in on probation violation.

  The radio splash from Harlene, saying the chief had called in—up! Because he had been assaulted and his vehicle stolen—down! And that he needed a crime scene team for this house no one had ever heard of.

  He got out of his car and thunked the door shut. In a matter of seconds, the chief appeared, limping across the enclosed front porch to let Mark in.

  “Chief! Oh, man, am I glad to see you!” Mark glanced involuntarily over his shoulder. “Investigator Jensen is on her way. She’s really pissed.” He stepped onto the chilly porch and took a closer look at the man holding the door for him. A bruise was purpling down the side of his face, and his jeans were smeared with dirt.

  “You look like hell,” Mark said.

  “Yeah, but you should see the other guy.” The chief let the flimsy door drop into place and led Mark into the living room.

  “What’s going on?” The living room was the definition of ordinary. It could have been his mother-in-law’s, albeit with fewer embroidered doohickeys lying around. And more computers. Way more computers. “Three desktops?” he said. “They got kids or some
thing?”

  The chief shook his head, then winced at the movement. “A witness places that Honda Civic”—he pointed toward the partially visible driveway—“at my house on Sunday afternoon. The day Linda was killed. The woman it’s registered to has no record, but when I came here to check things out, the guy she’s been living with for the past four months, according to the neighbors, jumped me. Knocked me down the stairs, stole my wife’s—my station wagon, and disappeared.”

  Mark whistled. “You find anything here?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to check out the upstairs yet. I got back from the accident scene right before you arrived. I want you to bust into those computers. Find out why Audrey Keane and her steroidal boyfriend need three of ’em. Somehow, I doubt they’re making their livings as Web site designers.”

  “Will do.” Mark unzipped his parka and slung it over the back of the kitchen chair doing desk duty in front of the computer table. One computer was already running, its otherwise blank screen requiring a password to get any further. He rebooted it, starting it up in safe mode, and set about convincing the machine he was an administrator. The chief’s footsteps thumped about over his head.

  “Mark! Get up here!”

  He shoved away from the table and sprinted up the stairs. “In here, the back bedroom,” the chief said. He sounded strangely shaky.

  The back bedroom was obviously used for storage. The double bed was heaped high with dresses in dry cleaner’s plastic; old magazines and worn-down shoes were piled atop cardboard boxes with WINTER SWEATERS and SUMMER PANTS scrawled on the sides in black marker. The chief was standing beside a girlish dresser whose top was cluttered with bowls and boxes of cheap jewelry. The lowest drawer was open.

  “I was looking for something identifying the guy who jumped me.”

  Mark stared. The chief had obviously rummaged through the colorful shirts and scarves stuffed in the drawer. Swaths of silky material fell from the edges, where he had pulled them away to reveal two snub-nosed Saturday night specials, a sap, and a large, wicked knife. Mark had seen the knife before. At yesterday’s meeting with the medical examiner. “It’s a K-Bar,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t touch it, did you?”

  “No. I hit one of the guns with the edge of my hand. That’s when I took the rest of the clothing out.”

  Mark felt a fierce smile fighting its way free on his face. He tried to stifle it. The chief certainly wouldn’t be smiling, not staring at the weapon that killed his wife. But all Mark could envision was Investigator Jensen’s face, when she saw how wrong she had been about the chief. Sure, it meant he was wrong, too, about Reverend Fergusson, but that he could live with.

  Yeah, he could certainly live with that.

  “We’d better leave this intact for the CS unit,” the chief said. “You have the chance to develop anything on those computers?”

  “C’mon downstairs,” Mark said. “I’m about to get into the first one. If they’re networked together, I’ll be able to access them all.”

  Seated back at the rickety computer table, he finished reassigning himself as administrator. “I’m in,” he said to the chief, who was slowly and methodically examining each of the two dozen photos hanging above the couch.

  “Whaddya see?”

  “I’m going to run a search function to find all the files created or modified in the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Can you do that for any date?”

  “Sure.”

  “Look for any action on Sunday.”

  “Okay.” While the search was running, Mark clicked on the Internet connection. He called up the history to see what the computer’s users had been up to online.

  The chief leaned over his shoulder. “Anything of interest?”

  “Lots of foreign sites.” Mark pointed to the entries with .de and .ch designations. “These Chinese ones might be some sort of spam harvesting or robot scraping sites.”

  The chief stabbed a finger toward the screen. “What about this?”

  “Northcountrylist.com?”

  “My wife has that bookmarked on her computer.”

  Mark clicked through. The Web site sprang up instantly. Whoever used these computers wasn’t fooling around when it came to access speed. “Looks like a help-wanted and swap site,” he said.

  “I know. When I checked it out, I searched for Linda. Didn’t find anything. See if you find anything for Audrey Keane.”

  Mark typed in her name. In seconds, it popped up. “Here she is.” He followed the hyperlink. “She’s advertising her services as a pet sitter. Huh?” He glanced around the living room, devoid of any sign that an animal lived in the house. “You’d think a pet sitter’d have a dog or a cat or something.”

  “Oh, my God,” Russ said. “The cat.”

  As soon as he said it, Mark understood. “Mrs. Van Alstyne got a cat. After you moved out.”

  The chief stood up, his eyes distant, following a cloud of maybes and might-have-beens. “Linda hired the Keane woman to take care of the cat.”

  “Was Mrs. Van Alstyne planning on going away?”

  “Not that she told her sister. Or her friend Meg. Of course, she wasn’t used to clearing her schedule with them. Time was, if anyone was looking for her, I’d be able to tell them where she was.” He fell silent for a moment. “Maybe she thought her date with Mr. Wonderful might really go somewhere. Or maybe she had a trade show in New York she forgot to tell me about.”

  “Her car was in your barn, though.”

  “Maybe she changed her mind. Came home unexpectedly and surprised the pet sitter and her boyfriend doing . . . what? What can you do if people give you their keys and have you come over to feed and water Fluffy and Spot?”

  “What couldn’t you do? Back a truck up to the front door and clean the house out while the family’s on vacation.”

  “But the victims’d twig to that right away. First thing you’d think of when reporting a theft to the cops would be the stranger with a key. Besides, there hasn’t been a rash of burglaries in this area.”

  Mark called up the search results.

  “Hey,” the chief complained as Audrey Keane’s page winked out of view.

  Mark opened one of the files, then another. Strings of numbers, interspersed with random letters. Clusters of letters. He counted a few. Fourteen. Ten. Fifteen. Twelve. Just about the right size, he figured, for first name, last name, and middle initial. Followed by twenty-five or forty-one or fifty-seven numbers. Some were much, much longer. None of them had fewer than nine. Nine. “What always has nine digits?” he asked the chief.

  “Zip Code Plus. Bank routing codes. Social Security.”

  Social Security numbers. The keys to the kingdom. “Identity theft,” Mark breathed.

  “Say again.” The chief, who had been twitching around waiting for Audrey Keane’s page to reappear, leaned over Mark’s shoulder.

  “I think they’re stealing identities. Names, dates, Social Security numbers . . .” He pointed to where a long string of numbers trailed after a cluster of letters. “I bet these are credit card numbers. Maybe even passports.”

  “But those aren’t names.”

  “It’s been encoded. With what looks like a cheap program. Maybe some freeware they downloaded off the Net. A good decryption program will break this in fifteen seconds.” He looked up at the chief. “I’m just guessing, based on what we’ve found so far. But I’d lay money I’m right.”

  The chief nodded, his eyes alight. “It makes sense. The Keane woman hires out as a pet sitter. While she’s in the house, either she or her boyfriend goes through the old credit card bills, the tax returns—”

  “She could take things like birth and marriage certificates, make copies, and then put ’em back.”

  “The vacationing pet owners come home, everything’s in order, nothing missing, Fido and Precious fat and happy—Keane takes damn good care of those animals, I’ll bet.” He straightened. “It fits perfec
tly.” He glanced around the house. “The neighbors said she’s lived here two or three years. If she was pulling this scam off all that time, I think she’d be living a little higher on the hog, don’t you?”

  Mark nodded.

  “My guess is, the job started out as legit. Then her boyfriend arrives, after a year or two of her living alone. What does that suggest to you?”

  “He was doing time.”

  “Uh-huh. I bet he’s got a record for fraud as long as my arm.” He stalked to the window and glared out at the road. “When the hell is that crime scene technician getting here? The sooner we lift his fingerprints, the sooner we get his name off the d-base.”

  As if in response to the chief’s complaint, an MKPD squad car crested the ridge, followed by an unmarked and the NYSP mobile crime lab. Noble Ent-whistle, in the cruiser, pulled ahead, letting the unmarked and the CS van squeeze into the last of the driveway. Noble parked his car opposite, lights on in warning.

  Emiley Jensen and Lyle MacAuley emerged from the unmarked. It was a toss-up which of them looked less happy. The investigator’s teeth were gritted, as if she had torn off a hunk of nasty and now was going to have to give it a good chew. The deputy chief’s chin was jutting out and locked in place, as if he had something so enormous lodged in his craw he had to keep his jaws clamped to prevent it spilling out.

  The chief vanished through the front door. Mark scooted the chair over to work on the next computer in line. He could hear the chief limp across the porch floor, the squeak of springs as he opened the door.

  “Chief Van Alstyne!” Investigator Jensen’s voice cut through wall and glass like a blowtorch through butter. “You’re under arrest! Officer Entwhistle, cuff him.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Russ ignored the woman crunching up the walk toward him. Instead, he focused on the state police technician, who was pulling equipment out of the rear of the van. “Hey! Sergeant Morin! You got a computer uplink in there?”

  “Sure,” Morin shouted back. “Can’t guarantee it’ll pick up a signal out here in the middle of nowhere.”