All Mortal Flesh

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  Clare’s mouth dropped open. She clasped her hands so tightly together her fingernails went white. Squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, they were bright with tears.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said. “Thank God.”

  Russ thought he might never have loved her as much as he did at that moment.

  He was still unsure if he had awoken from a nightmare or if he had fallen into a good dream. That Linda was alive again was too much like the magical thinking he had returned to over and over since Monday evening. Let it all be a mistake. This isn’t really happening. She can’t be dead.

  “Yep. Looks like Mrs. Van Alstyne’s disappearance is simply a case of a grown woman haring off without telling anyone.”

  That snapped him out of his reverie. “Wait a minute,” Russ said. “There’s no evidence of that. How can we be sure she hasn’t been abducted by Dennis Shambaugh?”

  “Who’s Dennis Shambaugh?” Karen asked.

  Jensen turned toward him. “Your deputy chief told me Mrs. Van Alstyne left e-mails to her sister, bragging about a hot date she was heading out on.” She glanced across the dispatch area to the entrance of the squad room. He followed her gaze.

  Lyle was standing there. He gave Russ a minuscule shrug. “If she hired a cat sitter, chief, she must have been planning to go somewhere for a day or two.”

  Jensen went on. “Given her predilections, I’d check and see if any of your officers have been out since Sunday.”

  He could feel the blood rushing to his face. He balled up his hands, then forced them to relax, knuckle by knuckle. Losing it now wasn’t going to get him what he needed. “We have to get a BOLO out on her. We have to get the identities Shambaugh stole into the federal cybercrime database and the Federal Reserve routing system. He’s on the run. He’s going to use one of those card numbers he has to get money. We have to talk to his parole officer and track down any known associates, and we have to do all that fifteen minutes ago.”

  Now it was Jensen’s turn to flush. “Don’t tell me how to run this investigation, Mr. Van Alstyne.”

  “It seems to me that’s exactly what he should do.” Geoff Burns flicked his suit coat back and squared his hands on his hips. “What looked like a domestic killing seems to be a case of a falling-out amongst thieves. Shambaugh and Audrey Keane were robbing the Van Alstynes’ house, they disagreed, and he killed her. When surprised by Chief Van Alstyne this afternoon, he fled. Under what construction do you continue to abrogate my client’s duties as chief of police? The only error in this entire investigation is that of the medical examiner, who is not under Chief Van Alstyne’s authority or yours.”

  “Counselor, that’s an entirely reasonable scenario. And”—she nodded lightly to Russ—“I’m proceeding with the investigation with that in mind. Paul Urquhart is speaking to Shambaugh’s parole officer, and Officer Durkee is continuing to work on the identity fraud aspect of the case. I’ve called in a colleague from the state cybercrimes division to help him.”

  Russ bent his neck in acknowledgment. She was just setting him up for some asinine theory, but he could be gracious. His wife was alive. Alive.

  “Now let me propose another scenario for you. A couple having an affair. The only thing standing in the way of their happiness is his wife, who insists on boring things like marriage counseling. And who, incidentally, turns out to be worth considerably more than her husband, thanks to her successful business. This couple decides to do away with her. At some point between Sunday afternoon and Monday afternoon, they drive to her house. For whatever reason, the husband can’t or won’t do the dirty. So the woman—” Jensen turned to Clare, looking for all the world as if she were going to ask her for the St. Alban’s worship schedule or the name of a good coffee shop nearby. “By the way, Reverend, is it true you were in the army? Flying helicopters? And that you had advanced survival training? An experience like that must toughen a woman up.”

  Russ could see Clare’s jaw muscles bunching as she ground her reply between her teeth.

  “Where was I?” Jensen said. “Oh, yeah. So the woman goes inside. She sees what she expects to see, an attractive fiftyish blonde. How many times had you met Mrs. Van Alstyne in person, Reverend Fergusson?”

  Clare opened her mouth.

  “Don’t answer that,” Karen Burns said.

  “Never mind,” Jensen said. “The woman sees the blonde. She slits her throat and mutilates the body.”

  Clare’s scowl vanished. She looked, horrified, at Russ. Oh, darlin’, he thought. I didn’t want you to know that ugliness.

  “The woman comes out. Tells her lover his wife is dead, because, after all, that’s what she thinks. The couple then alibi each other, saying they spent the night together.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Russ said. “With nothing to back it up. I can spin just as detailed a story using Lyle’s theory of a vengeful ex-con with just as little evidence to support it.”

  Jensen shrugged. “Evidence is what I’m looking for. Reverend Fergusson, would you consent to be fingerprinted?”

  “I don’t think—” Karen Burns began.

  “Yes,” Clare said.

  “Would you consent to a search of your house?”

  “No,” Burns said.

  “Yes.” Clare looked at her lawyer. “I’m not guilty. I have nothing to hide.” She paused for a second. She looked up at Russ, and he could see in her eyes the one thing she had gained with her reckless confession. “I have nothing to hide anymore.”

  Jensen smiled.

  “I expect you to restore my client to full duty as soon as the evidence clears him of any complicity,” Geoff Burns said.

  “Not if the prime suspect is his girlfriend, I won’t.” The BCI investigator thumbed open the case file she was holding. She glanced at a sheet of handwritten notes. “According to her own statement, Reverend Fergusson left her little vacation cabin early in the morning and didn’t return until two in the afternoon or thereabouts. That’s a lot of time unaccounted for.”

  “I didn’t leave until ten,” Russ said. Talking about this made him feel as if he had a mouth full of dry gravel. “Clare’s car was in the driveway. Dusted over with snow. It hadn’t been moved.”

  Jensen spread her arms. “But what about after? I don’t claim to be any expert in the geography around here, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe she’d have enough time between 10:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. to drive south to Millers Kill, do your wife—I mean, Audrey Keane, but she wouldn’t have known that—and be back north in time to appear out of the woods to this other priest guy who came to call. Or am I wrong?”

  He glanced at Clare. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t want to, but the calculations thrust themselves into his head: an hour and a half to Millers Kill plus an hour and a half back left one hour, more than enough time for someone swift, decisive, used to thinking on her feet. Maybe she had started with the intent to come after him. It was a long, quiet drive. Plenty of time to brood. And she had been tired, worn like a rag from too much emotion and too little sleep. Not herself.

  He realized he had been silent too long. Clare was looking at him with a dawning dismay. “Russ?” she said.

  “Am I wrong?” Jensen repeated.

  “No,” he said.

  Clare opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Not about the driving times, I mean,” he said, but he could hear the weakness in his own voice, the faltering of his belief.

  “Russ,” Clare protested.

  “Officer Entwhistle, can you escort Reverend Fergusson to the processing room and print her?” Her show-and-tell over, Jensen crossed to where Lyle was standing. “MacAuley, who can we spare to search the Reverend’s house?”

  Karen Burns frowned. “Clare, I’m going to say it again. I advise you most strongly against allowing an unwarranted search of the rectory.”

  Clare shook her head. “No. Let them.”

  “In that case, Investigator, I insist on being present.”

>   Jensen shrugged. “Sure. But you better get in gear. We’ll be over there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Fifteen minutes after Officer Entwhistle finishes with the fingerprints.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Jensen gestured toward Noble. “Anytime now, Officer Entwhistle.”

  Noble lurched into action. He touched Clare on the elbow and steered her toward the hall, her lawyer at her side.

  Karen Burns paused in front of her husband. “I’m going to drop her off at our house with the new deacon. I want her to stay there until I get back.”

  “Understood,” Geoff Burns said.

  And all the time, Russ stood there. Watching Clare. His last sight of her was her face, turned back toward him, as she rounded the corner.

  “Listen,” Burns said. “From now on, I don’t want you talking with her. You can’t help her case, and you can only hurt your own. Do you hear me? Van Alstyne?”

  A prayer she had told him about chased itself round and round in his brain.

  Oh, Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Clare let herself be trundled out of the station like a juvenile delinquent being picked up by her exasperated parents. “Take your car to my house,” Karen told her, tugging on a wool beret to protect her hair from the steadily falling snow. “You can watch Cody until I get back from the search of the rectory. Which I still really, really don’t like.”

  Following her lawyer down the steps, Clare made a feeble attempt to assert her independence. “Can’t I just go home and wait until they’re done?”

  “No.” Karen turned toward the parking lot behind the station. “In the first place, you do not want to be there when a bunch of jackbooted thugs go through your every possession. In the second place, I’ve already imposed on the new deacon too much. You can pay off some of your legal fee by babysitting Cody. When I get back, we’ll talk. I want to go over everything that’s happened up to this point.”

  “Oh, lord. Karen, I haven’t thought to ask what this is going to cost me. I don’t even know what you charge.”

  A smile slanted across the lawyer’s face. “I told you. I’m going to take it out in babysitting.”

  “But—”

  Karen flicked the snowflakes off Clare’s shoulder before resting her gloved hand there. “You’re my priest,” she said, “and I consider you a friend as well. Neither of which might get you off the hook, normally. But you saved my baby boy’s life. That gives you an unlimited line of credit at Burns and Burns.” Then she surprised Clare by pulling her into a hug. “We’ll get you out of this,” she whispered. “Don’t worry.” She released Clare and held out her hand. “House key?”

  “It’s unlocked.”

  “Okay.” She paused at her Land Rover’s door. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Go straight to my house. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, and for heaven’s sake, don’t hang around here waiting for Chief Van Alstyne.”

  Clare, who had been thinking of doing just that, started.

  “I mean it, Clare, I don’t want you seeing him or talking to him until we get this thing straightened out.” With that final admonition hanging in the air, Karen got into her SUV and started it up. Clare, watching her pull out of the lot, felt rather like Cinderella being warned that her outfit and ride had an expiration date.

  She dragged herself over to her Subaru, got in, and drove to the Burnses’ on autopilot. Their house, on a broad and affluent old street, could have been Judy Garland’s family home in Meet Me in St. Louis. Artificial candles still glowed in each window. Clare parked beneath the porte cochere and bent her head forward in a brief prayer that she not make more of a spectacle of herself in front of the new deacon than she already had.

  The Burnses didn’t have a mudroom, they had a back pantry, where Clare let herself in and kicked off her boots. “Hello,” she called, hanging up her parka. “Don’t be alarmed. It’s Clare.”

  She heard the thudding of tiny, footsie-clad feet. Cody skidded through the kitchen just as she emerged from the not-a-mudroom.

  “Care!” He flung up his arms for a pickup.

  “Hey, buddy.” She scooped him onto her hip. “Can we do it?”

  “Yes, we can!” he shouted.

  “How’re you doing? Where’s Mr. Squeaky?”

  “Mistah Squeaky watchin’ zuh twuck video.” Just as quickly, he tired of being held and wiggled away. He dashed toward the family room. She followed. “Elizabeth?” she said.

  Elizabeth de Groot was seated in one corner of an oversized sofa, leafing through a magazine by the light of a ginger jar lamp. She folded it into her lap and looked up eagerly. Cody swarmed up onto the cushion next to her and held Mr. Squeaky out for Clare’s inspection. “See?” he said. Mr. Squeaky was a rubbery plastic squirrel whose original colors and features had been almost completely obliterated after two years as a teething-toy-slash-love object. Cody pointed toward the television, where an eighteen-wheeler hummed down a highway to the accompaniment of an upbeat ditty about driving the big rigs. “Mistah Squeaky wuves twucks,” Cody said, before glancing back at the screen and falling under the spell of the video.

  “I see you’ve met Mr. Squeaky before,” Elizabeth said.

  “Oh, you’ll get to know him, too. He’s a regular attendee at the ten o’clock Eucharist. He tends to make himself known during the homily, but I’ve grown used to it.”

  Elizabeth craned her neck, looking past Clare into the dining room. “Is Mrs. Burns with you?”

  “No. She has . . . some more business to attend to. She asked me to watch Cody until she got home. Not that she was worried about your proficiency,” she tacked on, anxious not to offend. “She just didn’t want to impose on you any further.”

  “It was no imposition,” Elizabeth said. “He’s a sweet little thing. Besides, as soon as I heard what had happened . . .” She lowered her voice in sympathy. “Are you okay?”

  Since the attentive deacon showed no sign of leaving, Clare took the chair kitty-corner to the sofa. “I’m fine,” she lied.

  “I can’t imagine what it would be like,” de Groot said. “Accused, arrested, having to bare your most private moments . . . it must have been awful.”

  You have no idea, Clare thought. Part of her—the part that was still seeing Russ look at her, troubled and speculative—wanted to weep and moan and dump on the nearest warm body. But she didn’t have that luxury. She hadn’t in a long time. Since becoming the rector of St. Alban’s.

  “I wasn’t arrested,” she said. A truth. “I am considered a ‘person of interest,’ but that’s because the police have to clear anyone who was remotely involved.” A half-truth. There had been nothing in Investigator Jensen’s avid expression indicating she wanted to absolve Clare of anything.

  “Mrs. Burns said you were trying to give an alibi to the police chief and so you told the whole department you two had spent the night together. She was quite overwrought.”

  How did she respond to that? Yes, I lied to the police or No, I really did spend the night with Russ Van Alstyne. When did you stop beating your wife, Congressman?

  “I told the state police investigator, truthfully, that there was no way Chief Van Alstyne could have murdered his wife because he was with me during the established time of death. As it turns out, he had a pretty good alibi anyway. His wife hasn’t been killed.”

  “What?”

  “The dead woman was a pet sitter named Audrey Keane. She and her partner were evidently deep into stolen credit cards and identity information. The police think her partner may have killed her while robbing the Van Alstynes’, then fled.” And if Dennis Shambaugh didn’t turn up, she was in the spotlight. A fugitive couldn’t remain at large for very long, could he? Her mind helpfully threw up the name of D. B. Cooper, who parachuted into the Oregon wilderness and was never seen again.

  “How on earth could they get the identity of the victim wrong?” Elizabeth sounded scandalized.

  “They had s
imilar body types and hair. Close in age, too, I’d guess. They’re not sure if she was killed because she was Audrey Keane, or if she was killed because someone thought she was Linda Van Alstyne. She was”—Clare passed her hand across her face—“mutilated after she was killed.”

  Elizabeth glanced nervously at Cody, who, oblivious to the increasingly gruesome conversation, was singsonging, “Big wig, big wig, big wig wide zuh woad,” along with the video.

  “That’s horrific,” she said. “And up here, too, in such a pretty little town. What are the odds of that?”

  “Surprisingly higher than you would think,” Clare said. “Look, you’ve got a long drive home and the weather’s getting worse. Why don’t you go ahead and call it a day? I’ll watch Cody until his parents get home.”

  “This has got to be so stressful to you,” Elizabeth said, showing no signs of budging from the sofa. “Have you thought about taking some time off? Maybe going on a retreat? I know the diocese would be happy to provide a supply priest, all things considering.”

  “No. Thank you. I just came back from a sort of retreat. Six days alone in a cabin in the mountains. Now I need work.” Work and love, wasn’t that what Freud called the ultimate cure?

  “Not quite alone in the cabin, surely,” de Groot said in a small voice.

  “Alone enough,” Clare snapped. She breathed deeply. “Alone enough to realize that right now I need to make my parishioners my priority.”

  “I hope I can help you to do that,” Elizabeth said. She sat to attention, very upright and brave. “Although . . . won’t it be difficult to concentrate on serving them when you have criminal charges hanging over your head?”

  “There are no criminal charges!” Great. Now I sound like a shrew.

  “Because of this Shambaugh fellow, right. Who’s a suspect.” Elizabeth paused. “But what happens if—just hypothetically, mind you—whatever sort of evidence they pull together doesn’t implicate him? Will they start looking at you more seriously? I mean”—she laughed briefly, a musical ripple that went down the scale and up Clare’s nerves—“it’s silly, because what reason would you have to kill a pet sitter?”