When I think about how I spend most of each day, it's a wonder I ever let my kids out of my sight.
"Well, it's all pretty interesting," Emmet said.
"Oh?"
"We brought back a carton of stuff for the crime lab. But the main thing I wanted to tell you is this: Alice Hayward kept a journal. It's one of those books with blank pages that really isn't much bigger than an address book. As a matter of fact, that's what I thought it was when I found it--though I didn't understand at first why an address book would be way in the back of the woman's underwear drawer. But as soon as I opened it up, I knew what it was."
"She talks about her husband?"
"She does, and it's fascinating. Once in a while, you can almost see what she saw in him. I mean, he was a louse. A complete and total louse. But he wasn't always bashing her around the house. And after he did, man, was he contrite."
"That is the pattern. He might have been a nice guy some of the time, but I promise you, it was only after he'd whacked her somewhere."
"He wrote her poetry. Not my cup of tea, and I have no idea if it's any good. But it sounds very loving. I can see how he convinced her to take him back. But here's the really interesting part: George Hayward isn't the only man in it. You know who else she writes about?"
"Tell me."
"That minister who lit out of town. Stephen Drew. At least I think it's Stephen. There was something going on there."
"You think it's Stephen?"
"There's no name, just a code. She draws a little cross where you'd expect to find a name. So the journal is like, 'cross said this' or 'cross and I did that.'"
"And it's not a t?"
"Definitely not. The first time she used it, she made it pretty ornate."
"Well, he was her minister. He told us they would talk a lot. It's why he was so broken up about her death."
"I think there was more to it than that."
"How much more?"
"A lot."
"As in they were sleeping together?"
"I got that vibe. To wit, here's one of the passages from the diary I scribbled in my notes: 'Cross's hair reminds me these days of Christmas. It always has the aroma of evergreen.'"
"But she never comes right out and says they were sleeping together."
"Not in the pages I skimmed. But she was probably afraid that her husband might find the book, and so there's nothing definitively incriminating in it."
"A cross isn't real subtle. If she had something to hide, she wasn't real clever."
"I agree. But listen to this one: 'Day off, Katie with friends. Cross and I spent hours together today. Very peaceful, very quiet. What to do?'"
For a long second, I thought about that one. "What's the date?"
"March twenty-ninth."
"That was long after she had gotten the relief-from-abuse order and George was living on the lake."
"Take a look at the journal. You'll see what I mean," Emmet said. "Here's another one I wrote down: 'Cross here. Didn't leave the house for hours and hours. Heavenly.'"
Paul was in the kitchen, too, but he didn't know who I was on the phone with. Still, he would tell me later that my eyes went very wide and for a moment the tip of my tongue rested just at the edge of my lips. He has mimicked the look for me before and calls it my "savanna glare." He says it's the look I get when I'm seriously into the hunt and the prey has just stumbled big-time in the grass.
IT HAD THE potential to be a fascinating case to construct. On the one hand, it was going to be embarrassingly easy--a slam dunk--to show that Stephen Drew and his hair with the aroma of the church Christmas tree was sleeping with Alice Hayward. Later, when we dusted the whole Hayward house for fingerprints, we found what would turn out to be Drew's all over the bedroom, including the very top of the headboard. We found them on the nightstand and in the kitchen on wineglasses. We found his DNA in body hair in the shower drain in the master bathroom, and we determined that a piece of pubic hair in the bottom of the hamper belonged to the reverend. We found fibers from his living-room throw rug in the carpet of the Haywards' bedroom.
On the other hand, it was going to take some serious investigation to prove that he had gone to the Cape on the hill that Sunday night in July and shot George Hayward in the head.
Drew had had his weekly meeting with the church Youth Group that evening, and the gathering had lasted until a few minutes after nine. When he finally reemerged after fleeing, he told us that he had gone home to the parsonage as soon as that meeting was over. He insisted he hadn't gone anywhere near the Haywards' house that night--and we had nothing to link him to the murder itself. The only prints on the gun, the load, or the gun cabinet were George's--though some on the handle and one on the trigger were badly smudged, which was important, because it thus seemed possible that a second person had handled the firearm after George. There was no indication that Drew's car had been in the gravel driveway that night and no tracks that matched any of his shoes on the lawn--at least none that remained by the time we realized that Drew should be considered a suspect. We could see from Drew's Internet service provider that he'd been online from nine-fifteen until ten-thirty, answering e-mails and surfing the Web, but we would need a court order--or his laptop, which later we would subpoena--to learn the sites and Web pages he had visited. Then, he insisted, he had gone to bed. I was hoping that Alice might have called him earlier in the evening--battered women often seem to phone someone close to them just before their boyfriend or husband blows for the last time--but there was no evidence that she had.
And yet he had disappeared a few days after what was looking more and more like two homicides, rather than a suicide and a single murder. That was what kept coming back to me. The guy was a friggin' minister, and he'd jumped ship at the time when the town needed him most. That really got to me--that and the teeny-tiny detail that he was boffing a parishioner who would be murdered.
FOR NEARLY A week, from a Wednesday till the following Monday, none of us had the slightest idea where the good reverend had gone. No one in Haverill knew, and his own mother said that she hadn't seen him since the previous Saturday morning. We left messages everywhere, including on his cell phone. I'd been thinking all along about the fact that the church secretary had noticed his passport on his desk the morning of the funeral, and so on Friday I sent a fax to the State Department to see if he had left the country. He wasn't officially a suspect at that point--though unofficially in my mind he sure as hell was--but we certainly wanted to talk to him.
And he hadn't left the country. Hadn't even boarded an airplane and flown anywhere domestically.
Which meant, if he was on the move, that he was probably traveling somewhere in his car. (I didn't completely discount the idea that he might have paid cash for a bus ticket, but somehow the patrician Pastor Drew didn't strike me as the sort who would mingle with the bus-station crowd.) And while this is a big country, it's really not that difficult to find someone on wheels. There are the credit-card receipts at gas stations or the cash withdrawals from ATMs or the reality that there are a lot of cops and troopers out there on the road. I had heard back from the State Department on Monday and was wondering if it was time to put out a bulletin on the reverend when, lo and behold, he finally returned one of Emmet's calls. And as soon as Emmet hung up with Drew, he called me. It was midafternoon, and I was in my office.
"We have contact," he said, his voice so deep and refined that he always sounded oddly plumy to me for a Vermonter. I attributed that to the reality that Emmet was all business. Some people mistook the crispness that was a part of his demeanor as a state trooper for coldness. Usually that served him well, but not always. The reality is that he was tall and lean, his nose was a wedge, and his close-cropped hair was the dark gray of ash in a woodstove: He could be an intimidating presence when he wanted.
"Really?"
"I just got off the phone with him."
"And? Did he have an explanation for why he fell off the radar--or why he wo
uldn't call back?"
"He said he hoped we didn't think he was avoiding us."
"Now, why would we think that? Because no one in the world had the slightest idea where he was--"
"He was in--"
"Because he didn't return any of the messages you left at his home, his church, or on his cell phone?"
"He was in the Adirondacks. That was his explanation. He said he went with a friend to upstate New York for a couple of days and he was in some rugged corner of the mountains without cell-phone coverage."
"He was camping? He didn't strike me as the type."
"No, he wasn't camping. But he was in what he described as a relatively primitive log cabin."
"In the Adirondacks ... "
"Near Statler."
"Never heard of it."
"No reason you would have," he said. "It's a general store and a billboard, apparently."
"And there's no cell coverage there?"
"Nope."
"He didn't check his messages at home? He didn't call in to the church?"
"No, he did not. He said he was calling me back from the interstate, an hour or so from Albany--though he wasn't coming home. He was heading to New York City. His cell showed he had messages, and so he was returning the calls from the highway."
I sat back in my chair and took a sip from the water bottle on my desk. I raised my eyebrows to try to relax. "Is he alone? I don't recall him having any personal Adirondack connections."
"He says he's with that friend. He added that she was driving."
"So you knew he was a responsible driver, I suppose."
"I suppose."
"What's her name?"
He paused for a moment, and in my mind I saw him looking down at his notes. "Heather Laurent," he answered finally.
"You're kidding."
"Why? Should I know that name?"
"Well, you shouldn't. You have a penis. But women love her books. She writes bestsellers about angels. Frankly, I think she's a complete and total lunatic. Remember when I was so sick last month with bronchitis and I stayed home? I saw her on one of the morning talk shows going on and on about her latest book. And maybe it was because I was oxygen-deprived and half delusional from the medication, but I swear I thought she was talking about angels like they were our freaking neighbors."
"Well, he's a minister. I would think angels would give them something to talk about."
"Yeah, I'm thinking no. My sense is her take on angels isn't exactly going to mesh with his. She's somewhere between New Age and wack job. Her angels, I have a feeling, find you parking spaces when you need one. What did he say about her?"
"Really very little."
"I think she was in Vermont a couple weeks ago. I vaguely remember something in the newspaper."
"Mostly I asked Drew about his relationship with Alice and George Hayward," he said, and then he told me in detail what he had learned--and what Drew wouldn't reveal. Emmet is a pro, and so he didn't let on that we had reason to believe from Alice's journal that either she had one hell of a fantasy life or she and Drew were more intimately involved than anyone knew. And Drew stuck to a pretty simple story: Alice was one of his parishioners, George was not, and he'd offered Alice pastoral counseling.
"Would you say you two were friends?" Emmet said he had asked, and Drew had replied, "Absolutely. We were very good friends." The detective then inquired whether the minister could recall the last time he'd been to the Haywards' house, and Emmet said there was a pause and he had wondered whether Drew was deciding whether to admit he'd ever been there. In the end he told the detective he'd been there most recently in, Drew believed, May--other, of course, than the Monday after the Haywards had been murdered. At that point he had asked Emmet why we were looking for him.
"Oh, we're just tying up loose ends," Emmet had replied. But he did ask the minister whether he was returning to Haverill anytime soon and where he could be reached if he wasn't. The answer was Heather Laurent's loft in Manhattan for at least a few more days and then, maybe, with a couple of different friends around the country. But Drew also said he might simply return to Vermont after leaving Manhattan and get some things from his home before taking that longer road trip. Either way, Drew added, he'd most likely be in areas with cell coverage.
"Did he ask you if he needed a lawyer?" I asked Emmet.
"No."
"He sounds very accommodating."
"I said I'd call him if I had any other questions."
"Do we have something that we know has his fingerprints on it--or even his DNA?"
"We don't."
"What about when we were at the Haywards' the day after their murder? Remember what a scrubber Drew was? How helpful he was?" I said, and it seemed possible now that he had been working like mad to make sure that he'd left behind no evidence of his involvement at the scene Sunday night. Perhaps inadvertently he had left us a lead.
"I vaguely recall him Windexing the windows, but he would have been wearing rubber gloves by the time he grabbed the spray bottle."
"He moved the coffee table."
"That's right. But he was probably wearing the gloves by then, too."
"And I recall him drinking some kind of diet soda from a bottle," I said, hoping, if he was implicated, he had gotten sloppy.
"If so, it may still be under the sink. They had a recycling tub under there."
"Good. And if Drew does come back to Vermont, let's drop in on him or see if he wants to stop by the barracks. Perhaps we can ask him some more questions before he realizes he needs an attorney and winds up in custodial care."
"Will do," Emmet agreed. Then: "And you said Heather Laurent was a bestselling writer?"
"Yup."
"I wonder how she and Drew became friends. Think they went to school together?"
"It's possible."
"Let me look into her, too. Maybe she fits in here somewhere."
"But don't talk to her until you've talked to Drew again--if possible."
"I understand."
I couldn't imagine Drew traveling with the Queen of the Angels, and so as soon as Emmet and I hung up, I Googled her. I saw she was as pretty as she had struck me on television. And I learned that her father had murdered her mother and then killed himself. I decided then that the two were something more than friends, which made me ponder further the motives that drove the Reverend Drew. I began to wonder whether this Heather Laurent had been involved in the Haywards' murder as well. A love triangle? Possible. I saw online that she had appeared in Vermont on the Monday the bodies were found, which meant that she might have been here on Sunday night. And absolutely anyone is capable of absolutely anything. I know that. It is, for better or worse, the fallout from my job.
SOMETIMES LATE AT night, I will peer into each of my boys' bedrooms. Most nights they sleep in their own beds in their own rooms, their doors open, but that summer it wasn't uncommon for Lionel to grab his pillows and a blanket and curl up either at the foot of Marcus's bed or in the beanbag chair beside it. He had only been out of a crib for a year and a half. And though he was potty trained, he still slept in pull-ups--just in case. Paul says I will stand there for long minutes in my nightgown, just staring. Intellectually I know there's a connection between what I see at work most days and the time I spend watching my boys sleep: The weirder my caseload, the more likely I am to act like a sentinel.
They are both very deep sleepers. Their pediatrician once said she believed that little boys sleep more deeply than little girls. I've no idea if that's true, but I know that my sister and I never seemed to slumber the way our brother did. My father would wake me up when it was time to start getting ready for school, and I would hear him the moment he started turning the knob on my bedroom door. In the months when we were investigating the murders up in Haverill, I found myself standing with obsessive frequency over my boys' beds or that beanbag chair and watching the two of them. When Lionel was in Marcus's bedroom, the air would be filled with the aroma of baby shampoo,
and I would just stand there and study how my three-year-old would curl his small body into the beanbag chair as if he were back in the womb, his knees against his chest, while Marcus would sleep flat on his stomach, his legs as straight as an Olympic diver's as he entered the water. They were often in matching pajamas, though I have actually tried to discourage that. It's Lionel who insists on being a Mini Marcus and dressing as much like his older brother as his older brother will allow. Marcus, it seems, is much more tolerant in that regard than I would be. That summer the boys were sleeping in pajamas with a montage of comic-book superheroes, men and women who sort of do what I do, but without needing a judge's permission or a jury's agreement. And both boys would be sleeping so soundly that I would have to watch very carefully to detect the slightest rise in either Lionel's slender shoulders or Marcus's back. It's as if all that energy they start to expend from the moment they open their eyes--Exhibit A, breakfast--has completely drained their tanks by bedtime.
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