by JA Jance
Welcome to the world of being the last guy in. I had already been warned that I was automatically on tap to do the grunt work, and that was fine with me. I knew that was what it would take to learn the ropes. When I showed up in the garage, I more than half expected Phil Molloy, who ran the motor pool, to give me the business about it.
“So you’re out of squad cars and into unmarked,” he observed. “Who are you working with?”
“They haven’t assigned me a partner yet. I’m working a case with Detectives Watkins and Powell.”
“You’re lucky,” Molloy said. “They’re both good people.”
I sat in the passenger load zone on Third Avenue for the better part of fifteen minutes before Watty finally put in an appearance.
“Where to?” I asked.
“Saints Peter and Paul Catholic School on Magnolia to have a talk with Donnie and Frankie Dodd,” Watty replied. “You’re the one who brought up the path question yesterday, so it’s only fair that you’re there when we talk to them. Do you know where Saints Peter and Paul is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s on the far side of Magnolia Village,” Watty told me. “Just head over the Magnolia Bridge and turn right.”
Magnolia Village was the name of the neighborhood’s central shopping district.
“We’re going to talk to them at their school?” I asked, heading the patrol car in that direction. “Without their mother being there?”
Watty favored me with an owlish look. “Mac and I already tried talking to them with their mother in the room,” he replied. “We didn’t get anywhere that way, so now we’re going to try talking to them alone.”
It seemed like a good time to change the subject.
“How much does tuition to a private school cost?” I asked.
“Funny you should ask,” Watty replied. “I wondered that myself, and I already checked. It’s seven and a half thousand dollars a year per kid.”
I whistled. “Fifteen thousand a year? That’s a lot of money. How does a single mom afford something like that?”
“Good question,” Watty said.
I was still mulling it over when we arrived at the school and parked in a designated visitor parking slot. A sign on the door directed all visitors to report to the office, which we did. Moments later we were in the presence of Sister Mary Katherine, a tall bony woman in a severe black skirt and starched white blouse with a black-and-white veil pinned to short, graying brown hair. She examined Watty’s ID badge thoroughly through gold-framed glasses before handing it back to him.
“What can I do for you gentlemen?” she asked.
“Detective Beaumont and I are hoping to have a word with two of your students, Donnie and Frankie Dodd.”
Sister Mary Katherine glared briefly at me. It was the first time I had heard the word “Detective” attached to my name, but if she had asked to see my badge, I would have been stumped. The only ID I had still referred to me as “Officer Beaumont.”
I was relieved when she turned back to Watty.
“What about?”
“The boys were instrumental in helping us find a body over the weekend,” Watty said. “I spoke to them on Sunday, but a few more questions have come up.”
Sister Mary Katherine studied us for a moment longer. “On one condition,” she said.
“What’s that?” Watty wanted to know.
“That I stay in the room while you speak to them. These are my students, after all,” she added. “I won’t have them pushed around.”
“Fine,” Watty agreed.
With that, Sister Mary Katherine reached for the intercom button on her desk. “Miss Simmons,” she said. “Please ask Donnie and Frankie Dodd to come to the office.”
I noticed she didn’t have to specify in which classrooms the boys might be found. I had the sense that this wasn’t the first time the two red-haired brothers had been summoned to the office—and that it wouldn’t be the last. I expected them to show up together, but they didn’t. When the first one arrived, he was already protesting his innocence.
“Whatever it is,” he declared, “I didn’t do it and neither did Frankie.”
“It’s all right, Donnie,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “You’re not in trouble. These two detectives would like to speak to you and your brother for a few minutes.”
I was glad the good sister could tell them apart. In a pinch, I wouldn’t have been able to.
A minute or so later Frankie slouched into the room. Without a word, he settled onto a chair next to his brother to await whatever was coming. Yes, they had definitely been summoned to the principal’s office on more than one occasion.
“Do you remember me from the other day?” Watty asked.
Both boys nodded. Neither of them met Watty’s questioning stare.
“What about Detective Beaumont here?” Watty asked.
They both glanced in my direction and then delivered tiny simultaneous nods.
Watty launched straight into the heart of the matter. “I’ve been going over Detective Beaumont’s report. I believe you mentioned you’re not supposed to go down onto the pier or onto the railroad tracks. Is that correct?”
Again both boys nodded in unison.
“But you do go there.”
“Sometimes,” Donnie said.
On Sunday both boys had been equally communicative, but here—perhaps because they were operating under Sister Mary Katherine’s steely-eyed stare—Donnie seemed to have assumed the role of official spokesman.
“And do you always go up and down the same way?” Watty asked.
“I guess,” Donnie said.
“So there’s, like, a regular path you follow?”
Donnie nodded, more emphatically this time.
“And you were on the path when you found the barrel?”
This time the two boys exchanged glances before Donnie answered. “I think so,” he hedged.
“The funny thing is,” Watty said, leaning back in his chair, “I spent all day Monday out at the crime scene. There’s a path, all right, but it’s nowhere near where you found the barrel.”
“But we saw it from the path,” Frankie put in. “It was right there in plain sight until we pushed it on down the hill.”
Watty ignored the interruption and stayed focused on Donnie. “Is that true?” he asked. “Or did you go looking for it because you already knew it was there?”
“We found it when we were coming back from the movie,” Donnie said. “That’s all. We found it, and then we opened it, and then we called you.”
“How did you open it again?”
“We used a stick to pry off the lid,” Donnie declared.
“And where did you find the stick?” Watty asked. “Was it just lying there on the hillside?”
“Yes,” Donnie answered. “We found the stick right there.”
I could see where Watty was going with this. The barrel had been found in a blackberry bramble. The stick the boys claimed they had used to open the barrel had looked to me like a branch from an alder tree, none of which were anywhere in evidence.
“That’s not what the marks on the barrel say,” Watty told them. “They say you’re lying about that.”
He just dropped that one into the conversation and let it sit there. The two boys exchanged glances, squirmed uneasily, and said nothing.
“If you know more than you’re saying,” Sister Mary Katherine said, inserting herself into the interview, “then you need to tell the detectives what it is.”
In other words, it was okay to push Sister Mary Katherine’s students around if she was the one doing the pushing.
“We used a crowbar,” Donnie admitted finally, after a long, uncomfortable pause. “We only said we used the stick.”
“Where is the crowbar now?” Watty asked.
“We dropped it in the water down by the pier when we went to use the phone.”
“And where did the crowbar come from in the first place?”
“Our mom’s garage.”
“And how did it get from the garage to the barrel?”
“We took it down the hill on Sunday morning, while Mom was still asleep.”
“Which means you already knew the barrel was there,” Watty concluded.
This time both Donnie and Frankie nodded.
“How?”
“We saw the guy who dumped it,” Frankie said, speaking for the first time. “On Saturday night, we were outside.” He paused and gave Sister Mary Katherine a wary look.
“Go on,” she ordered.
“We had stolen some of Mom’s cigarettes,” he said. “The house next door is empty. We were hiding in the backyard, smoking, when a guy drove into the yard in a pickup with a camper shell on top of it. He drove as far as the end of the driveway. He got out of the truck and pushed something out of the back. When he rolled it out onto the ground, we could see it was a barrel.”
“What kind of pickup?” Watty asked.
“I don’t know,” Frankie said.
“It was a Ford,” Donnie put in.
“Color?”
“It was sort of dark, but we couldn’t tell much about it because it was late at night.”
“How late?”
Donnie shrugged. “After midnight. That’s why you can’t tell our mom. She’d kill us if she knew we were sneaking out of the house when she thought we were in bed.”
“And that’s why you made up the story of finding the barrel on Sunday?”
Donnie nodded.
Watty settled in closer, giving the two boys a hard look. “This pickup truck you saw. Had you ever seen it around before?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Did you see the license plate?”
“No.”
I’ve heard that twins often develop forms of communication that can pass between them in utter silence. I was suddenly under the impression that that was exactly what was going on here. They were both lying about something, but I couldn’t figure out what. I think Watty was getting the same message. Ditto Sister Mary Katherine.
“God knows when you’re not telling the truth,” the good sister remarked.
Both boys flushed beet red. “Please don’t tell our mother,” Donnie begged. “Please. We’ll be in big trouble.”
“So when did you take the crowbar from the garage?” Watty asked.
I closed my eyes and envisioned the house they lived in—a small 1940s vintage brick house with a detached single-car garage at the end of a narrow driveway. The house next door was an exact copy. When they were built, they were probably considered affordable housing for GIs returning from World War II.
“Like I said. We did it in the morning, before she woke up.” Donnie was back to doing the talking for both of them. “We knew there wouldn’t be time to open the barrel before we went to church. That’s why we decided to do it later. We told Mom we wanted to see Charlotte’s Web, even though we didn’t. We got in line at the Cinerama, but as soon as she drove away, we caught a bus back to the Magnolia Bridge. That way we knew we’d have plenty of time to open the barrel before we were supposed to get home. The next showing didn’t start until four thirty.”
“What did you think you’d find when you opened that barrel?” Watty asked.
“Treasure,” Donnie said.
“Money.” That was from Frankie.
They were two similar answers, but not quite the same. Not identical, as it were, and it made me wonder why. Treasure is something you keep; money is something you spend. What neither of them had anticipated finding in the barrel was what was actually there—the horrifying naked body of a murdered young woman.
“You said this all happened after midnight? Isn’t that kind of late for you to be out of the house and unsupervised?”
“It was the weekend,” Donnie said. “We didn’t have to get up for school.”
“Where was your mom?”
Donnie glanced in Sister Mary Katherine’s direction. “She was busy,” he said.
Remembering what Mrs. Fisk had told me, I could well imagine that the boys’ mother had been busy with something other than her sons on a Saturday night.
“And how did you get out of the house without your mother knowing you were gone?”
“We go out through the window in our room,” he said.
“I was by your house the other day,” I said. “I seem to remember seeing streetlights. Are you sure it was too dark for you to see that truck? After all, if you were close enough to see the barrel get pushed over the edge of the yard, you must have been close enough to see more of the truck than you’re telling us.”
“I already said,” Donnie insisted. “It was a Ford. And it was dark. Maybe it was black, or it could have been blue. And it was real loud.”
“Is it possible it belonged to one of your mother’s friends?”
“No!” Donnie said heatedly, unconsciously balling his fists. “And don’t talk about my mother.”
Obviously my comment about his mother’s friends had come a little too close to the truth of the matter. I had no doubt that Donnie had, on occasion, resorted to blows in defense of his mother’s somewhat questionable honor. The look Sister Mary Katherine leveled at me said that this wasn’t news to her, either.
“Is that all?” she asked. Her question was aimed at Detective Watkins, but we both nodded.
“For the time being,” Watty replied.
“All right then,” she said to the boys. “You may go back to your classrooms. And, Donnie,” she added. “You’d better schedule a time to see Father Hennessey.”
“You mean, like, for confession?”
Sister Mary Katherine nodded. “What do you think?” she replied.
“Yes, sister,” he replied. Then, biting his lip, Donnie followed his brother from the room.
“They may look identical,” Sister Mary Katherine observed, watching the two boys hustle from the room. “But there are definitely some differences, especially when it comes to brains. Frankie got held back last year. He’s doing fourth grade for the second time. Donnie is in fifth.”
“And you know about their mother?” I asked.
“Detective . . .”
“Beaumont,” I supplied.
“Detective Beaumont, we’re in the business of hating the sin and loving the sinner. Someone is paying for the boys to attend this school in the firm hope that we’re preparing them to make better choices with their lives. For all I know, what they witnessed over the weekend may well be part of God’s plan for keeping them on the right path. They did call the incident in, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“So they acted responsibly, correct? If it hadn’t been for them, the body of that poor girl might never have been found. Right?”
It was my turn to nod. Sister Mary Katherine seemed to have that effect on everyone—striking people dumb and turning them into complacent nodders, Detective Watkins and myself included.
“Being raised without a father, those boys have a hard enough time holding their heads up in polite society, so I’m asking that you give them a break. Their mother has been known to overreact on occasion. As far as I can see, they’re not suspects, are they?”
“No, but they might lead us to a suspect,” Watty objected. “If they could give us a better description of the vehicle involved . . .”
“If!” Sister Mary Katherine said derisively. “Let me tell you something for certain. If you rile up their mother about their sneaking out of the house and smoking cigarettes, she’s liable to take after both of them with a belt, because it’s happened before. I don’t know if the mother was the one who did the beating or if someone else did, but the point is, unless you want to accept the responsibility for that—for those two boys being beaten to within an inch of their lives—I suggest you leave Donnie and Frankie out of your crime-fighting equation.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Detective Watkins said, getting up and heading for the door. “Thank you for your help.”
; His immediate unconditional surrender surprised me, but I waited until we were outside before I said anything.
“What happened in there?” I asked.
“Donnie and Frankie are off-limits,” he said tersely. “Either we’ll find our killer without their help or we won’t find him.”
“But—” I began.
“I had a stepfather with a belt once,” Watty said. “Been there, done that. If those two boys end up getting into trouble with their mother or with one of her johns, it won’t be on my account, or yours, either. End of story.”
And that was the end of the story, at least as far as Donnie and Frankie Dodd were concerned. Watty and I never interviewed those kids again, and by the time I was assigned to my new partner, Milton Gurkey, the Dodd family had left town.
Just for the hell of it, I picked up my iPad now and tried googling them. Donald Dodd. Frank Dodd. Nothing came of it. Not a single link.
While I was doing my computer search, time had passed. When Nurse Jackie hustled into the room a few minutes later, I was surprised to realize that it was already late afternoon. The sun was going down outside. I looked toward the window Lieutenant Davis had peered out of, expecting to see the Space Needle rising in the distance. Except it wasn’t there. The window was, but the Space Needle wasn’t. The window faced east, not west. There was no view of the Space Needle there in real life, only in my dream.
“I’m working this floor today. Now, what’s wrong with your phone?” Nurse Jackie wanted to know, jarring me out of my window problem. “Your wife’s on the line, and she won’t take no for an answer.”
Examining the phone on the bedside table, Nurse Jackie quickly discovered it was unplugged. As soon as she rectified that situation, the phone began to ring. She handed it over, and Mel was already talking by the time I lifted the phone to my ear.
“When you didn’t answer, I was worried. I was afraid something bad had happened, that there had been some kind of complication.”
“Sorry,” I muttered guiltily. “No complication. I must have pulled the plug on the phone without realizing it. What’s up?”
“All hell has broken out,” Mel replied. “One of the protesters from last week—one who got Tasered—was found unresponsive in his apartment earlier this morning. An ambulance crew was summoned. They tried to get his heart going again, but it didn’t work. He was DOA by the time they got him to the hospital. So now it’s gone from being voluntary S.H.I.T. squad involvement to compulsory involvement. In other words, I won’t be home tonight. Do you want me to call Kelly and see if she can come up from Ashland?”