An End to a Silence: A mystery novel (The Montana Trilogy Book 1)

by W. H. Clark

  “He ask for anything? Special treatment?” Ward asked.

  “No sir, he didn’t. Didn’t ask for a thing. Just asked to see the detective in charge of the case. So I called your station and got your number and here you are.”

  “Who’d you speak to at the station?”

  “The lieutenant.”

  “Gammond?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Ward turned to Newton and said quietly, “Didn’t think Gammond wanted you anywhere near this case.”

  “It’s what I thought,” Newton said.

  “He had any visitors recently?”

  “He’s not the kind that gets visitors.”

  Ward nodded.

  The deputy warden pressed a button. Moments later a lock was broken and bars slid to the sound of a loud buzzer. The operator of the security system was behind plexiglass and he studied Ward and Newton like a cat watching two birds.

  Two more sets of security gates unlocked and they went through. The corridor they entered smelled of a cross between cabbage and festering corpses. With a splash of cleaning fluids. They walked to the end and turned right. The bright lights above them buzzed a high-pitched note and one flickered. On. Off. An old man in prison threads was mopping the floor and he nodded a respectful acknowledgment and Ward and Newton returned it. At the end of the corridor was a door leading to a room. A guard sat on a chair outside and he stood as the three men approached.

  Eric Lafayette sat inside the windowless room grinning but his smile was crooked on account of the big prison scar that streaked up from his cheek and finished in an empty eye socket that was closed and looked stuck with crusted glue. His good eye was topaz blue and bright as a flashlight. The sparse teeth that were there were unevenly spaced and mostly rotten. He managed to stroke his greasy hair back in spite of his cuffed wrists. His bones had a covering of pasty, wrinkled skin. Like wadded-up paper had been plastered onto his skeleton. His throat crackled phlegm as he breathed heavily.

  “You came in the plural. Only expected one. Two’s even better. Should I feel honored? I should feel honored.” He watched them both sit and the grin never left his face. “I guess it’s only polite to do introductions. I’ll go first. I’m Eric. Very pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand to Newton, who didn’t move. Then to Ward. The same reaction.

  “Aww, come on, gentlemen. We’re all gentlemen, aren’t we? Well, please yourself. I do it all the time. Please myself. You should try it.” He launched into a fit of laughter ending in a coughing fit which turned the gray skin on his face a dirty pink and nearly popped out his good eye. He swallowed phlegm and seemed to enjoy it. The grin returned like some oily residue.

  Ward spoke. “I’m Detective Ward and this here is Detective Newton. We’ve come to discuss what you said to the deputy warden. It’s an informal interview at this stage. You can request a lawyer to be present if you’d prefer.”

  “Don’t need no lawyer. Didn’t do me no good before.” He wheezed.

  “Do you want to tell us what you told the deputy warden?” Ward said.

  “It would be my pleasure, detective. I killed your little boy.” He grinned and his one good eye darted from Ward to Newton and back. “How’s that?”

  Ward noticed Newton twitch in his chair.

  “Oh, you want more details? Okay, but it ain’t pretty. Kinda grisly.”

  Ward noticed Newton flinch and he saw his hand form a fist.

  “Go ahead,” Ward said.

  “Well. Once upon a time there was a little boy and then there wasn’t. How’s that? Or do you want more?”

  Ward noticed Newton stand to his full height and noticed that he was about to snap Lafayette like a bunch of twigs. Noticed just in time to grab him and put himself in between Newton and the table, which got shunted into Lafayette’s midriff and pushed out a gasp and a cough. Lafayette’s grin morphed into something more sinister.

  “I got your attention, then.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Newton shouted, and the door opened.

  The guard studied the situation.

  “It’s okay. We got it under control,” Ward said, and he managed to get Newton seated.

  The guard nodded and he left the room and closed the door.

  “If you come for a happy ending I can tell you now you’re gonna be mighty disappointed.”

  Ward said, “Look, we’re not here to play games. We can leave now.”

  For a moment Lafayette’s grin faded under the bleaching intensity of Ward’s scowl.

  “Okay, okay. I’m done playing with you. We’re all gentlemen here. All friends. Okay. It was a hot day. So I took off in search of something to keep me occupied.” He winked at them both but tried it with his missing eye and it lost its effect.

  “Sometimes you drive forever and don’t find a morsel. On this occasion, though, the Lord himself was smiling down on me and he handed me this little gift straight from heaven itself. He was walking down the street. Little boy lost. So I pulled up my vehicle and I asked him ‘is you lost, little ’un?’ And he cried at me and I said not to cry, I’d get him back to his parents in no time at all. And I scooped him up like his daddy might and I put him in the car. We drove a while and he starts crying again and I said not to worry, we going the scenic route and I’d have him back with his parents before dinner. Right after I’d taken him for ice cream. And he stops crying again. All young ’uns, they like ice cream. That itself is a blessing ’cause it shut him up a whiles longer. I think it was when he sees the woods that he set to crying again.”

  Ward saw that Newton was winding up for another crack at him. He looked over at Newton and caught his eye and Newton breathed out heavily through his nose.

  “I have to warn you, while this is my personal favorite part, it might not be to everybody’s taste.”

  Ward said, “Go on.”

  “Okay, you asked me to go on and I will go on.”

  Ward started tapping his foot as Lafayette went into more detail. He nipped his own leg to distract himself from what he was hearing. Newton just stared straight at Lafayette and didn’t move a muscle. And all the while Lafayette’s grin grew and Ward wanted to knock his remaining teeth out. In his head Ward hummed. He tried to take his mind out of the room but he heard every word and he wanted to kill the son of a bitch.

  Lafayette let out a sigh. “And that’s that. You can’t write that shit.”

  Ward and Newton were silent for a few moments and then Ward said, “What did you do with the body?”

  “Well, I buried it of course. Out there in the woods.”

  “Could you tell us where?”

  “I could not do that. I can show but not tell. I reckon I can take you right to the spot. Could do with the fresh air, truth be told. And it’ll bring back such sweet memories.” He laughed.

  Newton launched himself at him and Lafayette crashed heavily on the floor, his head clanging as it hit. The door was quickly opened and the guard was in. He said “whatthefuck?” and he dragged Newton off. Ward was on his feet but he was slow to react. He didn’t know whether that was a conscious thing. He hoped it was.

  Lafayette was dazed and he breathed heavily and then went into another coughing fit and this one dislodged a tooth and it sounded like a tiny pebble when it hit the floor. The guard sat him upright again and a single drop of blood fell from Lafayette’s mouth onto the table. His grin returned and the extra gap took the grin to another level of sinister. His tongue examined the new gap.

  “I’ll take that for the tooth fairy,” Lafayette said, looking on the floor for the tooth.

  The guard guided Newton out the door and Ward stood and stared at the bag of bones in front of him.

  “Is there anything you want for this information?”

  “I don’t want nothing. Just doing my civic duty.”

  Ward followed Newton out. In the corridor, as the guard shuffled Lafayette out of the room, the old man shouted, “You ain’t taken my confession.”

 
Ward called back, “Go see the chaplain.”

  “Hey, hey! You didn’t write it down. I ain’t signed nothing. This is my kill. I want my kill.”

  “He said he didn’t want anything. Does that sound right to you?”

  Newton was still shaken. He heard Ward speaking with a slight time delay. “He didn’t do it.”

  “What I was thinking. Why would he confess now after all this time and not want some kind of privileges?”

  “He didn’t do it.”

  “You still think O’Donnell did it?”

  “Spent twenty-five years thinking he did. Knowing he did.”

  “And now?”

  Newton clenched both fists and studied them for a few seconds. “Hold on a minute while I get my head around twenty-five years of being wrong.”

  “Don’t mean you’re wrong.”

  Newton turned his head to face Ward. “You know it does. Someone put Lafayette up to this.”

  “You think?”

  “I know, son.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, it sure as hell wasn’t O’Donnell. But it’s not just the who, it’s the why that concerns me.”

  “Somebody wants the Ryan case to go away.”

  “I know it. But the deputy warden said Lafayette’s had no visitors.”

  “My guess is somebody got a note slipped to him. Asking him to kindly confess to a crime he didn’t commit. Somebody with connections inside the prison. Could be anybody.” Could be a cop, Ward thought, but he kept the thought to himself. Larsson had as good as said that there was police involvement in Ryan’s disappearance. But Ward didn’t want to air that thinking just yet.

  Newton said, “Who has something to lose by the truth coming out about what happened to Ryan?”

  “Whoever took him.”

  “Don’t you get the feeling there’s more to it than that?”

  “And we come back to the question of whether the two cases are linked.”

  Newton took a breath. “We solve one, we solve the other.”

  “Let’s see. Little boy disappears. Grandpa gets killed twenty-five years later. Why now? Maybe he knew something and was about to tell. He mentioned a confession. Somebody got wind of that. O’Donnell knew who did it. He knew what happened to Ryan. That was what he wanted to confess to. So person unknown kills the boy and all these years later kills O’Donnell because he thinks that suddenly O’Donnell is going to confess to keeping his silence about what happened. Who would know about what went on that night in Sunny Glade? What O’Donnell said about confessing to something? Who then went and killed Doctor Brookline because he thought O’Donnell had maybe said something to the good doctor? O’Donnell only said two things when he blew up according to the girl. He mentioned a confession and he also mentioned Doctor Brookline. That got somebody spooked enough to kill the old man. And the doctor.”

  “I know who you’re thinking.”

  Ward said, “Kenny.”

  “You still think Kenny’s involved?” There wasn’t really a question in Newton’s voice. Sounded like a man coming to terms with an inevitable truth.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I still think we have to tread careful with him.”

  “But you think—”

  Newton cut him off. “What I think is that we’ve just been given a bit more to go on. And I mean it about treading carefully. If Kenny’s involved, this thing could get dangerous.”

  “Look, Kenny was there that night. He has access to the pharmacy to get to the morphine that killed O’Donnell and Brookline. He has connections. Could’ve got Lafayette to confess to killing Ryan. If we agree that the two cases are linked it would do him good to pin the Ryan murder on somebody else. If we can’t link the Ryan case with the O’Donnell case it weakens the O’Donnell case. Takes away motive.”

  “But no morphine was missing from the pharmacy.”

  “And that’s a problem.”

  “A big problem.”

  “And what about the guy you say you saw? You thought he was Ryan.”

  “Could’ve been mistaken. I was mistaken twenty-five years about O’Donnell.”

  “We don’t like him for O’Donnell? His prints were found on the windowsill of O’Donnell’s room. But everything else about both scenes was clean. No prints anywhere else. So he’s not our killer.”

  “But we still need to find him. Rule him out.”

  “And find out what the hell he’s been doing going in and out of O’Donnell’s room.”

  Newton turned the engine over and revved loudly. “All we know for certain is that piece of shit Lafayette didn’t take Ryan.”

  “He really got to you.”

  “That thing in there?” Newton set the vehicle rolling. “There was some truth in it. He was describing another homicide he committed. He’s down for two. Son of a bitch was describing one of those. 1987. A year after Ryan went missing. He was getting off on the memory. And I won’t tolerate that.”

  54

  “You take his confession?” Gammond was more animated than normal. His cheeks were sherry red. His thick mustache, gray for the most part, twitched on his lip as he chewed on an imaginary tidbit.

  “He didn’t do it.”

  “Come again?”

  “He didn’t do it.”

  “The heck he didn’t.”

  “Lieutenant, he did not murder Ryan Novak.”

  “The heck he didn’t. You want to go tell the captain that? The heck he didn’t do it. I spoke to the dang deppity warden myself. Heard what the man said. He’s our man. It all fits.”

  “You ask me, it all fits a bit too neatly.”

  “Too neatly my backsides, Newton. The guy made a convincing confession. You took his confession, right?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t. Because he didn’t do it.”

  “Son of a gun. You get back there and take his dang confession in writing. He wants to claim a murder death, we let him.”

  “That’s just it, though. He wants to claim it. Another trophy. Why now? Why wait? He didn’t do it. I’m not taking no confession. You want his confession, you go get it. With the greatest respect. Sir. I have another homicide to investigate. The Ryan case is in the past.”

  Newton stood up as straight as his body would let him and he walked to the door. Gammond’s face was nuclear but all he managed was to sputter a few sounds that approximated curse words.

  55

  His skin itched to the tune of jazz piano. Worms poked at every pore. His skin felt hot and tight and it hummed underneath the surface like a swarm of bees. He wanted to scream but the scream would have to come out of his pores and the worms were blocking them. He saw two tubes snaking over his stomach. One carrying blood and the other carrying something that looked like strawberry milkshake. He figured it was some kind of filtration system and he thought he saw insects in the milkshake. He counted – one, two, three, ten, nine, eight – over and over again and he paced in the room. He hugged himself but the hug took his breath as his broken ribs bent like rubber and then he thought he was his own prom date and he kissed his arm and then bit it and almost drew blood with his remaining teeth. He wanted to shit and so he tried to do it in his pants. But he didn’t shit but he definitely pissed. Fuck, fuck, FUCK! No, no, no, no, no, no, no…

  He smacked himself about the head with his fist. He screamed at the pain as the impact reverberated like a broken cymbal and his cracked cheekbone exploded into purple flame. And the scream came from the worms and they all stood off his skin like fat hairs and they swayed in a nonexistent wind. He fell to his knees. Scrabbled frantically in the debris on the floor and came up with nothing. There was just the gun. He knocked it aside and found an empty pill bottle, which he shook and shook but it made no noise. He’d done a dumb trade. He knew it. And he hurt. And he gasped. And he wished he was still in the hospital. And the worms screamed.

  56

  Larsson answered. Ward asked him one question. Asked if the FBI investigated Kenny. He got his answer a
nd hung up the phone. He called his friend in the FBI’s San Antonio field office.

  Ward said, “Hi, Jake. It’s Ward.”

  “Hey, Ward. How’s it going there, my friend? More to the point, where the hell are you?”

  “In Montana.”

  “Fuck. Are you crazy? It’s fucking cold up there.”

  “I know. But it’s mainly manageable.”

  “Rather you than me. I guess you’re running? You hear anything from her now?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “So, what is it you want? You want something, right?”

  “I need some information. Public corruption case back in 1985, 1986. Name’s James Kenny. Westmoreland, Montana. The case got canned but I wondered if you could get your hands on some bank details.”

  “What kind of investigation we talking about?”

  “City Hall kickbacks. He’s a property developer.”

  “You got something new on him?”

  “No. It’s unconnected. Another investigation. Homicide.”

  “Bro, I’ll do my best for you. What is it you’re looking for specifically?”

  “I need his bank statements. Say for the entirety of 1986. I would expect the Bureau investigation would have that.”

  “That’s if they haven’t been destroyed. In any case, it might take some time. What’s your urgency?”

  “Ten.”

  “Okay. I’ll see what I can do. Leave it with me.”

  “Do your best.”

  “You know it, bro.”

  57

  Newton was sitting at his desk. He didn’t focus on much. Just sat. Gammond walked over to him. He’d calmed down. He eyed Newton with concern.

  “You want to finish early, I’d understand that. You don’t need this.”

  Newton glanced at Gammond. “What about the investigation? Ward’s out of the picture. Who’s going to run that?”

  “We can cover it. I don’t want you to go overstretch yourself. This thing might run for a few weeks and you ain’t got that time.”