Cover Story

by Brenda Buchanan

  “We believe Frank learned something that day that made him decide to take emergency action.”

  “But you don’t have any idea what that might have been, do you?”

  “I do not.”

  “In other words, the assertion that Corrine Boothby was at immediate risk of harm on May 22, harm serious enough to justify her removal to foster care, that’s all speculation, isn’t it?”

  Mansfield jumped to his feet, saying Cohen’s back-and-forth with the witness amounted to badgering. Justice Herrick overruled the objection.

  I glanced over at the jury. Several wore tight looks on their faces. It was unclear whether they were irritated by the defense attorney’s aggressive questioning or skeptical of Anderson’s testimony. Cohen must have decided his point had been well enough made, because he thanked Anderson for his testimony and headed for the defense table.

  Mansfield had time for redirect before lunch, but the prosecutor’s failure to prepare Anderson for Cohen’s tough cross meant he was stuck with a whipped dog in the witness chair.

  “How would you compare Frank O’Rourke to other case workers you’ve supervised over the years?” Mansfield no doubt expected Anderson to bounce back into his original persona as a grieving but proud boss.

  “He was pretty typical.” Anderson’s voice had grown defensive. “They all work hard, and they have a difficult job to do. Sometimes Frank made mistakes, but he did some good things, too.”

  Mansfield tried four or five additional questions, but Anderson never seemed to catch on that he was supposed to be rehabilitating his former employee’s reputation. No matter the question, his answers were those of a boy chastened after being caught telling a tall tale. All but throwing up his hands, Mansfield cut his losses and let Anderson step down as the clock struck noon, meaning the jurors were escorted out with the equivocal words of the overmatched Darren Anderson ringing in their ears.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Monday, January 12, 2015

  My instinct was to keep poking at potential sources of information, so I timed my arrival at the rear door to match that of Dolores LeClair. I told her who I was again, not sure if the previous week’s introduction had stuck, and asked if I could talk with her for a few minutes.

  “What do you want to talk about?” Despite having been in Machias for a week covering a story with enormous implications for her family, I was hearing Dolores’s strong Downeast accent for the first time.

  “Your thoughts about the trial.” I turned on my most polite smile. “Can I buy you lunch?”

  Before she could answer, Claude barreled up, his broad face as red as if he’d been working outside.

  “Why are you bothering my wife?”

  Paulie Finnegan taught me plenty about how to disarm people with humor, so I put a smile in my voice. “Aw, Claude. I was this close—” I held my thumb and index finger a quarter inch apart “—this close to convincing Dolores to be my lunch date.”

  Claude spun his big body toward his wife. “I forbid you to talk to this man, much less have lunch with him.”

  “No forbidding necessary,” Dolores said. “I already made plans to have lunch at the Peabodys’. But I’m sure you don’t care to listen to us chitchat, so if you want to eat with this fellow, go right ahead.”

  Claude looked at me like he suspected a trick.

  I put a little sing-song in my voice. “I’m buying. Your choice—we can eat at the pizza place or I can pick up a couple of sandwiches and meet you at the barber shop.”

  “Get sandwiches. Ham and cheese for me.” His tone left no doubt he’d prefer not to be seen with me in public. “With mustard, but not the spicy kind. I’ll meet you at the shop in ten minutes.”

  I zipped my parka and pulled on my hat as I jogged down the stairs, wondering if what I’d witnessed was a typical protective reaction from an old-school guy or the edgy paranoia I’d glimpsed before. At the pizza shop I handed over a twenty for two subs, a couple of bags of chips and two Cokes, and got almost six back in change. Claude was already at the barber shop when I arrived, sitting in the chair where I’d been shorn, no lights illuminating the space other than the sunshine coming in through the front window.

  We chatted about the weather a bit. I said nothing about my near-death experience driving through the storm the previous Thursday night, and he didn’t mention our skirmish in the courthouse hallway. I steered the conversation to the trial.

  “Cohen sure is working hard to get Danny off.” I unwrapped my sandwich. “Last week I thought he did a pretty good job raising doubt about whether Danny was the one who stabbed O’Rourke, and this morning he sure took that white hat off O’Rourke’s head.”

  The door swung open, letting in a bit more light along with Claude’s brother-in-law Lenny. “Where’s D’lores?” His voice was unsteady. “I saw you come in, but not her.”

  “She’s having lunch with the Peabody sisters. Don’t worry, she’s okay.” Claude waved him toward a seat. “You want part of my sub?”

  Lenny shook his head and settled into a chair two down from me in the waiting-for-a-haircut row.

  “What do you think the jury made of the dirt about O’Rourke’s record?” Lenny’s benign presence didn’t dent my determination to pick away at Claude’s brain.

  “Hard to say.” Claude drew out the vowels.

  “If Danny didn’t kill O’Rourke, who do you think might have?”

  “That’s a good question.” Claude leaned toward me. “I’ve been wondering about that myself. But all the evidence seems to work against him.”

  His voice strove for a tone of easy conversation, but tight breathing hinted at the suppressed emotion that charged the air when he cut my hair the previous week.

  “You know Jackson Harrison?” I asked.

  “All his life.” Claude set his sandwich aside.

  “You know anything about him having a beef with O’Rourke?”

  Claude raised his eyebrows. “Geeze, I don’t know. He might have had a run-in with him at some point. This is a small town.”

  “Harrison have any kids?”

  “Two. Must be grown now, or close to it. They live in Bangor, with their mother, I believe.” He opened his soda. “You thinking Harrison might have killed O’Rourke?”

  “Nah.” I backpedaled, fast. The last thing I needed was a pissed-off Jackson Harrison hearing I was naming him as the alternate suspect. “He’s on my mind because he told me the same thing Cohen was saying this morning, that O’Rourke wasn’t the nicest guy in the world.”

  “Jackson’d be right about that.” Claude picked up his sandwich and took a big bite.

  We ate in silence for a while, and swigged at our Cokes. After balling up my sandwich wrapper, I tried again.

  “The way I see it, Cohen’s got that jury wondering if maybe Danny didn’t kill O’Rourke, but they’re going to give him a guilty verdict unless he can point the finger somewhere else.”

  I studied his face, wondering if the wind had reddened his complexion or the ruddiness was caused by our conversation.

  “If I knew something that pointed the finger away from Danny, I’d say so.” Claude wiped a smear of mustard from the corner of his mouth. “But I haven’t heard a theory that makes any sense at all.”

  I looked over at Lenny, who was studying the floor tiles as if they held a code that would solve the mystery.

  “It’d be a shame if the wrong thing happened,” I said.

  Claude hoisted his fireplug body out of his chair.

  “Things have a way of working out.” He shuffled toward the bathroom.

  It was obvious Claude didn’t want to be seen in my presence, so I took my leave while he was in the john. As soon as I got back to the courthouse I pulled out my phone and found the number for the Subaru dealer who
had custody of my car. I was connected to the mechanic himself, who broke the sad news—the cost to fix my car would far exceed her market value. I promised to stop in on my way south to fill out the insurance paperwork.

  Totaled. Such a sad word.

  That afternoon Mansfield put on a series of cop witnesses who added to the pile of forensic evidence he hoped would convince the jury that Danny Boothby was the only guy who could have plunged the knife into Frank O’Rourke’s heart. I tried to force myself to focus on the testimony, but my brain kept tuning out the witness on the stand in favor of puzzling over the case’s inconsistencies.

  If Danny didn’t kill O’Rourke, was he acting under the erroneous belief that his daughter thrust the knife into the errant social worker’s heart? But how could Danny be mistaken about that?

  I played with that idea. Maybe Danny came home and found O’Rourke dead on his porch, Corrine crying in the house, and he assumed Corrine did the stabbing. If she was as hysterical that afternoon as Trooper Day described, she might not have been able to set him straight, and maybe there’d been no opportunity for them to see each other alone since that May night, no chance for her to explain that she didn’t kill O’Rourke, but found him dead on the porch when she returned from school.

  It seemed a little farfetched, even giving my imagination the benefit of the doubt.

  But assuming for a moment the killer wasn’t Corrine, Jackson Harrison was the most likely alternative. He lived next door to the Boothbys—which would have allowed him to walk undetected through the narrow strip of woods to and from the murder scene—and he loathed Frank O’Rourke. Harrison had showed up to watch the trial every day, which was odd. Didn’t he have a job, or something else to do? And how freaky would that be, for the real killer to come to a trial where someone else was sweating out the possibility of a conviction? I’ve heard that arsonists sometimes show up at fire scenes to admire their handiwork. Maybe Harrison’s presence in the courtroom while a jury sat in judgment of Danny Boothby was a twist on that pathology.

  But if Harrison was the killer, how’d that fit in with the Black Woods Road chase and the threatening phone calls? I’d been assuming the O’Rourke brothers, with their connections and their cool, were at least directing the harassment, if not carrying it out themselves, but what if they had nothing to do with it?

  In some ways Harrison was a more plausible tormentor. Compared to the O’Rourkes, he had a lot less to lose if he was caught running me off the road. I made a mental note to find out what kind of truck Harrison drove. Before testimony ended for the afternoon, I glanced around to see if he was still there. The tedium of the technical testimony had thinned the ranks, which made it easy to see that the Boothbys’ frowning next door neighbor was no longer in the courtroom.

  At three thirty the last cop of the day gave his last answer of the day and stepped down from the stand. Justice Herrick gave the jury her usual admonition before dismissing it for the night. Needing caffeine, I didn’t stick around, just waved to the Peabody sisters and headed for the back door. The temperature felt balmy compared to the previous week. I hustled to the Java Nook for a large cup of dark roast before they closed up shop and promptly spilled it all over my shirt. The thermometer at the bank across the road said it was thirty-eight degrees, and the dripping eaves bore that out. Black ice tonight, I thought. Glad I don’t have to drive anywhere.

  I stopped at the Easterly for a clean shirt and powered up my laptop in hope of finding a fresh email from scrapper64. Once again, nada. By the time I got to Cohen’s office, he and Emma were in the process of introducing themselves. I sat back and watched them feel each other out. After the briefest of preliminaries, Emma broached the subject of confidentiality. Cohen responded to her directness by laying his own needs on the table. I jumped in and three-way ground rules were established. Neither of them would reveal anything their clients had told them in confidence. I would not disclose anything told to me off the record by any source. But within those constraints, we would share information and theories.

  We had the same overall goal—to make sure the truth would come out and justice would be done. Of course, we each had an objective of our own—Cohen to get Danny acquitted, Emma to protect Corrine’s fragile mental state, and me to shine my journalist’s light on a complicated case affecting both powerful and powerless people. Digging out the truth would help each of us with our personal duty, we agreed, especially if our collaborative effort helped prove the underlying proposition we’d all come to believe—that Danny Boothby didn’t kill Frank O’Rourke.

  Rules of engagement having been established, we moved on to factual updates. Cohen reported that his physician sister had returned his call and said that, while unlikely, it was conceivable Frank O’Rourke could have been stabbed somewhere else and his body transported to the Boothby property. “She laid down a lot of caveats. Essentially, she wants us to know she’s speculating, because she doesn’t have access to the notes supporting the autopsy report. But bottom line, she said if the knife didn’t create a sucking chest wound, blood loss might have been minimal, making it possible for the body to have been moved without leaving a trail of blood across the dooryard.”

  I shared my theory about Jackson Harrison, describing his open hostility not only toward Frank O’Rourke but also his sneer at Tom, the grieving brother who merely walked by us in the hallway. As I was recounting my impressions, Cohen got up from the couch and went over to his desk.

  “Harrison did time on an aggravated assault charge several years ago.” He tapped his computer. “It was a barroom brawl, if I remember right.” A minute later he found the story in the Bangor Free Press’s online archive.

  “Yup, clocked a Cutler kid with a clam rake,” he said. “Fight started inside the bar then moved outside to the parking lot where Harrison grabbed his rake from the back of his pickup and started flailing away. The kid took the tines to the face. Lost an eye. Ugly. Harrison took a plea deal under which most of his sentence was suspended. But he did eighteen months at the correctional center.”

  Emma described to Cohen how Harrison’s house was visible from Danny Boothby’s front porch and remembered a strange conversation with him when he sat next to her in the courtroom one afternoon the previous week.

  “I didn’t tell him I was Corrine’s therapist, but somehow he knew that.”

  “It’s a small town,” Cohen said. “Outsiders stand out. Anyone who cares to know can find out who you are and why you’re here inside of five minutes.”

  “He sure seemed to be seeking me out. Climbed over three people to sit next to me, and after telling me he knew who I was, he launched right into a conversation about Corrine, asking how she was doing and where she’s living. Of course, I didn’t give him any information.”

  “Means, motive, opportunity,” I said. “All the elements appear to be there.”

  “And a history of violence,” Emma said.

  “At least when he’s drunk,” said Cohen.

  “If he killed O’Rourke, maybe he’s the guy who also tried to take me out, and left the dead fish on your lawn. Do you know what kind of truck he drives?”

  “Good question. You might want to drive by his place before it gets full dark and take a look.”

  I looked at my watch. It was twenty past four, and I had a six o’clock deadline.

  “I’ve got to write my story,” I said. “It’ll be dark by five.”

  “I’ll drive out there right now,” Emma said.

  “Not by yourself, you won’t,” Cohen said. “If Harrison’s the guy who killed O’Rourke and has been after Joe, I don’t want to think of what might happen if he sees you nosing around his house.” He picked up the phone. “Every one of us needs to watch ourselves.”

  He dialed without looking up the number. “I’m calling the sheriff’s department to ask for a deputy to meet me at Danny’s house.�
� We sat and listened while he concocted a story about needing to do some additional measurements in the yard in order to finish preparing his case.

  Cohen hung up. “They agreed to send someone to East Machias right away. Because I’m defense counsel, they have to give me access to the murder scene. Supervised, but that doesn’t matter. Given your suspicions about Harrison, it’ll actually be a good thing to have a deputy there.”

  He turned to Emma. “You can ride with me, and while I’m pretending to work you can check out Harrison’s yard through the trees.” As we scrambled into our parkas, we made a plan to meet back at Cohen’s after dinner.

  I called Leah on my cell while speed-walking back to the inn and promised seven hundred words by deadline. I’d composed my lead in my head by the time I reached my room and jammed my key into the lock. When I turned it, the deadbolt engaged, rather than cleared the latch. Cursing myself for not locking up in my rush to get to Cohen’s, I pushed the door open and saw that my room had been tossed.

  The bedspread had been torn off the bed, dresser drawers hung open, and clothes that had been in the closet were strewn on the floor. I stepped inside. It was obvious that my duffel, which was sitting on a folding luggage rack, had been pawed through. I was trying to wrap my mind around the situation when I realized my laptop was gone. The case was where I’d dropped it next to the desk chair, and the power cord still was plugged into the wall, but the computer itself was missing.

  Grabbing the phone, I punched the button for the front desk. The taciturn woman answered. Alarm crept into her voice when she heard my complaint. Within minutes the inn’s owner arrived at my door, full of apologies and puzzlement about how such a crime could have occurred at the Easterly Inn.

  “We’ve never had a room break-in. Never in the nine years I’ve owned this place. I’ll find who’s been in the building today. Our insurance will cover your computer, I can assure you.” She wrung her plump hands. “This is terrible. Absolutely terrible.”