by Nora Roberts
“He didn’t leave his wife a note.”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing personal. Nothing detailed in the computer note, either.”
Irritation flickered in Coben’s eyes. “Look, Burke, you and I both know that suicide notes aren’t nearly as typical as Hollywood makes them. The ME will make the call, but from where I’m standing this is suicide. The note links him to Galloway. We’ll pursue that, see if we can find a trail back to confirm. I’m not going to cut corners on this, or on Galloway, but I’m not going to kick, either, if it turns out both cases fall closed in my lap.”
“It doesn’t add up for me.”
“Check your math.”
“Do you have a problem with me pursuing this, quietly,” he added with emphasis, “from a different angle?”
“It’s your time to waste. But don’t step on my toes.”
“I still remember how to dance, Coben.”
IT WAS HARD TO KNOCK on Carrie’s front door. The intrusion on her grief seemed impossibly callous. He remembered, too well, how Beth had crumbled when he’d first seen her after Jack’s death.
And he’d been helpless, bound to a hospital bed, dopey from surgery, drowning in grief and guilt and rage.
There was no grief now, he reminded himself. A little guilt for the way he’d had to handle her earlier. But no rage. Now he was just a cop.
“She’s going to resent me,” Nate told Coben. “If you play on that, you might get more out of her.”
He knocked on the front door of the two-story cabin. When the redhead opened it, he had to flip through his mental files.
“Ginny Mann,” she said quickly. “I’m a friend of the family. A neighbor. Carrie’s upstairs, resting.”
“Sergeant Coben, ma’am.” Coben took out his identification. “I’d really like to speak with Mrs. Hawbaker.”
“We’ll try not to take long.” Artist, Nate remembered now. Painted landscapes and wildlife studies that were sold in galleries here, and in the Lower 48. Taught art at the school, three days a week.
“Arlene Woolcott and I have the kids back in the kitchen. We’re trying to keep them busy. I guess I could go upstairs and see if Carrie’s up to it.”
“We’d appreciate it.” Coben stepped in. “We’ll just wait here.”
“Nice place,” Coben said when Ginny went upstairs. “Homey.”
Comfortable sofa, Nate noted, a couple of roomy chairs, colorful throws. A painting of a spring meadow, backed by the white mountains and blue sky he imagined was the redhead’s work. Framed pictures of the kids, and other family shots, on the tables, along with the everyday mess from an average home.
“They were married about fifteen years, I think. He used to work for a paper in Anchorage but relocated and started his weekly here. She worked with him. It was pretty much a two-man operation, with some—what do you call it—stringers? They published articles from locals, some photographs, and picked up stories from the wire services. Older kid’s about twelve, a girl. She plays the piccolo. Younger son, ten, is a hockey freak.”
“You’ve picked up a lot in the few weeks you’ve been here.”
“I picked up more since this morning. First marriage for her, second for him. She’s been here a couple of years longer than him. Moved up on one of those teacher programs. Gave it up to work with him when he got the paper started, but she still substitutes if they call her in.”
“Why’d he move here?”
“I’m working on that.” He shut down when Ginny started back down, her arm draped around Carrie’s shoulder.
“Mrs. Hawbaker.” Coben stepped forward, voice sober. “I’m Sergeant Coben with the State Police. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“What do you want?” Her gaze riveted, hard and bright, on Nate’s face. “We’re in mourning.”
“I know this is a difficult time, but I need to ask you some questions.” Coben glanced at Ginny. “Would you like your friend to stay with you?”
Carrie shook her head. “Ginny, would you stay with the kids? Would you keep them back there, away from this?”
“Of course. You just call me if you want me.”
Carrie went into the living room, sank into one of the chairs. “Ask what you need to ask, then go. I don’t want you here.”
“First I want to tell you we’ll be taking your husband’s body back to Anchorage, for autopsy. He’ll be released to you again as soon as possible.”
“Good. Then you’ll find out he didn’t kill himself. Whatever he says,” she added with a quick, resentful glance at Nate. “I know my husband. He’d never do that to me or his children.”
“May I sit down?”
She shrugged.
Coben sat on the couch facing her, his body angled slightly in her direction. It was good, Nate thought. He was keeping it between the two of them, keeping it sympathetic. He started her on the standard questions. After the first few, she drew back.
“I told him all this already. Why do you have to ask me again? The answers aren’t going to be any different. Why don’t you go out there and find out who did this to my Max?”
“Do you know anyone who wished your husband harm?”
“Yes.” Her face lit up with a kind of horrible pleasure. “Whoever killed Patrick Galloway. I’ll tell you exactly what happened. Max must have found something out. Just because he ran a small-town weekly didn’t mean he wasn’t a good reporter. He dug something up, and someone killed him before he could decide what to do.”
“Did he discuss any of this with you?”
“No, but he was upset. Worried. He wasn’t himself. But that doesn’t mean he killed himself, and it doesn’t mean he killed anyone else. He was a good man.” Tears began to track down her cheeks. “I slept beside him for almost sixteen years. I worked beside him every day. I had two children with him. Don’t you think I’d know if he was capable of this?”
Coben changed tacts. “Are you sure about the time he left the house last night?”
She sighed, flicked at tears. “I know he was here at ten-thirty. I know he was gone in the morning. What more do you want?”
“You stated that he kept the gun in the glove compartment of his truck. Who else would have known that?”
“Everybody.”
“Did he keep the glove compartment locked? The truck locked?”
“Max couldn’t remember to close the bathroom door half the time, much less lock anything. I keep the guns we have in the house locked up, and I keep the key because he was absentminded about that sort of thing. Anybody could have taken that gun. Somebody did.”
“Do you know the last time he used it?”
“No. Not for certain.”
“Mrs. Hawbaker, did your husband keep a diary or a journal?”
“No. He just wrote things down when they came to him on whatever was handy. I want you to go now. I’m tired, and I want to be with my children.”
OUTSIDE, COBEN PAUSED beside the car. “Still some loose ends there I’d like tied up. Be a good idea to take a look through his things, his papers, see if there’s anything regarding Galloway.”
“Such as motive?”
“Such as,” Coben agreed. “Any reason you couldn’t work on tying up those ends?”
“No.”
“I want to get the body back to Anchorage, start the tests. And I want to be there when they recover Galloway’s body.”
“I’d appreciate a call on that when you have him. His daughter’s going to want to see him. And her mother’s going to be pretty insistent about taking custody of the body.”
“Yeah, I’ve already heard from her. Once he’s down, and positively ID’d, we’ll let the family fight that end out. His daughter can come down for a visual, but his prints are on file. A couple of minor drug busts. We’ll know if it’s Galloway once we have the body.”
“I’ll bring her in, I’ll tie up your loose ends and I’ll do what I can to play mediator with the deceased’s family. In return I want copies
of every piece of paperwork on both these cases. That includes case notes.”
Coben looked back at the neat house on its blanket of snow. “You seriously think somebody staged this suicide to cover up a sixteen-year-old crime?”
“I want the copies.”
“Fine.” Coben pulled open the passenger door. “Your lieutenant said you had good instincts.”
Nate sat behind the wheel. “And?”
“Good doesn’t always mean right.”
FIFTEEN
HE HAD TO WORK with what he had, and that included his two deputies and his dispatcher. He pulled them all into his office, along with the necessary extra chairs.
There was a plate of peanut-butter cookies and a pot of fresh coffee on his desk, courtesy of Peach. And he thought: Why the hell not?
He took a cookie, gestured with it toward his deputies before biting in. “First, the results of the canvass.”
“Pierre Letreck thinks he might’ve heard what sounded like a gunshot.” Otto pulled out his notebook and made a business out of flipping through pages. “He says he watched a movie on cable. Claimed at first it was The English Patient, and I said, ‘Pierre, don’t hand me that shit, you never watched anything of the kind.’ And he said, ‘How the hell do you know what I watch in the privacy of my own home, Otto?’ To which I responded—”
“Just give me the bottom line, Otto.”
Otto scowled, looked up from the notebook and his careful reading. “Just trying to be thorough. What he watched, which he told me after considerable interrogation, was some skin flick called Alien Blondes. He thought it went off around midnight, and he was in the bathroom taking a . . . relieving his bladder,” he amended after a loud throat-clearing from Peach. “He heard what he thought was a gunshot and, being of a curious nature, looked out the bathroom window. At that time he saw no one, but did notice Max’s—the deceased’s—truck parked in back of the paper. He then completed his business and retired for the night.”
“He thinks somewhere in the vicinity of midnight?”
“Chief?” Peter raised his hand. “I checked the listings, and the movie ended at twelve-fifteen. According to Mr. Letreck’s statement, he went straight from his living room to the bathroom and heard the single shot almost immediately.”
“Did he notice anything else? Any other vehicles?”
“No, sir. Otto made him go through it a couple of times, but he stuck with the statement.”
“Anybody else hear anything, see anything?”
“Jennifer Welch thinks she might have.” Otto flipped more pages. “She and Larry, her husband, were sleeping, and she says she thinks she might’ve been wakened by a noise. They’ve got an eight-month-old baby, and she says she sleeps pretty light. As soon as she woke up, the baby started crying, so she doesn’t know, for sure, if it was the baby or a noise that woke her up. But the timing’s about the same as Pierre’s. Said she looked at the clock when she got up to get the baby, and it was about twelve-twenty.”
“Where are these two houses in reference to The Lunatic’s back office?” Nate gestured to the chalkboard he’d picked up at The Corner Store and hung on his wall. “Draw it out for me, Otto.”
“I’ll do it.” Peach hauled herself to her feet. “Neither of these two can draw worth a damn.”
“Thanks, Peach.” Nate looked back at his deputies. “Were these the only two you could find who heard anything?”
“That’s it,” Otto confirmed. “We got Hans Finkle, who said his dog started barking sometime in the night, but he just threw a boot at it and didn’t notice the time. Fact is, most people aren’t going to pay any mind to a gunshot.”
“Are any of you aware of Max having words with anybody lately?”
At the negative responses, Nate looked over at the blackboard. Peach was taking him literally, he noted. Rather than just drawing a diagram, she was busily sketching buildings, adding trees. There was even the silhouette of the mountains in the background.
“Nate?” Otto shifted in his seat. “Not criticizing or anything, but this seems like a lot of official fuss for a suicide, especially since the State’s got the body and will be in charge of closing it up.”
“Maybe.” He opened a file. “What’s said in this room stays in this room, until I tell you otherwise. Understood? This was written on Max’s computer.” He read the note, was met with shocked silence. “Comments?”
“That doesn’t seem right.” Peach spoke softly, the chalk still in her hand. “I know I’m just a glorified secretary around here, but that doesn’t seem right.”
“Why?”
“I can’t see Max hurting anybody, not in my wildest dreams. And, as I recall, he admired Pat, sort of had a little hero-worship going there.”
“Is that so? People I’ve talked to are saying they barely knew each other.”
“That’s true enough, and I’m not saying they were the best of friends, but Pat had a way about him. He was good-looking, and charming when he wanted to be, which was most of the time. He played the guitar and drove a motorcycle, he climbed mountains and went off into the bush for days at a time if the mood struck him. He had the sexiest woman in town warming his bed. Had that pretty little daughter who adored him.”
She set the chalk aside, brushed the dust from it off her hands. “And he didn’t give a damn about much of anything. Plus he could write. I know Max wanted to get him to write for the paper—adventure stuff. I know because Carrie told me about it. She and Max were just getting serious about each other, and she was a little worried because Pat was wild.”
When Nate gestured for her to keep going, she walked over, poured herself some coffee. “I was going through the last spin of that bad cycle with my third husband. So with me she had a sympathetic ear and gave me one back. We talked a lot in those days. She was worried Pat might talk Max into going off to do something crazy. According to her, Max said Pat was what Alaska was all about. Living large, living your own way, bucking whatever system tried to stop you.”
“Sometimes admiration becomes envy. Sometimes envy kills.”
“Maybe it does.” Absently, Peach picked up a cookie, nibbled. “But it’s hard for me to see it. I know you said this stays here, but Carrie’s going to need friends now. I want to go see her.”
“That’s fine, but you keep what we discuss here out of it.” He rose, walked to the board.
She’d drawn in the road running behind the paper, had even put in the street sign and labeled it Moose Lane. The Letreck house was mostly garage, he remembered it now. Pierre ran a small appliance-repair business out of it, and his living quarters were an afterthought attached to his workshop. It sat across from the back of the paper and two lots to the east.
The Welch house, a bungalow style, stood directly across from the rear door of the paper. Hans Finkle’s second-story apartment was above Letreck’s garage.
She’d sketched in other houses, other businesses, and written the appropriate names across the buildings in her careful script.
“Good work, Peach. What we’re going to do now is set up a case board.” He picked up his file and walked to the freestanding corkboard he’d borrowed from Town Hall. “Anything we get that applies to Galloway or Hawbaker gets copied. A copy gets pinned up to this board. The State’s already gone through the paper, but, Otto, you and I are going over there and go through everything again, in case they missed something. Peach, I’m going to want to get inside the Hawbakers’, go through Max’s things there. Carrie’s not going to be receptive to that, not for a while. Maybe you can try to smooth that way for me.”
“All right. It’s sounding like you don’t believe what it said in that note. And if you don’t believe that—”
“Best not to believe anything until you have all the details lined up,” he interrupted. “Peter, I want you to contact the paper in Anchorage where Max worked. I want you to find out what he did there, who he did it for and with, and why he left. Then you type it all up in a report. Two copies.
I want one on my desk before you leave today.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And all three of you have homework. You were here when Pat Galloway disappeared; I wasn’t. So you’re going to spend some time thinking back to the weeks before and after that event. Write down everything you remember, no matter how irrelevant it might seem. What you heard, what you saw, what you thought. Peter, I know you were a kid, but people don’t always see kids, and they say things, do things around them without thinking.”
He finished pinning up the photographs, Galloway on one side of the board, Hawbaker on the other. “There’s one vital piece of information I want. Where was Max Hawbaker when Galloway left town?”
“Not that easy to pin that down, after all this time,” Otto said. “And the fact is Galloway could’ve been killed a week after he left. Or a month. Or six damn months.”
“One step at a time.”
“Hard as it is to take when you’ve drunk beer and fished out of the same hole with somebody, if Max confessed to murder, then shot himself, what are we trying to prove?” Otto pressed.
“That’s supposition, Otto. It isn’t fact. The facts are we’ve got two dead men, some sixteen years apart. Let’s just work from there.”
NATE DIDN’T EVEN STOP by his room on the way out of town. There would be too many questions he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer waiting at The Lodge. Better to evade them until he’d worked out an official line.
In any case, he wanted the open space, the frosty dark and the icy shine of the stars. The dark was beginning to suit him, he thought. He couldn’t remember what it was like to begin or end his workday with any hint of the sun.
He didn’t want the sun. He wanted Meg.
He had to be the one to tell her, the one to shake her world a second time. If, once he had, she tried to shut him out, he’d have to push to stay inside.
He’d managed, with little effort, to close people out for months. He wasn’t quite sure if the ease of his solitude had been because he’d been unable to hear people trying to break down the walls, or if there’d simply been no one who’d cared enough to try.