Perish the Day

by John Farrow

  “Fuck if I know,” Hammond mutters, loudly. He’s peeved to be finding this out only now.

  “My point,” Cinq-Mars tells him. “People need to know things. We all do. Even, and I know this won’t sit well with you, Captain, too bad on that, even me. I need to know a few things. I understand if you don’t like it. I wouldn’t like it in your shoes. In a roundabout way, I have the ear of the governor—”

  “Two governors.”

  “Both of them, sure. Suit yourself. You don’t have to like it—that’s how things stand. You found out what you need to know, and guess what, Captain, there’s a whole other boatload of stuff to learn. I’m certain of that. If we don’t share information, everybody might as well retire to Canada, not just me.”

  Outside, the next cop to arrive has been waiting for the one who followed him in, then the pair stride up to the house.

  “How’s that boy doing?” Hammond asks.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I hear one thing. You got ears on the ground. That girl tribe of yours.”

  “Which includes my wife.” He can get to like this guy for a while, but only so far. Then it’s as if he spits out the side of his mouth during a polite conversation. “The boy’s head trauma is delicate. He’s in an induced coma for that. The prognosis is fair. A full slate of broken bones. Do you want the list?”

  “That’s okay. I got the list. Listen,” Hammond says.

  On the way to the front door, Cinq-Mars pauses, and turns back. He waits to hear what the trooper wants to tell him.

  “I’m onside with what you’re saying. So you know.”

  Always it’s up and down with him, a roller coaster. Yet Émile appreciates the comment, and indicates as much with a slight, yet meaningful, nod, a gesture that Hammond returns. As much of a bond as these two men are likely to manage together.

  Chiefs Michael Till of Hanover, New Hampshire, and Roy Horriza from White River Junction, Vermont, are at the door.

  Another car turns up the drive behind them.

  * * *

  Once everyone has arrived and gotten settled, Cinq-Mars inquires of Till, “Did you get the ME’s report?” His way of both initiating the discussion and making a point.

  “You know I’m not privy,” the chief remarks. With Hammond present, he doesn’t appreciate being put on the spot this way.

  “Did you get it anyway, like I asked you, find a back door?”

  Hammond is interested in the answer. Six men are seated around a coffee table with their cups in front of them. They could as easily be a group of philatelists at a monthly meeting. The fifth man who has joined them—by walking downstairs—is Michael Hartopp, an FBI special agent with whom Cinq-Mars has worked previously and who provides him with assistance on occasion. Hartopp considers a favor to the Montreal detective—for rooting out a corrupt element in the bureau—a bottomless well, so never begrudges lending a hand. Such as talking to people who can talk to governors who can get things done. The others in the room were introduced to him and a line drawn from his work in the FBI to Homeland Security, and they’re already aware of his pull in high places. He’s accorded authority in the room. Émile’s connection to the man allows the retired Montreal cop to be in the room himself, as he has no official status and normally his presence would not be tolerated. Mainly, that’s why Émile brought him in. To lean on his authority. Hartopp is slim, bony of visage and body, with a knack for getting others to feel at ease around him. Consequently, in answering Émile’s question, Till is more concerned about Hammond than the outsider from Washington. He gives the trooper a hard glance, yet comes across with the truth.

  “Hey, I tried. But that’s a locked shop.”

  “You tried,” sneers Hammond, the sarcasm easing through his veins like an IV drip. “You damn well know you’re not privy but you tried anyway.”

  “Why am I not privy?” Till is set to blow a gasket. He’s not afraid of Hammond, just frustrated by the protocol that exists. “It’s my town! Holyoake is part of my jurisdiction. Two of the three dead are on my turf. That boy was thrown out of a speeding car on my turf.”

  The last man who showed up is a state trooper from Vermont investigating Malory Earle’s murder. His name is Archie Leopold and he’s the youngest of their bunch. His youth marks him as the least experienced among them, a supposition that holds true. When it comes to serious crimes he’s remarkably inexperienced for his rank and has relied more heavily than might be the norm on the advice of Chief Horriza. In this company, he’s comfortable to be present and on the sidelines.

  “Gentlemen,” Cinq-Mars begins, and his tone, at once serious, cordial, and authoritative, commands the room. “This is why we’re here. Three dead, one injured, and nobody has a clue because nothing is shared among us. I’ve worked with multiple departments all my life. Where I come from it was Mounties at the federal level, plus provincial cops and city cops. Always, every agency claimed that cooperation between the forces was exemplary. Departments won extra government funding to make that point, to assure the politicians that cooperation was seamless and computer friendly. None of you have worked in Canada, yet would any of you be surprised to learn that cooperation between jurisdictions was virtually nonexistent? Bogus. Nothing more than PR, and after the official PR was out of the way every police force in the land went back to keeping its information to itself and not communicating a damn thing. The more precious the information, the tighter that news was kept. Anybody here surprised?”

  They indicate that a similar regimen conforms to their own experience.

  “You’re sitting in a farmhouse today because we have got to agree that this can’t happen right now. Too much at stake. When this is over, go back to your Neanderthal ways. I don’t care. Nobody does. With three people dead and a young man in hospital we cannot afford the status quo. Who knows who else is at risk? Nobody in this room does, I’ll tell you that much. We’re all ignorant.”

  The policemen are feeling a trifle sheepish.

  “Incidentally,” Cinq-Mars continues, “Special Agent Hartopp has agreed that if you guys say you’ll cooperate, share information, then don’t, the FBI will take complete command and boot all of you off your stumps in the blink of an eye.” They know that he’s continuing to declare his own status: he can use his influence to have them booted if they don’t want him around. “I hope that’s understood. Now. Brass tacks. I informed Captain Hammond a few minutes ago that Philip Lars Toomey was an operative throughout his working life. Secret service although I think I know which branch. Special Agent Hartopp will enlighten us as to what that entailed. Take it as one example of information that needs to be shared, and if it’s not shared, we’re either working in the shadows or in a pitch-dark room. Captain Hammond. Since you’ve already been granted information that you didn’t know, give something back. The rest of us haven’t even heard yet if Addie was raped or not. Start with the ME report. What did the medical examiner say that we should all hear?”

  Émile has thrashed a stick around: This is a carrot. Hammond gets to take over the room and say what he knows, a salve to his ego, and Émile can tell that the opportunity suits him. By being the first visitor to speak, he’s content with his lot, and less concerned with being under this outsider’s thumb.

  “Real sick,” he lets them know. “Addie Langford was raped. You probably figured that. It’s been confirmed and gets worse. She was strangled. It’s believed that she was strangled with the same nylon stockings she ended up wearing. Both stockings, bound together for extra strength, I guess. And then, quite dead, this is the thing, her corpse was raped again.”

  They let the unspeakable settle among them.

  “Time of death?” Hartopp inquires. His voice is scarcely above a whisper.

  “Between 3:30 and 5:30 A.M. That’s about three to five hours before the body was discovered. The first rape possibly occurred between eight and ten hours earlier. Our ME doesn’t consider himself an expert in that regard so he communicated the
data to others who concur. Rape was inflicted sometime before death, and one crime did not immediately follow the other. Yet her disappearance, as far as we can ascertain, occurs hours before that. A prolonged misery. She was under the perpetrator’s control for many hours.”

  “What’s the basis for estimating her time of disappearance?” Émile asks.

  “Cell phone use. When did she stop answering her texts and stop checking status updates on Facebook? That’s constant for her during the day, every day of her life unless she’s in a class or sleeping or both, then stops suddenly the eve of her murder around 9 P.M.”

  “Have you found the phone?” Till wants to know.

  “Left behind in the clock tower. Upper level.”

  “You checked for fingerprints, of course.”

  “Wiped clean. Partial traces match her own prints. Mostly it’s been cleaned. That suggests that the killer was handling it and made sure to wipe it afterward.”

  “He didn’t phone home, I presume,” Hartopp says.

  “We’re not that lucky, no.”

  “Blood? Bodily fluids?” Cinq-Mars asks.

  “Very little blood was found and most of it was the victim’s. This is where we do get lucky. A bit of tissue and blood was left behind which is not Addie Langford’s. ME’s best guess is that it came off the elbow of the assailant.”

  “The elbow?” Horriza speaks up.

  “That kind of tough skin got left behind. Quite possibly this was during the rape, which lets us place the rape at the highest point in the tower. A trace secretion, from the girl’s anus, matches what remained in her lower bowel. Someone, undoubtedly the killer, cleaned it up. A fraction slipped down between the cracks into the grain of the wood up there. We’ve run the DNA, of course, of the foreign skin and blood. No matches.”

  “If we catch the guy, we have evidence to convict,” Horriza notes.

  “In that direction, for sure.”

  “I didn’t see damage or blood on the girl,” Cinq-Mars recalls. “Except for the ligature marks on her throat.”

  “She bled a little out an ear. Then the guy cleaned her up, to look nice. I can’t tell you if he did that before or after he had at her again, postmortem.”

  The comment brings on another contemplative silence.

  “She’s brought up to the highest point in the clock tower, probably lured there,” Cinq-Mars begins to summarize.

  “Why lured?” Trooper Archie Leopold interrupts, speaking for the first time. He looks around nervously, hoping his question isn’t inane.

  “No signs of a struggle on the way up,” Cinq-Mars points out to him. “Surely the rough surfaces of the stairs and banister would have picked up traces of fabric and/or skin and at least a drop of blood if a struggle was going on. Besides that, she brought her phone up there. It’s not conclusive, but presumably the killer would have taken it from her before going up the stairs if the attack happened earlier.”

  “How’d they even get in the clock tower?”

  Hartopp’s question elicits no response from anyone.

  “Possibly,” Cinq-Mars suggests, “that’s where Malory Earle comes in. Since we don’t know that yet, let’s stick with Addie. No signs of a struggle on the way up, not much evidence of a big struggle once there. That suggests a pacifier.”

  “Drugs,” Hartopp imagines.

  “Or a weapon,” Till adds.

  “The ME didn’t mention drugs,” Hammond says. “It’s not on the tox report. In conversation, he mentioned that she was probably as squeaky clean a college student as there is in the nation. Drug-free. Not even marijuana. She just says no.”

  “Then it’s a weapon,” Till concludes. “A gun to the head or a knife to the throat can buy a certain amount of silence and a fair amount of compliance.”

  Émile is tugging on an earlobe, which others think might be significant. It isn’t. He spies no clear path through this. “Two things,” he mentions. “A calling card was left behind to a cocktail party for the very well heeled on campus tomorrow.”

  “You don’t think it was a decoration?” Hammond asks. It’s not hard to tell that that’s exactly what he thinks of the invitation. “Or maybe an attempt to throw us off?”

  “Toomey was going to that party. Toomey, in fact, went to considerable lengths, this year and last, to make sure that he was getting in the door. The boy who’s lying in a hospital bed as we speak, he knows a professor who’s going. That professor, Edith Shedden, always attends the party, it’s part of her job. And—keeping this in the room, I’m not supposed to let this out—that lady professor probably had an affair with Addie Langford.”

  “The victim was gay?” Hammond asks. “I don’t get that. I’ve got a list of her boyfriends. Not one or two. A list.”

  “Girls at that age, the promiscuous ones perhaps, experiment. Or that’s what they call it anyway.” Cinq-Mars raises the index finger of his left hand. He wants to issue a warning, such as, Don’t say something you’ll regret two seconds later, then edits himself. He has to keep all these egos in the fold and it’s no time to warn Hammond not to be vulgar. Instead, he talks right through whatever he might say. “The point is, it’s a cocktail party for rich donors, and that brings us to the next item of interest. The necklace. What killer provides his victims with gifts? In my experience, usually they’re takers. What’s more, the necklace worn by Addie Langford is a close match to the one in Toomey’s glove box, and they’re both exceptionally radioactive. Radioactivity was found around the throat of Malory Earle.”

  “Those two were lovers,” Archie Leopold pipes up.

  “Malory Earle and Addie Langford?” Hartopp inquires.

  “No, no. I meant Malory Earle and Toomey.”

  “What makes you say that?” Hammond barks at him, almost as though he’d like to see the young man cower. “How can you know?”

  Although Leopold may be quiet, he’s not timid. “His picture was on TV. Professor Toomey’s. People in Malory Earle’s neighborhood recognized him. He paid visits to her all the time. A few think she was earning a little extra on the side. If that’s true, she had only the one client. What folks do know is that when they parted for the afternoon, she’d wave from her window. She wasn’t wearing a whole lot of clothes, and seemed, people say, happy.”

  “Her body wasn’t typical for a girl working that way,” Horriza says. “I vote for happy lovers.”

  Cinq-Mars is about to speak, then yields to Special Agent Hartopp who wants to run with this one. “So, Toomey goes to see Malory Earle. She’s wearing the necklace. He takes it off her. Why?”

  “Before or after he kills her? Not that it matters much,” Hammond says.

  “Not likely that he killed her,” Cinq-Mars stipulates. And explains, being careful not to insult him, “You saw his clothes. Clean. Wet—he was out in the rain—but clean. Malory died violently. That scene was a mess. No killer walks away from that one without bloodstained clothes.”

  “Okay, what if he finds her dead,” Hartopp is wondering. “He takes the necklace for an unknown reason, then goes home and has a shower? He’s got a note in his pocket that proves to be good advice. Breached Run! Does he run, after his girlfriend, or his consort, gets slaughtered? No, he gets into dry clothes and waits for his killer—who may be her killer—to knock on the door. If the guy’s a professional spy, like you say, he’s not without instincts. Resources, even.”

  “Tell us about that part,” Cinq-Mars suggests. “His history, his resources.”

  When first they met, he noticed the FBI agent’s narrow nose, yet the wide flare to his nostrils. A thought at the time, which perseveres, points to a touch of the dragon within his genetic code. In the way that birds are probably descendants of dinosaurs, in Émile’s mind this demure, thin, crafty fellow has a secret link to fire-spewing mythological beasts. The link requires a leap of the imagination, and is both ridiculous and crazy, yet for him it’s there. He’s glad to have him on his side.

  “His record is absent
from computer screens where you expect it to be located. What I mean is, now you see him, now you don’t. His record is on file. It can’t be opened, and where corollary evidence should exist, it’s missing. That usually points to CIA. I made a few calls.”

  Hammond is nodding aggressively. “You’re the guy, aren’t you? You’ve made the calls.”

  “We all have bosses,” Hartopp admits. “They can all be contacted, that’s true.”

  “Get over it,” Émile bursts out, speaking in Hammond’s direction. “You’re here. That’s all that counts.”

  Hammond throws his hands up. “I’ve got no problem with it. I’m just impressed, that’s all. You guys can move mountains. That’s all I’m saying. Go ahead. What about this CIA guy?”

  “Not CIA. That took time to figure out since we were sniffing the wrong hydrant. Military Intelligence. Army. He worked on the ground. He’s been in tight spots in his day. It makes little sense that his lover is murdered and he responds by letting nobody know, by going home, taking a shower, getting into fresh duds, then he waits to be shot in his living room without even turning his head away. Explain that to me in plain English. Anybody.”

  “Cinq-Mars here is the genius detective. Let him explain it.”

  Cinq-Mars might have expected such a comment from Hammond, but it’s Horriza who spoke. He doesn’t mean anything by it, he’s not picking a fight, and merely looks away in response to Émile’s sharp glance.

  Till takes up an initiative. “Captain Hammond, what did you get from the boy? You interrogated him for hours, correct? I know you released him. Anything interesting?”

  When Hammond takes time responding, the others study him more closely to see if he’s hiding something. That doesn’t appear to be the case. He’s formulating his response, which takes time because he’s drawing conclusions he hasn’t previously articulated, not even to himself.

  “In a way, he was not forthcoming, the boy. In another way, I have to say that at times I believed him.”