by Tom Bouman
“You and Ross need to incentivize Buckles,” Lee said. “Give him immunity.”
“Jesus, Lee—”
“This is a minor crime, this burglary. Felony two, nobody home, I’m not even sure why that is a felony. It’s a life. Maybe Penny’s too. At this point, you know . . . you know Kevin’s not the one.”
“And Sage Buckles is your best bet to get this across.” I thought, but did not say, that he sounded like a possible killer. Reasonable doubt in person. “I need names,” I continued. “Not just Buckles, I need someone at the lake who can give me Penny’s departure time. I need someone to put Kev back at the lake with Buckles after the cottage job. I need names of people at the lake with them.”
“Yeah,” said Hillendale, handing me a folded piece of paper. “We did our best. The call will help with timing, providing Buckles puts Kevin into the burglary. The lamp will be good for us.”
“How’s that?”
“Above the painting? No electric to the cottage for at least a week, probably two, and then right at that moment a light turns on. Nothing else would explain it. The utility can probably break that out.”
As we spoke, Kevin had fallen back asleep, or was pretending. We moved into the hall, where Deputy Jackson had taken up the post Patrolman Hanluain had recently vacated. Jackson looked back and forth between us.
“What’s up?” he said, with a note of suspicion in his tone.
“Kevin asked to see Henry,” Hillendale said. “No worries.”
Jackson looked at me a beat too long, turned away, spread his legs, put his hat over his face, and muttered, “Shit.”
Hillendale was at my elbow all the way out to the parking lot. “See what you get from the names, from the lake people, huh? And I’ll tell you flat out, so you can pass this along to Ross however you like: we want the murder charge dropped as soon as possible. Ross will want to let it go before jeopardy. Before the case gets bound over to common pleas, even. He’ll lose nothing if he nol-proses and anything new comes to light, understand? He can go after Kevin again. Later. But if you go forward now, you’ve got a problem, and if the magistrate doesn’t throw out the case on prelim—”
“It’s Heyne. You know he won’t, not on these facts.”
“But if we go to trial on these facts, I’ll win. Do you understand that?”
I raised an eyebrow but secretly agreed.
“Bottom line, I want the murder dropped even before preliminary hearing. We’ll damn well plead to the burglary once the murder is dropped.”
“Lee, don’t get ahead of yourself.”
“Be sure you’re not the one falling behind.” The lawyer drew himself up and tightened his tie. “I’m not asking you to help with the defense. We—Kevin and I—came to you in the spirit of cooperation so you’d get out there and find Penny. If she is to be found. That’s his concern, and he knows now he can’t do a thing about it himself.”
“Hey, I came all the way down here,” I said. “Can you do something for me? What’s this about some company taking over Casey Noonan’s properties? The Royal Lodges, at least. You know anything about that?”
He did not, but promised to look into it. We parted and each went about our day.
AT THE END of the list of names Lee had taken down from Kevin was scrawled “Jen Stewart.” I could almost trust her. Jennie Lyn Stiobhard, sister to local ne’er-do-wells Danny and Alan, and something of a ne’er-do-well herself, had lately taken up with a respectable woman. Pamela Maddox, stout young mother of two small children, was married to a former financial advisor now in prison for soaking elderly clients. Pamela lived in Wild Thyme, in a ranch house up a driveway that switched back once through trees to a nice ten-acre plot. Tim Maddox, the husband, wasn’t going to stay locked up forever, so I didn’t hold out much hope for Jennie’s arrangement long-term. In fact, I was a little concerned about how it was going to be when he got out.
Even so, as I pulled up to the house and found Jennie Lyn and a little girl in a princess dress blowing bubbles in the yard, I was taken aback at the irrational hope it gave me for her. She had changed her customary army/navy gear for jeans and a tank top, and her hair was pulled back and buzzed over the ears. As I got close I noted that she was barefoot; a small thing, seeing her feet, but it suggested a gentle side I’d never known. The princess was in the neighborhood of two or three, and met my arrival with silent dismay. I squatted to say hello, I do that with kids, get on their level so I’m not towering over them, and she turned her face into Jennie’s leg.
“Okay, girl,” said Jennie. “We’ll see what’s on TV, just for a sec if you don’t tell your mother. Promise me don’t wake up Jamie, either.” She turned to me. “Her brother’s having a nap. Come up to the porch.”
After Jennie Lyn got the girl settled, we took canvas chairs with a view south to hilltops.
“So what do you want?” she said, friendly enough.
“Looking for Penny Pellings.”
“Why would I know where she is?”
“I’m not saying that you would. But Kevin O’Keeffe? He says you might have seen her the night she went missing.”
“Up to Maiden’s Grove, yeah. I remember. I go up there less and less now.”
“I understand.”
“But I was there, yeah. I don’t know, it was a strange night. Maybe I’m the one and I never noticed. I’m not above a bottle of wine these days, but I don’t touch heroin. You try to talk to somebody, and you know . . .” Jennie mimicked passing out in place. “Everything was slowed way down. I’m used to it the other way. Anyhow. I could tell that Kevin wasn’t happy. I mean, he’s a clown, you know how he is, so it was strange seeing him that way. But something’s going on with this guy there. He talks funny—”
“How?”
“I don’t know, like he can’t quite get the words out. Anyway, he’s pissed, Kevin’s squirrelly, they argue, and finally, off they go up the hill, Kevin and him.”
“You got a name? What’s he look like?”
“No name. Never seen him before that night. A brick house, broken nose, barbed-wire tattoos on both arms.”
“Could his name have been Sage Buckles?”
“I’d remember that if I heard it.”
“Heffernan, then?”
“I simply don’t know.”
“Anybody with him?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“You ever see a green car with pink lights beneath?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“Okay,” I said, “what time did they leave?”
“It was after midnight. I know because I saw them go and I thought, shit, I checked the time, I got to get going myself. Back here.”
“What’s Penny doing?”
“Sitting. Just sitting there. She’s fucked up, but that ain’t news. After Kevin leaves, I look around to go and she’s gone too. Seen her walking up the trail to her place.”
“You sure about that timing?”
“Pretty sure.” She shrugged.
“Anybody follow her?”
“No. It wasn’t a big group of people there, we knew each other.”
“Anybody strike you as unusual? Behaving strangely?”
“Nobody was a total stranger except for the guy I said.”
“Was Andy Swales there?”
“No,” she said. “But he’s been known to show up drunk, sometimes with a lady. He’s not a bad guy probably, I don’t know. He lets us be there.”
I went over the facts with her again, and it came out much the same. From inside the house the little girl began to call for Jennie, and her infant brother woke and began to squall.
“Anything on Penny Pellings you can tell me? Rumors, reputation, whatever.”
Jennie Lyn thought a moment. “All the boys had high hard-ons for her, but Penny Pellings ain’t no better than anybody else, whatever she’d have you think. You try talking to her, it’s like talking to a tree.”
I headed back to the station
to do a little searching. Sage Buckles had no record in Pennsylvania, so I called my new friend Lieutenant Sleight of the Binghamton PD, who ran the name through New York’s system. It turned out that nine years earlier Buckles had done sixteen months in Collins for third-degree assault. I wrote out a complaint and affidavit for the Prosser burglary so Ross could look at it, and a magistrate, probably Heyne, could sign it. Of course, I was hoping that reason would prevail, that Ross would promise immunity or something close, and Buckles would put himself into the burglary.
I tracked District Attorney Ross down as he was leaving the courthouse by the back door. He smiled wearily when he saw me.
“Sorry,” I said. “We hit a snag.”
As Ross ambled toward his car, I followed and told him what I had learned that morning—how the witnesses, phone calls, and timing lined up against Kevin’s guilt. I had the complaint on Buckles folded in my hand. Ross, knowing very well what it was, gestured for it with some impatience, scanned it, and cursed.
“If this is true, I’m not taking the murder to trial,” he said. “Got a pen?” Ross scrawled an ‘Okay’ and his name. “Go see Heyne.”
“Assuming I get ahold of Buckles,” I said, “I’d like to stop short of an arrest. What can I tell him about your feelings on the burglary?”
“What do you want me to say? He robbed a house. It’s a felony.”
“If he testifies—”
“Yeah, all right,” Ross relented. “If he testifies and can still make restitution to Rhonda, I’ll consider no jail time. For Buckles, not O’Keeffe.” A breeze lifted a strand of his hair, and then laid it back across his dome like a blade of grass.
The day was disappearing on me. I called Magistrate Heyne’s office already knowing that he’d be gone. I left a message and then called his home line. His wife answered, and told me to look for him at Walker Lake, where he’d gone sailing.
Walker Lake is as crowded and noisy as Maiden’s Grove is lonely and sparse. People have built cottages, and cottages for their cottages, on every single spot of shore minus the state-maintained launch. There are pontoons, newly legalized by township decree. I like Walker Lake, it’s cheerful. If you want to hear the ghostly call of a loon in the morning mist there are other places to go. Walker Lake is also home to a yacht club of sorts, where people pay a fee to stow small craft on racks. The summer before, I’d gone on a regular tour of all of the bodies of water within ten miles, watching for a sailboard stolen from the club. It had never been seen again.
I walked to the end of a plywood dock kept afloat by plastic barrels, and found only one sail on the lake. My wave received no acknowledgment. I waited there for Heyne to notice me, but he kept a distance and continued to zigzag across the water to no clear end. Before long, an old-timer with a drooping mustache and a pink terry-cloth hat arrived, hoisted out a boat, and began to set it up. Then, noticing me, he nodded.
“How do you call somebody to shore?” I asked him.
The man raised a finger, disappeared into the clubhouse, and came back with an air horn. I gave the magistrate “shave and a haircut.” From across the water, I heard a faint response: “Up yours.”
“I need your boat,” I said.
The old man, name of Fred, directed me to the front end of the little cockpit and pushed us out into the lake. The wind caught the sail and the boat leapt to life. I trailed my fingers in cold water, and as we neared the middle of the lake, I noted lake weed rising almost to the surface, suggesting a tangled forest below. The surface felt alive, and like it was playing with me when a gust shook itself to shivers on the water. Every now and then Fred obliged me to duck way down to avoid the boom as it swept to the other side on a tack. It was my first time on a sailboat and I was learning what things were called. We were gaining on the magistrate, who lurked by the far shore.
When we got within speaking distance, Heyne called out, “Look, damn it, Fred, you rat.”
“Magistrate,” I said, “I hate to pester you.”
“Can I have one, just one afternoon without thinking about which dimwit killed the other?”
That was overstating his burden considerably. “Well,” I said, “no, you can’t.”
“Damn it.”
But Heyne let the mainsheet go—that’s not a sail, it’s the rope that controls the boom, I have learned—and the sail lost its wind. We came alongside and I gave him the complaint and affidavit. The magistrate tossed Fred a light beer from his cooler, and I crossed over to his boat and explained the developments as he read. The sail flapped above us.
“So this Buckles claims to have done the Prosser B&E with O’Keeffe? The night of the Pellings girl’s disappearance?”
“The other way around, but yeah. Buckles is an alibi witness for Kevin. For the Murder One.”
“Bring him in,” Heyne said. I handed him a pen and he signed the complaint with a flourish. “Horrible hunting.”
GRACE LANDSCAPE SERVICES was one of the local successes that came out of the Marcellus shale boom. Until just a couple years ago Alexander Grace ran an equipment business only, renting excavators and skid steers to small-time sometime contractors in the area. With a mid-sized wood chipper, a dump truck, several chain saws, and wages for three workers, Alexander had formed a side business, Grace Tree Service. They cut down and hauled away dying and unwanted trees all over Holebrook County and the surrounding area, no job too hairy, no power line too close. East of Fitzmorris, Alexander had a fenced plot where he split the wood that he brought home, which he then sold to the lazy and infirm at a premium. He also began a quarrying operation, both on his own land and as a contractor for others.
In the early days of the shale play, when landsmen were carousing the county like raccoons—Hey, can I have this?—Alexander saw how it could be. He sank god knows how much, probably at least a hundred grand, into a feller buncher, a heavy-duty stumper, and a skidder. Then he plied the gas companies with phone calls, emails, and letters, and took out ads in all the little local papers. Grace Landscape Services was ready to clear the way. If the operators were unwilling to use local labor, he’d feed that refusal into the anxiety that was gathering around the industry. I’d seen him in action at our township meetings, and so had the community relations people working for the gas companies. When Grace got its first contract, he invested even more capital in equipment, and in that way made one of the myths of gas development true: job creation. Any man who could use a chain saw, or who had heavy equipment certification or what, could now find a job. You had to admire it.
Sage Buckles had one of those jobs with Grace, and good for him. I guess it didn’t pay quite enough, though. At my station I wrote down his license plate, make, and model—a fifteen-year-old domestic sedan, brown—and switched into my own personal truck. The Grace businesses were spread out over a valley floor. Logs were milled in huge corrugated steel sheds, and wood, as I said, was split in the yard. Trucks hauling flatbed trailers stacked with lumber or pallets of shale inched out of a gate and onto the road. Trucks returned empty. Dirty men in fluorescent T-shirts moved to and fro. I waited and watched as four-thirty approached, then stepped through the gate and scanned the parking lot for Buckles’s car. It wasn’t there.
I pulled open the door of the office trailer and met the cheery smile of a fortyish woman behind the counter. It turned out Sage Buckles had taken time off from work to attend to a family matter, no idea where. The personnel manager gave me a look at his file without a fight, and his ICE contact was Hope Martinek, address in a little town way across the state in Beaver County, no phone number listed. I wrote it down, along with Buckles’s address in Airy Township, and left.
It took about forty minutes to drive to Airy. The southernmost part of it had been home to a little pocket of coal mining, which was unusual, as most mining had been done farther south in Lackawanna, Luzerne, and so forth. Whatever coal worth taking was gone, leaving odd right angles in the land, pools of strange color and unknown depth, and the highest hilltops
with trees that clenched like arthritic hands and never grew above eight feet tall. Head down into the valleys, though, and you found woods and clusters of houses, mobile homes, none too close together, very few farms or relics of them, just little places people had carved out to be alone in.
Sage Buckles lived in a white one-story cottage with black trim in the middle of an unmowed yard, up a steep driveway off of a nowhere road called Hurrier Lane. The house was backed by a hill with forest thinning to scrub near the top. I pulled alongside the home and parked, noting the absence of any cars, the windows shut and blocked by curtains. Knocking got me nowhere. A rusty canopy behind the house was empty, with tire tracks ground into the grass. It was bordered by machinery, presumably saved for parts or for lack of another place to put it. I made out a rider mower with no seat, a child’s four-wheeler missing two wheels, a shopping cart with nightshade growing up through it, and like that. Mr. Buckles had skipped town.
I called Sergeant Louis Resnik, the PSP station commander in Beaver, to ask for help in case Buckles turned up there.
“Don’t know the guy,” he said. “No warrants on him. What’s it to do with?”
I explained to the sergeant in broad strokes what had happened. “I’m comfortable calling him a material witness at this point,” I said. “We need to know where he is. How about his girl, Hope Martinek?”
“They connected, are they? Her, we know. In and out of treatment, petty larceny, solicitation, prostitution. I don’t see an address in our system. Okay, I’ll get word over to Beaver PD, maybe the county. Good luck to you.”
THE LAB sent a report on Penny’s cell, and we all gathered in Ross’s office to make sense of it. The gist was that the phone had Kevin’s prints all over it, which we’d be able to Branch in as evidence at the preliminary hearing. None of them printed in the blood, mind you, and of course he’d have reason to handle the phone in perfectly innocent ways. But there were only the two sets of usable prints, his and Penny’s, which we’d matched off of other personal items of hers.
And something else. Bethlehem sent a disc containing data and files from the phone, everyday text messages and photographs, including some that Penny had attempted to delete but were still lurking like germs in the circuitry. There were a few photos of Eolande in and around the Cavanagh home, in Kevin’s arms, in hers. Images Penny had taken of herself in the bathroom mirror were from a limited palette: sultry, sad, mysterious. I was reminded that her beauty was rare and startling for the area; once you really knew what you were looking at, it was like finding a morel or an arrowhead. She was also a devoted photo-chronicler of Maiden’s Grove, near and far. I would have liked to have stopped there but the lab dug deeper, into a darker seam of Penny’s life.