by ILLONA HAUS
“He called you?” Finn asked.
Kay studied Hagen, surprised. Both she and Finn had assumed Hagen had initiated the site, seeking out Arsenault’s assistance.
“Yes. He explained what he does and asked if I thought Bernard would be interested.”
“And you didn’t find that a little odd?”
“No. I think he took an interest because Bernard is local.”
“Did you ask how he got your name?”
“He’d spoken to one of Mr. Grogan’s clerks, asked if there was any family to contact. She gave him my name.”
“Because you’re paying for his defense?” Finn guessed.
“No, Detective, because I’m Bernard’s fiancée.”
For the first time Kay dropped her gaze to Hagen’s hands. They looked rough, the nails chipped and stained, no doubt from tending her garden. Kay noticed the diamond before Hagen—perhaps self-conscious—folded her hands in her lap.
“When Scott first called,” she said, “he suggested I check out his other sites. He told me about their success in raising awareness. In getting the truth out there.”
“And where do you get these ‘truths’?” Kay could no longer be silent.
“Pardon me?”
“The information on the site, where does it come from?”
Hagen shrugged. “Most of it from Bernard, through me.”
“So you’ve discussed the murders with Mr. Eales?” Finn asked.
“Of course not. How could we discuss something Bernard knows nothing about?”
A good dose of delusion was probably the only thing that kept Hagen coming back for visitations, Kay thought.
“Those women were killed in Mr. Eales’s house, Ms. Hagen. You are aware of the evidence in the case, are you not?”
“I’m aware of what the media tries to sell the public, as well as the kinds of things police will do to close a case.”
“So you don’t believe Mr. Eales killed those women?”
“I believe in the things I see, Detective. And for all the years I’ve known Bernard I have always seen in him a gentle person. Someone who cares about other people. Someone who embraces life. Not death.”
So, Hagen’s tunnel-vision view of life wasn’t a purely clinical condition.
“Then if not from you, how does Mr. Arsenault know about the details of the murders?” he asked.
“You’ll have to ask him that. I’m sure he has his sources.”
“All right. We’ll do that.” Finn flashed Kay a look before turning to a fresh page in his notebook. “And how long have you known Bernard?”
“Going on twenty years. My father handled his mother’s funeral.”
“And that’s when he hired Bernard?”
“Shortly after that. Yes.”
“What did he do for your father?”
“Ran errands, cleaned. Sometimes he’d assist in the basement.”
“The basement?”
“The embalming room. If things were busy, he’d have to help prep the bodies for interment.”
“And how long did he work for your father?”
“That first time it was a year. I don’t think Bernard could have handled much more. But then, five years later, while I was away at Norfold State, my father took him on again.”
“And how long did that last?”
“Less than a year.”
“Is there a reason his employment stints were so short?” Finn asked.
“Bernard and my father …they had issues.”
“What kinds of issues?”
Patricia Hagen shifted and the rattan armchair creaked under her. “I never got the whole story, but there were accusations.”
“Of what?”
Hagen chewed her bottom lip. “Improprieties,” she said at last. “But that’s not the reason Bernard left. Truth of the matter is, Bernard couldn’t handle all the death.” She was addressing only Finn now, doing her best to ignore Kay’s presence. “Like I said, he’s a gentle soul.”
Kay watched Hagen: her hands twisting in her lap, lips pinched. She was a flake but she wasn’t stupid. Kay wondered how Bernard had managed to charm her. She imagined Hagen as a teenager, a pretty but simple girl with thick glasses. The undertaker’s daughter. No doubt there were stigmas attached to that. And maybe dumb-ass Bernard had been the first boy to show interest.
Kay could picture Hagen in high school, working for the grades that would get her into college. Or maybe just applying herself to avoid helping out in her father’s shop of horrors. And then, a part of Kay understood Hagen. Hadn’t she done the same growing up? Turned to her books as a means of escaping her father? Escaping the bitter cold docks and the ragged nets of drowning fish, their guts spilling out across the stained deck of the boat. She’d never wanted any part of his world. So she stayed in her room, with her homework and her books, listening as her mother taught violin lessons in the parlor.
Kay studied Hagen’s profile and wondered how different she and the undertaker’s daughter really were.
“Did you date Bernard while he worked for your father?” Kay asked.
“We were only sixteen.”
“Did you sleep with him?”
Hagen’s eyes fixed on Kay. Angry, saucer-shaped hyperbolic eyes. For a second Kay imagined the woman would terminate the interview, but she turned to Finn instead. “I don’t see how these questions can have any bearing on whatever it is you’re investigating.”
“We’re just trying to establish some background on Bernard, Ms. Hagen. You were … are clearly close to him, but if you’re not comfortable discussing your relationship …”
But she was. What Kay saw in Hagen was a lonely woman, devoted to her garden, her cats, and Bernard—a relationship not many could understand. And with Finn, Hagen seemed almost eager to share the details of her bizarre existence.
“Bernard and I were … close. We lost touch after I left for college,” she said to Finn. “When I found out he’d been arrested, I came to his aid.”
“By paying his legal fees?” Finn asked.
“Yes.” And as though she sensed judgment from him: “Look, Detective, I don’t expect you or others to see the truth as I do. I know Bernard. He’s a pacifist. He’s simply not capable of doing the things he’s been charged with.”
Kay couldn’t bite her tongue any longer. She nodded to the Sun on the table beside Hagen’s chair. “You read the paper, Ms. Hagen?”
“Yes.”
“You watch the news on TV?”
“Of course.”
“Then I don’t know how you missed what your pacifist boyfriend did to my partner and me last year.”
“Bernard was acting in self-defense.”
“What he did, Ms. Hagen, was not self-defense. And I can also say with complete confidence that your Bernard is absolutely capable of having killed those women.”
Hagen stood from her chair, her lips a thin red slash across her pale face. “I think it’s time you left, Detectives.”
They followed Hagen to the foyer in silence, and Finn thanked her before falling in step with Kay down the walk.
“I might have gotten more out of her,” he said, his irritation evident as they reached the car.
“Like what, Finn? Eales hasn’t told her a thing. Why on earth would he? He’s got her wrapped up like a sweet little meal ticket. He’s not going to jeopardize that.” She opened the car door a little too hard. “How the hell did he even convince a woman like that to marry him? It doesn’t fit.”
“She’s lonely, Kay.”
“Yeah, and the irony is, she’s probably waited her whole life for her Prince Charming to rescue her from Daddy’s funeral parlor. And when the day finally arrives, she’s standing alone in some jewelry store paying for the damned ring herself.”
Kay got in and slammed the car door behind her, looking out the driver’s-side window at the groomed house. “There’s something not right about her and Eales.”
Finn got in. “Yeah. And ther
e’s something not right about her friend Arsenault either,” he said. “I for one am not done talking to that little asswipe. There’s a lot he’s not telling us.”
Kay started the car. “Don’t worry. He’ll talk. And he’ll come to us to do it.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he’s a homicide junkie. He gets off on being close to an investigation. I think for now, we need to break the news to Mr. Hagen about his daughter’s engagement. Something tells me he doesn’t have a clue. And, while we’re there, I want to know just what kinds of improprieties are really going on at the family business.”
23
THE CYBER CAFÉ on Charles Street was crawling with teenagers. Sipping cinnamon-dusted lattes, they hung in congested cliques, drifting from one terminal to the next. Boys in their frayed, low-riding jeans; girls flaunting their pierced navels in skimpy T’s.
From the back bank of terminals, he struggled to block them out. When a boy took up the station beside his, he spared a glance. The kid used one hand to navigate the mouse while the other picked feverishly at a rash of zits flaming across his ravaged chin.
He tried to ignore the kid, focus on his own terminal. The message boards had been busy. He looked for any post about Regester’s murder, but the morons hadn’t put two and two together. He flirted with the idea of starting a new thread himself, to point out that the witness in Bernard’s trial was now the subject of a homicide investigation. Headed by Detective Kay Delaney, no less.
But he refrained. Better not to raise any flags. Still, he needed to post a few responses to the various threads using his screen name, or other members would wonder where “Roach” had gotten to. It was all about balance. Blending in. Camouflage.
Roach wasn’t blending in at the Cyber Café though. Not anymore: the din was rising as the average age of the clientele dropped. A friend of the zit-picker sidled up, his backpack sliding off his shoulder and bumping Roach.
“Oh, sorry, man.” The kid barely afforded him a glance and Roach looked into the half-lidded gaze. He imagined the feel of the two-and-a-half-inch blade of his Spyderco lock-back sinking into the soft depression of the kid’s pale temple. A quick upward jab with the knife and a firm twist. Give the little shit a lobotomy to match that lifeless expression.
Roach’s hand clenched around the mouse. Out of curiosity he Googled Detective Delaney for anything new. The search engine came up with the archived articles and accompanying photos from the Sun, showing the aftermath of Bernard’s meth-induced freak-out on her. The picture sparked something in Roach.
He’d dreamed of Regester last night. Then Delaney.
He blamed Bernard for the dreams, and for the desire he felt steadily rising since killing Regester.
All because of Bernard’s letter. The man was a worrier: maybe the bitch had seen them both in Leakin Park when they’d dumped the whore’s body. Roach doubted it. Wearing Bernard’s raincoat, several sizes too large, he’d helped Bernard get the body out of the trunk. Then, as the rain hammered the car’s roof, he’d slouched in the dark behind the wheel while Bernard hauled her off.
The moment he’d approached Regester four nights ago in the college lot, Roach knew she’d never seen him before. There’d been no panic in her eyes. In fact, he could simply have walked away, left her there with her broken shitbox of a car, knowing she had no clue who he was. But the plan had brewed too long. A Technicolor fantasy. There was no way he could not have gone through with it.
And now, it wasn’t just the dream of Regester that kept Roach company. It was the memories from even farther back. Of that first time, in the cool stillness of the embalming room. It hadn’t been about power then, but comfort. Comfort in death’s embrace. It had been like coming home.
He never knew her name, that first one. But she’d been beautiful, in spite of the dissecting Y-incision left by the coroner’s scalpel, and the crude stitches drawing the puckered flesh together. The final incision that would never heal.
He’d slid his hand along her cold, tight skin, followed the line of her rib cage, her round hips, and the swell of her buttocks pooling against the table. He’d pressed his palm along her belly, past her hardened abdomen, until his fingertips touched the triangle of coarse, red-blond hair.
He remembered breathing in the calm air of the embalming room: the chemicals and the harsh soaps, the damp-stone scent of death. And in that cool, quiet stillness, he’d touched her in a way he’d never touched another human.
It had marked a turning point in his life. For Roach, it was the day he had become a man.
24
THEY’D HAD TO WAIT to see Alexander Hagen. A conference had taken him to Ocean City, and Finn hadn’t been able to book with the funeral director until Monday morning.
The Parkview Funeral Home stood as an impressive terra-cotta mammoth on Fort Avenue, a mere half dozen blocks from Eales’s Gettings Street home. The Queen Anne–style structure, with its soaring brick chimneys and high-pitched slate roof, loomed over a shallow lawn bordered by an imposing iron fence.
Finn had sensed Kay’s unease entering the perfumed interior of the home. The weekend seemed to have done her good. She seemed rested this morning, Finn noted when they sat down in the director’s office. Still she was fidgety. Hopped up on caffeine or just pent-up anxiousness about the case, he couldn’t tell which. As they sat in the high-backed, leather-upholstered wing chairs in Hagen’s office, Finn tried to ignore Kay’s fingers’ drumming against her notebook, and he focused on Patricia Hagen’s father.
Hagen was a tall, angular man with long, square fingers and a firm handshake. His tapered face was accentuated by a centered strip of balding and two slicked-back tufts of dark hair on either side of his narrow head. His nose looked as though it had been broken once, and deep lines bracketed his serious mouth. Still, he had an air of solace. It was his voice, Finn decided: resonant and calm. Every word carefully calculated. Finn wondered if they taught that in mortuary classes.
“It’s a location issue,” Hagen explained as he filled a packing box. “People don’t feel safe coming down here anymore, so I’ve bought a building up in Overlea. I’m hoping to be out of here by the end of the month.” He closed the box and hoisted it on top of several others with apparent ease. Finn imagined the man handling the stiffs in the basement embalming room, wondered if Hagen still did the work himself.
“So this Regester girl,” Hagen asked, starting a new box, “the murder you say you’re investigating, why would you think I’d know her?”
“We don’t necessarily. But we think her death is connected to Bernard Eales,” Finn said.
The man’s spine stiffened visibly. A fleeting reaction, there and gone as he shuffled papers. “I haven’t seen Bernard in years.”
“Oh. We assumed you had at least some contact with him, given his relationship with your daughter.” Finn had waited all weekend to see Hagen’s reaction to the news he doubted Patsy Hagen had shared with her old man.
“Pardon me?” What little color there had been in Hagen’s cadaverous complexion bled out.
“Your daughter is seeing Eales,” Kay said, clearly going easy with the news.
“But he’s incarcerated.”
“That apparently hasn’t stopped her from visiting him. Twice a week.”
Hagen shook his head. When he turned his gaze out the window to the shaded grounds and the street beyond, Finn watched the man’s heart-rate rocket, his pulse beating wildly along a purple artery that snaked across his temple.
“Actually,” Finn said, “from what we understand, your daughter and Eales are engaged. It also appears your daughter’s been paying Eales’s legal fees. Any idea where she’s getting that kind of money?”
“Her inheritance, I suspect.” Hagen’s deliberate voice sounded broken now. “From her mother.”
“Do you know if your daughter was seeing Eales prior to his arrest?” Kay asked.
“Clearly, I’m not the one to ask.” The old man’s p
rominent Adam’s apple lifted and dropped sharply several times. “What do you want from me, Detectives?”
“We’re trying to establish some background on Eales, and since he worked for you—”
“That was a long time ago, Detective.”
“You fired him, is that right?”
“The first time he quit. The second time that I was foolish enough to hire him back, I fired him.”
“And why’s that?” Kay asked.
“I’m really not comfortable discussing that.”
“We heard there were accusations of impropriety,” Finn said.
“Impropriety? Not at my funeral home.” But in Hagen’s voice, in the flash of his milky blue eyes, Finn knew the man was lying.
“So you never, say, caught Mr. Eales doing anything—”
“I resent what you’re implying, Detective.” In light of the accusation, Hagen’s apoplexy rose and his shoulders squared. “This home has been in my family for three generations. To even suggest the presence of anything untoward is an insult.”
Finn held up both hands. “That wasn’t my intent, sir. I do apologize.”
“Mr. Hagen”—Kay’s voice was soft now as she drew herself to the edge of her chair and closed her notebook— “we’re going to need a list of your employees.”
“What? Why?”
“Past employees, sir. Especially anyone who was here around the time Mr. Eales was. It’s just as part of our investigation into Mr. Eales. I hope you’ll accommodate us.”
“I don’t see how that’s going to be possible, Detective.” Hagen waved a hand over the room of boxes and taped-up file cabinets awaiting the movers. “It could be weeks before I get to unpacking up in Overlea.”
“I’m afraid we’d need those names sooner. Perhaps you could point us to the appropriate boxes and we can save you the trouble?”
“I can’t authorize that. There’s confidential information—”
“Sir, we need those names.” And in Kay’s firm tone, Finn knew Hagen had to have heard the words court order.
“You’re asking for two decades of employees.”
“I understand. And the Department appreciates your cooperation.” When Kay stood and extended her hand, Hagen looked forced to accept the handshake.