Scar Tissue

by William G. Tapply

  “He was murdered. What do you think of that?”

  “What kind of stupid question is that?”

  I nodded. “Okay, sorry. Look. All I’m trying to do is ease the mind of a couple of grieving parents, help them get on with their lives. They still have questions about what happened. Not finding Brian’s body—that’s been awfully hard for them. Jake and Sharon Gold are dear old friends of mine. I’ve known Brian from the time he was born. Do you know his parents?”

  Sandy shook her head. “Not really.”

  “Brian’s mother—Sharon is her name—she keeps having this dream,” I said. “In Sharon’s dream, she’s standing outside a big plate-glass window and Brian’s on the other side. His face is pressed against the glass, and he’s clawing at it as if he’s struggling to break through it, and he’s calling to his mother. But she can’t hear what he’s saying, and when she tries to call back to him, the words stick in her throat. No matter how hard she tries to call to her boy, she can’t make a sound. She wakes up crying. She’s afraid to go to sleep, because she knows she’s going to have that terrible dream, and she thinks she’s going to have that dream for the rest of her life.”

  Sandy was staring at me. “Like he was trapped under the ice,” she whispered.

  I shrugged.

  “That’s an awful dream,” she said. Her eyes were glittery.

  “All I want,” I said, “is to help Brian’s mother get rid of that dream.”

  She brushed the back of her hand across her eyes. “I just can’t—”

  A bell jingled, and Sandy lifted her head quickly and looked over my shoulder.

  I turned. An elderly woman had come into the shop. She was limping toward us with the aid of a cane.

  “I got a customer,” Sandy said.

  “I’ll wait,” I said.

  “Would you mind waiting outside?”

  “Okay.” I turned, smiled at the old woman as I passed her, and went out. I stood there on the sidewalk by the door and lit a cigarette.

  The old woman came hobbling out a few minutes later. She nodded to me, then climbed into an ancient Jeep Wagoneer and drove away.

  I shaded my eyes and peered into the camera store. Sandy was pacing back and forth behind the counter talking on the telephone. She was frowning and waving her hand in the air.

  I continued to wait outside. After a while, Sandy tapped on the inside of the glass door and beckoned me in.

  I went in.

  Sandy stood there by the door. “I can’t talk with you anymore,” she said. “I got work to do.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry I bothered you. I guess I was mistaken. I thought you might want to help ease the pain of some very nice, very sad people.”

  She blinked. “That’s so unfair.”

  “Is it?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t,” she whispered. “Please. Just leave me alone.”

  “That day by the river,” I said. “I gave you my business card. Do you still have it?”

  She shook her head.

  “You lost it?”

  “I—I threw it away.”

  I took out another card and put it on the counter. “Don’t throw this away,” I said. “You might change your mind.”

  She didn’t look at the card. “Please,” she said. “Just go away.”

  “Promise me you’ll keep my card.”

  “Sure, fine,” she said. She picked it up, glanced at it, and put it into her pocket. “Okay?”

  “Thank you.” I held out my hand to her.

  She hesitated, then shook it quickly.

  I turned and started for the front of the store.

  “Hey, Mr. Coyne,” said Sandy.

  I stopped and looked back at her.

  She hesitated, then shook her head. “Nothing,” she said.

  I sat in the front seat of my car outside the Reddington Camera Shop and smoked a cigarette. Terrific work, Coyne. Subtle. Intimidating teenage girls. Right up your alley, Counselor.

  I couldn’t figure out whether that was one step above ambulance chasing, or several steps beneath it.

  It was all Evie’s fault. I should have been spending this pleasant late-winter Saturday with her, minding my own business, intimidating nobody.

  Except Sandy Driscoll knew something, and she was afraid to share it. It wasn’t Sprague she was afraid of. He was dead.

  Who, then?

  Whom had she called on the telephone while I was waiting outside?

  I finished my cigarette and flicked the butt out the window. It was almost three-thirty. There were still a couple of hours of daylight left.

  I started up the car and headed for the house where the murdered chief of police had lived.

  FOURTEEN

  Tors Whyte’s directions were good, and I found the long, sloping gravel driveway off the two-lane country road in the sloping gravel driveway off the two-lane country road in the northwest corner of town. Sprague’s driveway was bordered by a scrubby oak-and-pine forest on one side and a lumpy meadow on the other. Old snow blanketed the shaded ground under the pines, but the meadow had been swept clean by the wind. The driveway was made for a four-wheel-drive vehicle. In the spring when the ground thawed I wouldn’t even try it in my BMW, but now it was solid under my wheels. It curled down and around the slope for about a quarter of a mile before it stopped at a turnaround in front of Sprague’s house.

  It was a typical nineteenth-century New England farmhouse—white clapboards, an L-shaped porch across the front and one side, fieldstone foundation, three chimneys, bow window, a couple of oddly shaped dormers. Several rocking chairs were lined up on the porch, and some old-fashioned lightning rods sprouted from the peak of the roof. It looked like it had been painted fairly recently. Azaleas and rhododendrons, now dormant, grew against the foundation.

  To the right of the house was a kidney-shaped in-ground swimming pool. It had been drained for the winter. Beyond that was a fenced-in thirty-foot square of raw earth covered with hay, which I assumed had been Sprague’s vegetable garden.

  A big wooden barn with a tin roof stood off to the left. The sides had been left to weather naturally.

  Ed Sprague interested me. He seemed to have been one of those people who are good at everything, the kind of guy who was captain of three varsity sports and president of his high school class, the boy most likely to succeed who’d grown into a man who inspired the admiration and respect—love, even—of those who knew him. He was smart and friendly and energetic. Too good to be true. A perfect human being.

  Too good, it occurred to me, to be satisfied with being chief of a tiny rural police force. I’ve never known a perfect human being. I don’t believe in them.

  Neither did Tory Whyte. According to her, Chief Sprague preyed on his female underlings and tormented all of his officers.

  Anyway, somebody had murdered him. That made at least one person who didn’t admire, respect, and love him.

  I climbed the three steps onto the porch, shielded my eyes with both hands, and peered in through the windows. The living room featured exposed beams, wide-plank flooring, a scattering of braided rugs, and a big fieldstone fireplace flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookcases. All the furniture was early American. I couldn’t tell whether they were authentic antiques or good replicas, but either way it was tasteful and understated and expensive-looking.

  The kitchen was modern, all stainless steel and inlaid tile and white birch. A beehive oven dominated the inside wall, and bunches of strung garlic and dried herbs and copper-bottomed pots and pans dangled from the center beam.

  I wandered over to the barn. Probably where Sprague kept his car, maybe a riding mower and a snowmobile and a motorcycle. The only windows were high up under the peaks, and both the big sliding door in front and the regular-size door on one side were padlocked.

  I went back to the house and sat on the front steps. It was a pretty spot Sprague had here on a little plateau about halfway down the gentle hillside. He’d cut away enough tree
s to open up a view of his pond, which was down in a little tree-rimmed bowl and now covered with ice. Plenty of seclusion and privacy for the chief of police when he wanted to get away from it all, and a good place for crowds to gather when he wanted company.

  It was the kind of place where I’d like to live. I’d thought about getting the hell out of the city a million times, and when I did, I imagined a place very much like this. Trees and birds and fresh air, and my own pond a five-minute walk from my front door. I’d keep an old rowboat down there. No motor. Just a pair of oars and creaky oarlocks. There were probably bass and pickerel in that pond. Hell, I could stock it with trout.

  I lit a cigarette. Okay, so Chief Sprague had himself a heavenly little spot out here in the country, and from all outward appearances, he kept it well maintained. Now what?

  Now I should turn around, drive back to Boston, and call Evie. It was Saturday.

  And if she didn’t answer her phone, then what?

  It took me five minutes to find the front door key. Just about everyone I know who lives in the country hides a spare house key somewhere. Under a doormat, in a flower pot, wedged under a shingle, on the ledge over the door.

  Sprague had kept his under the cushion of one of the rocking chairs on the porch.

  I unlocked the door, then returned the key to its hiding place. If anyone caught me inside, I’d say I’d found the door unlocked. That would eliminate the “breaking” half of a B and E charge.

  I had no idea what, if anything, I was looking for. I just wanted to get a feeling for Ed Sprague. Oddly enough, I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty, entering Sprague’s house uninvited. He was dead. He wouldn’t mind.

  Furtive, maybe. It pumped some adrenaline. I liked the feeling.

  Ed Sprague’s living room reminded me of his office at the police station. Comfortable furnishings, outdoorsy paintings on the wall, big fireplace, lots of books. Tasteful and homey.

  So was the kitchen. It appeared that Sprague liked to cook. There were two shelves of cookbooks, lots of utensils and machines, well-stocked cabinets and refrigerator.

  He had a small office on the first floor off the living room. No early-American stuff here. This room was dominated by a two-wall L-shaped teak desk that was tangled with electrical cords and covered with computer hardware—a new top-of-the-line Apple Macintosh with a nineteen-inch monitor, a big box-shaped color printer, two scanners, and a few other mechanical gizmos I couldn’t identify. Three digital cameras and two laptop computers sat on one shelf. Another shelf was crammed with CDs and boxed software. I’d never have guessed that Ed Sprague was a computer nerd.

  A three-drawer metal file cabinet was unlocked, and I paged through everything. Sprague had been a meticulous recordkeeper. He kept copies of bills and tax documents and insurance policies and mutual-fund statements and mortgage payments going back ten years. I added and subtracted the numbers in my head, and they were about right. Reddington paid him pretty well, and he seemed to have been living within his means.

  There were two bedrooms upstairs, a small one and a big one. The small one was a spare, furnished with twin beds. The big one, which was about the size of his living room, was apparently Sprague’s. King-size bed, neatly made, bedside table with an alarm clock and lamp, a pair of upholstered chairs with a pair of blue jeans lying over the back of one of them. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the wall at the foot of the bed. A big television and some audio equipment occupied several shelves. A small writing desk stood under a window.

  The closet held police uniforms and suits and pants and shirts, with well-shined shoes lined up on the floor. Underwear and socks and sweaters lay neatly folded in the bureau.

  No suspicious prescription drugs in either of the two back-to-back upstairs bathrooms or in the downstairs half bath.

  The cellar had a dirt floor and two unshaded lightbulbs. Nothing down there except the oil burner and a big stack of firewood and a few old wooden chairs.

  I went outside, fetched the key, locked the door, put the key back under the cushion, and sat in the rocking chair. I lit a cigarette and put my feet up on the rail. I’d spent a little more than an hour searching Sprague’s house, however ineptly, and I’d learned nothing.

  I was, in fact, quite impressed with how much I had not learned. Ed Sprague’s place was clean and neat and utterly unrevealing.

  Something kept nagging at me, though, and after a few minutes of smoking and rocking, I figured out what it was.

  Nobody’s perfect. Call me a cynic, but I don’t believe there’s a person on earth who has absolutely no secrets. A one-hour search of any normal bachelor’s house—even by an amateur snooper such as I—would turn up something. Love letters from a married woman, pornographic magazines or videos, a carton of empty vodka bottles, a baggie of weed, a collection of Uzis, a drawer full of women’s lingerie, a stash of hundred-dollar bills.

  I kept my old Playboy magazines in a desk drawer—in case I wanted to reread the stories.

  So where did Ed Sprague hide his secrets? In his office? On his computer? In a safe-deposit box?

  Any of those places was safe from me.

  The barn, maybe. I hadn’t checked there yet.

  I pushed myself up from the rocker, flipped away my cigarette butt, and walked over to the barn. Both doors were padlocked. Maybe Sprague had kept a key hidden somewhere, but I had no idea where to start looking for a barn key.

  I followed a rutted old roadway around back and saw that this barn had originally been used for cows or horses. The ground sloped acutely away from the back, leaving a garage-door-size opening underneath. The hay and manure that the animals left on the barn floor would be swept through a hole down onto the ground underneath, and a truck could back up to this opening to lug it away and spread it on the gardens. Those old Yankee farmers knew all about recycling.

  I stepped into the opening under the barn. It had probably been half a century since animals had lived upstairs, but down there I could still detect the faint, moist aroma of old manure. Not an unpleasant aroma, actually.

  In the day’s gathering gloom, it was pitch dark.

  I went back to my car, got a flashlight from the glove compartment, returned to the back of the barn, and went in.

  I shined my light around and saw a ladder going up to the opening in the main floor of the barn. I squished my way across the cushiony layers of old manure and rotten hay, and as I placed my foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, my flashlight picked up something shiny way in the back corner of this big space under the barn.

  I went over there. It appeared to be a vehicle of some kind. A tarpaulin had been thrown over it. My light had caught the reflection from a chrome bumper where the corner of the tarp had pulled away.

  I lifted a corner, hesitated, then pulled off the tarp.

  It was a mud-spattered red Jeep Cherokee, no more than a year or two old. Sprague, I assumed, had driven it here, as far out of sight as he could get it, and had then covered it with this tarp.

  He’d hidden his car.

  Why?

  I shined my light around the inside of Sprague’s Jeep. Aside from a few Coke cans and some McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts trash on the floor on the passenger side and a couple of paperback books on the backseat, it was empty.

  I started to walk slowly around it.

  When I got to the front, I stopped. The fender on the passenger side was smashed in, and my flashlight revealed a long, deep dent extending halfway along the passenger side. The Jeep’s red paint had been scraped away. I looked closer and saw a few smudges of blue paint.

  Tory Whyte’s witness had been right. There had been another vehicle there when Brian and Jenny went into the river.

  And Chief Ed Sprague had been driving it.

  It had been a hit-and-run. Tory’s suspicion about that had been on target, too. Sprague had sideswiped those kids. Had he been drinking? Just driving too fast, the way cops sometimes do? Trying to pass those two kids on a narrow road,
cutting it too close?

  Whatever. Sprague had panicked and kept going. Then he’d hidden his car in a place nobody—except a snoopy Boston lawyer—would think to look.

  No wonder Sprague had refused to follow up on Tory’s witness. If he had, that witness, under careful questioning, might have been able to describe Sprague’s red Cherokee.

  Jake had somehow figured it out. That’s what he’d been so excited about when he called me from Unit Ten at King’s Motel on Route Nine.

  He’d been right. It would have blown my mind.

  I figured Jake had intended to tie up all the loose ends and bring them to me. He’d probably invited Sprague to his motel room, expecting a sorrowful confession.

  Sprague had showed up. And then what happened?

  Then Jake murdered him.

  My first impulse was to jog back to Sprague’s house and use his phone to call the cops.

  My second, stronger impulse was to finish what I’d started. There was a whole barn to explore. Another hour wouldn’t make any difference. Sprague’s Cherokee wasn’t going anywhere.

  So I climbed up the ladder, pulled myself up through the opening, and found myself standing in the middle of the barn floor.

  I shined my light around and saw that the barn had originally been for horses. Narrow stalls with shoulder-high doors lined one side. At the front end of the barn was an open stairway leading up to the hayloft.

  The rest was a big open space with a rough plank floor. It was big enough to store reapers and threshers and mowers. Big enough for a square dance.

  The odor up here was much more intense than down below where the old manure and hay were moldering.

  This was a different odor—fresher and sharper and more nauseating.

  In fact, it was almost overpowering.

  One winter back in my married days when I was living with Gloria in our house in Wellesley, we were invaded by field mice. They left their droppings in the kitchen cabinets and behind the refrigerator and on the pantry shelves. When Gloria started finding mouse turds in the silverware drawer, she threatened to move out unless I got rid of the little buggers. So I baited some old-fashioned springloaded snap traps, and in a couple of nights I slew half a dozen of the poor critters.