‘I know him from around. From places.’
‘Why are you sitting in his truck today?’
Casper hesitated for a moment, then said: ‘Not going to lie to you. He told me he could score some meth for me.’
Chevy Deacon exploded. ‘That’s fucking bullshit. I don’t know this guy.’
‘This surely violates your probation, Chevy,’ Ivy said. ‘You know that, right? Consorting with felons?’
In that moment Chevy Deacon put his weight on his left foot, pivoted, and launched his right fist toward Ivy’s face. Ivy sidestepped the blow with ease, got behind the man and took him to the asphalt hard. Within a few seconds, she had Chevy Deacon secured by handcuffs.
Ivy worked Chevy to his feet, gave the man some time to decelerate. He was breathing heavily, blowing air in short bursts, his face bright red, scraped by the rough pavement.
‘Bad move, Chevy,’ Ivy finally said. ‘Your day just got a whole lot worse.’
Ivy contacted Walt Barnstable on her rover. She turned back to her suspect.
‘Chevy Deacon, you are under arrest for public intoxication and assault on a police officer,’ Ivy said. ‘I’ll put in a call to the county on the violation.’
Ivy could see the knot starting to grow on the right side of Chevy Deacon’s face. She waved a hand in front of his eyes to get his attention. He looked up.
‘And I haven’t even gotten to the part about why I wanted to talk to you in the first place.’
When the patrol car pulled out of the parking lot, with Chevy Deacon in the back, Ivy turned her attention back to Casper Walls.
‘You ever take any acting classes, Casper?’
‘No classes, ma’am. But I was in Grease when I was in junior high.’
‘You were Danny Zuko?’
‘Nothing like that. I was just one of the guys.’
‘You might have missed your calling.’
Casper smiled. ‘Did you know he was gonna take a poke at you like that?’
‘No,’ Ivy said. ‘That was just icing on a cake I was going to eat anyway.’
She reached into her pocket, took out a fold of bills, peeled off a twenty. ‘You have to promise me you’ll spend this on drugs or alcohol.’
Casper snapped the bill from her hand.
‘You have my word.’
Before returning to the station house, Ivy collected some items from the rear bed of Chevy’s truck. Specifically, a half-dozen large burlap bags.
Inside the bags were dead leaves and twigs. She did not find any overt evidence that was consistent with a human being having been inside any of the bags, no clothing or personal items. Ivy put them into paper evidence bags, and marked them to be sent to BCI to check for blood, hair and fiber.
Ivy picked up a can of Mountain Dew, and the small bag of sour cream chips, and opened the door to the interview room.
‘How we doing, Chevy?’
As expected, Chevy Deacon said nothing. Ivy sat down, put the Mountain Dew and bag of chips on the table. Chevy Deacon didn’t acknowledge the gesture.
‘Do you know why you got the invite, Chevy?’
‘You set me up is why.’
‘I set you up? How’d I do that?’
‘Putting that fat little fuck in my truck.’
‘So it is your truck, then?’
‘You know it is. Just like you know it’s in my brother’s name.’
Ivy took a moment, opened a folder. On top was Chevy Deacon’s sheet. He glanced down at it.
‘Now, I’m not looking to jam you up, Chevy. I haven’t yet called your PO, and I don’t have to do that.’
‘I think maybe I should talk to my lawyer.’
‘We can play it that way if you want to. But we both know you don’t have a lawyer. I’m going to have to call the public defender’s office in the county seat and they are not going to get here until, maybe, noon tomorrow. When they get here we’re going to present them with all the evidence we have on your consorting with known felons, not to mention the assault charge which, in and of itself, is going to rob you of some serious daylight.’
Chevy Deacon said nothing. Ivy continued.
‘You work with me a little bit, and I’ll see what I can do for you,’ Ivy said.
‘What do you want?’
‘I just need a play-by-play of your whereabouts starting Sunday night, right up to this afternoon. Don’t leave anything out.’
Chevy Deacon took a while to line up his thoughts. He told a brief tale of how he got up late on Sunday, drove to Mantua to pick up some parts for a Mustang he was trying to restore, met some people at a bar there, put on a major drunk, slept it off in the parking lot. At dawn he drove back to Holland County, stopped at the McDonald’s on Lambert Road, got home and flopped into bed, where he stayed until his alarm went off. Then he went to work.
‘How did you come to be on Cavender Road?’ Ivy asked.
‘Cavender Road?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Who says I was there?’
‘We have an eyewitness puts you on the corner of Cavender and 44.’
‘They’re mistaken. Wasn’t there. I was home sleeping.’
Ivy held the man’s gaze until he was forced to look away. He was lying.
‘Ever do any bird hunting, Chevy?’
‘What?’
‘Bird hunting,’ Ivy said. ‘Pheasant, duck, quail. The occasional chukar. Lots of great preserves in this part of the state. Ever hunt birds?’
Chevy looked suitably confused by this change of tack. Ivy had just introduced firearms to the conversation, which caused him to tense.
‘No.’
‘What about the nuisance birds. Ever pick off a few blue jays on your spread?’
‘No.’
‘Starlings? Pigeons?’
‘No.’
‘Crows?’
Ivy watched the man carefully when she said the word crow. There was no tell or tic.
‘Why are you asking me this?’
‘All part of a broader investigation.’
‘Why are you asking me about hunting? Did somebody get shot?’
‘Do you have knowledge of a shooting, Chevy?’
The man just stared at her, the wheels, such as they were, beginning to spin out of control. Whatever put him on Cavender Road was something criminal. Whether it had something to do with the death of that girl was yet to be determined.
‘Get me that lawyer.’
Ivy gave this a few moments.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll get right on that.’
Ivy gathered together her papers, exited the room. She saw that Walt Barnstable had been observing the questioning.
They entered Ivy’s office, closed the door.
‘I don’t think he’s our boy,’ Walt said.
‘I think you’re right about that.’ Ivy looked at her watch. ‘Let’s let him marinate for an hour, then cut him loose.’
Ivy reached into the file cabinet, took out the keys to the holding cell. ‘Box him up for me?’
‘Be my pleasure,’ Walt said.
While Walt bundled Chevy Deacon to the holding cell, Ivy did a little housekeeping on her desk. Chevy’s possessions were loose on the blotter, next to an empty plastic evidence bag. She began to put the items in the bag. On the sheet next to the bag she had written down what he’d had on his person at the time they brought him in and frisked him: an almost empty pack of Newports, a yellow Bic lighter, a few twenties, a pair of empty dime zip bags that smelled of pretty good weed, a cash receipt from a Taco Bell.
Ivy picked up the cash, slid one of the bills to the side, and found that it was really five bills.
Walt returned, put the cell keys on a hook by the door.
‘Is Slim Shady in there always this belt-fed?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Ivy said. ‘Today was about average. His old man was worse.’ She held the small stack of bills in the light. ‘Look at this.’
‘Brand new bills.’
&nbs
p; ‘Yeah,’ Ivy said.
‘None of them look circulated at all. All clean.’
‘Chevy Deacon is a lot of things,’ Ivy said. ‘Clean isn’t one of them.’
‘So why would someone like him have brand new bills in his pocket?’
Ivy considered the question. ‘Maybe it has something to do with why he was out on Cavender Road. Maybe they’re from some kind of transaction he’s trying to keep secret.’
‘And whatever the reason is, he’s willing to get violated for it?’
‘Let’s see what we get out of his truck. I’ll see if I can red line that search.’
As if anticipating her call, the desk phone rang. It was her direct line, not the police station number. Ivy answered. It was Gary Baudette.
‘Hey Gary,’ she said. ‘What’s up?’
‘I have something.’
‘That was fast.’
‘Not the new case,’ he said. ‘My team is still on scene there. I’m back at the Richfield lab. This is about the Paulette Graham case.’
Ivy sat straighter, got Walt’s attention. He crossed the room. Ivy wrote Graham on the legal pad on the desk in front of her, turned the pad so Walt could read it.
‘I’m here with Walt Barnstable,’ Ivy said. ‘Okay to put this on speaker?’
‘Sure.’
Ivy did so. ‘What do we have?’
‘I went back to the evidence collected at the Graham scene. Something had been nagging me since we hit the wall with the forensics.’
Ivy heard some papers rustling on the other end.
‘As you know, there wasn’t a lot, and what we have is pretty compromised. Much of the material found in that field was soggy, wet, rusted, or rotting. A lot of it was refuse, dumped around the field over many years.’
‘Right.’
‘Remember that tin box we found about five feet from the victim?’
‘I do,’ Ivy said. ‘It was covered in ice.’
‘Found a thumbprint on the underneath side of the top part of the tin. On the inside.’
‘What made you revisit?’
‘Craziest thing. When you offered me that tin of Altoids, you held the box between your thumb and forefinger, opened it, and as you did this your thumb slid inside.I didn’t think to process the inside of our tobacco box, because the box had been out in the elements and rust had begun to corrode the surface. The inside was still pristine. We’ve got a perfect sample.’
Ivy’s heart picked up a beat. Gary Baudette wouldn’t be calling if he hadn’t run the print through AFIS and the other databases available to BCI.
‘You have a name,’ Ivy said.
‘I have a name.’ Baudette gave it to her.
‘Got it.’
‘You know him?’ Baudette asked.
Ivy reached into her desk drawer, removed her service weapon, holstered it.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do.’
32
The smell was overpowering, a foul stew of rotting food, feces, and human decomposition.
The scene was a two-room apartment on the second floor over a long-shuttered commercial establishment at the far end of Jenkintown Road, a run-down section of the village that had once served, in the 1950s and 1960s, as a secondary commercial district.
In the 1990s an attempt was made to bring the structures up to code for occupancy as office space and living quarters. Ivy was sure that none of the buildings actually met that code, just as she was certain that people were renting the spaces for cash. As long as there were no fires, and people behaved themselves, it was not a concern for the Abbeville Police Department.
Until today.
Today, in this stifling hovel on the second floor of the building at the southeast corner of Blake Street and Jenkintown Road, the swollen corpse of Alonzo ‘Lonnie’ Combs was hanging from a beam.
Ivy knew Lonnie Combs from a few bar fights, and had seen him around the village when he was on deliveries. Lonnie Combs was a registered sex offender, and every one of his kind was on Ivy’s radar. She had never arrested him, but felt it was only a matter of time. In her experience it always was.
Missy Kohl was on her way to Corley and Sons, the place of Lonnie Combs’s employment. Ivy was standing just inside the front door at Lonnie’s apartment with Walt Barnstable.
Before joining the police force Walt worked as an insurance investigator for a large national company.
A lifelong bachelor, Walt had lived with his elderly father for years in a small bungalow on the north of the village. When his father passed away Walt took it hard. He went for a Caribbean cruise and came back with a new outlook and a new purpose to change his life. He applied to the police academy at the age of thirty-two and was accepted. When he applied for a job as a part-time officer with the Abbeville Police Department there wasn’t really an opening. But Ivy had known Walt a long time and believed that she could find a place for him on the small force.
What do you see, Ivy Lee?
The dead man was all but naked, wearing only a pair of stained white briefs. The nylon rope around his neck was looped through a large iron ring that was screwed into the beam in the ceiling.
Beneath the body, on the floor, amid all the filthy clutter, was a pair of dice. They were oversized, foam rubber, the kind that were popular to hang from a rearview mirror in the 1970s. They were a lot cleaner than everything else in the room.
‘What are we looking for, Chief?’ Walt asked.
‘We’re looking for anything linking Lonnie Combs to Paulette Graham. Photographs, personal items, notes or letters, jewelry, clothes. Start in his bedroom in the closets and drawers. I’ll handle his computer.’
Walt took a deep breath, blew it out. ‘I’m on it.’
He slipped on a pair of latex gloves and stepped into Lonnie Combs’s cluttered bedroom.
Ivy turned her attention to the sitting room.
Every square inch of the space was stacked with debris. In one corner was a grimy Formica table with a hotplate, as well as an old-style CRT monitor. Beneath the table was a dust-choked tower computer. Ivy saw the green light glowing.
As she poked through the bookshelves that were jammed with jigsaw puzzles and smudged and torn Penthouse and Playboy magazines, her eyes and attention kept returning to the bloated body hanging in the middle of the room.
She noted the position of the overturned chair near the body. It was close enough to have been what he’d stood on.
Ivy took a number of photographs, then righted the chair, sat down at the dinette table in front of the monitor. She turned on the monitor, and with a gloved hand clicked a mouse button. When the computer warmed up she saw a screensaver, a photograph of a 1970s era Dodge Charger. The text box in the window called for a password.
Ivy began typing. Everything she tried came up as an error. She looked around, spotted a pair of grease-streaked jeans folded on the counter. She crossed the room, took Lonnie’s wallet out of his jeans, returned to the computer. She tried inputting his birthday, his address, his driver’s license number, his name forwards and backwards. She tried his social security number. She tried Paulette Graham’s name. No luck.
Beneath the flap she found a weathered and smudged laminated card. It was Lonnie Combs’s probation card from the Department of Corrections. Ivy input the number.
She heard the hard drive begin to turn. Within a few seconds an image began to display across the screen.
It was a photograph of Paulette Graham.
‘Chief?’
Ivy turned in the chair to see Walt standing in the doorway.
‘What is it?’
Walt was colorless. ‘I think you should see this.’
Ivy took off her gloves, pocketed them, put on a fresh pair. She walked near the wall, entered the bedroom. From the doorway she took it all in. Three laundry baskets full of soiled clothes, an overturned plastic bucket for a nightstand, a lamp with no shade. In one corner was a pile of car parts – air filters, carburetors, radiator hoses. Against on
e wall was a filthy single mattress on the floor.
Walt pointed at the stained pillow on the bed. ‘Underneath.’
Ivy crossed the room. She kneeled next to the bed, lifted the pillow.
There, beneath the pillow, was a dead crow.
It had no wings.
33
The Bullfinch Tavern was almost empty. Ivy needed it that way.
As she turned the shot glass in her hand her thoughts drifted to Lonnie Combs. Creepy Lonnie Combs.
What was the direct line between Lonnie Combs and Paulette Graham? When had Lonnie put eyes on the girl? Had he been at the Gas ’N Go on that day in December? Had he followed her down the road and taken her?
So why didn’t she buy it?
She’d watched the video of Paulette Graham at the Gas ’N Go for the hundredth time. Could the figure at the upper left of the screen have been Lonnie Combs? It could have been. The compression and poor quality of the video itself, combined with the fact that the upper half of the subject’s body was not visible, meant it could have been just about anyone. When she stopped at the Gas ’N Go before coming home, and talked to the manager, he confirmed that Lonnie Combs had been a gas customer, occasionally coming inside for snacks and beer.
Ivy took out her phone, looked at the photographs she had taken. Had Lonnie Combs really taken apart a dead black bird and fashioned that crown?
If so, where was the other one?
It was with these thoughts rumbling through her mind that Ivy caught a shadow to her left, someone sliding onto the barstool a few doors down.
It was Johnny Paulson. Johnny was in his late forties, a recently retired mail carrier.
‘Did you hear about Godwin Hall?’ Johnny asked.
As always, the mere mention of Godwin Hall started a spider web spinning inside Ivy. Sometimes the web grew; sometimes the slightest breeze took it down.
‘What’s happening with it?’
Johnny set himself to deliver the goods. It was standard Abbeville conveyance.
‘I heard someone bought it,’ Johnny said. ‘Someone from out of town.’
‘An individual or a motel chain?’
‘Haven’t heard that part. I heard the news from Libby Thomas, and she heard it from Colleen Clausen.’
Libby was a busybody who worked for the town’s one and only Realtor; Colleen was a busybody who worked for the town’s one and only insurance agent. Nobody gossiped more, or with greater gusto, than these two. Odds were fifty-fifty on the truth.
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