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any woman out on the Gloria streets at that hour wanted to be picked up.
I stayed downstairs till three A.M.with my dad and Sam the cat, watching cable.Dad loves to have somebody to watch his old movies with and I was too rattled to sleep anyhow.Dino was gone for the night, playing stuff like Aerosmith covers in A.C., or so he’d said on the note he’d left.Dad and Dino weren’t talking because of Dino’s joyriding conviction for “borrowing” Ramon’s truck (for which he’d also been fired by Jonesy’s Marina).On my advice (more like a threat), my brother had pleaded guilty and gotten a thousand-dollar fine plus a hundred hours of community service.He’d been lucky to get Judge Louise Voisey, my favorite on the bench and a woman with a sense of humor—or maybe she just liked Joan Baez.At any rate, she’d sentenced Dino to play “folk” music once a week at the Gloria senior citizens center.For a year.The judge had brought along to court her own “Easy to Play Tunes” from her piano bench, which she lent to him.The book was called “Folk Favorites for Young and Old,” and included such songs as “If I Had a Hammer” and
“Shenandoah.” It seemed to strike Dino like food poisoning.
Dad and I had a good laugh about Dino’s sentence.I promised to drive my father in his wheelchair-ready van to the center to hear the first concert.We told him we’d get Aunt Betty to request a lot of the Kingston Trio’s big hits.
Despite a late-night showing of Bullitt, Dad’s spirits were low, as they tended to get around Christmastime.We both missed Gina the most then; she’d always tried so hard to make up for the mother and wife who wasn’t there—carting down all the old boxes of decorations, filling the house with the sound of carols and the smell of baking gingerbread.Joe Jr.’s Christmas Eve visits with his perky wife and sullen children were get-1 5 0
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ting shorter each year, and even though Dad said, “The shorter the better,” it hurt his feelings.And Dino’s feckless troubles weren’t helping.“I swear on my mother’s grave, I’m throwing him out of the house,” my father said tonight, as he watched me let the cat out the door.“Let Dino find out what it’s like to live in the real world.”
But we both knew he wouldn’t do it.“Be sure you find Sam before you go to sleep,” he added.“It’s too cold for him to stay outside.”
THE NEXT DAY I HAD OFF and I slept in.It was a few minutes after nine when my dad woke me, calling urgently on the intercom that I’d set up between the downstairs rooms and mine.He said that Danny Ventura was at the door and needed to see me right away.Hurrying, I pulled on a blue quilted bathrobe I’d gotten from Joe Jr.’s wife last Christmas and had never worn.
Danny wore a black parka and a black hunter’s cap with the flaps tied under his chin.He was banging his hands in their thick black ski gloves together, and he didn’t look happy.“Hi, Dan, what’s the problem?
I’m off today.Jesus, it’s cold! Come on inside.” I tugged at him, but he stepped back, pointing at his car at the curb.“What are you doing here Sunday morning?”
“We gotta go, Jamie.Rod’s waiting at the scene.”
“What scene?”
“He told me to keep calling you.He’s been trying.Some college kids just found a woman’s body in the woods near that new nature trail in Etten Park.Rod said you know her.So call him.”
“Who is it?” My body jerked involuntarily and I hugged myself to 1 5 1
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keep still.I thought he was going to tell me it was Debbie’s body they’d found.But he didn’t.“Rod said I should let you know.Somebody named Amanda Morgan.Somebody got her with a crossbow.”
I had trouble taking it in.“Amanda Morgan? What are you telling me? That she’s dead?”
“Oh yeah, totally.Got her right through the eye.”
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G E R T
ETTEN PARK WAStwo hundred fiercely protected acres of nature preserve, with the local country club’s riding stables on one side of it and the latest Ober subdivision on the other.It had started out as a private amusement park beside a lake, built on the site of a settlement of the Absegami Indians, a local branch of the Leni-Lenape.
A 1920s bronze statue allegedly representing their first chief (wearing the full headdress of a Crow warrior from the Northern Great Plains) still stood in front of the skating rink where Gert Anderssen had once amazed a group of us from the police department with a display of figure skating leaps and turns and spirals.By 1918, when they put in the carousel and paddleboat rides and the long fishing pier with its dance hall, the Indians were long gone, except for a few descendants like Rod’s family.The ironworks factory, whose rusted parts could still be seen in picnic tables along the trails, was gone too.
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Scowling the whole way there, Danny raced his Corvette to Etten Park (ninety miles an hour on the four-lane, fifty on the gravel road into the woods) while Rod prepared me over the phone for what I was going to see.For hours after the dispatcher took the call from two college kids on a hike who had stumbled upon Amanda’s body, Rod had been trying to phone my turned-off cell and our landline (Dad takes it off the hook on Saturday nights because Dino’s drunk buddies have been known to ring up at five in the morning).Then he’d sent Danny over to get me.So I knew what to expect.I told myself I was ready.
Rod was waiting in the little parking lot where old snow had been plowed in mounds against the bordering logs.I could see yellow GPD
tape behind the cars: two squad cars, the road rescue ambulance, Rod’s Jeep, Gert Anderssen’s Volvo station wagon and the new blue Jaguar with the special nature preserve plate.Danny slammed on his brakes, almost hitting a pair of bicycles hidden on the other side of the Jag.Without a word, he was out the door and running past Rod toward the crime scene, following the yellow tape.It led through thickly clustered pines around a curve on a dirt trail.When Rod and I rounded the turn, I could see the top of a huge bare oak tree where Danny was just joining some EMS
medics and four of our GPD uniforms, three guys and a young woman—
the only Asian on the force, Naoko Hayakawa.They were all standing under the oak, close together, hiding the body from my view.Our one-man forensics team, Abu Tomkins, was taking digital photographs.
Next to them, and as tall as Abu, Gert stood in a thin jacket and hatless—her hair a startling white in the sun—nodding kindly as she listened to a young couple in jeans.
The oak was the oldest, largest tree in the park, and had a marker on 1 5 4
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it saying so.Now it would be even more famous.Because someone had been killed there.
The park was no longer “the” place to go for fun around Gloria, but it was still popular in summer for family camping.In winter, the lake was off-limits, but a dozen nature trails were used for hikes and for cross-country skiing if there was any snow.There wasn’t much snow now, just a few spotty patches in the shade, and the ground was so frozen that new tracks were going to be hard to find.
Rod gave my shoulder a comforting squeeze as I took off my winter gloves, put on latex ones.“You ready?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Normal idea would be somebody had a shot go wild, never knew he hit her.That was Gert’s first thought.Or that maybe some idiot mistook her for a deer—she’s got on a fur coat—shot her, then panicked and ran.”
I was already trying to fix the terrain in my memory.“Well, we know the normal idea is wrong this time, don’t we?”
Slowly Rod nodded.“Yeah, we do.” He pointed in a wide arc at the thickly wooded area.“The arrow could have come from anywhere.Some of these crossbows, you can do twelve, fourteen hundred yards with them.But of course, makes it flukier, the trees are pretty thick.”
Rod’s black hair looked almost electric in the dry air and when he rubbed it, a current pulled it toward his hand.Like Gert, he was alwa
ys hatless; maybe because they’d both been serious athletes, the cold didn’t bother them.Plus she was from Sweden.This weather might feel like spring to her.
Ahead of us, Gert gently led the college kids away from the tree, and I saw what I’d been told to expect.When I did, I stumbled slightly, caught Rod’s arm.“I’m okay.”
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About fifty yards off, wearing her long sable coat over some brown riding pants, Amanda stood impaled against the trunk of the oak tree, shot through the eye with a metal arrow, the kind they call a bolt, that’s used in a crossbow.
True, Amanda was wearing fur that could have been mistaken for a deer.True, it was the local deer season these weeks in December.Danny Ventura had recently boasted about killing a buck on opening day.(He already had more venison in his freezer than he could eat if he stayed on the Atkins diet the rest of his life.) While hunting was illegal in Etten Park, true, people violated the rules.There were antlered deer grazing on acorns all through the surrounding woods, and we’d had maniacs shoot each other before.Last winter someone had shot a cow in a dairy pasture.
But a hunter hadn’t shot Amanda.I’d known that the minute I’d spoken to Rod.Now I handed him the third Death Book.I’d brought it with me from home, grabbing it from my bedroom desk as I hurried into my clothes.The book was opened to the page with Amanda’s description of how she could steal a Hart High archery set and use it to kill the student council president, passing the girl’s death off as a deer-hunting accident.Rod read through the page, then rolled the notebook and stuck it in his pocket.
“Homicide,” I said.I stopped him in the path.“This time you’re not going to argue with me, right? Rod? Homicide.”
He nodded.“Right.It looks that way.I talked to Chief Waige.He’s on board.So this one’s yours, Jamie.I told Danny he’s second on this.He doesn’t like it but that’s the way it is.You use what you need.”
As we slowly walked the trail, Rod went on with a steady calm flow of facts; I’d learned from him to use that tone with relatives of victims, be-1 5 6
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cause it made hard things easier to hear.“It’s a ten-inch carbon bolt with a hundred-gram target point.Shattered the right eye socket, exited the back of the skull.The tip’s two inches into the wood.My guess is a crossbow with a real power stroke, two-hundred-pound draw or more.”
I kept hearing Clay describe Barclay’s gunroom: “He’s got a scope on this big-ass crossbow so he can kill Bambi without ever looking at him.” I told Rod, “I need a search warrant for River Bend.” I told him about last night, how Amanda had slapped Barclay after he’d called her a bitch and vowed it wasn’t over between them.
Rod made the call to the courthouse right there.
When he finished, I said, “It’s fifteen degrees.What was she doing out here?” I pulled my thick wool ski cap down over my ears.
“Well, it’s actually not a bad walk, only a quarter mile, to the riding stables along this nature trail.The woman there said she liked to walk it, being on the preservation board and all, check things out, I guess.They were expecting her at the indoor ring at seven.They had her horse ready to go, but she never showed.”
“The two college kids?”
“Here to bird count for the Nature Preserve.They saw her as soon as they came ’round that bend and they called 911 right away.Dispatcher logged it at 8:09.Sent the uniforms and then phoned me.We lucked out a little because Bill and Naoko happened to be doing a look ’round Etten Lake.Here’s the weird thing: Amanda’d called the station just a week ago, wanting us to do something about people chopping down Christmas trees in the park.So Bill and Naoko were on the scene right away, and Gert got here by 8:45.Said she’d been dead maybe an hour and a half.
Around seven.”
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“Wouldn’t have been enough light much earlier than that.The shooter was aiming for her, so he had to be able to see her.Even with a scope, he had to have some light.”
It was, Rod told me, 141 yards to the tree from the curve that masked the trail from the parking lot, a clear shot with a good enough scope.
Could be the shooter even had a night scope.
“So either somebody came here with Amanda and walked away from the scene or he had his own car.” My eyes were moving in careful square sections over the ground, checking ahead of me along the path, then to the left, then to the right.“Any chance of other car treads? Footprints?”
Rod shook his head.“Don’t think so.Ground’s so hard now.A hundred partials, but who knows how old.It’s the holidays.People are out here, hiking, biking, cutting holly.Abu did a few casts near the Jag anyhow.”
We’d reached the body and now I had to look.Amanda was literally held against the oak tree by the strength of the carbon arrow that had gone through her head.Its plastic feathers brushed her skin around her eye socket.That side of her face was black with blood where the bone had shattered.Her other eye was open, staring at me without interest.Blood had dried in the corner of her mouth, under her nose, and had caked her hair.The back of her skull was stuck into the tree bark by the arrow’s head.
I studied her a long while.Everyone was quiet while I did.Then Gert stepped over to me and placed her hand lightly on my back.“Rod tells me you knew her.I am so sorry.”
I shook my head, made myself swallow.“We weren’t close.”
“But such a beautiful woman.What an awful shame it is.”
“Yes, it is.”
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Gert’s eyes were kind.“It was so fast she never had any fear.And no pain.Just died right away.”
“Yes, I see that.But before he shot her, we don’t know what he said, or did, do we?”
Something glinted in the dead leaves at Amanda’s feet, hidden half under her soft brown leather riding boot.Her keys.She must have had them in her hand, dropped them when the arrow struck her.There were five keys on the silver Tiffany ring, along with the black Jaguar computer lock.I recognized them from having picked them up when Amanda had dropped the ring on the sidewalk last night after we’d left Dante’s together.
But something had been added to the ring; something that hadn’t been there last night.It was a Yale key and it was tied to a red piece of yarn.It looked a lot like a key I’d seen recently taped to the Death Book: the key Connie had copied for us long ago at his father’s hardware store, so all the members of the Killing Club could open the padlock on the door to the Pine Barrens Playhouse.
TWO HOURS LATER, I was still at the scene.Near noon, it was not much warmer; the sky grayer than blue.We’d sent the college students off on their bicycles.They’d told us all they knew.It wasn’t much.When they’d arrived at the parking lot, there’d been no other cars there but Amanda’s Jaguar.They’d seen no one else on the trail.Amanda had looked exactly as she’d looked when the police arrived.They’d touched nothing.
Gert and the EMS unit went to the morgue with the body.Gert promised to call me with any information.She hugged me with a kind 1 5 9
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rub on my back.It was interesting that neither her job nor her long affair with Chief Waige (who, as far as I could tell, had none of her compassion) had hardened her.
A tow truck showed up to take the Jaguar to our garage, where every inch of it would be studied for evidence, its carpeting vacuumed, all surfaces dusted for prints.
Rod sent Bill and Naoko off to pick up the warrant in order to search Barclay’s gun room.Then he left in the other squad car to break the news to Amanda’s husband, Jim Morgan.
Of the three of us still in the park, Abu Tomkins was photographing the crime scene, including any tire treads that looked recent.Danny and I were moving out from the oak tree, side by side, walking slowly, looking among dead leaves and branches and mossy earth for anything that could help us.We bagged it all, knowing almost none of it
would likely prove meaningful—a beer can pop-top, cellophane from a cigarette pack, part of a broken dog collar, part of a ballpoint pen.Danny was sullen about my being senior on the case.But I was always senior on homicides.I’d made sergeant a year before he had.I’d scored 22 percent higher on the detective exam.He’d always hated that fact.This time was worse, because of the circumstances—Danny was, after all, a deer hunter who’d “bagged a twelve-point rack last winter” and who was I?
I’d been listening to his mumbling for an hour: “What do you get out of murder, Ferrara? Looking at corpses.Why don’t you get married?”
“Why don’t you?” We were both squatting to study a broken piece of hard plastic I’d picked out of the earth.
“You’re supposed to be a girl.”
“Oh, grow up.” I shoved him with the heel of my palm. Off balance, 1 6 0
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he fell backward.“I’m sick of this shit from you every time we start a homicide.You need to get over the fact that I’m female.”
“You sure have,” he muttered.“See, you do that to me, shove me, and get away with it.Because what am I going to do? But you don’t want it the other way.” Brushing off his sleeves, he pulled himself to his feet.
I leaned toward him with my hands tight.“Want it the other way?” I was a Tae Kwon Do second-degree black belt and Danny had reason to know it.A year ago, he’d seen me break the arm of a guy who’d pulled a switchblade on me.
Shaking his head, he headed back toward the parking lot.
“You’re an asshole, Ventura,” I yelled after him.
Abu Tomkins wasn’t very enthusiastic about the work either, but that was just because he hated to be outside.He hated the heat, but he hated the cold more.Wearing a one-piece neon-blue snowsuit with a bright yellow wool ski mask, he told me he was ready to leave now, he’d been ready.While we talked, he periodically scanned the area with binoculars, worried, he said, about trespassing deer hunters accidentally shooting him.“Only thing brown you can see on me,” he said, “is my nose.I do not want some shit-assed Rambo mounting my head on his damn wall with a label on it says ‘Africanus Americanus.’ ”
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