Dead in the Water

by Annelise Ryan

  “His parents aren’t involved?”

  “They sign the checks, but they don’t want the responsibility for the day-to-day stuff. They travel a lot, spend half the year overseas.”

  “So Tomas was your basic trust-fund kid and paid baby-sitter to his brother.”

  “Not totally. Tomas has a college degree in chemistry and at one time held down a job with a pharmaceutical company. He made decent money, from what I understand. But he quit a few years ago when his brother came to live with him.”

  “Interesting,” I say. I recall the pasty, wild-eyed look Tomas always had. “I wouldn’t have pegged Tomas as a softie.”

  “Only with regard to his brother,” Beckwith says.

  “Hal made a note in this file about a lie detector test. Was one ever administered to Tomas?”

  Beckwith lets out a weighty sigh. “How the hell did he find out about that?”

  “So there was one?”

  “There was. Tomas claimed he didn’t remember anything and didn’t kill the girl.”

  “And the results of the test?”

  “Look, I don’t know why you’re so focused on this, Mattie. Tomas is guilty as hell. And he’s probably a sociopath, so the lie detector test is meaningless. It’s not usable as evidence.”

  “Are you saying he passed it?”

  “Yeah, he passed it,” Beckwith admits irritably. “But like I said, these sociopathic types can beat those tests. Listen, I’d love to chat some more, but I need to be in court. Let this go, Mattie.”

  I think about mentioning the phone calls between Tina and Lech Wyzinski, but I sense that Beckwith is both in a hurry and anxious to end this topic of conversation. “Okay,” I say. “Thanks for talking to me. And good luck.”

  “Thanks, and sorry about your friend.” With that, he disconnects the call.

  I sit for a moment, staring at the letter and Hal’s notes. After a moment, I scribble down the phone number Hal had written down, tuck the slip of paper into my pocket, and put the Wyzinski file in my desk drawer, locking it. Then I head over to the police station, which is only a couple of blocks away.

  The walk does me some good, giving me time to get my thoughts and emotions reined in. I enter through the front door and greet Heidi, the day dispatcher on duty.

  “Mattie!” Heidi says. She greets me with a smile, but it evaporates and her expression turns morose. “Awful thing about Hal and his girlfriend.”

  I nod, noting the identity of our second victim, while not yet official, is common knowledge among some folks. “Is Hurley in his office?” I ask as she buzzes me through.

  “He is. Alison Miller is in there with him. She was here bright and early this morning.”

  I head back to Hurley’s office, curious as to why Alison is here. Had she dug up some new info? Judging from the excited look on Hurley’s face, I guess yes. He’s sitting at his desk, typing on his computer; Alison is standing over his right shoulder, watching.

  “Mattie,” Hurley says, looking up and waving me in. “Alison has done some of our legwork for us. She went around last night and canvassed a bunch of the neighbors who live on the streets behind Tina and Hal. She found someone who wasn’t home when our guys canvassed Hal’s neighbors. This guy not only saw our mystery man from yesterday, he wrote down a make and model for the car he was driving, and a license plate number. I’m just about to run it.”

  I walk over to the desk, stand next to Alison—who is wearing a broad beam of a smile—and peer over Hurley’s shoulder at the computer.

  “The man I talked to is Norman Chevelle, a retired ex–military cop, and he saw our mystery man go around to the back of the house behind Hal’s,” Alison explains. “He had a feeling the guy might be up to something, so he waited and watched until he saw the guy reemerge onto the street. Then he watched to see where he went and saw him get into a gray Chevy sedan. He’s a bird-watcher and had some binoculars handy, so he used them to get the license plate number. After the mystery man left, Norman went over to Hal’s house and scouted around the place to see if it looked like it had been broken into or vandalized in some way, but nothing seemed amiss. Just to be safe, he told his neighbor about it when she got home later, and the two of them walked around the place, checking everything. Nothing was amiss, so they dismissed it. Fortunately, Norman still had the info when I came knocking last night. He’d tossed it into a drawer, just in case anything came up later.”

  “Way to go, Norman,” I say.

  “Remind me to find out what the old guy likes to drink so I can get him a little thank-you gift,” Hurley says. “And there we are,” he adds, pointing to the screen. “That car is registered to one Peter Carmichael, twenty-nine, lives over on Garfield Street.”

  The DMV photo of Peter Carmichael pops up and it’s clearly not our mystery man. The picture shows a heavyset young man with blond hair, blue eyes, and a full beard and mustache. His stats, according to his DMV data, say he is five-six and 230 pounds.

  “That’s not the guy,” I say.

  Hurley prints the sheet off and goes to push his chair back, forcing Alison and me to step back. “No, it’s not,” he says. “But maybe he knows who our mystery man is and can explain why the guy was driving his car.” He looks at me, his car keys hanging on one finger. “Want to come along?”

  “Sure.”

  “What about me?” Alison says, making a pouty face. “I’m the one who came up with the lead.”

  Hurley hesitates, chewing on the inside of his cheek. I know he doesn’t want Alison to come with us and could easily tell her so, citing official police business, or some other such nonsense. But the simple truth of the matter is Alison can—and knowing her the way I do, I feel certain she will—follow us anyway. Short of arresting her for interference, there isn’t much Hurley can do to stop her. It seems we are in need of a compromise.

  “Alison,” I say, “there’s a good chance this Carmichael guy might know something and there’s an equally good chance he won’t tell us anything, either because he’s on the side of the bad guys, or because he’s afraid he’ll get someone he knows into trouble.”

  Sensing I’m about to quash her hopes of riding along, Alison starts to say something, but I hold up a hand and continue before she can.

  “And if that happens, there’s a good chance Mr. Carmichael will try to contact someone he knows, perhaps our very mystery man. He’s probably smart enough not to do it by phone, so he’ll try to do it in person. If so, he needs to be followed. He’ll recognize Hurley and me in a heartbeat, but you? He won’t think twice about you. So how about this? Why don’t you come with us, park down the street, and stay in your car. Let Hurley and me go in and see what we can find out from this Mr. Carmichael. We’ll call you when we come out, and if it doesn’t look like he knows anything, we’ll let you know and you haven’t missed out. But if it looks like he does know something and he’s holding back, we’ll let you know that. Then you can sit and wait and watch to see where he goes.”

  Alison wrinkles her brow in thought. She’s clearly intrigued by the idea of playing spy for us, but I can tell her base curiosity is also clamoring for attention. Plus, I think she’s a little suspicious, wondering if I’m trying to put one over on her.

  She looks at Hurley, her eyes questioning, and he shrugs. “It’s not a bad plan,” he says. “But it might put you in some danger.” At this, Alison’s eyes grow brighter. She’s drawn to danger. “You’d have to promise me you won’t do anything stupid like try to confront this guy, or anyone he might meet up with.”

  “I promise,” she says, sounding breathlessly eager, and I exhale a sigh of relief, knowing we’ve swayed her.

  “Okay,” Hurley says. “Let’s do it.”

  Alison exits out the front of the police station because her car is parked in the public lot. Hurley and I head out the back door to the police lot behind the building.

  “That was some quick thinking, Squatch,” Hurley says. “I was stymied there for a moment,
trying to figure out a way to tell her to buzz off without pissing her off.”

  “We need to throw her a bone now and then. She’s been playing fair lately, sticking to the rules we set down for her. And she did get this lead for you.”

  “We would have gotten to the guy eventually,” he says as we get into his car. I shoot him a look of exasperation. “Okay,” he admits in a conciliatory tone. “She did me a favor, so we’ll let her pretend to play spy for us. But if the scenario you suggested does come to fruition, I’m going to have to put an unmarked out there, too. And whoever it is will have to watch both Carmichael and Alison.”

  “Let’s deal with that if and when it happens,” I say. “For now, let’s focus on getting what we can out of Mr. Carmichael and hope he not only knows something, but is willing to share.”

  Hurley nods grudgingly and pulls out. Alison is waiting for us at the entrance to the front parking lot and she pulls in behind us as we drive by. As we negotiate the streets of downtown and head for Mr. Carmichael’s neighborhood, I switch gears and fill Hurley in on what Desi told me this morning about the locked chest my mother has in her basement.

  “I suppose we could try to talk to her first,” I conclude, “but based on my past experience with her, I doubt she’s going to give us much.”

  Hurley frowns. “If it comes to that, I might have to leave it up to you. I’m not that comfortable stealing or breaking into something that belongs to your mother on a wild guess about what might or might not be in it. Besides, we don’t know for sure yet if your father is involved in this.”

  “Even if he’s not involved in this case somehow, I want to get a look inside that chest. I’m tired of half-truths and innuendos. I want to know who and what my father is. And I want to find him and talk to him, ask him why he deserted us all those years ago.”

  A crusty silence fills the car as Hurley opens and closes his fingers around the steering wheel and I pick at a cuticle hard enough to make my finger bleed.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” Hurley says finally. “There’s a certain level of comfort to be had in plausible deniability.”

  “I’m sure,” I say with absolute conviction, though a funny little niggle in my chest tells me I’m not 100 percent on this. There is a fear there, a fear I’ll discover my father is a total lowlife, a person unworthy of my time and effort. And if I’m completely honest with myself, I’d have to admit there is a part of me—bigger on some days than on others—that hopes to exonerate him on at least some of the suspicions and accusations. Still, regardless of the outcome, I have to know. The not knowing is driving me crazy.

  Or maybe, I think, my crazy is something I come by honestly, something I inherited from my murderous deadbeat of a father.

  CHAPTER 20

  During the final leg of the journey, I fill Hurley in on the Wyzinski file I found in Hal’s stuff and my conversation with Beckwith regarding the letter. Hurley shrugs it off the same way Beckwith did.

  “I doubt it’s significant. Criminals use that I’ve-been-framed excuse all the time. It’s almost never true.”

  “Almost,” I echo. “But do we accept that it’s a coincidence Hal had a file on Wyzinski, and Tina apparently conversed with his brother?” I know what Hurley thinks about coincidences, and, sure enough, he frowns and lets out a conceding sigh.

  “Yeah, okay, we should look into it,” he allows. “But I think it’s likely that Hal had that file because he was helping Tina with the research for a book.”

  This scenario is plausible enough, and our conversation ends because we have arrived at our destination. We pull up in front of Peter Carmichael’s house and Alison drives past us and parks half a block away. As Hurley and I get out of the car and approach Carmichael’s front door, Hurley nudges my arm and points toward the back of the house, down Carmichael’s driveway. There, sitting in front of a one-car-sized, ramshackle garage, which looks like the Big Bad Wolf could blow it down with a good sneeze, is a gray Chevy sedan.

  “That’s the car,” Hurley says. “And the plate number.”

  Carmichael’s house is in better shape than the garage, but not much. The roof is missing a number of shingles; the paint is peeling; the lawn—what few patches of it there are amidst what is essentially a dirt front yard—is brown and dead-looking. The west-facing front porch is small, has several broken boards in the floor, and is badly in need of cleaning and some paint. The wooden front door has been bleached to a pale yellow along the bottom half by the baking rays of the late-afternoon sun sneaking in under Carmichael’s porch roof. At one time, there was a screen door to protect the main one, but it is now propped off to the side, hanging on one hinge, though it looks as if it’s held in place by a humongous spiderweb, the strands of which are as thick as licorice whips. The screen door is to the right, so I shift to Hurley’s left as we climb the rickety steps of the porch.

  There is no doorbell, just a hole in the wood siding to the left of the door where one used to be. So Hurley knocks firmly and we wait. I survey the neighboring houses and guess Carmichael isn’t much appreciated by his neighbors. These older neighborhoods in town are a mish-mash of house styles, eclectic collections of Victorians, fifties-style ranch homes, Cape Cods, Colonials, and Craftsman homes. The streets are lined with stately old trees—oaks and maples that have been there for decades—though a couple have been taken down or fallen due to rot and disease. It’s a gentrified neighborhood with homeowners that maintain their houses, landscape their yards, and take pride in their home ownership. Amid all of this tender loving care is Carmichael’s house, a definite eyesore—a pustular red zit on an otherwise unblemished neighborhood complexion.

  Hurley raises his hand to knock a second time when the door suddenly creaks open. Standing on the other side is Peter Carmichael. He looks just like his DMV photo, except his hair is longer and looks like it needs a good shampooing. He is dressed in a stained, baggy T-shirt, a pair of cutoff sweatpants, and flip-flops. His feet are filthy.

  “Can I help you?” he asks, and I see that his teeth haven’t been cared for any better than his house. I wonder if he’s renting or owns the place.

  Hurley and I both flash our badges, and as Hurley starts talking, I watch Carmichael’s reaction closely.

  “Mr. Carmichael, I’m Detective Hurley with the Sorenson Police Department and this is Mattie Winston with the medical examiner’s office. We’d like to have a chat with you for a moment about a case we’re investigating.”

  Carmichael doesn’t look worried or particularly interested. He looks annoyed. “I’m kind of in the middle of something right now,” he says. “Can you come back at a later time?”

  “This won’t take long,” Hurley says, neatly avoiding an answer to the question. “We just have a couple of questions about your car.”

  “My car?” Carmichael says, now looking a smidge wary. “What about it?”

  “It was seen in a neighborhood where a homicide occurred yesterday,” Hurley says. This isn’t technically correct, since the deaths occurred elsewhere, but Hurley likes to unsettle people with a tiny dose of shock factor. “A witness saw a man who was snooping around the victim’s residence get into your car and drive away.”

  Carmichael strokes his beard, his brows making a V over the bridge of his nose. He says nothing for half a minute or so, and we both wait him out. Carmichael finally says, “It wasn’t me.”

  “I know that,” Hurley says with an easy smile. “The description doesn’t fit you at all. But it was definitely your car.” The smile disappears. “And that makes you a potential suspect. Aiding and abetting someone else in the commission of a felony is punishable the same as if you’d committed the crime yourself.”

  Carmichael doesn’t like this. He frowns, shifts his weight from one foot to the other, and strokes his beard more furiously. “If he committed some kind of crime while using my car, I know nothing about it,” he says, his voice quavery.

  “He who?” Hurley says. He takes a step
forward across the threshold, forcing Carmichael to back up. “Let’s sit down and talk about this, shall we?” Hurley steps past Carmichael, who does nothing to stop him. I follow and we pause several feet inside the door, looking back at Carmichael expectantly. We’re in a hallway with a staircase to the second floor. To our left is a living room and I see what Carmichael was doing when we arrived. There’s a gaming system on a coffee table set up in front of a couch. The middle cushion of the couch is half the height of the two surrounding cushions—not hard to tell where Carmichael sits most of the time. On the opposite wall is a giant TV atop a credenza. Some kind of military shoot-’em-up game is displayed on the screen, momentarily frozen. All the window shades in the room are down, and neither of the lamps at the ends of the couch have been turned on, leaving the TV screen as the only source of light. It’s enough light, however, for me to see the heavy layer of dust in the room, though the coffee table’s dust is broken up by the occasional glass or bottle ring. There are several soda cans on the right side of the gaming console—this makes me think Carmichael is right-handed, an interesting but unhelpful observation at this point—and the couch has a half-empty bag of chips, a box of donuts, and a closed Styrofoam take-out container sitting on the end cushion farthest from us.

  There are no other seats in the room, so Carmichael heads down the hall toward the back of the house and the kitchen. Here things are a bit tidier, but I suspect it’s because Carmichael hardly ever uses the room. A trash bin near the sink is overflowing with take-out and microwavable food containers. Immediately to our left as we enter is a small table pushed up against the wall with four folding chairs—two on either side—tucked in around it. Carmichael waves a hand toward it, and Hurley and I settle in on the two chairs closest to the doorway while Carmichael takes a chair on the opposite side.

  “Tell me who this ‘he’ is you referred to,” Hurley says as soon as Carmichael has sat down.

  “He’s a friend. Well, more of an acquaintance, actually. He says he knew my mother back in the day.”