by Jen Blood
He knelt to give Einstein a proper greeting while I bridged the distance between us. He had on shorts and an Arcade Fire t-shirt, his wavy blond hair as untamed as ever. His blue eyes sparkled when they met mine. Diggs is eight years older than me, and forty never looked so good as it did on that man. He straightened. Stein wandered off to make sure all was copasetic with the rest of the paper.
“I wondered when you’d show your face around here again.” He said it with a smile, no trace of the awkwardness I was afraid I might find.
“I’ve been busy. You know how it goes.”
He looked amused, like my absence was exactly what he’d expected, my return right on schedule. I felt a flash of irritation that vanished when he took a step closer and tucked a tendril of hair behind my ear.
“You look good, Sol,” he said.
If I hadn’t been about to melt from the heat before, the look in his eyes was enough to finish the job. “You too,” I said.
My voice didn’t sound like mine and the flush in my cheeks didn’t have a thing to do with the weather. In the good old days, we would have hugged hello and he would’ve given me hell for staying out of touch so long. Now, thanks to a two-minute conversation while I was pressed against his desk in this very building three months ago, I was blushing like a virgin bride.
I cleared my throat, took a step back, and made a concerted effort to get a grip. “I was in town on a story—figured I’d pop in.”
“And steal our Wifi?” he guessed correctly.
“I’ll buy you lunch for it; that’s not stealing.”
“Deal.” He nodded toward the newsroom. “Snag a desk, or you can set yourself up in my office. I’ll be back in ten.”
He didn’t tell me where he was going, and I didn’t ask. After three months without so much as an e-mail to let him know how I was, I figured I didn’t merit much in the way of explanations.
Einstein and I went into the Trib’s newsroom, but the heat and the faint smell of sweat and stale Cheetos drove me straight to Diggs’ door. His desk was uncharacteristically neat, complete with a labeled inbox, a new computer monitor, and a jelly jar of wildflowers looking somewhat worse for the wear. Diggs isn’t really a wildflowers kind of guy; the sight didn’t sit well with me.
I set myself up with my laptop on his leather sofa so I could make the most of the tiny bit of relief provided by an old box fan in the window. I’d already logged into the network and was looking for everything I could find on Hank Gendreau by the time Diggs returned.
He tossed a plastic-wrapped sub sandwich on my lap and handed me an extra-tall iced coffee.
“I thought I was buying lunch.”
He waved me off, his attention already on my computer. “Next time. So, what’s the big story?”
I set the laptop aside for the time being. The sub was from Wallace’s—the town general store—which meant it tasted like the best thing this side of heaven but probably took five years off my life. Einstein parked himself at my feet with his chin resting on my foot, gazing up at me with profound faith that I’d do right by him. I tossed him a pickle.
“What do you know about Hank Gendreau?” I asked.
Diggs perked up. “The guy who claims he was framed for raping and murdering his own daughter? That’s who you were visiting?”
“I got wind of some anomalies in his case, heard there might be a story there,” I said. “I figured I’d talk to him first and see what I could find out. And there was no rape,” I added. “His daughter was tortured and strangled… No sexual assault.”
“Ah. Well, I guess if all he did was torture and strangle her, it’s no big deal.” He bit into his veggie burger and took his sweet time chewing before he continued. “They just turned down his last appeal, didn’t they?”
“Yeah. But there’s been a lot of interest in his case over the years. There’s some DNA evidence the jury never heard about, apparently.”
Diggs got that look he always gets when he sees more than I intend on showing. “What’s your interest? I thought you were focusing on your dad’s story for a while.”
“I still need to pay the bills.” It was the truth. Basically. “People eat this shit up, you know that. So, what’s your take—is there a story or isn’t there? Do you think he did it?”
“They got a confession from him, right? He was in the woods tripping balls the day it happened, then they found him later covered in his daughter’s blood. Definitely a slam dunk case at the time.”
“He says they found someone else’s DNA under her fingernails.”
Over the course of his career, Diggs has somehow managed to retain the details of just about every news story on all seven continents for the past century—something I tend to view as either incredibly helpful or just plain annoying, depending on circumstances. He didn’t even blink at what I considered fairly weighty evidence in Gendreau’s favor.
“There’ve been a couple of cases in the news about that lately,” he said. “The thinking now is that the nail clippers CSU used back then might have been contaminated from other victims.”
I read farther down before I shook my head. “They were using disposable clippers by then, for just that reason. Whatever scrapings they found had to come from under Ashley Gendreau’s nails.”
Diggs scratched his stubbled chin, thinking that over.
“Have you met him?” I asked.
“Gendreau? Once. I was doing a story on one of the job programs he spearheaded over at the prison. He’s done a lot of good work in there.”
“Everyone I talked to so far over there loves him,” I said. “Maybe times have changed, but the last I checked, guys accused of torturing and murdering their own kids aren’t real popular ‘round the cell block. The consensus on the inside is he got railroaded.”
“Maybe he’s just a good actor,” Diggs said. He sat back in his chair and finished his burger. “He could be a sociopath. Split personality. Anything’s possible.”
“He’s seen shrinks for the past thirty years. You don’t think one of them might have picked up on that?” I pulled up the story Gendreau had turned me onto during our visit.
“And then there’s this,” I continued. I read aloud from the screen. “ ‘Five of the six bodies discovered buried in the woods along the Maine/Quebec border have now been identified as young women from the central and northern Maine area reported missing in the early ‘80s.’ ”
“And you think whoever killed these girls is the same guy who killed Ashley Gendreau?”
“It’s a theory. They were all the same age. All kidnapped, strangled, and buried.”
“Except Ashley wasn’t buried.”
“Maybe her father interrupted the killer. Whoever did it had to run before he could haul the body away to his burial ground.”
He arched an eyebrow. “You’re reaching, Sol—this guy’s desperate. Since when did you become such an easy mark?”
I bristled. “I’m not an easy mark. There are plenty of unanswered questions here—I’m not alone in thinking maybe Gendreau got caught in a shit-storm with a bunch of cops out to string up the first suspect they found after they saw everything that had been done to this girl. You honestly think anyone could have been impartial after seeing that?”
He thought that over for a few seconds, then settled in behind his desk and fired up his own computer. “So, this mysterious killer who was murdering girls in the ‘80s… Do they have any leads on who he is? Any clue where he might be now? Or why he just stopped killing for no apparent reason?”
“How do we know he stopped?” I asked. “He could have more burial sites than just the one they found. Or maybe he got caught. Maybe he died.”
We both fell silent, scanning the innumerable websites that detailed the brutal slaying of Ashley Gendreau in 1987. At the time, the public had been ready to skip Gendreau’s trial entirely and get straight to the lynching. He’d gotten hate mail, death threats, been segregated from the general population… And yet despite all tha
t, somehow over the years he’d been able to change a lot of minds while he’d been inside. I wasn’t ready to dial up the governor for a pardon just yet, but looking into the matter didn’t seem like quite the colossal waste of time I’d thought it would be when I first got Gendreau’s letter.
I spent the afternoon and evening in Diggs’ office researching the Gendreau murder and the discovery of the bodies in Quebec. Hank Gendreau had given his lawyer permission to talk to me, so I set up a meeting for the following day. I checked the map to figure out where his daughter was killed and sketched out a time to visit the site later in the week.
I was in the middle of jotting down notes on the other victims when Diggs got up from his desk and turned off the fan.
“All right, Sol, I’m closing up shop.”
I glanced at the clock on my computer screen. “It’s not even seven o’clock—what happened to burning the midnight oil?”
“Not tonight. Your mutt’s wilting, and I’m teetering on the brink of heat stroke over here. First we swim, then we eat. This’ll wait until tomorrow.”
Einstein was looking pretty sad, and I was feeling a little damp myself. I peeled myself off the furniture and packed up my stuff. So far I hadn’t broached the subject of where I was planning to crash for the night—another thing that had changed since my last visit. I glanced at the flowers on his desk again. Usually, it was a given that Diggs would be putting me up during my stay. I wasn’t so sure about that anymore.
“I was thinking about giving Edie a call,” I said. “And maybe spending the night there tonight.” I’d been going for cool and casual; I fell considerably short.
Diggs flashed a brilliant smile my way. “Oh?”
“It’s not really fair of me to just show up out of the blue like this, and expect you to… You know.”
He folded his arms over his chest and leaned back against the doorsill, clearly enjoying himself. “No, I guess it isn’t.”
“You’re not gonna make this easy, are you?”
“Not if I can help it.” He straightened, grabbed my backpack, and tossed it over one shoulder. “Come on, Sol—I’ll race you to the car. We can fight about it there.”
Einstein was already out the door, hot on Diggs’ heels, while I was still trying to figure out my next move. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion, though: I’d been following Diggs since I was knee high to a toadstool. I wasn’t about to stop now. I grabbed the rest of my stuff and locked the door behind me, feeling undeniably nostalgic for those hot summer nights of my youth.
Chapter Two
Halfway to our old swimming hole, Diggs took a left and headed in the wrong direction entirely. We’d taken his Jeep; the top was down, the air was warm, and Einstein’s ears were blowing in the breeze. I had the uneasy feeling that what had started as the perfect evening was about to take a turn.
“You’re going the wrong way.”
“I thought we’d grab a bite first. We can swim later.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I am,” he said, with nary a glance my way. “Humor me.”
“Are we dining alone?”
His fingers tightened on the wheel. “More or less.”
I groaned. “Dammit, Diggs. I’m not in the mood for this tonight.”
“Have you even talked to her since she got out of the hospital?”
The ‘she’ to whom he was referring was my mother: Dr. Katherine Everett, pediatric surgeon extraordinaire. Or she had been, until she was nearly killed during that same catastrophic story that had almost done the rest of us in three months ago.
“I’ve talked to her on the phone.”
“When?”
I had to think on that. I’d been taking care of Kat’s house in Portland while she ran the Littlehope Medical Clinic during her ‘convalescence,’ but most of our interactions over the past few months had been through her partner, Maya.
“I don’t know—somewhere along the lines I must have.”
“Nice.”
“Hey, she didn’t call me, either.”
He pulled into the parking lot at Bennett’s Lobster Shanty with a long-suffering sigh. “Come on. I promised Maya I’d drag you over here. We don’t have to stay long.”
I would have put up more of a fight—or resisted entirely—but since I’d just found out about the potential link between my father and Hank Gendreau, I was actually anxious to see if I could learn anything more from Kat. She was notoriously close-mouthed about my father, but there was always the chance she’d slip up. It was right up there with hell freezing over and pigs taking flight, but it was a chance all the same.
“All right—sure,” I agreed. “What the hell. But if a war breaks out between the two of us, don’t blame me if you get caught in the crossfire.”
He grinned. “Don’t worry. I packed my Kevlar.”
◊◊◊◊◊
The best thing about Bennett’s Lobster Shanty is the lighting, which does patrons the kindness of keeping things so dim you can’t see whatever might be crawling away with your bread basket or skittering across your feet. As the only restaurant in twenty miles, however, it’s never hurt for business.
By seven-thirty on a Wednesday night, most of the folks who’d come for dinner were long gone. The TV mounted in the corner was tuned to the Red Sox, half a dozen fishermen at the bar drowning their sorrows while Buchholz pitched what was looking to be another losing game. Kat and Maya were late—partly because Kat was always late and partly because, I was sure, she was dreading this dinner even more than I was. Diggs and I sat in a corner booth with a votive candle in a red glass bowl flickering between us.
“So, I’m assuming you still haven’t found the connection between your father and Jane Bellows,” he said, thereby officially introducing the conversation I’d been dreading all day.
“Nothing,” I said. “So far every road I’ve gone down has been a dead end, just like while we were out there. Nobody recognizes his picture. No one’s ever heard of the Paysons beyond what they’ve seen on the news. I can’t find any connection between Dad and any investigations Senator Bellows might have done…” My frustration bled through before I could contain it. “She’d never even been to Maine before. Other than a thing for organic tomatoes and an investigation she did into cults in the late ‘70s, I can’t find a single reason why their paths would have crossed.”
Diggs nodded. “Well… You’ll figure it out one of these days.”
“Or I’ll die trying.”
“I think that’s what we’re all afraid of.”
Jane Bellows had been a senator in Washington state back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I had inadvertently connected her home address with my father last spring, when it turned out reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated. She’d been murdered just days after I’d called her home and spoken—very briefly—with my supposedly-dead father. Diggs and I had gone out west together once I got news of Bellows’ murder, rendezvousing with Special Agent Jack Juarez for a very unofficial inquiry. From there, it took only two days before I followed my last solid lead about Dad straight into a brick wall. Then there’d been a whole stupid mess between Diggs and Juarez and me and a blessedly angst-less romantic triangle I was still trying to figure out—one that, thus far, all three of us had managed to avoid actually addressing in any way, shape, or form.
Until now, apparently.
“So… Have you heard anything from Juarez?” Diggs finally asked, when the woolly mammoth in the room proved impossible to ignore any longer.
My eyes slid from his to the bread basket between us, now almost empty. “A couple of times.”
I could tell he knew that was a lie; I hedged before he could call me on it. “Maybe more, I don’t know. He calls.” And I answer was all I meant by that. Diggs didn’t take it that way.
“I would have called,” he said. “But the last time we talked, you said you needed some space. I figured you’d pick up the phone when you had a reason to.”
His instincts had been good on that count—I had needed space. And time. Even Special Agent Jack Juarez, steamy Fed that he was, hadn’t been able to convince me I was ready for anything beyond a few racy phone calls. Of course, Diggs had no way of knowing that.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry—I was just getting my head together.”
“And Juarez was a big help in that department, I suppose.”
“Watch it, Diggs. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were jealous.”
He looked me dead in the eye. “And if I was?”
I almost choked on my breadstick. Before I could come up with a witty retort—or recover the power of speech—Kat and Maya arrived, continuing my mother’s longstanding record of epically bad timing.
Maya was easy to spot in a crowd: tall and slender, with curly grey hair and a smile that radiated good health and good humor. My mother was a few inches shorter, with dark hair, a few more curves, and an unnerving tendency to say whatever popped into her head. She slid into the seat beside Diggs while Maya sat next to me.
“Sorry we’re late,” Maya said. “There was an unexpected delay.” She hugged me warmly—something she did a lot of. I’m not the huggy type, but in the few short months that I’d known Maya I’d learned to make allowances. Kat already had her menu open, but she looked up at her partner’s words.
“Work,” she said briefly, as though the single word explained everything. She looked from me to Diggs and back again, her eyes narrowed. “Did we interrupt something?”
“No,” we said at the same time.
“Right,” she said dryly.
I couldn’t see a trace of a scar from the emergency surgery she’d had months before, now hidden beneath her close-cropped hair, and her green eyes looked as sharp as ever. The only sign I could see of her recent brush with the Reaper was the way she clearly favored her right hand.