The Chill of Night

by James Hayman

  ‘Just that I’ve never seen you react like that before. I was wondering why this time.’

  ‘You said you wouldn’t ask.’

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  ‘Too much booze on an empty stomach. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Come on, McCabe, I know you better than that.’

  ‘It was the booze,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Bullshit. It wasn’t the booze. It was the body. You did a triple take. Like you knew her or something. And those phone calls to Sandy? What was that all about?’

  He looked at Maggie looking at him. He supposed he ought to tell her something. She was the closest thing to a friend he had in Portland, not counting Kyra or Casey. Finally he shrugged. ‘No, I didn’t know her. I just thought I did. She looked like my ex-wife.’

  ‘Sandy?’

  ‘The one and same. Casey’s mother. The wonderful woman who walked out on both of us and never looked back. I took one look at the body in the trunk, and, boom, I wasn’t looking at Jane Doe or Elaine Goff or anyone else. I was looking at Sandy. Dead. Naked. And frozen like a rock. It was like it really was her.’

  ‘Weird.’

  ‘Yeah. Weird.’ He didn’t tell Maggie the rest of it because he didn’t know how, and he wasn’t sure it was her business anyway. His cell rang. He checked caller ID. Sandy. He put the phone back in his pocket and let his voice mail pick up. He didn’t want to talk to her now. He realized he was sweating. He turned the heater down.

  Six

  Less than a minute later, Maggie threaded the big Ford down the narrow alleyway that led to the police garage. She pulled into a free space near the back door between two black-and-white units. Wordlessly they entered the building and took the elevator to four. The bureau was empty except for Tom Tasco, who was on the phone, and Brian Cleary, who had his feet up on his desk and was chewing away on a slice of pizza. Cleary, recently promoted to plainclothes, was the new kid on the block. Tasco was a seasoned detective with more than eighteen years in the PPD. McCabe figured Tasco was the right guy to show Cleary the ropes. McCabe had assigned Tasco’s former partner, Eddie Fraser, to work with the sometimes difficult Carl Sturgis.

  Cleary looked up as McCabe and Maggie approached. ‘A couple more pies down the conference room if you guys want some,’ he said.

  McCabe realized he was famished. He hadn’t eaten all day except for a bagel at breakfast. ‘Okay, let’s talk down there,’ he said. He signaled Tasco to follow when he finished his call. A couple of open boxes of pizza and some warm Cokes sat on the big table. A detective named John Hughes from Crimes Against Property was helping himself to a slice. ‘Who do I owe?’

  ‘Shockley’s treat,’ said Cleary.

  ‘That’s a first,’ said Hughes. ‘He must like you guys.’ Hughes took his food and left. Tasco came in.

  ‘Shockley still here?’ asked McCabe.

  ‘No. He just left. So did Fortier,’ said Cleary.

  ‘Anything else going on?’

  ‘You mean other than your frozen corpse?’

  ‘Yeah. Other than her.’

  ‘A couple of assholes decided to ring in the new year by beating the shit out of a homeless guy over on Preble Street.’

  ‘Just for the fun of it?’

  ‘Looks that way. Though it may have been racial. The vic was black and he didn’t have anything worth stealing. Bill ’n’ Will are checking it out now.’ Detectives Bill Bacon and Will Messing had been universally known by their rhyming first names since McCabe teamed them up three years earlier.

  ‘We know who did it?’

  ‘Not yet, but the vic’s in the ICU at Cumberland. Might not make it.’

  Detective Carl Sturgis stuck his head in the door. ‘This a private party, or can anyone play?’

  ‘C’mon in, Carl,’ said McCabe. ‘Where’s Eddie?’

  ‘At a school play. Peter Pan. His daughter’s playin’ the head fairy.’

  ‘Tinker Bell?’ Maggie smiled.

  ‘Yeah. Tinker Bell. Probably over by now,’ said Sturgis, checking his watch. He helped himself to a slice of the pizza and a Coke and sat down.

  McCabe signaled Maggie, who nodded and flipped open her cell. ‘Hey, Eddie, it’s Maggie.’ Pause. ‘Sorry to call you at home, but if the play’s over we need you to come in tonight.’ Pause. ‘Yeah. A murder. Plan on a long night.’ Pause. ‘No. Wait till the star’s tucked in. We can manage till then. Hope she brought the house down.’

  ‘By the way, some oversized uniform named Vodnick just deposited a witness in the small interview room,’ said Sturgis. ‘Guy named Hester?’

  ‘Hester can sit for a minute,’ said McCabe.

  Tasco came in and handed everyone a set of color photos. Three shots of the same woman. ‘Elaine Goff?’ asked Maggie.

  ‘Yup,’ said Tasco. ‘Elaine Elizabeth Goff, attorney at law and, as you all know, the owner of a brand-new BMW 325i convertible. I assume this is your corpse?’

  McCabe spread his set of pictures on the table one after the other. The resemblance to Sandy was even more startling in the photographs than it had been with the dead and frozen woman in the trunk. ‘Yeah,’ he said finally, ‘that’s her. Where’d you get the pics?’

  ‘Google Images. Amazing the stuff you can find there.’

  McCabe studied each picture in turn. The first was a business headshot in black and white. A formal Fabian Bachrach kind of thing. The second must have come from someone’s vacation blog. It showed Goff by a pool, wearing a skimpy bikini. Palm trees in the background. She was looking straight into the camera and sipping what looked like a piña colada. In this shot she looked more like Sandy than in either of the others. Sure as hell more than she did lying dead in the back of a Beemer. It wasn’t just the setting or the bikini that made the resemblance startling. It was the attitude. The same half smile, half smirk he’d seen a thousand times. The one that said, Eat your heart out, asshole, I’m way too hot for the likes of you. It gave him the feeling he knew everything there was to know about Elaine Elizabeth Goff. Even though they weren’t the same woman. Even though there had to be differences. It was a feeling he had to be careful of.

  In the last of the pictures Goff was wearing a strapless black evening dress at some kind of function. Looked like the kind of shot a press photographer might take at a fancy charity event. The Press Herald ran that stuff all the time. She was standing in a small group with another young woman, an attractive freckle-faced blonde, and three guys in black tie. Two of them were gray-haired and probably in their fifties. The third, the one to Lainie’s right, was maybe ten years younger. He was looking straight into the camera with intense dark blue eyes. He had a thin face, a crooked nose, and longish dark hair. McCabe wouldn’t have called him handsome, but there was something in those eyes that drew attention. Star quality. Charisma. Call it what you will, but even in competition with a beauty like Lainie Goff, one’s eyes might well go to him first – and stay with him the longest.

  ‘Who’s the guy with the violet eyes?’ asked McCabe.

  ‘Name’s John Kelly,’ said Tasco. ‘He’s executive director of a small nonprofit called Sanctuary House. Shelter for runaway kids located off Longfellow Square. Doesn’t seem like a black-tie kind of guy, so I figure the party must have been a fund-raiser for them.’

  ‘Who’s the woman and the other two guys standing with Goff?’

  ‘Don’t know yet,’ said Tasco. ‘That’s something we have to track down.’

  McCabe slipped his set of pictures into the breast pocket of his jacket.

  Tasco passed another printout around the table. ‘Elaine Goff’s bio page from the Palmer Milliken Web site.’

  Elaine E. Goff

  Associate

  Direct Dial: 207·555·1041

  egoff@palmermilliken.com

  Elaine Goff joined Palmer Milliken as an associate in the firm’s Mergers & Acquisitions Practice Group in 2000. Prior to joining the firm, Lainie served as law clerk to United States Distric
t Court Judge Edward Mellman.

  Education

  Lainie earned a B.A. from Colby College (1997) and a J.D., magna cum laude, at the Cornell University School of Law (2000). At Cornell, she was a member of the Cornell Law Review and served as articles editor her final year.

  Bar Admissions

  Lainie is admitted to practice in Maine.

  ‘Hell of a waste of a fine-looking woman, is all I can say.’ It was Brian Cleary. He was still gazing at Goff in her bikini. ‘Looks like that actress. You know. What’s her name? The one who played the math guy’s wife in A Beautiful Mind?’

  ‘Jennifer Connelly,’ said McCabe.

  ‘Yeah. Jennifer Connelly. Like her.’ Cleary shook his head in admiration. ‘Man, I don’t know why a hottie like this ever bothered going to law school. She coulda been a model, an actress, anything.’

  ‘A hottie? Gee, Brian, that’s not what I heard. I heard this babe’s ice cold.’ Sturgis guffawed at his own wit.

  ‘Oh, for chrissakes,’ said Maggie. ‘Brian, why don’t you do us all a favor and stop drooling over that picture like a horny twelve-year-old. The woman’s dead. And Carl, can the jokes, alright? They’re not funny.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Gee. Okay … Sorry, Mag,’ said Cleary, his normally red face turning even redder.

  Sturgis just glared. He didn’t like being rebuked by a woman. Especially a younger woman who outranked him in spite of serving fewer years in the department. There was a short, embarrassed silence around the table.

  McCabe broke it. ‘Okay, enough,’ he said. ‘Let’s get back to work. Maggie, would you go talk to Hester? He’s been cooling his heels long enough. Any longer, he’ll take a walk.’ If Hester was hiding anything, Maggie was the one to find it. She was as good as anybody McCabe had ever seen at ferreting information from reluctant witnesses. He’d seen her go from sympathetic to tough to friendly to threatening in the blink of an eye, all without pissing witnesses off or closing them down. Most never knew what hit them. ‘Meantime, I’ll brief these guys on what we saw on the pier.’

  Maggie nodded, collected her copies of the printouts, and left. McCabe spent the next fifteen minutes going over what they’d found, including the frozen note pried from Goff’s mouth and Terri’s opinion on the cause of death.

  ‘She was pithed, huh? Somebody stuck a knife in my neck, I guess I’d be pretty pithed, too,’ said Sturgis, again chortling at his own wit.

  McCabe threw him a warning look. ‘All right, Carl, like Maggie said, it’s time for you to stop with the humor. A woman’s been murdered, and if you or any of you other guys think that’s funny, trust me, I can have you out of this unit and back in a uniform before you even stop laughing.’

  Sturgis murmured an apology. McCabe turned back to Tasco. ‘Tommy, did you manage to track down Goff’s landlord?’

  ‘Yeah. Guy named Andrew Barker. Lives downstairs in the same building she lived in. It’s a six-unit over on Brackett. Number 342. Barker told me Goff’s apartment sits right above his on the second floor. Also says he hasn’t seen her in a while. Thought she was on vacation. I asked him if her mail was piling up. He said no.’

  ‘You check with the post office?’

  ‘Yes. That’s who I was talking to when you and Maggie got back. Goff submitted a hold-mail request to start Saturday, December twenty-fourth. Deliveries scheduled to resume this Monday.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yeah. I told Barker we were investigating a possible homicide and that we’d be sending the techs over to take a look at her apartment. Guy seemed kind of excited about that. Anyway, he said he’d be there to let them in and that he hoped nothing bad happened to Lainie. That’s what he called her, Lainie. I said we didn’t know yet.’

  ‘He’ll figure it out soon enough,’ said McCabe. ‘At least he will if he watches TV. Any luck with her cell phone?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Brian Cleary. ‘I worked on that. She uses Verizon.’ He glanced at his notebook and read out the number. ‘Number’s 555-4390. I got a subpoena and asked the company for a record of all her calls, incoming and outgoing, for the past three months. Also for access to voice mail messages for the last thirty days. I told them it was urgent. Supervisor there said they’d get it together, have it for me in the morning. Asked me to fax over a copy of the subpoena. I did.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Got something else, too.’ Cleary was hunched forward in his chair, his foot tapping nervously on the floor. McCabe had high hopes for the young detective. He saw Cleary as a throwback to the Irish cops of thirty and forty years ago. McCabe’s father’s generation. Smart and aggressive with a wise-guy cockiness that reminded McCabe of the young Jimmy Cagney. Made it, Ma! Top of the world! He looked a little like Cagney, too. Short, maybe five-eight or five-nine, with reddish blond hair and a face full of freckles. Cleary had been a bit of a brawler as a kid. Until his old man put a stop to it. Told young Brian if he enjoyed beating people up so much, he’d be better off doing it inside a boxing ring instead of in schoolyards. Turned out to be a pretty good welterweight. Won a bunch of bouts at the Portland Boxing Club. Even thought about turning pro, then thought better of it. He joined the department instead.

  ‘I found the head of HR on the Palmer Milliken Web site. Woman named Beth Kotterman. Called her at home. Asked her if anyone at PM would know about Goff’s vacation plans. She said yeah, she would. Seems all staff at Palmer Milliken have to let the office know where they’ll be on vacation in case there’s an emergency.’

  ‘A legal emergency?’ asked McCabe.

  Cleary shrugged. ‘I guess. She asked me why we wanted to know. I told her Goff’s car was found on the pier and we thought something bad might have happened to her. She dropped everything and went to the office to check her files. I guess she lives nearby, ’cause she called back a few minutes later. Said Goff was away for two weeks, returning next Monday. Her last day in the office was Friday, December twenty-third.’

  ‘Two weeks ago.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s why nobody reported her missing. She had reservations starting the twenty-fourth at a place called the Bacuba Spa and Resort on Aruba. Bacuba on Aruba.’

  ‘Traveling alone?’

  ‘I think so. At least she wasn’t sharing a room. I called the resort, and they had her down as a single.’

  ‘Place sounds expensive.’

  ‘It is. Twelve hundred bucks a night. When she didn’t show, they charged her credit card two nights as a penalty. I checked with Visa, and other than the penalty charge the card hasn’t been used since the twenty-second, when there was a charge for sixteen dollars and fifty-two cents from the Jan Mee Restaurant on St John Street.’

  ‘Is Kotterman still at the office?’

  ‘She said she was going home, but we should feel free to call her if there was anything else we needed.’

  ‘You still have her number?’ asked McCabe.

  Cleary wrote it down on a piece of paper. McCabe glanced at it and then crumpled it up. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘The timing’s a gift. It gives us back our chance to check alibis. Whoever killed her had to have grabbed her between the time she left her office on the twenty-third and before she was supposed to get on her flight to Aruba. Did you find out anything about her travel plans?’

  Cleary shook his head no.

  McCabe turned to Sturgis. ‘Carl, I want you to find out what airport she was leaving from, what flight she was supposed to be on, and if she ever checked in.’

  ‘Think he might have grabbed her at the airport?’ asked Tasco.

  McCabe shrugged. ‘Let’s find out.’

  Sturgis didn’t move. McCabe figured it was because, as a senior detective, he resented being asked to do what he considered routine clerical work. Tough shit. A lot of being a detective, senior or not, consisted of nothing more than routine clerical work.

  ‘Like now, Carl,’ said McCabe.

  Sturgis finally nodded, got up, and left. He passed Maggie on his way out the door without saying
a word.

  ‘What got into him?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘Okay.’ Maggie rejoined the others at the table and sat down. ‘Hester doesn’t know anything.’

  ‘You’re sure.’

  ‘I’m sure. I poked, I prodded, I pleaded. All he knows is what he told Vodnick down at the pier.’

  McCabe filled Maggie in on what she’d missed. After that he sat for a long minute piecing the investigation together in his mind.

  Tasco broke the silence. ‘Okay. Where do we go from here?’

  ‘You’re going to Brackett Street,’ said McCabe. ‘I want you and Brian to round up as many warm bodies as you can. That includes Fraser when he gets here and Bill ’n’ Will when they finish checking out the assault. Split into teams. Make sure everyone has a copy of her Palmer Milliken bio picture and start banging on doors. You know the drill. Start with the other tenants in Goff’s building, then fan out to include surrounding buildings on Brackett and then the neighborhood. Wake people up if you have to. Include any small businesses she may have patronized. Dry cleaners. Convenience stores. Whatever. It’s not that late. Some may still be open.’

  Maggie looked at the pictures again. ‘Let’s not ignore the obvious. Goff would’ve attracted men like flies,’ she said. ‘If she had a regular boyfriend, we need to bring him in and grill him. Maybe this whole thing was nothing more than a lovers’ spat that got out of hand.’

  ‘Doesn’t fit the MO,’ said McCabe. ‘Abusive boyfriends are usually a little more direct in their approach than neat little holes in the back of the neck, and they don’t leave quotations from the Bible. Still, you’re right, we ought to check it out. Tom, see if any of the neighbors can give you names or descriptions of current or former sexual partners.’

  ‘Could be somebody she dumped recently,’ said Cleary. ‘Somebody who maybe wasn’t too happy about it and decided to take it out on her. We’ll also check to see if anyone other than Goff was seen driving the Beemer. That’s a car people would notice. And remember.’