The Watcher

by Jennifer Pashley

  Kateri tries first to narrow the number of old-style Buicks on the road. Hurt told her it was an early-’90s model. Old, but not that old. Just enough to stand out. No one got plates. And there is no telling if the plates might be New York or Vermont or even Ontario or Quebec. Searching is slow and turns up a lot of nothing.

  “How’s it going?” Hurt asks from her doorway.

  “Not great,” she says without thinking.

  He leans in, and his body softens, his eyes warm. “It’s the course of the case,” he says. “It’s what happens. People get tired and discouraged.”

  “Is that how I seem?” Kateri asks.

  “Not in a bad way,” Hurt says. He comes all the way in and takes the chair across from her desk, sits with his ankle crossed over the opposite knee.

  Kateri looks at the ceiling, thinking.

  “I brought you something,” Hurt says then, beginning to smile.

  She jumps, and her phone clatters from the desk to the floor. She’s wary of men bringing her gifts. “What is it?”

  He places a fat folder on her desk.

  “It’s Bear Miller’s sealed file,” he tells her.

  * * *

  It’s from the mid-’90s. Kateri goes through the slick, damp-feeling facsimile pages and behind that finds a handwritten report from an officer in Vermont. Bear Miller was arrested at seventeen for assault on another boy, also seventeen.

  It’s written in careful cursive. Began as a fight. Boys were acquainted. Happened in the parking lot of a Kinney Drugs. Miller swung a bat in self-defense. This part is underlined. The other boy, Beaulieau, was knocked out.

  Charges were dropped.

  She looks at the date, and the town and the county, and opens her laptop. There must have been something else. Drugs. Money. A girl, maybe. Someone knows the rest of this story, she thinks. Otherwise, why seal it? It seems incomplete. Petty, even.

  She searches through the local files for Beaulieau. There are many, including other arrests. Burglary, assault, DUI. When she scrolls through the death records, there are Beaulieaus of all ages. An infant, the grandfather patriarch. And James Beaulieau, seventeen, of South Burlington. She pulls up the death certificate.

  Cause of death: cerebral apoplexy, secondary, hemorrhage in brain. The death is ruled natural.

  “Natural?” Kateri says aloud.

  The date is five days after Bear Miller’s arrest.

  Kateri covers her mouth. She wants to run down to Shannon’s cell. It took him five days to die.

  * * *

  After nine, it’s just her and the guards and the officers who are on duty overnight. She takes her key fob and lets herself into the wing where Shannon’s cell is. There are empty cells, ones they use mostly as drunk tanks, or when they pick up a guy on domestic and let him sweat it out in there, sappy and apologetic by the time someone finally comes to get him hours later.

  Shannon is at the end. The cell has a wired, tempered-glass door. Inside, the light is on, and Shannon sits on the bed. They’ve let him have a book.

  Kateri knocks on the glass and then uses the fob to let herself in.

  “Hi,” she says, soft. The room, the whole corridor, is eerily quiet.

  “Hello,” Shannon says. He puts the book flat on the metal bed, its spine cracked open. They’ve given him an old paper copy of Shane.

  “I hate this book,” he tells her.

  “I haven’t read it,” she says.

  “There’s no dad, and then the guy who could be the dad just takes off.” Shannon rolls his eyes.

  “How’s it going with Brewer?” she asks.

  Shannon shrugs. “He wants me to plead guilty and say it was because she abused me. Self-defense.”

  Kateri leans on the wall. There’s a stainless-steel toilet between them.

  “I didn’t do it,” he says. He looks her in the eye.

  “I know,” she says.

  He shakes his head, his eyes wide. The bruises on his neck have all but faded. “I can’t say that I did it,” he says, “just to get off. I’m not saying I did that,” he repeats. “That I killed my own mother, and then, and then, and then burned her body? I was in a fire,” he says. His voice goes up, shrill, tense. “Why would I do that?”

  “Well,” Kateri says, “the prosecution will likely argue that that’s exactly why you did it.”

  “They won’t let me go,” he says. “They’ll never let me go, even if I say I did it in self-defense.”

  “Who did?” Kateri asks.

  His lips are a flat line. “I don’t know,” he says.

  “Let’s look at our options,” Kateri says. “You didn’t,” she repeats.

  “No,” he says.

  “What about Bear Miller?”

  His jaw tightens. “He didn’t,” he says. She watches him press on his teeth from behind.

  “Are you sure?” she says.

  “He was with me.”

  “When?” Kateri asks.

  “When … it happened,” he says.

  “How do you know that?” she asks. “We’re not exactly sure when she was killed.”

  “We went to pick up some things, and the kitchen,” he says, “it was full of blood.”

  She waits, and her own heart fills up her ears, beating. “You have to tell me what you know.”

  “That’s all I know,” he says.

  He has trusted Bear with everything. She sees it now. Behind her, the faucet in the stainless-steel sink drips, a soft patter that after days would drive anyone crazy.

  “What happened during the fire? When you were little?”

  “I don’t remember,” he says.

  “You were hurt, though.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I have a burn scar.” He turns his arm over, and she can see the edge of it, coming out from underneath his short sleeve.

  “And your mother?” she asks.

  “She broke her back,” he says. “That’s why she always has pain meds.”

  “Where on her back?” Kateri asks. She pictures the bones on Elise’s table, the pelvis with the birth scars, the knuckles of spine.

  “Low,” Shannon says. “We were crawling to get out, and a beam hit her. By her waist,” he says.

  “Are you sure about that?” Kateri asks.

  “Yeah,” he says. “She has a scar. She had to have surgery on it.”

  The sink patters away. She needs to look again at the bones as soon as possible. She takes her phone out and checks for messages. Then she asks, “Does Bear know about your sister?”

  “Yes,” he says. Then he adds, “He doesn’t have her.” He folds and unfolds his hands, switching the lace of his fingers each time. “Aren’t you looking?” he asks.

  “We have a substantial lead,” Kateri says. “She’s been seen.”

  He presses his fingers together and steeples his hands in front of his face. It’s too late for her to try Elise Diaz, but she can get Hurt, and she can get there first thing in the morning. She notices the relief in Shannon’s shoulders.

  “Who’s the angel?” she asks him again, and this time he looks her in the eye, waiting. “The tall man,” Kateri adds. “In the suit.”

  “Did they see him?” Shannon asks.

  TWENTY-FIVE: SHANNON

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 16

  It was my turn to leave him in the bed. I got up while Bear was still sleeping and crept through the house. I looked in all the drawers; I tried to open the computer. It was password protected. I couldn’t think of anything he might use as a password, and my guess was that he was really good at coming up with something obscure. Like IWasATeenageMurderer.

  I almost typed it in, but the sound of Buddy’s feet from the bedroom made me jump, and I slammed the laptop closed.

  I let Buddy out, then shooed him back into the bedroom and closed the door most of the way. But before I did, I looked for a long time at Bear, asleep on his stomach, his arm stretched out where I had been, his face slack, the whiskers on his chin coming in gray.
>
  I looked in boxes in the basement and boxes in the garage. I didn’t want to open anything that had been sealed. I found a lot of nothing. Camping supplies. Books. A set of dishes. I figured anything important was sealed, or wasn’t even here.

  So I drove out to Mill Road by myself. I couldn’t risk taking the dog, and it had sounded like he’d settled in on the bed with Bear anyway.

  It was early, and I wasn’t working. Junior had hired fucking Kyle Metzger to replace me. Kyle was just a shitty version of me. All I could think was that Kyle was lazy and stupid, and Junior had said he’d knocked up his girlfriend, so I guessed he needed to work. Every time Junior called to ask me if I wanted a shift, I turned him down. If Bear was in the room when I answered and I said “Tomorrow morning?” to Junior, Bear would shake his head, and I’d decline. I didn’t even know if I had a job anymore.

  I parked in Baby Jane’s empty driveway, under the shade of pines and out of view from the road, where I saw two, then three cop cars go by, lights flashing, toward the park.

  But Bear had called yesterday, I thought. They should have found her yesterday. I tried to think of where Birdie might be if she’d been locked in the closet this whole time. Who might have come in to bash my mother. Bear kept telling me it was okay. That it was going to be okay. That he was on my side and he had resources. But it was a blank spot in my memory. A plain white wall. I’d fallen asleep. I could only remember being in bed.

  I went around the back of Baby Jane’s house. I had come prepared, with a screwdriver, thinking I might be able to pop out the screen and slide in through the window. But the kitchen door was unlocked.

  Inside, all the shades were drawn. There were sheets thrown over the couch and the chair in the living room. The bed was neatly made with the white chenille bedspread. Everything was gone from the bathroom. No suits hung in the closet.

  It smelled faintly of Pine-Sol, with just the lingering hint of cigarettes. I lay down on the bed, and that’s where I caught the smell of him, of whatever it was he put in his hair, a tonic, something old-fashioned like linden water, or bergamot. He never smelled sharp, but he always smelled clean. I thought about the hollow gauntness underneath his eyes the last time I’d seen him.

  “What could kill you?” I had asked him. I had resigned myself to the truth of it. He certainly had.

  “Something opportunistic,” he said. “An infection. A fever. Meningitis. Pneumonia.”

  We sat in the car. It might have been the last warm evening. It smelled like pine needles and smoke and lingering whiskey. Leaves were falling, one by one, bright gold, around us.

  “Why did you stop taking your meds?” I asked him.

  He stared into my eyes. “Because I was done,” he said.

  “Done living?” I asked. I felt stupid and afraid.

  “Yes,” he had said. “It was just more complicated than I knew.”

  I thought about the blood in his cabin, the gunshot wound from my mother. Birdie’s shriek.

  Where were you before this?

  Jail.

  I rolled onto my back on his bed. He knew she was there. He’d known all along. Tell your mother, my dad had said, that I know every goddamn thing she does.

  Everything rushed at me at once.

  They were going to find my mother dead. They were going to either find my sister or find out about her, and someone was going to be charged with kidnapping her. The house was going to be closed off as a crime scene. I was undoubtedly going to be arrested for some or all of it.

  I lay still with panic, my chest heaving, my hands shaking. All I could do was trust what Bear had said. That it would be okay. That he could save me. My mother was dead. I didn’t have anyplace else to go.

  TWENTY-SIX: KATERI

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 1

  “I need to see Diaz again,” Kateri tells Hurt. “I’d like you to go with me.”

  He looks only mildly surprised.

  “Find something?” he asks.

  “Not yet,” she answers. “But I’m confident I will.”

  They drive out in her car, and the sky is cut in half, along the horizon, bright blue and above that a sharp line of heavy gray snow clouds. It’s forty-eight degrees and dropping. The radio warns of freezing rain.

  She knows no plans have been made to release the remains or to have them processed in any way. There is still some slim hope of finding more of the body.

  In the lobby, the receptionist picks up the phone, and Kateri can’t hear what she’s saying. When she hangs it up, she says, “Dr. Diaz isn’t expecting you. Is there something I can help you with?”

  Hurt stands at her side, looking up at the art on the walls. Lithographs that look arty and Eastern, maybe Persian.

  “I need to reexamine the bones in the Pearl Jenkins case,” she says.

  The receptionist comes out from behind her desk, and Kateri sees that she’s in a well-cut pantsuit, with a white blouse that is open quite a ways, but it doesn’t seem to matter because the woman is thin and fairly flat chested. Kateri shrugs her own shoulders forward, caving her chest in.

  “Let me see if I can interrupt her,” the receptionist says.

  When Elise Diaz comes out, she’s wearing a white medical coat and has just taken off surgical gloves.

  “You didn’t tell me Detective Hurt was here,” she says.

  Kateri fights rolling her eyes.

  “All Fisher,” Hurt says.

  Diaz looks up at him, coy. “You’re not coming?” she asks. She’s about to lead them into the basement.

  “No, I’m coming,” he says. “But it’s Fisher’s lead.”

  * * *

  In the exam room, Diaz pulls out the specimen drawer and lays the bones on paper, where they can examine from all sides.

  Kateri leans but doesn’t touch. “Can you explain the birth scars to me again?” Kateri asks.

  Dr. Diaz pulls on fresh gloves and turns the pelvis over. The burn marks are surface stains, the way smoke leaves a trail up a wall, curling and sheer.

  “Birth is a trauma to the body, Detective Fisher,” Diaz says. She points to several pits in the bone. “These here, along with these depressions, indicate a body that has given birth—at least once,” she says.

  “Is there any way to tell if there were further births?” she asks.

  “No,” Diaz says. “We can generally tell if a body has never given birth, or if it has. It’s more difficult with cesarean deliveries.”

  “And what about the spine?” Kateri says, looking at the other knuckles of bone. “How hard would it be to tell if a bone had been broken?”

  Hurt paces around the table while the women stand still, heads bent.

  “Oh, quite easy,” Diaz says. “A fractured humerus, or a femur, for example, shows postmortem.”

  “Would a fractured spine?” Kateri asks, without looking up.

  “Mostly likely. Maybe not in the case of a hairline fracture.”

  “No,” Kateri says, “a compound fracture, in vertebrae L3 and L4. Which,” she says, looking up at Elise Diaz, “we have here.”

  Diaz draws in a sharp breath. “These have not been broken,” she says.

  Kateri looks at Hurt. “It’s not her,” she says.

  “How do you know?” he says.

  “I pulled her medical file from Mercy Hospital. When the fire burned that house down, Pearl Jenkins broke her back. She had surgery on it. She was in recovery for months. It was probably never the same. I have the summary that describes the fractures to L3 and L4.”

  Diaz looks at Hurt and raises an eyebrow, but the conversation is between him and Kateri.

  “When’s the arraignment?” he asks.

  “Friday morning,” Kateri says.

  “And no further sighting of the kid.”

  “No,” she says.

  “Let’s search Miller’s house,” he says.

  Kateri looks to Elise Diaz, who looks down at the bones on the table and not at Kateri. Hurt, meanwhile, leans i
n very close to the bones, without touching.

  “What else could these be?” he asks Diaz. “Besides human.”

  “There are several animals similar in size,” Diaz says. “The DNA is not back on these yet.”

  He takes a pen from his pocket and tips the piece of pelvic bone over on the table.

  “What is it?” Kateri asks.

  “I think it might be a bear,” Hurt says.

  * * *

  They rush back to the car as a sharp wind whips through the trees behind the building. What leaves are left are quickly falling, raining down on the cars.

  “Did you look at Miller’s file?” Kateri asks Hurt.

  “Yeah, it’s definitely a cover-up,” he says. “He paid to get out of something.”

  “He killed that kid,” Kateri says.

  “Did you find that?” Hurt asks.

  “Well,” Kateri says. She has a hard time keeping her eyes on the road because she keeps looking over to Hurt in the passenger seat. “The death was deemed natural,” she says.

  In town, they get stuck behind slow-moving construction trucks, headed up to Fountain Street, where Bear Miller’s house is. She pulls off abruptly and takes a side street toward the station.

  “You okay?” Hurt asks when he regains his balance.

  “Let’s take a squad car,” she says.

  * * *

  “This is a pleasant surprise,” Bear says when Kateri comes to his door this time, but he stops smiling his wide, eerie grin when he sees Joel Hurt behind her.

  Kateri holds up a warrant from the judge. “I have a warrant to search your property, Mr. Miller,” she said, “based on evidence that Shannon Jenkins was staying here.”

  “Mr. Miller,” he repeats, and then laughs.

  Hurt comes around to Kateri’s side and takes in the expanse of the house and the yard.

  “You can cooperate,” Hurt says, “or you can wait in the car with me while Fisher does the search. But that’ll take longer.”

  “I don’t get to wait in the car with Fisher?” Bear asks. He’s standing barefoot on the Persian rug in the great room. The dog—the same dog that has been riding around with Shannon—runs out back.