by Tom Bouman
“Well, can I help? You could give me access to his files, I’ll—”
“No, hon. As I understand it, state police is taking the investigation over, so there’s not much for you to do. I’m only in this for personal reasons.”
“What about these cases that went nowhere, you got any names?”
“I’m not able to give names. If I were, I’d give them to the detectives.” Her voice took on a tone of warning. “Officer Farrell, you’re a little … involved here, aren’t you?”
“How do you mean?”
“Just take care of yourself.”
“Miss DeCosta—” I said, but she had hung up.
WHILE I was out of town, the HO Mart got robbed again. Masked men had been climbing north from Williamsport or Scranton, we assumed. Or maybe dipping down below the border from New York State, targeting lonely gas stations in the hills. Whoever it was, he always used a handgun and was covered with a hood, bandanna, glasses, and gloves. He never spoke out loud. Some of the victims claimed it was a black guy, others said he was white, maybe Latino. Nobody knew for sure. He used a different vehicle every time, covering up the license plate before pulling in. The HO Mart had already had its turn a couple months back, and I figured it was safe now. But we’d never found the guy, and here he was and gone again.
I got back from Harrisburg around four, and there was still some time left to take statements and look at surveillance footage. I’d had the fond hope that it was the same guy who’d shown up on Mary Weaver’s trail camera, but no. Different body type, different clothes, different weapon. An overweight gothic boy named Kyle Mylnarz had been behind the register, and showed up to the store to give his account. He reported a man in a black hoodie with goggles and a bandanna this time, face downturned, broad shoulders, short. An anarchist type. He communicated only with the handgun he carried and a palm smacked on the counter when the clerk had been slow. This was what was on the video. There was no sound recording. The car had driven away south on 37, and from there the driver could have turned onto any of a dozen roads within five minutes, and after that, two dozen more roads. I left wondering why this didn’t happen more often.
Nate Hancock had been to Afghanistan as an army mechanic about eight years earlier, and had got out of that line of work and into franchise management, as it happened, stores my father-in-law Willard Meagher owned. Willard now saw these businesses as stones in his pathway, and was in the process of unloading them. Hancock had ended up with almost half ownership in two Ho Marts, and was saving money to buy them outright. The day following the robbery, he showed up with blurry video stills from several store robberies, his two stations and two others in the area. He watched me go through the photos without saying a word. His point was perfectly clear—the clerk in each photo was Kyle Mylnarz.
“How long has he been working for you?” I said.
“Hired him in June when the school year was up,” Nate said. “He needed full-time work, his people are from Hallstead, over in Susquehanna County. The son of a friend of a friend, or I wouldn’t have hired his fat ass. He also works at a store near Great Bend, that’s these,” he said, thumping at the photos with an index finger.
“Nights, mostly?”
“Yes,” Nate said.
“He ever work a day shift when the store got robbed?”
“Day shifts don’t get robbed. Two employees in the store. And it’s daytime.”
“Okay, so the time of night could be the factor, not Kyle. But I take your point, I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“I don’t know what I can do at this point. The stores are bleeding. State police ain’t done much. I want to handle my business, but Willard’s been giving me an earful about this and every other thing, and he wants too much money, and you know how he is, you married into a fuckin lifetime of it.” Nate was describing a Willard I didn’t know. I let it pass.
“Give Steve Milgraham a call and tell him your troubles,” I said, referring to my boss, the township supervisor. “Your business is in trouble, and if we can’t cover you with the resources we have …” I opened my hands in a helpless gesture. “But don’t tell him I sent you.” I had been asking for at least part-time help since my previous deputy had quit and moved elsewhere, and the answer had always been no. Nate winked.
“Listen, while you’re here, can you help me out? You friendly with Terry Ceallaigh?”
“He told me you might ask,” Nate said. “Yeah. Terry used to work for me when he moved back from Hazleton, until he found IT work. We’re friendly. I ran into him Saturday night with a few of his motocross buddies at the High-Thyme. They moved on from there, and I joined them. The girls with these guys, I’d follow anywhere. Frankly, by the end of the night, Terry was in no shape to drive, so come time to head back south of the border, I followed him home.”
There was nothing on Kyle Mylnarz in JNET. I tried looking another way, searching the name “Nathan Hancock,” and came up with nothing other than one DUI five years ago. I called down to Dunmore and requested PSP’s file on the robberies, plus stops made on the routes in the days leading up to each one. They gave me more than I asked for—every stop made anywhere near the stations for over a year. Nothing jumped out as to the robberies. There were three Schedule I drugged-driving offenses that I hadn’t known about. Shelly Bray made two appearances, once for parking on the shoulder at night near the horse farm, no citation issued. Once for speeding, midmorning, same route as the HO Mart, south of it heading north.
I put the gas station robberies aside and returned to Carl Dentry’s murder. I had yet to look into any connections, criminal or otherwise, people may have had to the place where he died. The one area I knew to look into was old trespassing complaints the Moores had brought decades earlier, and any pleas that resulted. That might at least give me the last bunch of hooligans who knew of the Freefall and used it, and lead me somewhere else. That time predated JNET, and the records would be housed, if anywhere, in a dusty courthouse attic in Fitzmorris. I headed down there.
The Holebrook County clerk was a soft, stout man with close-set eyes and a nose like an old tennis ball. He did not share the modern view that information should be made transparent; he was more in the nature of a sorcerer guarding secrets. He sat behind the counter in a high swivel chair, his fingers laced over his belly, not saying a word, as I told him what I was looking for. The clerk then told me that unless I had some kind of case number he couldn’t help. More than that, he couldn’t let me up into the attic by myself. The system would break down, all human knowledge would be lost, and barbarians would set the woods on fire. So I did what I had done in the past, which was to swear him to secrecy for the purposes of a highly sensitive investigation, and told him I had to pass through the wooden gate that separated him from the mob. Muttering, he let me up the stairs to the attic.
A heavy old light switch. Cluster flies, dead and alive. It looked like the clerk had been through and restacked everything a little more neatly, but in different places. The dust had been swept and reswept, but never quite removed. Once the files had been alphabetical, but not no more. A starting place: Alan Stiobhard, who was a little older than I, had at least one juvenile offense in his file that had gotten him sent to Tiernan’s Gap, a detention facility a bit north of Harrisburg. It would have been twenty years ago. Not that I thought he’d ever have let himself get collared for something like trespassing, no profit in that, but maybe I’d get a sense of what happened to Holebrook County juvenile offenders, who in the system would have been involved, anything. I knew where Alan’s file was, and I pulled it out. I was looking for his adjudication for theft of car parts from a junkyard business. That’s what got him sent down, in the end—something small and ordinary. But the papers weren’t there. I went through the file on Alan twice, but there was nothing on him before age eighteen, not even the letter his father had sent to the judge who’d put Alan away. I knew it was possible for people to have their juvenile records expunged; I just hadn’t thought that Alan would ha
ve bothered with it. I headed down the stairs.
“Hey,” I asked the clerk, “who’s been up here?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Records are missing. Juvenile adjudications.”
“It happens.”
“Yeah, but who’s been doing it?”
“Well,” said the clerk, “I can’t tell you whose records they might be, or how many. But you might ask the lawyer who’s been making requests, or the DA who has to review them. Or the judge who’s been signing the orders.”
“Can I see the requests?”
“I’ve been told to destroy the requests along with the records. Time marches on.”
I WILL TRY to make a long story short: I asked the Holebrook County district attorney Ross where these requests to expunge were coming from.
“They have to notify me of the requests,” Ross said, and shrugged.
“Yes.”
“It’s Casey Noonan’s project, far as I know.” Noonan was an old lawyer who’d moved on to other pursuits, including, until recently, landlording. But he’d sold some or all of his real estate to a limited liability company whose members were unknown to me, save a few sleazy opportunists I had yet to tag. At the mention of Noonan’s name, my ears pricked up.
“In what way is it a ‘project’?”
“Helping the county clear out our files, I don’t know. They’re decades old, some of them. It gets to where I just fuckin sign them and hand them over to Heyne. Henry, I don’t know anything about this. Okay?”
Jeremiah Heyne was an elderly magistrate who clung to the county’s legal system like a snapping turtle. I headed over to the magistrate court, in a plain little annex not far from the county courthouse proper, hoping to catch him in his office. He was in session, so I waited in the hall for court to recess, which it did before too long, the door opening and dislodging a collection of petty disputants who had taken things a step too far, and who never did learn to dress for the occasion. The magistrate was still at his bench.
“Judge,” I said, “how are you?”
“Dandy. What do you want?”
“I went looking for old juvenile case files,” I said, and the old man stiffened. “I gather you’ve been handling some motions to expunge?”
“Yes, yes, yes, Casey Noonan’s project,” Heyne said. “You know how old lawyers are. Look, I help out where I can.”
“How many are we talking about, Judge?”
“I don’t know. A few.”
“So this is all coming from Noonan? Some kind of pro bono thing?”
Heyne showed a flash of anger. “I don’t know where it comes from. Where does it come from? These are community members, decent people. They want to move on. So let them.”
This puzzled me; nobody who knew Alan Stiobhard would have called him a community member. He was decent, in his way, but wild as a bobcat and quiet as a snake. He lived indoors sometimes, but out among the stars just as often. His community participation was that he sometimes sold drugs, burgled houses and businesses and never got caught, and found comfort in the beds of unlikely young women, many of them married or not old enough to drink.
“Can you give me names?” I said. “For an investigation.”
“That’s the point of expunging the offenses. You let them go. But you can always ask Noonan.” Heyne said as I turned to go, “Officer, is there a problem?”
I shook my head and shrugged.
With no papers and no names, I had to fall back on institutional memory. I went to see Sheriff Dally, who I thought would have been a patrolman or a deputy back then. His admin directed me to a repossession at an address in south Fitzmorris.
I drove out there to a suburban hill expecting a scene, but all Dally was doing was looking on as a tow-truck driver winched a sapphire-blue F-150 out of a driveway. The owner never came out of the house. The vehicle was so shiny and new that the guy who’d bought it may not have really needed it anyway.
“You’ve been thinking,” said Dally.
“What do you remember about the Freefall, where we found the guy? Going back twenty, thirty years. Anything?”
“Not a thing.”
“The Moores said they pressed charges and got kids sent down to Tiernan’s Gap back in the eighties or nineties. Or a kid, anyway. Just trespassing. There would have been some friction over it. Were you around then?”
“Yeah, I probably got called up there a couple times,” Dally said, looking wary. “It’s hard to remember that far back.”
“You might’ve had to testify or something. I assume these kids wouldn’t have pled if they’d known they’d get jail time,” I said.
“Yeah, I don’t remember. What’s the point?”
“The point is … I don’t know.”
I drove over to Casey Noonan’s house on a hill, and was told by a neighbor that he was in Vermont.
With nobody talking, I was left with one option. Old Account Road climbed a wooded ridge into the Heights: a nickname for a collection of trailers and small houses scattered onto steep plots, where people who did not like town life settled. As I crawled up the road in the patrol truck, I tried as usual to look into peoples’ business, but curtains of green and orange and gold leaves hid homes on either side. Many more huts, popup campers, and tents could be found farther in, and I did not know where: follow the four-wheeler trails to deer trails, to rocky dells and firepits scattered with bones and empty cans, and you might find the men who lived as shadows in the woods and who were not at home anywhere else.
I had not had word of Alan Stiobhard in some time. Not since the shooting death of a prisoner last year, out in the hills. He stayed invisible until he wanted to be seen. But I’d grown up around the Stiobhard family, and pulled off Old Account Road and into the yard of Michael and Roberta, the Father and Ma of their family. In their yard I saw not Alan, but his younger brother Danny, splitting firewood. As I got out of my truck, I drew in the fresh air of the Heights, along with a funky scent of ash-wood sawdust and two-stroke exhaust from a chain saw that sat on the ground nearby. Danny was shirtless, and the extra flesh on him shivered as he brought the maul down on a massive piece of ash, which split right in two, first try. I stayed in the driveway, mindful of the dog they kept on a chain, who eyed me over crossed paws from its doghouse door.
The Stiobhards and I had come to an understanding over the years: they might be useful to me in some half-legal ways, and I might give them space to flourish at their enterprises, as long as nobody got carried away or hurt. You can say what you want about that. I had no deputy.
Danny was glad of the excuse to stop work. He pulled on a T-shirt and waved me into the yard. I watched the dog the whole way. Soon as I turned away from him, he ran out, snapped his chain tight, and bellowed at me until Danny shut him up. Danny lit a rollie, pulled off his gloves, and stuck out a hand for me to shake: strong, friendlier than it used to be. His gloves were the cotton-and-rubber kind you get at the gas station.
“The mighty hunter,” Danny said. “I’d love to talk, but …” he said, pointing to the wood left to be split.
“I’m looking for your brother,” I said.
“Out of town.”
“Out of town what for? Where?”
“Out of town I can’t say.” Danny tapped ash from his cigarette. “Maybe I could help you,” he said.
“The reason I need Alan,” I said, “is to talk about Tiernan’s Gap.”
“Oh. That?” Danny said. “Good luck getting a fuckin word out of him about that.”
“You remember anything?”
“I do. I almost got sent there myself. Brother Alan kept me out.”
“Stealing car parts.”
“Couple of masterminds. Listen, if I’m talking, I’m not getting the wood in.” He handed me the maul, handle first. Plastic handle, sharp blade, scarred head.
“You want me to split your firewood?”
“Not mine,” said Danny. “Mom and Dad’s.”
In the y
ard was a mix of ash, maple, and beech, bucked but mostly not split. I made straight for the ash, but Danny redirected me to the maple. As I hammered away, breaking apart years, knots, and trees within trees, Danny’s raspy voice sailed over the noise.
“We were trying to get an old Buick running, like in tech class, but on our own. Except they don’t want you to do anything yourself in this world. We took a thing or two from the Stokes junkyard. Ollie Stokes couldn’t catch us, but he swore he saw Alan, and it wasn’t the first time either. So out comes your buddy the sheriff, though he wasn’t the sheriff then, and takes Alan away. We think so what, been here before: a fine, we can’t pay it, Alan’ll come home, and we’ll carry on as usual. Brother Alan got a nine-month sentence for larceny. Wasn’t no burglary, we didn’t go to anybody’s house. He never made it home until nine months later.”
“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why. No kid gets sent down for petty theft. It’s summary, it’s nothing. Something must have happened, he fought, he ran.”
“I don’t know why you think that. You think they won’t make us pay, one way or another?”
“Maybe he should have pled.”
“He did fuckin plea, goddamn it. Just like his free lawyer told him to. And he got nine months. That’s why Dad wrote a letter, went down to the courthouse, too late.” Danny shook his head. “That was the beginning.”
“Of what?”
“Of the same old shit. Feudal times. Anything to make us mobile, like a car? We can’t have that, unless we’re yoked to it by money. Anything to make us strong, like a firearm, they’ll take that away with a law. Anything to make us smarter, like knowledge, we get reeducated at the public school.”
“Easy, now.” I’d heard Danny on this subject before. He wasn’t totally wrong. But I knew to head him off or he’d carom into false-flag theories and black helicopters. I swung the maul into a knotty piece of maple.
“And while I’m on the subject, how come your game commissioner comes sniffing around my place, counting points on our bucks and handing out tickets for not wearing the orange hats, but he won’t lift a finger when one of the landed gentry lights up an innocent sow bear with a fuckin semiauto? Out of season?”