Immediately, I’m on alert. I know better than to ask him questions-like if there are signs of foul play, or if we’re talking suicide. I’ll figure that out myself.
“Where?”
He gives me the address of a state highway, near a stretch of conservation land. It’s a popular place for cross-country skiers and snowshoers this time of year. “I’m on my way,” I say, and I hang up.
I take one last, longing look at the beer I didn’t drink and spill it down the drain. Then I grab Sasha’s coat from the front hallway and rummage through the mudroom for her boots. They’re not there; they’re not on the floor of her bedroom, either. I sit down on the edge of her bed and gently shake her out of sleep. “Hey, baby,” I whisper. “Daddy’s got to go to work.”
She blinks up at me. “It’s the middle of the night.”
Technically, it’s only 9:30 P.M., but time is relative when you’re seven years old. “I know. I’m going to take you over to Mrs. Whitbury’s.”
Mrs. Whitbury probably has a first name, but I haven’t ever used it. She lives across the street and is the widow of a guy who’d been on the job for thirty-five years, so she understands that emergencies happen. She babysat Sasha back when Hannah and I were together, and nowadays when Sasha is staying with me and I get an unexpected call.
“Mrs. Whitbury smells like feet.”
She does, actually. “Come on, Sash. I need you to get moving.” She sits up, yawning, as I pull on her coat, tie her fleece hat under her chin. “Where are your boots?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, they’re not downstairs. You’d better find them, because I can’t.”
She smirks. “Wow, and you’re a detective?”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I lift her into my arms. “Wear your slippers,” I say. “I’ll carry you to the car.”
I buckle her into her car seat even though we’re only going twenty yards, and that’s when I see them-the boots, lying on the rubber mats in the backseat. She must have kicked them off on the way home from Hanover, and I didn’t notice, since I’d carried her into the house.
If only all mysteries were that easy to solve.
Mrs. Whitbury opens the door as if she’s been expecting us. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” I begin, but she waves me off.
“Not at all,” she says. “I was just hoping for a little company anyway. Sasha, I can’t remember, are you a fan of chocolate ice cream or cookie dough?”
I set Sasha down inside the threshold. “Thanks,” I mouth to Mrs. Whitbury, and I turn to leave, already mentally mapping out the fastest route to the crime scene.
“Daddy!”
I turn back to find Sasha with her arms outstretched.
For a long time after the divorce, Sasha couldn’t stand to have anyone leave her. We came up with a ritual that somehow, along the way, turned into a good-luck charm. “Kiss, hug, high five,” I say, kneeling down and putting the motions to the words. Then we press our thumbs together. “Bag of peanuts.”
Sasha leans her forehead against mine. “Don’t worry,” we say in unison.
She waves to me as Mrs. Whitbury closes the door.
I stick a magnetic light on top of my car and drive twenty miles over the speed limit before realizing that the dead guy won’t be getting any deader if I’m five minutes late, and that there’s black ice all over the roads.
Which reminds me.
I never turned off the hose, and by the time I get home, Sasha’s rink might well have spread to the entirety of my back lawn.
Dear Auntie Em, I think.
I had to second-mortgage my house to pay my water bill. What should I do?
Troubled in Townsend
Dear Troubled,
Drink less.
I’m still smiling when I pull up to the spot where police tape is marking a crime scene. Urqhart meets me as I am checking out the abandoned vehicle, a Pontiac. I brush off a bit of snow from the window and peer inside with a flashlight to see a backseat full of empty gin bottles.
“Captain. Sorry to call you in,” he says.
“What have you got?”
“A jogger found a body in the woods. Guy’s half naked and there’s blood all over him.”
I start to follow him along a marked trail. “Who the hell goes jogging at night in the dead of winter?”
The victim is half dressed and frozen. His pants are pooled around his ankles. I do a quick canvass of the other officers to see what evidence they’ve found-which is minimal. Except for all the blood on the man’s extremities, there’s no hint of an altercation. There are footprints that match the victim’s one remaining sneaker, and another set that apparently were made by the jogger (whose alibi already eliminated him as a suspect)-but the perp either brushed his own footprints away or flew in for the kill. I crouch down and am examining the crosshatch abrasions on the victim’s lower left palm when the chief arrives. “Jesus H.,” he says. “Suicide or homicide?”
I’m not sure. If it’s homicide, where are the signs of a struggle? Or the defense wounds on the hands? It’s almost as if the skin’s been rubbed off raw instead of scratched, and there’s no trauma to the forearms. If it’s suicide, why is the guy in his underwear, and how did he kill himself? The blood is on his knuckles and knees, not his wrists. The truth is, we just don’t see this often enough in Townsend, Vermont, to make a quick judgment call.
“I don’t know yet,” I hedge. “Sexual assault seems like a given, though.”
Suddenly a teenager steps out of the edge of the woods. “Actually, you’re both wrong,” he says.
“Who the hell are you?” the chief asks, and two of the patrolmen take a step forward to flank the boy.
“Not you again,” Urqhart says. “He showed up at a robbery about a month ago. He’s some kind of crime scene groupie. Get lost, kid. You don’t belong here.”
“Wait,” I say, vaguely remembering the teenager from that robbery scene. Right now, I’m laying odds that this kid’s the perp, and I don’t want him to bolt.
“It’s really very simple,” the boy continues, staring at the body. “On episode twenty-six of Season Two, the whole CrimeBusters team got hauled up to Mount Washington to investigate a naked guy who was found at the summit. No one could figure out what a naked guy was doing on top of a mountain, but it turned out to be hypothermia. The same thing happened to this man. He became disoriented and fell down. As his core body temperature rose, he took off his own clothes because he felt hot… but in reality, that’s what made him freeze to death.” He grins. “I can’t believe you guys didn’t know that.”
The chief narrows his eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Jacob.”
Urqhart frowns. “People who freeze to death don’t usually bleed all over the place-”
“Urqhart!” the chief snaps.
“He didn’t bleed all over the place,” Jacob says. “Blood spatter would show up in the snow, but instead, there’s just transfer. Look at the wounds. They’re abrasions on the knuckles, the knees, and the lower hands. He fell down and he scraped himself up. The blood on the snow came from him crawling around before he lost consciousness.”
I look at Jacob carefully. One major flaw with his theory, of course, is that you don’t spontaneously start bleeding when you crawl around on the snow. If that were the case, there would be hundreds of elementary school children exsanguinating at recess during the winters in Vermont.
There’s something just the tiniest bit… well… off about him. His voice is too flat and high; he won’t make eye contact. He’s bouncing on the balls of his feet and I don’t even think he realizes it.
On the spot where he’s been bouncing, the snow has melted, revealing a patch of briars. I kick at the ground beneath my boots and shake my head. That poor, drunk, dead bastard had the misfortune to fall down in a field of brambles.
Before I can say anything else, the regional medical examiner arrives. Wayne Nussbaum went to clown college before getting his medical degree, although I haven’t seen the guy crack a smile in the fifteen years I’ve been on the job. “Greetings, all,” he says, coming into the clearing of artificial light. “I hear you have a murder mystery on your hands?”