David Handler - The sour cherry surprise

“What you ‘heard’ was a couple of raccoons,” Keith argued. “I’ve heard ‘em fighting in the night a million times-and you’d swear it was a person being gutted with a grapefruit knife.”

“It wasn’t raccoons,” Molly said in a low, insistent voice.

“You see?” Amber huffed at him. “Molly heard them, too.”

Keith shook his head disgustedly. “Fine, whatever.”

“I heard them when I was taking out the trash.” Amber gazed toward the end of the lane same as Molly had. “They were down there somewhere.”

“And how about you?” Des asked Keith.

“I was watching the Red Sox game in the living room,” he replied, swigging from his beer. “Didn’t hear a thing.”

“How are our boys doing tonight?”

He made a face. “Toronto’s killing us.”

“That figures.” Des looked over in the direction of the Procter and Beckwith houses, guessing that no one in either place had heard anything. If they had, they’d be out here in the street telling her about it by now. “I’m going to ask you folks to please follow me, okay?”

She strode back to her ride with the three of them and left them standing there in the driveway. Backed out into the road and pointed the cruiser so that its high beams lit up the end of the lane right down to the Jersey barriers. Then she got out and slowly checked out the wild brush growing alongside of the pavement, left hand gripping her flashlight, right hand resting lightly on the holster of her Sig. She trained the light on the tangled profusion of sour cherry trees, blackberry bushes, forsythia and lilac. She saw no broken branches. No signs of trampling. The brush did not appear to be disturbed on either side of the lane.

Until, that is, she got to within twenty feet of the barriers. Here, the lane began to dip downward as it neared the shallows of the river, the wild brush giving way to boggy salt marsh where Spartina grass and phragmites grew.

Here, the marsh grasses were newly trampled. There were mucky shoe prints on the pavement. And there was more.

There was blood. There was a lot of blood. And droplets leading down toward the water.

Stepping carefully around them, Des approached the riverbank and waved her light out into the water. She wondered if someone had pitched a body out there-figuring it would float out to sea on the current.

She did not have to wonder for long. She spotted the floater maybe fifty feet downriver where a dead tree had washed up in the mud. One of its branches had snagged him as he’d drifted past. Or at least it looked like a he from where she stood. The body lay facedown in the water, bobbing up and down in the gentle current of the river. Des didn’t want to disturb the crime scene. But she also didn’t want the body to break free and drift out into Long Island Sound. So she went down there and fetched it, keeping a watchful eye out for shoeprints or any other disturbances in the mud as she tiptoed her way along the water’s edge.

It was a man, all right. Dressed in a light blue shirt, khaki trousers and hiking shoes. Gently, she untangled him from the branches that held him there. Then she pulled him ashore and flopped him over, her abdominal muscles clenching as the pang of recognition hit.

It was Richard Procter. Someone had cut his throat from ear to ear.

It took the uniformed troopers less than ten minutes to get there from the Troop F barracks. They immediately set up a vehicular cordon all of the way back up Turkey Neck at Old Shore Road. And another cordon around the perimeter of the crime scene itself, which included all of Sour Cherry Lane, the riverfront and, at Des’s suggestion, the woods between Sour Cherry and the Peck’s Point Nature Preserve.

Soon after that, the Major Crime Squad crime scene technicians rolled up in their blue and white cube vans along with a death investigator from the Medical Examiner’s office.

By now it was nearly midnight. The residents of Sour Cherry were huddled together out in the lane like the survivors of an apartment house fire. By now Des had expected to see or hear from Grisky. But she’d had no contact from him or Cavanaugh or anyone else associated with Operaton Burrito King. She didn’t know what to make of that beyond the fact that they seemed content to let the normal investigative process unfold. So she went ahead and did her normal thing, which was to conduct preliminary interviews of the neighbors.

Kimberly and Jen Beckwith were standing out there with Molly. Kimberly was sobbing and moaning, utterly blown away. Her frizzy red hair was wet and uncombed-she’d been in the shower when Jen answered Des’s knock on their door. When Kimberly heard what had happened to Richard she threw on a purple caftan and came running, a damp towel still wrapped around her neck. Neither she nor Jen had heard the screams. Nor had they seen anyone fleeing the scene.

Jen seemed quite shaken herself, but unlike her mother was trying to keep her emotions in check for Molly, whose own mother was nowhere to be seen.

Molly had a surprisingly serene look on her freckled face as she stood there holding Jen’s hand. It was almost freakish how composed the girl was.

She was certainly holding up better than Amber and Keith, both of whom had turned goggle-eyed with shock and disbelief when Des told them what she’d discovered.

Patricia Beckwith stood slightly apart from the others, her posture erect, facial expression stony. Whatever emotions she was experiencing were private. Not to be displayed in front of others. “Richard and I ate a good dinner together,” she told Des in a firm, measured voice. “Scallops, rice and string beans. He had a fine appetite. He seemed very positive and upbeat. After we’d had our coffee he said he felt like taking a walk. I asked him if he would like some company. He said he’d be fine on his own, and went striding out the door shortly after nine.”

“Mrs. Beckwith, did he happen to speak to anyone on the phone before he left?”

“Not that I am aware of,” Patricia responded, pursing her thin, dry lips. “I shouldn’t have let him go by himself, I suppose.”

“He wasn’t your prisoner,” Des told her. “He was free to come and go as he pleased. So don’t blame yourself for this, ma’am. Whatever this is.”

Actually, Des thought she had a pretty fair idea what it was as she gazed over at Clay and Hector. The two of them were seated on the front porch of the Procter house drinking Coors and acting completely innocent. They’d been playing Texas Hold ‘Em at the kitchen table all evening, or so they claimed. Neither of them had heard a thing, or so they claimed. No screams in the night. No footsteps. No cars leaving the lane. Nothing but good ol’ country quiet.

Neither man had a scratch on him. No indication that he’d been involved in anything remotely physical that evening.

As for Carolyn, she’d been sacked out in the bedroom since nine o’clock, according to Clay. “The poor woman still can’t chase that virus,” was how he put it to Des. “You want me to get her up?”

“No, let her sleep for now,” Des replied, detesting the man. He and Richard had already fought once over Carolyn. Tonight, they’d fought again. There was no doubt in her mind about it.

What a mess. What a great big steaming turd of a mess this ruthless drug trafficker had made in her nice little New England town.

The homicide investigators from the Major Crime Squad were the last to get there from Central district headquarters in Meriden. They sent a two-person team that Des happened to know real well-Lt. Rico “Soave” Tedone and his half-Cuban, half-black sergeant, Yolie Snipes. Soave had been Des’s stumpy, bulked-up young pup of sergeant back in her glory days when she was still the state police’s great nonwhite hope. And Yolie, a brash hard-charger out of Hartford’s burned out Frog Hollow section, was someone who Des had very high hopes for. Yolie had a Latina’s liquid brown eyes. Lips, nose and an hour-and-a-half glass figure that said sister all of the way. The boys all called her Boom Boom because of what went on inside of her sweater. She wore a sleeveless one tonight, tattoos adorning both biceps. In her chunky boots she towered over Soave, who was still trying to win cool points with that goatee and shaved head look of his.