Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

It was all gathered in a plain blue folder, remarkably neat and orderly. Almost too neat, Graves thought. Too orderly, so that he wondered if perhaps Detective Portman had expected it to be reviewed at some point in the future, his work reconsidered and evaluated, his long effort to discover what happened to Faye Harrison now passed to other hands.

A newspaper article had been taped just inside the front cover. Its headline read DENNIS R. PORTMAN TO LEAD RIVERWOOD MURDER INVESTIGATION. An accompanying photograph showed Portman as a big man, his bulky body draped in a transparent plastic rainslick almost identical to the one Graves had earlier imagined him wearing. Reality had added a gray felt hat, however, one Portman had tugged down over his brow, leaving his face in shadow.

For a moment Graves peered into that shadow. He tried to make something of the dark, unblinking eyes that peered back at him through the years, sunken, hooded, with puffy bags beneath and deep creases at the sides. The eyes seemed pressed into the great doughy mass of the face that surrounded them, a fat man’s face, dissolute, with flabby jowls and a second chin that hung in an indulgent crescent beneath the first.

As he continued to look at the photograph, Graves could feel his imagination heating up, filling in the blank spaces, creating an identity for Dennis Portman. He began to feel the man’s vast heaviness, hear his labored breathing as he’d mounted the stairs toward the main house at Riverwood or struggled up the steep forest trail that led to Indian Rock. How the heat of that long-ago summer must have afflicted him. How often he must have swabbed his neck and brow with the white handkerchief that protruded from the right front pocket of his rumpled flannel jacket. How longingly he must have stared out over the cool green water. Had he remembered the slenderness of his youth, the speed and grace that had once been his, the whole vanished world of his lost agility?

Graves drew his eyes from the photograph, making himself stop. He knew that he was perfectly capable of losing his focus for hours, wasting a whole afternoon dreaming up a shattered life for Dermis Portman, and thus forgetting that other shattered life, Faye Harrison’s, that it had been the old detective’s job to investigate.

Portman had placed his first interview at the front of the book. The subject was Jim Preston, the hiker who’d spotted Faye Harrison on Mohonk Trail the afternoon of her murder. Since Graves’ reading had given him considerable experience with police argot, he found it easy to decipher the shorthand Portman used in his notes.

RE: James Miles Preston

PD: WM-Ht: 6’1” Wt: 145-(DOB: 2/3/28)

Status: NOW

CR: Neg.

DOI: 1h/12m

From these notes, Graves learned that James Preston was an eighteen-year-old white male. He was tall and rather thin. He had no criminal record, nor any outstanding warrants against him. That such a background check had been run on Preston at all indicated that he’d briefly been under suspicion, though probably for no more substantial reason than that he’d been the last person to see Faye Harrison alive.

On August 30, at 2:30 P.M., Preston had arrived at police headquarters in Britanny Falls. Seven minutes later he’d been interviewed by New York State Police Detective Dennis Portman in Sheriff Gerard’s office. That interview had lasted one hour and twelve minutes. It had been conducted by Portman alone, with no others present, and, in the absence of a stenographer, it had been recorded by means of audiotape.

The contents of that tape had later been transcribed, a copy of the transcription officially included in Portman’s Murder Book. The transcript was nearly twenty pages long, a rambling, repetitive conversation, with Portman applying the usual police method of revisiting the same area again and again, hoping to glean some additional fact the witness had either forgotten or chosen to conceal.

In the case of Jim Preston, the method had succeeded only in extending a brief sighting into an elaborate account of Preston’s own activities on the day of Faye Harrison’s disappearance:

PORTMAN: I guess I’ll start by asking you what you were doing on Mohonk Trail, Jim?

PRESTON: I had been hiking all that morning.

PORTMAN: Where had you started from?

PRESTON: Just outside Millerton.

PORTMAN: What time did you start out?

PRESTON: Around seven o’clock.

PORTMAN: Do you remember the route you took?

PRESTON: Up through Larchmont Gap. Then along Higgins Creek.

PORTMAN: Where had you planned to end up?

PRESTON: At the end of Mohonk Trail. I figured it would take me about three hours to get there from where I started, then I could get back home by lunch.

For the next four pages of transcript, Preston traced his route through the mountains, meticulously indicating particular trails. He’d walked for over an hour before finally penetrating the forest surrounding Riverwood, encountering no one else until he began to make his way up Mohonk Trail.

Up the trail, as Graves noted particularly, just as it had been reported in the local paper the day after Preston had first been questioned by Sheriff Gerard.

PORTMAN: Now, about what time was it when you got onto Mohonk Trail?

PRESTON: Well, I don’t carry a watch, but I think it was probably a little after eight o’clock.

PORTMAN: How long after that did you run into Faye Harrison?

PRESTON: About forty minutes or so. I’d made it to the top of the hill. That’s when I saw her.

PORTMAN: What did you see?

PRESTON: Well, I was walking up the trail and when I made it to the top, I stopped. There’s a big rock there. Right at the top of the hill. Indian Rock, they call it. That’s where I was when I saw her. She’d already passed Indian Rock. She was headed down the other side of the hill.

PORTMAN: So she was ahead of you?

PRESTON: Yes.

PORTMAN: How far ahead?

PRESTON: Oh, maybe thirty yards or so. Going down the slope to where the trail forks. One trail goes to the parking area and the other down to the river.

PORTMAN: Which one did she take?

PRESTON: I don’t know. I didn’t watch her that long. I just saw her heading down the trail.

PORTMAN: Did she see you?

PRESTON: I don’t think so. Her back was to me.

PORTMAN: Was she alone?

PRESTON: Yes, sir. She was all by herself. Moving pretty fast down the trail.

The fact that Faye Harrison had been moving at such an accelerated pace had triggered a thought in Portman’s mind.

PORTMAN: The way she was walking. So fast, I mean. Did you get the idea she might be trying to get away from somebody?

PRESTON: Could be.

PORTMAN: Now, when you first talked to Sheriff Gerard, you mentioned seeing another man in the woods. Was he on the same trail?

PRESTON: No, sir. He wasn’t on the trail at all.

Graves saw Portman lean forward on the cluttered desk, his sunken eyes boring into Preston’s open, youthful face.

PORTMAN: Now, you’ve already identified that man as Jake Mosley, right?

PRESTON: Yes, sir. Sheriff Gerard showed me a picture of him-Mosley-and he was the man I saw.

PORTMAN: How far from Faye Harrison was Mosley when you saw him?

PRESTON: He was pretty far down the slope from her. Almost at the bottom of the hill. The other side of the hill from where the girl was.

PORTMAN: You mean back toward Riverwood?

PRESTON: That’s right.

PORTMAN: What was he doing down there?

PRESTON: Just standing there, as far as I could tell. At the bottom of the slope. He was sort of leaning against a tree.