Julia Spencer-Fleming - All Mortal Flesh

The interior door opened, slowly and silently, and he backed himself against the wall. “It’s me,” Clare said. She had a paper sack folded beneath her arm and was holding an ancient buffalo-check coat that looked like it had been doing duty as a rug. In a garage. She had a greasy flap-eared cap to go with it. “These are our sexton’s.”

“For God’s sake, give the man a raise so he can afford something better.”

She thrust the coat at him. “These are what he wears for dirty jobs. He’s off today, he won’t miss them.”

“No lie.” Russ shrugged out of his department-issued parka and slipped on the coat. It reeked of cigarette smoke.

Clare wadded up his coat and squeezed it into the sack. “Here. Take the hat, too.”

He tipped it and looked inside. “This isn’t going to give me lice, is it?”

“Mr. Hadley is a very nice man.”

“I’m walking a half block down the street. This isn’t really necessary.”

“Says the man who parked behind the snowbirds’ empty garage. You’re not exactly inconspicuous, you know.”

He grunted but put on the disgusting hat.

Outside, the same wind that was shoving a mass of gray, snow-laden clouds across the sky pushed against their backs, giving them both good reason to bow their heads and bury their faces in their coat collars. St. Alban’s walkway was well cleared, but the sidewalk running along Church Street and up Elm was icy. Russ reached out instinctively to take hold of Clare’s arm and steady her, but she twitched out of his grasp. “Mr. Hadley wouldn’t touch me,” she said, her voice barely audible in the sighing of the wind.

He wasn’t so sure anyone would mistake him for the church’s janitor, even with the coat and hat. “Isn’t Hadley, like, six inches shorter than I am?”

“Hunch harder,” she said.

He wasn’t that worried-not yet, anyway. The department didn’t have enough men on this morning to lay down an effective beat presence and run an investigation, too. The moment he was in trouble was the moment Jensen decided she had enough to upgrade him from party-of-interest to suspect. He wondered how long it would take her to get an arrest warrant from Judge Ryswick. Russ had annoyed the old coot with enough middle-of-the-night and dawn hearings over the past seven years to likely make the judge quick on the draw. Once Jensen had a warrant, every cop, sheriff, and trooper between Plattsburgh and Albany would be looking for him.

They had come to the rectory drive. “I’ll call you with what I find out,” Clare said, handing him the bag with his parka. Her cheeks were red from the cold. “Don’t forget to call your mom.”

He nodded and forced himself to continue up the sidewalk instead of watching her make her way up her drive.

He retrieved the station wagon. He quite carefully named it in his thoughts, to avoid the words “Linda’s car,” and was grateful beyond words that she had been a meticulously neat person who never treated her vehicle like a mobile closet. There was nothing personal to haunt him, no commuter mug or discarded shoes or overdue library books to tell the story of the woman who, until a few days ago, had driven this car. Only two fifty-pound bags of kitty litter in the back-for weight and traction, not for the cat she had acquired as soon as the door had shut behind him-and the emergency kit he packed her every winter: thermal blanket and flares, collapsible shovel and gorp, battery and phone recharger.

He chucked Mr. Hadley’s smelly garb in the backseat and headed out toward Cossayuharie, driving the long way round, avoiding the town and the stretches where Ed and Paul, despite his directions to vary locations, habitually camped with their radar guns.

Bainbridge Road, like all of the roads through Cossayuharie’s dairy country, rose and fell across ridges and hollows, running past well-tended farms and abandoned barns alike, past brook-threaded fields marked out by modern barbed-wire and ancient stone fences, past distant, dilapidated houses more likely to produce meth than milk. He knew two families who lived on the road, the Montgomerys and the Stoners, both of them still hanging on with their herds of forty or fifty cows, following in the manure-edged boot prints of their fathers and their fathers before them. Probably the last generation to do so-the two Stoner kids and the Montgomery boys would likely have long shaken the barnyard dirt off their feet by the time their turns came.

Audrey Keane he did not know. At 840 Bainbridge Road, he found a small two-story house, with an enclosed front porch sagging away from the foundations and two cars in the dooryard of a Depression-era garage. One was a late-eighties Buick Riviera, whose half-deflated tires and crust of snow indicated it hadn’t been driven in some time. The other was a 1992 Honda Civic, with New York State plate number 6779LF.

The drive was a combination of scraped-clear ruts and hard-packed snow. He eased the Volvo up behind the Civic and put on the parking brake. He pulled his service weapon out from beneath the passenger’s seat and checked the clip. Leaning forward, he snapped his belt holster in place and slid his gun in, heavy and snug against the back of his hip. He shrugged into his parka and slid out of the station wagon.

He strolled slowly past the Honda, checking it out. It was the opposite of Linda’s car, littered with crumpled fast-food bags and empty soda cans, glittery Mardi Gras beads hanging off the rearview mirror, a Dunkin’ Donuts mug wedged between the two front seats. There was no K-Bar knife or blood-saturated clothing. At least not where Russ could see.

There was a buzzer next to the door to the enclosed porch. He pressed it, once, twice, three times. No response, either human or animal. He tried the door. It was locked. The wooden frame and the lock made it just one step up from a screen door, rickety enough that a good hard kick would open it. He pursed his lips thoughtfully and walked around the side, where the wind whipping between the house and the garage had scooped out most of the winter’s snow, leaving a hard, easy-to-walk-on crust. From this sheltered position, his chin was level with the bottom sill of the house windows. Through the gauzy sheers he could glimpse what looked like an ordinary and empty living room and kitchen.

The low-slung, square window of the garage revealed the usual detritus of an unused country garage-push mower, car parts, moldering cardboard boxes, and antiquated tools hanging off the walls. He turned the corner and saw, half buried in a drift, what he expected to see: an unused kitchen door, from the days when the lady of the house needed to bring her wet washing out to the line or harvest part of dinner from her vegetable garden.

Russ waded through the snow and scraped away as much as he could from the edge of the door. The lock was a simple handle latch, $10.99 at your local Home Depot. Russ considered the situation. Audrey Keane had most likely been at his house interviewing with Linda about a seamstress job. She had no criminal record, and there was nothing overtly suspicious about her home or car. Based on what he had right now, he’d never get a warrant to search her house. One more step and he would be breaking and entering.

It took him thirty seconds to pop the lock with his Visa card.

He opened the door slowly, brushing the snow back one-handed as it collapsed into the kitchen. He kicked his boots against the door lintel and stepped in.

The kitchen looked as if it had been modernized in the 1950s and not touched since, although the coffeemaker, microwave, and wall phone were all more recent additions. He grabbed a couple of paper towels from a roll hanging next to the sink and tossed them over the snow puddles spreading across the linoleum.