Julia Spencer-Fleming - All Mortal Flesh

“We’re here,” Mark said helpfully, bumping over the strip separating the police department’s parking lot from the road.

“Thanks,” Russ said. “I might not have recognized it with all the pretty snow.”

Mark flushed red and jammed his cap on his head. They both got out. Russ scanned the parking lot as he tromped toward the front steps. He recognized Lyle’s Pontiac Cruiser and Eric McCrea’s Subaru station wagon. Noble’s nondescript Buick and Harlene’s Explorer. Nobody who shouldn’t be on duty right now, thank God. That ruled out the stripper party. Unless Lyle was planning on wrestling him over to the Golden Banana in Saratoga?

He mounted the unswept granite steps carefully, Mark at his back, and stomped down the hallway toward his office, shedding snow as he went. The Millers Kill police station was state-of-the-art law enforcement construction-in 1880. Lots of granite, marble, and frosted glass. Very few spaces convenient for large electronic dispatch and routing boards. A great big holding tank in the basement, from the days when judges rode the circuit in buggies. A warren of small offices above stairs.

Harlene’s communications center had been knocked together from two small rooms and straddled the space between the officers’ bullpen (formerly three offices and a storage closet) and Russ’s office (original, but with much uglier furniture than his predecessors had a century ago).

“I hope someone has an explanation for me,” Russ said, entering the dispatch room. Harlene looked at him, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy. She silently pointed toward his own door like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come-if the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had had a tightly curled iron-gray perm and a purple MKHS Minutemen sweatshirt on its rotund form.

Sighing, he went in. Lyle was standing there waiting for him. Big surprise.

“Okay, what is it?” Russ crossed to his battered metal desk and plunked himself into his chair. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at his deputy.

Lyle shut the door. Tested the handle. He bit the inside of his cheek. “There’s been-” He stopped. “I have to-” He seemed genuinely disturbed.

Russ leaned forward, bracing his elbows on various pieces of half-completed paperwork. “Just tell me, Lyle.”

MacAuley sat down. Russ always thought of Lyle as a contemporary, but in the unkind fluorescent light, Russ realized his friend and sounding board was closer to sixty than fifty. His bushy eyebrows had as much white as gray in them, and the folds beneath his eyes, which normally gave him a deceptively lazy look, were sunken and settled, as if the skin had been pulled away from his bones and left to lie.

“Lyle?”

Lyle ran a hand over his face. “There’s no easy way to say this, Russ. Your wife has been killed. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

In Russ’s head, the usual clatter of thoughts and concerns fell absolutely silent. Everything within eyesight took on an otherworldly clarity: the damp sheen of Lyle’s face, the thin coating of dust on the straggly philodendron in the corner, the faded, felted spines of the Police Gazette s stacked on his extra chair.

“Linda?” he said.

MacAuley nodded.

Russ snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Russ, I know it’s hard to-”

“Linda’s a good driver. A cautious driver. As much snow as there is on the road-that wouldn’t throw her. And her car. A late-model Volvo wagon? I can’t even imagine how many of them must be registered in the three counties. You guys have tagged the wrong car.”

Lyle was shaking his head no, swinging it back and forth like a bell, and the look on his face was the look of something terrible trying to be born. Russ was suddenly afraid. Terrified of what was coming.

“There hasn’t been any car accident. Russ, she was killed. Stabbed to death. In your-in the kitchen.”

“Killed,” he echoed stupidly.

“Entwhistle and McCrea and Flynn are all over there right now, along with the state CS team. We’re going to find who did it, Chief. I swear to you, we’re going to find who did it. And when we do, he’s going to spend the rest of his life regretting he was ever born.”

The terrible thing was here. He felt himself crack open, his jaw unhinge, his lungs constrict. His field of vision shrank, and his head filled with a loud, dry-edged shuffle as his mind laid down every card in its deck. Linda relaxing in her favorite chair at the end of the day. The two of them shouting at each other over the hood of her car. A funeral-he had never planned a funeral, didn’t know how to do it, didn’t know who to call. Oh, God, he was going to grow old and feeble alone, without his wife, his beautiful wife…

The way it would feel, his finger tightening on the trigger as he pumped onetwothreefourfive rounds into her killer. Just like that.

Memory. Guilt. Confusion. Self-pity.

Rage.

He held on to the rage. All the rest flapped and fluttered around him, and he knew that if he stopped to consider them he would fall apart. He couldn’t fall apart. He had a job to do.

He held on to the rage.

“Harlene! Is the chief’s mother here yet?” Lyle’s voice, harsh with fear, seemed to be coming from a long way away. “Chief? Russ?” Someone shook his shoulders.

His vision cleared. Lyle was out of his chair, leaning over the desk, his hands tightening Russ’s flannel shirt into uncomfortable knots. “Jesus Christ, Chief. I thought you was having a stroke. Are you okay? Do you want to lie down?”

“No.” He held on to the rage. He had a job to do. “I want to be brought up to date on the investigation.”

“We’re not going to be able to put together anything like a coherent picture until tomorrow. The CS team is at the-is at your house right now. The ME ought to be over there as well. I can have Noble and Mark talk to the neighbors, see if anyone saw anything.”

Russ tried to snort. It came out a wheeze. “Not likely.”

“I know.”

“I want to see the scene. I’ll need to-to identify anything that might be out of place.” It felt as if he were pushing his thoughts, one at a time, down a long, dark track. “You think… home invasion?”

“You mean a burglary? Not from what I could see. Nothing missing that jumped out at me, unless you’ve loaded up on silver or electronics since last summer’s open house. There weren’t any signs of forced entry. The storm windows were all in place. She”-Lyle swallowed hard and went on-“she always locked the door when she was alone at home, right?”

Russ nodded. There was a noise, outside his door, down the hall.

“I think your mother’s here.”

“I need to see the scene.” He looked up into Lyle’s face.

“You will. Just not tonight. Trust me on this, Russ. Not tonight. Go home with your mother.” The noises grew closer. Footsteps, and voices. A rap on frosted glass, and before he could answer, the door swung open and his mother stood there, short and squat and beautiful.

“Oh, my darling boy,” she said, her eyes filling. Then she was there, beside him, wrapping her arms around him. Sitting down, his head came to her shoulder, and he pressed his face into a purple sweatshirt that would forevermore be the color of grief to him, while she rubbed his back and said, “My boy. Oh, my sweet boy,” and wept tears he could not allow himself.

Tuesday, January 15

Clare awoke early to a cold cabin and the realization that she was due to return to civilization today. To meet the new deacon the bishop was saddling her with. The thought should have made her grimace, but even annoyance was too much for her to compass this morning.

She rose; she dressed; she stripped the bed and threw the sheets, along with the napkins and the tablecloth, into the washing machine. Her attempt at morning prayer was flat; she had no words to offer. It felt as if she were kneeling inside a refrigerator box. Finally, she simply read out the Fifty-first Psalm. The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.