Pretty dead, p.6
Pretty Dead, page 6
“Some women just know how to push men’s buttons,” Roxanne said. “And she’s very, very attractive.”
“And he’s a prime piece of—”
“Real estate,” she said.
“Yeah. ‘Get out of the way, Maddie, and let me stake my claim.’ ” “Maybe she already has,” Roxanne said.
“That would explain some of it,” I said.
“But I don’t want to think that.”
“So we won’t.”
“What will we think?” she said.
“About how Maddie hit the nail on the head.”
“About us having—”
“Yeah,” I said. “You think she knew?”
“Some women have a sixth sense about babies,” Roxanne said.
“Do you?”
“I don’t know about that. I just know I want to have one with you.”
And she took my hand and clasped it in hers for the rest of the ride. I steered with one hand, off the main road and onto the dirt road, and then down the narrow lane under the canopy of trees. In front of the house, I parked and leaned across and kissed Roxanne for a long time. Her mouth was warm and soft and open and we drank each other in, and when we came apart, Roxanne sighed.
We walked to the house, opened the door, and Roxanne went to the kitchen. She put the phone receiver in a drawer in the kitchen and closed it. Went back and dropped her pager in, too. Took off her sweater and hung it on the back of a chair, then went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Chardonnay. Poured two glasses. Handed me one and took my other hand and led me upstairs to the loft. Kissed me as we stood beside the bed and her top fell to the floor and then her slacks, and then we were swept off our feet as if we’d been caught by waves, upended and tossed, clothes torn off, rolled onto the sand and pulled back, naked, into each other’s arms, clinging for dear life.
And when we surfaced, we held each other in the last light of that day and Roxanne said she loved me, and I said I loved her, too. Her eyes filled and she pulled me close and held me tightly. Her chin pressed my shoulder.
“Maybe that was the one,” Roxanne whispered.
“Maybe it was,” I said.
I felt her swallow, and then I felt something prick my skin. It was a teardrop. I held her closer.
12
Roxanne went to work, commuting from Prosperity to the Rockland office of the DHS. She worked on tracking down Devlin in Ireland and got as far as an aunt in County Kerry. She said Devlin may have had a bit of a mean streak, but she came by it honestly. Her father was a brute and once killed a cat by flinging it out a window onto the road. This was before he left the family and moved to Cork, the aunt said. Good riddance. And no, she hadn’t spoken to Devlin in years.
I worked with my old friend and neighbor cutting on a woodlot in Appleton. The land was a tangled mess—snags and bowed trees left from the ice storm two years before. The trick was to figure out which limb was the trip wire—before you cut it. I gashed my cheek, and my nose was sore where a limb had whacked me like a cop’s baton.
I told Clair I’d met the Connellys, because we had no secrets, but I couldn’t tell him the circumstances. “So be that way,” he said, but then he got going on rich people buying up the Maine coast, that the need to possess everything beautiful—paintings, antiques, mistresses, the sunrise over Penobscot Bay—was one of the flaws of capitalism.
“We’re taught that anything of value can be bought, that our possessions are the source of happiness,” he said, putting his saws back in the truck, closing up the toolbox. “So these people see a beautiful place, they buy it. It’s a terrible compulsion, this need to possess things. Native Americans never had it. Buddhists don’t have it. Leaves you feeling empty, ultimately. So you try to fill the vacuum. Promiscuous sex and booze and drugs. But contentment doesn’t come.”
“Connelly seemed pretty happy, considering the circumstances,” I said.
“A facade, Jack.”
“I don’t know. A beautiful wife, cute kid, a ton of money.”
“A recipe for misery,” Clair said. “Pass me that chain oil.”
“He wants to come up and cut wood with us.”
“As long as he doesn’t get in the way.”
On that note, hot and sweaty and smelling of fumes, we got in Clair’s truck and rumbled on home.
My marching orders were waiting.
I’d pitched a couple of stories to the Times and was waiting for Myra in the Boston bureau to tell me which one to do first. My pick was one about two guys in a little town up north who’d been best friends since kindergarten, had grown into bad drunks, and then one best friend had killed the other with an ax, reportedly chopping his buddy into pieces. Myra liked that one, the idea of a friendship that ended in horror. She wanted to know why, and she also wanted to know how many pieces.
After a shower, I tried to find out.
I called the medical examiner’s office in Augusta and got Nancy, the secretary. There was nobody else in the office, but that was okay, since Nancy had been there thirty years, knew everything that went on, and was unfailingly accurate. Our conversations were off the record.
“The guy with the ax up north,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Paul Bunyan.”
“How many pieces?”
“Five,” she said.
“Torso and all the limbs?”
“Not quite.”
“Jeez. Decapitated?”
“Quite.”
“And three limbs?”
“That would be the next logical choice.”
“God, best friends.”
“We always hurt the ones we love,” Nancy said. “And now I’ve got a question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“Why aren’t you out at the scene? Isn’t the town of Monroe near you?”
“Twenty minutes away. Scene of what?”
“A woman. Shallow grave.”
“A homicide?”
“They’re still out there—but something tells me she didn’t dig a hole and tuck herself in.”
We crossed the ridge on back roads, slipping through the dense summer woods, past barnyards where kids stood and stared, alongside pastures where tail-flicking dairy cows stared, too. Clair drove and I rode. Cresting the ridge, we looked out toward Knox and the Waldo County farms, fields, and woods that were the backdrop of countless dramas that had been acted out here over the centuries. It was a place that was simple at first glance, complex and dense and hard to fathom when you looked closer. I wondered if the woman was local. I wondered if she was young or old. I wondered what circumstances had led her to end up like this.
Coming down off the ridge, we rolled into the outskirts of the village and took a left. Two boys were riding bicycles, fishing rods across their handlebars. Clair slowed the truck and I leaned out the window, asked the boys whether they’d seen police. They said they had, three miles down, but a cop had chased them away. We drove on and a couple of miles out saw an unmarked state police cruiser parked against the woods. There was a uniformed trooper leaning against the car, and he straightened when we pulled in. I got out and he walked toward me, head shaved, young as a pup.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave, sir,” he began.
“I’m a reporter,” I said, and I handed him my New York Times ID. He peered at it and then at me. The jeans and boots. The cut on my face. I took out my pad and pen and smiled.
“I need to talk to Detective Cade.”
He looked at the card again, then back at me. He looked over at Clair, who had his arm out of the cab. It was tanned and muscled and the tattoo said semper fi.
“Who’s that in the truck, sir?”
“My assistant.”
“Huh.”
“Detective Cade knows me,” I said.
“Is that right?” the trooper said.
He turned away and murmured into the radio, listened, and then turned back to us, disappointed that I’d pulled rank.
“Straight in and follow the tracks, Mr. McMorrow,” he said.
So straight in it was, down the logging road, following the furrows between the tufts of grass and clumps of burdock. The grass got thicker as we drove, and soon you could see it had been brushed flat by the undersides of cars. The truck lurched along, branches scraping the sides and top of the cab, and then we came to a bit of a clearing where five police cars and a crime lab van were pulled into the brush. We got out and walked down the track deeper, between thickets of alder and cherry. A hundred yards in, Cade met us coming the other way.
He leaned down as we approached and picked a clump of bur-dock off his jeans.
“McMorrow,” he said. “You the only reporter in Maine or what?”
“Seems that way sometimes,” I said. “How’s it going?”
“It’s going.”
“This is Clair Varney. We work together.”
He gave Clair the once-over and they shook hands.
“What do you do?” Cade said.
“Logistics,” Clair said.
“Marines?” the detective said, glancing at the tattoo.
“Right,” Clair said.
“I did four in the army,” Cade said. “You?”
“Twenty-two years, but time flies.”
“Where?”
“Oh, here and there,” Clair said.
“Force Recon,” I said.
“No kidding. Huh. That’s the real deal. Vietnam?”
Clair nodded. Cade looked like he wanted to talk more, but it was time for business.
“Well, maybe you’d feel right at home in the stuff we’re working in. You get in deeper, it’s all blackberries and vines. Dense? I guess. All tangled with these thick viny things.”
“They dug a hole in these brambles?”
“No, she was in a clearing. This is a tractor path that probably once led to a pasture. Clearing where she was buried is like an island almost, with everything else grown up around it. But they had to drag her through some of the underbrush to get her where she was. Take a look.”
We started down the path, Cade leading the way. He was a wiry little guy, energetic and boyish, the youngest homicide detective in the history of the Maine State Police. He lived like an Eagle Scout, was very religious, and threw himself into murder cases like they were class projects and he was teacher’s pet.
“How recent?” I asked. “Very. Could be a day.”
“Young? Old?”
“Twenties, but that’s a guess.”
I scribbled as we walked.
“Clothed?”
“Not really.”
“How can you be not really clothed?”
“She was wearing one thing. I can’t say what it was.”
“Where was she wearing it?”
“Around her—come on, McMorrow. Slow down.”
“Injuries? I mean, is she all beat up, or shot?”
“Nothing apparent. ME will take care of that.”
“Local?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t know.”
“Is she still out here?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m going to have to ask you to not go right up to the scene.”
“How deep?”
“A foot or less. I think they got tired of digging. It’s not as easy as they make it look on TV.”
“Who found her?”
“Wasn’t a who, it was a what. Coyotes got digging at her. Then some old guy was up here with a beagle, hunting rabbits. Dog didn’t come back.”
“Found something better,” Clair said.
“So what’s she look like?” I said.
“Dark hair, pretty. I think she was, anyway. Of course, she could be from anywhere. So recent it may be hard because there won’t be missing persons reports yet. Not like somebody missing for months.”
“Somebody’s pride and joy,” Clair said.
Cade looked at him curiously.
“That’s exactly right,” he said. “That’s what I never forget.”
“So you’ll put out a picture?”
“A sketch. Picture’s a little rough for public consumption.”
“I’m sure,” I said.
Cade reached into his back pocket and slipped an envelope out. The three of us stopped and he handed the envelope to me.
“I don’t think it’ll take too long to ID her,” he said.
I opened the envelope, took out the Polaroid print, and turned it over.
“My God,” I said.
“What is it?” Clair said.
I stared at the swollen face, purplish and misshapen like a bruised grape. Her hair was askew and there was grass in it.
“What?” Cade said.
“I know her,” I said.
“Local?” Cade said.
“No,” I said. “Boston.”
I paused, still stunned, cradling the photograph like it was something delicate, this image of broken flesh.
“So who is it?” Clair said.
“Her name is Angel,” I said. “Angel Moretti.”
13
We did our talking next to the police cars, right there in the woods. There was Cade, another detective who was an older woman, and a uniformed sergeant. Clair leaned against the police pickup a short distance away, within earshot.
“You sure?” Cade said. “She’s pretty beat up.”
“Completely.”
“How do you know her?”
“I just met her this week.”
“You met her in Boston?”
“I met her here, on the coast. She was up here visiting.”
“Visiting where?”
“Blue Harbor.”
“Who was she visiting?”
I hesitated, my hand on the lid of Pandora’s box.
“She was staying with David and Maddie Connelly. They have a summer place there.”
“That’s not the Connellys,” Cade said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
Th cops looked at each other. The woman detective said, “No shit.” Cade said, “Huh,” and looked at the photograph again, as though some clue might now emerge. “So she’s some Boston rich lady?”
“She was working on it,” I said.
“How?” Cade said.
I pictured Angel with her hand on my arm, putting a spell on Dalton with her big dark eyes, the petulant little-girl act she used on David. “With everything she had,” I said. “And she had a lot.”
I recounted what I remembered about Angel, Monica, and Ms. Kind. I told them Angel seemed to be involved in some way with Tim Dalton. I told them she seemed pretty familiar with the Connellys, but it was sort of one-way, like she didn’t quite understand that working for them didn’t mean they were her buddies.
The cops asked a few questions but not many. I was partway through it when the ME’s people brought Angel’s body out of the woods, in a green bag on a shiny chrome gurney that jounced and rattled over the bumpy ground.
“I want you to see her,” Cade said. “Make absolutely sure.”
“Okay,” I said.
He walked over to the back of the ME’s van. I followed slowly, not without trepidation. I waited as one of the ME’s men unzipped the bag and folded one end back. Angel stared up at me, discolored and dirty. She was still oddly beautiful, even with the life and dreams drained out of her. She looked very young, like a child who had been playing in the mud.
I stared at her, unable to look away. And then I reached down and pulled the bag lower. The technician reached out to stop me, but I saw it. Around her neck was a white scarf. It was pulled tight and the dead flesh around it was blackened.
“Strangled,” I said.
“Not for publication,” Cade said.
“Is that silk?” I said.
“It’s a Hermes,” the woman detective said. “Expensive. I want to know more about this guy she was with.”
They zipped Angel up and slid the gurney into the van. The van backed out, its warning horn beeping, and when it had lurched down the path, we talked for another half-hour. I remembered my role and asked some questions toward the end.
They told me the name of the guy who found her. They said there was no car found nearby, but they were still looking. I asked if anyone had seen any activity in the woods the previous night or day, and they said they didn’t know yet, that the case was still fresh, that the investigation was just getting under way.
“You coming by, that was something dropped from heaven for us,” Cade said, and then he added, in all earnestness, “Now how you going to work that into your story?”
I mulled it over in the truck as we lumbered back down the path through the woods. I’d punched in the number of the Boston Times bureau on the cell phone and was waiting. I wondered how Myra would want to handle it. How did the reporter know Angel? How did the reporter know the Connellys? What about Roxanne’s case? Would that come out somehow?
The phone cut out and I dialed again. When we pulled out onto the side of the road, the kid trooper was still on duty. A television news crew from Bangor was setting up, the satellite dish rising from the roof of its van. A press photographer jumped out of a car and jogged toward us, a reporter with a notebook trailing after him. He pulled up short and fired off a few shots of Clair and me as Clair eased the truck up onto the pavement.
“Are they cops?” I heard the photographer say as the reporter approached.
She stopped, and I recognized her. She was from the Bangor Daily. She stared at me, and said, “Hey, that’s McMorrow from the New York Times. How’d he get in?”
Clair pulled over on the crest of Knox Ridge, hoping for better reception for the phone. I dialed and waited and this time Myra answered. She sounded harried, and when I told her about them finding a body in the woods, she said, “Three inches.”
I told her they’d ID’d the body as a woman from Boston, and she said, “Okay, give me six.”
And then I told her the name: Angel Moretti. I said she’d worked for the Connellys at their foundation. I told Myra I’d met Angel at the Connellys’ house in Blue Harbor earlier in the week. Myra said, “Oh, baby.”
And then came the questions.
