An End to a Silence: A mystery novel (The Montana Trilogy Book 1) (17 page)

Ward was
surprised that School Principal Leon Taylor at Meriwether Elementary School
hadn’t retired or moved on. He was even more surprised to see that he was only
in his
midfifties
. He had taken up the position at
the age of twenty-five – the youngest school principal in the county at the
time. He greeted Ward with an open hand and an open face. His mop of runaway
black hair still strangled out any attempts at grayness. Ward was impressed. He
guessed that came from working with kids. Detectives were mainly gray or bald
or both by that age. Or dead.

Ward
thought he’d seen him before but couldn’t place where.

He heard
a classroom singing discordantly as the principal led him down corridors which
seemed designed for fairytale dwarves. A miniature world decorated with
children’s drawings. A nostalgic smell of crayons colored the air. They passed
another classroom and Ward couldn’t help but look inside and he saw small
groups of children gathered around tables, all seemingly enthralled by something
he couldn’t see. He instinctively placed a hand on his chest, where the tattoo
of the little girl sat amongst dragons.

The
principal had been in a hurry to talk as fast as he walked.

“In fact
we both started here ’round about the same time,” Principal Taylor said. “I’d
been here a matter of weeks before. I was on the interview panel. In case
you’re wondering we did all the proper checks. I know the history behind the
Ryan Novak case and the interest that the police paid to Bill. We knew it was
all baloney. Knew it was. Bill was a very popular member of our staff. We got
lucky with him, certainly.”

“What can
you tell me about him?”

“He was a
good man. More than a janitor. He kept this school running through thick and
thin. Never complained. No job was ever too much for him. He was very good with
his hands. The place would have fallen apart were it not for Bill. But he was
more than that, as I say. He was a part of the school. How can I explain?” He
stopped walking and tapped a finger on his lips. “He was always there. First to
arrive in the morning. Last to leave at night, no matter how late someone was
working. The school really is a community and he was the center of our little
universe. It might sound trite but that’s how it was. I wish he was still with
us. We all do.”

“Was
there anything in his character that might make you uncomfortable about him
being around children?”

Principal
Taylor stiffened. He got that “now look here” stance but Ward headed him off.

“I’m
sorry, but I have to ask these questions. I mean no offense to Mr. O’Donnell’s
memory.”

“He was
fine around children and never gave off any signals that would make anybody
doubt that he was suitable to work with them. It’s a ludicrous suggestion.”
Ward had managed to take the venom out of that last sentence.

“I
understand,” Ward said, and the principal reverted to his demeanor at their
initial handshake. The handshake that had made Ward wince.

“He
didn’t have any formal education himself. You know he was a woodsman?”

Ward
nodded.

“His wife
died and he walked out of the woods with his daughter.” And then the principal
laughed. “You know, he would take home books. Children’s textbooks. He never
asked, just took them. Maybe he was embarrassed. I think he took them to
practice his reading and his math.”

Ward
said, “How many did he take?”

The
principal said, “He took lots. Over a period of three or four years, I guess.
Like I said, he always brought them back. I wish he was still here. We could
use a man like that with all the building work.”

“A new
science wing, right?”

“That’s
right. We want to introduce science and computing to our pupils at an earlier
age. The new facility will be splendid. At the moment it just seems like
demolition rather than building.”

“That I
see. When do you expect to open the new wing?”

“Next
school year, all being well.”

“Did you
know Ryan well?”

Principal
Taylor’s face slid. “I knew him well. He gave cause for some concern.”

“Concern
how?”

“He was a
very withdrawn and quiet child.”

“
Quiet
enough for Social Services to be called?”

“We
considered it. But it’s always a tricky business. We try to engage the parents
in most cases. Try to get to the bottom of what’s troubling the child. It was
always difficult with Ryan’s parents. They were boozers, both. Gee, I feel like
I’m speaking ill of the dead here. Let’s just say they didn’t come across as
model parents.”

“Okay.”

“It’s
hard to know what to say.”

“I think
what you’ve said is very helpful.”

“Well, I
only hope so. I only hope so.”

Ward wanted
to ignore his cell phone and ask a few more questions. Didn’t think he was
done. But when he looked he saw that it was Newton, and he excused himself from
the principal like a naughty schoolboy and answered.

His
farewell to the principal was a nod and then he was almost running to his car
as he took Newton’s news.

It was a
fifty-minute drive and Newton drove.

“I’m
suspended. I shouldn’t be here,” Ward said.

“To hell
with that,” Newton said. “You’re here as my guest.”

The
deputy warden met them and got them signed in. Newton checked in his weapon and
took a voucher.

“He spoke
to me. Said he had something he’d been meaning to get off his chest for a
while. Twenty-five years, in fact. Kinda unusual to get a confession so long
after the crime.”

“He ask
for anything? Special treatment?” Ward asked.

“No sir,
he didn’t. Didn’t ask for a thing. Just asked to see the detective in charge of
the case. So I called your station and got your number and here you are.”

“Who’d
you speak to at the station?”

“The lieutenant.”

“Gammond?”

“That’s
the one.”

Ward
turned to Newton and said quietly, “Didn’t think Gammond wanted you anywhere
near this case.”

“It’s
what I thought,” Newton said.

“He had
any visitors recently?”

“He’s not
the kind that gets visitors.”

Ward nodded.

The
deputy warden pressed a button. Moments later a lock was broken and bars slid
to the sound of a loud buzzer. The operator of the security system was behind
plexiglass
and he studied Ward and Newton like a cat
watching two birds.

Two more
sets of security gates unlocked and they went through. The corridor they
entered smelled of a cross between cabbage and festering corpses. With a splash
of cleaning fluids. They walked to the end and turned right. The bright lights
above them buzzed a high-pitched note and one flickered. On. Off. An old man in
prison threads was mopping the floor and he nodded a respectful acknowledgment
and Ward and Newton returned it. At the end of the corridor was a door leading
to a room. A guard sat on a chair outside and he stood as the three men
approached.

Eric
Lafayette sat inside the windowless room grinning but his smile was crooked on
account of the big prison scar that streaked up from his cheek and finished in
an empty eye socket that was closed and looked stuck with crusted glue. His
good eye was topaz blue and bright as a flashlight. The sparse teeth that were
there were unevenly spaced and mostly rotten. He managed to stroke his greasy
hair back in spite of his cuffed wrists. His bones had a covering of pasty,
wrinkled skin. Like wadded-up
 
paper had
been plastered onto his skeleton. His throat crackled phlegm as he breathed
heavily.

“You came
in the plural. Only expected one. Two’s even better. Should I feel honored? I
should feel honored.” He watched them both sit and the grin never left his
face. “I guess it’s only polite to do introductions. I’ll go first. I’m Eric.
Very pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand to Newton, who didn’t move.
Then to Ward. The same reaction.

“Aww,
come on, gentlemen. We’re all gentlemen, aren’t we? Well, please yourself. I do
it all the time. Please myself. You should try it.” He launched into a fit of
laughter ending in a coughing fit which turned the gray skin on his face a
dirty pink and nearly popped out his good eye. He swallowed phlegm and seemed
to enjoy it. The grin returned like some oily residue.

Ward
spoke. “I’m Detective Ward and this here is Detective Newton. We’ve come to
discuss what you said to the deputy warden. It’s an informal interview at this
stage. You can request a lawyer to be present if you’d prefer.”

“Don’t
need no lawyer. Didn’t do me no good before.” He wheezed.

“Do you
want to tell us what you told the deputy warden?” Ward said.

“It would
be my pleasure, detective. I killed your little boy.” He grinned and his one
good eye darted from Ward to Newton and back. “How’s that?”

Ward
noticed Newton twitch in his chair.

“Oh, you
want more details? Okay, but it ain’t pretty. Kinda grisly.”

Ward
noticed Newton flinch and he saw his hand form a fist.

“Go
ahead,” Ward said.

“Well.
Once upon a time there was a little boy and then there wasn’t. How’s that? Or
do you want more?”

Ward
noticed Newton stand to his full height and noticed that he was about to snap
Lafayette like a bunch of twigs. Noticed just in time to grab him and put
himself in between Newton and the table, which got shunted into Lafayette’s
midriff and pushed out a gasp and a cough. Lafayette’s grin morphed into
something more sinister.

“I got
your attention, then.”

“You son
of a bitch,” Newton shouted, and the door opened.

The guard
studied the situation.

“It’s
okay. We got it under control,” Ward said, and he managed to get Newton seated.

The guard
nodded and he left the room and closed the door.

“If you
come for a happy ending I can tell you now you’re gonna be mighty
disappointed.”

Ward
said, “Look, we’re not here to play games. We can leave now.”

For a
moment Lafayette’s grin faded under the bleaching intensity of Ward’s scowl.

“Okay,
okay. I’m done playing with you. We’re all gentlemen here. All friends. Okay. It
was a hot day. So I took off in search of something to keep me occupied.” He
winked at them both but tried it with his missing eye and it lost its effect.

“Sometimes
you drive forever and don’t find a morsel. On this occasion, though, the Lord
himself was smiling down on me and he handed me this little gift straight from
heaven itself. He was walking down the street. Little boy lost. So I pulled up
my vehicle and I asked him ‘is you lost, little ’un?’ And he cried at me and I
said not to cry, I’d get him back to his parents in no time at all. And I
scooped him up like his daddy might and I put him in the car. We drove a while
and he starts crying again and I said not to worry, we going the scenic route
and I’d have him back with his parents before dinner. Right after I’d taken him
for ice cream. And he stops crying again. All young ’
uns
,
they like ice cream. That itself is a blessing
’cause
it shut him up a whiles longer. I think it was when he sees the woods that he
set to crying again.”

Ward saw that
Newton was winding up for another crack at him. He looked over at Newton and
caught his eye and Newton breathed out heavily through his nose.

“I have
to warn you, while this is my personal favorite part, it might not be to
everybody’s taste.”

Ward
said, “Go on.”

“Okay,
you asked me to go on and I will go on.”

Ward
started tapping his foot as Lafayette went into more detail. He nipped his own
leg to distract himself from what he was hearing. Newton just stared straight
at Lafayette and didn’t move a muscle. And all the while Lafayette’s grin grew
and Ward wanted to knock his remaining teeth out.
In
his head Ward hummed. He tried to take his mind out of the room but he heard
every word and he wanted to kill the son of a bitch.

Lafayette
let out a sigh. “And that’s that. You can’t write that shit.”

Ward and
Newton were silent for a few moments and then Ward said, “What did you do with
the body?”

“Well, I
buried it of course. Out there in the woods.”

“Could
you tell us where?”

“I could
not do that. I can show but not tell. I reckon I can take you right to the
spot. Could do with the fresh air, truth be told. And it’ll bring back such
sweet memories.” He laughed.

Newton
launched himself at him and Lafayette crashed heavily on the floor, his head
clanging as it hit. The door was quickly opened and the guard was in. He said “
whatthefuck
?” and he dragged Newton off. Ward was on his
feet but he was slow to react. He didn’t know whether that was a conscious
thing. He hoped it was.

Lafayette
was dazed and he breathed heavily and then went into another coughing fit and
this one dislodged a tooth and it sounded like a tiny pebble when it hit the
floor. The guard sat him upright again and a single drop of blood fell from
Lafayette’s mouth onto the table. His grin returned and the extra gap took the
grin to another level of sinister. His tongue examined the new gap.

“I’ll
take that for the tooth fairy,” Lafayette said, looking on the floor for the
tooth.

The guard
guided Newton out the door and Ward stood and stared at the bag of bones in
front of him.

“Is there
anything you want for this information?”

“I don’t
want nothing. Just doing my civic duty.”

Ward
followed Newton out. In the corridor, as the guard shuffled Lafayette out of
the room, the old man shouted, “You ain’t taken my confession.”

Ward
called back, “Go see the chaplain.”

“Hey,
hey! You didn’t write it down. I ain’t signed nothing. This is my kill. I want
my kill.”

“He said
he didn’t want anything. Does that sound right to you?”

Newton
was still shaken. He heard Ward speaking with a slight time delay. “He didn’t
do it.”

“What I
was thinking. Why would he confess now after all this time and not want some
kind of privileges?”

“He
didn’t do it.”

“You
still think O’Donnell did it?”

“Spent
twenty-five years thinking he did. Knowing he did.”

“And
now?”

Newton
clenched both fists and studied them for a few seconds. “Hold on a minute while
I get my head around twenty-five years of being wrong.”

“Don’t
mean you’re wrong.”

Newton
turned his head to face Ward. “You know it does. Someone put Lafayette up to
this.”

“You
think?”

“I know,
son.”

“Who?”

“Well, it
sure as hell wasn’t O’Donnell. But it’s not just
the who
,
it’s the why that concerns me.”

“Somebody
wants the Ryan case to go away.”

“I know
it. But the deputy warden said Lafayette’s had no visitors.”

“My guess
is somebody got a note slipped to him. Asking him to kindly confess to a crime
he didn’t commit. Somebody with connections inside the prison. Could be
anybody.” Could be a cop, Ward thought, but he kept the thought to himself.
Larsson had as good as said that there was police involvement in Ryan’s
disappearance. But Ward didn’t want to air that thinking just yet.

Newton
said, “Who has something to lose by the truth coming out about what happened to
Ryan?”

“Whoever
took
him.
”

“Don’t
you get the feeling there’s more to it than that?”

“And we
come back to the question of whether the two cases are linked.”

Newton
took a breath. “We solve one, we solve the other.”

“Let’s
see. Little boy disappears. Grandpa gets killed twenty-five years later. Why
now? Maybe he knew something and was about to tell. He mentioned a confession.
Somebody got wind of that. O’Donnell knew who did it. He knew what happened to
Ryan. That was what he wanted to confess to. So person unknown kills the boy
and all these
years
later kills O’Donnell because he
thinks that suddenly O’Donnell is going to confess to keeping his silence about
what happened. Who would know about what went on that night in Sunny Glade?
What O’Donnell said about confessing to something? Who then went and killed
Doctor Brookline because he thought O’Donnell had maybe said something to the
good doctor? O’Donnell only said two things when he blew up according to the
girl. He mentioned a confession and he also mentioned Doctor Brookline. That
got somebody spooked enough to kill the old man. And the doctor.”

“I know
who you’re thinking.”

Ward
said, “Kenny.”

“You
still think Kenny’s involved?” There wasn’t really a question in Newton’s
voice. Sounded like a man coming to terms with an inevitable truth.

“Don’t
you?”

“I still
think we have to tread careful with him.”

“But you
think—”

Newton
cut him off. “What I think is that we’ve just been given a bit more to go on.
And I mean it about treading carefully. If Kenny’s involved, this thing could
get dangerous.”

“Look,
Kenny was there that night. He has access to the pharmacy to get to the
morphine that killed O’Donnell and Brookline. He has connections. Could’ve got
Lafayette to confess to killing Ryan. If we agree that the two cases are linked
it would do him good to pin the Ryan murder on somebody else. If we can’t link
the Ryan case with the O’Donnell case it weakens the O’Donnell case. Takes away
motive.”

“But no
morphine was missing from the pharmacy.”

“And
that’s a problem.”

“A big
problem.”