Dead of Winter (41 page)

Louis thought of the sensual cabin, with its draperies, music, pillows, candles and incense. He couldn’t see Gibralter tolerating any of it.

“What about your name?”

“I read it in a novel once and I always wanted to go to France. I never used it before that night by the lake when I saw you. It just...came out.”

Her voice had trailed off to a whisper. “I always hated the name Jean. I never felt like a Jean.”

Louis came back to stand near the fireplace, looking down at her. “Why didn’t you tell me you were married?” he asked.

“Would it have made a difference?”

“Yes.”

She stared at him. “It must be comforting to have such a reliable moral compass.”

He couldn’t tell if she meant it to be sarcastic. “You could have left him,” he said.

“We’ve been together since I was nineteen. We had...” She paused. “He needed me.”

“I can’t see him needing anyone,” Louis said.

“He wasn’t always like this,” she said. “In the beginning, back in Chicago, it was different.”

Louis looked away. He didn’t want to hear about the joys of Brian Gibralter’s young married life. She saw Louis’s reaction but went on.

“When Brian was a rookie, he used to come home at night so excited about the job, so sure he was doing good,” she said, her eyes going to the fire. “But he got transferred to Englewood and things changed. He started talking about the bad things, the junkies, the thirteen-year-old hookers, the man who pulled a  knife on him after he pulled him over for a broken tail light.” She paused. “One night, I found him sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, still in his jacket. I finally got him to tell me what it was. He had arrested a man who had bashed in the head of his girlfriend’s baby with a baseball bat because the baby wet his pants.”

Louis didn’t respond.

“He stopped talking to me about work after that. He said I couldn’t understand,” she said.

Louis thought of the night Ollie died. Even as she had held him while he cried, he had thought the same thing.

“I didn’t fit in with the other wives and I was very lonely,” she said. “I started taking the el downtown for classes at the Art Institute but Brian made me stop. He said I’d get raped or mugged.”

He heard her voice break. Her face was streaked with tears.

“It got worse,” she said. “He yelled at me for not locking the door when I went down to the laundry room. He yelled at me for not ironing the crease sharp enough in his uniform pants.”

“You should have left him,” he said.

She looked at Louis. “I wanted to but I had no way to support myself, no job. I didn’t even have a high school diploma.” She gave a small laugh. “I needed him.”

“I thought you had a sister,” Louis said.

She nodded. “She told me I could come stay with her. I even had a suitcase packed but then something happened and I couldn’t leave.”

“What?”

She looked at him warily.

“What happened?”

“Brian,” she said. “Something happened to him and I couldn’t leave him.”

He could see something in her face, pain, guilt maybe, and he knew she had to be referring to the incident that Gibralter’s department had covered up, the event that Doug Delp had been unable to unearth. He waited, tense. A part of him, the man who had been deceived, didn’t want to hear one more damn word about Brian Gibralter. But the other part of him, the cop part, needed to know.

He sat down next to her. “What happened?”

She pulled in a breath, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater.

Louis went to get her a Kleenex. He sat down again, waiting. “What happened?” he repeated.

She was unable to meet his eyes. “I didn’t find out until weeks later. He wouldn’t tell me. He had been to a doctor, someone the department made him see. I think the doctor was the one who told him to tell me.”

Louis waited. The wind picked up outside, sending a low whistle through the windowpanes.

“He was on patrol alone because his partner was out sick. It was March. I remember because it was very cold for March.” Her voice dropped to a soft monotone. “He turned into an alley, thinking he had seen something suspicious. They had been watching the neighborhood because there was a lot of gang violence. He should’ve called for help but he didn’t.”

Louis suddenly knew where this was going. What he didn’t know was how bad it would be.

“They...a gang...they jumped him. He was alone and they jumped him. They took his gun.”

Louis shook his head.

“Then...” She squeezed her eyes shut. “They held his gun on him and made him undress. They stripped him. It was so cold that night. But they left him there, naked.”

It took her almost a full minute before she was able to speak. “They handcuffed him to a fire escape in the alley and beat him. Then they spray painted...things, words, things all over his body.”

She took a breath and the rest rushed out in one long sigh. “He was there for hours before another unit came by and found him.”

“What happened to the kids?” Louis asked.

“Kids?” She seemed bewildered. “The gang?” He didn’t want them prosecuted because then he would have had to tell the whole department what had happened. The cop who picked him up and one or two others, including his captain, were the only ones who knew.”

Louis remembered what Delp had told him, the drug bust for the gang members that came out of nowhere.

She had stopped crying. She was just sitting there, staring vacantly at some point over Louis’s shoulder, as if she didn’t even know he was there anymore. When she focused back on his face, there was a naked look in her eyes, as if what she had just told him was about her, not her husband.

For several minutes they just sat. He listened to the wind pound the glass and the crackling of the fire. Her soft voice interrupted the silence.

“We came here about a year later. He didn’t even tell me about the ad in
Police Chief
magazine. He just told me we were going, that he could start over, build his kind of department.”

Louis leaned back on the sofa, closing his eyes.

“I thought things would change,” she said softly, “but they didn’t. I didn’t fit in here either.”

He knew she was talking about being black, or half-black half-Asian. Loon Lake wasn’t like some backwater boonie in the South but it was undeniably white. White in its racial makeup and white-bread in its small-town mind-set. He had come to feel like an outsider in the short time he had been here. He could only guess how a lonely woman like Jean Gibralter could survive.

He moved to hold her, to comfort her the way she had him, but he stopped. There was no future for them. He knew that now, even if he hadn’t been so sure an hour ago. His anger toward her had dissipated but he knew he wasn’t beyond judging. Even after this ugly mess was over if she decided to leave her husband, he was not sure he could give his heart to her again. He wasn’t sure he could trust her again.

“I think I’d better go,” she said, rising.

She went quickly to the door, putting on her coat. He rose and watched as she pulled on her gloves. She looked up.

“I’m sorry, Louis. I’m sorry I lied to you,” she said.

The door opened, a flurry of snow blew in and she was gone.

Louis swung the Mustang around a turn and up the hill. The bald tires spun on the snowy road but finally caught hold. The car moved slowly up through the pines.

A small sign marked the entrance to the driveway -- LITTLE EDEN -- and the pines parted to reveal a clearing with a large log cabin in the center.

Louis pulled up in front and cut the engine. He frowned, seeing the smoke curling from the chimney and the shiny white Ford Bronco parked at the side. He picked up the raid file from the passenger seat and searched for the owner’s name. Eden, David and Glenda. Damn, they were here now? He hadn’t counted on having to deal with anyone.

He had decided to come to the cabin only that morning, not telling anyone at the station. It had been an impulse, partly to get Zoe out of his head, but mainly because he was hoping to find something to back up his suspicions before he went to Steele. But as his eyes traveled over the cabin he knew he had no idea what he was looking for.

The front door opened and a man stood behind the storm door, staring at the Mustang. Louis got out and started up the shoveled walk. The man didn’t seem to relax any seeing Louis’s uniform.

“Mr. Eden?” Louis asked.

He cracked open the door. “Yes?”

Louis held out a hand. “Officer Kincaid, Loon Lake police.”

The man shook his hand tepidly. He was about fifty, balding, beefy, and swathed in a red sweater with reindeers prancing across his chest. He had the buffed-pink look of a successful middle-aged man, buttressed by his wealth and unaccustomed to such sordid things as visits from cops. Louis remembered reading the Edens were from Dearborn, the man a management type with Ford. He wondered why he hadn’t sold the cabin after the raid.

“I’m sorry to bother you this morning, Mr. Eden,” Louis said. “I didn’t know anyone would be here.”

“We don’t come much anymore,” Eden said, “just over the holidays.”

A woman’s face appeared behind him. “What is it, David?” she asked.

“Nothing, Glenda. Go back inside.”

She gave Louis a blank look and retreated. “What do you want, officer?” Eden asked.

Louis took off his sunglasses, remembering something his lieutenant back in Ann Arbor had told him, that nobody liked talking to a cop in sunglasses. He realized he disliked it when Jesse wore his.

“I would like to look around,” Louis said.

“What is this about?”

“Just a routine follow-up, sir.”

“It was five years ago,” Eden said.

“I know, sir. We’re closing the case officially. I just need to take some notes.”

“Is this really necessary? I don’t want my family upset.”

“I don’t need to come inside, Mr. Eden, or talk to anyone. This will only take a minute, I promise.”

David Eden hesitated then gave a curt nod.

“Thank you, sir.”

Louis could feel the man’s eyes on him as he went back to the Mustang. Finally he heard the door close.

Louis gathered up the raid file and stood back to look at “Little Eden.” The property was large, enough so that no other cabins were visible. The woods in front had been cleared to provide an impressive view of Loon Lake below. The cabin itself was a new prefab structure, the kind built from blueprints bought from the back of a home-decorating magazine, and it had the contrived rustic charm of a Disney World exhibit. It was secluded and private, a perfect place for a gang to hole up, even if it didn’t look like the kind of place where two kids would die.

Louis dug through the file, finding the diagram that detailed the positions of the bodies and the officers. It gave no sense of what the place really looked like. But it was always like this. The dry starkness of reports and diagrams never prepared you for the physical reality of a crime scene. That’s why he had always liked to see the places where things happened, like Pryce’s house. Maybe it was just vibrations, intuition, like Jesse had said. Whatever it was, it always helped clear his thinking.

He reached back into the car and picked up a second folder, which held the extra crime scene and autopsy photographs. Tucking both under his arm, he set off around the side of the cabin and into the backyard.

The back was cleared about sixty feet from the cabin to where the heavy woods began. There was an aluminum Sears shed off in a far corner and a large woodpile, but nothing else on the lot. Louis turned to face the cabin. He was facing due east and had to bring up his hand to shield his eyes from the sun.

The back of the cabin was plain compared to the front, with two windows on the first floor and a sliding glass door that opened onto a snow-heaped deck. There were three windows on the second floor and a large satellite dish on the roof.

Louis fished Gibralter’s report from the file. He needed to refresh his memory on the sequence of events.

Pryce had been the first on the scene, calling for backup after the kids refused his order to come out. Gibralter, Jesse, Ollie and Lovejoy had arrived soon after. Even after tear gas was fired into the cabin, the kids refused to come out. At this point Gibralter was in front with Pryce, Jesse in the back, with Lovejoy and Ollie positioned on either side of the cabin.

According to the report, Johnny Lacey ran out the back door, took off toward the woods and was tackled by Jesse about twenty yards from the cabin.
“Officer Harrison’s shotgun discharged, hitting suspect in the left front facial area. Suspect died at the scene.”

Louis turned and looked at the woods. He could almost picture the way it went down. He could see Johnny Lacey bolting out the back. He could see Jesse chasing him, the way he had chased Duane Lacey in the snowy field outside Jo-Jo’s. He could see Jesse losing it, the way he had with the hippie. He could see Jesse going into a rage and bludgeoning Johnny’s head.