Indefensible (8 page)

“Don't touch my daughter,” I tell him, surfacing from the dopey befuddlement of the whole scene. This young goon is manhandling Lizzy, who predictably clings to the wasted boy. The cop doesn't let go.

“Don't touch my daughter,” I order again, smarting from Lizzy's and Flora's assumptions that I somehow had both Lloyd and this boy arrested. I grab Stubby to pull him away from Lizzy. Someone stumbles, and the three of them—Lizzy, the Sammel boy, and Stubby—go down in a heap with the boy on the bottom and Stubby squirming around on top of Lizzy. I kneel beside the pile of them, and the crook of my arm finds its target like a heat-seeking missile. I roll, taking Stubby's head and neck with me. The rest of him follows.

Then silence. The screaming stops (most of it, I realize, was Flora's). Lizzy crawls away. I'm sitting in the gravel; Stubby sits between my legs, leaning back against me with my arm circling his throat. He makes gurgly noises, but we sit there together a few seconds longer until I am again aware of shouting, and now Trooper Voight stands nearby with his legs apart and a hand fluttering over the handle of the handgun at his side. “Release the officer,” he commands.

I do, but I try to make it look like my own idea. Stubby chokes, coughs, rubs his throat. “You okay?” I ask him.

Flora's hands are pressed to her mouth. In the background, slightly out of the picture, I'm aware of  Tina, whose eyes are locked on Voight. Tina's right hand is lifting a standard-issue Glock from
the depths of her shoulder bag. Before it's really in view, everything settles. I'm helping Stubby to his feet, Lizzy is kneeling by the Sammel boy, and the trooper has lost interest in me and is also looking at the boy. Tina drops the gun back in her bag.

My cell rings again though it doesn't strike me as the best time to answer. We're all on our feet except the sick boy, who lies in the gravel wheezing. “Daddy, he's hurt,” Lizzy says. We crowd around. Lloyd kneels and feels his pulse and looks into the boy's eyes. “Let's get him to the hospital,” he says.

“Are you, um, medical?”

“Doctor,” Lloyd answers. “Used to be, anyway.”

I make eye contact with the trooper who wasn't about to shoot me. He comes over, and we lift the kid up and get him into the cruiser. He flops down in the seat, hands still cuffed behind. “Uncuff him,” I say to Stubby. He obeys. Then the cruiser goes out the driveway, Lloyd in back with the kid, lights flashing,
whoop-whoop
ing into the landscape.

Flora, Lizzy, and I get into Flora's car and head for the hospital. My cell rings again. “Davis here,” I answer curtly.

“Nick, it's Chip.”

“Chip,” I say, and it comes out squeaky because my throat catches with affection. Chip's stable and gentle voice is a psychological oasis among lunatic events. “My buddy Chip.”

“Bad news, Nick. Cassandra Randall is dead.”

T
he second Monday in September. It's been a rotten summer, and I'm glad it's over.

I drive through town, watching workers burst from office buildings to speed home and hear about the kids' first day back at school. At an intersection, the light says
walk
, and a damburst of crossers flows into the street. Now the light says
stop,
but they keep coming. I nose through, and in the no-man's-land before the next light, far from any crossing, a guy steps off the curb. He stops me with an upturned hand like a traffic cop as he waits for an opening in the other lane, but no one is as persuadable as I. So I'm stuck waiting until he can spot his chance and bolt. If he'd look at me, I could smile and offer the gift of my patience. By ignoring me, he steals it. Not even a glance in my direction, so in a flash of fury, I add the feeble bleat of the Volvo's horn to the sounds of the afternoon. The crosser sees his opening and runs, but in the air behind him, he leaves the vision of that upturned palm, which, in the moment of its departure, too late for me to stomp the gas and run him down, becomes a single-fingered wave.

Fuck you, too, my friend.

Beyond the business district, I drive past the fenced-off wreck of the old Aponak Mill complex where my dad was a floor superintendent for most of his career. He died of lung cancer three years short of retirement.

Just last week, a couple of kids got inside the fence and spent the afternoon lobbing bricks into the road. No one was hurt, but a few cars got dinged, and the kids earned a trip to juvie on criminal trespass and destruction of property. As I pass now, I see the form of someone in a garbage bag huddled against the fence, a piece of
twine tethering his or her wrist to a shopping cart that waits like a loyal steed.

I'm on my way out to Seymour Station to look at another body. This one was found in a freezer. I'm not needed there, but it's a good chance to catch up with Dorsey and Chip. I've scarcely talked to them since June.

There have been no arrests in the murder of either Zander Phippin or Cassandra Randall. The lovely and innocent Cassandra Randall was killed in her home. It was after dark. Someone with an assault rifle shot her through her living room window—a single shot to the head. The shooter apparently waited under a tree across the street from her home. Cassandra's two teenage children were at their father's house, and they came home in the morning to find her there, her hair stuck to the carpet in a hideous mass of dried blood.

We feel pretty certain it was Avery Illman, aka Scud, who killed Zander and probably Cassandra as well, but we've had trouble putting it all together. Of the half-dozen players picked up that day last June, none mentioned Scud's name or admitted knowing anything about Zander Phippin. Maybe they really didn't know, or maybe they were more scared of Scud and his friends than they were of the law. So Chip brought Scud back in and asked him outright: “What were you doing west of town on the early morning of June third?”

His answer, offered with that frownlike smile, eyes drawn down at the corners: “Bird-watching.”

If I'd been there in person instead of seeing it four days later on video, I'd have come across the table and twisted his head off.

The agents asked for permission to search Scud's car. “Not without a warrant,” Scud answered. Ditto his home. Smug smile.

We weren't able to get a search warrant last June. Upton Cruthers made the request, but instead of signing it, Judge Two Rivers phoned Upton and engaged him in a debate about what does and doesn't constitute probable cause. Apparently, Two Rivers doesn't see probable cause in an ex-con, drug-dealing, midlevel scumbag like Scud Illman driving into town from the direction of a body dumping on the morning in question. Scud Illman is still on the loose, and we're
at a dead end. Or we were until Seth Coen was discovered chopped up and packed in his own freezer.

•  •  •

Seymour Station is industrial. I pass a warehouse with dozens of trucks backed up to loading docks like piglets at teats. This is the part of town beyond the car dealerships, but closer in than the rock-crushing plants and junkyards.

The address is a motel-looking place called Seymour Apartments. I don't know much yet. Chip called me and said Dorsey had called him. They believe the deceased might be the second man from the reservoir that day: one of the guys who buried Zander Phippin.

I pull up at the building. There's not much going on outside, just a cop in a raincoat keeping an eye on things, and a few official cars parked in front. “Send him up,” Dorsey yells from the balcony. The cop flicks his head toward the stairs. I go up. The photographer and forensics team are there, plus Dorsey and Chip.

“We might have a lead here,” Chip says.

“Friggin' time,” I say.

“Friggin' time,” Dorsey says.

Chip says, “Remember back in June, there was one associate of Scud Illman's we wanted to talk to but we could never find him? Seth Coen. And since we didn't have anything on him, we never bothered asking for a warrant? Well, we've found him.”

Dorsey walks me into the bedroom. The forensic team was taking things apart systematically, but you can tell it was a clean and orderly place when they started. Everything is nondescript. Pasteboard dresser, double bed with a dingleberry bedspread, closet with bifolds. Under the window, where you'd expect a desk, there's a chest freezer. Big but not the biggest. Maybe four feet long.

“Mr. Mellon,” Dorsey says to one of the guys I assumed was forensics. Now I see he was just standing back out of the way.

“Milan,” the guy says. “Spelled like the city.”

“What city?”

“Milan.”

“I mean—”

“Italy.”

“Oh. Mi-
lan
,” Dorsey says with a convincing accent. “Amazing cathedral there. Renaissance center of art and culture. Bombed to smithereens during the war. Too bad.”

I glance over at Chip to see if he's surprised. I didn't have Dorsey pegged for someone to expound on European history. Chip is oblivious.

“Lousy krauts,” Mr. Milan says.

“Actually, the Allies bombed it,” Dorsey tells him. “Remember, Il Duce got confused about which side were the good guys. Got cozy with Hitler.”

“Anyway, I'm not Italian,” Milan says.

“Talk to us about the freezer.”

“He was a hunter,” Milan says. “He asked permission for the freezer, and I said sure, so long as he takes it away when he leaves. He said he needed it 'cause of his deer meat and fish and ducks. I don't care, so long as they pay rent and don't burn the place down.”

“Why in the bedroom?” I ask.

Milan points through the bedroom door, and without looking, I know he's saying the rest of the place is tiny, and this was the only place it fit. “Of course,” I say. Milan is a small guy with a squeaky voice and a bald top but plenty of hair on the sides. He's wearing jeans with suspenders and a hooded sweatshirt. He strikes me as the kind of guy who's law-abiding and honest until there's some little provocation not to be. I'm betting if we ran a history, we'd find minor stuff but nothing too recent.

Milan continues, “The last rent I got from Mr. Coen was for June. Then my mother died, and I had to go out of town.”

“I'm sorry,” Chip says.

“I said I had to go out of town,” Milan repeats louder.

“No, no,” Chip tells him. “I mean I'm sorry about your mother. Sympathies.”

“Yeah . . . well . . .” Milan trails off. Chip and Dorsey and I wait for him to regain composure, then he says, “Stroke.”

“Your mom?”

“Healthy as a horse, you know? Then gone. Just goes to show . . .”

We all make sympathetic sounds and wait.

Milan walks in a circle. He says, “So Mr. Coen paid for June, and then I get called out of town and don't get back till late July and my God, when I got back the books were a mess, but oh well. And so I don't even realize he never paid July. But then he doesn't pay August. So I keep trying to get hold of him. Notes on the door and the whole bit. Finally, I use my key and go in, and everything looks clean, no damage, but it's clear he hasn't been around, so I don't worry about it. His deposit covers July and part of August, and there isn't much to haul out of here, just the freezer and some clothes and rotten food in the fridge. Believe me, I've seen worse. At most I'm out a couple hundred. So I fill out the paperwork for the eviction, everything all legal, you know, and that takes a couple more weeks. Yesterday I get the eviction default, so today I come in with garbage sacks and start emptying the freezer, and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I almost have a coronary.”

“It's all in Ziplocs,” Dorsey tells me, “quite tidy.”

“And all of it hidden underneath,” Milan says.

“Come look,” Dorsey says. He lifts the lid of the freezer, but I hesitate, which he notices. “Don't worry, counselor, we've sorted everything into black garbage sacks.” He says it with surprising gentleness. “There's nothing grisly to see. Unless you want to.”

I walk over. There are several large black bags. “These over here are the body,” Dorsey tells me, “and this one here is everything else.” He reaches into the “everything else” bag and pulls out a package and hands it to me. It is a clear plastic evidence bag weighing a pound or two; inside is a frozen something expertly wrapped in butcher paper. Someone wrote, “Venison shoulder. June,” on the butcher paper. I reach into a black bag and pull out another, this one torpedo-shaped: “Rainbow. March.” And another: “Ven. Backstrap. June.”

“Are these legit?” I ask.

“Don't know yet,” Dorsey says, “we'll let the lab take a look. Anyway,
the body parts were all at the bottom, hidden under the frozen game or whatever it is.”

“Is the body—the parts—are they wrapped in this butcher paper?”

“No, just bags. I never knew they made Ziplocs that big.”

“Is it complete? I mean, if you put the pieces together.”

Chip looks at Dorsey. Dorsey shrugs. “It looks about right,” he says.

“And do we know for sure the guy in the bags is Seth Coen?”

“If I may,” Dorsey says. He reaches into one of the black garbage bags and takes out an evidence bag that was right on top. “One of the smaller packages,” he says. It is a Ziploc quart bag with a human hand inside, severed about three inches above the wrist. Something travels down my spine and spreads out and dissipates, but then I'm fine. The hand is covered with frost; Dorsey holds it up and tells me to look closely. I do. I see the green-black ink of a home (or prison) tattoo job. It is a square divided into four smaller squares, like a window made up of four panes.

“Mr. Milan recognized the tattoo,” Dorsey says.

“That's right,” Milan's high-pitched voice adds from across the room.

I turn away and focus on breathing a moment. Dorsey puts the hand back in the black plastic and closes the freezer.