The German (7 page)

“Shut your trap,” Hugo snapped. “This ain’t no game. Daddy says the Germans have been sending spies over since they lost the Great War. The Nazis trained every one of them and they’ve just been waiting to attack. And you think it’s a coincidence Harold disappeared just after D-Day? No sir. No how.”

“Well, if that’s true, why’d they wait so long?”

“Because we hit ’em good at Normandy and they want revenge. No reason to expose their spies if they’re winning the damn war. Use your head.”

The argument played in circles while the boys continued walking down Bennington Avenue. Hugo maintained his confidence that one of the Germans in town had butchered Harold Ashton. Ben Livingston questioned the logic, and Austin expressed his eagerness to kill them all. Again the voices thinned out and became the whispers of violent spirits before the night ate them entirely.

Once I felt certain Hugo and his gang had put sufficient distance between us, I climbed to my feet and worked my way through the bushes and would have headed for home right then, except a car rolled into the intersection at my back, its brakes creaking an alarm as it rolled to a stop. I crouched down again and looked through the bushes to see a black Ford idling dead center in the intersection. The driver had turned off the headlights, or he’d never thought to turn them on. The dark shape of the driver’s head was distorted, and I realized he wore a large brimmed hat, a Stetson or Panama, though the former struck me as far more likely. I couldn’t make out anything else about the driver, and I again wished the city had spent the money to erect street lamps in my neighborhood to give a face to this mysterious figure.

My first thought was that the driver had been following Hugo, Ben and Austin on their patrol through the streets, but this malicious motive arose and dissipated like smoke. He was probably just lost, trying to decide which direction to turn, except I couldn’t convince myself of anything so mundane. The car’s presence made me uneasy. I felt as if I hid in a jungle observing a tiger that was waiting for prey. This train of thought gained steam and soon enough, I convinced myself that the Ford had come for me, a precursor to the hearse that would carry me to a final church service. Suddenly, I was drowning in thoughts of Harold Ashton’s murder, and panic crackled in my veins hot as electric current. I wanted to flee, but my legs were locked.

Then the Ford rolled forward, slowly crossing the intersection, continuing its prowl down Bennington. Once it was out of sight I ran, retracing my surreptitious path along Worth Street.

Hurrying between two houses, working my way back to Dodd Street, I thought of Ernst Lang, my neighbor, because he shared the killer’s nationality. I certainly didn’t believe he had murdered Harold Ashton, and I knew he hadn’t been the driver of the black Ford because Mr. Lang drove a cream-colored Buick, but his proximity to the important pieces of my life – my house and my mother – made me uneasy.

Why had he chosen to live in my neighborhood instead of on the other side of town where the majority of the German immigrants had taken up residence? Why did he live alone? Where were his wife and children? All grown men had families, but Mr. Lang had never mentioned his, and there was also the issue of the men.

On more than one occasion I’d seen different men visit Mr. Lang’s home after sunset, and I’d thought nothing of it. Yet the more I considered these visits, the more their oddity needled me. Often enough, my neighbor would not turn on his porch light to greet his visitors, and soon after they entered his house, the living room lights went dark – sometimes the whole house. Most of the time the visits were brief, hardly the length of a good chat among friends. The recollections of these visits struck me as significantly more peculiar as I made my way through shadows and bushes on my return home.

I was so caught up in my suspicions of Mr. Lang, I nearly ran into him. My neighbor came around the corner of the Ashcroft’s front lawn and blocked my path like a bull, and his appearance so startled me, I backpedaled clumsily and fell on my butt.

“In your living room, eating a piece of cake. He came outside to see if you were at the lake, and I told him to go inside and wait until I found you.”

I took the German’s hand and let him pull me up. He patted my back lightly a single time and then set off down Crosby Street.

“It’s quicker if we go between the houses,” I said nervously.

“But those aren’t your houses, or your yards. It’s rude to make a road of a man’s property if he hasn’t invited you. We will walk around the block like gentlemen. It is a nice night and you are safe, so where is the hurry?”

“A walk?” he asked. The scars on his nose and cheeks seemed more pronounced in the gloom as if the furrows in his skin had no bottom, just openings revealing great, black space beyond the flesh. “You took a walk through bushes and between houses? A walk that upset your friend so much?”

“No,” I said, but the lie rang in my own ears so clearly, it must have been obvious to my neighbor. Still, I pushed on, hoping to camouflage my fear with reason. “Why would anyone want to kill me?”

His comment about men puffed me up. I said good night and strutted into the house as if I had returned from an actual spy assignment, and I teased Bum for an hour, not telling where I was or what had happened, but allowing him to stew in the material of his imagination.

Tom sat at his desk, face in his hands. He scrubbed his palms over his cheeks and eyes, trying to erase a bit of the fatigue the long day had left with him. Gilbert Perry remained in the front office but Rex had gone home to develop the crime-scene photos and Don was out to the city hall building a list of suspects from the town’s census, focusing on the German population. Tom still believed, or wanted to believe, that the murderer of Harold Ashton had crept into town, done his evil, and then moved on to some new, distant location, but he couldn’t count on that. Doc Randolph had done a thorough job with the boy, and noted the cleanliness of the multiple cuts necessary to remove so much material from Harold’s torso. Though any number of the city’s residents could dress a deer in a few minutes flat, Doc Randolph thought a good place to start would be with butchers, stockyard workers, and surgeons. A preliminary list already sat on Tom’s desk, and he’d gone over it a dozen times.

The note they’d found in a lacquered snuffbox in Harold’s mouth turned out to be something of a puzzle. Rex suggested they have Brett Fletcher translate the thing, since Brett spoke a little German, but was not part of their community. He’d been trained in the language to work for army intelligence, but had barely been able to put it to use before his Jeep exploded out from under him. Tom agreed with Rex and they’d paid Brett a visit. It took him just under two minutes to decipher the message with the help of a translation dictionary. According to Brett the note read:

One less gun against the Reich.

One more pig for the slaughter.

Did you know he was the third?

Tom had asked Brett to check his findings, and Brett said that was as close as he could come with his limited knowledge and the dictionary. The last line bothered Tom most of all. The third? The third what?

For the time being Tom was keeping the contents of the note quiet, only sharing it with his men and Doctor Randolph, who’d suggested based on the final line of the missive that perhaps the killer had struck before. This possibility needled at the sheriff. Harold Ashton wasn’t the only person to disappear from Barnard in the last few months. Dewey Smith’s parents had reported him as a runaway just after the start of the new year, and Karen Perry – Gilbert’s cousin – had also disappeared, though it was highly suspected she’d eloped with a boy she’d met at a church in Austin. The girl had a history of family troubles, so no one was surprised when she didn’t call or write to explain her whereabouts. Still, no word on either of those two kids in months, and those were just the two that immediately sprang to Tom’s mind. People of that age often ran off, whether it was to chase love, escape the family, or seek out their dreams in a bigger city. Except for the families, hardly anyone batted an eye.

It had been hard as hell breaking the news to Harold’s parents, seeing the collapse of Chuck Ashton’s face as his wife fell against his chest, but to have them storm into his office an hour later, infuriated that Tom hadn’t revealed his evidence – the German’s note – had been impossible. He let them scream and accuse, and he had said nothing until they’d worn themselves out. He calmly explained that the note didn’t actually tell them much. The German population of Barnard was enormous: five hundred new residents in the last two years alone, and more than a thousand in the ten years since Hitler had taken power of their homeland. Then there were the second-generation families and third-generation families, many of whom retained a functional knowledge of the language – certainly enough to get through the Lutheran Christmas Mass out to St. David’s. Any other foreign language would have whittled down the suspect list considerably, even Spanish, but a note written in German could have come from any one of two thousand different people.

Chuck Ashton demanded that he be kept informed of every scrap of evidence Tom found. Tom declined politely, apologized a third time for the man’s loss, and then asked Gilbert to see the Ashtons out of the sheriff’s office.

Since their departure, Tom had sat at his desk, reading a short list of names – names of people he knew quite well – and wondered if any of them was capable of the violence he’d seen done to Harold. He didn’t think so, but it was his job to check them out.

Doc Randolph knocked on his office door just after sunset, and Tom asked him in. The doctor was a short and narrow man, reed thin from shoulders to toes. He wore a neatly cropped fringe above his ears, which stood only a few steps off pure white, and a pencil-thin mustache cut a line above his all but imperceptible lips. The doctor sat in the wooden chair across from Tom, his face twisted with questions, but he didn’t say anything for a very long time. Finally, Tom asked, “Something on your mind?”

“Too many things, I’m afraid.”

“I know the feeling,” Tom said. “Want to take them one by one?”

“Where was Harold all that time?” the doctor asked in a burst of frustration. “Gone for weeks but he hasn’t been dead for more than a day, maybe two. Did he leave and get accosted on his way back into town? Was someone holding him prisoner all that time?”

Logical questions, Tom thought. He’d asked himself those very things a number of times, and his conclusion was, “He didn’t run off. If he was going anywhere, then it was to enlist, and we all know if he’d succeeded he wouldn’t be back, and if he didn’t succeed he’d have been back a whole lot sooner. So I’d have to guess that he was kidnapped and the murder came later.”

“Well, this monster must have wanted something, and if it wasn’t a ransom or some other stimulus from outside the situation, then he must have been hoping to get something from Harold himself.”

“Get something?” Tom asked. “Such as?”

“I don’t know,” Doc Randolph said. “To the best of my observation I saw no signs of sexual interference, but who can say? So much of the boy is gone.”

“Sexual interference?” Tom said, feeling a flush of heat in his cheeks. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m trying to help you find a motive, and the motive may be a pronounced mental illness. If your theory is correct, Harold didn’t just stumble into a bad situation to get his throat cut and have his body discarded. There was planning to this, and there was a purpose. I’m suggesting that the killer may be compelled by certain stimuli – and that could be sexual – and if that’s the case, then it’s likely this will happen again.”