All Mortal Flesh (18 page)

Russ put his coat on and wrapped his old tartan scarf around his throat.

He heard Harlene asking, “You want me to help you with any of that?” and Lyle refusing.

Russ shoved his gloves into his coat pocket. Looked around the office. Was there anything he had to take with him?

The clatter and clash from the squad room startled even him. He heard Harlene’s chair squeak, roll, and thud into her file cabinet. He glanced through his doorway in time to see her disappearing in the direction of the noise, which now consisted of loud swearing, shouts from someone whose uniform had been wrecked, and Kevin Flynn laughing hysterically.

He stepped out into the dispatch room, closed his door behind him, and, unnoticed and unheard, left the building.

Driving away from the station house in his red pickup, Russ could have felt guilt, or anger, or panic. He guessed any of those would have been more appropriate than the almost giddy sense of escape that filled him. Maybe, after all those years of the straight and narrow, walking on the wrong side of the law had a certain wild appeal. That would explain a lot about his relationship with Clare.

Thinking of her dampened his spirits, and the first left that led him out of town and toward his house extinguished them. His house. The thought of going back there yet another time nauseated him. He was going to have to sell it. Or better yet, burn it. Make it a pyre for his marriage. Slain jointly by a stranger’s knife and his own infidelity.

He drove through the outskirts of town, into the farmland that rolled higher and higher out of the east, until it crashed against the mountains in the west. The sky was thicker now, the ice-pale cloud cover turning leaden. He realized he hadn’t listened to the news or caught a weather report in three days. He switched on the talk-radio station in time to catch the 9:00 A.M. highlights. War, a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, terrorist cells in the U.S., and a record-breaking deficit. New England was celebrating the Patriots making it to the Super Bowl. The North Country could expect a slowly developing storm to drop another four to six inches of snow within the next twenty-four hours.

The rousing music of the Dr. Adele show swelled behind the psychologist’s voice, telling him today’s show was for all those women who couldn’t enjoy sex because they were self-conscious about their bodies.

Christ. He snapped the radio off. If he hadn’t been depressed before, that would have done it for him.

The Peekskill Road was empty of traffic. Empty of all signs of life around the widely spaced farmhouses, save for the threads of smoke rising from every chimney except his. And the folks who lived to his left, the Andersons. He frowned. Had something happened to the elderly—no. It was all right. They were away in Arizona.

Good enough. He didn’t want any witnesses if Investigator Jensen came around asking questions.

He powered up his driveway and parked in front of the barn door. He got out, hauled it wide open, and, getting back behind the wheel, inched his truck into its space next to Linda’s wagon.

He grabbed his soft-sided CD holder and squeezed out the driver’s side, reflexively careful not to scratch the Volvo, and rumbled the big door shut along its track. He paused at the hard-packed walk to the kitchen and went instead to the front of the house. Wading through more snow was a small price to pay not to have to step into the room where his wife had—

He forced his attention to unlocking the door. Inside, the air was so cold he could see his breath. Either one of the responders had turned the thermostat off, or they had run out of oil. There was a pronounced smell of cat, and he remembered Eric McCrea telling him about his wife’s new pet, and how it had been stuck inside after she had been—

He realized the damn cat was probably a witness to the murder. Not that that was going to do him any good.

He strode toward Linda’s tiny office, looking as little as possible to the left or right. He dropped into the desk chair and pushed the computer’s on button, hoping that the cold wouldn’t affect the machine. It slowly blinked into readiness, and he turned to a stack of blank CDs she kept at hand. He loaded one into the disk drive, opened the hard-drive menu, and started copying.

E-mail, Word documents, spreadsheets, photos. Not knowing what might yield something useful, he copied it all. Browser, Web sites, fax program, music player. He went through three CDs, then four. While the computer burned data, he riffled through Linda’s paperwork again, looking for anything out of the ordinary, anything that would point to one direction or another.

A notice popped up on the screen. DISK FULL. PLEASE INSERT ANOTHER DISK AND PRESS CONTINUE. He released the CD drive, scooped out the disk, and replaced it with an empty one.

The phone rang.

He froze. In the silence between rings, the disk drive clicked smoothly into place.

CONTINUE COPYING? The computer asked him.

He fished his cell phone out of his pocket and thumbed it on. The house line rang again. His cell displayed its service logo. The house line rang again. The cell’s signal and battery indicators ramped up. The house phone rang again. The cell phone beeped loudly. Its screen read 2 MISSED CALLS. He thumbed the selection button. The screen displayed the numbers he had missed. Both were from the station.

The answering machine picked up, and he heard his own voice asking the caller to leave a name and number.

“This is Investigator Jensen of the BCI, looking for Russ Van Alstyne. Chief Van Alstyne, if you get this message, it’s very important that you contact me. I need to meet with you as soon as possible to discuss the direction of the case. Please call me at the station or on my cell phone at 518-555-1493.”

He released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. She worked fast.

He pressed the CONTINUE button on the screen. One more disk, and then he was gone. If he were Jensen, he’d be sending out squad cars to try to pick him up at the most likely locations. His house, Mom’s house, Janet’s farm. All addresses readily available from his personnel file.

Unzipping the CD holder, he considered his options. He could blow town completely, find an Internet café in Saratoga and go over the files. Of course, if she put an APB out on him, that might not work so well. A public place was risky. He needed somewhere where he couldn’t be brought in or disturbed until after he’d had a chance to sift though the megabytes of information he’d taken from Linda’s computer. He needed a sanctuary.

DISK FULL. PLEASE INSERT ANOTHER DISK AND PRESS CONTINUE.

No time to download any more. He would have to hope he had gotten what he needed. He removed the disk, hit the CANCEL button, and directed the computer to shut itself off.

Sanctuary. What better place than a church?

Clare knew she was in trouble when attendance at the 7:30 A.M. Wednesday Eucharist doubled. Admittedly, only fourteen people showed up, but that was seven more than the usual group: one businessman on his way to work in Saratoga, one young mother who couldn’t make it on Sundays, and five retirees who had never warmed up to the modernized 1979 version of the Book of Common Prayer.

Clare didn’t even recognize some of the people in the pews. That worried her. On the other hand, Elizabeth de Groot wasn’t among them. Praise God.

Nathan Andernach, who was assisting her, finished the intercessions and glanced at her. She stepped forward. “Ye who do earnestly repent you of your sins,” she said, “and are in love and charity with your neighbors, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, and walking henceforth in His holy ways; Draw near with faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort; and make your humble confession to Almighty God, devoutly kneeling.”

The three people she didn’t know remained awkwardly standing for an extra beat as everyone else knelt. Clare waited for a moment to begin the General Confession.

“Almighty God,” she said, and the others’ voices chimed in, “Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men; We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness…” For all that Clare preferred the simpler constructions and the more gender-neutral language of the modern Eucharist, she had always thought the Confession fell flat. “We are truly sorry and we humbly repent” sounded like an apology to a meter maid. The old Confession was written by men who knew what it felt like to have done bad things: “We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable.”

Indeed.

She pronounced absolution, focusing hard on the words to block out the voice in the back of her head that suggested she was hardly fit to be forgiving anyone’s sins. She gratefully lost herself in the ritual of the holy Eucharist: washing her hands and girding herself with a blessing; the white linen and the red book. Here, she never felt the sting of unworthiness. This was God’s miracle, not hers.

Andernach, whose thin chest concealed a bell-like baritone, led them in their communion hymn. It was low-pitched and easy to sing, the tune a melancholy French carol from the seventeenth century. Clare, at the altar, did not sing but stood, head bowed, and listened to the grimly mystical text.

“Let all mortal flesh keep silence,

And with fear and trembling stand;

Ponder nothing earthly-minded,

For with blessing in his hand

Christ our God to earth descendeth,

Our full homage to demand.”

Ten people came up to receive communion. Three did not. She and Nathan wrapped the service up quickly. She hadn’t told him yet that Elizabeth de Groot expected to take over his liturgical functions. Nathan had the fussy precision of a lifelong bachelor, but he was dedicated to his work at St. Alban’s, and she suspected it was one of the anchors of his life.

She greeted people beside the narthex door, sheltered somewhat from the cold that billowed in whenever the great outer doors were opened. Her young mother and businessman dashed by with a hurried hello as always, but the retirees clustered around her, eyes shining with interest, to ask how she was. The new people hung at the edges, clearly dying to hear some juicy revelation but too bashful or well-mannered to come right out and ask her if her affair with the chief of police caused him to shoot his wife. Clare stuck resolutely to the weather and the upcoming spaghetti dinner fund-raiser, which, she realized, was probably going to be very well attended this month.

Eventually, the retirees and the curiosity-seekers trickled out. A man about her own age had been dawdling along the south aisle, looking at the stained glass windows. He wore a heavy-duty parka over a coat and brightly striped shirt, and his loosely knotted tie had a picture of Snoopy on it. Not a lawyer, that was for sure.

“Great place you have here,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“When was it built?”

“Right around the Civil War. You’ll notice that the dedication names on that window you’re looking at have several death dates in the 1860s.”

“Who’s the Roman soldier with the halo?”

“That’s St. Alban, our patron. He was a centurion stationed in Britannia when he became a Christian. Legend has it, when the priest who converted him was sentenced to death, Alban switched clothes with him and died in his place.”

“So. A soldier disguised as a priest.” He looked at her. “I hear that describes you.”

“Ex-soldier. I used to fly helicopters, but that was a long time ago.” She smiled easily. “You doing a story on the church?”

He grinned. “Am I that obvious?” He held out his hand. “Ben Beagle, from the
Post-Star
.”

“Well, you have this slightly rumpled,
Front Page
kind of look going on.” She shook his hand, all the while thinking,
Crap! What do I say? What do I do
? She didn’t think that a word in the right ear, as Mrs. Marshall suggested, was going to do much good. On the other hand, looking at the reporter’s cheerful, intelligent face, she knew she couldn’t threaten him with a suit for slander. Or libel. Whatever.

Then his name registered. There couldn’t be more than one Ben Beagle. “You do investigative stuff for the
Post-Star
, right? Didn’t you win an award?”

He nodded, his cheeks pinkening. “Believe me, most of the day-to-day stuff is much less sexy. A few weeks ago the biggest story I had was a part-time farmer who lost a pig to somebody who decided to help himself to a Christmas ham right there in the sty.”

She blinked. Every once in a while, she got a visceral reminder of exactly how rural her parish was. “I see your point. I guess Woodward and Bernstein didn’t get to investigate many hog butcherings.”

He laughed. “No.” He pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open. “I’m working on something much more significant this week. The death of Linda Van Alstyne. You’ve heard that she was killed.” It was not a question.

“A terrible tragedy.” How had he known? She didn’t think the murder victim’s identity had been released to the press yet.

Beagle was evidently a mind reader, because he tilted his head toward the other side of the church, where a woman sat hard against the stone of the north wall. “I was contacted by Debbie Wolecski, Mrs. Van Alstyne’s sister.”

Clare had crashed a helo once. She had walked away from it—barely—but she had never forgotten the anxious accumulation of problems, blossoming into the realization that she was screwed. She had that same feeling now.

“I don’t know if I can help you,” she said. “I only met Mrs. Van Alstyne a couple of times.”

“But you do know her husband.”

She decided to brazen it out. “Of course. Russ and I are good friends. We have lunch together almost every Wednesday at the Kreemy Kakes Diner, barring urgent police business or pastoral emergencies.”

“According to Mrs. Van Alstyne’s sister, you two were more than just good friends.”