The Abortionist's Daughter (8 page)

Even the parents got excited: by the time the yellow school bus came lumbering up the street, five or six of them stood huddling together, unwashed, unshaven, holding steaming mugs of coffee as they speculated on the possibilities. Only one of them had seen the ambulance the night before, the others having closed their drapes to insulate their great rooms from the bitter cold; but the one who saw the ambulance was consumed with problems of her own, namely her eighty-six-year-old mother out in California who’d just that evening wandered out of the nursing home in another Alzheimer’s fog. Now this morning, with the yellow tape suggesting a slew of dark possibili-ties, everyone’s mind was racing, and as they waited for the bus, they began to call their children back, ostensibly to check for mitten clips but in fact to reassure themselves that they were in control in the face of unknown evil.

While parents and children were waiting for the school bus, Huck and Ernie were heading into a nearby coffee shop. Having been up all night, Huck was ready for a plate of eggs and hash browns; the coffee shop was known for its baked goods, so he ordered a blueberry muffin as well. Ernie, whose bad cholesterol had peaked out at 153 during his last checkup, opted for plain oatmeal, but when the waitress set down a volcanic sugar-crusted muffin, Ernie reached across and broke off a good-size chunk.

“Do you mind?” Huck demanded.

“Leigh never makes them this big,” Ernie said through a mouthful. “And she doesn’t put sugar on top, either. What did Piper say, exactly?”

Huck relayed what Piper had said. “She’s handing it over to John,” he added.

“Whoa. Piper McMahon giving up a high-profile autopsy? How’s that happen?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know, either. I have other things to wonder about.”

“Did Frank find a place to stay?”

“Yeah.”

“Because the chief’s not too pleased we let him stay at the house last night,” Ernie said.

“Well, the chief wasn’t there. He didn’t see Frank. We can be human once in a while.”

Ernie braced his forearms along the edge of the table. “Okay, so what do we got? Besides a woman with a smashed-up head and a blood alcohol of point-oh-nine?”

“Broken glass. Fingerprints. Possibly a few footprints, if we’re lucky. No sign of forced entry.”

“And no weapon.”

Huck felt a sneeze coming on. What was the deal with echinacea, anyway? On Carolyn’s advice he’d started taking it since the first itchy tingle in his throat two days ago, but the virus seemed unstoppable. “I’m still not entirely convinced she didn’t cause the injury herself,” he said. “She was drunk, remember.”

“Point-oh-nine isn’t exactly smashed.”

“It’s enough to make you slip. Take the whole thing why don’t you,” he said as Ernie broke off the remaining top of the muffin.

“Want some oatmeal?”

“No thanks.”

“Good stuff.”

“So quit eating my food,” said Huck.

Just then his cell phone rang, and he turned away from Ernie to answer it.

“Where have you been?” Carolyn exclaimed. “I tried calling until midnight!”

“On a new case,” he said. “Look, can I call you later?”

“All night?”

“It’s a big one,” said Huck. “How’s your mother?”

“Okay. What happened?”

Huck briefly explained the circumstances. “I’m here with Ernie right now,” he said. “I’ll call you later.”

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too,” he told her. He hung up. Ernie wore a smug look on his face.

“So,” said Huck. “Where were we?”

Ernie brushed crumbs onto the floor. “Okay,” he said, “maybe she fell. Doctor comes home after a long day at work, has a drink before her daily swim and slips on the floor and her glass goes flying across the room as she falls and bonks her head. Kind of stretching it, I’d say. And why would she be having a drink
before
working out? Isn’t it usually the other way around? I’m with Piper,” he said. “Somebody did this to her. Whoever it was, maybe they meant to, maybe they didn’t, but this isn’t a slip-and-fall.”

Outside on the sidewalk a man in red Gore-Tex straddled his bike and tore off bits of croissant and fed them to his dog.

“Fine,” said Huck, turning back. “Let’s start a list.”

Ernie opened up his notebook. “Well, we start with the obvious,” he said. “There’s Frank. Domestic argument. Top of the list. After that there’s the Coalition. Motive is pretty obvious.”

“Someone from the Home Tour,” Huck suggested. “Yes indeed,” he added when Ernie cast him a quizzical look. “Three years in a row, according to Frank.”

Ernie shook his head. “This is a woman who because of all the threats on her life has a direct line to Dispatch—and then she goes and opens up her house to strangers?”

Huck too found this unsettling. It didn’t make much sense, unless she had a massive Martha Stewart kind of ego.

“What about the girl?” Ernie asked.

Huck gave a hoot.

“Just because she’s young and pretty?”

“You’d have to be pretty pissed to kill your mother.”

“Girls fight with their mothers all the time.”

“Forget it,” said Huck. “You can write it down, but there’s no way. Let’s go back to the Coalition. Any statement from the reverend?”

“Not yet. It’s not exactly their tactic,” said Ernie, “going in and bludgeoning someone. Seems to me that if they’d wanted to kill Diana Duprey, they would have hired a sniper. Or wired her car. Doesn’t seem the most efficient way, going into her house and smashing her head against the pool. Hey”—he tore another packet of Sweet’N Low into his coffee—“did you read that editorial he wrote a while back?”

“Comparing abortion to genocide?”

“I don’t get it,” said Ernie. “He says he doesn’t condone violence, and then he goes and writes something like that. Who’s he trying to win over with an argument like that?”

Huck glanced at his watch. The restaurant was filling up, and they had to get back up to the house.

“What about jilted lovers?” he said.

“Piper McMahon doesn’t strike me as the type. Plus that thing was over a decade ago.”

“Maybe Diana had a lover,” said Huck. “Maybe she dumped him, and he was pissed.”

“We’ll check it out,” said Ernie. “Hope you didn’t make any plans for Christmas, my friend.”

“Just dinner at your house,” said Huck.

“As long as you bring the beer.”

“What are you getting the kids this year?”

Ernie’s face darkened. “Snowboards. Know how much a snowboard costs?”

Huck shook his head.

“Too much for what I make, that’s for sure,” Ernie declared. “Finish up.” He nodded at the rest of the muffin.

“Be my guest.”

Ernie finished the muffin in one bite. “How come you can eat like such a horse?”

“I don’t,” said Huck, “when you’re around.”

—————

By noon that day a group of press trucks from the major networks had settled themselves in front of the Thompson-Duprey house. Already the chief of police was fending off speculation by an increasingly cynical press corps: Was this going to turn into another Templeton debacle? Didn’t Frank’s position with the DA’s office pose a conflict of interest? Would they bring somebody neutral in? The chief of police tried his best to respond with professional dignity, but when a reporter asked point-blank how he was going to avoid another screwup, he snapped—according to the reporter, he used the F-word, as referencing a certain act that that certain reporter might perform upon himself. Afterward it was agreed that certain biases ought to be toned down and a semblance of objectivity maintained. The department, after all, was under new leadership. The sins of the past were the sins of the past. Et cetera.

Inside the house, trained investigators were busily taking photographs and searching for fingerprints, fibers, hair samples, handprints, footprints, pieces of glass, paint chips. A thorough vacuuming turned up hair and fibers—promising, but they would have to await further analysis. Outside they were looking for tire tracks and footprints mostly, but their efforts were largely hampered by the ongoing snowstorm, which had picked up again with a vengeance and long since covered up evidence of any activity the night before. And the snowplows had been out before dawn, before anyone could stop them, thus obliterating any possible tire tracks that might have remained on the side of the street.

Huck’s job was to make sure that every square inch of the house was examined—that every fiber, every shard of glass was properly bagged and labeled, that every surface was carefully dusted for fingerprints. While this was being done, he went outside to talk with the neighbors, many of whom were milling around outside the cordoned-off area. Most had little to say, but one of the neighbors, a young mother, revealed that around four o’clock the previous afternoon, just after she finally managed to get her son down for a nap, she’d heard a car go
thwump
out in the street. Huck took out his notebook. Because it had been snowing all day, the woman went on, she was afraid someone had had an accident, so she hurried to the window, only to see Frank’s car parked at an odd angle, half up on the curb; and there was Frank himself running up the walkway, and he had no coat on, which she thought was a little odd, but she didn’t dwell on it, because she knew her son would only sleep for half an hour, and in that half hour she had to return three phone calls, truss a chicken, and mop up the apple juice that her son had flung on the floor in an effort to avoid getting put down for a nap. She had been in the middle of the second phone call when she heard Frank and Diana arguing.

“There must have been a window open or something,” she said, “and it got so loud that it woke my son up, which frankly ticked me off, because without a nap he’s like a
monster.
Got kids?”

“No,” said Huck.

“Just wait,” said the woman. “Anyway, I almost called them up and told them to respect their neighbors but then I heard a glass break and thought, Oh god, here we go again.”

“Meaning?”

“They’re
always
throwing things,” the woman said. “Once Dr. Duprey threw an entire television out their bedroom window! How do I explain that to my child? I’m always saying, Use your words, honey, and then he sees the neighbor throw her television out the window!”

“What time was that, do you think?” asked Huck.

“What?”

“When you heard the glass break,” said Huck.

“Four-twenty,” the woman declared. “Which I know, because my son was wanting to watch cartoons, and although I normally don’t let him watch television until five, I had to get this chicken in the oven and so I told him he could watch
Yu-Gi-Oh!
for special, in ten minutes.”

“Were they yelling before or after the glass broke?”

“Before. After. Maybe both. I don’t know. They’re a noisy family, that much I know. Well, Diana’s noisy. Frank, he’s the quieter one. But this isn’t any of my business, I suppose.”

Huck wrote down her name and thanked her. He talked with a few other people; one man revealed that it wasn’t at all unusual for Frank to come home in the afternoons.

“He’s a runner,” said the man. He was white-haired and tan, girdled head to toe in slick black Lycra. “So a lot of days he comes home around three and heads off on the trail for an hour or so. Then he goes back to work.”

“Did you see him go running yesterday?”

“Nope.”

“Did you ever run with him?” Huck felt confident making this assumption, considering the man’s build. He looked like Spider-Man, only with white hair.

“Oh, sure. He was a good partner, kept a steady pace. In spring we trained together.”

“Did he ever talk about his personal life?”

“
Whoa
no. The guy was
very
private. Just the opposite of Diana. Now
she
was talkative. She’d be working in the yard and I’d be out for a run and she’d nab me and start asking how my grandkids are doing. I’m about to become a great-grandfather, you know,” he said with pride. “Any day now.”

“That’s great news,” said Huck.

“As long as I don’t have to babysit,” the man warned.

“Did you ever see or hear them fighting?” Huck asked.

The man gave a long sigh and shook his head. “You guys are going to be focusing on Frank, aren’t you? You’re thinking this was a domestic dispute that got out of hand. Actually, Diana was the one who provoked everybody. You probably know this. She was a very opinionated woman. They’d have these dinners out on their back deck, fire up the grill, and maybe she drank a little too much but some nights you could hear her hollering like she was up on a soapbox.”

“About what?”

“Oh, you name it. Money, kids, the right-to-lifers outside the clinic. Very strong feelings here.”

Huck suspected that, given the chance, the man would gladly have offered up his own views on the right-to-lifers outside Diana’s clinic. Not exactly a direction he wanted to take. “What do you know about the daughter?”

“Oh, she’s a good kid. Very smart. She put all her bets on Princeton but didn’t get in, so she’s here at the university.”

“Did she get along with her parents?”

The man smiled. “Not my domain, detective. All I can say is mothers and daughters, they all have their issues. Diana and the girl weren’t any different. There were a few times, you’d see them in the morning, hurrying out of the house together, screaming at each other, but—Hey: you don’t think the girl had anything to do with this, do you?”

Huck looked over his shoulder to where Ernie was beckoning him. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was close to three o’clock.

“Because that’s absurd,” the man said with reproach. “Don’t waste good taxpayers’ money on that one. Please.”

“We’re just trying to get a complete picture,” said Huck.

“Then focus on the anti-abortionists. Tell the truth, I doubt Frank had anything to do with it. But certainly not the girl.”

Huck assured him once again they were covering all their bases and thanked him for his time. He walked over to one of the vans that was serving coffee and pastries out of its rear door. Ernie was eating some kind of sticky bun, claiming how this was going to have to count as dinner. Huck poured himself a cup of coffee and told Ernie about his conversations with the neighbors.