In the Bleak Midwinter Read online

  He dumped three teaspoons of sugar into another mug and handed it to Clare. She was sitting kitty-corner to Kristen, a Millers Kill P.D. tape recorder at her left hand. After Kristen had identified her sister’s body, the girl couldn’t get out of the morgue fast enough. She had agreed to give her statement at the police station, where Harlene, in full mother-hen mode, had fussed over her, fetching coffee and strudel from the dispatch room, opening the shades in the briefing room to let in the sunlight.

  “You know, sometimes, the first thing that comes to mind is the right thing, no matter how bizarre or improbable it seems,” Clare said. “It could be your intuition was trying to tell you something. What was it, Kristen?”

  The young woman put down her mug and smoothed her hands over her face. She had washed up in the station’s unisex bathroom—unisex by virtue of having both urinals and a tampon machine—and without her black and purple and red makeup, she looked like one of the pretty country girls from up the hills past Cossayaharie. Katie must have borne a strong resemblance to her sister before her death.

  “Can you tell me how she died?”

  Russ sat down in a red leatherette chair, cradling his coffee to warm his hands. “She was hit in the back of the head by something heavy and blunt, hard enough to make her unconscious. Then she was rolled off the trail downhill, to the edge of the kill. The medical examiner believes she died of hypothermia, that she never woke up.”

  “How did she get out there? Do you know?”

  “Only that it was a four-wheel-drive vehicle with all-weather tires. The wheel width indicates a truck or a sport-utility vehicle. We don’t know if your sister was conscious when she reached the trail, or if her killer drove her there after she had been knocked out.”

  Kristen closed her hands over her face again for a moment. “What a weird thing to say,” she said. “Her killer. Like, her sister, her teacher, her boyfriend. Her killer. Somebody with a relationship to her.” She frowned. “Was she molested? Had she been, you know . . .”

  “No,” Russ said. He glanced at Clare.

  “What? What is it?” Kristen’s gaze flickered between the two of them. He tilted his head, passing the job of telling about the baby to the one who had found him.

  “There is something else, Kristen,” Clare said. “According to the medical report, Katie had a baby within the past two weeks. We have strong reason to believe that she, or someone, left the baby on the back steps of St. Alban’s church a week ago. He’s in foster care right now.”

  “He?”

  “A little boy, yes. She left a note, naming him Cody.”

  Kristen’s face contorted. “Oh . . . she always loved that name. She used to say if she had a boy, she’d name him Cody, and if she had a girl, she’d name her Corinne.” She squeezed her nose and eyes, trying to stifle more tears. “I can’t believe Katie would give her baby away. I just can’t believe it. Unless he made her!”

  “Who made her, Kristen?”

  She was crying openly now, shaking her head. “Our father.”

  Clare and Russ looked at each other. “Your father would’ve made her give up her child because she wasn’t married?” Clare asked.

  “No, no . . .” Kristen blew her nose on one of the paper napkins Harlene had piled next to the strudel. She took a shaky breath. “My father would have forced her to give up a baby if he was its father.”

  Russ felt as if someone had thrown a bucket of the kill’s icy water over him. Clare was pale, but calm. “Kristen, what are you saying? Did your father sexually abuse Katie?”

  Kristen pushed her hands through her short hair. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. But he used to do it to me.”

  “Jesus,” Russ exclaimed, under his breath.

  “Can you tell us, Kristen?”

  The girl looked at Clare, indecision and grief warring on her features. “It’s hard. It’s hard to talk about.”

  “Listen, Kristen,” Russ said, “You don’t have to be afraid of your father. Give me his name and address and he’ll be in the county jail before five o’clock.” With maybe an unscheduled stop on the way, where the bastard could fall down a few flights of stairs by accident. Nobody at the jail would make a comment.

  “No, please!” Kristen said. “I don’t want to press charges. I got away, and that’s all I wanted. I thought Katie had escaped, too . . .”

  “Tell us, Kristen. You don’t have to sign out a complaint against your father if you don’t want to.” Clare forestalled Russ’s complaint with a swift glance that said, “Back off.”

  “I . . . I . . .”

  Clare held out her hand, flat on the tabletop. “Take my hand and tell me. If it gets too hard, just squeeze as tightly as you can.”

  The girl tentatively placed her hand in the priest’s. She took another breath heavy with unshed tears. “Okay. I’ll try.” She shut her eyes. “My father started in on me when I was around fourteen or so. Katie would have been twelve. I wasn’t dumb, I knew that what he was doing was wrong. But I was afraid to tell anyone, because without him, how would we live? He had his business—and he’s got disability and social security money. Mom was useless. Worse than useless. She would have denied he was fooling with me up one side and down another. Besides, she would have fallen apart without him. So I just . . . hung on. I knew girls who dropped out of school, or got pregnant to get a boy or the state to take care of them, but I wanted something more than that. I knew that if I could just last until I finished high school, I could get a decent job, make enough money to live on. So that’s what I did.”

  “For four years?” Clare asked quietly.

  “Uh huh.”

  Russ felt sick. His muscles shook from the effort of sitting still and not pacing around the room, pounding on the walls.

  “I started working at the bank the day after I graduated, and as soon as I had my first paycheck, I was out of there. I begged Katie to come with me, but she wouldn’t. She said Mom needed her.” She bit down on her lip. “I think she was worried that it would be too much, me trying to support the two of us until Katie finished high school. And she was really ambitious, too. She was so smart, her teachers all said she could get a scholarship. She wanted a college degree more than anything.”

  “That’s how she got to the State University at Albany? A scholarship?”

  “For her tuition, yeah. She’s been covering her room and board with student loans, and working for her book and spending money.” Russ could see Kristen’s hand tighten over Clare’s. “I didn’t know—before I left home, he never touched her. And she didn’t mention anything to me. But maybe she wouldn’t have. She was, I don’t know, sort of distant her last semester in high school. We didn’t get together as much. But I knew she was busy, working at the Infirmary and studying and all that.” She looked at Russ, pleading. “I mean, she would have told me if he was, was after her, wouldn’t she?”

  “You never saw any signs of her pregnancy?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “She went to Albany in June, right after she graduated. The university had given her a work-study job in the computer center, and they needed her there for the summer. At least, that’s what she told me. We talked on the phone at least once a week. She sounded so good! I never guessed. I never would have guessed.” She released Clare’s hand to pick up her coffee.

  “The girl who first identified Katie for us said she’s had a boyfriend, Ethan Stoner. Is there any possibility that he could be Cody’s father?”

  “Ethan? Geez, that’s hard to imagine. They did go out for a long time in high school, but Katie broke it off senior year.”

  “She broke it off? How did Ethan take that?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not too well. Katie was . . .” she gestured widely, “. . . more than anything else he had in his life. I know she didn’t break up with him over any bad feelings. She just felt they had really grown apart over the years.”

  “She was college-bound, and Ethan was going to wind up on a dairy
farm, is that it?” Clare asked.

  “Yeah. Plus, Katie is really smart. She used to like to talk about books and poetry and stuff like that. Ethan wasn’t much of a talker, and what he did have to say was usually about some TV show or the Nine Inch Nails. You know what I mean?”

  Clare nodded. “Did she have any other boyfriends, then? Maybe someone more like her?”

  “No. It was hard for Katie. She didn’t fit in very well. She didn’t have new clothes and money for fun things like the other college-track kids in school, but she didn’t have anything in common with the grounders, either.”

  “The grounders?”

  “You know, like Ethan. The kids who are hanging on ’til they graduate and then get married right off the bat and go to work for a gas station.”

  Russ got up. “Anyone want some more?” he asked. The women both declined. “Kristen,” he said, his eyes on the hot coffee flowing out of the pot, “why do you think it was your father who got Katie pregnant, and not Ethan?”

  She swiveled around to where she could see him. “I . . . I guess one is as likely as the other. She never said anything to me about sleeping with anyone. As far as I knew, she was still a virgin.” She pushed her fingers through her hair. “I guess that’s a pretty naive thing to say, isn’t it? But I’ll tell you something. I can’t imagine Ethan getting violent with Katie. But I sure as hell can picture my father doing it. He’s an evil man. An evil man. He could have killed Katie and gone home the same night and slept . . . and slept like a baby.”

  The chief of police stared up at the windows of number 162 South Street from the relative warmth of his car. He had been to this address many times before, though never to the fourth floor apartment of Darrell McWhorter. Unlike his neighbors, who drank and partied and beat each other up where everybody could see, Darrell McWhorter did his lawbreaking in private.

  Russ opened the door, wincing as the cold pinched his nostrils shut and stung his eyes. From the second floor, a curtain flapped aside for a moment and then fell. Cops were not welcome to this flat-faced yellow building, and he wondered how many baggies were being flushed down the john even as he crossed the sidewalk, opened the chain-link gate, and walked up the sagging steps to the front door. He ran his finger down a double row of tarnished door buzzers. MCWHORTER: 3D. He pressed the bell and waited.

  “What is it?” a voice crackled indistinctly over the intercom.

  “Mr. McWhorter? Chief Van Alstyne, Millers Kill Police. I need to speak with you, please.”

  Russ looked at a small plastic slide and trike half-buried under the snow covering what passed for a yard in this place. On the sidewalk, a pair of teenage girls with teased-up hair were smoking and gabbing despite the cold, while two toddlers in snowsuits waited, ignored. One of them stared at Russ, slack-faced and runny-nosed. How could anyone believe in a God who let some kids grow up with everything, and other kids live out their whole lives in poverty and neglect? Or worse.

  “What do you want?”

  “We don’t want to discuss this over the intercom, sir. It’s about your daughter Katie.”

  “Katie?” The voice, as distorted as it was, sounded surprised. The buzzer sounded, cracking the front door open. Russ climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, not holding the banister because he was resting his hand on his holster. Habit. Not a bad one.

  The door was open when he reached the fourth-floor landing. “What is it about Katie?” Darrell McWhorter was no more than five-ten, squared off, with the look of a high school jock run to flab. His dark hair was pretty well thinned out on top, and he had it combed over in what Linda would describe as a spider-holding-a-billiard-ball style. He looked unthreatening and unremarkable, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers, the kind of guy you’d pass a hundred times in the A&P and never think, “That one’s screwing his own daughter.”

  Russ tamped down the heat behind his eyes. Kristen had emphatically refused to swear out a complaint against her father when she gave his name and address. Until he had something linking the sonofabitch to Katie’s death, Russ couldn’t touch him. Officially, he was here to break the bad news to Mr. and Mrs. McWhorter. Unofficially, he was here to see if he could shake something loose.

  “May I come in?” he asked.

  “Sure, sure, come on in,” McWhorter said, stepping aside. The apartment reeked of cigarette smoke, but it was well kept, especially compared to the dumps some other tenants inhabited. The furniture was mostly old, too big and too dark for the living room. It had the look of family hand-me-downs rather than Goodwill. The TV in the corner was a built-in in a blond wood cabinet, pure Danish Modern circa 1965. His mom had had one just like it. The picture was surprisingly good for something that old. He could count every tooth in the oversized smile of the game-show hostess twirling around a shiny new car.

  “Great, innit?” McWhorter thumbed toward the set. “That’s what I do, TVs and small electronics. My wife says she wants one of those big-screen jobs, but I figure, as long as I can keep this one running cherry . . .” He took a last drag on his cigarette and stabbed it out in a pedestal ashtray.

  Russ turned to face McWhorter. “Is your wife here, Mr. McWhorter?”

  “Yeah, yeah, she’s in the bedroom. Brenda!” he yelled down the darkened hallway between the living room and the gallery kitchen. “Get out here! There’s a cop here with news about Katie.”

  “About Katie?” An enormous woman lumbered up the hall. “What about my little girl?” She looked like her daughters, blown up to Macy’s parade size, their rounded cheeks and soft chins expanded into a fleshy mask through which once-pretty eyes peered at him suspiciously.

  Get to the worst of it fast, he thought. “I have very bad news for you folks. Your daughter, Katie McWhorter, was found dead out past Payson’s Park last Friday night.” Darrell McWhorter stared at him blankly. Brenda McWhorter screamed.

  “My baby! My baby!” She staggered around like an elephant with a tranquillizer dart before slipping to the floor. Her husband caught her under her arms and hefted her onto an elaborately carved Victorian sofa. A man would have to be pretty damn strong to help get that woman up. Russ wondered what sort of disability kept him from working.

  “How did it happen?” Darrell McWhorter asked.

  Russ recounted what the coroner had found out about Katie’s death. Brenda McWhorter continued wailing, punctuating her cries with, “My poor baby! My poor little girl!” Her husband listened without comment, frowning.

  “There’s one more important thing I have to tell you,” Russ concluded. “Katie had a child within a week or so of her death. DHS has custody of the baby right now.”

  Brenda’s wails cut off abruptly. Darrell looked as if he were trying to get the final Jeopardy! answer within thirty seconds. “A baby?” he said.

  “A little boy. Did either of you know or suspect she was pregnant?”

  Brenda shook her head, her mouth still half open.

  “Do either of you know what connection Katie might have had to Saint Alban’s church?”

  “Saint Alban’s?” Darrell still looked as if he wasn’t going to make the buzzer before Alex Trebeck called time. “What’s that? The fancy looking church across from the old bandstand?”

  The small park at the end of Church Street was a popular summer spot. The town still put on dances and concerts there, just like when Russ was a young man. “That’s the one.”

  Darrell thought for a few seconds more. “A baby,” he said. Then, “No, I don’t know nothing that Katie would of been up to involving a church. How come?”

  “Katie, or someone, left the baby on the back steps of St. Alban’s, with a note directing that the boy go to the Burnses, a couple from the church that’ve been looking to adopt for several years. Would you or Katie have known them some other way? They’re lawyers here in town.”

  The McWhorters looked at each other.

  “A lawyer?” Brenda said. “We don’t know no lawyers. ’Cept that one who settled my dad’s
estate, but that was ten years back, and he was old then. He wouldn’t be looking for no baby.”

  Darrell reached for a pack of cigarettes lying atop a Soap Opera Digest magazine. “These lawyers go to that fancy church?” he asked.

  “Yes sir, they do.”

  “But they don’t got the baby yet?”

  “No. There are several legal issues to sort out, from what I understand. For instance, we don’t know who the father of the child is.” Russ fixed Darrell with a level stare. “I had a long talk with her sister this morning, who told me Katie broke up with her boyfriend in her senior year. Kristen hadn’t heard of anyone else who might have been going out with Katie.”

  Darrell lit his cigarette and took a drag. “Can’t put much store by what Kristen says. We wouldn’t help her out with money she wanted after she was out of school, and since then, she’s been bad-mouthing us something awful.”

  “Never comes to see us,” his wife chimed in. “Not in almost two years. It was like we lost her. And now Katie . . .” She started wailing anew.

  Russ was tempted, sorely tempted, to ask Darrell to come to the hospital right now for a blood test and cell scraping. But he didn’t want anything questioned and possibly thrown out if it went to court.

  “Had either of you seen Katie recently?”

  “Nope,” Darrell said. Brenda shook her head.

  “Where were you two last Friday?”

  “Why?” Darrell frowned. “You asking if we had anything to do with it?”

  Damn right I am, thought Russ. “I’m trying to get a fix on Katie’s movements, to see where she might have gone and who she might have seen.”

  “We went out to that new Long John Silver’s at the County Road shopping center,” Brenda said. “We had coupons.”

  “Then we went to the Dew Drop for a few. Met up with some friends. We must of been there until eleven o’clock.”

  “We come straight home after that. I remember, ’cause it was awful cold and I was worried I had left the bathroom window cracked open and things would start freezing in the bath.”

  Russ never trusted people who could recall and retell their every movement without having to stop and think about it. Most folks’ lives weren’t that memorable. On the other hand, first Friday of the month, after the social security check had come in, it might be their big night out.