Red Herring Read online

  “It’s not supposed to be bad,” a female voice said behind him. “They said a dusting, maybe.”

  He turned to see his coworker also getting ready for the cold, pulling a knit cap over her blond hair and tucking in the loose strands.

  “Easy for you to say,” he told her. “You got snow tires.”

  “You don’t?” she asked.

  He grimaced, glanced one last time out the window, and began heading for the front door. “I don’t even have tread.”

  Bob braced himself and pushed open the glass door, exchanging the fast food–scented warmth for the shock of winter chill. He hated the cold. Born and bred in Post Mills, he’d still never gotten used to it.

  He pulled his keys out as he approached his Toyota pickup, parked near the Dumpsters, as required by management. It was a rusty, spring-shot, oil-leaking heap, and every time he saw it, it reminded him of his overall fate—stuck in the boonies, living with his grandmother, his father in jail and his mother God-knows-where. He was all of nineteen and felt like an old man. Even the manager of the Taco Bell considered him a loser, and that Bozo could barely tie his own shoes.

  Which didn’t mean he wasn’t right.

  Bob unlocked the truck’s door and hitched himself in behind the wheel, struck by how, even in below zero temperature, the cab smelled of mildew and general decomposition.

  He went through the painful ritual of bringing the engine to life, using the starter as a defibrillator.

  He’d gotten the truck for a hundred bucks and had put that much into keeping it running. If he hadn’t been friends with the mechanic who issued the inspection sticker every year, even that much wouldn’t have done the trick.

  Running at last, he nosed out of the parking lot, his headlights dim, his windshield scratched, and his ineffective heater not even on.

  At least he had his iPod, which he’d stuck into his ears first off, making the lack of a radio the one aggravation he could overlook.

  Traffic in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, where Bob worked in the entrails of a long commercial strip next to the interstate, was down to a trickle. It was midweek, very late, and most people had sense enough to stay indoors when the weather reports were bad.

  At least, most people who had a choice.

  His head bobbing slightly to the music, he aimed north toward home, on the other side of the Connecticut River, above Thetford Hill, Vermont. It would take him about forty minutes, avoiding the freeway, which he wasn’t fast enough for anyway—assuming the snow didn’t get more ambitious than the flurries dusting his hood.

  And, he added to himself with pressed lips, assuming his tires held out, the engine didn’t quit, the tranny kept hold, and the creek don’t rise.

  The irony was, while he was pretty depressed by his present state, he also knew he had it better than a lot of his friends. Marginalized rural Vermont kids over sixteen could easily screw themselves up, and so far, Bob Clarke had managed to stay sober, avoid drugs, keep out of trouble, and hold a job. The fact that he was occasionally either tempted or frustrated didn’t stall the stamina that his grandmother kept stoking through her gentle support. As embarrassing as it was to be living with an old lady in her ramshackle farmhouse, Bob had to admit that the good outweighed the bad. As old ladies went, she was cool, and you couldn’t knock the lack of overhead.

  He was in Vermont by now, having crossed the river, and had been daydreaming long enough to have covered two-thirds of the journey home, when he saw a glowing aberration in the featureless darkness before him.

  There was a red flare in the road ahead, and the vague shape of someone waving him down behind it.

  Bob crawled past the flare to see better what had happened. A car was pulled over to the side of the road, and a man dressed in new insulated coveralls was standing next to it.

  “Trouble?” Bob asked.

  “Damn, yeah,” the man said, pulling his watch cap low. “My engine quit, and I thought I was gonna freeze to death out here before anybody came by. This road is, like, never used.”

  “Not too popular,” Bob agreed, wondering who this might be. He’d forgotten to check the license plate, and now he’d pulled ahead of where he could see it.

  “Where you headed?” he asked.

  “Well, that’s the worst of it. It’s only a few miles, but no cell phone, no passing cars, and no luck—until you came along.”

  Bob was assuaged by the local reference. “You want me to see what I can do?”

  The man’s eyes widened. “Could you? I know nothing about engines. They either work or they don’t. This might be super simple, for all I know.”

  Bob pulled ahead of the car and swung out of his truck, noticing as he did so the sound of rushing water far below. A year-round stream ran alongside the steep bank here—a locally known bad spot, complained about for its lack of a guardrail and propensity for swallowing up vehicles surprised by the tight curve.

  He sidestepped between the truck and the top of the bank, and met the man around back.

  The man proffered an open bottle of Scotch. “You want some?”

  Bob stopped dead in his tracks, staring. “What?”

  “You want a swig?” he repeated.

  Before Bob could answer, a large hunting knife appeared in the man’s other gloved hand, its blade pointed to right under Bob’s left eye.

  “Trust me,” he said, his voice low and steady. “You do want a drink.”

  Bob didn’t move, his heart pounding as if it wanted out of his chest.

  “Take the bottle, Bob.”

  “You know me?”

  “And Candice, your grandma. Take the bottle.”

  “Who are you?”

  The tip of the blade came to rest against Bob’s cheek, making him wince. He took the bottle in his bare hand.

  “Drink.”

  “I don’t drink. I mean, maybe a beer, sometimes.”

  He felt a light sting just under his eye. Slowly, he lifted the bottle to his lips and poured a little in. Just as he reacted to the harshness of the liquor, the man pulled the knife away, letting the boy half retch without being cut.

  But the blade returned immediately after.

  “Again,” he was ordered.

  “Why?”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. He grabbed the bottle back with his free hand, pushed Bob against his truck, and held the knife high and flat. Behind him, the red from the flare cast a devilish halo.

  “I do have a cell phone, Bob, and a buddy holding a knife just like this to your grandma’s throat. You either drink up or she gets to swallow her tongue like a ham sandwich. And I’ll make sure she finds out why, you little shit.”

  Bob tentatively took the bottle and tried again, swallowing a larger amount this time.

  “Again.”

  He repeated the process five times before the man finally stepped back, taking the bottle and quickly placing it on the ground. The knife, he tucked inside his belt, freeing his hands.

  “That wasn’t so tough.”

  Bob wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, hating the taste both of booze and fear.

  “Now what?”

  The man shrugged. “Nothing. You get back in your truck.”

  Bob studied him incredulously. “That’s it? You want me to drive drunk?”

  “Yeah. I busted your cherry. Look at it that way.”

  Bob scowled. “You’re an asshole, man.”

  “Remember Grandma,” was the response.

  Bob couldn’t see much choice, or the point to any of it. Angrily, he shook his head and turned away to negotiate the narrow gap between the truck and the clifflike bank.

  He didn’t see the man extract a heavy iron truncheon from his back pocket and couldn’t avoid the lethal club landing high on the nape of his neck.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Joey? You sound like shit. What’s wrong?”

  Joe’s initial groan at the phone ringing by his bedside instantly became a low chuckle at the sound of his
younger brother’s irrepressible voice. “Hey, Leo. Not that it matters to you, but it’s five-thirty.”

  There was a pause on the other end. “So?”

  Joe began laughing. “So, nothing. I was roofing the house is all, and I had to get off the ladder to reach the phone. You heading off to work?”

  Leo was a butcher in Thetford, about ninety minutes north of Brattleboro by interstate. A bachelor extrovert who still lived at home with their widowed mother, on the remnants of the farm their father had worked for his entire life, Leo was now a local celebrity because of his market, to which shoppers flocked over sometimes enormous distances as much to bask in his upbeat aura as to partake of his excellent cuts of reasonably priced meat.

  “You are full of it, Joey. Bet you were still sleeping. Helloooooo, Lyn,” he suddenly screamed, making Joe wince and violently pull the phone away.

  Lyn merely dragged a pillow over her head.

  “She says hi,” Joe said.

  “Liar. Hey. I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

  “Sure. Shoot.”

  “There was an accident up here last night. Kid got killed driving drunk—went off the road. Robert Clarke. Bob. That ring a bell?”

  Joe stared at the ceiling a moment. “Nope.”

  “Nice boy. Good manners and lived right. Most of that due to Candice Clarke.”

  Joe interrupted. “Well, her I know. Mom and she are like Butch and Sundance. At least they used to be.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Leo was saying. “Still are. That’s why I’m calling. The kid was Candice’s grandson. After Bob’s fuckup parents fell out of the picture, Candice took him in and brought him up.”

  “Ouch,” Joe said.

  “Right. So now Candice is totally destroyed and Mom’s a basket case, and I gotta go to work.”

  Joe became wider awake. “Leo, I’m in the middle of a case . . .”

  “No, no, no, no. That’s not what I meant. I just want you to call her. Maybe a couple of times today. She wouldn’t want you around anyhow, since she’s already at Candice’s, holding her hand. I’ll give you the number there and you can let her know you care. Lie your ass off.”

  He was laughing as he recited the phone number. Joe fumbled for a pen on the night table and wrote on his palm.

  “Jesus, Leo. You are a pain in the butt. But this is terrible. Didn’t Candice’s husband die in a car crash?”

  “Yeah. That’s irony for you, right? He was a drunk, too. That was a thousand years ago, though.”

  “Still,” Joe mused, the cop in him stirring, “I thought you said Bob was a straight shooter. He go on a bender for some reason?”

  “Nobody knows. He left his Taco Bell job on time, headed home like always, and was never seen again. Somebody noticed faint tire marks by the side of the road about an hour ago and looked over the edge. The truck was smashed into the creek and Bob was dead and stinking of booze. An empty bottle was in the cab. Beats me what happened—probably a girl. Poor bastard just went off the tracks or something. Christ knows how many times I nearly killed myself in the old days.”

  Leo had a huge fondness for cars from the sixties and younger women with commitment phobias. He was no longer as wild as he used to be, but he’d just now told no lie.

  “I gotta go, Joey. Will you do that for me?”

  “Course I will.”

  “Cool.” He screamed again, “Bye, Lyn. Love youuuuuuu.”

  The phone went dead, leaving only a faint ringing in Joe’s head.

  Curious, he thought, and maybe deserving of more than a phone call.

  Deputy Rob Barrows walked into the café in Thetford Center and gave Joe a wide grin. “Isn’t this what they call déjà vu all over again?”

  Joe rose to shake his hand and waved to the waitress to bring a second cup. A couple of years ago, Barrows had helped him investigate a car crash that had landed both his mother and Leo in the hospital.

  “Not so good an outcome this time, of course,” Rob added, as if hearing Joe’s thoughts.

  “True,” Joe agreed, “and maybe even more complicated, from what you told me on the phone.”

  Rob pulled a sheaf of several pages from the inside of his insulated uniform jacket and laid them on the table. “I kinda noticed your sudden interest. That’s the printout from my narrative, complete with some pictures. I’m still a little fuzzy on what got you so excited.”

  Joe glanced up from the paperwork. “You said you found a single drop of blood on the dash but that the driver didn’t have a scratch on him.”

  “Not obviously,” Rob agreed. “It might’ve come from his nose or something. It’s not like I pried his mouth open, either. Maybe he busted a tooth.”

  Joe studied the full facial shot before him. The young man’s slack features revealed nothing. He moved through several more pictures of the truck, its nose in the water, and of the driver, wedged behind the steering wheel, until he reached what had truly brought him up here.

  “There,” he said, displaying an image of a circular disk of glistening blood on the dashboard, about the size of a silver dollar.

  Many cops, confronted with evidence of one of their own investigations, verbally circle their wagons with rationalizations, surplus explanations, or excuses, even before being challenged. Rob Barrows, to his credit, merely studied the picture more carefully, trying to see it in a different light.

  “It’s a lot of blood to have come from a tooth or an invisible nose bleed,” he conceded.

  “What else?” Joe prompted him. “I want to make sure I’m not reading into it.”

  Rob nodded, understanding. “I see what you’re saying,” he finally said. “It’s perfect. There’s no direction to it; no spatter. It looks poured in place, and from an angle the kid couldn’t have reached with his head.”

  Joe’s enthusiasm was growing. He returned to an earlier photo and tapped on it with his finger. “Look at the way his feet are slightly twisted; and the pants material—the way it folds toward the door along the length of both thighs. What’s that suggest to you?”

  Again, Barrows took his time before saying at last, “He almost looks slid in, like when an old person is shifted onto a hospital bed or a wheelchair.”

  Joe laughed. “Exactly what I thought. My mom’s in a wheelchair. My brother and I move her in and out of it all the time, and her pants always look that way—kind of bunched up because of the friction between her legs and the surface she’s being put on.”

  “Meaning Bob Clarke might’ve been positioned behind the wheel after he died,” Rob concluded for the both of them.

  “Could be,” Joe agreed. “Looks possible, anyway. Did you collect that blood?”

  The deputy looked apologetic. “Didn’t see the point. But I still have the truck.”

  Joe was back to the sheaf of photographs. “Well, hang on to it for a while. The body went north, right?”

  “For autopsy? Yeah—barely.”

  Gunther stared at him. “What?”

  “I don’t know about you guys,” Barrows explained, “but our local SA gets huffy about who gets cut and who doesn’t. I think she gets a kick out of pissing off Hillstrom. Why, I don’t know. Anyhow, she wasn’t interested here—you know, the drunk son of a drunk father. I sort of made an issue out of it, and got Clarke’s grandma to weigh in. A voter will get this woman’s attention, even if a cop can’t.”

  “So Candice was interested?”

  “You know her?”

  “She and my mom are best buddies.”

  “Nice lady,” Rob said, frowning. “This really knocked her for a loop. Her husband died the same way.”

  “Yeah.” Joe dragged the word out and gazed at his companion.

  “What?” Rob asked.

  But Joe merely shook his head. “Nothing. Kind of like a theme song I can’t pin down. Keep going.”

  Barrows nodded. “None of this makes any sense to her, which is partly what got me thinking about it, too. I mean, everybody’s kid is a vir
gin or a choir boy, even when you hit them with the evidence, but Candice is like a rock, and I believe her when she said she brought him up right. So Bob went north. Oh,” he added, “and the truck’s in the wrecker’s garage until Candice decides what to do with it.”

  “You got a place we can lock it up as evidence?”

  “Sure. You really think something happened here, don’t you?”

  Joe was about to downplay the notion, perhaps by stressing how they should all wait for clearer results. But he ended up admitting, “Yeah. I do.”

  The Clarke farm outside Post Mills reminded Joe of the house he’d grown up in—planted in the middle of a field and bordered by a thin grove of trees. It was modest, slightly peeling, very old, had clearly been inhabited through several generations of farmers, and yet was just now starting to appear vaguely imperiled. It was reminiscent of a very old relative, usually taken for granted, who suddenly looked as if he had one foot in the grave.

  Joe drove up the long, plowed driveway, not surprised to see his brother’s car parked near the front door. Leo habitually delivered their mother to her friends’ homes in his car—customized to carry a wheelchair and its occupant—and simply exchanged it for whatever he found there to continue on to work. Presumably, Candice Clarke’s car was therefore now parked outside the butcher shop. That was life in a small, tightly knit community, and spoke well to Joe of Post Mills, Thetford, and their neighbors. There was erosion at the edges, in the form of urbanites transplanting to the boonies and unintentionally disturbing the social currents and eddies, but here—still—a tenuous core had been maintained, if only by a group of ancient widows and a few old codgers.

  The death of Bob Clarke, and its effect on his grandmother, would ripple like an earth tremor, exacting an ominous toll on the status quo. Bad news never echoed simply the factual truth—it always carried extra meaning.

  Joe got out of his car and paused a moment to take in the snow-draped field around him, flat, still, and unmoving, showing no hint of the life it would cradle in the spring.

  “I thought I heard you drive up.”

  He turned at the familiar voice and saw his mother in the open doorway, leaning slightly forward in her wheelchair as if wishing it to fly.