Chet had not mentioned one reason why Anne might have killed herself. Not suggested one reason for her having committed such a desperate act. Or suggested any other person who might be responsible.
So, while Claire was sure that Chet had deeply loved Anne and was terribly sad that she had died, distraught to the point of being speechless, she was afraid that he had pulled the trigger on the gun that had shot his wife.
How would she explain this all to Rich? Maybe she wouldn’t have to. Maybe he would settle down and as the facts came out, know that she was just doing her job. Best yet would be if Chet would confess. At the moment she wasn’t hopeful that would happen any time soon.
Claire remembered a barbecue earlier in the summer over at the Baldwin’s. Rich and Chet had been playing horseshoes. Anne and Claire had sat at the picnic table and watched the two men out in the field. They were drinking gin and tonics and
Claire remembered thinking what a perfect drink for a midsummer evening—tart and thirst-quenching.
Bentley sat right next to Anne, his head taking up her whole lap. Her hand played with his ears. “What does he want?”
“The dog?”
Anne laughed. “Oh I know what he wants. He’s easy to please. No, I meant my husband.”
For some reason, Claire hadn’t pursued it. The question had sat between them. Soon it got too dark to see and the men joined them in the gloaming.
Claire thought back on that scene and wondered what Anne had meant, what Chet had been up to.
As if he were reading her mind, Chet asked, “Aren’t you going to ask me if I killed Anne?”
“Yes. At some point I will ask you that.”
“What if I tell you I didn’t? Would you take me back home?”
“No, Chet, I think you need to stay with us at least overnight.” Claire followed the car beams down the road. “What I want to know is why in the hell did you move her?”
“How’d you know that?”
“Found the blood on the carpet.”
“I couldn’t leave her lying in the middle of the floor. On the carpet. It didn’t seem right. She looked so cold. I just thought she’d be more comfortable in the bed, you know.”
Disassembling. “It looks bad that you moved her, Chet. Kind of suspicious.” As long as he was talking, she might as well ask him the big question. If she got him to answer it, Claire was
sure he wouldn’t change his story. “All right. So, tell me, did you kill her?”
“I might as well have.” He didn’t say another word the rest of the ride.
I
n what seemed like only minutes after Claire put her head down on the hard little pillow on the hard little cot in the jail’s spare room, she was being woken up by someone shaking her: the new deputy, red-eared and pimple-faced but nice Jeremy, who was saying, “Sheriff told me to wake you.”
Claire sat up, glad she had not bothered to strip out of her uniform, and tried to figure out what was going on and why Jeremy was shaking her. “What’s the matter, Jer?”
The new deputy was wringing his hands and nodding toward the hallway. “He hung himself with the sheet. You gotta come.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
“That guy that shot his wife.”
Chet. Claire bolted upright and asked, “Where is he?”
“The sheriff and Red are there. They’re administering CPR. Sheriff told me to wake you.”
“Fine, Jeremy. That’s fine.” Claire stumbled to the doorway and looked down the hall to where she had left Chet a few hours ago. She could hardly walk straight, her body listing from
sleeplessness to one side, her eyes gummed with sleep. “What time is it anyway?”
“Seven-thirty.”
Just as she started to walk toward Chet’s cell, the door at the end of the hallway burst open and a group of EMTs boiled down the corridor, with a gurney in tow. She stopped and watched them turn into the room, then came up behind them.
The room was filled with action, which was a good sign. That meant they were still trying. There was hope for Chet. As the EMTs worked on him, Claire could see his crumpled body on the floor at the foot of his cot, a tangled scarf of a sheet stretched out behind him, his head turned to one side, an oxygen mask strapped on, his eyes closed. Was he breathing? She couldn’t tell.
Something in Claire began to crumble. She remembered going over to Chet and Anne’s for a big venison dinner after hunting season last year. Rich had made stuffing with hen of the woods, she had found the time to make an apple pie with what was left of the fall fruits. The four of them had sat around the bountiful table and eaten and drank and laughed until their eyes were full of tears.
Why hadn’t she sat up all night and talked to Chet until he explained exactly what had happened? Why hadn’t she had him sedated so there was no chance of him waking and trying anything? She blamed herself for what had happened. But she had not thought he was suicidal. Plus, she knew he would be checked on hourly by the wardens.
Maybe she should have left him at home to take care of his animals. She shook her head. Then he might really be dead. Full
access to guns and pills and no one to check on him.
“We’ve got a pulse,” one of the EMTs said. “Let’s get him out of here.”
They moved him onto a neck board, hoisted him up onto the gurney, and rolled him down the hall and out the door.
Then they were gone, Red following behind. The quiet they left behind was disturbing. Claire, Sheriff Talbert, and Jeremy looked at each other.
“Fill me in here, Claire. What was Chet doing here? Was he under arrest?” the sheriff asked.
“Not really. Not yet. I just didn’t want him to be left alone in the house and I wanted to question him first thing in the morning.”
“You think he killed his wife?”
Claire wanted to be careful with what she said to the sheriff. This was a small county. The sheriff was close friends with Chet too. She needed to work the crime scene and find out what story would be revealed in the blood and fingerprints and bullet hole.
“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what happened.” She filled him in on what they had found at the Baldwin’s house.
The sheriff gave Claire an up-and-down scan. She was sure the bright lights and little sleep weren’t showing her at her best either. “I guess we’ll just have to see what happens. Why don’t you go back and try to catch a few more hours of sleep. I know what time you got here last night. I fear it’s going to be a long day.”
Claire watched the face of the man she had worked with for many years and trusted. The light in the jail cell and the early
morning didn’t do much for the sheriff’s pallor. He looked older than usual.
Claire said, “Stewey, I’ll say this—it doesn’t look good. What do you think? You know him pretty well. Could Chet do such a thing?”
Sheriff shook his head as if to rid it of his own dark thoughts. “Chet was a proud man. Never knew him to be violent. Who knows what any of us can do when we get pushed. But I can’t imagine what it would take to push Chet that hard.”
* * *
When Meg came downstairs in her long purple t-shirt that she wore as a nightie, the first thing she asked was, “Where’s Mom?”
Rich knew he couldn’t talk about what he had seen last night so he just said, “Work.”
This one word was enough explanation for Meg. She grabbed the Frosted Flakes out of the cupboard, the milk out of the fridge, and poured herself a cup of coffee. This was new for her this summer. She had just started drinking coffee. Rich was sure she thought it made her seem more grown-up. But then she put three teaspoons of sugar and a hefty slug of milk into it until the brew turned the color of chocolate milk, which rather ruined the adult effect.
Rich stood by the counter and blew on his own cup of real black coffee and tried not to think about Chet. He hadn’t slept well or long and he felt really shaky. Chet was a very close friend and his wife had died of a gunshot wound. He couldn’t get the image of the two of them on the bed together out of his mind.
But there was even more than that to what he was feeling. He had a horrible gut feeling that Claire was gunning for Chet. She had turned very cop at the scene and then had closed down about what she was thinking, but he could see it in her face when she looked at Chet. She thought he had killed his wife. And something about Claire thinking that kicked a hole in Rich’s guts. How could she think that of one of his best friends? What did that say about her?
Meg poured milk onto her cereal and then hit it with the back of her spoon to sink the floating cereal pieces. “Did she even come home last night?”
“No,” Rich answered.
* * *
“You’re her favorite,” Bill said, leaning over Amy’s desk. “You girls have to hang together.”
Amy ran her finger down the scar on her face, then quickly pulled her hand away. It was a bad habit she was trying to quit. The scar was nearly impossible to notice on her face, but she could still feel it, a tightness like a puckering where it sat on her cheekbone.
“She doesn’t have favorites. And we’re not girls. I just happened to be there. That’s all. That’s why she asked me to watch and report on the medical examiner’s findings. Could have been anyone,” Amy said as she looked up into his big smiling face. He had a dimple in his left cheek. She wanted to reach up and poke it with her finger, but she tried to resist touching him during
work. “You could have done it, Bill, but you left. You went home right at the end of your shift, like you always do. Anyways, you don’t like looking at dead bodies.”
“You got that right. The less I have to be in the morgue the better I like it. Give me drunks any day over dead bodies, especially Mr. Bloatie.”
“He was gross,” Amy agreed. “Did he seem familiar to you?”
“Nope. Never saw the guy before in my life.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Bill rolled his eyes. “When you’ve been in this business as long as I have you don’t forget a face.” He paused. “Even if it is all spongy from a week in the muddy Mississippi.”
“Speaking of his face, I’m in the midst of trying to track him down. The medical examiner figures that he’d been dead, at the most, a week, at the least, three days. Could you help me get on the computer and show me where the missing persons databases are? Is it by state?”
“Can’t, Ame. I’m off on patrol this morning. You’ll figure it out. It’s easy.”
Amy didn’t say anything. She was a better shot than Bill, but he was much more skilled on the computers.
Bill stood up to leave, then asked, “Hey, what happened with that guy that shot his wife?”
“I don’t think they know yet. Took him off to the hospital and I guess he was breathing. Hopefully he’s still alive.”
“I heard that he hung himself with strips of the sheet. He must have been really desperate.”
Amy gave Bill a slow look. “I think that attempting any form of suicide indicates a high level of desperation.”
Bill stared at her. “You sound just like her.”
“Like who?”
“Claire.” Bill tapped her on the nose with his pointer finger. “Scary. That’s the way she talks. Are you starting to be a Claire clone?”
Amy decided to break her rule of not touching him and picked up the report she had been going over and batted him with it.
After he ducked away from her swing, he asked, “Any chance you’ll feel like a pizza tonight?” he asked.
“Only if it comes with mushrooms.”
“Half of it can,” Bill said.
“So just tell me this, to find out if someone’s been reported missing, do I just go into the Wisconsin Public Records?”
“Depends on if they’re missing from Wisconsin.”
“I know. He’s just as likely to be a Minnesota guy. I’ll start on our side of the river, but plan to branch out later.”
“If it’s happened as recently as the medical examiner thinks, he might not be in the database yet. In fact, he probably won’t be. He might not even have been reported as missing yet.”
Amy stood up. “Okay, enough encouragement. Point me at the computer.”
Bill put his large hand on her shoulder and pushed her toward the door of the computer room.
Amy said hi to another deputy who was scrolling through a database of numbers and sat down in front of one of the free computers. A psychedelic pattern of blending and swirling colors mesmerized her. She watched the twirling colors for a few moments, then managed to find her way into the Wisconsin Missing Persons database.
Working the database wasn’t as hard as she had feared. She entered the data that she knew about their bloated man: red hair, blue eyes, 6 feet tall—probably around 200 pounds, but hard to tell because of the water gain—a small scar on his lower back that the coroner had called her about, and a tattoo on his left shoulder.
At first, she held off on the tattoo, just in case it wasn’t mentioned. She was hoping the tattoo would make all the difference. Could there be that many men out there sporting a tree tattoo?
Age parameters: Dr. Davis said he was probably between thirty-five and forty-five. She had looked at his teeth as she said that. Just like with horses, Amy had thought, looking for the wear pattern. Then there was the dental work. To be on the safe side, Amy entered 30 < >50, even though that was a pretty large range.
She was counting on the tree tattoo to help winnow down the possibilities.
Two hits. A forty-eight-year-old pharmaceutical rep from Green Bay, way on the other side of the state. Didn’t seem likely. The other was a thirty-one-year-old homeless vagrant. Again, the healthy, strong man that Amy had seen on the medical examiner’s table didn’t look like he had been missing any meals lately.
She started scrolling through the other recent missing persons and noted how most of them were under thirty and female: a nineteen-year-old girl, scholarship student at UW-Green Bay, pregnant, missing for five years; a twenty-eight-year-old woman who had diabetes that could render her unconscious; a fifty-year-old woman named Bethany, whose husband had been beating her, he had since been hit by a car; a twenty-one-year-old
girl who had left a bowling alley after closing, made a phone call at two-thirty in the morning and was never seen again.