The Hallows, page 9
“Wait, hold on, escorting? What do you mean escorting?”
“Just what I said. Escorting.”
“Patty was a prostitute?”
“I personally prefer escort, but if you want to put it that way, yeah. And that’s not all—Farah said the mayor, or a mayor, came in drunk one night after telling Patty he was leaving his wife for her. She didn’t say it was River Falls’ mayor, but I think we should have a chat with him. I asked Diana how much Patty was charging, and get this: two grand a date. That’s high end for New York, forget River Falls. There’s like maybe ten people in River Falls that can afford that. And Diana said Patty was uncomfortable going on dates with people she didn’t know, so her dates were almost always the same handful of older men from River Falls. The richest ones, I’m guessing.”
“Yeah, the ones that run this town and the county.”
“Don’t wuss out on me now, Gates. You got me to stay and you wanted this worked right. We’re working it right.”
“I’m telling you, Tatum, I interviewed Anderson myself once. He killed her.”
“Probably. Look, everything points to him, and I think we can get a conviction, but we gotta be sure. This one is too important not to be sure.”
She sighed. “We can’t let this get out. I know Hank, and he did everything he could to raise Patty well. If he found out she was escorting, it would kill him.”
“We got a bigger problem than that. When Russell Pritcher finds out she was an escort, he will make her look like Jack the Ripper. He’ll paint her to that jury as the worst person in the world and Anderson as a savior that was trying to help her and got blamed for a murder he didn’t commit. We need to figure out who was stalking her.”
“Well,” she said, exhaling loudly, “for now, we can’t hit those men up. I know them all. They have attorneys on retainer. If we go to them, they’ll clam up. Get me some more evidence, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“I will. And, um, be careful around those guys, huh? Never know.”
She chuckled. “I can handle myself, old man. Just get me that conviction.”
“Haven’t lost yet,” I said, no longer sure that was a point of pride.
My suit was wrinkled beyond repair, and I had brought only one with me. Didn’t think I’d be needing one at all. In the morning, I googled the nearest clothing shop and found it was in the next town over, about a half hour away. I bought the most expensive suits and shirts they had and drove back to River Falls.
When I got into the office, Jia and Will were already there.
“All right, boys and girls, time for business. Jia, where we at on the ME?”
“He finished the autopsy this morning. Said he’d be down at the coroner’s.”
“Will, how are we on witnesses?”
“Tried to interview the elderly couple that found the body, but they weren’t answering. Was going to go over there today.”
“Any new motions from the great Russell Pritcher?”
Jia said, “Got a call from his office asking if we needed to get any discovery to them before the preliminary hearing. Said I would check with you first.”
“I checked this funky state’s rules, and we’re under no obligation to give them anything before the prelim.”
Will said, “That doesn’t sound right.”
“Check rule seven. It’s right. Remember, this state is descended from cowboys and pioneers. Justice moved slow in the Wild West. So that means we need to get done as much as we can before the preliminary hearing next week so we know where we are and what we got. If there’s any way for this case to get dismissed, Russell Pritcher is going to find it.” I checked my watch. “Where’s Gates?”
“Meeting with the mayor.”
“The mayor, huh? Well, I’ve got some news on our dear old mayor. I’ll tell you on the way. Let’s go pay the ME a visit and see what he found on our girl.”
The coroner’s building looked like something you would see in an old Western movie. The interior was filled with paintings of cowboys and buffalo. A prayer carved into a wood block hung over the door. I didn’t see a single science journal or book on any of the bookshelves.
I walked over to the desk as Will went to find the coroner. Staring at his degrees, I saw only an undergraduate degree in biology. I checked the rules for coroners in Utah on my phone and confirmed what I’d already guessed: in Utah, you didn’t have to be a doctor to be a coroner. Another gift from the frontier towns of the 1800s. There weren’t enough doctors, so anybody who could fill in was allowed to run and be elected.
An older man with glasses, dressed in a vest and a white shirt, came in and said, “Damn rude to be interrupting a man’s breakfast to talk about the dead.”
“That’s what the taxpayers are paying you for, right? You’re the corpse whisperer.” I turned to his degree and pointed. “Tell me you spilled prune juice on your medical degree, and it’s just drying off somewhere.”
He took out a soda from a small fridge behind his desk and said, “I ain’t no doctor.”
I rubbed my head. Russell Pritcher was going to eat this guy for a snack. Our only hope was the medical examiner.
“Where’s the ME?”
“Your fancy doctor is downstairs. Feel free to find your own way.”
Lawrence Bryce, from the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner, was a tall guy with sandy-blond hair and glasses. I’d met him once before, on a case that involved a banker accused of killing his business partner. Lawrence had flown out to Miami to testify in the case, and, well, I hadn’t exactly been kind to him on the stand.
Lawrence stood beside a metal gurney containing a tarp over what was clearly a body. The room seemed sterile and smelled of antiseptic.
“Larry, how are ya?”
He looked at me and shook his head. “I was told you were the prosecutor on this. I was hoping it was just someone with the same name.”
“Hey, we both had jobs to do and I did mine.”
“You called me the Curly of medical examiners in a courtroom full of people.”
“Hey, Curly’s everyone’s favorite Stooge. It was a compliment.” I folded my arms and looked down at the body. “Let’s set that aside and try to put away the boys that did this, shall we?”
He had been filling out a form on a clipboard, which he set down on the counter. He pulled back the tarp.
Patty’s body had severely decomposed. Will groaned and looked away. Jia didn’t flinch. The Y-shaped incision was fresh, sewn over for the second time. I looked at her nails. They were still painted a fading pink.
“Tell me you got something.”
“Some. Why they let people without medical degrees become coroners in these rural counties I’ll never understand.”
“Yeah, it’s a real mystery. What’dya got?”
“Well, there’s not going to be much forensic evidence after an autopsy and burial, so you can forget about that. But there were a few interesting things. For one, she’s got cigarette burns over her body. That wasn’t in the initial reports.”
“Yeah, goof up by the boys in blue.”
“They’re fairly egregious injuries. I counted twenty-one cigarette burns over her body from head to toe. There was one on her right cornea.”
Will said, “Bastards.”
Lawrence glanced at him and then looked down to the body. “We had a couple fractured bones that weren’t in the coroner’s report. Her navicular bone on her right foot was fractured. Something heavy was probably dropped on it.”
“Or maybe someone stomped on it wearing a boot.”
“That would also explain it, yes. The lacerations across her body were also not mentioned.”
“It’s fixed now. But what I’m really concerned with is the time of death.”
“Hard to tell at this point, but I did send some photos to my entomologist on the larvae that the detectives took at the scene. He thinks they were too young for her to be exposed to the elements for four days. Lividity suggests she was killed at the scene, so more than likely she was dead less than a day before the witnesses found her.”
“He’ll testify to that?”
“I suppose, for what it’s worth after just looking at a few photos.”
“So if that’s accurate, it means she was probably tortured somewhere else.” I turned to Jia. “We need to find that somewhere else. Tweedledee and Tweedledum’s search of Anderson’s and Steven’s homes said they didn’t find anything. But if those boys killed her, I’ll bet you if we go through the basements, and I mean really go through them, we’ll find something. Get the forensic team from a bigger county down here, and tell them it’s high priority. We can’t trust our dear old mayor right now, so if they drag their feet, tell Gates to get our state rep to call their state rep or district attorney or sheriff or whatever. Just get them down here.”
“On it,” she said, taking out her phone and leaving the room.
“What about the rape?” I said, turning back to Lawrence.
“That I can’t help you with. The body is simply too degraded.”
I nodded, looking down at Patty’s ghostly white face, one eye closed and the other halfway open and rotted away. “What else?”
“That’s it. There’s just not enough for me to work with here.”
“Did you review the tox report? Anything I should be worried about in there?”
“No, luckily the coroner sent that to the state lab, so everything’s good there. Alcohol in her system but no narcotics.”
I nodded. “I appreciate you coming down, Larry.”
“I came down for her,” he said, pulling the tarp back over the body. “Not for you.”
26
With Jia running down a forensic team to search the boys’ homes, and a request from me to interview Patty’s best friend Cecily to see if she knew anything about Patty’s stalker, Will and I headed to the scene. Many lawyers didn’t visit the scene of a crime, but I always did, no matter what type of case. If it was shoplifting, I went to the store and wandered around; if it was a DUI, I went to where they were pulled over; if it was murder, I went to the scene and took my own photos and tried to imagine what my client and the victim felt.
“Up here,” Will said.
We were in a wooded area with a few clearings here and there. It was up a canyon so there weren’t that many people, and I’d only seen a few cars on the drive up. When we got out of the car, I could smell the pine trees and hear a stream nearby. Peaceful and quiet. A couple of picnic tables were near the stream.
We walked a trail through some trees. A small clearing about the size of a basketball court with tall grass was just beyond. A breeze blew, and the grass swayed with it. I tapped one of the pine cones at my feet with my shoe. The Hallows hadn’t changed even a little since I’d seen it last almost thirty years ago.
“I forgot how secluded this place is,” I said. “It hasn’t been developed at all.”
“No one really wants to move here, so there’s no need to build anything. We used to think the place was haunted when we were kids.”
“I remember someone killed themselves here when I was in elementary school. All the kids would go up after school to see if there was a ghost.”
“I don’t remember any suicides, but there was another murder here a while back,” Will said. “Some teens up here drinking, and one just, outa nowhere, smashed a bottle and stuck the business end into this other kid’s throat. Couldn’t even explain why he did it after. Said he just felt like he had to. I don’t blame people for not wanting to develop here.” He stopped, pointed. “Patty’s body was found over there.”
We walked to a small ditch in the middle of the clearing. It wasn’t wider than a couch, and it was about as long as one. I knelt down and looked from one end to the other. Then I looked from one end of the clearing to the other. It was a perfect spot for this kind of thing: far enough from the road and civilization that no one could hear screams. For this type of killing, with this type of brutality, I had no doubt that the killer or killers would’ve enjoyed hearing the screams before she died.
I looked out over the Hallows. The last time I had been here, I was eleven and with a group of friends. We left soon after coming here because we heard rocks falling down the hills, like someone, or something, was climbing down toward us.
On the north end of the clearing was a picnic table. The only indicator that this place was anywhere near civilization.
“The detectives said they found a toy near the picnic table, right?” I said.
“Yeah, a little monkey. Like an action figure.”
I rose and stared at the picnic table. It was maybe thirty feet away. Heading over there, I listened for cars but couldn’t hear them this far in. Nothing but the tall grass rippling in the breeze and the occasional bird.
Sitting down at the table, I placed my hands on the worn wood. The table tilted slightly to the right; the ground had moved underneath it. To the left, a trail led back into the woods.
“Where does that go?”
“A parking lot.”
We followed the path through the trees, and sure enough, there were a few parking spaces. A dirt road behind them led out through the forest and back into town.
I took out my phone and pulled up the file for the case. I’d had the secretary scan and email me all the reports. I looked at the photo of the doll: a white monkey with swords in its hands.
“There’s no dirt on this toy.”
“So?”
“So it means it wasn’t out here very long. In fact it looks brand new.” I looked up and around at the parking spaces and the trail leading out of the forest. “Why would a kid leave a brand-new toy? They usually hang on to these like gold.”
He shrugged. “Kids lose stuff all the time.”
“At a picnic table with nothing else around? I mean, he would’ve realized at some point the toy was missing, and his parents would’ve driven back here, right?”
“Maybe.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Maybe.”
I looked back to the ditch, and I remembered the photo Gates had shown me, Patty lying there with a child’s heart necklace around her neck. I wondered if her father had seen that photo.
I took a deep breath and then said, “What stores around here sell toys?”
27
Only two places in town sold toys: the Walmart and a small hobby shop. We drove to Walmart and walked up and down the toy aisles but didn’t see anything like the monkey. We asked a clerk if they carried anything similar, and she said she didn’t think so.
Next we hit the hobby shop. Walking in, Will said, “They could’ve ordered it online.”
“They could’ve. Make a note to check which stores carry it and might have shipped it here.”
Will made the note as I glanced around the store. I saw a bar with a soda fountain behind it and several stools in front of it. Posters of old science fiction movies were up on the walls. It was the type of place that probably had been on every street corner seventy years ago but seemed a relic of ancient history now.
The guy behind the counter had curly hair and glasses and a blue shirt with stains on the front. I approached him and showed him a picture of the monkey.
“You got this here?”
“Yeah,” he said, coming around the counter. He went back to the action figures aisle and pulled one down. I compared the photo and the toy: identical.
“Someone bought one of these here within the last few months. I need to know who it was.”
Will came up and said, “He’s with us, Mel. He’s good people. So far anyway.”
I grinned. “Nice.”
Mel rolled his eyes and said unhappily, “Let me go through the receipts, I guess.”
Luckily, Mel kept electronic receipts and was able to pull up the information before long.
“One person. Roscoe Mallory.”
“The football coach? You’re kidding me?”
“That’s what it says.”
My old pal Roscoe. I glanced at Will and then turned to Mel and said, “Thank you.”
We left the store and I put on my sunglasses. “I’ll go chat with him. I want you to help Jia with interviewing Cecily and getting a forensic team here ASAP. Something might be in one of those boys’ homes, and I want to know what it is.”
I imagined being back at your old high school was a nostalgic, pleasant experience for most people. For me it dredged up memories better left forgotten. Small-time jocks pushing me around, girls laughing at me, teachers that would throw erasers and hit us with rulers. I stood out on the field. The buildings looked run down, and the pavement in the parking lot was chipping with massive cracks running its entire length, but the football field was well manicured and taken care of. Not a blade of grass out of place.
As I entered, I stared at the lockers on either side of the hallway and at the trophy case off to the right near the gym. Classes were in session. I could hear the hum of teachers speaking in several rooms. I went to the front office and asked for Roscoe.
“He should be teaching social studies right now. Upstairs, second door on the right.”
“Thanks.”
In his classroom, surrounded by students, Roscoe looked even bigger than he had at the diner, with arm muscles that bulged underneath a white T-shirt with red trim and a ponderous belly that stretched the shirt to its limits. I stood at the doorway and smiled and said, “Just need a minute, Coach.”
He told the class to hang on and came out into the hallway.
We shook hands, and he asked how I liked being back in River Falls so far and I said, “Fine.”
He put his hands on his hips and glanced over his shoulder at the class. “What’s going on, Tatum?”
“I’m helping out Gates, prosecuting Patty Winchester’s case. I’m guessing you heard about it.”
“Small town, everybody knows everything.”
“What do you know about Patty? She went here, right?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I knew Patty pretty well. She was in my class a couple years back. Sweetest girl. The room would just light up when she came in. She helped one of the kids that was struggling. Tutored him every night so he could pass the class. Didn’t tell anyone, just did it. That’s the kind of kid she was, never wanted any credit for anything. She did it because it was the right thing to do. And her father—” He shook his head. “I can’t even imagine what Hank is going through. He’s got a big heart, and I’m afraid he’ll never recover. If it wasn’t for the fact that he’s still got his boy to look after, I mean, who knows what he would’ve done by now.”
