Barry’s current client was a veterinarian who either had or had not strangled his wife. A jury would answer that question very soon now, probably early next week, and at lunch Barry was full of the problems besetting a poor defense counsel merely trying to put his client in the best possible light. “The judge just isn’t gonna let me show the video in my summation,” he complained, crumbling a roll in vexation. His client, in happier times, had won a humanitarian award from some veterinarian’s association, and Barry insisted that no one who watched the video of the man’s acceptance speech would ever he able to convict him of anything more nefarious than littering. “He’s not even gonna let me show a photo of it.”
“Well,” Gwen said, being gentle, “that is kind of far from the subject at hand.”
“Which of course is what the judge insists. But if I were to just mention it, the award, that could be even worse than—”
“Bartlett,” Gwen said.
Barry frowned at her. “What?”
“Bartlett pear,” Gwen said, “Mrs. Bartlett. Bosky Rounds.”
“Gwen,” he said, “is this supposed to be making sense?”
Beaming at him, Gwen said, “All at once, it does.”
7
When Trooper Louise Rawburton signed in at the Deer Hill barracks at three fifty-two that afternoon, she was one of sixteen troopers, eleven male and five female, assigned to the four-to-midnight shift, two troopers per patrol car, doing this three-month segment with Trooper Danny Oleski, who did most of the driving, which was okay because it left her more freedom to talk. Danny didn’t mind her yakking away, so it made for a happy patrol car, and if it wasn’t for the system of rotation she knew she and Danny would have been happy as a team on their tours of duty forever.
However, the system of rotation was, everybody agreed, all in all a good idea. Put two straight men who get along with each other into the confines of a patrol car for several hours a day and they’ll swap old stories, tell jokes, recommend movies and generally make the time go by. Make it one straight man and one straight woman and they’ll do all the same things, but after a while they’ll start to smile on each other a little differently, they’ll start to touch, start to kiss, and down that road lies marital unhappiness and inefficient policing. A three-month rotation is usually short enough to keep that sort of thing from happening, to almost everybody’s relief.
When Louise joined Danny and the other fourteen troopers in the shape-up room for the day’s assignments from Sgt. Jackson, she expected today’s tour to be more of the same: roadblocks. For over a week now, most of their on-duty time had been spent mounting roadblocks, the only variant being that the roadblocks were shifted to slightly different locations every day.
No one would say that the roadblocks had been completely unsuccessful. A number of expired licenses had been found, lack of insurance, faulty lights, the occasional drunk. But as to the purpose of the roadblocks, to nab the three men who’d destroyed three armored cars and made off with the fourth, full of cash, over a week ago, not a glimmer, The one man who’d been captured, and subsequently lost, was the result of a tip from a deli clerk who’d been passed one of the known stolen bills. Still, the powers that be felt better if they could mess up the whole world’s schedules by littering the highways and byways with roadblocks, thus assuring the whole world that something was being done, so that’s what Louise and Danny and the rest had been up to and would continue to do.
Except not. “This afternoon,” Sgt. Jackson told them, pacing back and forth in front of where they stood on the black linoleum floor in the big square empty room with tables and chairs stacked along the rear, “our orders are a little different.”
An anticipatory sigh of relief rose from the sixteen, and Sgt. Jackson gave a little shrug and said, “We’ll see. Ladies and gentlemen, our mission has changed. We’re not going to stand around any longer and wait for those fugitives to come to us. We are going to actively search for them by trying to find that stolen money.”
One of the troopers said, “How we supposed to do that, Sarge? Hang out in delis?”
“Those three did not manage to transport their loot away from this part of the world,” Jackson told him. “That’s the belief we’re operating from. Now, it’s a big untidy pile, that money, and the idea is, if we look for it, we’ll find it, and if we find it, the fugitives won’t be too far away from it.”
There was general agreement in the room on that point, and then Jackson said, “What our job is today, you are each getting a sector, and you are to physically eyeball every empty or abandoned building in that sector. Empty houses, barns, everything. On the table by the door there’s a packet for each patrol, with your sector laid out in it, and by the way, a new suspect sketch on one of the fugitives. This is supposed to be closer to the real man.”
“What’ll they think of next?” asked a wit.
Riding shotgun, Louise ran an eye down the printout of the roads and intersections in their sector, then unfolded the new suspect sketch and studied it. “Oh, that one,” she said.
Danny, driving, glanced once and away. “That one,” he agreed.
“He doesn’t look as mean this time,” she decided.
“He was always a good boy,” Danny said.
“Did somebody ever say that in a movie?” Louise wanted to know. “You hear it all the time.”
“Beats me.”
Putting away the sketch, Louise went back to the printout, studied it some more, and said, “We should start from Hurley.”
“Real backwoods stuff.”
“That’s what they gave us. Oh!” she said, surprised and delighted, “St. Dympna!”
“Say what?”
“That’s where I went to church, when I was a little girl. St. Dympna.”
“Never heard of it,” he said. “What kind of name is that?”
“She was supposed to be Irish. Most churches with saints’ names are Roman Catholic, but we weren’t. We were United Reformed.” Louise laughed and said, “The funny thing is, when they founded the church, they just wanted some unusual name to attract attention, so they picked St. Dympna, and then, too late, they found out she’s actually the patron saint of insanity.”
Danny looked at her. “You’re putting me on.”
“I am not. Turned out, there’s a mental hospital named for her in Belgium. When I was a kid, that was the coolest thing, our church was named for the patron saint of crazy people.”
“Is it still going?”
“The church? Oh, no, it got shut down, must be more than ten years ago.”
“Ran out of crazy people,” Danny suggested.
“Very funny. No, it’s really way out in the sticks. There weren’t so many small farms after a while, and people moved closer to town, until there was almost nobody left to go there, and nobody could afford to keep it up. It shut down when I was in high school. There was some hope an antiques shop would buy it, but it never happened.”
“So that’s got to be one of the places on our list.”
“It sure is.” Louise smiled in nostalgia, and looked at the road ahead. “I’m looking forward to seeing it again.”
8
Mrs. Bartlett was sorry to see Captain Robert Modale and Trooper Oskott leave Bosky Rounds. Not that the room would go begging; this time of year, she always had a waiting list, and would surely fill that room again no later than Monday. But she’d liked the captain, found him quiet and restful, and a happy surprise after the unexpected departure of Mr. and Mrs. Willis.