“That’s right,” Sam said, looking helplessly at Eve. “I live here.”
Latovsky turned back to Eve, eyebrows raised.
“We’re separated,” she said quietly.
“Ah,” he said in a that-explains-it voice. “And you’d never visited before.”
“No.”
“Why now, Mrs. Klein?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were you hoping to reconcile?”
“Is that any of your business?” she snapped.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve got a murder, Mrs. Klein, a very nasty murder. Not sure yet what’s my business and what isn’t. Uh... perhaps you’d like to have a lawyer present.”
“For what?” Sam cried. “She didn’t do anything.”
“No. Of course not,” the big cop said. “No question that it was a man who did the butchering.”
Eve’s stomach heaved.
“Now, where were we?” Latovsky said pleasantly. “You were lost.”
“I took the wrong turn at the lake,” she said hoarsely.
“Oh? And how did you find your way to the lake?”
She told him about the bartender in the bowling alley because the bartender might tell someone she’d been there, and that someone might tell someone else.
“So you did have directions,” Latovsky said.
“Verbal directions. And I was nervous and got confused at the lake, and I guess I turned the wrong way.”
“Confused,” he said quietly. “Okay... then what?”
“I kept going, hoping I’d get to number three hundred or see lights from a house where I could ask directions or something.”
“But you didn’t.”
She remembered the lights of houses across the lake. They’d been close to shore, probably hidden from the road by trees like this house. “No,” she said, taking a chance.
“But you did stop at the old Carlin place.”
She nodded.
“Why?” he asked gently.
There’d been a path in the vision; it had been overgrown, but definitely a path that must’ve led from the road to the clearing.
“I saw a path,” she said. “I thought it might go somewhere.”
“I see. So you ignored the lit-up roadhouse and the driveways that obviously did go somewhere and picked an overgrown path in the middle of the woods, in the dark.”
“I have a flashlight,” she said, quickly. Frances insisted that Larry put flashlights in the cars’ glove compartments and check them once a month. “In case,” Frances had said. No one ever asked in case of what.
“A flashlight.”
“That’s right.”
“But no other light. No indication of habitation,” he said.
“Just the path.”
“Yes, of course. The path. Pretty overgrown, that path...”
“Yes, but it’s there,” she said stubbornly.
“Pretty long way from the road to the clearing where we found her.”
“Not so far,” she said.
He leaned back; the chair creaked a little.
“Okay. You left your car, went up a path with a flashlight into the woods to the clearing that had once been Steve Carlin’s cow pasture, saw the woman and the shed. But didn’t notice the farmhouse foundation or the stone chimney...”
“No.”
“Then what did you do, Mrs. Klein?”
“I don’t remember. I was very upset.”
“I can imagine,” he said drily. “So you must’ve raced down that same path back to your car...”
She nodded.
“Then raced back the way you’d come. Presumably still lost.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t stop at the roadhouse to call the police.”
“No,” she whispered. “But as I said I was very...”
“Upset.”
“Yes.”
“So you went back to the T of Old Rimer Road and this time took the correct turn.”
“Yes.”
“How long do you think all this took, Mrs. Klein?”
“I have no idea.”
“Ballpark? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour?”
“I don’t know,” she mumbled. He had set some kind of trap, she felt it closing on her.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Mrs. Klein. Without a helicopter that trip around the lake on Lakeshore—which is the only road—takes at least an hour, and even then you could break an axle. So it took you at least half an hour to forty minutes to get back to Old Rimer Road where Lakeshore T’s and another ten minutes to get here. And on the way, you didn’t just pass the roadhouse, Mrs. Klein, you crossed its parking lot because the road cuts through it. And Frank’s is lit up like a Tokyo whorehouse. Town fathers’ve tried for years to get Frank to cool it on the lights: issued summonses, threatened boycotts, you name it. Nothing works; it’s lit night and day, summer and winter. So you had to see it, had to figure they had a phone you could use to call for help. But you didn’t.”
Latovsky leaned forward so his head was only a few inches from hers. She leaned back, trying to put distance between them, but was trapped in the chair. She smelled the warm scent of his hair, a limey aftershave, and the starch in his shirt. It was almost two in the morning, he’d probably been sound asleep when they called him about the woman in the clearing, yet he’d put on a jacket, clean shirt, and tie.
He said, “The call from your husband to 911 came in at exactly twelve minutes after eleven. That right, Mike?”
“Right, Lieutenant.” The little man grinned wolfishly.
“Eleven twelve,” Latovsky said. “Fortunately, Mike—Sergeant Lucci here—was on duty tonight and knew exactly which green-roofed shed your husband meant, having lived on Raven Lake when he was a kid. Now, Mrs. Klein, we may be a bunch of rednecked shit-kickers up here, but we do have a helicopter, and in view of the fact that this looked like the fifth murder in our backwater serial—”
“Fifth!” Eve cried.
“That’s right, Mrs. Klein. Four last summer and fall, now one this spring. Bastard seems to like warm weather. So, since this was the fifth, and everyone’s understandably worked up, Sergeant Lucci got the use of the helicopter and was at the Carlin back pasture by... what, Mike... ?” He kept his eyes on Eve. “Eleven thirty?”
“Eleven thirty on the nose, Lieutenant,” the smaller one said. “And the woman was still warm, Mrs. Klein,” Latovsky went on. “It was down to forty-five by then. Cools off fast here when it decides to, so it had gone from sixty to forty-five by eleven. But she was still warm, Mrs. Klein. Her blood was hot and liquid... her guts steamed...”
Eve’s skin turned cold and slimy and she knew she was going to faint.
“The pine needles were sopping wet,” Latovsky intoned.
“Stop it,” Sam cried. “For Christ’s sake, stop!”
Eve’s eyes rolled back in her head. Any second now, she’d pass out and slide bonelessly out of the chair to the floor. Let it be soon, she prayed, let him stop...
But she stayed conscious and the big cop’s voice kept battering her. “Even the pine needles were still wet with blood, Mrs. Klein, hadn’t started drying even at the outer edges of the patch she lay on.
“Do you hear me,” he snarled, “do you... goddamn it...”
Her eyes snapped open, looked into his, and saw utter contempt. She didn’t get it. As far as he knew she’d gotten mixed up about the times and hadn’t stopped immediately to report the corpse in the woods. Wrong, silly, and maybe inconvenient for the police, but hardly contemptible. But he was looking at her as if she were the killer or worse. Then she put it together.