That one was Lincoln Wilmott, physician and, also, medical examiner for the township of Drum Ridge. He arrived — Stutz showed his wrist watch to Kin, who wrote down 1:26 — in a run-of-the-mill two-door sedan. “Well, well, what have we here?” He was a husky man in robust middle age, bright and buoyant, popular after five years in town. “Has Dr. Ackerman been here?”
Priddy had come up with him from the junction, and now said, “With bells on, Dr. Wilmott. He must be in his seventies. You’d think he’d call it quits.”
Wilmott looked at him, up and down. “Dr. Ackerman’s seventy-nine. He hangs on, I suppose, because that’s his whole life and always has been.” He turned to Stutz. “It would be easier for me if you moved the body into the ambulance.”
In ten minutes he was through, said he would make his report to the coroner; and he left with a pleasant nod.
Stutz looked around morosely, saying, “I guess that about wraps it up here for the time being. One of you boys will have to finish out Boagard’s Pike patrol. Who?”
Kin hung in the background pretending interest in the notes on his clip-board. Stutz skimmed a glance toward him, paid no attention to Phelps’s offer, nor to Priddy’s desire to type up his shorthand notes. He gave a noisy blast through his pipe.
“You, Priddy,” he said. And to Kin: “I’ll ride back with you, Kinsland. You, Decker,” he said to the trooper who had come up with Phelps, “take back poor Boagard’s buggy.”
The brown leaves sailed and spiraled in the headlights’ glare on the drive down the Hake Mountain road; they snapped and clattered against the car’s underparts. Stutz was screwed up in the corner with his watch cap almost down to his eyebrows.
He said, “Kinsland, I’ve only been at Drum for about three months, and maybe I catch on slow. Anyhow, I don’t get you.”
“I’m sorry, sir.” Kin was wary. He cleared his throat. “Haven’t I been doing my work right?”
“By the book, yes. But when I first came here I went over the dossier on all the troopers. There’s a lot in yours about initiative, alertness, competence, quick to take a calculated risk — stuff like that. On the ball. In their pitching extra innings.” His pipe made a loud noise. “If you’ve got a beef against me, let’s have it. And don’t bother dressing it up with ‘sir’ this and ‘sir’ that. Dish it out.”
Kin laughed outright, spontaneously. “What? For Pete’s sake, sir!” And he dropped his guard. “If it was anything as simple as that—” He got his guard up again, quick. And because he didn’t know how to explain himself, he lied. “Maybe for a while there — before you came — I was too much of an eager beaver. Too much of that stuff and you’re in the other troopers’ hair. You know?”
Stutz looked at his pipe and then spoke as if he hadn’t been listening. “Could be,” he said in a casual way, “you’re losing your guts. Happens. Some get ’em back, some don’t. Some don’t try. They just stick it out — polite, respectful, sticking to the book. And comes pension time, they get the same as any other man. It’s a living.”
The taste in Kin’s mouth was bitter, acrid. The lump that rose in his throat was soft and mushy and sickening. He hit the throttle, swung off Hake, and streaked up the Turnpike. He eased up only a little bit for the Drum Ridge exit and was on the throttle again, hard. He snaked the car viciously up the barracks driveway and slammed down the brakes in front of the square granite building.
Stutz yawned a little and rubbed his eyes. He got out of the car, said, “Kid stuff,” and went inside.
They were all there in the central room when Kin slipped in a few minutes later. Troopers were all over the place — not a single man in bed upstairs. Reporters and news photographers had come in from the nearest city and were milling around along with a radio man lugging a tape recorder. McGraw looked beat-up by this time; so did DiPolo. Pots of black coffee, cups, plates of sandwiches were set up on a card table. Kin stood around on the edge of it all, listening.
Why, he kept asking himself, didn’t anyone mention the reasonable similarity between the deaths of Boagard and Harry Eaves? He kept on listening, looking, but no one mentioned it. Why not? Or had he been too close to Harry’s death, remembered too much or imagined too much? But on the night of May 10, late, a filling-station man on the Hillsboro road saw a police car flash past in pursuit of a speeder. Half an hour later, and only five miles from the filling station, the driver of a milk-tanker found Harry sprawled on the road twenty feet from his patrol car. Dead.
Harry had been shot clean through the heart and had died instantly. Had he been careless in not radioing to Drum that he was in pursuit of a stolen car? Or had he known the driver and, like Boagard, overhauled him and tried to reason with him? The consensus at the barracks was that Harry in his haste and inexperience, and not wishing to drive one-handed while using the radio-phone, had risked running down a known stolen car before first reporting in by radio. Well, Kin told himself, if that was the consensus—
“Hey, Kin. On the phone over here,” McGraw yelled. He pointed to one of three on his desk. “That one. Katherine Eaves.”
Kin picked it up. “Katherine?”
“Katherine! Yes, Katherine!” Her voice was high, strident, as if in wild outrage or anger. “And only inexperienced troopers get killed-killed!”
He ducked his ear away from the phone, baffled and tongue-tied. And the next instant he realized she had hung up. He stared stupidly at McGraw, who managed a wry, haggard grin, touching his own ear as if the stridency on the phone had reached him too. Kin looked ill. He turned and stared at DiPolo, who looked back at him with a kind of exhausted irony.
“Couldn’t the Old Man even trust you to finish up the night patrol for poor old Boag? How’d you live with yourself, buster?”
Kin gave him a sad look, with no bewilderment in it. He said, “Say that again, Lulu. Tomorrow, sometime, when you know what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying it right now!” DiPolo shouted. “Yellow! Yellow!”
Kin looked around — at McGraw, at half a dozen other troopers; at Stutz in his corner office, who looked back, blinking, through the open door. “Warm in here — getting warm,” Kin said. He looked again at McGraw, at his heavy red face, the beetling eyes, the massive hunched shoulders. “You think I’m yellow, Mac?” he said softly.
“Don’t ask me,” McGraw said. “You were told by somebody else.”
“By a little guy, Mac. Five-feet-seven, about one-forty. You want to say it, Mac? If you do, let’s go outside and you say it.”
Stutz came out of his office, jangling keys on a ring. “Cut out this kid stuff. Kinsland, Boagard’s keys. Go down and clean out his locker and bring the stuff to my office.”
When Kin returned to the central room ten minutes later everybody looked washed out and the high crackling tension had passed. He carried an armful of clothing and the square strongbox to the corner office and they found the key to the box and opened it. Stutz called in McGraw to witness and itemize the contents. Two bankbooks, a sheaf of receipts, a Bible, a stack of old photographs, sixteen dollars in bills, a dozen pamphlets and a book, a bundle of letters — pink or blue paper — and a newspaper clipping of his wife’s death five years ago. The quiet, tough, strict man’s little hoard of things he must have considered too personal to leave lying about. The men around the desk read the clipping, shook their heads; and they leafed the pamphlets and only McGraw and Stutz shook their heads.
Kin didn’t shake his head. He felt a slow crawling along his spine and his whole body stiffened as if to stop it. The pamphlets and the book reminded him of something — something Katherine had once told him, amused about it, laughing and forgetting it the next minute. As he had. “Sir,” Kin said.