Then Officer Sweeney turned away and sat back down at his desk.
Chief Crow winked at us. “Happy trails, boys.”
I stared at him for a few moments as thunder rattled the windows in the tiny office. Then I nodded and turned to go. Just as Bunny opened the door for me, Crow said. “Welcome to Pine Deep.”
I turned and met his eyes for a few long seconds. He neither blinked nor looked away. For reasons I can’t adequately explain, we nodded to one another, and then I followed Top and Bunny out of the office. As we walked to the car, I could feel eyes watching me.
-5-
The Safe House
August 16; 6:28 P.M.
We got back in the car.
“Okay,” said Bunny, “that was freaking weird.”
No one argued.
“Want me to run him through MindReader?” asked Top.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know him from somewhere.”
“Cop thing?” asked Bunny. “You do a shared-jurisdiction gig with Pine Deep?”
“No.”
“Something social? FOP weenie roast.”
“Cute. But, no. I don’t think I’ve met him, but there’s something banging around in the back of my brain about him. Crow. Could be a martial arts thing.”
“He train?” asked Bunny.
“Yes,” Top and I said together.
Top added, “Not karate, though. No calluses on his knuckles.”
“Has them on his hands, though,” I said, touching the webbing around my thumb and index finger. I had a ring of callus there, too. “Kenjutsu, or something similar.”
“Kid uses his knuckles, though,” Top said. “Hard-looking son of a bitch. Looks like he could go a round or two.”
A few fat raindrops splatted on the windshield and the glass was starting to fog. I hit the defrost and waited while Bunny called it in to Bug, our computer guru at the Warehouse. Bug did a search through MindReader and got back to us before we’d driven two blocks.
“Plenty of stuff here,” he said. “Malcolm Crow grew up in Pine Deep. Medical records from when he was a kid show a lot of injuries. Broken arms, facial injuries . . . stuff consistent with physical abuse.”
“Anyone charged for that?”
“No. His mother died when he was little. He and his brother were raised by his father, who has a lo-o-o-o-ng record of arrests for public drunkenness, DUI, couple of barroom brawls.
Sounds like he was the hitter. Wow . . . get this. His brother was murdered by a serial killer thirty-five years ago. Your boy was the only witness. A couple of dozen victims total before the killer went off the radar. Possibly lynched by the townies, and the local police may have been involved in that.”
“Lovely little town,” Top said under his breath.
“Chief Crow was a cop for a while,” Bug continued. “Then was a drunk for a long time.
He sobered up and opened up a craft and novelty store, and helped design a haunted hayride for a Halloween theme park. All of this was before that trouble they had there. Crow was deputized by the mayor about a month before the Trouble, and—here’s another cool bit—the deputation was because another serial killer was in town killing people. Thirty years to the day from when Crow’s brother was killed. Freaky.”
“Damn,” I said. “What else you got?”
“He’s married. Wife is Val Guthrie-Crow. Hyphenates her last name. And they have two kids. One natural—Sara—and one adopted, Mike.”
“Mike? What was his birth name?”
“Same as he’s using now. Michael Sweeney. Never changed it.”
“What else?”
“Crow, his wife, and Mike Sweeney were all hospitalized after the trouble. Various injuries. Their statements say that they don’t remember what happened and they claimed everything was a blur,” Bug said. “That more or less fits because the town water supply was supposed to be spiked with LSD and other party favors.”
“Do we have anything linking Crow to the Trouble itself? Any involvement with white supremacist movements, anything at all?”
“No. A couple of other guys on the Pine Deep police force might have been involved, though, including the chief at that time.”
“But nothing that would connect Crow to it?”
“Nothing.”
“What are his politics?”
“Moderate with a tilt to the left. Same for the missus.”
“And Sweeney?”
“Registered independent but has never voted. Oh . . . hold on. Got a red flag here. Looks like Sweeney’s adopted father—another asshole who liked to hit kids, if I’m reading this right—was one of the men suspected of orchestrating the attack on the town.”
“What about the kid?”
“I hacked the Pine Deep PD files and it looks like the stepfather filed a report for assault. The kid decked him and ran away.”
I glanced at Top. “You read the kid as a bad guy?”
He shook his head, then nodded, then shrugged. “I really couldn’t get a read on him, Cap’n.”
I thanked Bug and told him to call us if he got anything else.
“So, what d’you think, Boss?” asked Bunny. “Crow one of the good guys or one of the bad guys?”
“No way to tell. We’re not even sure we have any bad guys in this. Burke could be shacked up with some chick.”
“And doing what?” asked Top. “Making crank calls to the AIC?”
“And terrorists?” added Bunny.
I grinned. “Yeah, yeah.”
We drove through the town, which takes less time than it does to tell it. A couple of stoplights. Rows of craft shops. A surprising number of cafes and bars, though most of them looked run down. More for drinking than eating, I thought. The biggest intersection had the Terrance Wolfe Memorial Medical Center across the street from the Saul Weinstock Ball Field. The hospital looked new; the ball field was overgrown and a hundred crows huddled in a row along the chain-link fence. Ditto for the hospital.
I noted it away and kept driving. The place was starting to get to me, and that was weird because I had worked a lot of shifts in West Baltimore, which was probably the most depressing place on earth. Poverty screamed at you from every street corner, and there was a tragic blend of desperation and hopelessness in the eyes of every child. Yet this little town had a darker tone to it, and my overactive imagination wondered if the storm clouds ever let the sun shine down. Looking at these streets was like watching the sluggish flow of a polluted river. You know that there’s life beneath the grime and the toxicity, but at the same time you feel that life could not exist there.
We left town and turned back onto Route A-32 as it plunged south toward the Delaware River. This was the large part of the township, occupied for the first mile by new suburban infill—with cookie-cutter development units, many still under construction, and overbuilt McMansions. More than three quarters of the houses had FOR SALE signs staked into the lawns. A few were unfinished skeletons draped in tarps that looked like body bags.
Then we were out into the farm country and the atmosphere changed subtly, from something dying to something that was still clinging to life. Big farms, too, like the kind you’d expect to see in the Midwest. Thousands of acres of land, miles between houses. Endless rows of waving green cornfields bright with pumpkins, and row upon row of vegetables. A paint-faded yellow tractor chugged along the side of the road, driven by an ancient man in blue coveralls. He smoked a cheap pipe that he took out of his mouth to salute us as we went by.
“We just drive into the nineteen forties?” asked Bunny.
“Pretty much.”