“I asked if you saw her with anyone.”
He lowered his head more. “Why are you being like this?”
“Hey,” she said softly. She squeezed his shoulder. “You know you’re not in trouble, right? You’re going to be fine.” She felt some of the tension ease out of him.
“You’re being so mean.”
She was torn between wanting to slap him or put him to bed with his favorite binky and a cup of warm milk.
“I’m just trying to get some answers, Tripp. You know how it is. Just trying to do my job.”
“I feel you, I feel you.” She doubted that, but he knew the script. Regular guy, Tripp Helmuth. Working hard or hardly working.
She gripped his shoulder more firmly. “But you need to understand this situation. A girl died. And these people she ran with? They aren’t your friends and you aren’t going to stay hard or not rat or any of that crap you’ve seen in movies, because this isn’t a movie, this is your life, and you have a good life, and you don’t want to mess it up, yeah?”
Tripp kept his eyes on his shoes. “Yeah, okay. Yeah.” She thought he might cry.
“So who did you see with Tara?”
When Tripp was done talking, Alex leaned back. “Tripp?”
“Yeah?” He kept staring at his shoes—ridiculous plastic sandals, as if summer never stopped for Tripp Helmuth.
“Tripp,” she repeated, and waited for him to raise his head and meet her eyes. She smiled. “That’s it. We’re done. It’s over.” You don’t ever have to think about that girl again. How you fucked her and forgot her. How you thought she might give you a good deal if you made her come. How it got you off to be with someone who felt a little dangerous. “We good?” she asked. This was the language he understood.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going to let this go any further, I promise.”
And then he said it and she knew he wouldn’t tell anyone about this conversation—not his friends, not the Bonesmen. “Thank you.”
That was the trick of it: to make him believe he had more to lose than she did.
“One last thing, Tripp,” she said as he made to scurry back toward the dining hall. “Do you have a bike?”
Alex pedaled across the green, past the three churches, then down to State Street and under the highway. She had about two hundred pages of reading to do if she didn’t want to fall behind this week, and possibly a monster hunting her, but right now she needed to talk to Detective Abel Turner.
Once you were off campus, New Haven lost its pretensions in fits and starts—dollar stores and grimy sports bars shared space with gourmet markets and sleek coffee spots; cheap nail salons and cell-phone hubs sat next to upscale noodle shops and boutiques selling small, useless soaps. It left Alex uneasy, as if the city’s identity kept shifting in front of her.
State Street was just a long stretch of nothing—parking lots, power lines, the train tracks to the east—and the police station was just as bad, an ugly, muscular building of oatmeal-colored slabs. There were dead spaces like this all over the city, entire blocks of massive concrete monoliths looming over empty plazas like a drawing of the future from the past.
“Brutalist,” Darlington had called them, and Alex had said, “It does sort of feel like the buildings are ganging up on you.”
“No,” he’d corrected. “It’s from the French, brut. As in raw, because they used bare concrete. But, yes, it does feel like that.”
There had been slums here before, and then money had poured into New Haven from the Model Cities program. “It was supposed to clean everything up, but they built places no one wanted to be. And then the money ran out and New Haven just has these… gaps.”
Wounds, Alex had thought at the time. He was about to say “wounds,” because the city is alive to him.
Alex looked down at her phone. Turner hadn’t replied to her texts. She hadn’t worked up the nerve to call, but now she was here and there was nothing else to do. When he didn’t answer, she hung up and dialed back again, and then again. Alex hadn’t been anywhere near a police station since after Hellie died. Not only Hellie died that night. But to think of it in any other terms, to think of the blood, the pale pudding of Len’s brain clinging to the lip of the kitchen counter, set her mind rabbiting around her skull in panic.
At last Turner answered.
“What can I do for you, Alex?” His voice was pleasant, solicitous, as if there were no one else he’d rather speak to.
Reply to my goddamn texts. She cleared her throat. “Hi, Detective Turner. I’d like to speak to you about Tara Hutchins.”
Turner chuckled—there was no other word for it; it was the indulgent laugh of a seventy-year-old grandfather, though Turner couldn’t have been much over thirty. Was he always like this at the office? “Alex, you know I can’t talk about an active investigation.”
“I’m outside the police station.”
A pause. Turner’s voice was different when he answered, a bit of that jolly warmth gone. “Where?”
“Right across the street.”
Another long pause. “Train station in five.”
Alex walked Tripp’s bike the rest of the way up the block to Union Station. The air was soft, moist with the promise of snow. She wasn’t sure if she was sweaty from the ride or because she was never going to get used to talking to cops.
She propped the bike against a wall by the parking lot and sat down on a low concrete bench to wait. A Gray hurried past in his undershorts, checking his watch and bustling along as if afraid he was going to miss his train. You’re not going to make that one, buddy. Or any of the rest.
She scrolled through her phone, keeping one eye on the street as she searched Bertram Boyce North’s name. She wanted a little context before she went asking the Lethe library questions.
Luckily, there was plenty online. North and his fiancée were celebrities of a kind. In 1854, he and his betrothed, the young Daisy Fanning Whitlock, had been found dead in the offices of the North & Sons Carriage Company, long since demolished. Their portraits were the first link under New Haven on the Connecticut Haunts site. North looked handsome and serious, his hair more tidily arranged than it had been in death. The only other difference was his clean white shirt, unmarred by bloodstains. Something cold slithered up her spine. Sometimes, despite her best efforts, she forgot she was seeing the dead, even with the gore splattered all over his fancy coat and shirt. Seeing this stiff, still black-and-white photo was different. He is moldering in a grave. He is a skeleton gone to dust. She could have what was left of him dug up. They could stand by the edge of his tomb together and marvel at his bones. Alex tried to shake off the image.
Daisy Whitlock was beautiful in that dark-haired stony-eyed way that girls of that time were. Her head was tilted slightly, only the barest hint of a smile on her lips, her curls parted in the middle and arranged in soft loops that left her neck bare. Her waist was tiny and her white shoulders emerged from a froth of ruffles, a posy of mums and roses clutched in her delicate hands.
As for the factory where the murder had taken place, parts of it hadn’t yet been finished at the time of North’s murder and it was never completed. North & Sons moved their operations to Boston and continued to do business until the early 1900s. There were no photographs of the crime scene, only lurid descriptions of blood and horror, the gun—a pistol North had kept in his new offices in case of intruders—still gripped in his hand.