“Right this way, gentlemen. Nicole, thank you. You’re dismissed.”
Lyle raised his bushy gray eyebrows at Russ, who shrugged. They followed Smith into a shadowy room of faceless metal file cabinets and a wide countertop workstation with three computers. One of them had what looked like a VCR player slaved to the CPU.
“I’m hoping to get the funding to convert the security cams to digital, but until then, we have to translate the actual tape into computer images.” Smith rolled a chair in front of the augmented machine. “This enables us to lighten the images, get better resolution, blow things up-everything we need to better identify someone.” He pointed to another wheeled work chair. “Chief, why don’t you have a seat.” He flicked on the monitor. “The ATM report indicated that the flagged card was used at nineteen-forty-seven hours.”
Lyle caught Russ’s eye and made a face.
“I’ve advanced the tape to nineteen-thirty. I’m putting it on fast forward until we get to the incident time.” He opened a menu and clicked on a selection, and the monitor filled with a grainy black-and-white image of the floor, door, and part of the outer wall of the ATM kiosk. Numbers indicating the hour, minute, and second flickered by in the lower left-hand corner. As they watched, a woman with a toddler, an umbrella, and several large carrier bags entered, dropped the bags, folded the umbrella, took out cash, scolded the toddler, and left, all in the triple time of a Keystone Kop.
“You ever see any funny stuff on these?” Lyle asked.
Smith looked at him. “All the time.”
The tape showed floor, partial wall, glass, edge of door. Russ watched the numbers hurtling toward 19:40. Then 19:42. Then 19:45.
“Slow it down!” He rolled closer to the screen.
Smith hit a key and the action slowed to normal speed. Someone entered the kiosk in a slicker and rain hat.
“That looks like a woman,” Lyle said. “Look, she’s got a purse.”
“Yeah,” Russ agreed. She was hefting two large Kmart bags. They watched as she put them down, dug through her purse, and after a search of two minutes, eighteen seconds, pulled out the ATM card. “Can’t you get a better angle than this?” he asked Smith. “I can’t see anything but her hat.”
Smith hit another key and the action slowed further. “She’ll have to reach up to punch in her PIN number. When she does, we’ll get a better view.”
He was right. As soon as she slid the card in, she tilted her head back to read the screen and they could see the face of-
“Shit!” Russ slammed his hand on the countertop. “That’s his wife.”
On the screen, Renee Rouse went on punching in the PIN number, selecting the amount of cash, and pulling sixty dollars from the machine.
“What is it you were looking for?” Smith asked.
Lyle opened his mouth, and Russ held up a hand to stop him before he said they could tell Smith, but then they’d have to kill him. “We’ve got a missing sixty-five-year-old doctor, disappeared twelve days ago. Search and rescue hasn’t turned up any sign of him. I was hoping anyone found with his ATM card might be able to shed some light on where he is.”
“Maybe his wife did him.” Smith leaned back in his seat and folded his arms across his chest.
“I’ll ask her when I see her,” Russ said, pulling his crutches into position.
“When’s that going to be?”
“As soon as we can get down to the car and get over to her place.”
Renee Rouse looked anguished. “I’m so, so sorry,” she said, holding out the ATM card she had dug out of her handbag. “I didn’t realize I had his. It was in the dish on my dresser, where I keep my change and things. I just grabbed it and stuck it in my bag.”
Russ took the card. It had Allan Rouse’s name along the bottom. “What about the PIN number?”
“We have the same one. Allan’s birth month and year. It makes it easier.”
Russ glanced at Lyle, then back to Mrs. Rouse. “Let me just go over this again,” he said. “You and your husband have a joint account that you can access through his ATM card.”
“That’s right, that’s where all the bills are paid from.”
“And you have your own account, with your own ATM card, where you keep a smaller amount of money.”
“Yes. Usually if I need cash I just write a little over at the supermarket. I was going to get cash back at the Kmart last night, but I forgot. That’s why I used the card. I don’t normally.”
“Have you checked the balance in your account since your husband’s been gone?”
“No. Usually Allan manages all that for me.” She started to cry. “Oh, God, he’s never coming home, is he? What am I going to do without him? What am I going to do?”
Russ left a quick message with Clare’s secretary, Lois, explaining he was going to be working and would have to take a rain check on their usual Wednesday lunch. It took a bit longer to extricate himself from Renee Rouse’s living room. The doctor’s wife whipsawed between begging for help, demanding police action, and crying. Russ guaranteed that he would check and see if anyone had withdrawn anything from her account, promised her that the Millers Kill Police Department was still treating this as a missing-persons case, and extracted her promise to call one of her friends to sit with her so she wouldn’t be alone.
When he and Lyle were finally back in the car, Lyle had that vacant, dreamy look that meant he was thinking hard.
“How do you like Mrs. Rouse as a suspect?”
“Not much.” Russ buckled his seat belt.
“Usually, the spouse is first call for the bad guy in these cases. We haven’t even looked at her.”
“We’ve confirmed that Renee Rouse placed numerous calls to friends from four o’clock onward, looking for her husband. Debba Clow was with Rouse between six and seven or seven-thirty the night he disappeared. We’ve got evidence that places him in her car. At eight-thirty, the wife is speaking with Harlene. At nine-thirty, Mark Durkee’s already spotted Rouse’s car, crashed into some trees off the road. How would you suggest we put Mrs. Rouse into this picture?”
“Maybe she was waiting in his car. Debba Clow never said she got a look inside.”
“Okay, let’s say she’s sitting in the car, freezing her tail off while her husband chats about vaccinations with Clow. Clow drives off, leaving Mrs. Rouse with her husband.”
“Who has a bashed-in head.”
“What’s she going to do with him? Even if she dumped him in the lake and crashed the car to cover her tracks, how does she get home in time to call Harlene looking for help?”
“She called on her cell phone.”
Russ snorted. “Not out there.”
“Maybe she and Clow are in on it together.”
“Would you trust your neck to Debba Clow?”
“Maybe she hitchhiked out with someone.”
Russ threw up his hands. “You’re not going to give up, are you? Okay, look into it. See if she stands to inherit a bundle from insurance, if there’s another man on the scene, the usual.”
Lyle started the car. “I know it’s a long shot. But there was something about the way she said she didn’t know anything about the accounts. Creeped me out. My ex, if I took my checkbook out of my coat pocket, she knew about it.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Linda handles most of our money.” He stared out the window at the passing yards with their rapidly shrinking patches of ice and snow. A few more days up in the forties and it’d be gone. Unless they had an April storm, which wasn’t out of the question.
“Do you know what the average date is for ice out on Stewart’s Pond?” he asked Lyle.
“Third, fourth week in April, usually.”
“You think there’s patches of open water up there yet?”
“Sure. That’s why everybody goes to Florida in March, you know. Because there’s not enough ice for ice fishing, and there’s not enough water for a boat.”
“Let’s get in touch with the staties’ dive team, see if they’re open for business yet.”
Lyle glanced over at him. “What are you thinking?”