“Peek around where?”
“The house on Bow Bog Road? Where we tried to arrest a suspect yesterday in the hanger case?”
“Yeah, good collar. Except where you shot the guy to death.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hey, did you hear about these goofballs in Henniker? Couple of kids riding one of those two-person bikes, trailing a rolling suitcase on a bungee cord. State police pull ’em over, the suitcase is full of escopetas—those little Mexican shotguns. We’re talking fifty thousand dollars’ worth of firearms these kids are biking around with.”
“Huh.”
“Today’s prices, anyway.”
“Huh. So, Denny, I’m going to head back to that house now, give it another look.”
“Which house is that?”
The crime-scene taping job that’s been done at J. T. Toussaint’s ugly little house is clumsy and haphazard. One thin strip of yellow cellophane, run in a series of slack fluttering U’s, from porch post to porch post, then to one of the sagging branches of the oak tree, then across the lawn to the flag of the mailbox. Tied loosely at each station, half slipping, wind teased, like it doesn’t matter, like it’s birthday party decoration.
Supposedly, subsequent to yesterday’s gunplay, this house was secured and searched by a team of patrol officers, per procedure, but I have my doubts, based firstly on the lackluster nature of the crime-scene taping, secondly on the fact that, inside, nothing appears to have been moved. All of Toussaint’s battered and stained living-room furniture rests exactly where it did yesterday. It’s easy to imagine, say, Officer Michelson, enjoying an egg-and-sausage sandwich, strolling through the house’s four small rooms, lifting and dropping sofa cushions, peering in the refrigerator, yawning, calling it a day.
Six thick patches of blood form a black and rust red archipelago across the carpeted floor of the living room and the hardwood of the front hallway. My blood, from my eye; Toussaint’s, from the cut on his forehead, from the multiple gunshot wounds that killed him.
I step carefully over and around the blood, and then I stand at the center of the living room, turning in a slow circle, mentally dividing the house into quadrants, as Farley and Leonard recommend, and then I launch into a real search. I go through the house inch by inch, crawling on my belly when necessary, awkwardly shoehorning my body all the way under Toussaint’s bed. I dig a stepladder out of the cluttered closet and climb up to punch through the flimsy tiles of the ceiling, find nothing in the crawlspace but insulation fiber and ancient secret stockpiles of dust. I go through Toussaint’s bedroom closet carefully—looking for what, exactly? A rack of fancy leather belts, with one missing? A blueprint of the men’s room of the Main Street McDonald’s? I don’t know.
Anyway—pants, shirts, overalls. Two pairs of boots. Nothing.
A five percent chance is what Alison reckoned. Five percent.
A small door beside the pantry opens onto a short flight of concrete stairs, no railing, a grim basement, a single lightbulb with a length of twine as a pull-cord. Opposite a massive dead boiler is the lair of the dog: a pillow bed, a collection of chewed-up rubber toys, a food bowl licked clean, another bowl with a quarter-inch puddle of dirty water.
“Poor thing,” I say aloud, and then he appears, Houdini, as if conjured, standing at the top of the steps, a tiny scruffy mop-head of a dog, yellow teeth bared, eyes wide, white fur mottled gray.
What am I supposed to do? I find some bacon and I cook it up, and then, while Houdini is eating, I sit at the kitchen table and I imagine Peter Zell sitting across from me, glasses off and set down beside him, eyes intent on his small delicate task, carefully sniffing up the crushed white interiors of a pain pill.
And then there’s the loud bang of the front door slamming closed, and when I leap up my chair tips backward and hits the floor, a second bang, and Houdini looks up and barks and I’m running as fast as I can, through the house, flinging open the door and shouting, “Police!”
Nothing, silence, white lawn, gray clouds.
I sprint down to the road, lose and then gain my balance, sliding the last three feet as if on skis. “Police!” again, one way down the road, and then the other, breathing hard. Whoever it was is gone. They were here, in here with me this whole time, or they’ve slipped in and out again, looking for whatever it was I’m looking for, and now they’re gone.
“Shoot,” I say quietly. I turn around and stare at the ground, trying to tell the intruder’s footprints in the snow and slush from my own. Big snowflakes are tumbling down, one at a time, as if they’ve agreed in advance to take turns. My heart slowly decelerates.
Houdini is on the doorstep, licking his chops. Wants more food.
Wait, now. I tilt my head, study the house and the tree and the lawn.
“Wait.”
If Houdini lives down there with the boiler, what’s in the doghouse?
The answer is simple: it’s pills. Pills and a whole lot of other stuff.
Manila mailing envelopes crammed full with pill bottles, each bottle containing several dozen thirty- or sixty-milligram tablets, each tablet stamped with the name of the medication or the manufacturer. Most of the pills are MS Contin, but there are others: Oxycontin, Dilaudid, Lidocaine. Six of the thick mailing envelopes in total, hundreds of pills in each. There’s a small carton filled with small white wax papers; a pill crusher, the kind you get at the drug store; in another box, wrapped in a baggie, inside a paper bag from Market Basket, a snub-nose automatic pistol, which in today’s environment must be worth several thousand dollars. There are vials of dark-colored liquid and several dozen syringes wrapped individually in crinkly plastic packaging. In another Market Basket bag is cash, fat bricks of hundred-dollar bills.
Two thousand. Three thousand.
I stop counting after five thousand. My hands are trembling, so I can’t count it all, but it’s a lot.
Then I limp back to the car again for a roll of crime-scene tape, and I wind it all the way around, secure it properly, tight and taut. Houdini trots along with me around the perimeter, and then stands next to me, panting, and I don’t invite him into the Impala, but I don’t stop him from getting in, either.
“Stretch. My brother. You’re never going to believe this.” McGully is at the window, it’s slightly cracked, there’s a sweet and heavy smell in the room. “So these jokers up in Henniker are on ten-speeds, they’re towing a rolling suitcase—”
“I heard.”
“Oh,” he says. “Ruin it.”
“Are you smoking marijuana?”
“A little bit, yeah, I am. It’s been a hard week. I shot a guy, remember? You want?”
“No, thanks.”
I tell him about my haul from Toussaint’s house, tell him how I’ve discovered that there’s more to the story, much more. He listens with glazed eyes, and occasionally he takes a deep pull from the tiny rolled-up twist of paper, blowing smoke out the crack in the window. Culverson is nowhere to be seen, Andreas’s desk is empty, computer monitor turned to face the wall, phone unplugged. It feels like it’s been empty for years.
“So the scumbag was lying,” is McGully’s conclusion. “I could have told you that. He’s a drug dealer, he got his buddy hooked, and then his buddy killed himself.”
“Well, except it’s true that Zell was the one who brought Toussaint drugs in the first place. He stole his sister’s prescription pad.”
“Oh. Huh.” He grins, scratches his chin. “Oh, wait—you know what? Who gives a shit.”
“Yep,” I say. “Good point.”