Russ turned to face McWhorter. “Is your wife here, Mr. McWhorter?”
“Yeah, yeah, she’s in the bedroom. Brenda!” he yelled down the darkened hallway between the living room and the gallery kitchen. “Get out here! There’s a cop here with news about Katie.”
“About Katie?” An enormous woman lumbered up the hall. “What about my little girl?” She looked like her daughters, blown up to Macy’s parade size, their rounded cheeks and soft chins expanded into a fleshy mask through which once-pretty eyes peered at him suspiciously.
Get to the worst of it fast, he thought. “I have very bad news for you folks. Your daughter, Katie McWhorter, was found dead out past Payson’s Park last Friday night.” Darrell McWhorter stared at him blankly. Brenda McWhorter screamed.
“My baby! My baby!” She staggered around like an elephant with a tranquillizer dart before slipping to the floor. Her husband caught her under her arms and hefted her onto an elaborately carved Victorian sofa. A man would have to be pretty damn strong to help get that woman up. Russ wondered what sort of disability kept him from working.
“How did it happen?” Darrell McWhorter asked.
Russ recounted what the coroner had found out about Katie’s death. Brenda McWhorter continued wailing, punctuating her cries with, “My poor baby! My poor little girl!” Her husband listened without comment, frowning.
“There’s one more important thing I have to tell you,” Russ concluded. “Katie had a child within a week or so of her death. DHS has custody of the baby right now.”
Brenda’s wails cut off abruptly. Darrell looked as if he were trying to get the final Jeopardy! answer within thirty seconds. “A baby?” he said.
“A little boy. Did either of you know or suspect she was pregnant?”
Brenda shook her head, her mouth still half open.
“Do either of you know what connection Katie might have had to Saint Alban’s church?”
“Saint Alban’s?” Darrell still looked as if he wasn’t going to make the buzzer before Alex Trebeck called time. “What’s that? The fancy looking church across from the old bandstand?”
The small park at the end of Church Street was a popular summer spot. The town still put on dances and concerts there, just like when Russ was a young man. “That’s the one.”
Darrell thought for a few seconds more. “A baby,” he said. Then, “No, I don’t know nothing that Katie would of been up to involving a church. How come?”
“Katie, or someone, left the baby on the back steps of St. Alban’s, with a note directing that the boy go to the Burnses, a couple from the church that’ve been looking to adopt for several years. Would you or Katie have known them some other way? They’re lawyers here in town.”
The McWhorters looked at each other.
“A lawyer?” Brenda said. “We don’t know no lawyers. ’Cept that one who settled my dad’s estate, but that was ten years back, and he was old then. He wouldn’t be looking for no baby.”
Darrell reached for a pack of cigarettes lying atop a Soap Opera Digest magazine. “These lawyers go to that fancy church?” he asked.
“Yes sir, they do.”
“But they don’t got the baby yet?”
“No. There are several legal issues to sort out, from what I understand. For instance, we don’t know who the father of the child is.” Russ fixed Darrell with a level stare. “I had a long talk with her sister this morning, who told me Katie broke up with her boyfriend in her senior year. Kristen hadn’t heard of anyone else who might have been going out with Katie.”
Darrell lit his cigarette and took a drag. “Can’t put much store by what Kristen says. We wouldn’t help her out with money she wanted after she was out of school, and since then, she’s been bad-mouthing us something awful.”
“Never comes to see us,” his wife chimed in. “Not in almost two years. It was like we lost her. And now Katie . . .” She started wailing anew.
Russ was tempted, sorely tempted, to ask Darrell to come to the hospital right now for a blood test and cell scraping. But he didn’t want anything questioned and possibly thrown out if it went to court.
“Had either of you seen Katie recently?”
“Nope,” Darrell said. Brenda shook her head.
“Where were you two last Friday?”
“Why?” Darrell frowned. “You asking if we had anything to do with it?”
Damn right I am, thought Russ. “I’m trying to get a fix on Katie’s movements, to see where she might have gone and who she might have seen.”
“We went out to that new Long John Silver’s at the County Road shopping center,” Brenda said. “We had coupons.”
“Then we went to the Dew Drop for a few. Met up with some friends. We must of been there until eleven o’clock.”
“We come straight home after that. I remember, ’cause it was awful cold and I was worried I had left the bathroom window cracked open and things would start freezing in the bath.”
Russ never trusted people who could recall and retell their every movement without having to stop and think about it. Most folks’ lives weren’t that memorable. On the other hand, first Friday of the month, after the social security check had come in, it might be their big night out.
“You wouldn’t happen to remember the names of the friends you were with, would you?” He tried to make his question as inoffensive as possible.
“Sure we do,” Darrell said, “It was the Jacksons, Dave and Tessa. They live out to Cossayaharie, where we used to. You wanna phone number so you can check up on them or something?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Russ said, omitting the “yet.” “While I’m here, do you have a sample of Katie’s handwriting I could take with me? Printing would be best. I’ll send it on to the state lab to see if they can match it to the note that was found with the baby.”
“Let me check her room,” Brenda said, hoisting herself from the couch.
“Why d’you need that if you know the baby is Katie’s?” Darrell said.
“Just another way of making sure. The medical examiner sent a scraping of Katie’s genetic material down to Albany for DNA testing. That will prove Cody is her son. That’s the baby’s name, by the way. Cody.”
Darrell rubbed his lips with the edge of his hand. “I heard about that DNA testing on some news report.”
“It’s one hundred percent accurate. Once we have an idea who the father is, we can do the same thing. It takes a few months to get the lab work back, but there’s no way to fudge your DNA. It either matches, or it doesn’t.” He paused, let that one sink in. “What kind of car do you drive, Mr. McWhorter?”
“Huh? An ’eighty Ford Ranger pickup.” He ground the cigarette stub out in the standing ashtray. “Look, Chief, I don’t know what Kristen told you and I don’t care, I ain’t seen Katie since she left for Albany this summer. And neither has my wife.”
Brenda hurried into the room, puffing from the exertion. “Here. It’s a college application she didn’t finish. She printed it, like it says on the form.”
Russ took the thin sheaf of papers from Brenda. “Thank you.”
“What do you need to find the father for, anyway?” Darrell asked.
“In the first place, the father has rights to the child. Either to take custody of the boy, or to consent to adoption. Understand, we were looking for Cody’s parents before we discovered Katie’s body. More important, now we’re working on the theory that the man who fathered Katie’s child either killed her, or has knowledge that could lead to her murderer.”
“And if the father ain’t found, we’re the closest relatives of the baby, right?” Darrell’s eyes lit up with the greatest interest he had shown so far during the interview. The thought of placing a baby with this pair started the acid sizzling along the nerve edges in Russ’s stomach. The Burnses would be Parents of the Year material compared to these two.