“Right,” he said.
“So, we should get custody of the boy, right?”
At this, Darrell’s wife frowned. “Honey, we’re kinda old to be having a baby around again.”
“Naw, naw, that baby belongs to us. How do we get ahold of the people who got him now?”
Russ pulled one of his cards out of his breast pocket. “I’ll write down the number at DHS you can call.” He leaned over an oblong table reeking of ashes and dusting spray, fishing for his pen. “The other side of this card has my number on it. Call me if you think of anything that might have slipped your mind. I know it’s been a shock.” Though they seemed to have recovered mighty quick.
“A shock,” Brenda agreed. Darrell took the card, reaching out his hand to Russ, who gritted his teeth and shook hands.
“Thank you for telling us about Katie,” Darrell said. “And about our grandson. We’ll call DHS right away and see about that little boy.”
Russ paused at the door. “DHS hasn’t gotten my paperwork yet, identifying Katie as Cody’s mother. You may have to wait a day or two.” Maybe he could lose it. Not that it would do Cody any good in the long run. Just give him an extra week with the foster mother before McWhorter got his hands on him.
Brenda looked distinctly unhappy. Darrell smiled. “It’ll be worth the wait. It’ll be just like having a little piece of Katie back with us again.”
Clumping down the stairs, Russ was in what his mother would have called “an old cow stew.” When a door inched open, revealing a bearded man with spectacularly bad teeth, Russ glared at him with such venom the man nearly caught his facial hair in the frame as he slammed the door shut. Russ toyed with the idea of shouting “Washington County Probation Department!” to see how many residents would cut and run. It would feel good to do something constructive, even if it did mean filling out packets of forms at the county jail.
What would the McWhorters want with Cody? More accurately, what would Darrell want with Cody? The monthly foster child support check from the state? Jesus Christ, what if Darrell’s tastes ran to little boys? It was a stretch, but, still . . . Russ wiped the hand Darrell had shaken on his parka before opening the outside door. Either he convinced Kristen to make a complaint against Darrell McWhorter, or he had better find another candidate as the baby’s father right quick. Because if he didn’t, Cody would be one of those slack-faced little kids sentenced to poverty and neglect. Or worse.
CHAPTER 10
Russ’s wave of determination to help Cody broke apart on that jagged rock of modern life, the telephone answering machine. He tried to reach Kristen at her apartment and was met with a blast of unintelligible music that sounded like jack-hammers destroying a guitar shop, followed by a half-screamed order to leave a name and message. Saint Alban’s office had on a machine, too, asking him to call between the hours of eight-thirty and three. In case of pastoral emergency, you can reach Reverend Clare Fergusson at the rectory. Except he couldn’t. On her message Clare sounded too enthusiastic to make her apology for not picking up the phone believable. In case of pastoral emergency, her pager number was . . . Russ began to wonder about these pastoral emergencies. What were they, deathbed confessions? Emergency baptisms?
He weighed the idea of paging her, but decided against it. Instead, he left a message describing his meeting with the McWhorters and asked her to call him back. He slapped his chest and rummaged through his pockets until he found the paper with Emily Colbaum’s number, then sat through a recording featuring a whole flock of giggling females telling him he had reached “the girlz in the house!” He left his name and number and tried the DSS case worker’s office next, only to get caught up in a voicemail system. He tried following the automated directions—press two, press the pound sign twice, if you know your party’s extension—and wound up in the mailbox of the educational scheduling department. He banged the receiver down and unloaded a piece of army vocabulary on the person who had first replaced an operator with a machine.
He stomped into the dispatch room, hoping Harlene would ask him what was wrong so he could let loose his opinion of people who were never at the damn phone when you needed them. Harlene wasn’t there. He followed her voice into the squad room, a kind of big-city name for a cluster of six desks and a water cooler. Lyle MacAuley and Noble Entwhistle must have just checked in at the end of their shifts, but instead of filling out their incident reports, they were huddled with Harlene over a big red camping cooler.
“Hey, Chief!” Noble said.
“Oh, here he is, you can give it to him now,” Harlene said, elbowing Lyle. Lyle dug into the cooler, emerging with a large package neatly wrapped in butcher’s paper.
“For you, Chief,” he said, grinning. “Steaks and the round. I hit the jackpot with a twelve-point stag the day before season close.”
Twelve-point antlers. Russ tried to suppress his pangs of envy. At least Lyle was being liberal with the venison. God damn, a whole deer season come and gone and he had been too busy working to ever get out and—the day before season close? When Lyle had been scheduled on the duty roster? “Weren’t you sick with the flu for two days before Thanksgiving?” Russ asked. “What did he do, walk into your yard and have a heart attack?”
Lyle smiled more broadly. “I guess that’s the way it happened, Chief.”
Russ looked at Harlene and Noble, both of them grinning their fool heads off. Russ pulled himself up to his full height and tucked the package of venison under his arm. “Then I’m sure it will be good and tender, Lyle, seeing as how he died peaceful-like, of natural causes.”
Their laughter followed him back to his office where he put on his parka and turned out the lights. At the door, he paused, thinking, before wheeling and scooping up the Katie McWhorter file. He returned to the squad room and laid it on Noble Entwhistle’s desk. “Noble, you read the file on our homicide yet?” he asked.
Noble ambled to his desk and flipped open the folder. “Nope,” he said.
“Take a look at it tonight before you go home. Tomorrow, I want you to get a life picture of the victim from her sister and start making the rounds of all the motels and bed-and-breakfasts and whatall. See if you can find someone who remembers a pregnant young woman checking in. We’re especially interested in any man who might have been with her. Get the bus station, too, see if anyone picked her up when she arrived in town Friday.”
The officer ran his finger down the case entry form. “Yup.”
“Thanks. Good night, all.” Noble was the right man for this job. Unimaginative, not the sharpest pencil in the box, but methodical, with an ability to put people at ease and get them to open up. Russ pulled his knit cap firmly over his head before braving the cold. Outdoors, the temperature had fallen still further. Thank God he had the Ford pickup tonight, with its fast-working heater, and not the old whore. He’d stop at his mother’s, give her the venison, and wangle a dinner invitation for later in the week, when Linda was away on her buying trip to the city. Maybe he ought to introduce Mom to Clare. Interesting to see how they’d get along.
It was out of the way to his mother’s, but he drove by the rectory just to make sure everything was all right. The lights were all off. Had he left her his number at home so she could reach him? Yeah, he had. His dashboard clock glowed. Geez, he’d better hurry, or he’d miss another dinner.