I was impressed by the way he modulated his voice, making it almost theatrical. “Funny you should mention Owen and Billy. They were regulars here, weren’t they?”
“Them and a lot of other people.”
“You and Owen pretty tight?”
He glanced at me. “Kid’s a retard.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
His eyes narrowed just a fraction, then he went back to staring into space. “He was a wannabe-attached himself to whoever didn’t shake him loose.”
“Like you.”
“What do you care who he hung out with?”
I ignored the question. “You may be right-we think he’s a little simpleminded, too. Prone to doing what he’s told, even when it gets him in trouble.”
“No shit?” But he didn’t sound surprised.
“You know anyone who used him that way?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t pay attention. He sucked up to me a lot, but it just bugged me.”
“So that’s what people saw when you two were together? Him sucking up and you resisting?”
He smiled. “Okay. It wasn’t that bad. I didn’t know he was a psycho, though. I would’ve told him to fuck off if I’d known he was nuts. I mean, hell, he could’ve whacked me.”
“He did come at you once. What did you do to piss him off so much?”
He seemed to consider that for a moment. “Don’t know. I don’t even remember it.”
“You know Brenda Croteau?”
He took the change of topic in stride without comment. “Sure. Everybody did-one way or the other.”
“Which way was it for you?”
He leered. “Oh, no. I wasn’t going to stick it in that honey pot. She was just a barfly to me, and an ugly one to boot-that’s it. Did the autopsy show she had AIDS? I bet she did.”
“How ’bout Owen?”
“I didn’t think he knew her-guess I got that wrong, huh?”
“Interesting. You two were glued at the hip. He knows her well enough to kill her, and you don’t think they were even acquainted.”
He equivocated again. “Well-acquainted-sure, they were probably that. This is a popular place. All sorts of people see each other.”
“What was the scuttlebutt when he killed her?”
“Not much. It’s a weird world. Lot of bad shit happens.”
I slid a document across the table at him. “Got something for you.”
He picked it up as though it were a flyer stuck under his windshield wiper and gave it a cursory glance. His eyebrows knitted slowly. “What the hell is this?”
“It’s a court order for a sample of your blood.”
“Why do you want my blood?”
“You can have it drawn at the hospital within the time frame stated in there. Or if you want, I can drive you there right now-get it over with.”
“I got to do this?”
“So says the judge.”
For the first time, he seemed at a loss for words. He stared at the evidence order before asking, “What’s my blood going to tell you?”
“Your DNA, for one thing, plus all the information a urine sample does.”
He laughed. “Oh, shit. I live to pee in a cup. Seems like that’s all I do for you people. I can tell you now, you aren’t going to find any drugs. No way I’m going to fuck up my parole doing that shit.”
I slid out of the booth and stood up. “Then you got nothing to worry about.”
He hesitated, obviously weighing his options. “What about DNA? They use that like fingerprints, right? For rapists and whatever?”
“Yeah. You leave a little of it behind and we find it, you might as well have left your driver’s license.”
Walter’s confidence seemed to return. He actually laughed as he also got to his feet. “Just like a fingerprint. That’s pretty cool. Lead the way.”
I took him to my car and we drove to the hospital at the other end of Canal Street, less than a mile away.
“So why me?” he asked on the way.
“You knew Owen, Brenda. You been a bad boy in the past. You’re actually pretty high on our list of suspects.”
“Suspects of what? Owen whacked her.”
“He knifed her. We don’t think he killed her.”
He was quiet for a while, watching the scenery go by. The snowbanks hadn’t been replenished for several weeks. Winter was winding down, and its coat was shabby, tattered, and stained.
“I never heard she was raped.”
I liked that his brain was circling this problem, trying to sort it out.
“She wasn’t.”
Another patch of silent thinking. “Then why collect DNA?”
“Oh. There was a ton of blood. Her head was almost cut off-by a hunting knife-probably one with a double edge, curved at the tip like a Bowie knife.”
He turned away from the view to stare at me. “How could you know that?”
This time I laughed, pulling into the hospital parking lot. “Don’t you watch TV? They don’t make that stuff up. Those lab guys are incredible. Here we are.”
I escorted him to the ER, got him hooked up to a nurse, who quickly and efficiently sat him down in one of the examination rooms, tied off his upper arm, swabbed the inside of his elbow, and extracted a tube of bright red blood-all in a matter of minutes. Throughout, I could almost see the wheels turning in Walter’s head as he tried to calculate what he’d just given up.
Finally, rolling his sleeve down over a Band-Aid and putting his parka back on, he asked, “So they’re going to compare my blood with what they found at Brenda’s?”
“Yeah, among other things. You want a ride back downtown?”
He paused in the lobby. “What other things?”
“Well, DNA’s funny that way. It’s not just in blood or semen. It’s almost everywhere in the body. It’s what makes up our cells.” I held up my fingertip. “There’s DNA in every bit of skin, for example-in the roots of each hair. And you know how much they fall out-hundreds of them every day, supposedly.”
Unconsciously, his hand snuck up and touched the side of his head. He jerked it away as if he’d found it trespassing.
“But it’s not really hair we’re interested in,” I continued casually. “Turns out there was a small sample of skin under one of Brenda’s nails-we think where she scratched the man who really killed her. That’s what we’re hoping this’ll match.” I patted the pocket where I’d placed Walter’s vial of blood.
He stared at me, and then down to the pocket, his lips slowly compressing.
“Give you a lift back?” I offered again.
I could barely hear his voice, it was so low. “I’ll walk.”
I was watching TV when Gail got in that night, not too late. I heard her dump her briefcase in the kitchen, as usual, and kick off her shoes in exchange for the slippers she kept by the back door.
“Hot water’s on,” I shouted and heard her preparing one of the curious-smelling concoctions she called tea.
A few minutes later, she entered the living room balancing a steaming mug and a plate of cookies on a tray. I cleared the coffee table in front of the couch.
“My kind of hors d’oeuvres,” I said, grabbing one of the chocolate chips. “How was your day?”
“Pretty good,” she said noncommittally. “What’re you watching?”
I hit the mute button and reduced two people to reading lips over a greasy pan and a dishwasher. “The news. Just finished. I was trying to make up my mind to either veg out or make some dinner. I didn’t expect you back so soon.”
She laid her head back against the cushions. “I know. And I have a pizza being delivered. So you’re off the hook. What did the news say?”
“Hot topic’s our esteemed speaker, Mark Mullen, who’s doing what everyone thought he would. Now that the Reynolds Bill is in his hands-which he never refers to by name-there’s a whole bunch of hemming and hawing going on. The clip they showed had him touting the virtues of all us heroes in blue, and how the worst thing we can do to this precious resource we call Vermont is to overreact to an admittedly egregious situation, et cetera, et cetera. I smell some wicked deal-making in the air.”