“Hit you how? With her fist?”
“No. She slapped me.”
“Let’s back up a little,” I suggested. “If you went there to kill her, didn’t you have your own knife?”
“I couldn’t find it. Walter gave it to me, but I didn’t have it in the house. I knew then I’d left it in the truck. But when I looked later, it wasn’t there, either.”
“And you have no recollection of how you got to Brenda’s house? You don’t remember driving there?”
He shook his head.
“Is it possible you were driven there by Walter?”
He looked up a second time, briefly. “I don’t know. There are whole parts of that night that’re just gone-like they didn’t exist. I dream about it sometimes, but that doesn’t help either, ’cause the faces get mixed up. I have one where I’m hitting Lisa with the knife.”
“In those memories, Owen-the real ones, not the dreams-how do you see Brenda? What’s she doing to protect herself?”
“I dunno. Holding her hands up.” He shuddered suddenly. “I don’t like thinking about it.”
“You’ve got to, though. You know you did this.”
Reggie McNeil stirred slightly in protest and I nodded to him. “Owen, how much blood do you remember? Was it spurting all over, or just running out like it would from a cut?”
“There was a lot of it. I don’t remember spurting.”
“And when you left, was she still alive?”
“She was still yelling at me, down on the floor.”
“Yelling?”
He equivocated. “Maybe not yelling. She was crying. She sounded real scared. The anger was all gone.” His voice cracked at that last comment, and he lapsed into silence.
“Think back to the last memory you have of her, on the floor. Is she surrounded by blood? What does it look like on the floor?”
He gave me a baffled stare. “I don’t know. Splotches-like when you cut something real bad.”
“Not a big pool?”
“No-just a whole bunch of spots.”
“Okay. Let’s back up again. You said Walter called Brenda a blackmailer, along with everything else. Did he say who she was blackmailing, or why?”
He shook his head.
“And you also mentioned an office. Where was that?”
“Where the Dirty Dollar is, on the top floor. Nobody knows about it. It’s not really an office. It’s full of old junk. Walter just called it that. We’d meet there and talk. Sometimes, when I was in a jam, he’d let me sleep there, too. That was kind of fun.”
“Was it just you and Walter who knew about this place?”
“And Billy. I saw him there once, when I was leaving. He was coming upstairs.”
“Billy?”
“Yeah. Billy Conyer.”
I stood in the doorway of Walter’s office-an abandoned, dusty corner room, filled with old broken furniture, dilapidated shelf units, and piled boxes of unused municipal forms apparently stashed there by some neophyte clerk of the 1950s who’d overordered by tenfold and chosen to bury his sins.
In a corner, under two grimy windows, was a cluster of blankets, ratty pillows, two seats torn from a car, and a scattering of pornographic books, magazines, and some crumpled newspapers. The floor was littered with cigarette butts, used Kleenexes, stray pieces of clothing, and clumps of ancient accumulated dirt.
Willy, J.P., and two uniformed officers were just finishing their examination of it all.
“Find anything?” I asked.
“Nice timing,” Willy cracked. “You show up to offer a hand?”
J.P. snapped off his latex gloves and neatly put them in his pocket. “Pretty much what you see,” he said with an uncharacteristic smile. “There’re some more clothes and dirty books in a carton, and we found a cashbox-open and empty. Walter might’ve cleaned it out before he disappeared.”
I glanced out the windows at Brattleboro’s flat-topped skyline, rendered by the dust to look like an ancient photograph of some gritty industrial town. “Willy,” I asked, “did you ever hear back from the lab on Billy’s personal effects?”
“Like fingerprints on the banknotes? Yup, but none matching anything on file. And the rest didn’t come to anything, either-rent receipts and bills, and a letter demanding back payment for some hundred-dollar wreck on wheels.”
It sounded like a wash, but I sensed from the good mood of both men that they were holding something back. I entered the room and walked over to the carton J.P. had mentioned that contained more clothing and books. I kicked back one of the flaps with my foot and peered inside. “So what’s the punch line here, guys?”
“Right here,” J.P. said, obviously pleased with himself.
I turned to see him dangling an evidence bag by one corner, swinging it back and forth. “And that is?”
He smiled. “A bloodstained T-shirt. If there’s a God, it’ll match someone we know.”
“Just heard from the lab. The blood on the T-shirt belongs to Phil Resnick, and the shirt’s the right size and has trace evidence linking it to Walter Freund. You’ll love this-the DNA you collected from him matches the sweat stains from the armpits.”
I was sitting in a borrowed chair in the squad room, opposite the two cubicles occupied by Ron and Willy. As I spoke, I fiddled with a rubber band I’d found on the floor.
“I suppose Walter could’ve used Billy like he did Owen, brain-jamming him to participate in Resnick’s killing, but I kind of doubt it. Billy struck me as more of a fellow traveler. Owen was a plaything-a mouse to Walter’s cat.”
“You don’t use a mouse as a hit man,” Willy said doubtfully.
“You might if you’re feeling too exposed,” I countered. “A three-time loser on parole-and the T-shirt tells us Walter already had one body on his slate. In theory, Owen could’ve been the perfect remote-control killer-he’d do the job, get caught, and clam up out of loyalty to the only friend he has left in the world. Walter would be in the clear because nobody would think to connect him to it. It must have really bummed him out when he realized Owen had left the Bowie knife in the truck.”
“No shit,” Willy agreed. “So Walter went in after Owen peeled out of there-throwing the kitchen knife into the bushes-finished Brenda off, ransacked the place looking for whatever it was she was blackmailing him with, tore out the journal pages with his name, and split, leaving the lights on behind him and the kid to freeze to death.”
“With one additional detail,” I said. “She would’ve survived otherwise. The ME’s pretty confident the kitchen knife only inflicted the lesser wounds. That’s why Owen only remembers splotches of blood, instead of the huge pool we found. Walter’s problem was he had to kill her, but he couldn’t get close enough without getting scratched.”
“Which probably pissed him off enough that he almost decapitated her,” Willy finished.
“It explains the savagery Owen lacks,” I agreed.
“But it still leaves us not knowing what she was holding over him,” Ron said, ever the pragmatist.
“Yeah,” I mused. “The way he went through the place, it must’ve had a physical form, like a recording or a picture-maybe a document. It had to be more than just the journal, since that was on the desk out in the open. But we could be putting too much faith in that. She might’ve just known something about him.”
“Then why tear the house apart?”
“To make sure there wasn’t anything more, like another journal or some pictures. He couldn’t afford the smallest link between them, especially now that his plan with Owen had gone wrong.”
“There was the empty cashbox at his hideout,” Willy pointed out. “Maybe he hid whatever he stole from her in that.”