"You could try charming me," I said.
"Would that work?"
"No, but I wouldn't have to punch you in the balls."
He rocked his spring-loaded swivel a little.
"Nobody wants this opened up," he said after a while. "The kids' parents, the school, the kids themselves."
He looked at me heavily for a minute.
"I don't. Town doesn't. We want to wrap it up neat and put it away and get on with it."
"How 'bout the people who lost someone in the shooting?" I said.
"They want it over. They know we got the bastards. They want to see them fry, and they want to move on as best they can. Nobody wants you opening up all the fucking wounds again."
"They won't fry in this state," I said.
"I know, just a manner of speaking," he said. "Been simpler if we'd shot them dead on the spot."
"That would have required you all to actually go on in there and maybe interrupt things," I said.
Cromwell nodded slowly. All of the General Patton crap seemed to have drained from him. He seemed gray and tired, almost human.
"I know," he said. "I know."
"You didn't know what to do," I said, "did you."
He shook his head.
"We're a small town," he said. "Upper-class. Quiet. We never ran into this sort of thing. Most of my guys never fired their weapons except on the range."
"You?" I said.
He looked at the big six-gun on the corner of his desk as if he'd never seen it before.
"No," he said.
"Hard to learn on the job like that," I said. "Most people aren't ready the first time."
"God, I hope there's no second time," he said.
"There'll be something," I said. "Sometime. And you'll be more ready."
"You're not going to leave this alone," Cromwell said.
"No," I said. "I'm not. Either of these kids got a history with you?"
"I don't give out juvie files," he said.
"I'm not looking for files. Just information. You and me. Alone in the room. Either of them been in trouble you know about?"
"We talked to the Grant kid couple times," Cromwell said.
He was looking past my left shoulder, out an office window, at the nice, neat stretch of lawn in front of the station. Orderly.
"He was shooting cats with a pellet gun," Cromwell said slowly. "Strays mostly, but he got a coupla pets and the owners complained and we brought him in and talked with him and his mother. He was maybe thirteen."
He shook his head.
"I've met his mother," I said.
"She just sort of said the hell with him. Like he's some sort of aberration. It's not my fault."
"Talk to his grandfather?" I said.
"They begged us not to. Both of them. I felt bad for the kid, tell you the truth. His mother's just a waste of time."
"The last hippie," I said.
"Yeah," Cromwell said. "So we confiscated the pellet gun and told him he was on probation and we were giving him a break, so if he got in any more trouble, we'd go hard on him."
"Did he?"
"Nothing official. I heard he hung out at the Rocks with the burnouts and freaks. But we never had any reason to bring him in again."
"What'd you do with the pellet gun?" I said.
"Give it to my sister's kid, lives outside Stockbridge."
"And he probably uses it to shoot cats," I said.
Cromwell shrugged.
"Maybe," he said. "But he's not doing it here."
"Anything with Jared Clark?"
"No. Never even heard of him until the Grant kid fingered him after the shooting."
"Ever talk with anybody about him?" I said.
"Talked with the school shrink."
"Dr. Blair?"
"Yeah. You met her?"
I nodded.
"She's something, isn't she?"
"She is," I said. "What did she tell you?"
"Classic stuff," Cromwell said. "Jared was bullied a lot. Kids picked on him. Pushed him around. She feels he allied himself with Grant so that Grant would protect him."
"Why would Grant protect him?" I said.
"Don't know. He was the school tough guy. Big kid. Football player. Who would have thought it, him having the mother he did?"
"Sometimes, I guess, the apple falls as far as it can from the tree," I said.
He nodded.
"You know of any previous connection between Clark and Grant?" I said.
"No. But, you know how it is, they don't pop up on the screen unless they are causing trouble."
"And these guys weren't?"
"Except for the cat killings," Cromwell said.
"Love to know how they got together," I said.
"Maybe Blair knows," Cromwell said. "Ask her. Be a good excuse to talk with her."
"I will," I said. "Maybe she'll show me her knees."
"You gonna tell me about where they got the guns?" Cromwell said.
"No," I said.
"Isn't that sort of like withholding evidence?" Cromwell said.
"It's not like you need it for a conviction," I said.
Cromwell nodded.
"Just thought I'd ask," he said.
Chapter 36
IT HAD BEEN a wet summer. Outside my office window, it was raining again. I was watching it. Pearl was resting on her couch. Later, when the excitement died down, I might read the paper. My phone rang. Pearl had no reaction. She didn't care about phones. I didn't, either, but somebody had to answer, so I picked it up.
AN HOUR LATER, Pearl and I pulled up in front of the Dowling village market. The rain was steady but not abusive.
Through the steady sweep of the wipers, I saw him in front of the market, the red-haired kid from the Rocks. He was pressed against the front of the building, trying to stay dry. He was wearing the zippered top of a warm-up suit, his cap on backward, and sucking on a cigarette. His jeans were baggy, and his sneakers were black Keds high-tops. Retro. When he got in the front seat, Pearl growled at him from the back.
"What's wrong with him?" the kid said.
"Her," I said. "She doesn't like you."
"She bite?"
"Not today," I said.
I reached back and patted her. He hunched forward and a little sideways in the passenger seat, away from Pearl.
"Where we going," I said.
"How much is the reward?" he said.
"Depends on what you show me," I said.
"I'm going to take you where they did a lot of shooting,"
"So you said. Let's go there and see what we see."
"But there's some reward."
"Absolutely," I said.
I couldn't figure out what I was going to get from this, but Spenser's Crime Buster Rule #8 is Always look.
We drove past the park that backed up to the Rocks, and down a narrow road that skirted the west end of the lake, and parked in a dirt turnaround next to a rutted dirt road.
"It's down this road," he said.
I nodded. We got out of the car. Pearl didn't like the rain much, but she loved the woods. She struggled with her ambivalence for a moment and then committed to the woods. I took my gun out from under my raincoat and put it in my raincoat pocket. Then I started back up the paved road we'd just driven down.
"Hey," the red-haired kid said, "where you going. It's in here."
"We'll come on it," I said, "from a different direction."
"Man, in this rain? Through the woods? We'll get soaked, everything's all wet in there."
"Different direction," I said.
Spenser's crime buster rule #8a: Don't blunder into something while you're looking.
Pearl was bred to be a hunting dog, before she made a career change and became a lap dog. And sometimes her instincts resurfaced. She ranged far ahead of us, snuffling everything, and circled back to check with me before she ranged out again. She'd probably let me know if there was somebody in the woods.
The kid was right, the bushes and low branches were wet and pressed their wetness against us as we moved through them. But I had no way to know this wasn't a setup, and until I did, I'd have to act as if it was. But it wasn't. We came into a clearing in the woods and saw Pearl sniffing something carefully. There was no one there, no sound of anyone anywhere, nor did Pearl act as if there was anyone. I took my hand off my gun, though I left it there in my pocket. I took a look at what Pearl had found. It was the desiccated body of a dead cat.