Maybe a Ford. Maybe a Chevy. White. Rusted out around the wheel wells. Big guy behind the wheel. A working stiff, not a student.
Why a working stiff?
“You know. Tractor cap, canvas vest, wild hair? A wood-smoke boy. Cedar savage. You know the type.”
I knew. Which narrowed my list of potential suspects down to the sixty thousand blue-collar folks who didn’t live in Sugar Hill or the condos along the lakeshore strip.
Rusty white pickups? That slimmed our suspect list down to a thousand or so. But I didn’t need a thousand names. I already knew the name.
I questioned Carl Novak, of course. Spoke to him on the porch of his double-wide in Poletown, a Slavic enclave in the smokestack shadows of the Deveraux hardboard plant. Novak didn’t invite me to step in out of the weather, a deliberate breach of etiquette in the north.
His alibi was rock solid, though. Novak could account for every minute of the day Derek Patel disappeared. Witnesses could vouch for his whereabouts the entire time.
Which proved beyond a doubt that he was involved. Nobody keeps total track of a day, unless they expect to answer questions about it. Innocents don’t need alibis.
Still, on the face of it, Novak was as pure as the new-fallen snow. Probably felt ten feet tall and bulletproof. He was sure that he’d won, and he wanted me to know it.
And I did. But there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
Dr. Patel and his family were out of their minds with worry. The state police assigned an electronic intercept team to their home to deal with a possible ransom demand.
They tapped their landline home phone and their cells, ready to identify the relay tower as soon as the call came, then triangulate the signal and home in on it.
But there was no call. No ransom demand. No threats.
As the shopping days before Christmas dwindled down to the final few, there was no word at all.
Derek Patel had vanished as though he’d never been.
And when the dreaded phone call finally came, it didn’t ring at the Patels’ home. Or even at my office. It came to Bowie Cadarette, a conservation officer with the DNRE.
A farmer named Pete DeNoux capped a coyote that had been killing piglets. Pete hurried his shot, didn’t nail the rogue cleanly. Gut-shot him, he thought.
That would have been sufficient for some folks. The wound would likely prove fatal. The predator would crawl off into the brush and bleed out. Even if he survived, he’d be minus his taste for bacon.
But DeNoux was a wood-smoke boy, born in the north. Raised on some unwritten rules. If you shoot something, you damn well put it down. You never leave a wounded animal to suffer. Ever. Not even a thieving coyote.
Pete had no trouble following the blood spoor through the snow. Trailed the rogue male back to the farthest corner of his land, near his fence line.
He found what was left of the animal near its den at the base of a toppled pine. The poor bastard had made it home, only to have his own pack turn on him. Maddened by the blood scent, they ripped him to pieces.
The deep-woods wild has countless graces, but mercy isn’t one of them. It’s a human concept, and not all that common with us.
Satisfied, if a bit dismayed, Pete turned to leave, then hesitated. There were a lot of bloody bones around that den. Too many for a rogue coyote. The pack had been working over another carcass. DeNoux took a closer look, expecting to find the remains of his piglets. The bones weren’t from a shoat, though. Nor a deer, nor anything else he recognized.
At first.
Pete was no biologist, but he’d butchered enough game to know the basics of bone structure.
Even so, it took a good twenty minutes for his mind to accept what his eyes were seeing. Even then he harbored some doubts.
Until he found the remains of a torn tennis shoe...
DeNoux was so shaken, he wasn’t sure who to call. So he rang up the conservation department. And they called me.
Ordinarily the district attorney would check out a crime scene personally, but Derek Patel’s skeletal remains were tied to a case Todd Girard had stepped away from. I guessed he’d be stepping away even farther now. Faster than a buck on the run.
ADA Harvey Bemis arrived at the coyote den dressed for heavy weather. In his L.L. Bean down-filled parka, with matching tanker cap and furred earmuffs, he looked ready for a trek across the polar ice cap. I was wearing my usual leather car coat and jeans. In the shelter of the tall pines, twenty degrees doesn’t seem that cold. Especially when you’re seething.
“Is there any question the remains are the Patel boy’s?” Harvey demanded.
“Not much,” I said. “We haven’t found the skull yet, but the shoe is the brand and size described by the family and the blood type’s a match.”
“Why haven’t you... found the skull?” Harvey asked, glancing around the savaged ground as though my officers and the state police CSI team had overlooked it somehow.
“This isn’t the original dump site,” I explained. “My partner and a conservation officer are backtracking it now. Most likely the body was ditched out near the shore highway. The coyote pack found it there, tore it apart, then carried the pieces back to the den.”
“I thought coyotes were afraid of people,” Harvey said.
“That was before the Internet boom, when folks realized they could do business anyplace you can plug in a laptop. The population along the north is exploding, Harve. We’re crowding onto their habitat, and coyotes don’t read Darwin. As they get used to seeing us around, they lose their fear. If they find us dead on their turf, we’re lunch. Like roadkill, chickens in a coop, or a fawn frozen in the snow.”
“Coyotes didn’t kill this boy,” Bemis said grimly. “We both know who did this.”
“Actually, we don’t. Whatever the time frame for the killing turns out to be, I guarantee you Carl Novak’s going to have an alibi the KGB couldn’t break. A family reunion, a christening? He was there, surrounded by fifty witnesses.”
“Then he hired it done!”
“You’re exactly right. He did. And we helped him.”
“Helped him? What—?”
“Novak was working two jobs just to keep his daughter Julie in school, Harvey. He didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Then she was killed and Avery wrote him a check. Tipped him like a bellhop. Two hundred thou for his daughter’s life. And now?” I gestured at the savage clearing. “Look what a backwoods boy can accomplish with a few bucks.”
“He’s not going to get away with this,” Bemis said furiously. “Alibi or no alibi, I want that sonofabitch arrested! I want him hauled into the House in cuffs—”
“No,” I said.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean I’m not going to bust him, Harvey. He’ll just lawyer up, and we’ll get nothing. Novak’s not the one I want anyway.”
“Of course he is! What are you talking about?”
“His daughter died in the snow, and nobody was held accountable. And now we’ve got another dead kid, or what’s left of one. We gave Novak money instead of justice. So he used our cash to buy his own justice.”
“He bought murder!”
“Damn right. And that’s the guy I want. The sonofabitch who killed this boy for money. And Novak is going to give me his name. Because he’s angry and hurting, but most of all, because he feels justified! He thinks he bought retribution. When I tell him the truth, that he killed the wrong boy, he’ll unravel like a cheap suit.”
“But you can’t tell him! It was revealed in confidence!”
I almost decked him. It was a near thing. I snatched up a piece of Derek Patel’s shattered femur instead, and dragged the jagged end of it across Harvey’s new parka, smearing his coat with blood and slime.