In the Bleak Midwinter

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.