In the Bleak Midwinter

“Well . . .” Brenda looked uncertainly at Clare. “You know, there wasn’t nothin’ gonna bring Katie back, was there? And maybe Darrell would have turned him in after he’d gotten what he wanted.” She opened her hands. “I didn’t really . . . think about it.”

CHAPTER 18

Russ was dropping piles of papers on the big scarred-oak table in the briefing room when Mark Durkee strolled in, fifteen minutes early for the evening shift. “Hey, Chief. How y’doing?”

“This goddamn case is giving me a goddamn headache,” Russ informed him, slapping down a manila folder next to a reprint of Katie McWhorter’s high school photo.

“Actually, I was thinking more like, how are you feeling after that shootout at the Stoner’s place yesterday? Everything cool?”

Lyle MacAuley stopped in the doorway, already changed into his civvies. “Yeah, Chief. That post-cow stress disorder can be a killer.” Mark laughed. “Maybe you ought to have yourself checked out,” Lyle went on helpfully, “make sure you didn’t pick up any hoof-and-mouth disease.”

Russ gave both of them what he hoped was a killing look.

Mark laughed harder. “Really, Chief, we were worried about you.”

Lyle nudged past the younger officer. “Hell, Mark, it’ll take a lot more than some pumped-up kid with a shotgun to take out the chief here. It takes a solid ton of muscle, hide, and milk to make the man sweat.” He leaned over the assorted folders and files, his bushy, graying eyebrows rising in interest. “Whatcha got here?”

“I’m drowning in reports on the McWhorter case. I’m sorting everything out, trying to shake something loose.” Russ slid a broken stick of chalk across the table to Lyle. “Get up to the board there, Lyle, help me time line this thing out.”

Lyle moved to the school-room sized blackboard hanging on the windowless wall of the briefing room.

Russ opened the medical examiner’s report on Katie McWhorter. “Friday, December fourth.” Lyle chalked the date in the upper left-hand corner. “Sometime between seven and nine o’clock, the killer—no, wait, better make that killer A—bashes Katie’s head in and drives off.” Underneath the time, Lyle added “A→Katie McW.”

“A could be one or both of the Burnses. They have no alibi other than each other for Friday night. It could have been Darrell McWhorter—”

“Those names he gave you checked out, though,” Lyle reminded him. “Dave Jackson?” He stepped back to the table and ran his finger over the single-sheeted investigative reports. “Here it is. He was ready to affidavit that he and his wife had been with the McWhorters from seven to eleven that night.”

“Yeah, I know. Okay, erase McWhorter. Ethan Stoner could have done it, too. He had the truck, he had the time, and he was mighty riled up about something that night when I saw him around ten or so.”

“I took his initial statement,” Mark said. “He said his friends would testify that he’d been with them all that evening.”

Lyle and Russ looked at each other. “Is it me, or does that boy seem awful young to you?” Lyle asked.

Russ pushed the bridge of his glasses up his nose. “I’m sure his friends would say just that, Mark. And I’m just as sure that five minutes of grilling would bust that story wide open if the Stoner boy hadn’t been babysat all night by his buddies.”

Lyle wrote down the name.

“Ethan’s blood type checks out as the possible father of Katie’s baby. But,” Russ tapped the hospital’s test report, “Noble showed Katie’s picture around to the local motel owners and found that the guy who runs the Sleeping Hollow Motor Inn saw Katie with some man who wasn’t Ethan Stoner right around Thanksgiving. Had a record of the car and everything. We ran a match on the ’86 Nova they were driving. Turns out it’s one of Katie’s roommate’s cars. We haven’t been able to match the name and the numbers on the license the guy showed the clerk, which leads me to believe it’s a fake I.D. So, Katie and whoever stayed three days, and when they left, they took a blanket with them that’s an exact match to one of the blankets the baby was wrapped in.”

“So Ethan’s not the father?” Mark hitched a hip onto a wide sill and leaned back against the wire mesh covering the lower half of the tall, turn-of-the-century window.

“I don’t like Ethan as the father,” Russ said. “It doesn’t fit with what we know about Katie. She broke up with him clean, and according to her sister, she was nice to him, but not friends with him, after that. She doesn’t strike me as a girl who’d have jumped in the sack with her old boyfriend on a whim.”

“Doesn’t mean Ethan couldn’t have killed her when he found out about the baby,” Lyle said. “He wouldn’t be the first rejected guy to build up a fantasy about getting together with a girl and then turn violent when reality intrudes. And let’s face it, we’ve seen he’s capable of picking up a gun and threatening to kill someone.”