Seven Days Dead (34 page)

“Could be that our lives are at stake. Certainly our Jeep’s life is. So get on it, boy. Stop all this pussyfooting around.”

As if he’s the one who just took time off for a shower and a change of clothes.

*   *   *

They wait at the roadside in Louwagie’s cruiser while Sandra goes up the long walk, and only when Maddy answers and sends out a cheerful wave does Émile give the nod to get moving.

Going down the eastern seaboard of the island to Woodwards Cove, he and Louwagie have no view of the western sky, the height of the island blocking it off. For all intents and purposes, this is a fine sunny day. They know better, and expect rain, but Émile, in the shotgun seat, not having to drive, can appreciate the seascapes, the picturesque coves, and the rocky shore as they travel on. Then they’re off the main highway and heading down a gravel road to Pete Briscoe’s house.

He’s home.

Warily, he greets them through the screen door.

“Can we come in, Pete?” Louwagie inquires.

“That’s okay. The place is a mess. I’ll come out.”

He’s putting on a shirt as he does so.

“What’s going on?” Briscoe asks. The door clicks shut behind him.

“Just getting up?” Cinq-Mars probes.

“Changing my shirt. Hot day. I got sweaty is all. How’re you guys doing?”

“Top-notch,” Louwagie tells him. “You?”

“It’s all good,” Briscoe says. Once his buttons are done, he tucks the hem into his jeans. “So what’s going on?” he presses them again.

“If you don’t mind, I want you to show me your dead dog’s grave site,” Cinq-Mars replies.

“I mind.” Briscoe understands now that this is not a particularly friendly visit. “Why?” he asks.

“That’s really not your concern, Pete,” Louwagie informs him. “Detective Cinq-Mars has his reasons and that’s all that’s necessary here.”

“That makes no sense to me,” he argues. “You’re supposed to be the law here, Wade. You’re the Mountie. He’s what? Retired? A mainlander.”

“I’m also a mainlander, Pete. Mr. Cinq-Mars is helping me on the case,” the Mountie explains, but Cinq-Mars is done with being delayed.

“Where’s your dead dog buried?”

“What’s it to you? Seriously, it’s a private place. I’m not going to take you there. Maybe I can’t even find it. In the woods. You know.”

“I don’t know,” Cinq-Mars attests.

“You saw.”

“I didn’t see. I saw you. I didn’t see your dog. What’s her name again?”

“What do you care really? It’s Gadget. What do you care?”

“We’re the ones who get to ask the questions, Pete,” Louwagie explains again.

Cinq-Mars supposes that Louwagie is being the caring and attentive cop, if not entirely the good cop. He can work with that.

“You get to answer,” Cinq-Mars warns Briscoe. “If you don’t, we drag you in and make you.”

“Make me what?”

“Stop wasting my time. You’re in deep enough without wasting my time. That only makes things worse. You haven’t guessed that?”

“You come here, ask me where my dead dog’s buried, and you’re saying
I’m
wasting
your
time. You sure you got that straight?”

Logically speaking, he has a point. Émile isn’t going to concede anything today. “Where, Mr. Briscoe, do we find your dead dog? This is the last time I’m asking politely. Next time will be at the station where I speak to you privately.”

Briscoe’s defiant. “I can take you.”

“Does that count for something? This isn’t a wrestling match. You can dump that little fantasy in the trash for now. So, do we go down to the station?”

Louwagie helps out by extracting a pair of handcuffs from his belt. Briscoe can’t believe this shift in his fortunes and fidgets on the porch.

“Okay. Look. It’s nearby, all right? Between the house and the water. What’s the big deal? It’s above the tide line. It’s legal that way. It’s just not my property, see. That’s why I’m reluctant to tell you. It’s not my property.”

Cinq-Mars looks over the lay of the land. He already has Briscoe dead to rights on several counts. “Then why,” he asks him, “did you put Gadget on the front seat of your pickup? As if you were going to cart her some distance? You can’t drive toward the water from here. Putting her in the truck didn’t help you.”

“I changed my mind is all. I planned to bury her someplace else.”

“Why did you change your mind?”

“I just did,” Briscoe maintains.

“Where’s your shovel?” Cinq-Mars asks next. A new tack. Always keep the man you’re interviewing off guard. Not only will he not know where you’re coming from, he’ll soon be disoriented and confused as to which questions are important and which are, in the vernacular of the sea, red herrings.

“What do you mean by that? What shovel?”

“Haul him down to the station,” Cinq-Mars tells Louwagie. “Save us time and trouble.”

“What do you mean?” Briscoe protests. “What shovel? I don’t have a shovel.”

“You buried your dog with your bare hands?”

“No, I—”

“What? I saw you up on Seven Days Work with a shovel!”

“I borrowed it. All right? I borrowed a spade, if that’s what you mean. It wasn’t my shovel.”

“Who from?” Louwagie asks, exercising a patient voice as counterpoint to Émile’s aggression. “Where is it now?”

“What do you care? It’s only a, you know, a spade, a shovel. I’m not being a hard-ass, but seriously, what do you care?”

“Ask one more question,” Cinq-Mars warns him, “one more, and we haul you in. You won’t enjoy it. I will. You won’t.”

If Briscoe is a legitimate tough guy, his threat is meaningless, even laughable. The tough guy would already have won this contest of wills. Cinq-Mars doesn’t believe that Briscoe is the tough guy he pretends to be, and he’s sure the man has virtually no clue what he might be in for. Which gives him a huge advantage.

“Where’s the spade you had up on Seven Days Work? Who’d you borrow it from? Where is it now? We want to know,” Louwagie stipulates, less patiently now.

A long, low rumble is heard from beyond the nearest hills, and a darkening of the sky comes into view on this protected lowland.

Pete Briscoe’s eyes skip back and forth between the two men, as though he’s trying to choose his safer fight. “I returned it,” he admits.

“To whom?” Louwagie presses him with mock sarcasm.

Briscoe hesitates.

“Pete,” Cinq-Mars adds, “word to the wise. If you’re arrested, I’ll interrogate you night and day. My wife was abducted a few hours ago. She’s safe now, thank God, but I’m after anyone and everyone who had anything to do with that. You want to exonerate yourself if you can. I’m pissed now. You don’t want to go toe-to-toe with me while you’re handcuffed to a steel bed for hour after hour. Or do you? Do you?”

“I don’t know anything about that! I had nothing to do with that! I don’t know about your wife. I didn’t do nothing!”

“Sure you did. You said so yourself. You borrowed a long-handled spade. I saw you digging with it.”

“I’m allowed to borrow a spade. Holy mackerel! This guy makes no sense!”

“You know what?” Cinq-Mars asks. Then warns him again, “Don’t answer with another question.”

Briscoe doesn’t know how to respond and so keeps mum.

“I know what you were digging up on Seven Days Work.”

He sighs, as though this talk is torture. “Of course you know. I was trying to bury my dog.”

“That’s a lie and a half. That’s a whopper. I’ll remember it when we’re together in our interrogation cell and you’re strapped to the steel bed. I’ll remember how you just lied to me for no good reason. I might go into that room with a hammer.”

“Pete,” Louwagie reminds him, “you just told us you buried Gadget nearby.”

“Oh yeah,” Briscoe says. “What was I doing, if you think you know?”

“That’s a question,” Cinq-Mars points out to him.

The fisherman goes silent then, and Cinq-Mars stands more closely in front of him, staring down his lengthy beak at the much shorter man.

“You weren’t burying a damn thing. Certainly not your dog. You were retrieving that long-handled spade from the murder site. That was your job for the day. Admit it. Don’t tell me another lie. You took the shovel away from the scene of the crime, where it was up by the forest, and so the cops never saw it. You carried it away and took it to another location. What were you doing with it? Don’t answer, because that might come out as another question and you’ll be sorry then. You were wiping the blood off it, Pete. Wiping the blood off.”

The pupils of Briscoe’s eyes have grown huge, but Louwagie is also perplexed, and intrigued. He’s evaluating the fisherman under different light. He assessed him as a possible material witness, not someone who committed a serious crime. Now he’s not sure. He doesn’t know where Cinq-Mars is going with this, but he can tell that Briscoe is busting to elude him.

“Pete,” Émile goes on, “you were tampering—this is a serious crime by itself—you were tampering with the evidence. You wanted to get the blood off. After I went by and we saw each other and you came running to me with some cockamamie tale about burying your dog a whole day late, after that you did more than just wipe the spade through the grass to get the blood and the tissue scrapings off. You started digging to make it look good. Because I saw you there. That’s the only explanation for what you were doing up there. So—and be careful now, because I’m about to ask you a question and I don’t want another question in return, and trust me, you don’t want that, either—where is the shovel now, Pete? Who did you return it to? Who did you borrow it from? Don’t take your time with this. For your sake, because you’re already in serious trouble for tampering with the evidence, just answer the questions.”

As straightforward as the path has been laid out for him, Briscoe still doesn’t know how to take the first step. Instead, he tries to get around Émile.

“I had nothing to do with any murder. You can’t think that. That’s crazy.”

“Except to tamper with evidence.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Okay. Maybe that. But I didn’t
know
I was doing that.”

Cinq-Mars backs off a moment. He goes over to the porch railing as another, yet still distant, thunderclap rolls across the sea.

“I’m a big-city cop,” Émile says to him, looking out toward the water now with Briscoe at his back. “You’ve heard the stories about me, I’m sure.” He looks back over his shoulder to see if he’ll respond, and Briscoe does nod yes. Émile turns, intertwines his arms over his chest, and leans his butt against the railing. He decides to make use of his exaggerated reputation. “Do you think I cracked the Mafia apart in my home city and took down the Hells Angels by being Mr. Nice Guy? Tell him, Officer. He listens to you. If he comes down to the station, you won’t interfere with what I do.”

“I’m not interfering,” Louwagie says. “Sorry, Pete, but this is serious business, murder is. Things aren’t normal anymore.”

Cinq-Mars likes this, the conviction in his voice, the logical explanation to deter Briscoe from assuming that the old guy is mere talk, no action.

“You won’t protect him,” Émile states.

“I’ll go home, sir. Leave you two alone.”

That’s when Pete Briscoe confesses although he might not know it. “I borrowed it from my girlfriend. Okay? The spade.”

Cinq-Mars stares him down. Briscoe’s a challenge, as his near unibrow somehow gives him a place to hide his eyes by tilting his forehead down a few degrees, as if his mind and his reactions are hiding in the bushes. Yet Émile has much confidence, gained from long practice, in the ferocity of his gaze, and when the man’s eyes do quick little shifts, from holding his look to measuring the mountain that is his nose, and then feeling self-conscious about that, tries to regain a hold on his eyes again after it’s too late, the former cop has him right where he wants him.

“Never make me wait this long again for an answer. Understood?”

Briscoe appears to accept this altered structure to his universe, and nods.

Cinq-Mars asks, “Where were you the night Orrock was killed?” Keeping him off guard again, going on to a different subject altogether.

“Killed?”

Cinq-Mars scarcely moves, but ever so slightly his pupils expand.

“Sorry, that’s not a question. I thought he died is all. Old age.”

“Killed,” the older man confirms. “I told you that already. This is not news.”

“I just forgot.”

“Who can forget that? Selective memory? Now answer my question.”

“I was out fishing.”

“Not possible,” Cinq-Mars states.

“Sure it is,” Briscoe protests. His voice is weak and his eyes scurry around.

“You’re not a real fisherman.”

Cinq-Mars can tell that the man is trying to ask a question but has to warn himself not to do so. “Sure I am,” Briscoe says at last, but he clearly has his doubts.

“You’re a fish farmer. That’s different.”

“Yeah, it’s different. There’s more money in it. A better life, too.”

“I understand,” Émile says, and there’s genuine sympathy to be gleaned from his tone. He knows that old ways sometimes change and people adapt. “What it means, though, is that you weren’t fishing that night. Because you don’t fish, do you, Mr. Briscoe? You don’t fish, and I know exactly, very precisely, where your boat was moored. Under the Orrock mansion.” Pete Briscoe so much wants to ask a question that Émile takes pity on him and answers it himself. “You left your AIS on. That’s how I know. I’ll give you credit. You didn’t want anyone to crash into you. Where you were moored, that was possible, even probable, if anyone was making harbor that night. So at least you exercised good seamanship, I’m giving you credit for that. You weren’t out fishing and you weren’t out at the fish farms. You were moored where you had no business being moored, and you weren’t on your boat, because why would you moor there if you wanted to stay on your boat? You’d have gone into the harbor. On to a safer place. The question is—and remember, I don’t want you wasting my time, so answer right away—where were you, Pete?”

Pete has begun to cooperate, and Émile needs to keep bringing him along, to help him feel more at ease divulging secrets. Once he says something to implicate himself or others, there will be no turning back. The whole shebang will come out. Louwagie at that moment moves over to an Adirondack chair on the porch and sits down, and both Cinq-Mars and Briscoe observe him do so. They’d both like to be that comfortable, that free. Louwagie looks up, waiting to see how this plays out.