The Storm Murders (2 page)

Ron was not sure. Neither choice seemed grand. The options might be equally dangerous, but he didn’t think that that was the point. Weren’t they
supposed
to wait for backup?

“Here’s the thing,” Marc determined. “That guy in the living room? He doesn’t live alone. Somebody’s life could be in danger here. Where’s his wife?”

“Maybe she killed him.”

“Maybe. Probably. Who else? Or—she’s a victim, too. We don’t know.”

Photographs of her smiled up at them from the coffeetable. A middle-aged, matronly sort. Not your average assassin. Not one to tie up her husband before she shot him. Ron nodded. Yes. This is why he became a cop. He was onside with this. They proceeded to the nearest room, a kind of home office, small, where he waited at the doorway as Marc went in and checked the large closet. Empty.

Marc returned to the doorway. Tall. An angular face. If he was an actor, he’d more likely be cast as an academic, or as an accountant, than as a cop. He’d never find work as an actor trying to play a cop. “Clear,” he whispered.

“Do we announce?” Ron asked. The more powerful of the two, a solidness was reflected in his squared-off cheekbones and chin. “We should announce.”

Marc didn’t like to be corrected by a prot
é
g
é
. “Okay. Whatever. Whoever’s here already knows we’re here.” To maintain his status, he said, “You announce.”

Scared, Ron shouted out, “Police! S
û
ret
é
du Qu
é
bec! This is the police! Identify yourself!” In French only. He repeated, “Police!” which worked in either language.

That silence.

“Happy now?” Marc asked him. Ron considered it an unwarranted comment and didn’t forgive his partner’s sarcasm. He felt that he didn’t really like this guy anymore but that was no big concern. They were bound together. In fear, and, as it happened, in mutual trust.

Next was a sewing room, which doubled perhaps as a guest bedroom. Ron slipped in, his heart thumping through his brains. He came back out and muttered, “Clear.” The word caught in his throat. He hoped his high anxiety wasn’t showing.

But it was okay. Marc looked frightened, too. Fear, Ron reminded himself, was never the point. What counts is not how scared you are or how brave you claim to be or even how calm you are. All that matters is what you do.

More small rooms. Definitely, a woman lived there with a man. The furnace came on again giving them a start. With the front door smashed, the inrush of cold air was causing it to frequently cycle on. They glanced at one another.
The furnace.
So there’s a basement. Of course. And an upstairs. They were caught between the two. The door down was in the kitchen. Marc made the decision and Ron went down the stairs partway and swept his eyes around. Washing machine and dryer. A work bench. A radial-arm saw. Tools. Various ladders. Farm and garden implements, shovels, rakes, and a pitchfork. The furnace. The oil tank. A hot-water heater. Storage boxes on a rack. Kitty litter. Everything was up off the floor as if the space flooded on occasion. A sump pump. A tidy basement. But no one with a gun, and no dead people with their blood on the floor. No hiding places. He went back up.

They checked more small rooms.

A powder room. A TV room. A large hall closet. What looked like a music room. Now that was a luxury.

Time to go upstairs.

On the balls of their feet they moved slowly, but the old wood underfoot announced their trespass. Creaking.

A heating pipe banged and Ron shouted back, “Police! SQ! Identify yourself!”

“Shut up for Christ’s sake,” hissed Marc.

Ron really didn’t like the guy. Why did he ever tell his girlfriend that his partner was okay, a tad full of himself maybe? He was a whole lot more than full of himself. He let him go first. He’d rather not take a bullet for him if he could help it.

“Fucking procedure,” attested Ron, mumbling really. “You got to identify yourself before you go shooting anybody. That’s so basic.”

Marc decided that he might as well bellow, too. “Missus? Are you here? Lady?”

Furnace thrum, a clanging radiator, and under all that a gawking silence.

They made it to the top of the stairs and their legs and breathing felt as though they’d just climbed Everest. Marc signaled his partner to check the room on their left. Ron preferred not to do so but he was given no choice. The door stood open. He flashed his head in the doorway, pulled it back instantly, then processed what he saw in that moment. Nothing. He looked in again and held his gaze. He entered as he’d been taught to do, weight and pistol forward. Recruits were taught to do it that way. If shot, the officer falls forward, which might allow him to get off a few rounds of his own. Maybe save his life that way, at least in theory.
Yeah, right.
Ron figured it really meant that he’d hit the floor face-first. Bust his nose. Mess up his corpse for the coffin. No one in the room, no one in the closet, no sign of any disturbance. The ceilings were low and the slope of the roofline evident: The room occupied half the upper floor, a bedroom, yet without the look of a master suite. It appeared to be infrequently used. Pillowcases did not adorn the pillows.

He held his breath and checked under the bed. No one. No shooter, no second vic.

Ron came back out.

Marc led the way down the hall. A bathroom was nearly opposite the top of the stairs. He crossed to the far side of the door. Ron glanced in. On his second look, he could see more of the room by checking the mirror on the face of the medicine cabinet. Then he went in and confirmed that the space was empty. He mouthed the word,
“Secure,”
and followed Marc further along. The door to the last room on the floor was also open. Marc’s turn. He glanced in and jerked his head back. He looked at Ron, which was not procedure. He took a breath. Whispered, “Woman on the floor. We got another one.”

“Suicide?”

“How the fuck do I know? Looks like it anyway.”

He risked a longer glance in, not looking at the woman so much but at the far corners, at the edge of the bed, searching for anything that might move. Not even a cat. A farmhouse, and not even a cat. He went in, weapon raised and checked behind the door, in the open closet, over the far side of the bed. He signaled Ron to check under the bed. Ron wanted to puke. He’d been looking at the woman. On his knees, he lifted up the bed ruffle and checked that space. A few small storage items, but no killer.

Ron rose, relieved that his head hadn’t been blown off. Marc entered the room first but left him the scariest task. Now they both looked at the woman. A dismal view, more so because she was naked. The indignity. Legs akimbo. Blood smudged. Marc had seen dead people on the job mangled in their cars. Gruesome enough. He went closer. He touched her. He was not supposed to do that. “Fuck,” he said, but in a way that sounded amazed. “Still breathing.”

“Really? No way.” So much blood, from her head wound and also her hand. Blood from the hand had splashed around.

“Call it in.”

Ron did so. He reported that one victim was alive and requested an ambulance. He was told that one was on the way, that it had been on the way for a while, just in case.

In case of what? he wondered.

Then an impression gnawing at him struck home. “Marc,” he said.

“What?”

“There’s no gun. No weapon.”

They looked around. If this was a suicide then she shot herself through the back of the head without a weapon. The dead man downstairs had his hands tied behind his back. He didn’t do it. And no footprints left the house.

Under his breath, Marc said aloud what Ron already knew. “Still here.”

Yet they’d searched everywhere.

They stuck close to each other near the door, their backs against the wall for additional protection, listening.

“Wait for backup?” Ron suggested. He was afraid he might piss himself. He felt that he was all right overall, he could handle this, but he might piss himself.

“Yeah. We wait for backup.” Marc didn’t know what else to do. He looked at the woman. He was pretty sure that the man downstairs had a finger cut off. That was certainly true for the woman.

Marc glanced out to the hallway, just to check there. When reinforcements arrived he wouldn’t let them see him like this, cowering. He’d tell them that they stayed in the room to protect the woman and because waiting for backup was fucking procedure. Fuck this shit. He wanted to be a detective, he joined to become a detective, not some uniform risking his life in some godforsaken farmhouse in what was not only the middle of nowhere but the worthless
center
of the middle of nowhere in the freezing fucking cold. But
shit
it was exciting, too. A double murder! Unless the woman makes it, but still, a double
shooting
on his watch and the killer might still be around if he hadn’t left by helicopter or by Santa’s bright red sleigh.

Marc glanced out the door again to make sure that no one was creeping up on them. He didn’t see a thing and drew a deeper breath to release his tension and before he got to fully exhale he dropped to the floor, landing awkwardly, and toppled over. Ron saw him fall and the shock of the blast turned his blood to glue. He didn’t think
don’t hesitate
, although he wanted to think that way, but he couldn’t think anything and yet he hardly hesitated at all and bent his arm around the doorjamb with his pistol ready to fire and his hand shaking and his heart bursting out the top of his head and his eyeballs out his skull and yet he had no one to shoot at. He only had walls in his line of sight and the shooter, he figured, must be behind the wall at the top of the stairs and he aimed at the spot waiting for the shooter to show himself and yet he never did and he yelled into his collar transmitter, breathless, “Officer down! Officer down!” because he couldn’t remember the code, he’d never needed to remember that code, then he yelled like a crazy man, “Police! Come out—” and although no one was there he never discerned that fact as he heard a sound, a small sound, like a shuffling, and then his brain imploded and he fell upon his partner, and as he bled his blood commingled with his partner’s. Nor was he aware that all there was before him now and under him and around him was that silence, that perfect stillness which he experienced initially as an unfathomable dread, but now became the perfect silence of a swift death.

Silence throughout the countryside, interrupted for those moments, ensued for a spell, then broke again. Across the snowy fields, echoing off the hardwoods, came the bark of yet another gunshot, so the quiet that returned, contrasted by the shot, felt immense, sustained, eternal, as brilliant as the sunshine, until there occurred a rising bedlam, a raring noise, distant at first then drawing closer, as sirens raced to that snowbound cottage, police and ambulance and more police, and something in the wailing, something in the plaintiveness over the waves of fresh snow on the serene fields, suggested that their speed was insufficient, that their urgency, both provoked and necessary, was too little and could only arrive too late.

TWO

Retirement was not serving former Sergeant-Detective
É
mile Cinq-Mars as well as desired. He had much to do, especially with his wife’s horse business, and a variety of interests engaged his attention. So he did not suffer from any lack of activity and contrary to his prior speculations hardly missed the job at all. But he was wickedly unlucky. He fell, not
off
a horse, which he might have expected and carried with a certain honor—what horseman did not brave more than one nasty fall?—but he tripped over a bucket and tumbled
into
a horse who, startled, gave a kick, catching him right below the heart. The near-miss might have been his salvation although, for about six seconds, Cinq-Mars thought he was dead, then for the next six hours wished that he was. Notwithstanding the evidence of his survival, the broken ribs took their own sweet time to heal, a painful and lethargic process.

His first stroke of bad luck proved not to be his last.

Amid the fanfare concerning his retirement, during which time he was feted and anointed by colleagues both respected and despised, pumped for knowledge and contacts, equally praised and excoriated in the press so that a public debate ensued over whether citizens ought to be dancing in the streets or wearing sackcloth—somewhere within that repetitive munificence of sentiment and gift-giving he was handed the de rigueur gold watch. Initially, Cinq-Mars felt disrespected that a superior would stoop to such a banal gift when a halfhearted handshake would do, and irritate him less, but then he checked the watch. Hey. A nice watch. He liked it. He had never possessed an object of such obvious value before and grudgingly made peace with the symbolism.
Time’s up.
Or,
All you got left is time now.
Or,
About time you got the hell out of here.
Or even,
We couldn’t think of anything else but it’s the thought that counts, right?
He was the recipient of retirement cards that humorously underscored such sentiments. But he liked the watch and enjoyed putting it on in the morning, at least until the day that he strapped it onto his wrist and discovered that for all its value and beauty and artful weight it offered back the wrong hour.

Still ticking, but 247 minutes behind.

To effect the repair under warranty required that he return it to the jeweler where the watch was initially purchased. Which is when he discovered that it was worth over two grand. Police department money wasn’t tapped to purchase the timepiece, not at that price, the cash raised instead among colleagues, from among those both favored and despised. Indeed, from among those who exhorted him to stay and from those who were counting down the minutes, perhaps using the pricy watch, to his departure. Cinq-Mars felt a pang. Of affection. Of loss. For the old camaraderie. Even for the old daily frictions. In returning to retrieve the repaired Rolex he took note that this was only the fourth time in his life that he found himself inside an upscale jewelry boutique as a paying customer rather than as an officer of the law. Once to buy a ring for a girlfriend as a young man, once to choose an engagement ring and wedding bands for himself and his future wife—she went back to pick them up—once to return his broken watch and now, a fourth time, to pick it up. On his first two trips he wasn’t retired, and went in on his lunch break, wearing a regulation pistol. So bringing the watch in, and now to pick it up, constituted his only times in a jewelry store unarmed, which struck him as both ironic and unfortunate given that he was interrupting a robbery-in-progress.