Shatter the Night Page 4

  I had to smile at that. “Why are you here, Judge?”

  “I play bunco with Chief Teller’s wife. She called me as soon as she heard.” Dumont took another swig of the gin. “I had to see it for myself. It’s the former prosecutor in me, I suppose. And more importantly, Caleb was a friend, a mentor. I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  I nodded, well aware that I was in a precarious situation. On the one hand, Judge Dumont would need to know pertinent details as the investigation progressed, as she or the associate judge would be the ones to sign off on search and arrest warrants. On the other hand, her colleague had been viciously murdered, and as a motive had not yet been established, there remained the possibility that she herself could be a target.

  “I’ll do whatever I can to help you catch his killer. Whatever it takes. Caleb was a good friend to me over the years,” she added.

  “Judge Dumont, I’d like you to consider laying low for the next few days. Can you reschedule your cases? Stay out of sight for a while?”

  Shock in her eyes. “You think I might be a target?”

  Frankly, I was surprised she hadn’t considered it. “Possibly. You, or other court personnel. We don’t yet know what we’re dealing with. At least consider it; talk it over with Nash.”

  “My husband is many things, but a good listener he is not.” Dumont sighed. “Look, you and I don’t know each other very well. If we did, you’d know that I don’t back down, ever. If it’s my time to go, then it’s my time to go. Until then, I refuse to be a coward. I have a court to run, cases to rule on. People are counting on me, Detective.”

  “If I may be so blunt, Judge, that’s both commendable and foolish.”

  She shrugged and took another, albeit smaller, sip from her flask. “I don’t know how to be anyone but me. Besides, Caleb had left the bench. I’d look to people who fell outside of his career to find your suspect.”

  We sat on that, silent, watching as life continued around us. It was late now, past ten o’clock, though the techs were still hard at work collecting evidence. As Finn had thought, the search radius was large and surprisingly high … they’d found a piece of bumper from the Mercedes ten feet up in the branches of a pine tree. Though it was incredibly gruesome to think about, it was a wonder that there’d been anything left of Caleb’s body at all.

  A couple of older boys, maybe fifteen or sixteen, rolled by us on bicycles, their faces obscured by bloodied hockey masks, their handlebars weighted down by bulging bags of candy. One of them let loose with a banshee call and Dumont flinched. She quickly stood. “If there’s nothing else? I need to get the hell out of here. I feel as though I’m on the verge of falling down into a very long and very deep rabbit hole, one from which I may never emerge.”

  “Perhaps we can talk tomorrow more.”

  The judge nodded, gathered her things, and walked away, her head down but her shoulders squared back. She was a strong woman, but I wondered if she wasn’t a little naïve.

  I found Finn at the perimeter of the crime scene. As the night had worn on, it had gotten colder and colder. He handed me a knit cap and an extra pair of leather gloves. I slipped them on, grateful.

  “I just got off the phone with Ravi. We lucked out; Montgomery had oral surgery a few years ago and his X-rays were in his records at the hospital. She said it won’t take long to make a comparison. His, uh, jaw was intact.”

  Shivering, I nodded.

  Finn rested his hand lightly on my back for a moment, then let it drop. “You don’t need to do this, you know. Work this particular case. Say the word and we’ll sub Moriarty. I didn’t mean to be an ass earlier; you know as well as I do that some cases are better handled by others.”

  “Thanks for the offer, and the apology, but I need to be along for every step of this investigation. I owe it to him, to my family.” I stared down, noticed dark streaks of soot on the front of my jacket and black stains on the palms of my hands. I rubbed them on my dark pants but the marks refused to disappear. “This is personal.”

  “Be careful, Gemma. In this business, we can’t afford to let things be personal. You hungry?”

  To my surprise, I was. “House of Five Spices?”

  “You got it.”

  We grabbed a couple of bowls of fried rice and Kung Pao chicken from the twenty-four-hour Chinese restaurant near the police station and ate standing at a long white counter under blinking fluorescent lights. I dumped extra sweet-and-sour sauce onto my fried rice and devoured the whole thing in four bites. The Kung Pao chicken took three. A long swallow of lemonade and I was almost feeling back to normal.

  Then Finn’s phone rang.

  He took the call, his face growing more somber with each passing moment. Finally, he hung up, and turned to me. “That was Ravi. Caleb Montgomery’s dental X-rays match the body. I’m sorry, Gemma. It’s him.”

  My heart sank. I’d known this moment was coming but it didn’t make hearing it any easier.

  I pushed the lemonade away, a sour taste rising in my throat. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter Four

  Caleb’s last words to me had been a warning to watch out for the monsters. Now Caleb was dead, and it was up to me to break the news to my grandfather Bull and then to Caleb’s widow. I was hoping the former would help me with the latter.

  And unfortunately, neither could wait until first light.

  Caleb was too well known in town; it would be a matter of hours before the news leaked to reporters. The thought of either Bull or Edith Montgomery hearing the worst from the radio or the television was enough to turn the fried rice in my stomach.

  From the car, I phoned home and spoke with Brody. He was shocked to hear the news, and sorry that my night seemed to be getting longer by the minute … but as he liked to say, he knew what he was getting into when the two of us hooked up six years ago. Once I’d sworn the oath and slipped on the blue, my life was no longer my own; my time, my energy, even my dreams belong in equal parts to both victim and perpetrator.

  Brody, and Grace, shared me with the dead.

  We managed to make it work. We employed a wonderful young woman, Clementine Major, as a full-time nanny for Grace so that Brody could continue excelling at his job in town. A former geologist, he worked for a consulting company, assisting with international mining contracts and securing business deals. He’d done well for himself and there was talk that he could be appointed a vice president in the coming year. The extra income would be nice, but the promotion would mean more travel for Brody, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  A long-ago affair between him and a colleague had left me often unsure of the footing between us; things always seemed to get rockier the longer and more often he was away. Things were … easier when he was home.

  Less messy, somehow.

  Especially now that we were to be married in a few weeks. Things finally felt as though they’d reached a nice, easy state of stability.

  I ended the call with a promise to wake him when I arrived home.

  By the time I was on the road, it was after eleven. An evening fog had crept into the valley and it hung, a low cloud, over the land. Though the heat ran full blast, my core was numb with cold grief.

  On the radio, Warren Zevon sang about werewolves in London. The station was playing all the Halloween hits, had been doing so for the last week. I’d be glad when they switched over to Christmas jingles, which in my experience would happen exactly three seconds after the calendar turned to November 1.

  I texted Bull and discovered he was having coffee at a diner that stayed open late near his house. Since we’d moved my grandmother, Julia Weston, into a long-term care center across town, Bull had taken to spending his evenings in a rotation of late-night diners, card games, and double features at the cinema. I found him at a booth near the back, with a full cup of coffee and a half-eaten slice of apple pie.

  I gave him a hug, then eyed the pie. “Are you going to eat that?”

  “He
lp yourself. I think it’s a little heavy on the cinnamon.” Bull sipped his coffee, watched me take a bite.

  “It’s delicious. I can barely taste the cinnamon. It could have used a pinch more, in my opinion.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Gemma, out with it. If you’re not home with your family, you must be working a case. So, spill. What do you need from me?”

  Bull was grumpy these days, though that didn’t make him wrong; I was stalling. I took in his shock of white hair, his narrow, lanky frame. He’d lost ten pounds over the last few months, most of it from stress and worry over my grandmother. His angst was understandable. After all, Julia, the woman who had raised me after my parents were killed in a car accident, the woman we both loved, was dying.

  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow.

  But bit by bit, her memory and abilities were being stolen by dementia.

  And eventually, the loss of brain function or a secondary infection would kill her.

  The last few years had been rough on all of us, but especially on Bull. Though he remained active in the community since retiring as a judge, mostly with his church and the local Boys & Girls Clubs, I worried how he would do once my grandmother did pass. He’d spent the last two years so focused on her health and care that I guessed he’d been neglecting his own.

  Bull raised his eyebrows when he saw the serious expression on my face. “This can’t be good.”

  “It’s not.” I took his hand. The diner was a fifties-themed dive joint, all hot pink and turquoise vinyl. From a jukebox in the corner, a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize sang about troubles with her man. It was a strange and surreal setting to deliver the news, but as Ravi had quoted … death comes when it will. There could be no further delay. “I’m so sorry to tell you this. Caleb Montgomery is dead.”

  Bull went white. “Caleb? That can’t be, Gemma. You’re mistaken. I just spoke with him yesterday.”

  “I saw his body, Bull. He’s dead. There was an explosion tonight, outside his office on south Main. Caleb’s car, it … well, it may have been a car bomb. He was inside the vehicle when it caught fire.”

  Bull’s eyes grew damp. “A bomb?”

  “The fire department is investigating and, of course, so will we. We’ll get the bastard that did this, Bull. I swear it.”

  “My God. I can’t believe this.” My grandfather rubbed at his temples, pinched his eyes shut. “Has Edith been notified?”

  “No, not yet. I’m hoping you’ll come with me. You were Caleb’s best friend. I’m sure Edith would appreciate you being there. And, to be honest, it’s been months since I’ve seen her.”

  “Of course.” Bull paused, then added in a weary voice, “They’re separated, you know.”

  “Who, Caleb and Edith?”

  “Yes. Caleb moved out of the house in July. He’s been living at the Tate Lodge Inn until the divorce was finalized, at which point he planned to buy a condo.” Bull looked around the diner, watched as a couple of older women dressed in costumes took up seats at the counter and began chatting to one another loudly.

  I had to lean forward to catch what Bull was saying.

  “I think he might have been seeing someone on the side. Edith, too, maybe.”

  “You don’t say.” I excused myself to call the station and arrange for an officer to secure Caleb’s rooms at the hotel until Finn and I got a search warrant. As I ended the call, I bit my lip, thinking. Edith and Caleb Montgomery were wealthy. I’d left the crime scene certain that the same individual who’d sent Caleb the threatening letters had killed him. But divorce can make people do strange things, and if you tossed affairs into the mix … I was suddenly forced to confront an unexpected motive, and suspect, in Caleb’s death.

  As I returned to Bull, I asked, “Were things friendly between them?”

  “Well … not exactly. The last I heard, most of the conversation was going through the attorneys. They’ve both got top-notch people representing their interests and I’m sure they’ve been advised to keep contact to a minimum.” Bull saw the look on my face and sat up straight, his eyes darkening. “You can’t possibly imagine Edith had anything to do with Caleb’s death.”

  I’d seen too much in my career to put anything out of the realm of possibility. But at that very moment, I’d actually returned to thinking again about the threats. I described them to my grandfather, quoting what I could remember from the few I’d read. “Why would Caleb wait so long to bring them to our attention?”

  Bull thought a moment. “Well, if I had to guess, I’d say that Caleb didn’t want to let the sender have the satisfaction of him reporting them. Which of course is all sorts of screwy but Caleb could be an odd duck.” He checked his watch and stood, withdrawing a crumpled ten-dollar bill and tossing it on the table. “It’s getting late, Gemma. We should go to Edith.”

  I followed Bull out of the diner. We drove the fifteen-minute trip separately, slowly, through the thickening fog. By the time I parked and met Bull in the driveway of the Montgomery mansion on Fifth Street, it was nearing midnight.

  We walked to the house, our shoes crunching on a carpet of fallen leaves, the path ahead illuminated by dozens of ground-level lights. The house was a beautiful rambling manor of redbrick, with a wide wraparound porch and Victorian turrets. It had once belonged to the wealthiest man in Cedar Valley, Stanley Wanamaker James, the town’s first silver baron. After the mansion had fallen into disarray in the 1980s, Caleb and Edith had bought it for pennies on the dollar and then sunk thousands into repairing and restoring it.

  To my relief, a number of lights still burned in the house’s windows. I wouldn’t have to rouse Edith from sleep only to then deliver her straight into a nightmare.

  Someone, presumably Edith, had placed carved pumpkins on the porch. Next to the gourds, a straw-stuffed scarecrow sat in a rocking chair, a felt hat pulled down low, shading his face. At his feet, a large plastic crow stared at us. All of this, the entire Halloween tableau, was lit up by an orange glow from the hanging porch light.

  And on the front door, the wooden silhouette of a witch on a broomstick was carefully hung with a strand of inky black ribbon. The witch reminded me of something, something I’d forgotten, perhaps even repressed, for years.

  The memory came barreling back like a runaway train. I stopped at the first step leading up to the porch and shuddered.

  Bull paused at the top of the steps, sensed the fear that had descended over me. “What’s wrong?”

  It took me a moment to get the words out. “I’d forgotten all about the Halloween party here, when I was six or seven years old. Do you remember it?”

  “I’ll never forget that night. We thought we’d lost you.” Bull shook his head and murmured, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so terrified in my life.”

  The words tumbled from my mouth as I remembered all the details of that long, strange evening.

  Or rather, not all of them.

  Not the important ones.

  “There were a handful of children here, weren’t there? We decided to play hide-and-go-seek in Edith’s gardens, at the back of the house. It was warm that year, too warm for Halloween. Then it turned cold. I can still feel the sudden gust of wind, the way the night got darker, like someone had hung a blanket up over the moon and the stars. The sky went black. And then everyone was gone. They must have run inside, but I missed the message. I was alone.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. “It was the most complete loneliness I’d ever felt. I remember walking back toward the house. I was nearly there when a shrub stood up and outstretched its arms. I realized it wasn’t a shrub at all but a witch. And out of her head flew a pair of bats, huge, black bats as big as birds. Then a gray mist settled around me. I ran. I ran for what seemed like hours. All I could think about was getting away from the witch.”

  My mouth was dry and my legs felt like they’d been encased in cement. I forced myself up the stairs until I’d reached the top and joined Bull on the porch.

/>   “Cal always thought there was a cave somewhere around here where the bats hibernated; he’d seen them over the years, too. Anyway, thank goodness we found you.” Bull put an arm around my shoulders. “It started snowing, just after we got home and tucked you in bed. Your grandmother couldn’t stop crying at the idea of you out there in a snowstorm. Alone, lost.”

  “Where did you find me?”

  Bull paused, his hand about to grasp the door knocker. “You don’t remember?”

  “No.”

  “You were in the Old Cabin Woods. We found you inside the ruins, tucked in beside the remains of the chimney. It was a miracle; other than a few scratches and bruises, you were okay.”

  Bull gripped the door knocker and banged it once, twice, three times. With each knock, the wooden witch jumped on her broom.

  Was Bull right? Had I been okay?

  The Old Cabin Woods, whose proper name was the Ashley Forest, was the sprawling open space and wilderness that the Montgomery’s house butted up against. Its nickname came from the homesteader’s cabin that had been the only residential building on the land for years. The cabin, and the homesteader inside it, burned down over a hundred years ago and the ruins were said to be haunted by his ghost. At least, that’s what parents told their kids in an effort to keep them from playing in those particular woods. The land was littered with rusted steel animal traps, the kind with sharp teeth that jumped up and snared legs when the trap was stepped on. And under the heavy cover of thick trees, the soil was loose and the many creeks that ran through the forest combined with the soil to create a thick mud, similar to quicksand.