Chapter 13
1
Holly sleeps badly, haunted by dreams of the big man with the bat. She doesn’t kick the chair in these dreams, only freezes in place while the big man swats Kate’s head off. She awakes with dawn just an orangey-pink line on the eastern horizon, pulls her iPad off the charger, and writes an email to Jerome.
I hope you are busy with your book, and I hate to ask you to go back to work for me, especially after you got in touch with John Ackerly, but I have to. (Besides, I think you said you were looking for a distraction.) I believe the woman who is stalking Kate may be—is almost certainly—a religious zealot. Kate got a note in Spokane that said she who speaks lies shall perish, which is from the book of Proverbs. When the stalker dumped roadkill on Kate’s luggage, she wrote Exodus 22 on the door. This is a long shot, J, but would you look online for churches that have been in trouble with the law for crimes having to do with abortion protests, women’s rights, or LGBTQ+ rights or rallies. Start with Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, and follow the breadcrumbs from there. I’m only interested in church protests that resulted in charges for gross trespassing, assault, criminal threatening, things like that.
If you do this for me, not only will you be paid, you will also get a free pass to call me “Hollyberry” three (3) times. Thank you, and if you are too busy, I understand.
Holly
She sends it off with a swoosh, then finds John Ackerly in her contacts and writes to him.
Dear John: If it will not violate your NA “anonymity clause,” I wonder if you would ask around, not for Program people named brIGGS but for someone named TRIG. I think that might be the killer’s real name, or nickname. Thank you.
Holly
With that done, she goes back to bed, and manages to sleep for another two hours. This time there are no dreams.
2
Izzy Jaynes and Tom Atta arrive at the Grinsted home at quarter of nine on Sunday morning. A thin-faced woman in a quilted housecoat answers the door and looks at their badges. She doesn’t ask why they’ve come, only tells them her husband is in the gazebo. She pronounces it gaze -bo. “Go through the kitchen,” she says, and cocks with her thumb like a hitchhiker.
“Tell me something, Mrs. Grinsted,” Izzy says. “Does Russell have a younger brother or sister?”
She doesn’t ask why Izzy wants to know. “Only child. Raised to think of himself as the little prince.” And rolls her eyes.
They go through the kitchen. Tom speaks low to Izzy. “I think there might be trouble in this particular valley.” Izzy nods. Mrs. Grinsted struck her as a woman suffering a serious case of detachment.
Across a patio and in the middle of a good-sized patch of back lawn, a balding man in a red bathrobe and pajamas is sitting at a table in the gazebo, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. He sees them coming and stands up, re-belting his robe. He doesn’t ask to see their badges. He doesn’t need to.
To both: “Cheezit, the cops.” And to Izzy: “Atta I know from court. You I’ve never had the pleasure of deposing or cross-examining.”
“Isabelle Jaynes,” she says, and gives a brief shake to Grinsted’s outstretched hand.
“What are you doing here bright and early on a Sunday morning? Don’t tell me, let me guess. It concerns whoever is killing people and leaving the names of the Duffrey jurors in his victim’s hands.”
“That wouldn’t be you, would it?” Tom asks pleasantly.
Russell Grinsted looks blank for a moment, then laughs. “Good one! Now what can this humble esquire help you with?”
Izzy and Tom don’t reply. Grinsted looks from one to the other. “You’re not joking.”
“Not a bit,” Tom says.
Grinsted turns and picks up his coffee cup and drains it. He speaks not to his visitors on this warm and charming spring morning, but to the empty cup, as if to a microphone. “Two city detectives show up at my house on Sunday morning while I’ve still got sleepy-dust in my eyes to ask if I’m killing people because of the late and lamented—by me, among others—Alan Duffrey. Who I just about tore my guts out defending. And they’re not joking.”
He turns to them, not laughing now but smiling. Tom will tell Izzy later that he remembers that smile from being cross-examined by Grinsted. Which was an unpleasant experience.
“And what has led you to that amazing idea, Officers?”
“Why don’t you let us ask the questions, and then we’ll let you get back to your Sunday morning,” Izzy says. “Assuming the answers are satisfactory, that is. If they’re not, you may have to accompany us downtown.”
“Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. All right, ask away.”
“Let’s start with May third,” Izzy says. “That was a Saturday. Where were you between the hours of, let’s say five and seven PM?”
“Really?” Still with the smile, now accompanied by raised eyebrows. “Do you remember where you were on a Saturday three weeks ago?”
The kitchen door bangs open, and Mrs. Grinsted joins them. She has a coffee pot and two cups on a St. Pauli Girl tray. Also cream and sugar. “He was here, I should think. We watch Antiques Roadshow on Saturday afternoons or evenings. Streaming is convenient because you can watch any old time. Russ usually gets takeout. Whatever he feels like. I am rarely consulted. Coffee?”
“No, thank you,” Tom says. “Of course, we usually expect spouses to offer alibis.” He gives her his own smile, which is considerably more friendly than Grinsted’s sharklike grin. “Just sayin.”
Izzy: “What about the next afternoon? Sunday the fourth?” The day the winos were killed.
Grinsted says, “Oh my Jesus. Wait, I might actually have something on that.” He goes into the house, tightening the belt of his robe and once again muttering, “Unbelievable.”
“Do you have any memories of that Sunday?” Tom asks Mrs. Grinsted. “It was a chilly one, looked like rain, not like now.”
“I went to church. I go every Sunday. Russ doesn’t attend. I believe he was in his study, prepping a case or expecting somebody, but I can’t really say.”
“Does your husband own a firearm, Mrs. Grinsted?”
“Oh yes, we both have guns. I have a Ruger .45 and Russ has a Glock 17. They are for home protection. My husband is a criminal lawyer who often has bad people for clients. Sometimes he brings them home.”
Both weapons are bigger than the gun used on Mike Rafferty, and much bigger than the gun used on the woman and the winos. But they will have to check those weapons, if Grinsted cannot provide any alibi stronger than a wife who doesn’t seem especially crazy about him. Still, they have next to nothing… except for Holly Gibney’s deductions, which Izzy trusts, and knows that Tom does, too. Up to a point, anyway.
Grinsted comes back with his own appointment book. He flaps it at them. “At two o’clock on that Sunday, Jimmy Sykes came over to fix my desktop computer. It kept crashing. I was hoping he could come on Saturday, but he was fully booked. Look.”
Tom looks. Izzy writes down the name. “He’s your IT guy?”
“Yes. He re-booted it or something, so I could do some casework.”
“More like so you could play online blackjack,” Mrs. Grinsted says.
Grinsted turns his thin smile away from Izzy and Tom and onto his wife. “Be that as it may, do you remember Jimmy coming in on Sunday?”
“Yes, but not which Sunday.”
He taps the square for May 4th. “Here it is, dear one.”
This provokes an eyeroll from Mrs. Grinsted.
Tom says, “You didn’t just happen to jot that appointment down on that particular date before you came out here, did you?”
“I’d resent that if it wasn’t so ridiculous.”
“Here’s an easy one,” Izzy says. “May twentieth, last Tuesday. Let’s say between six and ten PM. Home with your wife, I suppose. Maybe watching Masterpiece Theatre .”
“I was playing poker. Not online, with friends.” But for the first time, Russell Grinsted seems unsure.
His wife, however, doesn’t. “He wasn’t here, but he wasn’t playing poker, either. If you ask him for the names of the men he was playing with, he’d be in real trouble, because they’d tell you he wasn’t in the game. Russ isn’t a killer, but he is a cheater. Last Tuesday night he was with his chippy.”
Silence in the gazebo. Mrs. Grinsted puts the tray down. Her mouth grows a thin-lipped smile that is much like her husband’s. But is that surprising? Izzy thinks. Don’t they say that men and women who’ve been married a long time grow to look like each other?
“Her name is Jane Haggarty. She’s a part-time legal secretary and ugly as a scarecrow in a melon patch. They’ve been seeing each other off and on for a little over a year.” She turns to her husband. “Did you really think I didn’t know? You are an extremely bad cheater, Russ.”
Izzy hardly knows what to say next, mostly because Mrs. Grinsted—she still doesn’t know the woman’s first name—is so calm . Tom, however, has no problem. Grinsted, after all, once went at him on the stand.
“Will this Jane Haggarty confirm you were with her on the twentieth of May, Mr. Grinsted?”
“Erin, I…” Grinsted doesn’t seem to know how to finish, but at least Izzy now knows Mrs. Grinsted’s first name. Her first thought is She looks too thin and too disappointed to be an Erin.
“We’ll discuss this later, after the police have gone,” Erin Grinsted says. “For now just be happy I saved your bacon. For a lawyer, you certainly know how to talk yourself into trouble.”
She leaves, disappearing into the kitchen without a backward glance. Grinsted sits down at the gazebo table. The belt of his robe, which he has been obsessively tightening, comes undone. The robe flops open. Underneath is a pajama jacket pooched out by a middle-aged potbelly.
“Thanks, assholes,” he says without looking up.
“To coin a metaphor that may be apt in this case,” Izzy says, “the jury is out on who’s the asshole here. The question is whether this Jane Haggarty will confirm you were with her at the time when we believe Reverend Mike Rafferty was murdered.” They will ask Grinsted for an alibi for the Sinclair murder if necessary. It may not be.
“She will.” Still without looking up.
“Address?” Tom has his notebook out.
“4636 Fairlawn Court. She’s married, but they’re separated.” He looks up at last. His eyes are tearless but glazed, like the eyes of a fighter who’s just been the recipient of a hard right to the jaw. “Why in God’s name would you think I was killing those people? I gave Alan Duffrey the best defense I could. Judge and jury got it wrong. Prosecutor has ambitions. End of story.”
Izzy has no intention of bringing her private investigator friend into the discussion. Nor does she have to. She asks Grinsted if the name Claire Rademacher rings a bell.
“She worked at First Lake City,” Grinsted says, sounding suspicious. “Chief cashier, if I remember rightly.”
“You never called her to testify,” Tom says.
“Had no reason to.” Grinsted sounds more suspicious than ever. As a veteran litigator, he understands there’s a trapdoor here somewhere; he just doesn’t know where.
Tom Atta now tells Grinsted—with real satisfaction—about the Plastic Man comic books Cary Tolliver brought Alan Duffrey as a “congratulations on your promotion” present. There was no mention of this six-issue series in the court transcripts, nor of the Mylar bags. Izzy tries to tell herself she’s not enjoying the look of dismayed understanding that dawns on Grinsted’s face. Then she gives up. She is enjoying it. Partly because Grinsted has been cheating on his wife, more because Grinsted thought his wife was too dumb to know, mostly just because she, like most police, dislikes defense attorneys. In theory, she understands their importance to the legal process. In practice, she thinks most of them suck. She reads Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller books, and roots for the Lincoln Lawyer to fall on his face.
“The fingerprints weren’t on those kiddy-fiddler magazines?” Grinsted is still trying to get the enormity of his lapse into his head. “They were just on the bags?”
“That is correct,” Tom says. “Maybe next time, Counselor, you should hire a private investigator instead of trying to hog the retainer and subsequent fees for yourself.”
“Douglas Allen needs to be disbarred!” In his indignation, Grinsted seems to have forgotten he has big trouble on the home front.
“I think disciplinary revocation is the best you can hope for,” Izzy says, “but that should put a pretty good-sized stick in his spokes. Disbarment is unlikely. Allen never said the fingerprints were on the magazines, he simply let you assume it. I doubt if you’ll admit it, but I think you believed those magazines were Duffrey’s all along, even though he denied it.”
“Whatever I may have believed—and you aren’t in my head, Detective Jaynes, so you don’t really know—is immaterial to the defense I mounted for my client. I repeat, I pulled my guts out for that man.”
“But you didn’t pull them out enough to hire an investigator,” Izzy says. She thinks—no, knows —that if Grinsted had hired Holly Gibney, Alan Duffrey would still be alive and free. So in all probability would McElroy, Epstein, Mitborough, and Sinclair. Also, an unknown woman with a juror’s name in her dead hand. And Rafferty, him too.
Grinsted opens his mouth to offer a rebuttal, but Tom gets there first. “Even on your own, you should have figured out fingerprints that clear couldn’t have been taken from the pulp stock those magazines were printed on.”
“And your people didn’t figure it out?” Grinsted asks. He pulls the belt of his robe tight again, as if trying to strangle the potbelly beneath. “Your forensics crew? They must have known, but nobody came forward! No one!”
This is something Izzy hasn’t even considered, and it hits home.
“Our job isn’t to do your job.” She knows it’s specious logic, but it’s the best she can do on short notice. “You could have deposed Rademacher, but you didn’t. You didn’t even interview her.”
“Doug Allen got Alan Duffrey killed,” Grinsted says. He seems to be talking to himself. “With an assist from the police.”
“Oh, I think you also played a part,” Tom says. “Wouldn’t you say so, Counselor? Or should I call you Trig?”
There’s no guilty reaction to the calculated use of the nickname. No reaction at all. Grinsted just seems lost in thought. Perhaps realizing that this is just Confrontation 1, to be followed by Confrontation 2, after Izzy and Tom leave.
At this moment, Izzy realizes that Holly’s deduction—which Holly herself found a bit shaky—is wrong. The anagram was a coincidence; what mystery writers in the old days would call a red herring.
“We’ll be checking Jane Haggarty,” Tom says, closing his notebook. “You have a nice day now, Mr. Grinsted.”
Grinsted, whose day is shaping up to be anything but nice, makes no response. Izzy and Tom go back to the house. Mrs. Grinsted is in the kitchen, drinking her own cup of joe. Judging by the bottle of Wild Turkey on the counter, she has fortified her Folgers.
“Are you done with him?”
“For the time being, yes,” Tom says. “Your turn.”
If he expected a smile at this sally, he’s disappointed.
“How long have you known about Haggarty?” Izzy asks. It has no bearing on their case, but she’s curious… as she knows Holly would be.
“A year? Maybe sixteen months.” Mrs. Grinsted shrugs, as if the topic doesn’t interest her much. “Her perfume on his skin. Texts. Hangups a couple of times when Russ left his phone on the counter or on top of the TV and I answered. He didn’t try to hide it very much. I suppose he thought I was stupid. Maybe I am.”
“Maybe you were scared,” Izzy says.
Erin Grinsted sips her fortified coffee. “Maybe I was. Maybe I still am.”
“Does your husband go to AA or NA?”
“No. If he needs one of those anonymous programs, it would be the one for gamblers. Or sex addicts. Or both.”
“Mrs. Grinsted, do you call your husband Trig?”
“No. I call him Russ. Most people do. Alan Duffrey did.”
“Does anyone call him Trig?”
She looks up at Izzy and does the eyeroll thing again. “Why would they?”
Why indeed , Izzy thinks. Back to square one .
They leave her to discuss various matters with her husband.
3
While Izzy and Tom are talking to Russell Grinsted, Trig—the real Trig—is in Cowslip County, a hundred miles from the city. It’s the least populated county in the state, and the kids whose bad karma it is to live there call it—of course—Cowshit County.
Trig cruises along Route 121, passing the occasional farm and barn, but mostly just woods and fields. There’s little traffic; 121 has been rendered all but obsolete by the interstate, which runs through more populated areas to the south. He doesn’t even kid himself about what he’s doing out here. Although meeting Annette McElroy and her dog on the Buckeye Trail was only weeks ago, it seems like something that happened in another life.
When I was normal .
At first he tries to push that idea away, but gives up. Because it’s not an idea, it’s a fact. More and more what’s happening reminds him of how he became an alcoholic… and why not? It doesn’t matter if it’s booze, dope, food, gambling, or obsessive-compulsive behavior, at bottom it’s always the disease of addiction. He could blame his father (and sometimes does), but addiction—antisocial behavior, in shrink-speak—isn’t caused by childhood trauma or stress or social pressure; it’s just a glitch in the software that causes destructive behavior to repeat and repeat and repeat.
There’s a saying he’s heard in meetings: “First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, and then the drink takes the man.” It’s true. Somewhere in his twenties, not long after his sometimes loving, often destructive father died, a switch got flipped. One day he was drinking like a quote-unquote normal person , and the next he was an alcoholic. Boom. Over done with gone.
Trig has discovered that murder is pretty much the same. He thinks that after McElroy, he could have stopped. In the legal sense he’d crossed a red line, sure, but in his own head? Probably not. He doesn’t think it was Epstein and Mitborough that tipped him over, either. He thinks—he’s not sure, but he thinks —that it was Big Book Mike that flipped the switch. All he knows for certain is the next one, Sinclair, relieved a certain building pressure that had little (maybe nothing) to do with his original mission.
He passes through the tiny community of Rosscomb, consisting of a market, a gas station, and the Rosscomb United Baptist Church. Then he’s out in the country again. Four miles further on, he sees a man driving a big old highpockets tractor and pulling a disc mower. It’s too early for hay, the grass is still green, so maybe the farmer is going to sow some crop here. Beans or corn, likely.
Trig pulls over onto the shoulder and gets out. The Taurus .22 is in his pocket. He’s not a bit nervous. Excited. Anticipating. He waits until the old tractor swings close and gives the man driving it a big semaphore wave and a grin. A truck passes, headed south.
That driver may remember a Toyota pulled over at the side of the road, and a man waving down the farmer .
He should back off, maybe just ask for directions and then drive on, but the girl he left at the shelter in Crooked Creek has whetted his appetite the way the first drink used to do. Just a quick one after work , he’d tell himself… then drink all the way home, even though his rational mind knew that getting picked up for DUI might crash his entire life. As those awful pictures and magazines had crashed Alan Duffrey’s life… or so everyone thought, judge and jury included.
The farmer brings his tractor to a stop, but even idling, the old International Harvester makes a hellacious racket. He’s as old as his tractor, with a tanned and weatherbeaten face under a big straw hat. Trig walks to one of the tractor’s big mud-caked wheels, wearing a smile to which the farmer responds with a smile of his own.
“Help you, fella?” the farmer shouts over the racket of the tractor and the spinning mower blades. “You lost?”
“Yes!” Trig shouts back. “I’m lost!”
He takes the Taurus from his pocket and shoots the farmer twice in the chest. The sound of the gunshots is all but lost in the roar of the tractor. The farmer rears back as if beestung. Trig gets ready to shoot him again, but then he slumps forward. His hat falls off. Thinning gray hair blows in a light breeze, reminding Trig of milkweed puffs.
A car goes by on the highway. It slows. Trig gives the car a wave without turning around— all okay here —and it speeds up again. Trig takes the leather folder from his pocket and thumbs through the thinning collection of slips inside. He feels no sense of worry, just as he never worried in the old days when he’d drive home sipping from a handle of Smirnoff between his spread thighs. There is a sense of perfect rightness about this encounter, and oh God, such relief. The need will come again, but for the moment all is well.
I need MA instead of AA , he thinks, and actually laughs.
From his folder he takes the slip of paper with Brad Lowry printed on it. Lowry was Juror 12 in the Duffrey case. Trig picks up the farmer’s straw hat and puts Lowry’s name in it. Not hurrying, he also puts the slips for Jabari Wentworth (Juror 3) and Ellis Finkel (Juror 5) into the hat. The farmer has welded a handy step-up onto the side of the peakseat. Trig uses it and pushes the farmer back into an upright position, being careful not to joggle the transmission and start the tractor moving. Then he jams the hat down on the farmer’s head. Eventually, someone will take the hat off. Eventually, the slips of paper will be found, and will be understood.
A farm truck full of equipment passes. Trig stands where he is, as if conversing with the farmer. The truck passes. He goes back to his car and drives away.
I’m going to be caught.
Not a guess but a stone-cold fact. He’s remembering something that happened near the end of his drinking, the thing that got him to his first AA meeting. Three blocks from his house, drunk as a skunk with that handle of vodka resting against his crotch, he saw blue lights go off in his rearview mirror. Calmly, he had screwed the cap on the bottle, put it in the passenger footwell, and pulled over, telling himself the cop wouldn’t be able to smell vodka on his breath like gin or whiskey, at the same time knowing that was a myth.
The cop flashed his light in Trig’s window and asked for his license and registration. Trig handed them over, getting the registration from his Toyota’s glove compartment—a different Toyota, but similar to the one he was now driving. The cop put his light on them, then went back to his cruiser. Trig tried to put the bottle of vodka in the glove compartment. It was too big to fit. Under the passenger seat. Also too big. He thought, I may or may not spend tonight in the city drunk tank, but for sure my name will be in the paper’s Police Beat column tomorrow.
The cop started back. Trig returned the big bottle of vodka to the passenger footwell. It was the best he could do. A sense of fatalism washed over him.
“Have you been drinking, sir?”
“I had a couple after work, but that was hours ago.” Not slurring. Or hardly at all.
“I see by your license that you’re close to home.”
Trig had agreed that was so.
“I suggest you go there, sir, and not get behind the wheel again until you are sober.”
He then shone his light into the passenger footwell, spotting it on the three-quarters-empty bottle of vodka.
“If I see you weaving again, sir, you will go to jail.”
So nothing in writing, just a verbal warning. That would not happen after killing seven people.
I should have taken the Rev’s calendar instead of just changing the name. That was what Daddy would have called “too clever by half,” probably punctuated by a clip to the side of the head. And what about the vehicles that passed while you were “talking” to the farmer? What if one of them saw the old guy slumped forward and thought it was peculiar? What if one of them jotted down your license plate?
He doesn’t believe anyone did that, but the calendar is a different matter. That will have been gone over by experts, and they may already have decided that he has altered TRIG to brIGGS. It’s true that Trig is only a nickname, and nothing like his real one, but he has used it at AA and NA meetings. Almost always out of town, it’s true, but he has attended the Straight Circle meeting on Buell Street a few times. What if someone in that meeting knows him in what alkies and druggies call “the other life”? He doesn’t think that’s likely—most of those at Straight Circle are low-bottom alkies and homeless drug fiends—but it’s possible. One thing is sure: he won’t be going to Buell Street again.
And look on the bright side , he tells himself. I’ve name-checked eight of the twelve jurors. I might even get them all.
In his rearview mirror, he sees a State Police cruiser coming up fast, and flashes back to that night when he saw blue lights in his rearview. That same sense of fatalism comes, as comforting as a blanket on a cold night. He touches the .22 in his pocket, slows down, pulls over. He’ll shoot the cop, put a name in his hand, and then—maybe, maybe not—shoot himself. The cop car sweeps by him, speeding on down Route 121 toward Rosscomb.
“No,” Trig says, letting go of the gun. “Not done, Daddy. Not done yet.”
He turns on the radio, but he’s too far from the city to pick up the news station, so he settles for some old-time rock and roll instead. Soon he’s singing along.