Nine
license. It was a semidetached, the middle of five connected, two-story homes, none more than twenty feet wide, and each with
a driveway about half that size. Of the lot, the Kennard address was the most well-maintained. No flaking paint, a small flower
garden below the front window.
There was no car parked out front, but that wasn’t a surprise. She’d found the dead woman’s Toyota Corolla down the street
from the Chartwell home and had used the key from her purse to unlock it.
The car yielded no useful information. No discarded fast-food wrappers, nothing in the ashtray, the floor mats free of gravel
and dirt. Even the trunk was empty save for a spare and a couple of reusable grocery bags.
McCabe didn’t yet know whether Leah lived alone or shared this place with others, so she rang the bell, steeling herself to
deliver bad news to next of kin. Waited ten seconds and rang it again. Finally, she tried knocking, hard. No one came. She
peered through a narrow pane of glass in the door, shielding her eyes with her hand. No movement inside.
With one of the other keys from Leah’s set, McCabe was able to open the front door and step inside.
“Hello!” she called out, just in case. Her voice echoed through the house.
She opened the front hall closet. There were half a dozen light jackets or heavier coats in there, all sized for someone of Leah’s build. No men’s coats. On the floor, three pairs of shoes, including one pair of Reeboks, and some boots. McCabe was betting the woman lived alone.
The furnishings in the small living room were simple and functional, the stack of magazines on the coffee table perfectly
stacked and lined up with the edge. The kitchen counters were free of clutter, not unlike Leah’s Toyota. The stainless steel
sink was empty and clean. The dishwasher’s light was on, indicating a completed cycle. Many items in the refrigerator or cupboard
were labeled low-fat, sugar-free, or made without artificial preservatives.
You try to live a healthy life, McCabe thought, and then someone comes along and shoots you in the head. The poor woman should have treated herself to a dozen Krispy Kremes the day before.
McCabe slowly worked her way through the first floor, looking for anything that jumped out at her, and came up empty. She
climbed the stairs to the second floor, where there were two bedrooms and a bathroom, although one of the bedrooms appeared
to be a combined exercise and storage room. Business boxes were stacked neatly along two walls, and in the center of the room
was a basic treadmill, without a screen or other fancy electronic gadgetry.
She went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and found, mostly, what she would have expected. Various over-the-counter
pain medication and ointments. One antianxiety drug that was also used to treat depression. McCabe made a note of the doctor
who’d prescribed it.
McCabe entered the bedroom, opened the top drawer on the bedside table. There was a plastic jar of fruit-flavored Tums, some
earplugs, an eye mask, a charger cable for an iPhone. Nothing much out of the ordinary, except for a small photo album.
About the size of a paperback novel turned sideways, she opened it and found, on the inside cover, three words, done in calligraphy.
Maybe that had been one of Leah’s hobbies. The words were: My Boy Tom.
What followed were several pages of snapshots of a white male over what appeared to be a span of several years.
In some, he looked no older than a teenager, while in others he was, McCabe guessed, in his midthirties.
There were a couple of him when he was probably no older than ten.
Unmistakably the same person, although in some his hair was long, or he was sporting a beard.
In others, shorter hair, clean-shaven. In the later pictures, he was thin, with lank brown hair.
All the pictures appeared to have been professionally processed. The older ones undoubtedly were shot with an actual camera,
the roll of film taken to a retailer to be printed. But some of the pictures looked more recent, the cars in the background
more current. Those, McCabe guessed, were taken with a phone, then emailed to a photo shop to be printed out on the proper
paper.
In all the pictures, this young man was alone. Some of the snapshots were smaller, oddly sized, suggesting the rest of the
picture, which presumably had featured other people, had been discarded. At least a dozen of the pictures had been edited
with a pair of scissors.
In her pocket was the phone she’d found in Leah’s purse. Having broken the passcode, she brought up the home screen and tapped
on the photos app. Up popped hundreds of pictures. McCabe started scrolling through them quickly but found none of the person
whose images filled the album. That led McCabe to think these pictures had been taken by someone else and given to her. That,
or she’d taken the pictures with a device other than this phone.
McCabe took the album with her—it was small enough to tuck into her purse—and exited the residence, locking the door on her
way out. She went first to the house on the right, rang the bell twice, but no one answered. She tried the place on the other
side of Leah’s, figuring her closest neighbors would be the most likely to know anything about the woman.
At the second door, someone answered.
It was a curly-haired girl, no more than six or seven years old.
“Hi,” McCabe said, looking down at the child. “Your mom or dad or any adult home?”
The girl said nothing, turned and walked back into the house. A moment later, a thin woman in her late twenties in a Springsteen T-shirt and frayed jeans appeared. She brushed some hair away from her face as she eyed McCabe with curiosity.
The detective displayed her badge, introduced herself, and asked the woman for her name, which was Elaine Turcotte. McCabe
said, “I’m seeking information about your neighbor, Leah Kennard.”
“Yeah? She done something wrong? Because she’s good people,” Elaine said, turning every few seconds to check on her daughter,
who was seated at a kid’s desk-and-chair set, making circles on a sheet of paper with an orange crayon.
“You know where she works?”
“Uh, she works at the walk-in clinic? The one on Proctor? She works the desk, runs the office, stuff like that?”
“Is there someone there named Jerry?” McCabe was thinking of the text she had seen on Leah’s phone, asking if she could work
late Monday.
“That’d be Dr. Fielding,” she said. “Gerald Fielding. He runs the clinic.”
“And does she have a friend named Billy?”
“Billy?”
“Someone who has a young child.”
“That might be a cousin or somebody.”
It would be easy enough to find out, McCabe thought. Billy’s number was right there in her text exchanges with Leah.
“Does Leah live alone?”
“Just her.” She paused, then added, “Most of the time.”
McCabe tilted her head slightly, waiting for Elaine to expand on that.
“She’s had a couple of boyfriends, but no one permanent.”
“So, not married? No kids?”
“No, and no.” Elaine was getting impatient with the questioning. “Seriously, is she in some kind of trouble?”
“Just making some inquiries.”
Elaine gave her a dubious look, but said, “Not married, though there was a guy who lived there for a while. She kicked him out, thank god. There’s an older guy, too; he comes by occasionally.
I mean it’s not like I’m hanging out by the window all day.
I’ve got my hands full with work and looking after my daughter but we talk sometimes. ”
“Are you and Leah close?”
“More or less. She bails me out if I can’t get home from work in time to meet Shana when she gets out of school. I work part-time
at Walmart, which gives me a lot of flexibility, but it doesn’t always work out. We look out for each other. If she’s ordered
something from and isn’t home I’ll grab it off the step before someone steals it. She babysits Shana when I’m in a
jam. I’m on my own here.”
McCabe could identify.
She had her phone out, brought up a picture. “You said there was an older guy who comes by sometimes. This him?”
Elaine looked at a shot of Brent Chartwell that McCabe had taken from one of the photos in the house. “Yeah.”
“When did you first start seeing him around?”
Elaine had to think. “I’ve been living here for seven years and I don’t remember seeing him back when I first moved in. Year,
year and a half, maybe two. More recent.”
“Ever talk to him?”
“Just hello or goodbye if I happen to be out front. He’s not a big talker. Not rude or anything, just comes and goes fast.
Seems a little embarrassed when I spot him. Nice car. Got some old classic car too. Decent dresser. Definitely doesn’t buy
his clothes where I work.”
“Leah tell you about him?”
Elaine shrugged. “She said she knew him from a long time ago, that they kind of reconnected. Bumped into each other or something,
whatever. He’s a little older than her, but hey, I don’t judge.”
The detective took the photo album from her purse, opened it up so Elaine could see the pictures, turned a few pages for her
to look at.
“Do you know who this is?”
She shook her head. “No idea. That Leah’s?”
McCabe managed a nod. “She ever mention someone named Tom?”
“No,” Elaine said, her tone indicating the conversation was coming to an end. As McCabe returned the album to her purse, Elaine added, “What’s actually going on here?”
McCabe sighed. You could only hold things back for so long. “Ms. Kennard died this morning.”
Elaine’s jaw dropped. “Oh god no.” She said it loud enough that her daughter raised her head, looked their way, eyes wide.
“Sorry.”
She glanced back, saw that her daughter was still engaged with her crayons, and stepped outside, leaving the door open a crack.
“What happened? Did she have a car accident?”
“It’s a homicide.”
Elaine put a hand to her mouth. “Someone murdered her?”
McCabe sidestepped the question. “We’re trying to learn all we can, and we want to get in touch with next of kin. Do you know
whether her parents are still living?”
Elaine needed a moment. “She never mentioned parents.” She shook her head slowly, then stopped, a thought occurring to her.
“Was it the guy she kicked out? Did he kill her? It wouldn’t surprise me for a minute.”
“What was his name?”
“Roy. No, that’s not it. His name was Ray.”
“You remember a last name?”
She bit her lip, struggling. “He lived there long enough that he was getting mail, and sometimes they deliver to the wrong
house, so I’d get his stuff and walk it over, put it in their mailbox. Stanhope. Ray Stanhope.”
McCabe had her notebook out, asked how to spell that last name, wrote it down. “And he moved out when, again?”
“Around the time . . . that the old guy started showing up. They had fights about it, her and Ray. I could hear them going
at it through the wall. These places are supposed to be soundproof, but you make enough noise, your neighbors are gonna hear
it. Especially when someone screams.”
“And you heard Leah scream?”
“Ray hit her, at least once. One time, Leah was wearing sunglasses when we had a week of rain. So he must have popped her
in the eye.”
“Were the fights about this other man she was seeing?”
“You couldn’t always hear the actual words, just the noise, you know? Maybe the odd snippet. This other guy was married and
Ray was saying she wanted him for his money. Leah threatened to call the cops on him, but I don’t think she ever did. You’re
the first one I’ve seen around here.”
Something else occurred to her. “I remember one day, the new guy shows up in his fancy car, and Ray is coming out the front
door, and they start to get into it. Ray’s in the guy’s face, pointing a finger at him, the older guy’s looking pretty freaked
out, starts backing up, but then Leah comes out and starts screaming at Ray to leave or she really will call the cops this
time. So he heads off but he’s telling them to fuck off and giving them the finger. He was kind of scary, Ray was.”
“Has he been around lately?”
Elaine shook her head. “If he has, I haven’t seen him.”
“You know where he lives now? Works?”
“I don’t know where he lives. But he was always driving Toyotas. Not the same one every time. I think he might work at the
dealer and that’s how Leah met him. Went in there for service.”
Ray Stanhope was worth talking to, McCabe thought. He might provide some insights into what was going on between Leah Kennard
and Brent Chartwell.
Elaine, clearly having made up her mind about Stanhope, said, “I hope he fucking rots in hell.”