Ostertag stopped and wheeled at the sound of someone calling his name. Buzz took a quick step toward him. “Sorry to shout at you like that.” He extended a hand. “Buzz Almond. Wanted to talk to you a minute about the Kimi Kanasket case.”
Ostertag looked twenty pounds overweight—not obese, but like a man who finished his plate and liked a cocktail every night, as well as his sweets. He’d begun the middle-aged man’s first concession, wearing the buckle of his belt below his protruding stomach.
“Almond. Right. I thought the name sounded familiar. I got your reports. They were good. Very thorough. Thanks for those.” Ostertag worked a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other and looked at Buzz through silver-framed glasses that resembled the ones Telly Savalas wore on the popular detective show Kojak. Buzz wondered if that was why Ostertag also shaved his head.
“Thanks. Listen, I spoke to Lorraine at the Columbia Diner.”
“Who?”
“She’s the waitress at the diner where Kimi Kanasket worked the night she went missing.” Buzz had assumed Ostertag would have spoken to Lorraine, but that had apparently not been the case.
“Right. And you talked to her . . . why?”
“I just stopped in to get a bite to eat, and we got to talking,” Buzz said, again conscious not to look as though he was stepping on Ostertag’s investigation. “Anyway, she said Kimi wasn’t upset about Tommy Moore coming in that night.”
“Hang on.” Ostertag raised a hand and turned to a man in a suit passing in the opposite direction. “Hey, Carl, we still on for tomorrow?”
Carl turned, talking while he walked backward. “I reserved the court for six thirty. Figured we could grab breakfast after we play.”
“Loser buys?”
“Hey, I never pass up a free meal.”
“Bring your credit card,” Ostertag taunted. “Winning makes me hungry.”
Ostertag redirected his attention to Buzz. “Sorry. I gotta kick his ass in racquetball tomorrow morning. Keeps him in line. So you were saying something about a waitress?”
“Lorraine,” Buzz said. “She said Kimi wasn’t upset about Tommy Moore breaking up with her. That Kimi even waited on his table that night.”
“Remind me again—Moore was the boyfriend, right?”
“Ex-boyfriend,” Buzz said, wondering what the hell Ostertag had been doing. “He brought a date with him to the diner to get a rise out of Kimi, but he stormed out when he got no reaction.”
“Hang on again. I’m sorry. I was on my way to take a leak. Drank too much damn coffee this morning, and my back teeth are floating. I’m gonna drown if I don’t take care of it.”
Ostertag crossed the hall and disappeared behind the swinging door to the men’s room, leaving Buzz in the hall feeling like an idiot. He took a few steps farther down the linoleum and tried to look like he was doing something. After several minutes, Ostertag propped open the door with his foot while he finished drying his hands with a brown paper towel. He tossed the wad back inside, presumably at a garbage pail. When he stepped into the hall, he seemed surprised Buzz remained waiting for him.
“So after I spoke to the waitress,” Buzz said, “I was driving away, and I spotted a turnout, maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty yards past the diner. I couldn’t see it that night when Earl Kanasket and I walked the road because it was too dark, and it had started snowing. Anyway, there’s a path there, and I noticed footprints and tire tracks. So I followed them and—”
“And you came to a clearing,” Ostertag said, loosening the knot of his gold tie and undoing the top button.
“You know it?”
“Everyone on the force knows it.”
“You’ve been out there?”
“More times than I cared to be when I was on patrol.”
“I mean for this investigation.”
“This investigation? Why would I be out there for this investigation?”
“The footprints and tire tracks lead to the clearing. I’d say two, maybe three people. Hard to tell.”
Ostertag’s brow furrowed. “I meant, what does that have to do with Kanasket?”
“Well, I mean that was the direction she would have headed walking home. She’d have walked 141. If something spooked her—”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Buzz fought against becoming irritated.
Ostertag frowned. “How long you been on the force . . . ?” As his voice trailed off, it was clear he’d forgotten Buzz’s name.
“Buzz,” he said.
“How long you been on the force, Buzz?”
Buzz was not in the mood to hear sage advice from an overweight desk jockey who probably got a college deferment from the draft while Buzz spent two tours slogging through the jungles of Vietnam commanding his own platoon. “Couple months.”
“This your first case? First big case?”
“Yeah, but what does—?”
“Let me give you a piece of advice, help you with your career. Your job is to respond to the calls and get those witness statements. And you did a nice job; I’m going to note that to my sergeant. My job is to follow up and investigate. You do your job and let me do mine, and everything is smooth sailing. Right?” Ostertag smiled. The toothpick flicked to the corner of his mouth.
“I understand,” Buzz said, mentally counting to ten. “But I took photographs. I was going to get them developed. I could show you.”
Ostertag continued to smile. “You took photographs of footprints and tire tracks?”
“Right.”
“Let me tell you about the clearing, Bert.”
“Buzz.”
“The kids like to go out there on the weekends because it’s isolated. They bring a couple six-packs of beer, get drunk, and get in their cars and spin donuts. Other times, it’s a guy and his date. He takes her out there to look for ghosts.”
“Ghosts?”
“A legend about some guy getting hanged there and coming back and burning down the town. They say his ghost is still out there, that you can hear him moaning when the wind blows. You know, bullshit high school stuff guys tell their dates, hoping to get them scared so they cling close and he gets his hands up her shirt or down her pants, right? You got pictures of footprints and tires tracks that could belong to every kid at Stoneridge High and every car parked in the parking lot.”
“I don’t think so.”
Ostertag scoffed. “You don’t think so?”
“The ground froze that night when the temperature dropped. That means whoever was out there Friday night, their footprints and tire tracks froze.”
“Froze?”
“In place. They froze in place. Anybody going out there after that wouldn’t leave tracks or footprints because the ground would have been too hard. So the tracks had to have been from Friday night. It had rained earlier in the week. The ground would have been soft, which is why the tires chewed up the path.”
“How do you know those tire tracks haven’t been there a week, or a month, or six months? You see what I’m saying?”
“But it could be something. I mean, shouldn’t we follow up on it?”
“We?” Ostertag scratched at the side of his head. “Listen, I’m gonna ease your mind. We got the pathologist’s report back this afternoon. If it makes you feel any better, he confirms the kid killed herself. Jumped in the river, got banged around good on the rocks, and drowned.”