“Come on, get real, Chief,” Womack said.
There they went, leaping to conclusions already. When Owen originally pondered this move, he’d worried that he or the kids wouldn’t like the town, or that he’d find the job boring. None of that turned out to be true. Instead the problem was the friction between him and the men—only the men; Keisha was great—under his command. He simply couldn’t get them to conform to his standards for what good police work looked like. Of his four full-time, non-traffic-patrol officers, Marv Pelletier and Gene Stevens were the biggest pains in his butt. They spent their time carping about how the former chief ran things better and how the town and the department were going to hell. Worst of all, they were competent with paperwork but lax with actually getting their butts on the streets, which meant they were either lazy, or cowards. Fortunately they were both near retirement age. This guy Rob presented the opposite problem. Rob was young and ambitious, a musclehead type with a starched uniform and a spic-and-span cruiser who’d been passed over for the chief’s job when they hired Owen. He was borderline insubordinate, and regularly told Owen how they did things around here rather than doing what he was told. None of this was a great setup for working an important case, a case Owen cared about more perhaps than any other in his career.
“She jumped, Chief, I guarantee it,” Rob said. “The kids love to jump off the old railroad bridge. They do it on a dare, and they don’t always come back up.”
“Not too many girls do it, though,” Gene said. “Girls are too smart for that shit.”
“Local girl, or Carlisle?” Marv asked.
“She wasn’t a girl.” Owen flipped open the case file. “Victim is Katherine Elizabeth Eastman, aged forty, Nineteen Dunsmore Street—”
“Faculty Row,” Marv and Gene said simultaneously.
“What?” Owen asked.
“Nobody calls it Dunsmore Street, it’s Faculty Row,” Marv said. “Used to be, the college actually owned the houses and they’d give ’em to the profs as part of their compensation package. Now they’re all private, but they’re still orange on the inside. Orange being the Carlisle color, see?”
“Yes, I know that, Marv,” Owen said.
“So what’s her Carlisle connection?” Rob asked.
“I don’t know that she has one,” Owen said.
Owen hadn’t forgotten Kate telling him in the bar on that rainy night how she’d disappointed her father by not graduating from Carlisle. But if he repeated that, his officers would know he’d met her.
“No Carlisle connection?” Marv said.
“Who knows?” Owen replied. “That’s not the question that should leap to mind when you respond to the scene of a death.”
“Around here, it should be,” Marv said. “Nineteen Dunsmore. Keniston Eastman owns that place, if I’m not mistaken. The Eastmans are a big Carlisle family, Chief, one of the biggest. You got your Eastman Commons. Your Eastman Field House. The Eastman Wing at the hospital. You don’t want to mess with that family without talking to the general counsel’s office first.”
“General counsel of what?”
Marv and Gene looked at each other like, Who the hell is this guy?
“Of the college,” Marv said. “You know if we ever arrest a Carlisle kid, we give the GC a heads-up as a courtesy, right?”
“Chief Dudley mentioned that. I couldn’t believe it was true.”
“Oh, it’s true. I know you got your pride, Chief, but trust me. It’s not worth pissing off the college just to mark your territory. If you’re telling me you pulled a Carlisle kid from the river, that’s huge. You’d better call the mayor, too. She doesn’t like to get blindsided.”
Owen made a dismissive gesture. He would call the mayor in his own good time.
“Wait a minute, Kate Eastman,” Rob Womack said, and slapped the table.
Owen turned to Rob. “You know her?”
“Kate Eastman was the girl who was with Lucas Arsenault the night he died, am I right?” Rob said.
“With who?” Owen said.
“Local kid,” Marv said. “Jumped off the bridge in the off season, as I recall, just like this female jumper you got here. It was a big to-do when he died. Nobody wanted to believe a local boy would be that stupid.”
“Yeah, because he wouldn’t,” Rob said. “I knew Lucas. He didn’t jump.”
“When was this?” Owen asked.
“Maybe twenty years ago,” Rob said.
“Twenty years?” Owen exclaimed. “Jesus, will you people lay off the ancient-history bullshit? We have a real case here. Now. Today. Do you have any interest in working it?”
“Yeah, of course we do,” Rob said, bristling.
“Then stop bringing up irrelevant nonsense and focus.”
“Sorry, Chief. You’re right,” Marv said.
Rob looked pissed and Gene grumbled something, but Owen had a case to solve. He couldn’t worry about hurting grown men’s feelings.
“You don’t think she jumped?” Rob said. “Why not? What does the ME say?”
“What the ME says might not be correct,” Owen began.
Seeing the skeptical looks around the table, Owen realized he needed definitive proof to back him up. He pressed the intercom and asked his secretary if a fax had come in for him from a Dr. Michael Chan in Boston. Within minutes, his secretary (and yes, Owen still had a secretary, but that’s because he was the chief) came in and put the report in his hands. Owen leafed through it quickly and immediately found the answer he’d been looking for.
“Gentlemen, this is a report from a highly respected forensic scientist who’s testified in some of the biggest murder cases in the country. I had him take a second look at the autopsy results, because our county medical examiner, believe it or not, has never handled a homicide case in his entire career.”
“We don’t get too many murders around here, Chief,” Marv said.
“You paid for an outside expert?” Rob said. Owen decided to ignore him.
“The county ME,” Owen continued, “noted that no water was found in victim’s lungs, signifying that she was dead before she hit the river. But he drew no conclusion from that fact about the manner of her death, other than to say it was caused by blunt-force trauma to the head. Fine, but then what? We need to know, does that mean someone hit her with a baseball bat and threw her in, or does it mean she jumped and hit a rock on the way down? The county ME didn’t have the guts to make a decision on that. Like a lot of mediocre bureaucrats, he pulled his punches. So I brought in Dr. Chan. Dr. Chan’s report, which I just received, concludes that Kate Eastman was killed by a blow to the head. The conclusion is based on the position of the injury to her cranium. That injury could only have been inflicted by an assailant who was standing behind her and striking downward. The bottom line is, we have a murder case to work.”