Everything was quiet, just the ticking of the clocks downstairs.
“Thank you so much,” Overton said. Mike stepped back so Overton could exit the bedroom. She said, “We don’t want to keep you from work.”
“Oh, it’s no problem.” Maybelle seemed to remember she was the one guiding the tour and jerked back into motion, returned them to the staircase. “Is there some new evidence in Corey’s case?”
A glance between Mike and Overton. “We’re hoping to shed some light on it,” Mike said, “but it’s early to tell.”
“I understand.”
Down the stairs, and then they stood around in the foyer for another awkward pause. Maybelle blinked rapidly and said, “Oh,” and picked up a purse on a small table by the door, fumbled around for her keys.
She opened the door, Mike and Overton stepped out, then Maybelle followed, locked it behind her.
“We’ll let you know right away if we learn anything new,” Mike said.
* * *
Detective Frank Corrow was middle-aged, shaggy-haired, wore a brown suit, had sideburns, and generally looked like he’d never quite left the late seventies, stylistically. They met him at the Watertown police station, exchanged greetings, and agreed they’d all pile into his vehicle for the second part of the tour.
If Corrow’s personal aesthetic was outdated, he had a nice, brand-new Impala with all the bells and whistles. He pulsed the gas in traffic, the powerful V6 engine roaring as he jockeyed around the other cars, bringing them to the Watertown Department of Social Services, a square gray block of a building.
“Okay. First stop on the ride: September twenty-second, last year, Corina Lavoie left work. She punched out at 5:02 p.m., and we have video of her in her car, leaving the parking lot at 5:05.” He turned and put an arm up on the seat, gave the two investigators in the back a look. “All good so far?”
Mike felt a little bit like he and Overton were kids, riding in the back seat of the family vehicle. Overton asked, “Did any of her co-workers from that day say anything about her?”
“Nope. She was her usual self. Pleasant, busy, somewhat a private person, I guess. That was the gist I got.”
“And you looked at her cases.”
“Oh yeah. It’s a tough workaround, as I’m sure you’ve found. But, you know, you gotta do it. And I gotta say, not exactly revelatory. I mean, these caseworkers – the stuff they have to deal with… I don’t think I could do it. But you take someone like Lavoie, and she’s on call a lot, because she’s childless; she’s got a real hefty caseload.
“We went back a couple years, looked at ten or so reports. And of these ten reports, only three came back as indicated. You know, somebody makes the complaint, call comes in, report gets filled out, then there’s an investigation. That’s what these people are doing, what Lavoie was doing. But, often it’s something like… say, some fifteen-year-old girl and her mother are in an argument, and maybe it gets a little rough, then the girl falls down, hits her head. That, or it’s suspected child abuse. The report comes in, then the investigation to see if it’s indicated. They can go to the kid’s school, go into the home, sometimes the cops are involved, sometimes it’s more a ‘team’ effort…”
Mike knew all this, but it was interesting to hear Corrow’s take, the way he subtly diminished the scope of Lavoie’s workload, and didn’t interrupt him until the end of his spiel. “Were you ever involved on a case with Lavoie?”
“That’s not my area. That would be the uniformed guys, usually. There was a couple where they had to get involved, where the people wouldn’t let CPS come in the house, things like that.”
“But nothing that stood out to you.”
“No.” Corrow sniffed then rummaged around for something out of sight, put a stick of gum in his mouth, started balling up the wrapper. Mike noticed he looked at Overton in the rear-view mirror quite a bit.
“Did you check into any of the reports?” Mike asked.
“Of course we did, yeah we did. We talked to a couple people. So, like I… this is delicate. You can’t roll up on someone because they had a CPS report at some point. Most of them turn out to be unfounded.”
“But of the indicated cases…”
“We looked at a guy, yeah. He’s since been convicted; he’s a registered sex offender.” Corrow tossed the gum wrapper aside. “But nah, it wasn’t him.” He gave them both a look. “Listen, I understand you got this murder in Lake Haven. I mean, what’s that – first murder in ten years?”
“Eighteen,” Overton said.
“Eighteen years. So you’re scrambling, I get it. But trust me when I tell you, we went through all this with a fine-toothed comb. We worked round the clock for weeks. Months. Nobody from her cases did this. Just remember: Corina Lavoie is a missing person. We didn’t have a corpse, didn’t have a crime scene. All we had was the goddamned car. I think she just took off.”
“And left the car?”
He waved a hand in the air then faced forward, got the Impala moving. “Ah, she was with some guy. Doesn’t matter what her sister thinks – sisters hide things from each other. I know. I’ve got three of them. I bet she was seeing some guy, someone outside the area, and he came and picked her up, you know, met her at the movies and they took off and that was that. She doesn’t wanna be found. She doesn’t wanna go back to that weird little house with all the Jesus stuff in it.” Corrow’s eyes found Mike in the mirror this time. “No offense to any religious sensibilities.”
He took them along the route that Corina Lavoie was supposed to have driven on her last day in a world that knew where she was, what she was doing. Corrow said, “She came home, we’re pretty sure, because the sister said there was evidence of that – Maybelle was away, visiting friends in Gouverneur. Her church group, or something.”
“Her church group had overnight functions?” Mike asked.
Corrow’s eyes in the mirror again. “I guess so. What do I know? The woman says she spent the weekend with friends… Oh, it was a retreat, that’s what it was. A religious retreat.
“But the sister says when she came home she found dirty dishes in the sink, though she’d cleaned up the morning before she’d left, indicating Lavoie had come home after work before going to the movies. Oh, and the clothes – Lavoie had left dirty clothes in the closet, and we showed those clothes to co-workers, and it was what she was wearing that day. We went through her whole wardrobe, the sister helped, trying to do a process of elimination on what clothes she could be wearing based on what she’d left behind.” He started laughing, like it was the funniest thing, and his laughter turned to coughing. Corrow rolled down the window, spat out the gum, rolled it back up.
“So,” Mike said carefully, “Corina Lavoie goes off with some guy she’s secretly seeing, but doesn’t take any of her clothes, any of the things in her room. Just leaves her sister – she moved home to be with her sister, help out. Then she ups and leaves?”
“Look,” Corrow said, starting to sound agitated, “I told you, with all due respect, we went through this. I was in this woman’s room two days—” he held up fingers to accentuate the point, recalling the gesture made by Jesus “—two days I’m in there going through this woman’s clothes, her personal effects. I know it looks capricious, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe she’s bogged down by her sister, her job, and the only way out is to just bolt. Just escape. I’ve seen it plenty of times. And we had no evidence of foul play. Nothing. No blood, no DNA, no weapon, no witnesses. I understand you want to link this to the Fogarty case you got. Whip up a little serial murder investigation. But I can’t sit here and tell you I think Corina Lavoie was murdered.”
He finally fell silent after that, and they slowed in front of Lavoie’s house, where Mike and Overton had just been. Then he sped up again. “So this is the route we figure she took. Mall is a mile away. This is the easiest, most natural way to go.”