A second officer came out of the woods, returned a dog to the vehicle, and told him the same thing. “Hank took me up to River Street and along the road, stopped just before the big hill there.”
Mike thanked him and headed away, dialing as he walked to his car. When Overton answered, he asked, “What did we get from the door-to-doors up on River Street?”
“Just a few houses up there,” she said. “No one home; everyone at work.”
“K-9 seemed to nose out one spot in particular. Can we send the guys back? Have them do another check. Maybe we get the phone numbers, talk to these people at work. I’m headed up there now.”
He sank into his department-issued Impala, kept the door open while he turned up the air. Overton asked if there was anything specific they should be looking for. “I’ll find out,” he said.
* * *
Mike stopped on the street where the two K-9 officers said the police dogs had alerted. The pooches had followed their powerful senses of smell to a spot between two houses. One was white with a large, wraparound porch. The ground dropped away toward the woods, a steep embankment. The yard between the white house and the next, smaller house – pea-green with peeling paint – was overgrown with weeds. Mike thought some of those weeds looked trampled – like a path carved through the plantain grass and yellow clover.
He stepped out of the Impala onto a narrow, broken sidewalk, crabgrass growing through the fissures. There was a rusted railing alongside the walk, bent and listing toward the downslope.
Standing between houses, he peered into the woods, bending his knees, almost able to see through to the DSS building, but not quite. Still, it was easy access from here, if someone didn’t mind risking a little poison ivy.
He walked to the white house, floorboards creaking as he moved to the door and knocked. Waited, knocked again; no one answered. It was still working hours, not quite two in the afternoon. Across the overgrown lot, the pea-green house looked just as deserted. In fact, he thought, moving back along the busted sidewalk, the green house didn’t look lived-in at all. He reached it and found the realty sign advertising it for sale.
There were a few other houses around: One Victorian, proud but sagging with age, sat higher up the hillside. Beside it was McIntyre Street, narrow and covered in asphalt boils and potholes. Still further up McIntyre was a nicer place, brown with red trim and a big porch. Between these two and the white house, Mike thought, maybe someone saw a car parked on the street sometime between seven and eight the night before. Someone cutting down from the street through the overgrown lot and into the woods.
He started humping his way up to the Victorian to see if anyone was home when a Lake Haven cruiser pulled up behind his Impala. Two uniformed officers ambled over, sent by Overton, sliding nightsticks into their belts. Mike explained the idea that the killer had gone down to the DSS from River Street, asked them to have another look at everything in proximity, to call Brit Silas for any possible evidence, Overton for anything else.
For Mike, it was time to talk to the husband.
Four
Terry Fogarty looked grim. He was about ten years older than Mike, grayer, wearing half-rimmed glasses and dressed in battered jeans and a plaid, short-sleeved shirt. He seemed in decent physical health, but emotionally, he was wrecked. Sitting in the medical examiner’s lobby next to Detective Lena Overton, the loss filled his eyes. He clasped his hands together between his legs, as if to keep them from shaking.
Overton intercepted Mike and walked him into a vacant viewing room out of earshot. She closed the door. “It took me an hour to coax him away from the autopsy suite. Dr. Crispin is in there now. And their son, Victor, is on his way up from New York City.”
“He’s not coming here, is he?”
She sighed, and her shoulders sagged. “He says he wants to see his mother. I overheard Fogarty talking to him on the phone. You know how it can be with sudden bereavement.” Overton looked at the door. “He should be here any minute.”
“Let’s talk to Fogarty alone first. Informally.”
“Okay.” She started out of the room.
“What’s he entitled to after this?”
Overton stopped, hand on the doorknob, then turned to face Mike. “Well, I’ve only just had a look. The Department of Social Services pays out three years’ salary to either the spouse, or the spouse and the children, or just the children, depending on the arrangement. Harriet made about 65,000 a year, before taxes.”
“So that’s about…” Mike glanced up as he did the math.
“A hundred and ninety-five thousand,” Overton said.
“Well, let’s look at it and see how it’s distributed between him and the son. What else?”
“Harriet has an inheritance from her parents, both deceased.” Overton spoke in a voice close to whispering. “Again, I’ve barely had time to look. But that inheritance has already been absorbed into the marriage, and based on where their son went to school – Colgate – I’d say tuition has eaten up a lot of it. There’s nothing new Fogarty or his son stand to gain beside the life insurance from DSS, as far as I’ve seen.”
“And he’s a Highway Department guy?”
“A supervisor. Just retired.”
“What’d he do?”
“Highway maintenance worker. So… whatever that is. I haven’t had time to pull those records but I’m guessing, you know, since he had twenty-five years, by the end maybe he was making forty, forty-five grand, and he’s got a pension. She was probably doing better, but for their house and a kid in college… you know, the inheritance definitely helped them.”
“Alright. Let’s talk to him.”
Fogarty agreed to join them in the small room. There was a plush loveseat, some bookshelves filled with inspirational stories on grief no one ever read, and a window looking into an adjacent room, in case it was necessary to separate the bereaved from the deceased. Fogarty sat on the loveseat, slouched forward.
“Mr. Fogarty,” Mike began, “I don’t know how better to say it… I am so sorry for your loss.”
Fogarty’s hunch seemed to deepen, his eyes darted about, ringed red from emotion.
“What happened last night?” Mike asked. “Did you expect your wife home at some point?”
He nodded, slowly, his eyes filling with tears. “I fell asleep.”
“You fell asleep? About what time?”
“Right about eight thirty. I was on the porch, reading, getting tired. So I went in to lie down. I’ve had something – I don’t know, it’s going around.”
“You mean you felt sick?”
“My stomach. My head ached. I took NyQuil – that really knocks me out. I closed my eyes and…” He shrugged, and two tears tracked down his face. “And that was it. I woke up around six this morning, and she wasn’t there.”
Mike gave it a moment, glancing at Overton, surprised to see emotion swimming in her own eyes.
Mike used a soft voice as he resumed with Fogarty. “Then what did you do?”
“I texted her. I got up and went to the bathroom. Then I… I called her.”
“We have your incoming call on her phone – 6:17 a.m.”
“Right.” He seemed to straighten out, and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes and nose. “I knew something was… Rita wouldn’t just stay out all night or anything like that. I knew something happened. Something was wrong.”
“And that’s when you called 911, who directed your call to the Lake Placid police. That was at six twenty.”
Terry gave a big nod, then looked over their shoulders at the window into the next room.
“What did Lake Placid say?” Mike asked.
“They said they would look into it right away. They asked me if… I told them we haven’t been having any problems. They asked me… I don’t know. The usual. Acting like she might’ve left me.”
“Any reason to think she would?”