The Pact: A Detective Locklear Mystery Page 3

  The house was old but looked smarter and more affluent than Locklear had expected. He rang the doorbell and was surprised when the door opened almost immediately. He could already tell that the woman in front of him was Andrew Fehr’s sister, Esther. She had the same mousy-brown hair and pale skin. Her eyes were dark grey with shards of amber like the sun trying to cut through the clouds on a dark winter’s day.

  She stared at him for the longest time, glancing only occasionally at Carter who stood back, until she finally spoke.

  “Kann ick di hulpen?”

  “This is Sergeant Locklear, Esther. He’s here because of Andrew,” Carter offered nervously.

  Esther, on the other hand, showed no signs of nervousness. She threw a sharp glance at Locklear.

  “Laat mi in Roh!” she spat before closing the door firmly on them.

  “She said –”

  “I know what she said,” Locklear replied, “or I can guess. You speak the language fluently, Carter?”

  “No, but I understand a good bit. I went to high school with some of the community. ‘Leave me alone’ is something I heard a lot from the girls,” he said with a grin.

  “But they all speak English?”

  “Yeah, but they won’t. Not ’less they have to.”

  Locklear reached forward and pressed the bell hard until the door swung open again. This time the surprised face of Pastor Plett greeted him. Without a word, the pastor stood to one side and beckoned for them to come in.

  Locklear heard Carter whisper “Sorry” as he passed the preacher in the hallway.

  As they were led down a narrow hallway, Locklear noticed that despite the fancy facade, the house was not luxurious on the inside. As he passed several rooms along the dark hallway he noticed they were surprisingly sparse of furniture and dimly lit.

  The pastor led the visitors to the kitchen at the back of the house. Inside there was only a large wooden table, four wooden chairs and a tall oak kitchen dresser with rows of old-fashioned crockery on it. A ceramic sink on top of two tiny cupboards was the only other item in the room. He could see no refrigerator or other electric appliances. He looked up and was relieved to see electric lights on the ceiling.

  Pastor Plett seemed to read his mind. “We do have electricity. Rachel prefers to have the appliances in the adjoining room. The buzzing from them gives her migraines.”

  Plett pointed at the table and both men dutifully took a seat on the hard, uncomfortable-looking chairs.

  “I assume you are here to talk about young Andrew?”

  As if on cue, Esther appeared in the kitchen, still scowling.

  Pastor Plett, who had taken a seat opposite the men, stood and placed his hands on her shoulders. Locklear could almost see the tension leave her.

  “We have welcome guests for dinner, Esther. Please tell my wife,” he said in English.

  Esther did what almost passed for a curtsy and left the room, leaving the door open behind her.

  “She’s a spirited girl,” Plett said, grinning.

  “You adopted her?” Locklear asked.

  “No, Esther came to us six years ago. She was fostered by the Wyss family until she turned eighteen. She works for us now.”

  “Are you permitted to have a shunned person in your home?” Locklear asked.

  Plett’s shoulders rose up in defence. He cut a look at Carter as though the trooper had possibly told more to an outsider than he should.

  “I’m breaking no rules. Shunning is rarely practised in our faith, Mr Locklear. What happened to the Fehrs happened a long time ago and is outside of my control. My wife and I care deeply for Esther. Our own children are raised. It has done us both good, especially Esther, to keep her here.”

  Locklear noticed his use of words. It would have, he felt, been more appropriate to say have her here, than keep her here.

  “Tell me about how you came to find Andrew Fehr.”

  Plett stood and quietly closed the kitchen door. He returned to his seat and took a deep breath. Locklear reckoned he was about to listen to a very tall, well-rehearsed tale. He listened as Plett told of a visit to the Wyss family towards dusk and how he noticed car lights on the dirt road leading up to the Fehrs’ farm. Worried that the farm was being robbed by outsiders, he left the Wyss house quickly and took a shortcut up to it on a dirt track through the fields. When he arrived, he could hear a car on the main road. He noticed the barn door open and went inside where he found Andrew hanging. He drove his car under the boy and stood on the roof of the car and propped him up until help came.

  “How did you summon help?” Locklear asked suspiciously.

  Plett reached into his trouser pocket and took out a cell phone.

  “With this.”

  Locklear thought for a moment. Not lost on him was the fact that his trooper asked not one question.

  “Were the lights of the car going towards the farmhouse or away from it?”

  Plett moved his tongue around the inside of his mouth – obviously unprepared for that particular question.

  “Away from the farm.”

  “That’s quite a steep hill and most of the dirt road veers left, away from your field of view.”

  Plett said nothing.

  “How many minutes did it take you to reach the barn?”

  Plett made an attempt to pretend he was recalling the evening, as though his entire story was not practised to perfection.

  “Around four minutes.”

  “Pastor Plett, let’s say you hadn’t noticed that car until it was a good deal down the roadway and that the murderer had stood and watched Andrew Fehr hanging for two or three minutes – in that case, by the time you reached him he would be dead. So ... either you are lying about the time you noticed the car or you were a lot nearer to the boy when someone tried to hang him.”

  Plett said nothing but Locklear could see the veins pulsating above his white shirt collar.

  The kitchen door opened and Rachel Plett gushed in. Locklear wondered at her precise timing and felt she had been listening at the door. She thrust out her hand.

  “Willkamen.”

  Carter stood and shook her hand warmly and did not seem to notice the steely gaze she gave his partner before beginning to set the table for dinner.

  “Pastor, thank you for your kind offer of dinner but we must go. We have a lot of work to do.” It was Carter who spoke, taking Locklear by surprise.

  “I understand,” Plett said.

  They stood and moved towards the front door where Plett pretended to take an interest in Carter’s conversation about the local baseball team.

  Locklear realised Carter was creating the diversion for his benefit. He walked outside, leaving the two in conversation, and wandered around to the back of the house. There he saw Esther Fehr walking towards the small shed-like home she presumably lived in with a plate of food in her hands. He pictured her sitting there alone, day after day, unable to share a meal with anyone except maybe her siblings – though he had no idea if she saw them and if she did what their relationship was. Knowing it was useless to try to talk to her, he walked back to the front of the house where Carter was giving an amused Plett a re-enactment of his swing the previous Saturday.

  There was one more question Locklear needed to ask. For now.

  “Mr Plett? Were you alone when you visited the Wyss farm that night?”

  Plett looked to the ground but his facial expression remained unchanged. He raised his eyes again to meet Locklear’s.

  “Yes. I was alone.”

  The motel Irene had organised for Locklear in Harrisonburg did exactly what it said it would do on the roadside sign. Basic accommodation at a good price. He rested the key on the TV stand and sat for a moment on a plastic chair in the hot room. He knew not to even look for the air conditioner. A fan above the bed looked like the only respite he would get from the murderous heat and sleep would probably evade him for however long it took to close the case.

  He opened the fridge to fin
d it empty. After all these years he still thought about alcohol, still thought about opening the fridge on a hot day and reaching for a cold beer or opening a bottle of Jameson on a cold winter night. He went outside and bought as many sodas from the vending machine as his change would allow and downed two before getting into the shower. He had at least made some headway with Carter who had seen through Plett’s story and knew the pastor was lying. What they didn’t agree on was why, Carter being of the opinion that Plett may have seen something he wished he hadn’t while Locklear felt the preacher was knee-deep in whatever was going on around here.

  It was only nine hours since his arrival yet he felt like he’d been in the town for weeks. He went over what he now knew which wasn’t much. Pastor Plett was lying and his wife knew why – maybe she was even a part of it. Luke Fehr wasn’t going to talk to him – not unless he made life very uncomfortable for him and even then he guessed the man Carter said lived like a hermit would not speak. Esther would be no better.

  He wondered what their relationship with their youngest brother was. In any other case he would been fending off family wanting to point fingers at whoever they felt was responsible for the attack on their loved one, but Esther hadn’t even asked how her brother was. He went over Esther’s expression when she opened the door. She wasn’t afraid of him and she didn’t look guilty. Carter had said that the Pletts came under a lot of pressure from church elders including Shank when they took Esther in, which didn’t match up with what he knew so far about the pastor who seemed completely devoted to the faith. Nothing added up in this place and it seemed like everyone, including his trooper, was lying.

  Locklear dressed and took a walk through the town which looked like hundreds of towns he’d been through. Harrisonburg could, he supposed, be described as a pretty town. It was laid out in neat grids, save the downtown section where the town was first established in the early 1700s.

  He turned left onto Main Street past a pretty white steepled church on the corner, reminiscent of bygone days. He stopped to admire the redbrick colonial-style houses along the street and stopped again at the impressive Baptist church. He wondered briefly if this was where Carter came to worship. He could imagine him there each Sunday, dressed in his Sunday best with his wife and brood of baseball-playing kids. Locklear was not affiliated to any church – he didn’t even know what beliefs his mother had had – if indeed she’d had any at all.

  The town’s colonial history was evident in the fine buildings, once homes to rich industrial families and now relegated to government offices and museums. He passed more churches – Methodist, Mennonite, Catholic, Presbyterian – there was something for everyone in this multi-denominational community. As he reached the main square, he saw that an impressive stone courthouse stood there, its red roof and shining green dome standing out among the fine homes on either side.

  Locklear continued up Main Street in the heat until he found himself in the seedier part of town. Soon, redbrick houses gave way to closed-up shops and discount food stores. He passed two pawn shops side by side and knew he was in the part of town he’d feel comfortable in, so he continued on until he found what he was looking for – a diner that looked like a hundred diners he had been to before. He had grown up sitting in the corner of diners, doing his homework in the back booth of whatever sweat-hole his mother found work in and he found them oddly comforting, like a home away from a home he had never truly known. A sign on the window said: “Waitresses Wanted – Movie Star Lookalikes Welcome.” He ordered his usual from an ageing busty blonde waitress trying her best to look like Marilyn Monroe. A fake mole had slid down her cheek in the heat and was resting on the corner of her chin. Locklear reasoned that not too many Marilyn lookalikes must have applied. He remembered another sign on a different diner in a different state over fifty years ago when he was just a boy. His mother and he had been driving through Arizona for days, stopping only to eat or rest which involved sleeping in the back of the pickup she had “borrowed” from a boyfriend they were running from. On their last ten dollars, they stopped at a diner in the middle of nowhere. A sign in the window said “Help Wanted – No Indians No Blacks” so they kept driving.

  By the time he’d finished his meal, the fatigue he’d felt on leaving Carter had evaporated and he made his way back to Dayton to the incident room he had not yet used. He signed in and introduced himself to an overweight officer with an unfriendly manner who pointed to the room at the end of a long corridor.

  The door to the supposedly secure room was open and surveying the large noticeboard Carter had set up was a tiny Hispanic woman in an oversized police uniform.

  She didn’t seem to hear him as he stepped up behind her.

  “Are you lost?” he asked.

  The woman, jolted from her thoughts, swung around to greet him, bumping her large breasts into him.

  “No,” she said. “I’m Josefina Mendoza.”

  “Mendoza?”

  “Yes,” she said with a smile. “Your help. Call me Jo.”

  “You’re a woman?”

  Mendoza looked down at her expansive bosom. “Last time I checked.”

  Locklear ignored the sarcasm. “I was expecting a man,” he retorted.

  “Well, you got me,” she replied, unperturbed.

  Locklear was stumped. To say anything further would make him seem sexist which he wasn’t – least not as far as he was concerned.

  He walked back to reception and lifted the phone. The fat officer ignored him as he shoved a hot dog into his fleshy mouth. The number rang three times before Kowalski answered.

  “Kowalski, are you shitting me?”

  Kowalski laughed. “Mendoza arrived, huh?”

  “Alex – I asked for some goddamn help. Instead you team me up with a Baptist bible-thumping boy afraid of his own shadow and now – what – goddamn it – does she even weigh a hundred pounds?”

  “You need her to lift something?”

  “Funny. That’s real funny, Alex.”

  “Listen, Locklear – she’s sharp, she’s got no allegiances, she’s tough, she’s committed, she’s got balls. If you need all that and a penis, I got no one for you right now. So, keep her or send her back. I could sure use her here.” He hung up.

  Locklear kicked the bin at his feet.

  “Goddamn fucking damn it!” he shouted.

  He turned to find Mendoza standing at the door, listening.

  “You ready to get to work now?” she asked.

  Locklear breathed a heavy sigh.

  “Sure.”

  Chapter 4

  Locklear rose before dawn with a clearer plan than he’d had the day before. At breakfast he sat separate to Mendoza whom Irene had booked into the same motel, knowing that this would irritate him. He was useless with small talk and when a case was on his mind all he wanted to do was think on it, reason it out, see the flaws in alibis and interrogate accordingly. It was why, he supposed, he had loved jigsaw puzzles as a boy. He spent many happy hours alone as a boy piecing the bits together, working out the patterns and colours and shapes in front of him until a picture began to emerge from the jumble of oddly cut shapes. Each time his mother found a new lover she would buy her only child a new puzzle to keep him busy and would buy him another one when the man left, which they all did eventually. By the time he reached adolescence he had about fifty puzzles in the top of the wardrobe of wherever they happened to be living. He was never sure if that reflected badly on his mother’s relationship skills or on the characters of the men that she chose. Probably both.

  Locklear knew that he had to break Plett’s alibi but he needed more to go on. Plett had said he was visiting the Wyss farm on the night someone tried to kill Andrew Fehr, so a visit to the woman who had fostered at least three of the Fehr children was his first port of call. He stopped first at Dayton station to collect Carter who seemed immediately at ease with Mendoza. The trooper slid his tall frame into the back seat which symbolised his new position on the case. Locklear
checked to see if Carter was sulking but his genial trooper launched into a friendly conversation with Mendoza and did not seem to notice her monosyllabic responses. Neither did he sulk when she curtly told him she preferred quiet when working on a case so she could think. She turned quickly to Locklear when she said this and had a glint in her eye. He glanced at her questioningly.

  “My father worked with you, remember? He told me all about you and your ... ways” – which resulted in a loud guffaw from the backseat passenger.

  When they reached the entrance to the Wyss farm, Locklear sent Carter and Mendoza to walk the crime scene again and asked Carter to update Mendoza on where the investigation was at – in as few words as he could manage. He wanted to speak to the family alone.

  As he approached the front door, he saw a thin young girl standing at the side of the house. She was looking up towards the Fehr farm. He did not know if the Wysses had any biological children but knew instinctively that this was Abigail Fehr. She had the same colour hair as her siblings and the same deathly pale face. He walked around to face her.

  The same stormy-grey eyes as Esther’s greeted him with the same bright flecks of amber. He had never seen eyes like those shared by the Fehrs. He said hello but she did not answer him and stood transfixed to the spot, staring at what he did not know.

  He rang the bell and was greeted by a plainly dressed woman in her mid-fifties. He could see that Helena Wyss had once been a beautiful woman but that hard work on the farm had worn her down. She was painfully thin and her faded pastel cotton dress hung awkwardly on her emaciated frame.

  “Come in,” she said quietly, without even asking who he was.

  Word had got around, he reasoned.

  Locklear sat on a hard wooden chair and glanced around at the meagre furniture in Helena Wyss’s kitchen.

  “My husband Peter works in Harrisonburg – the farm doesn’t pay enough – so, it’s just me here ... and Abigail,” she said.

  “She always like that?” he asked.

  “She’s upset at the moment. Lost her rag doll. Red, she calls it, because of the colour. Too old for it anyhow. She’ll be fine in a while. She has these things – absences – she comes in and out of them. When she comes out of them she says the strangest things and then she’s fine again.”