CHAPTER EIGHT

Jake scrutinized the man who was rushing toward them just outside the police station. He saw outrage in the man’s face and bearing, but didn’t sense that it was aimed at him. And he was aware that Tallhamer wasn’t bracing for action.

Meanwhile, Cardin had turned and hurried rapidly away along the sidewalk.

The angry man stormed up to Tallhamer. Waving an arm in the departing Cardin’s direction, he shouted …

“I demand that you take that bastard back into custody!”

Seemingly impervious to the man’s anger, Sheriff Tallhamer calmly introduced Jake to Earl Gibson, the town’s only doctor and Alice Gibson’s husband.

Jake started to shake hands and to offer his condolences, but the doctor’s arms were still waving in circles as he ranted on at Tallhamer. He noted that Dr. Gibson was a remarkably homely man with a heavily pockmarked face that wasn’t improved by the flush of fury. He remembered Cardin describing him as “that toad she took up with.”

Indeed, Cardin was positively handsome by comparison.

Jake figured that Earl Gibson must have virtues that had attracted the dead woman despite his looks. After all, Gibson was a doctor, and Alice’s ex was nothing more than a failed short-order cook …

Probably a pretty easy choice in a town with few options.

Gibson’s anger only increased when he found out who Jake was.

“The FBI! What business does the FBI have even being here? You already caught my wife’s killer. You had him locked away. There’s not a jury in the world that wouldn’t find him guilty. And now you just let him go!”

Sheriff Tallhamer shuffled his feet and spoke in a patient, almost condescending tone …

“Now, Earl, we talked about this just a little while ago, didn’t we?”

Dr. Gibson said, “Yeah, we did. And that’s why I stayed right here, waiting. I had to see this for myself. I wanted to stop it.”

“We’ve got to let him go, and you know it,” Tallhamer said, “Another woman was murdered last night over in Dighton, the same way as Alice was. I can vouch for Phil Cardin’s whereabouts last night, and he sure wasn’t anywhere near Dighton. He didn’t kill that woman, and now we’ve got no reason to think he killed Alice, either.”

“No reason!” Gibson said, sputtering with rage. “He threatened her life that very day. And don’t insult me with all this nonsense about the victim in Dighton, and how Phil Cardin couldn’t have killed her. We both know there’s a perfectly viable suspect for the other murder.”

Jake’s interest was suddenly piqued.

“A viable suspect?” he asked.

Gibson scoffed at Sheriff Tallhamer and said, “So you didn’t tell him, eh?”

“Tell me about what?” Jake asked.

“About Phil Cardin’s brother, Harvey,” Gibson said to Jake. “He takes Phil’s side in everything. He threatened Alice too. He’d get her on the phone and tell her that he and Phil were going to get revenge. He called her the same day she was killed. And wherever he was last night, he wasn’t in any jail cell. He’s the one who killed that woman in Dighton. I’d bet my life on it.”

Jake was truly startled now.

He asked Gibson, “Why do you think he’d kill someone in another town?”

Gibson said, “His motive you mean? Maybe he had something personal against that woman. He wanders around the state a lot so maybe he got involved with her, then followed his brother’s example. But I think he most likely did it to protect his brother—to make people think he didn’t kill Alice.”

Tallhamer sighed and said, “Earl, we talked about this too a little while ago, didn’t we? We’ve both known Harvey Cardin all our lives. He travels around because he’s an itinerant plumber. He talks tough from time to time, but he’s not like his brother. He’d never hurt a fly, let alone kill anyone in such an awful way.”

Jake’s brain clicked away, trying to process what he was hearing.

He wished Tallhamer had told him about Harvey Cardin from the start.

Small town cops, he thought. Some of them are so sure they know everything about everybody in their district that they can miss what’s important.

Jake said to Sheriff Tallhamer, “I want to talk to Harvey Cardin.”

The sheriff shrugged as if he considered it a waste of time.

He said, “Well, if that’s what you want. Harvey lives only a couple of blocks away from here. I’ll take you there.”

As Jake started walking with the sheriff, he saw that Gibson was following along. The last thing Jake needed right now was a grieving and irate widower inserting himself into the interview of a possible suspect.

As delicately as he could, he said, “Dr. Gibson, the sheriff and I need to do this on our own.”

When Gibson opened his mouth to protest, Jake added …

“I’ll want to interview you in a little while. Where can I find you?”

Gibson fell silent for a moment.

“I’ll be in my office,” Gibson said. “The sheriff can tell you where it is.”

Gibson turned and stormed angrily away.

Jake and Tallhamer walked the short distance to a tiny white house where Harvey Cardin lived. It was a ramshackle cottage with an overgrown lawn.

Tallhamer knocked on the front door. When no one answered, he knocked again, and there was still no answer.

Tallhamer said, “He’s probably away, maybe working in some other town. We’ll have to catch him some other time.”

Jake didn’t want to wait for “some other time.” He peered through one of the  glass panes in the front door. He could see some stark, simple furniture, but little else inside—certainly no personal touches to the decor. It looked like a the kind of place that was rented furnished, but there was no sign that anybody lived there.

Jake guessed that Harvey Cardin was out of town, all right …

But is he ever coming back?

His musings were interrupted by a man’s voice from next door …

“Can I help you with anything, sheriff?”

Jake turned and saw a man standing in the yard.

Tallhamer said to him, “This FBI fellow and I are looking for Harvey Cardin.”

The man shook his head and said, “You won’t have much luck, I don’t reckon. I saw him loading up his truck a week ago—just after his brother got arrested for killing Alice Gibson. It looked like he was taking everything he had, not that there was much of it to begin with. I asked him where he was going, and he said, ‘Anywhere that’s not Hyland. I’ve had it with this goddamn town.’”

Jake felt a jolt of alarm.

This possible suspect had already disappeared.

“Come on,” Jake said to Tallhamer. “Let’s go talk to some people.”

*

Jake and Sheriff Tallhamer spent the rest of the day conducting fruitless interviews, starting in the neighborhood where Harvey Cardin had lived. All that Harvey’s other neighbors knew was that they hadn’t seen him since he’d driven away weeks ago.

They had no better luck with Alice’s friends and acquaintances. Alice’s female coworkers at the beauty parlor agreed that Phil Cardin had made a terrible, frightening scene there on the day before Alice was killed.

When Jake and Tallhamer stopped by Mick’s Diner, the owner said that Phil Cardin had gotten himself fired from his job as a short-order cook for a whole cluster of reasons—skipping work, showing up drunk, and getting into fistfights with other employees.

None of them knew anything about where Phil’s brother Harvey might be.

Finally Jake and the sheriff stopped by Earl Gibson’s physician’s office. The doctor was still seething about Phil Cardin’s release, and was further angered to hear that Harvey had disappeared. Jake managed to calm him down enough to ask him some questions, but Gibson wasn’t able to shed any light on who else might have wanted to kill his wife.

Their inquiries only deepened the mystery as far as Jake was concerned. He was looking for any indication that the two Cardin brothers had committed the two murders by turns, or even that the missing Harvey Cardin had committed both murders …

But if not?

Jake didn’t have any alternative scenarios just yet. He’d gotten no gut instinct about anybody else in Hyland committing either of the two murders. Alice seemed well-liked by everyone they talked to that day, and nobody in Hyland seemed to know Hope Nelson except by name. Neither, apparently, had Alice Gibson. The two women were from the same part of the state, but had spent their lives in different towns and different social circles.

When they found themselves back at the police station after a fruitless day, Jake told Tallhamer’s deputy to keep a close eye on Harvey Cardin, especially to make sure he didn’t try to leave town.

“One more stop,” he told Tallhamer, “and then I’ll give up for the day.”

The sheriff drove Jake out to the first murder scene.

Dusk was falling by the time they got there. The fence post where Alice Gibson’s body had been found dangling was marked by an X that Sheriff Tallhamer’s deputy had painted on it. Like the spot where Alice Gibson’s body had been found, the fence bordered on a gently rolling pasture.

Jake suppressed a sigh as he imagined the hideous bundle hanging there …

This’d be nice place to visit under different circumstances.

He figured it must have taken a remarkably sick man to leave such a grisly object in such a lovely location.

Was Phil Cardin such a man?

Might his brother be such a man?

Jake crouched down by the fence post and breathed long and slowly, hoping to catch some feeling about what had happened here. Jake was known for making intuitive leaps at murder scenes, oftentimes getting an uncanny sense of the mind of a criminal. Jake knew of nobody else who could do that—except for young Riley Sweeney, and her instincts were still erratic and undisciplined.

This morning at the other crime scene, Jake hadn’t been able even try to make such a connection—not with all the hubbub going on around him and the arrival of a TV news helicopter.

Can I do it now? he wondered.

Jake closed his eyes and focused, trying to get some sort of gut feeling.

Nothing came.

When he opened his eyes, he saw that three black and white Black Angus cows had wandered over and were eyeing him curiously. He wondered—had they seen what had gone on that night? If so, had the horror of what they’d witnessed had any impact on them?

“If only you could talk,” Jake said to the cows under his breath.

He rose to his feet, feeling thoroughly discouraged.

It was time to head back over to Dighton and check in with his forensics team. He’d go over the day’s notes and get some sleep in the town’s only motel, then get a fresh start early tomorrow. Jake had left some unfinished business in Dighton, including a serious interview with Hope Nelson’s husband, the mayor. Mason Nelson had been too incapacitated with shock for Jake to talk to him when they’d met at the other murder scene.

As for trying to track down Harvey Cardin’s whereabouts, Jake knew that it wasn’t a job for either the local cops or the forensics crew he’d brought along. He’d have to call for technical support from Quantico.

He said to Sheriff Tallhamer, “Take me back to my car, I’m leaving.”

But before they could get into the sheriff’s car, Jake saw a van approaching with a TV station’s logo on it. The van pulled to a stop nearby, and a crew poured out with lights, camera, and a microphone.

Jake let out a groan of despair.

There was no way of getting away from the media this time.