CHAPTER 54 - Rita

CHAPTER 54Rita“OKAY, ALISON, START WALKING,” JOE SAYS.He and I stand in the cold morning air in the Mountclair Tavern’s parking lot. Agent Metz takes a couple of steps, her phone in her hand counting the minutes. She turns and walks backward.“Shouldn’t I drink a couple of beers first for accuracy’s sake?”Joe smiles, and she turns back around and keeps walking along the side of the road.“Maybe later,” Joe yells after her. “Work first.”She waves at him over her shoulder. We want to see about how long it took Annalise Robb to walk from the bar to where she was abducted. Agent Metz is closest in age and size to our vic, so she got volunteered. Chase stands at the side road, where Annalise would’ve turned the corner, to direct Alison.Joe and I drive up to the end spot where Annalise disappeared and wait for Agent Metz to arrive.We sit in his vehicle, heater cranking, coffees in hand.“Whoever did this had to leave the Bradley house sometime after midnight,” Joe says, “or Mrs. Pearson probably would’ve noticed. Annalise left the bar anywhere from one o’clock to one-twenty, according to witnesses.” When we reread the statements gathered by the sheriff’s department, there was some discrepancy as to when Annalise actually left. Still, it’s a pretty good timeline.“And the deed was probably done by five a.m.,” I add.“Key ring wasn’t back, according to Alice.” Joe raises his eyebrows.“True. But wouldn’t she have heard something? I’m thinking the perp replaced the ring later. Realized it was still in his pocket maybe. I think he was finished by then and back in bed. It would’ve been risky to have been prowling around the house in the early-morning hours. I think he got the job done overnight when he was sure everyone was asleep.”We’d gone over all this since we interviewed Alice yesterday, but talking through possible scenarios is always ongoing. You never know when something you hadn’t thought of before might pop up.“And,” I say, “I don’t think it was the doctor.” I had lain awake half the night thinking about this case, and I’m growing more convinced Jay Bradley wasn’t a killer. Maybe it’s just my gut talking, but it’s getting louder. Ma always said the McMahons could feel things that not everyone else could. She used to visit an old woman who lived over Corrigan’s Bar on the corner who claimed to be a psychic, much to Father O’Brien’s chagrin. I don’t necessarily buy into that sort of thing, but you never know.Joe tips his head. “Maybe not, Rita.”“I still think he would’ve used his own keys. Why bother with the ring in the mudroom?”“Maybe it was handy.”We sit in silence. The car is facing down the road so we can see Agent Metz coming. She eventually appears, walking at a moderate pace, trying to embody a tipsy Annalise. When she gets close, Joe and I exit the vehicle.Alison takes a big breath and points over her shoulder. “That incline is steeper than it looks.”Chase appears headed our way, having walked a little behind her. We stand in a huddle.“Okay, how did you do?” Joe asks, and Agent Metz hands him her phone, leans over, and puts her hands on her thighs.“Asthma,” she says to me.When I raise my eyebrows, she adds. “Cold weather does it. It’s not normally a problem.”Joe writes in his notebook. “That took you twenty-two minutes.” He looks at me.“So Annalise arrived at this spot anywhere from one twenty-two to one forty-two, give or take.”“Yeah. Looks like.”Chase arrives, also a little winded. “What now?”Joe stows his notepad in his pocket. “We drive from here to the Bradley place. Hop in.”We drive in silence, the bare winter trees skimming by. I’ve got my phone timing us as Joe drives. He’d been to the scene before he’d arrived in Graybridge, but together, armed with the statements from our people of interest, we hope to find some answers. Joe pulls up on the side of the road. The old hunting lodge looks dark, dreary in the snow, like a huge dead beast. “How long did that take?” he asks me.“Six minutes.” We get out, and he pulls a tarp out of the back of the car.“I don’t have to get in that, right?” Agent Metz says. We’d run through our plan back in Graybridge and decided we weren’t going to go that far, but we all laugh.“No, although it would help.” Joe cocks an eyebrow. She snorts and steps back. “Okay. We know that whether he took her around the house from the outside or went through the house entrance to the basement, he had to carry her quite a ways.”“All of our suspects are big men,” I say. “Mr. Westmore carries heavy objects in the course of his work. Mr. Ferris plays hockey and tennis. Mr. Pearson isn’t any wimp.”“Hayes Branch?” Chase says.“Okay. He’s not Goliath, but he’s not a hundred-pound weakling either, and with adrenaline pumping . . .”“The doctor was also a fairly big guy, and Ms. Robb was petite,” Agent Metz says.“Right,” Joe adds. “Anyway, let’s walk around the outside of the house first.” He lays three cinder blocks in the tarp and wraps it up, and we head down the sloping lawn. The blocks aren’t quite the same as a full-grown woman, but Joe wanted something to approximate an unwieldy load. The snow isn’t too deep, thank God, but we slip a little anyway. We’re on the side of the house where the Westmores’ bedroom had been, but no windows. The other side of the house would’ve presented more difficulties. Much steeper, more trees, windows, the side porch where the Branches were sleeping. If the perp carried Ms. Robb outside, it would stand to reason it was on this side.We make our way slowly down the hill, perspiration dotting Joe’s forehead, his muscles straining. We finally reach the metal double doors of the basement. Wearing a latex glove, I remove the key ring from an evidence bag and find the basement key among several hanging together. The lock clicks open easily enough with little sound, and I swing the door open.The musty, pungent smell hits us. It has probably been here for decades, adding a little to the stench after the years and animal carcasses had their turn. Mrs. Bradley said that no one went down here much anymore. No one has actually hunted here since Dr. Bradley’s father, more than twenty years ago. And when the doctor and Mr. Westmore came up here to fish, they usually threw back their catch. They didn’t clean the fish down here.I flip on the overhead light, a dim, sickly fluorescent tube suspended on the low arched ceiling. It hums overhead, adding eerie background noise. The table, with its wall-mounted pegboard over it, sits just as we’d found it last time we were here. But forensics has been through, and tiny, yellow, numbered tents mark the areas where the spilled nails and box were found on the floor, as well as the drops of blood under the table.“Creepy place,” Agent Metz says.“Yeah. But a perfect place to . . .” Chase says, coughs.Because of the state of the body, it was impossible to tell if Ms. Robb had been raped, but there was some reason he brought her here. Maybe just to finish what he started in the road. Maybe she started to stir from the head injury. We’ll never know unless he decides to tell us. But the important thing is that we find justice for her and her family by putting the bastard away for good.Joe has finished looking around and rejoins us by the doors. “Let’s walk over to the burial sight.” He picks up his bundle where he’s laid it on the concrete floor next to the drain.Outside the air is cold but fresh, and I draw a deep breath. We walk down the lawn, slipping in the snow. The footbridge is slick with a thin layer of ice, and we’ve got to hold on to the handrail to keep from falling. The river below is gray and, as it’s late January, running fast with melted snow. The sound of the current makes conversation nearly impossible, so we silently press ahead and make our way to the spot where Ms. Robb’s body spent the last six months.Crime-scene tape marks off a rough rectangle. Agent Metz wipes the sleeve of her jacket across her mouth and nose. “Why bury her so close? Pretty sloppy, huh? Why didn’t he go farther into the woods? It didn’t take much erosion here to expose her.”I shake my head. “He might’ve been worried about time. He needed to get back inside, clean up, and slip back into bed before anyone noticed. The whole operation was pretty risky.”“Maybe that’s what he liked,” Chase says. “Doing this right under his friends’ noses.”“Maybe,” Joe says.The area has been pretty well canvassed by the forensics team, so we head back across the bridge and up the sloping lawn to our vehicle.Joe drops his weighted tarp, takes a deep breath, and wipes his hands on his jeans. “Okay, let’s try this through the house this time.”We head down the driveway, and I unlock the door. I pause in the mudroom and point to the peg where the key ring would usually hang.“Convenient,” Joe says.“Yeah. Mrs. Bradley said it was there for whoever needed it.”“Like a serial killer?” Agent Metz chuckles. “Here you go. Take the keys, and go find a victim, and end her life in our basement. The perfect host.” We all groan. She’s young, but she’s got the gallows humor down pat.“The first door on the right after the mudroom leads to the basement.”“The perp wouldn’t have had to go through much of the house if he brought her through this way,” Joe says. “Let’s take a look.”We head down the basement steps. The light switch is easily accessible on the wall at the top. I’m in the lead, so I flick it on. The staircase isn’t terribly steep or hard to maneuver. It looks like it was probably replaced in the last twenty or thirty years. Not original to the house. At the bottom, the light peters out, and we’re in darkness.Joe drops his tarp, and the cinder blocks make a scraping sound. He points to the faint light coming from the door at the far end. “So when he had her in the house and down here,” Joe says, “I doubt anyone could’ve heard him once he got through the door to the tunnel.” We follow as he leads us deeper into the basement and through the door. That ubiquitous smell increases as we approach the table and sink area. Cobwebs line the arched ceiling, and a constant drip echoes from somewhere. We stand silently, each wondering, I suspect, about Annalise Robb’s last minutes in this dim cellar.