THE SKY WAS PALE gray and the breeze hinted at rain. Jake’s Cadillac left a trail of dust on the gravel road as he swung into the dirt driveway of what looked like a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse. Behind the white house, a barn leaned dangerously toward an abandoned chicken coop, as if waiting to pounce. Below, Owasco Lake lay in the crease of the long, low hills running north and south. Dora had the shot set up on the listing front porch, capturing the lake below and part of an ancient oak tree spread wide across the front lawn.
Jake tapped his horn, wincing at the sound, and pulled in behind the crew’s van. A white-haired woman in hot pink curlers stepped out onto the porch in a robe and slippers, chastising one of the crew for draping his cables across her rosebush. Myron Kissle followed, looking sheepish under a dome of pomaded hair and in a button-down tan shirt with a blue paisley tie. Brown brogans peeked from beneath a pair of dark brown wool slacks too big for the old man by two sizes. His wife turned to him and fussed with his tie as Jake approached the porch. Its railings needed scraping and paint, and the faded white curtains behind the bay window provided a stage on the sill for smiling Hummel figurines with a host of dead flies at their feet.
After meeting the wife and shaking hands with Kissle, both men had to sit through having the makeup woman touch up their cheeks before they could be wired up. Kissle blinked at the bright lights, shading his face with a liver-spotted hand.
“Like the old hot seat,” he said. “Lights hotter than hell, and a rubber hose if we needed it.”
“The good old days,” Jake said, forcing a smile, the pain in his head distracting him now.
Kissle nodded fervently and took a sip from the water bottle offered to him by the makeup woman as he tugged at the microphone clipped onto the collar of his shirt.
“Can we move that mic to his tie?” Jake asked.
A soundman hurried in and out of the shot, following Jake’s direction.
“I want to move the two shot over this way a little,” Dora told a cameraman. “I think the back of his head looks a little funny.”
“Nothing funny about it,” Jake said, touching the back of his skull and feathering his hair over the top of the stitches. “I didn’t think you could actually see it.”
“Your hair covers it pretty well,” Dora said, “but it’s got a funny shape.”
“Great,” Jake said.
Kissle looked at Jake, mystified, and Jake just made a face and softly shook his head not to worry. Dora caught his eye and told him they were rolling.
“So,” Jake said, “Detective Kissle, we appreciate you talking with us.”
Kissle shook his head. “Just Kissle, or Myron. I retired from the force eleven years ago, so I can’t go by Detective, as proud as I am of my shield.”
“Mr. Kissle,” Jake said, leaning toward the old man. “Do you remember the Cassandra Thornton case back in 1989?”
“This isn’t New York City,” Kissle said, nodding toward the countryside behind him, “so we don’t regularly get things like that. Luckily. No, that’s the worst I ever saw or hope to see. As pretty a girl as you could wish. Face cut to pieces. Pants torn off. Stabbed full of holes. Blood all over the room like some slaughterhouse. Her daddy covered in it and crying to us to save her. She was still breathing, barely.”
Jake paused, then asked, “What can you tell us about the investigation following?”
Kissle rubbed his nose in a big circular motion. “Well, we were looking for a black man, no one ever said why, but that’s what we were looking for. Then we get a call from someone at the bus station who says a black man with blood on his clothes got on the bus to New York and good riddance to him, but someone ought to know. We caught up with Dwayne Hubbard down in New York City. Man went to trial and they put him away, you know that part.”
“That’s right,” Jake said, “the police found Dwayne Hubbard, but there were some things about the case that people-people like yourself-asked about that others didn’t like. What can you tell us about that?”
“Well,” Kissle said. He sat forward, the chair creaking and his rheumy eyes beginning to glisten. “We got word from above that said for us to stop asking questions, we had our man, and that was to be the end of it. The detective on the case-”
“Uh, Detective Yancy?” Jake said.
“Right. He dropped right out of it and left the force. Last thing he said to me was that if I was gonna stick around it’d be best to stop asking questions. Then he dropped off the face of the earth.”
“What kind of questions were you asking?” Jake asked.
“First thing was the boyfriend of the girl, I mean the ex-boyfriend,” Kissle said, using his aged hands to conduct as he spoke. “He’d been following her. She worked just up the road at the putt-putt golf, worked the ice-cream stand, and he’d show up there most every night, just hanging around with his buddies, or by himself if he didn’t have any, and watching her. We’d get calls from her dad, but we had to tell him that it’s a free country, which it is.”
“And what was the question some people had about the ex-boyfriend?” Jake asked.
Kissle shrugged. “Well, it only figures we should have talked to him. I mean, I know we had the New York City boy, but talking to him seemed like proper police work. That was my take on it. Billy Cussing-he was my partner-he thought more about it than me and he found himself looking for work. Couldn’t find anything until he got to Florida. I’m past that now, though. Work.”
“You worked hard for a lot of years,” Jake said. “Can you tell us about the ex-boyfriend? Who he was, and why you think it may have had something to do with you and others being asked to forget your questions?”
“We weren’t asked,” Kissle said, narrowing one eye and rubbing his nose. “They told us flat out. Leave it alone. We had our man and that was that.”
“Why?”
“Simple,” Kissle said, “the boyfriend was the DA’s son.”
“Can you tell us their names?”
“Everyone knows,” Kissle said, “that Patricia Rivers’s boy, Nelson, was no good, never. We’d pick him up smoking pot and driving drunk out on the road and we’d just bring him home. People didn’t necessarily think he’d do something like butcher a girl, but we thought at least he should be asked some questions. Not her, though. She put the word out and the chief at the time-not our chief now-he went with her on it, so did the mayor, and the word came down we had our man.”
“Do you think Nelson Rivers is the one who killed that girl?” Jake asked.
Kissle shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not, but we sure didn’t do nothing to find out if he did. He was stalking her. We all knew that. You won’t see any reports on it or anything, but the chief had a talk with the mom about getting him to back off.”
“Did Patricia Rivers, Judge Rivers now,” Jake said, “did she ever say anything to you directly about the investigation?”
Kissle tightened his lips and nodded slowly, remembering. “I imagine she said the same thing to Martin Yancy and Billy Cussing that she said to me. I was getting into my patrol car out back of the station and she pulled up in her big black Mercedes and she says, ‘Myron, you’ll leave that Thornton case alone if you know what’s good for you. You’re an officer of the law; you’re supposed to be working for the law, not against it.’ Well, I told her I thought I was. I told her the law was supposed to be blind when it come to color, but she just gave me a funny smile and told me the world was a hollow place for a cop who worked against the law. That’s what she called it, a hollow place.”
“And what did you do?” Jake asked.
“I believed her,” Kissle said. “She’s not one to mess around, never was. I guess Billy Cussing found that out the other way.”
“And Dwayne Hubbard,” Jake said.
“Yeah, him, too,” Kissle said, “and I’ve had an ache in my gut ever since. That’s why I’m sitting here now. I been keeping it inside all these years, and when I saw you people showing up and trying to help put things right? Trust me, though, back then? No one was putting anything right. She’s a hellcat. No one messed with Patricia Rivers and no one ever called her Patty, either. How do you think she got to where she is? Big judge in that big house? It wasn’t any kind of luck, I’ll tell you. She’s a barracuda.”
Jake looked over Kissle’s shoulder at Dora, his head feeling much better. She nodded and gave him two thumbs-up.