And so Graves knew it would be there. The Murder Book. The lead detective’s account of a homicide investigation. He found Dennis Portman’s Murder Book in the top drawer of the filing cabinet behind his desk.
The Murder Book consisted of a detailed record of Portman’s activities, everything that had been done in the course of the State Trooper’s investigation. There were usually photographs of the victim, of suspects, sometimes even witnesses, along with precise timetables of the detective’s movements, the collection of evidence, everything from lab reports to interviews with witnesses, the time and place such interviews had occurred, and summaries of what each witness had said.
It was all gathered in a plain blue folder, remarkably neat and orderly. Almost too neat, Graves thought. Too orderly, so that he wondered if perhaps Detective Portman had expected it to be reviewed at some point in the future, his work reconsidered and evaluated, his long effort to discover what happened to Faye Harrison now passed to other hands.
A newspaper article had been taped just inside the front cover. Its headline read DENNIS R. PORTMAN TO LEAD RIVERWOOD MURDER INVESTIGATION. An accompanying photograph showed Portman as a big man, his bulky body draped in a transparent plastic rainslick almost identical to the one Graves had earlier imagined him wearing. Reality had added a gray felt hat, however, one Portman had tugged down over his brow, leaving his face in shadow.
For a moment Graves peered into that shadow. He tried to make something of the dark, unblinking eyes that peered back at him through the years, sunken, hooded, with puffy bags beneath and deep creases at the sides. The eyes seemed pressed into the great doughy mass of the face that surrounded them, a fat man’s face, dissolute, with flabby jowls and a second chin that hung in an indulgent crescent beneath the first.
As he continued to look at the photograph, Graves could feel his imagination heating up, filling in the blank spaces, creating an identity for Dennis Portman. He began to feel the man’s vast heaviness, hear his labored breathing as he’d mounted the stairs toward the main house at Riverwood or struggled up the steep forest trail that led to Indian Rock. How the heat of that long-ago summer must have afflicted him. How often he must have swabbed his neck and brow with the white handkerchief that protruded from the right front pocket of his rumpled flannel jacket. How longingly he must have stared out over the cool green water. Had he remembered the slenderness of his youth, the speed and grace that had once been his, the whole vanished world of his lost agility?
Graves drew his eyes from the photograph, making himself stop. He knew that he was perfectly capable of losing his focus for hours, wasting a whole afternoon dreaming up a shattered life for Dermis Portman, and thus forgetting that other shattered life, Faye Harrison’s, that it had been the old detective’s job to investigate.
Portman had placed his first interview at the front of the book. The subject was Jim Preston, the hiker who’d spotted Faye Harrison on Mohonk Trail the afternoon of her murder. Since Graves’ reading had given him considerable experience with police argot, he found it easy to decipher the shorthand Portman used in his notes.
RE: James Miles Preston