Page 56 of Not a Word

Twenty

McCabe double-checked that she was parked in front of the right house. She was expecting something different.

Her recollection of Yorkton Hill Police Detective Giles Maitland, before he took his retirement, was that he was a meticulous, detail-oriented cop. His yard said otherwise. What parts of the lawn weren’t overtaken by weeds didn’t look as though they’d been mowed in weeks. The disintegrating webbing on the folding lawn chair by the front door didn’t look safe to sit in. There was mail sticking out of the box, suggesting it hadn’t been brought in for a few days.

She hoped he wasn’t dead, and not just because that would be a terrible thing. She really wanted to talk to him.

McCabe went up to the front door and rang the bell. When she didn’t hear a chime, she figured it wasn’t operational, so she tried knocking. Rapped on the door a couple of times, waited, then rapped again.

“Hold your horses!” someone inside shouted.

Seconds later, the door opened a foot. McCabe recognized Maitland, but he had seen better days. He was heavier than the man she remembered seeing around the station. And he wasn’t in a suit and tie anymore either. He was wearing gray sweatpants and a black pullover shirt and was peering at her through a pair of grimy reading glasses.

“Yeah?” he said.

She showed her badge. “Janice McCabe,” she said. “I think we ran into each other occasionally back in the day.”

He squinted. “I remember you. But you hadn’t made detective.”

“No, sir. I was still in uniform.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to talk to you about a case you worked on.”

“Oh yeah? What case is that?”

“May I come in?”

He opened the door wide and stepped back. McCabe noticed a foul smell she couldn’t quite identify. Cabbage? Dirty socks? Spoiled milk? A blend of the three?

Maitland led her into the living room, cleared some newspapers off the couch so she could sit. Before he dropped into a recliner, he asked if he could get her something. A coffee? Soft drink?

“I’d offer you a beer but you’re on the clock.”

“I’m good,” she said. “So, how long’s it been since you retired?”

“Seven years,” he said.

“Seems to suit you,” she said, actually wondering to herself what she meant by that. It just seemed like the right thing to say. “I heard your wife had passed away. My condolences.”

“Chandra, yeah, four years ago,” Maitland said, nodding toward a picture on the mantel of the two of them. “So what’s this case?”

“I’ve been reading up on it in just the last few hours. There may be a connection between something you investigated and an incident here in town yesterday. A murder-suicide. Maybe you saw something about it on the news?”

He shook his head. “Don’t watch the news much. Still get the paper, though. Gets thinner every day.”

“This was an open-unsolved back in ninety-nine. Woman in her midthirties, shot, body dumped at the side of the road north of—”

Maitland raised a finger. “When was this again?”

“Ninety-nine.”

“Right, okay, go ahead.”

“The case you were investigating was of a woman who’d been found in a ditch at the side of the road. Thirty-six years old, about five five, white, blondish hair. She’d been shot in the back. Like she was running away at the time.”

His eyes closed briefly. “That’s starting to come back to me. This was on the road that went up past the drive-in, before they went out of business, tore it down. Her clothes were in disarray, pants pulled down, blouse ripped open, as though sexually assaulted, but no evidence of rape. Yeah, I remember wondering whether it had been staged, but that was only a feeling.”