The Dead Husband by Carter Wilson (best summer reads of all time .txt) 📗

he stares, and as my headlight beams sweep along the Bury streets as we make our way back to Rum Hill Road, I just want to know the answer to that one question.

Will Max be okay?

And try as I might, I can’t turn off the little voice that laughs at me. Deep in my brain, deep in my heart.

Laughs and says:

Don’t be silly. He’s just like the rest of you.

Thirty-Nine

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

November 9

Colin’s attention wandered again, as it had been doing all morning. The paperwork felt endless, and he still had to finish his phone-tap warrant request for a suspected meth dealer. He was working several other cases along with Riley McKay’s, and though it was becoming more and more likely there wouldn’t be enough evidence to consider McKay a murder victim, Colin couldn’t get Rose Yates out of his mind.

He’d finished her upcoming book over the weekend.

First thing he did yesterday morning when he got to work was put a call into Chief Sike in Bury. Sike called back this morning, but Colin had missed it. Knowing he had to make a dent in the paperwork for his other cases, Colin vowed not to return the call until he at least got the warrant request done.

It ended up being the fastest he’d ever written one. An hour later, he called Sike and was glad not to get the man’s voicemail.

“Chief Sike.”

“Hi, Chief. Colin Pearson, Milwaukee PD.”

“Hey, Pearson, good to connect.”

“Things busy out there in Bury?”

Sike grumbled. “Yeah, a bit. You know, for a sleepy town anyway.”

“Anything interesting?”

Sike took a couple seconds before answering. “We had a murder yesterday.”

Colin sat up straight in his chair. “A murder?” His mind raced through all the people from Bury he’d met. “Who?”

“Not who. What. A dog.”

“Dog?”

“Poodle. But you know, not the little yippy kind. Big one, like you see in the dog-award shows.”

“A poodle was murdered?”

“Ayuh. Looks like it. Throat slit. Someone took it from its backyard and killed it out on a green belt.”

“God, that’s terrible. Who would do that?”

“Well, that’s what I spent my day yesterday trying to figure out. Still no clue. Owner is out of her mind.”

“I can imagine,” Colin said. “Sounds like a warning.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Sike replied. “Dog wasn’t known to be a noisy one, and if a neighbor had an issue, there would’ve been a history of complaints, but nope. And using a knife on a dog? That’s pretty brutal. My guess is it has nothing to do with the dog.” He cleared his throat with enough force that Colin recoiled from his handset. “So that’s what’s going on here. Now, what can I do for you?”

Colin leaned back in his chair and looked around the department. He didn’t know why he felt guilty for talking to Sike about something not related to the McKay case. Maybe because Colin knew he was grasping at straws and his sergeant would certainly admonish him for wasting his time.

“Well, here’s the thing, Chief, and it’s going to sound a little out there.”

“You have some new theory about the Yates woman offing her husband?”

“No. This is about Caleb Benner.”

“Benner kid? Don’t tell me that’s your new pet project, ’cause I’m sure you got plenty other work to do there. Best to leave Bury crimes to us.”

Colin tried to swallow but found his throat dry. “I agree, Chief. I’m not trying to step on any toes. But worlds are colliding and I’m just trying to make sense of things.”

The sigh of a man with little patience and a backlog of work came through the phone. “Okay,” Sike said. “I got a few minutes. But just a few. I know how you Midwesterners like to drag on, so I’m asking you not to. So go on now, tell me.”

And so Colin did.

With great efficiency, Colin told Sike everything that intersected about the Riley McKay death and the Caleb Benner disappearance. The connective threads were few and frayed but strong enough to make shape of something, even if Colin didn’t quite know what that something was. His main points were:

1. Riley McKay’s death was too suspicious to be ruled an accident, in Colin’s opinion. The man died of an overdose of alcohol and sleep medication, the same way a character died in one of Rose Yates’s books. When he approached Yates, she quickly became defensive and uncooperative.

2. Twenty-two years earlier, Caleb Benner disappeared in Bury. The last person he was seen talking to that night was Cora Yates, sister of Rose. The transcript of her interview with the police felt oddly abridged, ending at the point in which the Yates patriarch, Logan Yates (in attendance), mentioned some of the flooring and stairs in his house had just been restained.

3. In her upcoming novel, Rose Yates writes about a sixteen-year-old boy who is murdered in a struggle with his girlfriend. He’s stabbed and then falls down a flight of stairs, breaking his neck. The character’s name is Corey Brownstein. Same initials as Caleb Benner.

Colin barely got these points out before Sike interjected.

“You trying to pull my pud here, Detective?”

“Sorry?”

“You are a detective, right? I’m just trying to confirm I’m talking to Milwaukee PD Detective Colin Pearson and not an eight-year-old with a junior G-man badge.”

Colin had no idea what that meant. Sike didn’t wait for a reaction.

“Because this is Conspiracy Theory Bullshit 101,” he said. “And you want me to do something with this? What am I supposed to do with this?”

Colin heated up, a bit due to anger, another bit due to embarrassment. But he pushed through, trying to keep his voice steady.

“Excuse me, sir, but I wasn’t done.”

“Oh?” Sike said. “Do tell. I have another thirty seconds to spare.”

“I called her publisher,” Colin said. “Her editor.”

“Yeah?”

“I told her we were just looking to confirm that the story wasn’t based on any actual open-case investigations,” Colin said, “given Yates’s history of working with the police in her stories. I mentioned the upcoming book, the one with the murder on the stairs.