“Chicago,” the woman would say. Or Detroit or Los Angeles or Houston...or Fargo, Emporia, Elko, Walla Walla or any other of the thousands of cities and towns around the contiguous United States. Mrs. Somerset always limited herself to the contiguous forty-eight states for no reason Howie was able to figure. The guys all said it was because her crazy couldn’t cross oceans and didn’t have a passport to get into Canada. Howie was kinder—which was one of the reasons Mrs. Winston Somerset called his direct line. He always just figured there were enough unsolved mysteries in the lower forty-eight to keep the old lady busy without her crossing international borders.
The story at police headquarters was that Mrs. Somerset had been calling a Durham homicide detective every week for thirty years, since the day after her murdered husband was buried, to divulge a clue to a random homicide. About seven years ago, some foolish and overly helpful public librarian had taught her how to use the internet, and she’d expanded her reach from the crime reports in the News & Observer and Herald-Sun to whatever wild story she came across in the crazy depths of the World Wide Web.
Not valid in Alaska and Hawaii.
Taking Mrs. Somerset’s calls had become his responsibility three years ago. Punishment, his sergeant had said, for being an idiot.
Last week’s phone call had been unusual. Howie hadn’t been in the office for it, but she’d left a message. “Durham,” she’d said to the voice mail. The order of her words and the flat tone of her voice was no different than if he’d answered the phone. “Computers risk everything for money. Could the devil be a family member?” And then she’d hung up.
It wasn’t the cryptic nature of her call that had been odd. All her calls included a town, a brief, often obtuse, description of a crime and a clue almost calculated to send any homicide detective driving to Butner for voluntary admission into the mental hospital. It was always something obscure and almost—almost—intriguing enough to invite a curious detective to call back and ask for more information. But Howie never followed up with her. Not that he doubted the crimes, necessarily. Hell, he’d only stopped double-checking them two years ago, which meant he’d been a fool for a whole year. It was just that he wasn’t convinced even Mrs. Somerset knew what her clues were supposed to mean. And he never passed on the tips. No one in the Durham Police Department ever had. People called in random crime tips all the time, either for revenge or because of mistaken identity or in the hopes of a reward. Or for some other reason entirely. Mrs. Somerset’s tips fell into the category of “other.”
What made last week’s call unusual was that it hadn’t been about a murder. As far as Howie knew, Mrs. Somerset had only ever given tips on murders. And since Durham’s city limits abutted the Research Triangle Park, where corporate headquarters for multinational countries traded in computers and money, it wasn’t even clear she was referring to a crime.
That minor variation in her routine, combined with the vague reference to family, had almost been enough for Howie to call her back and ask how she was doing. He’d done that several times over the past three years—when the crime she was calling about had clearly upset her and pushed her even further off her rocker than she normally was.
Because, though Howie thought it was rude to say so, he did agree with the rest of the unit—Mrs. Somerset was her own special kind of crazy. For all he knew, she called Raleigh on Monday, Chapel Hill on Tuesday, Greensboro on Thursday and Charlotte on Friday. Or maybe she’d used her high-speed internet for research on more than just murders and was on a first-name basis with a detective in Atlanta or San Francisco or Buffalo. She may even have a rotation of times. Las Vegas at ten. Portland at seven. But it was always Durham at eleven and always on Wednesdays. And never his cell number, despite the fact that he’d given her the number two years ago, when one of her calls had upset her enough that she’d cried into the phone. In the past three years, Mrs. Somerset had never once messed up due to a time change, snowstorm or hurricane. Sometimes, like last week, there was a younger woman’s voice in the background, asking Mrs. Somerset to promise to make this call the last. Yet never once had Howie heard Mrs. Somerset acknowledge that request.
But she was polite when he got her to talk about something other than the week’s clue. And the murder of her husband had never been solved, so he sympathized with her dedication. Apparently, after her husband’s murder, she’d tried to offer a reward for tips leading to an arrest, but not a single person had called the station.
Which was unfortunate because, given what little Howie knew about her husband’s murder, he would’ve bet that a month into the investigation, with no leads, the department would have investigated any call, even one from someone like Mrs. Somerset, even the one time when she had claimed to be getting the information from her cat.
On this particular Wednesday, Howie turned his attention to his phone the instant the static-filled weather-check message ended. Even though it didn’t ring immediately, he didn’t start another task. Mrs. Somerset may not have a knack for solving crimes, but she sure as hell seemed to know when an interruption would send his entire Wednesday veering off course.
After five minutes spent flipping through the News & Observer, which he subscribed to for the crossword puzzle he never had time to work on, Howie began to worry. Ten minutes after eleven, he was contemplating the shit he would get from both dispatch and patrol if he sent someone to knock on Mrs. Somerset’s door.
When the phone finally rang, almost thirty minutes after eleven, Mrs. Somerset was not on the other end of the line.
* * *
HOWIE BLESSED THE watch commander as he stopped his car at the outer edge of the flashing lights. By the looks of the uncontrolled arm-waving visible from down the street, Al had gotten here before him and black uniforms had already formed a perimeter around Mrs. Somerset’s house. Judging by the curse words coming from cars being redirected on Washington, Al had made the perimeter as large as they could feasibly secure. Howie found the scribe, reported in and stepped onto grass bright with the summer sun and a recent rain. This front lawn, and many others in this neighborhood, was now a crime scene.
The neighbors in this area of Durham wouldn’t crowd around the tape, but the urgent tasks they found to keep them busy on their front lawns—and get them yelled at by a uniform—allowed them to gawk just the same. Two of the neighbors outright stood on their front stoop and all but ate popcorn while they watched.
An older woman he didn’t recognize sat on an Adirondack chair in the shadow of Mrs. Somerset’s magnolia tree, her head in her lap and blue-rinsed curls collapsed about her ears. A bored schnauzer sprawled out on the lawn at the woman’s left. A shiny steel bowl was at her right, and the hand of young Officer Rodriguez on her shoulder. As Howie approached, movement across the street caught his eye. The across-the-way neighbor, a middle-aged woman wearing a black T-shirt with a giant orange kitten on the front and tan pants with an elastic waist, walked across the street carrying a glass of what appeared to be tea, and sweet tea mostly likely. Mrs. Carr, Howie remembered from the last time he’d stopped in at Mrs. Somerset’s after a particularly lurid phone conversation with her. Mrs. Somerset had called in with clues about a mass shooting for which the perpetrator had already been arrested. The shooting had happened at a political rally and five people had died. Mrs. Somerset usually limited her visions to strictly clean murders, maybe muddied by a robbery or two.
That had been eighteen months ago and at the time Mrs. Somerset had also called Mrs. Carr with the information. Mrs. Bernadette Carr—she wasn’t old enough to sign letters “Mrs. Larry Carr,” though neither was she young enough to introduce herself as simply Bernadette—had rushed over to her neighbor’s house and spiked Mrs. Somerset’s tea with a heavy dose of brandy. By the time Howie had gotten there, Mrs. Somerset was too tipsy to explain what had happened to suddenly make mass shootings the focus of her attention.
Today Mrs. Carr crossed the lawn, gave what appeared to be a biscuit to the dog then held out a glass to the woman in the chair. He couldn’t hear what Mrs. Carr was saying to the older woman, though he could imagine her