Page 89 of Never Flinch

At this moment, Izzy realizes that Holly’s deduction—which Holly herself found a bit shaky—is wrong. The anagram was a coincidence; what mystery writers in the old days would call a red herring.

“We’ll be checking Jane Haggarty,” Tom says, closing his notebook. “You have a nice day now, Mr. Grinsted.”

Grinsted, whose day is shaping up to be anything but nice, makes no response. Izzy and Tom go back to the house. Mrs. Grinsted is in the kitchen, drinking her own cup of joe. Judging by the bottle of Wild Turkey on the counter, she has fortified her Folgers.

“Are you done with him?”

“For the time being, yes,” Tom says. “Your turn.”

If he expected a smile at this sally, he’s disappointed.

“How long have you known about Haggarty?” Izzy asks. It has no bearing on their case, but she’s curious… as she knows Holly would be.

“A year? Maybe sixteen months.” Mrs. Grinsted shrugs, as if the topic doesn’t interest her much. “Her perfume on his skin. Texts. Hangups a couple of times when Russ left his phone on the counter or on top of the TV and I answered. He didn’t try to hide it very much. I suppose he thought I was stupid. Maybe I am.”

“Maybe you were scared,” Izzy says.

Erin Grinsted sips her fortified coffee. “Maybe I was. Maybe I still am.”

“Does your husband go to AA or NA?”

“No. If he needs one of those anonymous programs, it would be the one for gamblers. Or sex addicts. Or both.”

“Mrs. Grinsted, do you call your husband Trig?”

“No. I call him Russ. Most people do. Alan Duffrey did.”

“Doesanyonecall him Trig?”

She looks up at Izzy and does the eyeroll thing again. “Why would they?”

Why indeed, Izzy thinks.Back to square one.

They leave her to discuss various matters with her husband.

3

While Izzy and Tom are talking to Russell Grinsted, Trig—therealTrig—is in Cowslip County, a hundred miles from the city. It’s the least populated county in the state, and the kids whose bad karma it is to live there call it—of course—Cowshit County.

Trig cruises along Route 121, passing the occasional farm and barn, but mostly just woods and fields. There’s little traffic; 121 has been rendered all but obsolete by the interstate, which runs through more populated areas to the south. He doesn’t even kid himself about what he’s doing out here. Although meeting Annette McElroy and her dog on the Buckeye Trail was only weeks ago, it seems like something that happened in another life.

When I was normal.

At first he tries to push that idea away, but gives up. Because it’s not an idea, it’s a fact. More and more what’s happening reminds him of how he became an alcoholic… and why not? It doesn’t matter if it’s booze, dope, food, gambling, or obsessive-compulsive behavior, at bottom it’s always the disease of addiction. He could blame his father (and sometimes does), but addiction—antisocial behavior, in shrink-speak—isn’t caused by childhood trauma or stress or social pressure; it’s just a glitch in the software that causes destructive behavior to repeat and repeat and repeat.

There’s a saying he’s heard in meetings: “First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, and then the drink takes the man.” It’s true. Somewhere in his twenties, not long after his sometimes loving, often destructive father died, a switch got flipped. One day he wasdrinking like a quote-unquotenormal person, and the next he was an alcoholic. Boom. Over done with gone.

Trig has discovered that murder is pretty much the same. He thinks that after McElroy, he could have stopped. In the legal sense he’d crossed a red line, sure, but in his own head? Probably not. He doesn’t think it was Epstein and Mitborough that tipped him over, either. He thinks—he’s not sure, but hethinks—that it was Big Book Mike that flipped the switch. All he knows for certain is the next one, Sinclair, relieved a certain building pressure that had little (maybe nothing) to do with his original mission.

He passes through the tiny community of Rosscomb, consisting of a market, a gas station, and the Rosscomb United Baptist Church. Then he’s out in the country again. Four miles further on, he sees a man driving a big old highpockets tractor and pulling a disc mower. It’s too early for hay, the grass is still green, so maybe the farmer is going to sow some crop here. Beans or corn, likely.

Trig pulls over onto the shoulder and gets out. The Taurus .22 is in his pocket. He’s not a bit nervous. Excited. Anticipating. He waits until the old tractor swings close and gives the man driving it a big semaphore wave and a grin. A truck passes, headed south.

That driver may remember a Toyota pulled over at the side of the road, and a man waving down the farmer.

He should back off, maybe just ask for directions and then drive on, but the girl he left at the shelter in Crooked Creek has whetted his appetite the way the first drink used to do.Just a quick one after work, he’d tell himself… then drink all the way home, even though his rational mind knew that getting picked up for DUI might crash his entire life. As those awful pictures and magazines had crashed Alan Duffrey’s life… or so everyone thought, judge and jury included.

The farmer brings his tractor to a stop, but even idling, the old International Harvester makes a hellacious racket. He’s as old as his tractor, with a tanned and weatherbeaten face under a big straw hat. Trig walks to one of the tractor’s big mud-caked wheels, wearing a smile to which the farmer responds with a smile of his own.

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