Chat (14 page)

There was a knock on the open door, and a tall, angular man stood awkwardly on the threshold.

“You called for me, Chief?” he asked warily.

He was young, obviously not long on the force, and still looking slightly out of place in his uniform. Giordi brought him over to the table with the open binder. He gestured toward Joe as he did so, and repeated the introduction he’d made earlier to Matt Aho.

Not surprisingly, this only increased the concern plainly stamped on the officer’s face.

“What Agent Gunther is trying to find out,” Giordi explained, seeking the exact line on the opened page, “is the whereabouts of a Taser cartridge our records say was issued to you.”

Giordi tapped on the entry with his fingertip. Palmiter bent at the waist hesitantly, as if expecting the entire binder to come leaping for his throat.

“Yes, sir,” he said without meaning or understanding.

Giordi looked at him quizzically. “So, have you used or lost a Taser cartridge?”

Palmiter straightened, stung by the suggestion. “No, sir. I’ve never even fired one except in training.”

His boss studied Palmiter’s duty belt. “How many cartridges do you carry?”

“Two. I’m supposed to have three—one in place and two backups—but they only issued me two.”

“When was this?” Joe asked.

The young officer pointed at the open page. “Then—when I was working at the airport. That’s when I got Taser certified. I was issued the Taser and the holster.” He tapped the weapon on his belt. “You can see where it’s got places for two backup cartridges, but only one of them’s full.” He undid the Velcro flap on one of the compartments to reveal its emptiness. “I figured they’d run short or something,” he continued. “And, to be honest, since there’s not much action at the airport, I didn’t see bothering them for extras.”

He looked worriedly at his chief. “I hope I didn’t screw up. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

“Have you been down to the southern half of the state anytime recently?” Joe asked him.

“No, sir. I don’t know anybody down there.”

Giordi considered the binder thoughtfully for a moment before nodding in Palmiter’s direction. “Okay, Brian. Give me your Taser and get issued a new one. I want to hang on to yours for a while.”

The chief waited until the door had closed behind his now very nervous officer. He hefted the plastic gun in his hand. “I’ll have someone run the computer memory in this thing—find out when it was fired last. What do you think?” he asked Joe.

Joe made a face. “On paper,” he answered, “either Palmiter is lying or Aho screwed up. But my gut tells me it’s neither. Something else must’ve happened.”

Tim pushed out his lips thoughtfully before murmuring, “Once you get me some more information about all this, I’m still going to put them both through polygraphs, just to be sure. What’ve you found out about your John Doe?” he then asked. “And do you know for sure a Taser was even used on him? They do leave holes.”

“The ME has the body,” Joe answered, crossing the room and considering the view of the park outside. “She told us there were no outward signs of trauma. We don’t even know the cause of death yet, much less anything about the guy. Complete mystery. I’m seeing Hillstrom next, since I’m in town, just to kick the tires personally.”

He turned to face his old friend. “Tell me about Aho and Palmiter.”

Giordi raised his eyebrows. “Fair question, if a little painful. I’m not too crazy about all the possibilities here.”

Joe held up his hand. “It’s just a question.”

“Aho, I’ve had with me for years. He’s solid, dependable, never messed up before. He worked as a street cop before becoming the supply officer, also for this department. I know his family, and everything seems stable there, too. Palmiter, I don’t know quite as well. The kid’s only twenty-one and he hasn’t been with us long. So far, so good, though. He gets good ratings from his sergeant.”

He paused to run his hand through his short, graying hair. “I will tell you I’ll be checking this whole thing out with the proverbial fine-toothed comb—and probably making some procedural changes, at least.”

“You asked me what I thought,” Joe said. “How ’bout you? Any idea how the cartridge left the building?”

Giordi looked a little hapless. “You know how it goes, Joe. We do the best we can. We have the usual bells and whistles, but a lot of people go through this building every hour of every day. How big is one of those cartridges? Half a deck of cards?” He frowned before adding, “I’ll be shaking things hard to see what falls out, but don’t be surprised—and for Christ’s sake don’t think I’m holding out on you—if, in the end, I’ve got nothing to show for it.”

Joe again made an appeasing gesture before shaking Tim’s hand and retrieving his coat from where he’d draped it over a chair. “Not to worry,” he told him, heading out. “I appreciate both the help and the pickle you’re in. I promise I’ll be in touch, and don’t worry too much until you have to. At least I know for sure where that little tag originated—whether that’s relevant or not, we’ll both find out.”

Giordi shook his head. “Let’s hope so.”

Mandi144:
Boring

JMAN:
what do u lik 2 do?

Mandi144:
Hang out. Try nu things

JMAN:
I lik nu things. Lik wat?

Mandi144:
Fool around

JMAN:
kool. ASL

Mandi144:
14/f/Vermont – U?

JMAN:
kool. 24/m/Mass

Mandi144:
kool

JMAN:
U dun that a lot?

Mandi144:
Enuf

JMAN:
All the way?

Mandi144:
Sure

JMAN:
kool

Chapter 13

T
he office of the chief medical examiner, whose title was reduced throughout law enforcement to simply OCME, was located across town from the Burlington Police Department, in the cumbersome embrace of the awkwardly rebuilt Fletcher Allen Medical Center, Vermont’s largest hospital and the home of the University of Vermont’s nationally regarded medical school.

The OCME hadn’t started here. As Joe first maneuvered through Burlington’s dense traffic and then poked through the hospital’s confusion of hallways and interlinked buildings, he recalled how Beverly Hillstrom had once kept an office down the block, above a dentist’s office, and worked on her cadavers in the hospital’s basement, not far from the loading docks.

It was a credit to her longevity, her efficiency, and her political prowess—not to mention a few friends in the right places—that all that had been replaced with a clean, modern, highly professional workplace, albeit one hard to locate for the uninitiated.

Joe was certainly not among those, having been here dozens of times. As a result, once safely aboard, he was honor bound to spend a few minutes with whichever staffers he encountered on his way to Hillstrom’s corner office, catching up on local gossip.

“I thought I heard your voice,” Beverly Hillstrom greeted him when he finally reached her threshold. She stood and came around her desk to kiss him on the cheek, an unheard-of familiarity in the old days, when, for years, they had addressed each other formally, by title—an eccentricity she maintained with everyone else outside the office.

He surveyed her with a smile. She was perfectly squared away, not a hair out of place, her clothes unwrinkled and pristine—an image of uncanny precision enhanced by her dust-free, immaculate office. If he hadn’t gotten to know her all-too-human and vulnerable side, she might have remained as scary as she appeared to almost everyone else. But she had granted him that access at one point, and while he understood that it allowed him no special liberties now, he was grateful that it had welcomed him into a highly restricted personal inner sanctum.

“You look great, Beverly,” he told her.

She smiled, flushing slightly. “Well, I should. Life is good, both here and at home.”

He knew not to pry, but that was happy news. Their single night of intimacy had been partly created by her husband walking out on her. Joe had since heard that the two of them had been working to mend that rift. Clearly, things were paying off.

She considered him seriously. “I heard about your family and the accident, Joe. How are things progressing?”

“As well as can be expected,” he told her. “My mom is completely fine. My brother survived, which is saying a lot, but he’s touch-and-go in a coma.”

“I know it will sound trite,” she said. “But if there’s anything at all I can do . . .”

“I know,” he interrupted her. “And I appreciate it. I promise, I will call if I need to.”

She nodded once. “Good.” She then brightened somewhat and changed the subject, moving them both to firmer ground. “A wild guess tells me,” she continued, “that you’re now going to try to upset my apple cart a little. You are here for at least one of your John Does, are you not?”

He laughed, as much at the comment’s phrasing as at its content. Hillstrom was unique among his friends in her use of an almost textbook English. “I am, but I’m hoping it’ll just help things along. We’ve discovered something that might tie in to the first one we sent you—the floater in the stream. Do you still have the clothes he arrived in?”

She nodded and moved toward the door. “We do, although we were about to ship them to the crime lab for safekeeping.” She passed over the threshold and headed toward the lab in the back, speaking as she went. “So you’re not here for the body at all?”

“I may be,” he explained, “but I’ve got to start with the clothing.”

“Ah. A mystery in the unfolding. I like a little intrigue.”

She eventually took him to a wing off the autopsy room, beyond the coolers where, he knew from past experience, the two men he’d shipped her were still stored, and placed a couple of oversize plastic tubs on a nearby examination table.

“Brattleboro John Doe Number One, as we’re calling him—or at least his personal effects,” she announced, standing back.

Joe stepped up to the table and opened the tubs. Unlike when he’d first seen them, the clothes were now dry, though still soiled by some of the debris they’d picked up in the water.

By instinct, he started with the upper torso coverings, reconstructing the layering from skin contact to outermost garment, and then began poring over the fabric’s surface, inch by inch.

Hillstrom finally yielded to curiosity. “What are you looking for?”

Gunther laughed. “Maybe nothing, but it was too interesting to pass up. We’re pretty sure we found out where this guy spent his last night. He checked into a cheap motel with a small overnight bag, no car, paid in cash, and used a phony name—Norman Rockwell, in case you’re tempted to change your John Doe.”

Hillstrom wrinkled her nose. “Not the way this is going, I’m not. Rockwell deserves better.”

“If it helps,” Joe suggested, “my team’s calling him Wet Bald Rocky, versus Dry Hairy Fred.” He resumed his scrutiny. “Anyhow, we’re playing with the idea that he met someone at the motel, which person then immediately rendered him harmless before transporting him to the stream.”

Hillstrom was already nodding in comprehension, following where he was leading. “And it’s the rendering him harmless that you’re looking for? What did you find in that motel room?”

He paused to look over his shoulder at her. “You’re good. It was a single identifying tag belonging to a Taser cartridge.”

“A Taser!” she exclaimed. “But they work with wired barbs. I would have found skin defects on the body.”

“Only if the barbs reached the skin,” Joe explained. “They don’t have to in order to work.” He straightened, holding up the decedent’s leather belt, adding, “They just need to close the circuit. By digging into something like this.”

She came in close to see what he’d found. In the center of the belt’s surface was a small hole with a minuscule jagged edge to it, as where a tiny barb might have left a tear upon being extracted.

“Oh, my Lord,” she murmured. “It is possible, isn’t it?”

He laid the belt back down. “It does connect. It would help if we found evidence of a second impact site.”

She’d already grabbed hold of his upper arm. “Come here. Let’s take a look at him, now that we know what we’re after.”

She led him to the storage cooler, which had two horizontal doors stacked one atop the other, and opened the upper one. A wash of cold air spilled out as she seized the edge of the drawer inside and pulled out a tray laden with the plastic-wrapped body of the man they’d found in the water days ago.

Quickly donning latex gloves, she expertly exposed the naked corpse, its torso pragmatically sewn back shut with a series of widely spaced stitches, and with Joe’s help, she rolled it onto its side to reveal its back.

“That was the back of the belt, right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said softly, already craning to study the blanched, fleshy surface before him. He touched the mottled body near its lumbar area. “Around here. If the shooter knew what he was doing, the second barb should have hit somewhere at or just below the shoulder blades.”

“Here,” she said, tapping the cold skin with her fingertip. “It’s not an actual defect . . . more like a pimple.”

She crossed the room to fetch a strong magnifying glass and applied it to the spot she’d found.

“That’s it,” she announced after a few seconds of study. “During an uneducated survey, it’s nothing much to note. But with scrutiny, it’s clearly not a pimple—more like a tiny burn.”

Joe spread his fingers just above the body’s back, measuring the distance between the lumbar spine and the small red dot. “About a foot and a half,” he announced. “Which means the shooter was standing pretty close when he fired.”

He returned to the pile of clothes to find some piece of clothing that might reveal a barb having been roughly torn lose. He found it in a tightly knit polar fleece vest—a mere couple of strands hanging loose from the fabric.

“Bingo,” he said, bringing the vest back over to Hillstrom and holding it next to the cadaver.

“Lines up perfectly,” she agreed.

She stepped back to consider him thoughtfully. “But what does that tell you, exactly?”

“Not much that’s provable,” he admitted. “It does suggest how to incapacitate a man in a motel room and then drown him fifteen miles away.”

Joe drove from Burlington to Chelsea next, hoping to catch Rob Barrows in his office. He left the interstate at exit 4 and journeyed east through Randolph Center and East Randolph to take the Chelsea Mountain Road up and over Osgood Hill. This was also a roundabout way to reach Thetford and New Hampshire beyond, and more reminiscent of the challenges the state offered its travelers a mere half century earlier, before most of them were seduced by the ease and comfort of I-89. These now less used roads were, by contrast, old Vermont to Joe’s mind, set among a countryside as prickly as a porcupine’s back with trees, and so encumbered with streams, ravines, and claustrophobic, pressed-together hills as to make progress before the advent of paved roads a quasi-heroic effort. Still, for all that, atop Osgood Hill, cresting a rise and emerging from the woods, he was abruptly rewarded with a sweeping view—long, curving fields, the sparkle of otherwise hidden water, and the solid massiveness of distant ancient mountains—and was won over yet again by his state’s uncanny ability to both challenge and nurture those willing to carve out a living in its midst, while shaping them into something hardy, independent, self-sufficient, and sometimes a little cranky in the process.

Joe found Rob Barrows at the sheriff’s headquarters in Chelsea, at the top of the northernmost of the village’s two greens—an eccentricity particular to the town. The sheriff’s office was tucked behind the United Church of Christ, in a nineteenth-century red-brick building neighboring Court, School, and Church Streets—a trio of names simultaneously bland, comforting, and a little peremptory, as if the founders of the village had better things to do—and more land to grab—in the late 1700s than to linger here and apply their imaginations.

“Hey,” Barrows said as Joe entered the officers’ room, a small, cluttered space that served a variety of roles. “I thought you were going to give me a call, not actually make the trip.”

“Nice day for it,” Joe answered neutrally, choosing a chair beside Rob’s desk. He did not go into how staring at his brother’s inert form in the hospital for a half hour at a time was more than he could stand, even in his mother’s company. “What did you get out of that?” He pointed at the equally blank-faced, remarkably filthy computer that they’d removed from Steve’s Garage.

Barrows had been at his own console when Joe entered, and he now waved at his screen in explanation. “Just been following up on that,” he said. “I got the software to get around the password. Hit pure gold. For one thing, he’s cooking the books—the legit stuff is what we saw at the shop; the kickbacks and bill padding and bogus work claims are all behind the password. When everyone gets out of the hospital, I’d seriously recommend you get another mechanic.”

Joe opened his mouth to respond, and to ask about Leo’s car, but Rob was clearly building up steam and continued instead with “I also found out that somebody at Steve’s has been filling his time with more than cars. I made a copy of his hard drive and transferred it to my computer so I wouldn’t be tampering with evidence, but take a look at this.”

He turned to the machine and began moving around from window to window, talking as he went. “Whoever’s behind the password’s been using one of the more popular chat rooms, in part looking for old car parts, but some other, much more interesting stuff as well.”

He paused to cast a glance at Joe. “I won’t bore you with all the computer geek stuff unless you’re into that.”

“Not me,” Joe assured him, focusing on the screen. “But you said, ‘whoever’s behind the password.’ You don’t know?”

“I know Dan Griffis posted the profile using his real name, but technically, until we get more proof, he could claim somebody else did that to frame him. I just said what I did to be cautious, but do I think it’s Dan? Sure. To be honest, old Barrie McNeil didn’t look like he had the smarts to do more’n turn the thing on, if that.

“Anyhow,” Barrows resumed, “I used a forensic software program we got to not only look at what he’s been up to, but to read his supposed ‘deleted’ files, too. You can see he calls himself CarGuy—cute—and that he plays here a lot. I found more chats than I can shake a stick at, and most of it’s recent.”

The computer’s cursor moved nervously across the screen, opening windows, closing others, almost as if it had a mind of its own, Rob narrating as it went along.

“A ton of this is pretty boring, so I went to the picture files as soon as I found a reference to a snapshot CarGuy wanted his contact to see. Worth a thousand words, right?” He laughed briefly as the computer burst forth with color photographs, primarily pornographic.

“So far, so good,” he commented contentedly, “but not too surprising, either. Usual raunchy stuff. Until . . .” He paused while he scrolled to the right set of pictures. “ . . . You get to this—it’s what he was referring to in his chat.”

He sat back to allow Joe a full view of several baggies of white powder, neatly arranged on a tabletop for their portrait.

“Heroin, I’m guessing,” Rob announced. “I already cross-checked with the back-and-forth that led me here. CarGuy is dealing drugs on the side. I captured a whole conversation where he and SmokinJoe—whoever
he
is—set up a buy that took place two days ago.”

Joe straightened and looked elsewhere to adjust his eyesight for a moment. “Did you . . . ?”

But Rob cut him off. “Get warrants for all this? Yep. Step by step, all the way down the line. I’ve been calling the SA as I go, making sure everything’s legal.”