Open Season (8 page)

That part of the building isn’t designed to boost morale anyway. The cells line one wall of a low-ceilinged beige room lit with bare bulbs and spotlights. They’re fancy kennels, really, with one steel fold-away cot and a porcelain toilet per cell. Surveillance cameras are mounted on the opposite wall.

Rodriguez was our only tenant. He was sitting on the cot with his hands between his knees when I walked in. He sprang to his feet as soon as he saw me. “You’ve got to get me out of here. This is a mistake. I haven’t done anything.” His voice was high-pitched and tinged with hysteria.

“Relax. It feels worse than it is.”

“But I’m in jail.” He grabbed the bars and shook them to demonstrate his point.

“Not for long. Sit down and calm yourself. Come on. Sit.”

He sat reluctantly. He was about thirty years old, good-looking, with a full head of dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He was wearing denim work clothes, also neat and clean.

“Good. Now hold out your hands, palms down.”

He looked at me as if I’d lost my marbles, but he did it. There was a wicked triple scratch running across the center of the eagle tattoo on his right hand. It looked infected and painful.

“How did you get the scratch?”

He looked at it as if for the first time, thrown further off balance. His words came out more slowly now. “My cat. I threw him out of the house a couple of days ago and he clawed me. We don’t like each other—he belongs to my kids.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll send someone down to look at it.” I turned to go.

He leaped to his feet, revved up again. “Wait. Don’t leave me. I don’t want a Band-Aid. I want to get out of here. I don’t belong here. I’m innocent. I didn’t rape anybody.”

“The police report says you got a call last night that sent you on a wild goose chase. Is that right?”

“Yes, I swear. I had some tools stolen a few days ago. The man on the phone said he’d found them; that his brother had stolen them, and that he felt bad about it and wanted to return them. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.”

I paused at the bottom of the steps. “Mr. Rodriguez, I’m sure it is true. We picked you up on the available evidence, that’s all. I’ve just got to make a couple of calls to clear this up, and I’m pretty sure we can get you out within the hour. By the way, what color are your eyes?”

“Brown. What about a police record?”

“No record. We’ll clear it up with your boss, too. If it all works out, the only thing you’ll have to worry about is keeping your mouth shut. If you go to the press, or talk to them if they come to you, you’re the one who’s going to get the bad publicity. Fair or not, that’s how it works. Ask any celebrity.”

I went upstairs and knocked on Murphy’s door. I was sorry to see Kunkle sitting in his guest chair. “I’ll talk to you later, Frank.”

Kunkle got up before I could leave. “Did you see Rodriguez?” As usual, he was abrupt and hostile—a man on perpetual simmer.

“Yeah. I just talked to him.”

“Why?”

“Maxine told me about the scratch on his hand.”

“What about it?”

“Wendy Stiller didn’t mention it.”

“So?”

“So I thought I might ask her if she’d seen it.”

Kunkle gave me a hard stare. I decided I’d better not leave it there. I asked Murphy if I could use his phone. He pushed it across his desk to me, and I dialed the hospital and asked for Stiller’s room.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Miss Stiller. This is the man who spoke to you this morning about the attack.”

“Oh, hi.”

“When you saw that tattoo, was there a scratch running across it? maybe a Band-Aid or some makeup or something?”

“No, it looked like it did at the trial.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Thank you. One last thing: do you remember the man’s eye color?”

“They were blue—pale blue.” The answer was immediate. I didn’t question how she could be so positive.

I thanked her again and hung up. “We’ve got the wrong man. The scratch wasn’t on the attacker’s hand, and his eyes were blue.”

Kunkle snorted and looked at the ceiling. “Jesus, that’s pretty slim. I mean, the man lathered her up and flicked her tit. You think she’s going to take time out to catalogue his eye color and the odd scratch here or there? Give me a break.”

I felt my face flush with anger. He brought back the image of every self-confident, stupid bully I’d ever known in grade school—the guys who made ignorance a martial art. The fact that he was actually a pretty smart guy who was drowning in his own troubles made no difference; he’d been on this kick for too long.

I spoke directly to Frank. “That scratch is a mess. It’s infected and a couple of days old. No way either she could have missed it or he could have gotten it between midnight and now. Show her Rodriguez’s hand, and his eyes. She’ll tell you he’s not the man.”

Frank nodded and I turned to leave. Kunkle grabbed my arm. “Pretty sure of yourself.”

I shook him off. “I’m also right.”

I walked into my own office and slammed the door. Stan Katz was sitting on the edge of my desk. “Get out, Stan; you’re trespassing.”

“Testy, testy.”

I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and shoved him toward the door. Kunkle’s style was catching. Stan opened the door and paused. “I just wanted to get your side before I started writing.”

“My side of what?”

“The events of last night, and the night before.”

“What about them?”

He gave me a smile custom-made for a fist. I buried my hands in my pockets. “You ought to know. You’ve been involved with all of them, according to the scuttlebutt. What’s going on?”

That cooled me down a notch. He was fishing. “Investigations are going on, like they always are. This is a police department, Stan. We bust people. And Woll was just a screwup.”

“Why are you the hot man, all of a sudden? You’re popping up all over. I heard DeFlorio pulled the Woll case, but you’ve been poking around in it. I also heard Kunkle was pissed off that you were treading on his turf.”

I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him—gently—out into the hall. “We always get into each other’s hair; it’s standard. Besides, I’m their lieutenant; I’m supposed to keep an eye on ’em, you know that. Your problem is you don’t have enough to keep you busy. That happens when things are slack. Don’t take it out on me, okay? Go see a movie.” I closed the door in his face.

I had just sat down when Murphy stepped in. He leaned against the wall and smiled. “Well, well, Mr. Diplomacy.”

“Lay off, Frank. Kunkle’s a jerk. If he’s got problems, you can change his diapers.”

“I won’t have to. He just told me I might as well hand the Stiller case over to you since you stole it anyway. I must say, you two aren’t very friendly.”

“I’m tired of trying.”

“By the way, I sent a unit over to fetch Stiller. We probably ought to dot the i’s and so forth before we kick Rodriguez loose.”

“Fine. I just threw Katz out, by the way. He’s sniffing the air like a hyperactive pointer. You better make sure any paperwork he’s liable to see doesn’t have any names on it and that all this shit is on a need-to-know basis, or he’s going to start making the same connections I have.”

Frank sat down and shut the door with his foot. “Which are what so far?”

“Rodriguez makes it the fifth jury member in two days. Whoever’s doing this really did his homework. He stole Phillips’s dog, Rodgriguez’s tools, spent days terrorizing Reitz, and cased both Wodiska’s and presumably Stiller’s daily habits. He’s been working on this for a long time.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “The number-one question. I still think it’s the Harris case.”

Frank sighed.

“It’s the common thread. Of course, maybe it’s the moon or the alignment of the planets, or maybe the entire jury took LSD time capsules and simultaneously flipped out three years later.”

“I’d take that over reopening Harris.”

“I don’t think we’ve got a choice. Even you have to admit a similarity in all these cases, and the likelihood that they were all orchestrated by the same man. Besides that, none of these set-ups was built to last—they were to get our attention, not to sidetrack us. Whatever it is Ski Mask wants, he obviously thinks it involves Harris.”

Frank grunted. “And Phillips’s death guarantees we can’t just ignore him.” He got up. “So I guess we won’t.” He paused at the opened door. “You can look into Harris, with my incredibly valuable backing, but still try keeping it under your hat, okay?”

EARLY ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1983
, the police were called by the manager of the Huntington Arms on Putney Road. One of his tenants, Kimberly Harris, had made arrangements with a local cab company to be picked up and driven to the Keene airport, but she wasn’t answering the repeated knocks on her door. From what the manager could see through the living room window, the apartment appeared ransacked. He said he didn’t want to use his pass key until the police were with him.

Two patrol cars were dispatched to the scene, driven by Sergeant George Capullo and Patrolman John Woll respectively, each of whom was near the end of his shift. They entered the apartment with the manager and found the nude and strangled body of Kimberly Harris tied to her bed. Calls were put out to Support Services, the State’s Attorney and the regional medical examiner. Detectives Willy Kunkle and J.P. Tyler arrived ten minutes later; Kunkle took charge of the investigation while Tyler went about gathering physical evidence.

A preliminary review of the site led officers to believe that a struggle had taken place, ending in Kimberly Harris being tied to her bed. The rope attaching her right hand to the bedpost had worked loose, and her fingernails were jagged and bloody, indicating she had scratched her assailant. A broken, blood-smeared lamp was found on the floor near that same hand, rousing suspicions that it may have been used for self-defense. Wet, viscous deposits in and around her mouth and pubic area led Tyler to assume she had been sexually assaulted.

The regional medical examiner, Alfred Gould, recommended that the state medical examiner take personal charge of the forensic investigation, and James Dunn, the State’s Attorney, agreed. Dr. Beverly Hillstrom was therefore contacted and arrived on the scene from Burlington three hours later.

Meanwhile, based on the manager’s statement that the leather belt found around the victim’s neck belonged to the janitor, Kunkle quickly secured a warrant allowing a search of the janitor’s quarters. During the search, the police found a woman’s undergarments, a small quantity of heroin with the appropriate paraphernalia, and the janitor, a black man named William Davis. Davis was sitting on the edge of his bed under the influence of the drug, nursing both a bad head wound and several deep scratches on his left cheek. He was booked on a charge of felony-murder.

Several days later, Dr. Hillstrom reported her findings. They were compared with additional tests conducted by the state crime lab. According to both reports, the blood under Harris’s nails matched Bill Davis’s; his fingerprints were in various parts of her apartment and on the belt used to strangle her; the blood-smeared dent found on the lamp matched the cut on his head; the rope used to tie her down was cut from a coil found stored with the rest of his tools; and the semen found on her body was compatible with his blood type.

One additional detail surfaced but was deemed largely irrelevant: Kimberly Harris was five-and-a-half months pregnant at the time of her death. Davis’s blood chemistry ruled him out as the father.

Davis’s statement to the police, obtained after he’d been apprised of his rights, was a rambling, barely coherent denial of the accusations made against him. He claimed he’d been hit on the head from behind sometime the night before and had woken up in his bedroom shortly before the police had arrived. He also claimed he’d been injected with heroin while he was unconscious. He denied ever having an interest in Harris. When asked if he had a lawyer, he burst out laughing. The public defender was called in to take his case.

From that point on, the legal dance began, and the police all but vanished from the scene. Davis was arraigned, his counsel pleaded for release, the judge set a stiff bail, and Davis ended up as a target for the white pranksters in the Woodstock State Correctional Facility, all in short order.

All that was according to the official written report, tailored for public consumption and rendered in such obtuse pseudo-legalese that I had trouble translating it. There were three remaining sources of information I could use to dig into the case: the court records, located upstairs in the derelict, sauna-like bathroom; the police case file, a bound logbook stuffed with additional odds and ends scribbled on napkins, paper placemats, and what have you; and the officers’ notebooks, those small black jobs we all carry around to make personal notes and which don’t belong to anyone but ourselves. The notebooks are usually the most telling, of course, assuming the owner has kept them and can still decipher his own handwriting, but they are sacrosanct—some of what’s in them could get a cop into serious trouble. Had the head guy on the job been Murphy, I might have gotten some access to his notebook. Considering that man was actually my dear friend Kunkle, I wasn’t going to waste time worrying about my chances.

The case file was the logical first step, but it too demanded some deciphering. Many of the items thrown into it were comprehensible only to the throwers, and since Frank wanted me to act invisible, I was in a bad position to ask for favors.

So, for the moment, the court records were the only road I could travel. I closed the written report before me, returned it discreetly to the filing cabinet in the main office, and lumbered my way back upstairs to the Clerk of Court.

The girl behind the counter was her usual summery self. “Two days in a row? I thought you didn’t like the stairs.”

“I’m working on a medical disability. I need your indulgence again.”

As before, she glanced at the door behind her and lowered her voice. “Shoot.”

“Are you the only person from this office who goes upstairs?”