Red Herring (7 page)

Willy rolled his eyes, but Joe stabbed his finger at him, his meaning clear.

“No problem, Doc,” Willy reluctantly complied.

“What I meant,” she continued, unaware of all the pantomime, “was that this is the second case in two days where a deposit of blood appeared out of context.”

Joe leaned forward, his attention seized. “What?”

“A suicide,” she said airily. “It came in last night, from north of you—Ethan Allen Academy. An elderly woman found hanging from a beam by her companion. Left a note; no one seems to think it’s anything else. But there was a small deposit of blood on her foot, with no clear source. I thought I should mention it.”

Joe studied his companions, seasoned investigators all, who were facing a blank wall in one case and had just now heard a distinct echo bouncing off from another.

“Hold on to that old lady, Beverly,” Joe requested. “I think we’ll want to take a look at her.”

“That’s where she was hanging. Here’s the photograph.” The Vermont state police detective handed Joe a computer printout. “Sorry about the quality. We have a crummy printer at the barracks.”

His name was David Nelson. He was dressed in a suit, with a completely shaved head—square-shouldered, flat-bellied, and monotoned in voice. A poster boy for the state’s largest, best-trained, best-equipped—if occasionally too highly self-regarding—law enforcement agency. The VSP’s oft-quoted in-house sobriquet was “the Green and the Gold,” which, while literally representing their uniform colors, unfortunately also smacked of the very pride that irritated so many of their law enforcement colleagues.

Not that Joe was one to complain. Most of his own elite VBI ranks were filled with former troopers, who, pride aside, were in fact damned good at their jobs.

Willy Kunkle sidled closer to peer at the photograph. “Fat,” he murmured. “Couldn’t have taken her long once she had that strain on her neck.”

Nelson looked at him, faintly shocked. He was brand-new to
plainclothes, as he’d admitted during introductions, and a transplant from near the Canadian border. Surprisingly, in a state this small and thinly populated—certainly by full-time cops, of which there were barely a thousand—neither Willy nor Joe had ever met the man.

“A power cord,” Joe said softly, tapping the photo with his fingertip. “That’s unique. It’s usually clotheslines or lamp wires.”

“And a woman,” Willy added. “Not their favorite method.”

“She was a lesbian,” Nelson suggested.

Both VBI men looked up from the photograph to peer at him.

Nelson blinked in return, sensing that he’d misstepped. “Well, you know . . .”

“Right,” Willy agreed with him. “Amazing she didn’t cut her head off with a chain saw.”

Joe sighed inwardly. Nelson’s comment had been legitimate, if poorly presented, but Willy was never one to show mercy for an easy kill.

Willy pointed to a stool sitting in the corner, looking out of place. “That what she used?”

In the picture, Mary Fish’s feet dangled several feet off the floor, the stool lying toppled beneath her.

“Yeah,” Nelson conceded, his voice tighter. Joe suspected the poor guy had already been ribbed about meeting up with two VBI cops. By gubernatorial decree, the Bureau had been born largely to replace the VSP’s plainclothes branch—the BCI—as investigators of statewide major crimes. A black eye of major proportions, an unusual setback for Vermont’s most influential law enforcement agency, and a partial explanation of why someone of Nelson’s relative lack of experience was even here. The BCI detectives were still alive and functioning as second-rank investigators, but without their sharpest
members, who’d fled to the VBI, and minus the prior presumption that they were the best and the brightest.

Joe sympathized. Once chief of detectives for the Brattleboro PD, he wouldn’t have liked the VBI hovering overhead either, waiting to pounce on the choicest cases. For that very reason, he had urged the architects of the new outfit to make sure that the Bureau could only enter if invited by the host agency. Nevertheless, resentments festered, in large part because while other agency bosses were only too happy to call for help in traditionally budget-busting major cases, their own rank and file lived for the glory of a good headline-grabbing showstopper.

“Could you do me a favor, Dave?” he asked the trooper now, hoping to coax him in from the cold. “Could you put that stool where she must have had it to climb on?”

Nelson shrugged and complied, while Willy and Joe stood back, approximately in the same spot from where the photo had been taken.

“Huh,” Joe grunted. “You see that?”

Willy was similarly struck. “Might be what they call a clue.”

“What?” Nelson asked, returning with genuine interest.

Joe handed him the picture. “Hold it in front of you and line everything up. You can see how the stool is sitting now, where it had to have been for her to use it, and you can see how she’s hanging in the shot.”

Nelson stood motionless for a few seconds, his eyes flipping from the image to the reality before them, mentally trying to put Mary back where they had found her hours earlier, before taking her down for her rendezvous with Beverly Hillstrom.

Willy sighed after a few seconds and wandered off, not sharing Joe’s teaching propensity. Nelson’s face reddened slightly as he almost
stammered, “It looks like her feet ended up higher than the top of the stool. Isn’t that impossible?”

Willy laughed, not turning around.

Nelson’s astonishment overrode any embarrassment. He stared at the picture again. “But there was a note.”

“That, I’d like to see,” Willy commented.

Nelson walked over to a briefcase he’d placed on the counter dividing the living room and kitchen areas. He snapped it open and extracted a sealed plastic evidence bag with a single sheet of paper inside it. Joe and Willy gathered around him to read.

“Typed,” Willy cracked. “How convenient.”

Joe read aloud, “ ‘I’m sorry, Elise. I can’t live with you and I can’t live without you. I love you, but you’ve made my life a living hell.’ ”

It was signed with a capital letter M.

“A guy wrote that,” Willy said flatly.

Nelson opened his mouth, Joe suspected in order to restate his earlier comment about Mary’s sexual orientation, but then closed it.

“We heard her companion found her,” Joe commented, moving along.

Nelson took one last look at the note before gazing at the older man. “Yeah. Elise Howard. They’d been an item forever, supposedly. She was at Bingo, came home, found Mary, and called the headmaster—some guy in hysterics named Nicholas Raddlecup, if you can believe that. He’s the one who called 911—of course after he came over to see for himself. From discovery to phone call was maybe twenty minutes, from what we put together.”

“You were among the first on scene?”

“Close enough.”

“How was Elise?”

“Hysterical,” he said flatly. “She’s in the hospital right now, sedated.”

“Place was unlocked?” Willy asked, wandering around once more.

“No one’s even sure where the key is,” Nelson told him. “The whole campus is wide open, except for the administrative offices, the lab classrooms, places like that. They like to consider the school a big happy family.”

“It may be,” Joe said quietly, taking in the place as a whole—the way it was decorated and accessorized; the homey touches reflective of an old couple with a lot of shared history.

“And the electric cord belonged here?” Willy asked.

“Yeah,” Nelson answered. “It usually hung from a hook at the top of the cellar stairs.” He pointed to a slightly open door off on the side wall. “They’d just bought it to replace a ratty one Elise had been complaining about.”

Joe noticed a movement through the window by the front door and caught sight of a short, round man with a red face, dressed in a long, virulently green coat with blue trim. He was approaching across the snowy yard—an elf on the run.

A hurried knock was followed by the door being flung open.

“Who are you?” the elf demanded.

Willy bristled. “We’re the police, dipwad, and you’re not invited.”

“That’s Nicholas Raddlecup,” David Nelson said, his distaste audible. “The school headmaster.”

“We’re conducting an investigation here, Mr. Raddlecup,” Joe told him. “I’d like to speak with you at some point, but not right now, if that’s all right.” He pulled out a document and handed it to Raddle-cup. “That’s a search warrant making this all nice and legal.”

The headmaster distractedly took the folded sheet of paper.
“Investigation?” he burst out. “What’s to investigate? The woman strung herself up without so much as a how-do-you-do. She broke Elise’s heart, abandoned her responsibilities; she left me totally in the lurch.” He paused to shake his head before adding, “Suicide is such a selfish act.”

“Takes one to know one,” Nelson muttered mostly to himself before retreating deeper into the house.

Joe began closing the door. He had a northerner’s aversion to heating the outdoors. “I’ll be happy to hear all that in a bit. We shouldn’t be too long. I take it Detective Nelson knows how to contact you?”

Raddlecup put his hand on the door to stop it. “Wait.”

“Why?” Joe asked, his tone no longer inviting.

“What are you people doing? Isn’t this over?”

Joe considered saying something diplomatic, but he’d found that his reaction to this man was no better than Nelson’s.

“No,” he said, slamming the door.

“What an asshole,” Willy said.

Joe stared at the floor for a second, before looking up at Dave Nelson. “Okay, let’s kick this around from a different angle.”

“As a murder?” Nelson asked.

“You think?” Willy grumbled.

Joe ignored him and kept addressing their colleague. “We are told to approach every death as a homicide, and maybe we do at first, but it doesn’t take long to start seeing a duck as a duck and ruling it out as anything else.” He waved his hand to encompass the room. “This may be a perfect example—it
looked
like a suicide . . .”

“But it might’ve been a homicide,” Nelson finished.

Joe smiled. “Right. Do you have more photographs of the scene?”

Dave returned to his briefcase and extracted a thin sheaf. “I thought you might ask, when I heard you were coming here.” He laid out a row of pictures on the countertop. Willy and Joe stood side by side, studying them closely.

“There’s the blood,” Willy commented, pointing.

Joe indicated the body’s bare foot, and the red drop upon it. “You see that at the time?”

“Sure,” Nelson told him, sliding another shot to the front. “That’s why I took a close-up. But I assumed it came from up her dress someplace—that the ME would find out where.”

“You didn’t check it out yourself?” Willy asked.

Joe thought that was unnecessarily judgmental; he had serious doubts Willy would have stuck a flashlight up there himself.

“Reasonable assumption,” he therefore said. “The ME prefers it when we don’t mess with her bodies, so you get my thumbs-up on that one. Besides, that’s exactly what Hillstrom did. Except she
didn’t
find a source for it.”

Nelson stared at him. “Where did it come from, then?” He paused before rubbing his forehead, adding, “Oh, shit. Did they get a sample, or was it wiped off inside the body bag?”

“They got it,” Willy grumbled.

“So it’s the killer’s.”

Joe shook his head. “We’re not sure it isn’t hers,” he stressed. “We’ll get that in a week or less, depending. In the meantime, we proceed as if you’re right.”

Nelson seemed stuck on his earlier statement. “Where else could it have come from?”

“You sure it wasn’t the girlfriend’s?” Willy asked.

Nelson had thought of that. “I asked. It didn’t appear to be.”

“What feeling did you get about them as a couple?” Joe asked. “Happy? Unhappy? Did you pick up any rumors last night, when all this was fresh?”

“Everybody was stunned,” Nelson admitted. “Raddlecup said they were just like Ozzie and Harriet, whatever that means.”

“Old TV show,” Joe told him. “No troubles in paradise? The note sounds like there were.”

“That’s what hit Elise the hardest,” Nelson said. “She kept holding on to the note and saying it didn’t make sense. She said, ‘We were happy, we were happy,’ again and again until they took her away. To be honest, I was glad to hear you had doubts about the note, too.”

“How many people did you interview?”

“Not many,” he conceded. “It was a suicide, as far as we were concerned—no signs of violence, no forced entry, the note. I asked Raddlecup if she’d been under any pressure and he said she was a workaholic and that he was always telling her to go home to Elise. He sounds like a phony every time he opens his mouth, so it’s hard to tell, but he said there was no way he could put in the hours she did and remain sane. She virtually ran the whole school.”

“Doesn’t say much for him,” Joe said quietly.

Nelson smiled. “I’ll give him that much. He seems to know he’s a lightweight. Anyhow, given what we thought we had, we didn’t push too hard. I did call her doc. She was on meds for cholesterol and high blood pressure. The doc said he was surprised—called her a real trooper—but that she’d been tired and overworked the last time he saw her and seemed a little depressed. So even there . . .”

He left the sentence unfinished.

Joe got the idea. “They have a computer here?”

Nelson appeared to be gaining self-confidence. “For the suicide note? Yeah. In the upstairs office.”

Bringing the note, he led the way to a steep and narrow staircase and took them up to a virtual cubbyhole across from a bedroom. The entire house was beginning to feel like the set of a Disney movie about anthropomorphized mice. Stooping under the low ceiling and huddled together like conspirators, the three of them compared what they had in the evidence bag to the top sheet in the printer’s outfeed tray—a grocery list.

“Not even close,” Willy commented.

“I did notice that,” Nelson said. “But I also figured that the two women might’ve liked different typefaces.”

Willy chuckled for the first time. “Good point,” he allowed. “You’ll be yanking out the hard drive anyway, though.”