Red Herring (8 page)

Joe straightened and pointed at the computer. “Yeah. Someone better get a warrant for that.”

Nelson gave him a sideways glance. “You people taking the case?”

But Joe shook his head. “If we’re invited. The reason we’re here now is because of something the ME said. That’s why I asked you on the phone if meeting us would be okay. I’m not big on stepping on people’s toes.”

“Not to worry,” Nelson said. “You saved me from dropping the ball.”

Joe hoped Willy wouldn’t jump in for a cheap crack, and as usual, Kunkle surprised him.

“How long exactly you been in a suit?” Willy asked.

“One week,” the trooper admitted.

“Don’t beat yourself up, then. You were supposed to think what you did.”

Nelson pulled out his cell phone. “I’m telling my lieutenant you should get this.”

But Joe laid his hand on his arm. “You check out her office computer?”

This time, Nelson looked at Willy when he said, “Jesus. Just when I was feeling good.”

Willy laughed as he headed down the precarious stairs, talking as he went. “Hey! If it matches, then
we’ll
look like jerks, not that you weren’t thinking that anyhow.”

“What did you guys find out?” Sam asked as Joe and Willy entered the office, removing their overcoats.

“A suicide, it’s not,” the latter said, heading for the coffee.

“Where’s Les?” Joe asked her, settling behind his desk and checking his computer for messages.

“Doing homework on Doreen at McNaughton Trucking,” she said. “So this woman was murdered, after all?”

“It wasn’t natural causes,” Willy continued.

Sammie sighed and looked to Joe.

“She may have
been
hanged, instead of doing it herself,” he told her. “The suicide note looks bogus—it wasn’t printed from either her office machine or the home’s—and we can’t figure out how she could’ve climbed the stool and kicked it over, and ended up with her feet higher than the stool when it’s upright.”

“Ouch,” she said. “There’s a goof.”

Willy turned away from the machine, a mug in his good hand. “Which makes you wonder,” he said, “what the hell’s going on?”

This, thought Joe, noticing Willy’s leading tone of voice, was the
primary reason he kept this quasi-sociopath employed. “Meaning what?” he asked him.

“Maybe it’s a stretch,” Willy said, pausing to sip. “But it looks like we got a rape that’s not a rape and a suicide that’s not a suicide. Both victims are older women; both have a drop of blood on ’em we can’t track to an obvious source; neither case showed forced entry or peripheral violence. They both look carefully planned and carried out, and they both turn into something else as soon as you barely scratch the surface.”

“As if that was planned, too,” Sammie suggested.

“Right,” he agreed. “So—no goof with the fake suicide.”

“Like a calling card,” Sam barely murmured.

“Along with the drop of blood,” he added.

“But,” Joe challenged them both, “then what? Why go to all the trouble? Why the misdirection?”

“Find the connection,” Sam said, “and you find the answer.”

“Between Mary and Doreen?” Willy asked.

“Yeah,” she continued. “Standard, old-fashioned link analysis. I don’t know why, but the blood we keep finding has to mean as much as the bogus setups. Sure as shit, the same guy must’ve done both women. It stands to reason both of them pissed him off somehow, and that maybe part of the explanation is in the theatrics.”

Joe was nodding and writing on a legal pad. “I’ll get the lab to put a rush on the blood tests. Also, let’s see what overlaps might exist between McNaughton Trucking and Ethan Allen Academy. Both women were key to their organizations—invisible number two people. There could be a psycho-sexual angle tying them together—some guy who worked at both places and resented strong women pushing him around.”

“The link could also be between the women,” Willy suggested. “Mary might’ve once been a teacher, Doreen her student—there’s about a twenty-year gap between ’em—so maybe the guy fits in there.”

Joe sat back from his pad. “Okay. Well, Christ knows at this point. We need to do some serious digging—put a foundation under the theory. Connect the dots, like Sam said.” He pointed to her and suggested, “Call Lester and tell him what we’re after. He’s already at McNaughton; he can broaden his questions and see if Mary Fish pops up. As for the rest of us, it’s time to find out more about these two ladies than their mothers ever knew.”

He paused a moment then, watching Sam reach for the phone and Willy head for his desk. For all the drudgery and headaches this job could involve—the lousy hours, minimal pay, exposure to bureaucrats above and dirtbags below, and politics from everywhere—there were just enough moments like this one, when the first faint glimmerings of an idea began forming, that made it all a pure joy.

Until the phones began to ring, of course. Which his did at that precise moment.

“Gunther—Vermont Bureau of Investigation.”

“Joseph, my old pal. You’ve been trying to avoid me.”

Joe felt a small shot of adrenaline. He not only recognized the local paper’s editor-in-chief, Stanley Katz—an old and respected sparring partner—but suddenly realized that only the four people in this room knew Doreen to be probably just the first half of any news story about homicide. Little did Katz know what he was actually poking into.

“Stanley,” Joe responded in a jocular voice, loud enough for the rest of them to know who was on the line. “I’m surprised you took so long. You’re losing your touch. Nice article this morning, though.”

Katz laughed. “Yeah, right. As if you’re going to tell me a ton more
now than you would’ve if I’d called you in the middle of the night, which is nothing.”

“That wouldn’t have stopped you in the old days.”

“In the old days, I didn’t need all the drugs I take now. I’m in a fucking coma every night with the shit they have me on.”

Joe laughed outright. Trust Stan Katz to reduce the general state of geriatric suffering to a one-liner. “You shouldn’t have lived the way you did way back when. I told you that more than once.”

“You fairy,” Katz retorted. “You’ll get to dance on my grave—I’ll give you that—but I’ll still have the bigger smile on my face. Give me what you’ve got on this Ferenc lady. Raped, too, was she?”

Katz and Gunther went back years. In more ways than one, it seemed a very long time.

“You clearly received the press release,” Joe answered him.

“Worthless piece of crap. Tell me about the rape.”

“Nothing to tell yet.”

“Tell me about the rapist.”

Joe knew better than to react.

“You got anything at all?”

“We’re working on it right now,” Joe told him.

“Ooh. There’s a headline: ‘Cops Working on Homicide.’ Better than the opposite, I suppose. Come on, Joe. You’re busting my balls here.”

“I haven’t even started, Stanley. And you of all people know I’ll call when we get something we can make public.”

“God, you’re a prince.”

The phone went dead and Joe slowly hung it up. Stanley Katz’s casualness notwithstanding, this had been a warning shot, if not precisely from the
Brattleboro Reformer
, then from the industry it represented.

It wouldn’t take long for the press in general to crank up its interest, especially as things got more complicated.

Bob Clarke looked balefully out the window as he slipped his much patched winter parka over his Taco Bell uniform.

“Great,” he muttered, watching the snow drifting from the night sky into the parking lot lights, and there coming to life like excited fireflies.

“It’s not supposed to be bad,” a female voice said behind him. “They said a dusting, maybe.”

He turned to see his coworker also getting ready for the cold, pulling a knit cap over her blond hair and tucking in the loose strands.

“Easy for you to say,” he told her. “You got snow tires.”

“You don’t?” she asked.

He grimaced, glanced one last time out the window, and began heading for the front door. “I don’t even have tread.”

Bob braced himself and pushed open the glass door, exchanging the fast food–scented warmth for the shock of winter chill. He hated the cold. Born and bred in Post Mills, he’d still never gotten used to it.

He pulled his keys out as he approached his Toyota pickup, parked near the Dumpsters, as required by management. It was a rusty, spring-shot, oil-leaking heap, and every time he saw it, it reminded him of his overall fate—stuck in the boonies, living with his grandmother, his father in jail and his mother God-knows-where. He was all of nineteen and felt like an old man. Even the manager of the Taco Bell considered him a loser, and that Bozo could barely tie his own shoes.

Which didn’t mean he wasn’t right.

Bob unlocked the truck’s door and hitched himself in behind the wheel, struck by how, even in below zero temperature, the cab smelled of mildew and general decomposition.

He went through the painful ritual of bringing the engine to life, using the starter as a defibrillator.

He’d gotten the truck for a hundred bucks and had put that much into keeping it running. If he hadn’t been friends with the mechanic who issued the inspection sticker every year, even that much wouldn’t have done the trick.

Running at last, he nosed out of the parking lot, his headlights dim, his windshield scratched, and his ineffective heater not even on.

At least he had his iPod, which he’d stuck into his ears first off, making the lack of a radio the one aggravation he could overlook.

Traffic in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, where Bob worked in the entrails of a long commercial strip next to the interstate, was down to a trickle. It was midweek, very late, and most people had sense enough to stay indoors when the weather reports were bad.

At least, most people who had a choice.

His head bobbing slightly to the music, he aimed north toward home, on the other side of the Connecticut River, above Thetford Hill, Vermont. It would take him about forty minutes, avoiding the freeway, which he wasn’t fast enough for anyway—assuming the snow didn’t get more ambitious than the flurries dusting his hood.

And, he added to himself with pressed lips, assuming his tires held out, the engine didn’t quit, the tranny kept hold, and the creek don’t rise.

The irony was, while he was pretty depressed by his present state, he also knew he had it better than a lot of his friends. Marginalized rural Vermont kids over sixteen could easily screw themselves up, and so far, Bob Clarke had managed to stay sober, avoid drugs, keep
out of trouble, and hold a job. The fact that he was occasionally either tempted or frustrated didn’t stall the stamina that his grandmother kept stoking through her gentle support. As embarrassing as it was to be living with an old lady in her ramshackle farmhouse, Bob had to admit that the good outweighed the bad. As old ladies went, she was cool, and you couldn’t knock the lack of overhead.

He was in Vermont by now, having crossed the river, and had been daydreaming long enough to have covered two-thirds of the journey home, when he saw a glowing aberration in the featureless darkness before him.

There was a red flare in the road ahead, and the vague shape of someone waving him down behind it.

Bob crawled past the flare to see better what had happened. A car was pulled over to the side of the road, and a man dressed in new insulated coveralls was standing next to it.

“Trouble?” Bob asked.

“Damn, yeah,” the man said, pulling his watch cap low. “My engine quit, and I thought I was gonna freeze to death out here before anybody came by. This road is, like, never used.”

“Not too popular,” Bob agreed, wondering who this might be. He’d forgotten to check the license plate, and now he’d pulled ahead of where he could see it.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

“Well, that’s the worst of it. It’s only a few miles, but no cell phone, no passing cars, and no luck—until you came along.”

Bob was assuaged by the local reference. “You want me to see what I can do?”

The man’s eyes widened. “Could you? I know nothing about engines. They either work or they don’t. This might be super simple, for all I know.”

Bob pulled ahead of the car and swung out of his truck, noticing as he did so the sound of rushing water far below. A year-round stream ran alongside the steep bank here—a locally known bad spot, complained about for its lack of a guardrail and propensity for swallowing up vehicles surprised by the tight curve.

He sidestepped between the truck and the top of the bank, and met the man around back.

The man proffered an open bottle of Scotch. “You want some?”

Bob stopped dead in his tracks, staring. “What?”

“You want a swig?” he repeated.

Before Bob could answer, a large hunting knife appeared in the man’s other gloved hand, its blade pointed to right under Bob’s left eye.

“Trust me,” he said, his voice low and steady. “You do want a drink.”

Bob didn’t move, his heart pounding as if it wanted out of his chest.

“Take the bottle, Bob.”

“You know me?”

“And Candice, your grandma. Take the bottle.”

“Who are you?”

The tip of the blade came to rest against Bob’s cheek, making him wince. He took the bottle in his bare hand.

“Drink.”

“I don’t drink. I mean, maybe a beer, sometimes.”

He felt a light sting just under his eye. Slowly, he lifted the bottle to his lips and poured a little in. Just as he reacted to the harshness of the liquor, the man pulled the knife away, letting the boy half retch without being cut.

But the blade returned immediately after.

“Again,” he was ordered.

“Why?”

The man’s eyes narrowed. He grabbed the bottle back with his
free hand, pushed Bob against his truck, and held the knife high and flat. Behind him, the red from the flare cast a devilish halo.

“I do have a cell phone, Bob, and a buddy holding a knife just like this to your grandma’s throat. You either drink up or she gets to swallow her tongue like a ham sandwich. And I’ll make sure she finds out why, you little shit.”