Scent of Evil (3 page)

My relationship with Katz was emblematic of all that was wrong between the press and the police. We didn’t like each other, didn’t trust each other, and each of us was generally convinced the world would be a better place without the other. Stanley couldn’t hear the time of day from me without smelling a cover-up, and I couldn’t read beyond his byline on an article without feeling that he’d hyped up the gore and screwed up the facts. The irony was that we knew neither perception was accurate, but our reactions were chemical not rational, a fact to which we’d finally become resigned.

Katz’s narrow face broke into a wide grin at our approach. “Who belongs to the hand, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know, Stanley,” I said, as I squeezed between two of the concrete barricades and under the rope. Klesczewski, who couldn’t tolerate even speaking to Katz, was heading around the corner of Ed’s and down across the sloping Elm Street bridge.

I saw WBRT news reporter Ted McDonald drive up, park haphazardly near the curb, and struggle to get his massive bulk and tape recorder out of the radio station’s undersized car in one failed fluid movement. His eyes focused on me like a dog’s on dinner.

“Joe,” he shouted cheerfully.

I waved to him and heard Katz’s quiet groan. That gave me a gentle pang of pleasure. McDonald was a good old boy, born and raised in Brattleboro, as faithful to the town and its denizens as he was to the flag, and a throwback to the less complicated days I’d been thinking of mere moments ago. In his hourly four-minute news spots, he pretty much reported what he saw and what we told him, with no hype and no prejudicial inflections, which to me was eminently acceptable. Katz had once told me he thought McDonald was a dim-witted, stoolie woodchuck, the last part of which was a derogatory name given local rural folk. Katz was from Connecticut, which we woodchucks saw as a condemnation speaking for itself.

I waited for Ted to join us, enjoying Katz’s heightening but resigned disgust.

McDonald’s face was beet red and dripping with sweat. He began fumbling with his tape recorder but stopped when I shook my head. “Sorry, Ted, it’s still too early. We’ve found a body behind the retaining wall, but we haven’t even finished digging it up. We have no who, when, how, or why to give you.”

Katz gave a condescending smile to the older reporter. “It’s obviously a murder—they just haven’t determined the cause.”

McDonald’s face brightened, but I smiled and shook my head. “Don’t let him jerk you around. Nobody’s said it was a murder—right now, it’s an unexplained death.”

Katz fell in beside me as I set off to rejoin Klesczewski. “But he was murdered, right?” Ted lumbered silently behind, noisily pushing buttons on his machine.

“We don’t know that.”

“You think he died of natural causes and buried himself? Very considerate.”

“It’s early on, Stanley. Once we’ve exhumed the body and the medical examiner has had a chance to take a look, we or the state’s attorney’s office will issue a statement.”

“How was he killed?” Ted asked.

“We’ve got a hand sticking out of the dirt. We’d like to see the rest of the body first.”

“So he
was
killed.” Katz smiled.

“He’s dead—that’s all we know. We don’t know who he is, we don’t know how he died, and we don’t know if he was killed. We don’t know anything at the moment.”

“So what are you doing now?”

We were halfway across the bridge, which sloped steeply from Canal to the Whetstone Brook’s low north bank. Below us, Klesczewski had already jumped the guardrail at the far end of the bridge and was sidestepping down to the edge of the river. I let out a sigh. The sun and the conversation were giving me a headache. “I’m trying to patiently explain that I have nothing to say.”

Katz tried a more benign approach. “How about off the record? What does the guy look like? What did Dunn have to say?”

“Nothing. I’m not ducking you, guys. I just don’t have anything.”

“How about the age of the body? I mean, is it half rotted or does it look fresh?”

I lifted one leg over the guardrail in order to join Klesczewski. “I got to go to work. Talk to you later.”

Ted, who by now had gotten the message and was undoing all his button pushing, muttered, “Thanks, Joe.”

Katz made to follow me.

I placed my hand gently against his chest. “Where’re you going, Stanley?”

I half expected some small lecture on the rights of a free press, but even Katz had grown beyond that. Besides, we both knew the unwritten rules of the game, and despite our sparring we observed them. He gave me an infectious grin. “Thought I’d go fishing?”

I shook my head, unable to suppress a smile myself. “Nice try.”

I left him on the street and climbed down the bank to where Klesczewski was moodily staring at the water, waiting. “So—what have you got?”

“It’s over here.” He led the way under the bridge, keeping to the rocks to avoid disturbing the damp soil.

Once in the shade, I paused and blinked to get used to the low light. It was suddenly delightfully cool, with the sound of water splashing off the concrete bridge that arched overhead, and the shadows flickering with reflected spots of sunlight. There was a slight but permeating odor of rotting vegetation.

“Nice place.”

Klesczewski pointed to the narrow wedge where the bank met the underside of the bridge, some six feet up from the water’s edge. “You’re not the only one who thinks so.”

Running parallel to the brook, a small shelf had been scooped out of the embankment, and on it was a two-inch-thick mattress of old newspapers. Scattered around the shelf was an assortment of everyday trash—bottles, food wrappers, odd scraps of paper, most of it fairly fresh.

“The Dew Drop Inn, complete with air-conditioning—and recently occupied.”

Klesczewski nodded. “That’s not all.” He retraced our steps to the opening, so we were half in the shade and half back in the glare. He pointed again to the ground.

I squatted down, keeping my hands on my knees. Resting on top of the moist, pungent earth was an unusually fat, chewed-up wad of gum, still pink and clean.

“What do you think?” I asked.

Klesczewski looked vaguely uncomfortable. He hadn’t led me all the way down here to hear me ask that. But he had led me, so I knew he’d reached some conclusions.

“Somebody’s living here, or at least they were, up to a few hours ago. Maybe they saw something.”

I looked again at the gum, poking at it with a pen I’d removed from my pocket. It was dry, but not rock hard, and its cleanliness attested to its having been spat out within the last half day. “We can’t afford a twenty-four-hour watch on this place, but tell Patrol to keep an eye peeled for anybody coming back here in the next few days. I’d like to talk to the gum-chewer.”

I glanced over my shoulder, straight across the water and up the opposite bank to where I could see Tyler and his team bent over their work. He didn’t know it yet, but Tyler’s day was going to be full of excavating. At least here, he’d be in the shade.

BY LATE AFTERNOON WE WERE ALONE
, the body and I, in the cool basement embalming room of the McCloskey Funeral Home on Forest Street. Along the walls were a sink and counters, a roll-around cart with a variety of nonsterile surgical instruments whose role here I didn’t want to know, and shelves stocked with row after row of identical plastic bottles filled with variously colored liquids, designed to be injected into bodies to give the skin a perking up. I was sitting in the corner on a metal folding chair. The corpse lay face up on a fiberglass table, the bottom of which sloped slightly, so that any fluids accumulating at his feet could be washed down a drainpipe that paralleled one of the table legs.

Not that there were any fluids. The black-rubber body bag had been completely unzipped, revealing a man still fully clothed in a pair of pale blue slacks and a polo shirt and covered with dirt. He looked like a well-dressed tunnel digger who’d chosen this incongruous spot to catch a couple of minutes of shut-eye.

The door-to-door canvass for witnesses was continuing, Dunn had finally returned to his office, and Tyler and his crew had switched from the retaining wall to under the bridge. I was waiting for the regional medical examiner, Alfred Gould, to get off the phone and start giving my roommate an external examination.

The autopsy would not be done in Brattleboro. Beverly Hillstrom, the state’s chief medical examiner, would do that in Burlington, where her office was located. Usually, in a homicide, Hillstrom traveled to the scene, wishing to keep the preliminary autopsy and the crime scene as close to one another as possible. But timing was a problem here; she’d made it clear that if we wanted results within the next forty-eight hours, the body would have to go north, soon.

It was an irritant. After all, we didn’t know who this man was, and we didn’t know what, or who, had killed him. All we had was the body and little time to pick up a fresh scent. Still, I wasn’t begrudging the point. Although Hillstrom had almost single-handedly made Vermont’s one of the best ME systems around, only her laboratory had all the proper facilities for a complete job. So I had negotiated a compromise: Gould was to do a preliminary once-over before shipping the body north. It was the best deal I could get.

Alfred Gould walked in, looking starchy and official in a white lab coat he’d borrowed from the funeral director. Examinations of this type were also done at Memorial Hospital, but McCloskey’s was far better for keeping out of sight of the press and other curiosity-seekers.

Gould smiled at me. “You look half-asleep.”

I laughed and got to my feet. “It’s the air-conditioning—first cool air I’ve felt in days. I’d move a bed down here if it weren’t for the company. You all set with Hillstrom?” I’d given him the phone after bargaining with her, so they could work out the details.

He was standing by the table now, his fingertips resting lightly on its edge, like a piano player preparing for a difficult solo. In the normal world, he shared a successful family practice with two other doctors. But I had only seen him in his medical-examiner capacity, and it made me feel odd to think of him working on live patients.

He nodded distractedly to my question. “Yeah. She’s busy right now on another case, but she’ll be ready in three hours or so.”

The trip up to Burlington took three hours. “So how long’re you going to spend on this?” I was disappointed. Time flies when you’re struggling to get clothes off a body, or turning it over to check for previously unseen wounds, especially when it’s as stiff as a board. It didn’t leave us much time to actually examine anything.

His eyes were sweeping back and forth across the body. “Thirty minutes at most. She can only fit it in today if we get it to her fast. It doesn’t matter; it looks pretty straightforward. I basically just want to draw some blood, lift his prints, and check for anything obvious.”

Gould had appeared at the Canal Street scene shortly after Tyler had finished his exhumation. He’d looked at the pupils, checked the temperature in and outside of the body, felt the jawline and extremities for rigor, and examined the man’s neck. It had taken all of seven minutes, and only because he’d moved slowly. I was growing anxious to find out what little he knew, but I was reluctant to rush him. Past experience had taught me he liked to keep his findings to himself until he was absolutely satisfied they were accurate.

So, suppressing my impatience, I stuck to quietly assisting him as he awkwardly stripped his uncooperative patient.

Dead bodies don’t bother me much, at least not emotionally. The horrifying realization that a once-vibrant human being can be reduced to a corpse in an instant had been beaten into me repeatedly during the Korean War. As a teenage warrior, I had seen friends and strangers shot, maimed, burned, blown up, and frozen to death until the shock and my tears had evaporated. Now, instead of the horror, I can’t help but see a corpse as a Chinese puzzle box.

Preliminary forensic examinations, like the one I was attending now, tend to open a few of the more obvious hidden compartments, answering the broader questions about the time and method of death. But the classic exams, the ones done by the true artists of the profession, can reveal far more, even, sometimes, the feelings, the motivations, and the calculations that once drove an individual through life. Hillstrom I considered such an artist.

The man Alfred Gould and I were undressing was not bad-looking. Of medium height and build, he was probably in his late twenties, with a strong upper torso and only the faint beginnings of a soft waistline. His hair had been carefully barbered, his fingernails were neat and evenly clipped, and, as I’d suspected at the gravesite, he was clean under his earth-soiled clothes, as a man might be who showered every day. The silver ring on his right hand was matched by a thin silver chain around his neck.

Twenty-five minutes after we’d begun, Gould muttered a small “huh.” The body was on its side, and Gould was peering closely at something near the dorsal side of the right shoulder, out of my line of sight. While Gould had conducted his examination, I’d been noting details I thought might come in handy later, like the pale outline of a watch across the body’s left wrist—a watch now missing—and the labels from his clothing, from L.L. Bean and Land’s End, both upwardly mobile catalog stores. I’d also noted the bloodless dime-sized puncture Ernie Wallers’s soil-boring tool had left on the corpse’s right forearm.

I raised my eyebrows at Gould from across the body. “What?”

He smiled. “I appreciate your self-restraint, Joe. One of these days, I’m going to walk out of the room without saying a word, just to see if you’ll wait a few days for the written report.”

“I’d shoot you in the foot first. What did you find?”

He straightened and motioned to me to come around the table and look. What I found was a small reddish patch of skin on the shoulder, a perfect circle about a half-inch in diameter.

“Bee sting?”

“I’d say an injection site; it’s called a ‘wheal.’”

I looked up at him. “So he OD’d on something?”