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  RED HERRING

  OTHER BOOKS BY ARCHER MAYOR

  The Price of Malice

  The Catch

  Chat

  The Second Mouse

  St. Albans Fire

  The Surrogate Thief

  Gatekeeper

  The Sniper’s Wife

  Tucker Peak

  The Marble Mask

  Occam’s Razor

  The Disposable Man

  Bellows Falls

  The Ragman’s Memory

  The Dark Root

  Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

  The Skeleton’s Knee

  Scent of Evil

  Borderlines

  Open Season

  RED HERRING

  A Joe Gunther Novel

  ARCHER MAYOR

  Minotaur Books

  New York

  Table of Contents

  TITLE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  RED HERRING. Copyright © 2010 by Archer Mayor. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  ISBN 978-0-312-38193-6

  First Edition: October 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To John Martin

  You supplied me with several crucial plot points in the writing of this story, revealing a creative streak that has inspired me in the past. You are a friend, an advisor, and a sharp-eyed critic, and I thank you for all three.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It has become a convention to thank many and all for the results of a labor like this story. However, in some cases, the influence of advisors and sounding boards is more peripheral than in others. This effort, however, falls under the “others” category. Without the enthusiasm, assistance, time, and efforts of the kind and generous people listed below, this book would not have been written, quite literally. My thanks to you all:

  Eric Buel

  John Martin

  Nancy Aichele

  Paco Aumand

  Steve Shapiro

  Gaye Symington

  Ray Walker

  Castle Freeman, Jr.

  Julie Lavorgna

  Yael Cohn

  Scott Casella

  At the Brookhaven National Laboratory:

  Elaine Lowenstein

  Elaine DiMasi

  Phil Sarcione

  Kendra Snyder

  Peter Guida

  Garman Harbottle

  Susan White-DePace

  Andreana Leskovjan

  Daniel Fischer

  Mark Sakitt

  Jeanne Marie Petchauer

  Carl Anderson

  John Dunn

  Doon Gibbs

  Jane Koropsak

  And with very special and particular thanks to Wally Mangel

  Additionally:

  The Brattleboro Police Department

  The Vermont Forensic Lab

  Vermont’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

  RED HERRING

  CHAPTER ONE

  Doreen Ferenc slipped her nightgown over her head and let it fall the length of her body and gently settle onto her shoulders. This was the reward of every day, this threshold moment, when, as though dropping a heavy burden, she exchanged her regular clothing, complete with belts, buttons, zippers, and elastic, for the sensual, almost weightless comfort of a simple shift of light cotton.

  Not that the day had been more onerous than usual. Her mom had been in good spirits, minimally judgmental of the nursing-home staff. They’d served Indian pudding for lunch, a perennial favorite. Her mother had once been an expert at the dessert, and it had led them both down a path of happy memories while they’d worked on the quilt for Doreen’s new nephew. Doreen’s brother, Mark, had recently married a much younger woman in Nevada, where they lived, and she’d just delivered their first child.

  Doreen and Mark weren’t particularly close, as siblings went, but they got along, and their mom loved them both. She preferred Mark, as Doreen well knew, but only because he was in a position to present her with a grandchild. Doreen had never found marriage appealing, and by and large didn’t like kids, which, thank God, she was now safely beyond having anyway. The quilt had become a salutary talisman of good tidings to which Doreen could contribute guilt-free.

  She left the bedroom in her bare feet and dropped her clothes into the laundry hamper in the darkened bathroom, pausing a moment to admire the unexpected snow falling from the night sky onto the enormous skylight she’d spent too much money having installed. The house was an almost tacky prefab ranch—virtually a trailer with pretensions—but she knew in her heart that it was also the house she’d most likely die in, so why not splurge a little, like on the skylight and the heat she poured on to make the whole house as toasty as in mid-July? She loved winters in Vermont, including flukily premature ones like this year’s. She’d known them her whole life, and had, at various times, enjoyed skiing, snowball fights, and even shoveling the driveway. But no longer. Now she just wanted to watch the weather from the comfort of an evenly heated, boring modern house that was fussed over by a handyman complete with a snowplow—assuming he’d attached the plow to his pickup by now. She had started working full-time at seventeen, decades earlier, and now she was going to enjoy all the fruits of a slightly early retirement.

  Entertaining such thoughts, she pursued the next step in her nightly routine, and entered the small kitchen. There, she dished out a single scoop of vanilla ice cream, splashed an appreciable quantity of brandy over its rounded top, and retired to the living-room couch, which was strategically angled so she could watch TV from a reclining position.

  It was snowing—heavily, too—and only October. People hadn’t switched to snow tires, sand deliveries were still being made to town road crews, and cars were going to be decorating ditches all over the state by morning. But Doreen didn’t have to care about any of it. She was as snug as the proverbial bug.

  Settled at last, she hit the remote, dialed in her favorite channel, and heard the doorbell ring.

  “Damn,” she murmured, glancing at the digital clock on the set. It was just before ten P.M. “Who on earth?”

  She placed her bowl on the coffee table, struggled up from her place of comfort, and sighed heavily as she crossed the room to the tiny mudroom and the front door beyond it.

  Enclosing herself in the mudroom to preserve the heat, she slipped on an overcoat from the row of nearby pegs, hit the outside light, and called out, “Who is it?” She could see the outline of a man standing before the frosted glass of the door.

  A weak voice answered, “You don’t know me, ma’am. My name’s Lyle Robinson. I’ve just wrecked my car about a h
alf mile up. I was wondering if I could use your phone.”

  So much for keeping immune from the woes of poor weather. She then heard him cough and bend over as he clutched his chest.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I think so, ma’am. I wasn’t wearing my seat belt, like a damn fool . . . Sorry. Don’t mean to offend. I think I just bruised my chest, is all.”

  She hesitated.

  “Ma’am?” he said next. “Not that it’ll matter, but I’m a cousin of Jim and Clara Robinson. They used to live just outside Saxtons River. I don’t know if you know them.”

  “I do,” she blurted out. “So, you’re related to Sherry?”

  “Yes, ma’am, although what she’s doing way out west is beyond any of us.”

  Doreen threw open the door.

  She was only aware of two things after that: the bare blade of an enormous knife, held just two inches before her eyes, and, behind it, a man disguised by a hooded sweatshirt worn backward, two holes cut in the fabric for his eyes. She now understood why his voice had sounded weak.

  “Okay, Dory,” he said. “Drop the coat and step back inside. You and I are gonna get acquainted.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  He wasn’t sure how it happened—he hadn’t been paying attention—but Joe Gunther was now all alone in the room. Aside from the body, of course—one Doreen Ferenc, according to her driver’s license, her neighbors, a computer check, and her mail. She herself was silent on the matter, not that he didn’t think she had a few things left to tell him.

  Joe sat gingerly on a wooden chair to take advantage of the sudden stillness, dressed in a white Tyvek suit that made him look more like a nuclear plant worker than a cop.

  Crime scenes, especially homicides, were busy places—all bustle and talk, sketching and taking photographs, lifting prints and logging evidence. Along with a platoon of people—from cops to medics to funeral-home employees to state’s attorneys and unwelcome official gawkers.

  It left little room for quiet contemplation.

  Gunther didn’t worry about where everyone had gone. They’d be back too soon anyway. Instead, he sat motionless, studying both room and victim for what they might tell him.

  It wasn’t much. There was a single glistening drop of blood on her forehead, presumably from a scalp laceration above the hairline, and no obvious signs of disruption around her—a slightly displaced coffee table and a wrinkled doormat that could have been mere casual housekeeping. By all appearances, the entire house looked like what it had actually been: the home of a spinster of fifty-four who’d had a habit of lying on the couch every night to watch TV, accompanied by a plate of slightly spiked ice cream.

  That was her version of the wild life, from what they’d been told by a nurse at her mother’s nursing home, who’d also said that Dory came to visit every day for four hours, without fail, morning and afternoon, equally divided into two-hour increments—the best and most consistent relative or visitor the place had ever known.

  Prior to Joe’s arrival here, another cop had spoken to the nurse on the phone—not the usual place to discuss a death. Joe preferred to break such news face-to-face. But a call had been made to the retirement home to make sure they’d have someone to speak with later, and the nurse—Brenda Small by name—had immediately blurted out, “I knew it. She’s dead. That’s the only way she’d miss visiting her mom.” The cop had been too stunned to disagree. Joe didn’t think it mattered. Small had vowed that she’d keep the death to herself, and volunteered what little they now had on Doreen, including the brandy garnish on the ice cream. She claimed that she and “Dory” had become virtual sisters over the years—unsurprising given that Doreen did little aside from staying at home and tending to her ailing and needy mother.

  Joe had his doubts. He suspected Doreen got out more than Brenda imagined. In his experience, of which he had decades, people were quick to pigeonhole one another, reducing them to caricatures. As in using the word “spinster.”

  He imagined she had been that only literally. There was no evidence in the house stating otherwise—pictures or documents attesting to husbands or children, alive, dead, or estranged. But there were travel books and brochures, signs of a love of cooking, and a dozen albums and several cameras speaking to both an enthusiasm for and an ability in photography. This was a woman who, for whatever reasons, had chosen to hand over the majority of her time to accommodating her mother’s needs, but who’d also managed to work in the basics of what appeared to be an enviable, if solitary, life.

  Except for its last moments. Those had, by all appearances, been a waking nightmare.

  Up to now, Joe had employed a favorite time-tested technique at death scenes—while acknowledging the body, he didn’t start by focusing on it, choosing instead to work from the fringes inward. But he’d done that by this point. He’d wandered through the small, neat house, asked many of the preliminary questions, and gathered an overall sense of Doreen’s daily rhythm.

  Now he gazed at her, supine on the couch, her mouth agape, the blood shining on her forehead, her clouded eyes fixed on the ceiling as if she’d died wishing herself someplace else.

  Joe didn’t fault her there. The most compelling aspect of this entire scene, and which had transfixed every other investigator here, he feared, was the story suggested by her position. Her legs were apart, her nightgown pulled up to her waist and torn at the bodice, and her black underwear dangling from one foot.

  By all appearances, Doreen Ferenc had been raped and murdered.

  “Are you the one they told me to see?”

  Joe glanced over to the door leading to the kitchen. A bearded man in his mid-thirties with longish hair was leaning over the threshold, hesitant to enter. Like everyone else, he was dressed all in protective white, but his self-consciousness about it was transparent.

  Joe rose from his seat. This was no cop. “I don’t know. Joe Gunther. VBI.”

  VBI stood for Vermont Bureau of Investigation, the state’s major case squad. Joe was in fact its field force commander—a title that in more populated states would have guaranteed him a spot behind a desk. But not in Vermont.

  Joe crossed the room, careful to stay on the floor’s butcher paper travel lane—a crime-scene detail designed to curtail contamination.

  He stuck out his gloved hand. “And you?”

  The younger man flushed. “Oh, damn. I’m sorry. Jack Judge. I like John, to be honest, but everybody calls me Jack. Holdover from when I was a kid. I’m the new assistant medical examiner. Sorry I’m late. The snowstorm caught me by surprise.”

  Gunther smiled, amused by his self-deprecation. It was a nice break from the usual Type A behavior at such a setting.

  “Welcome, John. You want to see the main attraction?”

  Judge smiled back. “I guess that’s why I’m here.”

  Joe led the way. The rule was that no one touched a body before the ME. This wasn’t always observed, but it had been this time, Joe being in charge. Back in the day, AMEs, as they were now called, used to be volunteer local doctors, but as the world had become more litigious, violent, and complicated—even in this rural corner—they’d been replaced by trained investigators. Though not full-timers, they were often nurses or paramedics, used to responding to chaos in the middle of the night, working alongside cops, interpreting medication labels, and filing prompt paperwork.

  “You just start?” Joe asked.

  “Yes and no,” Judge answered him. “I was a medic in the service.”

  Gunther looked at him more closely. “See any action?”

  Judge nodded. “Iraq.”

  Joe, ex-army himself, nodded and circled the couch to introduce the AME to the reason he’d been called. “Tough,” was all he said, before stating, “Doreen Ferenc; DOB 5/24/56, making her fifty-four.”

  Jack Judge squatted down, his forearms on his knees, and studied the body’s face.

  Joe kept speaking, knowing the drill. “Some of this is sketchy—it’s still
early—but we think she lived alone, led an orderly life centering mostly around her mother, who’s in a nursing home. She had a regular doctor, whom she saw yearly, but had no medical problems and was only on an acid reflux med. I don’t remember the name. One of the other guys has that.”

  Joe pointed at the small bowl of melted ice cream. “She supposedly had a little vanilla laced with brandy every night in front of the tube, so this looks like it happened last night.”

  Judge cast a glance at the darkened TV.

  “We turned it off,” Joe filled in, adding for no reason except to slightly humanize the victim, “It was on the Nature Channel. She had an ironclad routine, going to the nursing home every morning and afternoon to spend time with Mom, so when she didn’t show up today, someone over there began calling. A neighbor finally saw this through the window and called 911.”

  “Who saw her alive last?” Judge asked.

  “You’re kidding, right?” came a voice from the doorway. “What the hell do you think we’re all doing here?”

  They looked up to see a scowling man with a withered left arm, the hand of which had been shoved into a pocket of his Tyvek suit to keep it from swinging around. This fellow, the arm notwithstanding, had cop stamped all over him.

  Gunther said with a frown, “Willy Kunkle—John Judge, from the ME’s office. Willy works for me, although nobody knows why.”

  Judge nodded, but Kunkle smirked. “They call you Jack, right? Jack Judge. Cute. Sounds like a cartoon.”

  Joe didn’t say anything, recognizing the futility of educating Willy, but Judge, to his credit, simply answered, “Jack or John—doesn’t matter. I heard of you, too.”

  Kunkle laughed. “I bet. You do her yet?”

  “We were about to,” Joe said.

  Willy drew near, but had the courtesy to stay quiet. Joe didn’t doubt that he’d give Judge more grief later. Hazing suited him, showcasing the least flattering of his many, often conflicting personality traits.