Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series)

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, I am indebted to many generous people for the meat and substance of these stories. They have the knowledge, experience, and insight that I often lack. That is indeed often why I pursue the topics that I do—so that I can interview them and enrich my brain with just a fragment of what they so willingly offer. To them, and to so many others as well, my thanks.

  Margot Mayor

  Ray Walker

  John Martin

  Chelsea and Greg Kline

  Greg Davis

  Bill Schur

  Neil Schur

  Roberta Zeff

  Ernie Conover

  Wednesday Night Dinner

  Scout Mayor

  Julie Lavorgna

  Gail Steketee

  Shane Harris

  Judith Forman

  Castle Freeman

  Fran Plevinsky

  Steve Shapiro

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Also by Archer Mayor

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was the time of year when New England wobbles between fall and winter, as prone to Indian summer as to sudden, short-lived snowstorms.

  It wasn’t snowing tonight, but it was cold, and Jason Newville was regretting that he’d only worn a sweatshirt. Nerves played a part. Unlike some, he tended to cool down when he was on a job, instead of working up an adrenaline sweat. But as with most things taken for granted, he hadn’t considered it when he set out, and was paying the price now.

  It wasn’t unbearable. He was born to this weather, and in line with southeastern Vermont’s being mockingly labeled “the banana belt,” it did run warmer here than in the rest of the state. He’d survive. Besides, he had things to keep him occupied, like the whereabouts of the crazy old man who lived here.

  Jason stepped out from behind a large maple at the edge of the darkened property and studied the layout by the light of a full moon. This wasn’t his first visit. He’d been here twice before over the past week. There’d never been a change. The house remained still and as black as a tomb. Just as it was tonight.

  But instead of lending him confidence, the silence only bred foreboding.

  Jason had been burglarizing homes for three years, time enough to have developed a balance between caution and foolhardiness. He had an instinct about most places—an inner radar, as he saw it—that had helped to keep him out of jail, so far.

  But that radar wasn’t working here. He was as keyed up as during the first time he’d crept from the woods that girdled the house.

  It was a rambling spread, once entirely agricultural, with barns, sheds, paddocks, and a centrally located family house. With time, most of the fields had been abandoned or sold off, and each structure at the farm’s core—depending on its original sturdiness—had fallen into disrepair, or to the brink of collapse. The one sign of expansion—at once attractive and daunting to Jason—was the steadily accumulating piles of looming, jagged scrap. Depending on their nature and/or size, they bulged outward from every orifice of every building, or seemed to erupt from the earth as semi-mountainous heaps of mechanical debris.

  Balers, tractors, combines, tedders, conveyor belts, pickup trucks, generators, and more—ghostly, hulking, rusty, and inoperable monsters teetered drunkenly under the bright moon like otherworldly space junk gleaned from the night sky in the sweeping gesture of an invisible hand. It was an entangled collection of such enormity that it staggered the imagination, and—its scope magnified by the steely-sharp lunar lighting—ignited in Jason’s chest an instinctive fear about what or who, besides him, might also be silently lurking among the riot of sharp-edged shadows.

  He knew of the crazy guy who lived here—Ben Kendall. A loner, an eccentric, a hoarder of vast appetite. He was a local fixture, keeping to himself but roaming constantly around the neighborhood, his ramshackle open-bed truck swaying under a precarious tower of mostly metal debris. Hand-lettered wooden panels along both sides of the truck advertised KENDALL’S SCRAP & RECYCLING, although everyone suspected that the “recycling” remained mostly in Ben’s mind. No one that Jason knew had ever seen that truck leave Ben’s property other than empty.

  Jason stepped from the trees, not running ducked over as he had the first time, but with trepidation nevertheless, seized by the place’s malevolent quality.

  As often occurred in the mythos surrounding hoarders, neighborhood rumors of treasure residing in the heart of Ben’s possessions had curled like smoke tendrils. There was no evidence of it. Ben displayed no proof of wealth anywhere. But word had reached Jason’s ears a month earlier, and prompted his initial reconnaissance a few days ago.

  He hadn’t stayed long that time, mostly touring the property’s perimeters, like a wolf rounding the edges of a sheep pen. As with tonight, there’d been no movement or sound. He’d tried peering through windows, to find every view blocked, and had opened the occasional outbuilding door, to meet a wall of objects standing against him. But no dogs had barked, no lights had come on, and Jason had begun thinking of the place as an unheard-of possibility: a bottomless well to revisit time and again.

  His second foray had therefore been bolder. He’d driven here in a borrowed vehicle, bringing two duffel bags. As before, he’d met no resistance or opposition, but he’d been infected by a cloaking eeriness, and at the last minute, opted to stay outside. He’d foraged among the precariously balanced pyramids for the odd piece of salvage that he could extract with minimal noise, and left largely empty-handed and stymied.

  Because that was the irony, even to him: While all this was far from any road or keen-eared neighbor, and had never shown signs of life during his visits, Jason couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. Like a hypersensitive rodent recognizing the trap while mesmerized by its contents, Jason kept tentatively reaching out, convincing himself that his desire would eventually overpower his dread.

  Tonight, he’d told himself, he was going inside.

  Because those rumors had to be true. How else could Ben survive, unless he had a ready supply of money? This was a big property, even if in decay. For Jason, whose past homes had been trailers, flophouses, and other people’s couches, Ben’s spread was an estate. And estates had to be paid for.

  Jason approached the farmhouse’s front door, set back under a sagging porch roof and guarded by sentries of cordwood, lawn furniture, rusting grills, bicycles, car fenders, and bald tires. He placed a foot carefully on the first stair trea
d, and pressed down, as he might have in testing the buoyancy of a floating dock. Surprisingly, it remained solid, not emitting the merest creak, as if the wood had been compressed beyond complaint by time and neglect.

  He continued, his hands out unconsciously, atop an invisible tightrope. To either side, the dark hedgerows of Ben’s belongings closed around him as he neared the door, silent and still.

  He placed one hand on the knob and used the other to extract a flashlight from his pocket, suddenly unsure whether he should use it now, or wait until he’d opened the door. Yielding to fear, he hit the switch before pulling the knob.

  The door opened reluctantly, rubbing against the inner floorboards, its hinges complaining without conviction. The inside air spilled out, wrapping him in a fog—warm, fetid, cloying, almost alive. He felt the entire house had just released a deep, internal sigh.

  “Oh, God,” he barely whispered, knowing that the slightest unexpected sound or motion now would be enough to send him flying.

  But, as always in his experience here, there was only the silence accompanying the absence of life, or the holding of one’s breath.

  Timidly, he played his light along the floor ahead, and off to both sides, taking in not a room, as he’d expected, but the narrow confines of a tunnel formed of densely packed newspapers, magazines, and boxes, reaching up to the ceiling.

  Scowling, his breathing shallow and rapid, Jason eased by the doorway and entered the rough-walled shaft, his flashlight setting off an endless shifting of shadows. The thick air around him closed in.

  Fifteen feet along, he came to a widening, where the clutter lowered enough to allow him to see farther afield. He was standing in a four-foot-deep foxhole, peering out over an undulating landscape of newspapers, files, furniture, catalogs, and paper products. The beam in his hand brought to mind a battlefield searchlight, crisscrossing a no-man’s-land in search of movement. In the distance, the tops of doorways indicated paths to adjoining rooms, with overhead clearances of a couple of feet. He had no notion of what the original purpose might have been of the room he was occupying.

  Sweating now, light-headed in the rank atmosphere, Jason wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve, wondering what to do, where to start. Surrounded by more than the plenty he’d dreamed of, he was stuck.

  Reluctantly, he climbed from the trench and crawled onto the surrounding rubbish, unsure of what rotting object he might encounter by chance, or even if the unstable surface might suddenly give way and swallow him whole. Fueling his concern, the commingled layers beneath kept slipping as he moved.

  He headed for the nearest crawl-space doorway, feeling increasingly trapped and hopeless, telling himself that not every room was the same as this one, and that he was bound to discover some order that made sense.

  “I just want to steal something,” he murmured as he went, not reflecting on the absurdity of either the statement or his predicament.

  In fact, there was a change after he slithered under his chosen door header. From his perch there, he found the room beyond filled more with mechanical objects than with paper. There were appliances and large woodworking equipment intermixed with books, operator manuals, and piles of broken or rusty hand tools. Depending on the spot, he could even see the floor.

  Still, he hesitated atop the doorway’s steep slope, surveying the chaos ahead with growing frustration. Again, he could see nothing of value, and too much of everything. His head was pounding, and he was getting angry.

  Hungry for any success, he finally swung around and slid down the embankment like a kid on a toboggan, skittering paper to both sides and arresting his descent by jamming his boots against a three-legged drill press.

  That was the end of all stealth. The drill slowly toppled, smashing into its metallic neighbor and throwing dozens of items into the air.

  Jason covered his head against the shower of hardware, throwing out a hand for balance. As he’d been dreading from the start, his fingers closed on something cold, soft, and damp. He screamed in horror, dropping his flashlight in the process.

  Scurrying backwards, rubbing his palm obsessively against his pants, he retrieved the rolling light and aimed it at the offending object.

  Caught in the bright halo, peering from under the avalanche like a discarded animal carcass, was a partially decayed human face.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Vermont Bureau of Investigation. Joe Gunther speaking.”

  “Hi, Joe.”

  At the sound of Beverly Hillstrom’s voice, Gunther removed his feet from the windowsill and turned around to face the empty squad room, resting his elbows on his desktop and cradling the phone more comfortably. Hillstrom was Vermont’s medical examiner—tough, disciplined, and scrupulously thorough. More important to Joe, she had recently become his sweetheart—if, for the time being, a quietly acknowledged one.

  “Hey, there,” he said. “How’s the light of my life?”

  “I like that,” she laughed. “You’re sounding sporty.”

  “You interested?” he asked. “I could get there in two hours.”

  “My sofa has recovered from the last time,” she told him. “But I’m not sure I want to explain a locked office door in the middle of the day.”

  “Ah. No guts,” he accused her. In the minute pause that followed—and to move them off the subject smoothly—he added, “But you probably didn’t call for that, did you? Have we sent you someone I don’t know about?”

  Her voice took on the professional tone he knew so well. They’d been a romantic couple for a short time, but colleagues for decades.

  “It came in as a natural or an accidental,” she explained. “I’m still determining that—probably a cardiac event brought on by the stress of an accident. But it’s not a criminal case. At least, not based on state police findings.”

  “Oh?” he prompted her, his interest piqued. Beverly was not one to make chatty shoptalk. Something was afoot. “Where did this come from?”

  “Your neck of the woods. Dummerston.”

  That was near enough, being the township just north of Brattleboro, where Joe’s office was located.

  “You have suspicions?” he asked.

  She hesitated. “I do,” she finally conceded. “And there’s a complication. The decedent is related to me.”

  That caught him by surprise. “Oh, Beverly. What happened?”

  “His name is Benjamin Kendall. We were first cousins. He was found at home, under a pile of personal effects, and at first, it seemed reasonable that he’d fallen prey to a domestic mishap.”

  Joe was used to her almost antique English, but here, it was the substance rather than the delivery that caught his attention. “Reasonable?” he countered. “That a pile of … what? Personal effects? Fell on him?”

  “He was a hoarder,” she elaborated. “It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. His environment was literally a series of precarious stacks and archways—books, newspapers, decades’-worth of randomly acquired…” Here, even she appeared at a loss for words, and fell back upon, “Stuff.”

  Trusting that the story would gain clarity, Joe moved along. “You’re thinking that’s not what happened?”

  “He exhibited multiple nonlethal injuries,” she went on. “All of them more or less consistent with being pinned under a heavy weight. But it had been days, and his tissues had degenerated, making things harder to sort out. My deputy did the autopsy, per protocol, but I couldn’t not come in for a consultation. That being said, a cardiac event seems like the most credible finding—his heart was in poor condition. But it’s just not sitting right with me. We’re leaving it open at least until the toxicology comes back.”

  She stopped there, although he knew that she had more to tell. Beverly Hillstrom’s autopsies, even if conducted by a deputy, were not going to be anything but in-depth analyses. But she was on tricky ground. This was a Vermont State Police investigation. Joe was VBI—also a state agency, but restricted to major cases—and generally activate
d only by direct invitation from the lead investigator, which was not Beverly.

  He tried easing her distress. “Beverly. I’m really sorry this happened. I didn’t even know you had a relative in Vermont, aside from your daughter in college. I thought you were a Philly girl. If you’d like, I’d be happy to call whoever caught this case, just to delicately check his homework.”

  Her relief was palpable. “Oh, Joe. Thanks so much. I wasn’t sure what to do. Ben ended up in Vermont because of me, and I took care of him as much as he’d let me, which wasn’t much. To be honest, we’d only recently gotten in touch because of Rachel—the one at UVM. She was looking for an art project—a documentary for credit—and I introduced the two of them just a couple of months ago. It’s all so sad and unexpected. I’d really appreciate your giving this a look.”

  Gunther was teeming with questions, but decided to bide his time and make his approach from the outside in. He reached for a nearby pad. “Give me the lead’s name, would you, Beverly? I’ll make a phone call and find out what I can.”

  * * *

  Brattleboro, Vermont, is in the state’s lower right-hand corner pocket, assuming that you envision a trapezoidal pool table with seven urban pockets instead of six, and that you allow for a spine of mountains to run down its middle. The state capital—the seventh pocket—is smack in the table’s middle. The others, starting with the lower left, are Bennington, Rutland, and Burlington up the western side, and St. Johnsbury, White River Junction, and Brattleboro down the eastern.

  Once dependent on waterways, like most older New England hubs, Brattleboro is fed by the first three northbound Vermont exits of Interstate 91—the paved slab that had completely replaced the Connecticut River as a source of commercial vitality. The interstate showed up on maps like a chain saw’s scar, severing the town’s once bustling western extension and transforming it into an emotionally disenfranchised entity called West Brattleboro—or, more colloquially, “West B.”

  That’s where the VSP barracks had been built, in an unfortunate example of 1970s architecture, the only advantage of which was its proximity to the Chelsea Royal Diner, just across the road.