Red Herring Read online

  Joe was laughing by now. “All for the cause, Beverly, all for the cause. You are too much.”

  “And that little secret had better accompany you both to your graves,” she said severely.

  David Hawke saluted her and stood up. “Aye, aye. Can I go now? I’ve played hooky long enough.”

  “Go,” Joe told him, “and many thanks. This has been truly above and beyond.”

  Hawke gathered his files and moved to the door. “Not really. As Dr. Hillstrom said, if all three of these are connected, we’ve got something more than worthy of our collective attention.” He paused and added, “I’ll run using Brookhaven by the state’s attorney, just to make sure we’re on safe ground with all this.”

  Beverly waited until the door had closed behind him before asking her old friend, “And what more can I do for you?”

  “It’s going to sound a little weird,” he warned her.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’d like to see Mary and Bob. I’m going to do my best to tell their stories and maybe let them rest in peace. I just wanted to meet them, if only this once.”

  Beverly smiled and patted his hand, rising from the table. “I don’t think that’s the least bit weird, Joe.”

  She led him back down the hallway and out into the lab, the last door of which opened onto the autopsy room, an arena he’d visited often over the years, usually with Hillstrom officiating.

  She crossed over to the wall cooler and pulled open two of its drawers, revealing the pale, slightly yellow-tinged bodies of a young man and an elderly woman. The woman’s face was dark and discolored and her tongue protruded slightly from between her lips. Both bodies had the familiar Y-shaped cut decorating their torsos.

  “Tell me what you know,” Beverly requested.

  Joe studied the faces for a moment, barely registering the signs of death that would have derailed most observers. He had seen hundreds of corpses in his career, and before that in combat as a young man. He had learned to read life’s sign language in what was left behind.

  “Mary I know the least,” he began. “Hardworking, dependable, devoted to the woman she lived with and the people she worked for, even though her boss is clearly an idiot. From what I could tell, she had a quiet, comfortable life, and filled her time away from the office with classical music, show tunes, and a huge collection of DVDs of classic Hollywood movies. It looked like she and Elise, her other half, loved cooking, staying home, and each other. Of course, Elise and I have yet to meet, and you know what they say about first impressions.”

  Beverly chuckled slightly. “That they’re usually correct?”

  He conceded the point. “Not what I was thinking, but for Elise’s sake, I hope so. Maybe those memories will eventually overshadow the effects of that fake suicide note.”

  He shifted over to the young man. “Bob Clarke’s grandmother, Candice, is best friends with my mom, so him I know more about. Terrible upbringing until his father was locked up as a habitual offender, then the proverbial gift from God. He reacted to Candice’s offer to take him in like a starving man hits a meal, and repaid the favor with respect and hard work and abstinence—at least as far as any of us knew. At the time of the transition, I know my mom was pretty nervous. Candice is no spring chicken, and not in the best of health; Mom thought the effort might do her in. But of course, it was just the opposite—both of them bloomed in the other’s presence.”

  He stood there for a moment, looking down at both bodies, and then finally stepped back. “Thanks, Beverly. That helped add a little perspective.”

  She placed her cool hand on the nape of his neck and smiled. “I know the feeling. Good luck finding who did this.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Springfield’s hospital sat above the town, less overlooking it than standing slightly aloof, like a doting nanny standing off to one side, ready to care for her accident-prone charges. It was gray and damp when Joe pulled into the parking lot, and he paused a moment before entering the facility to appreciate a climate so many other Vermonters his age had come to thoroughly dislike.

  He didn’t deny that the late fall/early winter cusp, especially, could be challenging, and that some years its unrelenting grayness could seem biblical in duration. But he was born of this part of the earth, and while he’d traveled far in his time, the nostalgia he’d felt when away was only reinforced when he was back in its embrace. Familiarity in his case led only to comfort and a sense of belonging. As with all love affairs of the type, the occasional crankiness was easily forgiven.

  And so he walked slowly across the parking lot, feeling the mist against his face, very much aware of the two people he’d left in Hillstrom’s cooler, fellow New Englanders who’d been robbed of any more such experiences.

  Elise Howard had been placed on the hospital’s top floor, in a quiet room facing a steep embankment covered with evergreens, across the feeder road to the upper parking lot.

  Joe stood quietly in the open doorway, studying the thin, frail woman in bed as she gazed out the window, as unmoving as if she’d joined Mary Fish at the morgue.

  He tapped softly on the wall beside him and watched her slowly turn her head away from the view, as if letting go of the one rope that was keeping her moored.

  “Yes?” she said in a whisper.

  He advanced into the room and took a seat between the window and the bed, so that she could look over his shoulder if she chose, instead of having to watch him.

  He squeezed her hand, less in a shake than in a simple touching of sorrowful humans, and uttered his all-too-practiced standard introduction.

  “Hi, Ms. Howard. My name is Joe. I’m a police officer. I am so sorry to be meeting you under these circumstances.”

  “So am I,” she said, which pleased him as a response. It implied that the numbness accompanying her misery hadn’t dulled her ability to react with precision and truthfulness.

  “I hope my being here isn’t too much of an intrusion,” he continued.

  “No,” she sighed. “I knew someone would come eventually. I imagined it would be a funeral director or someone like that.”

  “That can be arranged,” he offered. “For the moment, we all just wanted to let you be, at least until the initial shock had passed.”

  She nodded. “Thank you.”

  He assumed the need to pursue a funeral director had passed. “I would like to chat with you a little about Mary, though. Would that be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I know this sounds a little stupid, but I want to show my respect by asking how you’d prefer to be addressed. As Ms. Howard? Elise?”

  She had returned to the window, but this brought her focus back squarely to his face. “How long have you been a police officer? I’m sorry . . . I forgot your name.”

  “Joe. And a long time.”

  She allowed for a thin smile. “It shows. You’re very good. Elise will be fine.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and leaned forward to prop his elbows on his knees, placing his face near hers, but slightly below it, so she wouldn’t feel cornered.

  “How long were you and Mary a couple?”

  “Thirty-two years,” she answered without pause, the number no doubt having been floating in her head for several days. “And before you even ask it, they were the happiest years of my life.”

  “What do you think of how Mary died?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What do I think of it? What an absurd question . . .”

  He held up his hand to stop her. “Not how you feel about it, Elise. What do you literally think happened?”

  She teared up and blinked several times, fighting to keep her composure. “We were doing fine,” she finally said, barely audible.

  “No disagreements?”

  She tilted her head slightly. “No. I’d been complaining about wanting some time just for us. At first, she’d been a little impatient—she was the one who brought in the money, you see. But after a while, her enthusiasm grew, until sh
e was talking about it more than I ever did. We laughed about that. It wasn’t a bone of contention.”

  Gunther remained silent, letting her continue the conversation to his advantage.

  She finally took a deep breath and asked him, “Could she have been murdered?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to determine,” he admitted.

  Her mouth fell open, her shoulders went slack, and she became so pale, Joe thought she might pass out.

  What she said, however, surprised him. “I thought so.”

  He watched her a few seconds, concerned, but she remained staring at him, alive and conscious.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked.

  Her answer was disappointing. “I couldn’t think of any other explanation.”

  He pursed his lips thoughtfully before proceeding. “Elise, I have to be honest with you. Most people are killed by someone they know and for reasons that make sense—or at least they’re explainable. Random stranger killings are very rare, especially around here.”

  “All right,” she said, as if he were detailing a theorem.

  “If everything was going well between you two, then what else might’ve gone sour for Mary?” he pressed her. “Schools can be hotbeds of jealousy and disappointment. Mary was in a powerful position, being Raddlecup’s number two. Did she ever discuss what happened at work with you?”

  “All the time,” Elise said. “And it was Raddlecup that caused most of her problems. The rest of them usually went to her to avoid him, and she was wonderful with them.”

  “How did that make the relationship between Raddlecup and Mary?”

  “It was fine,” she told him. “He loved her; she saved his bacon every week and made it crystal clear that she never wanted to replace him.”

  Joe paused a moment before asking, “The way she died was very personal. It wasn’t like someone fired a gun into the air and the bullet just happened to strike her. Does the staging of a fake suicide tell you anything?”

  Again, she paled, and Joe feared he might have overestimated her reserves, but she took a deep breath and said quietly, “No.”

  “There’s never been a death like that—a hanging—in either one of your families?”

  “No.”

  She was looking down by now, apparently focusing on the edge of the bed. Only by doing the same did Joe notice her tears silently dripping onto the sheet. He reached for her hand and squeezed it gently.

  She looked up, her weathered cheeks glistening, and gave him a wan, apologetic smile. “I’m sorry. She was the love of a lifetime.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “I lost my wife to cancer decades ago,” he admitted. “I never wanted to marry again.”

  “Then you know the feeling.”

  “There may be another angle to this we haven’t discussed,” he said after a moment. “Could it be that someone wanted to hurt you by doing this?”

  She straightened and pulled her hand away, if only to wipe her cheeks. She looked startled by the suggestion. “Me? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered.

  She frowned. “This has become such a terrible world.”

  “Did you think of something?” he asked hopefully.

  She closed her eyes briefly, seemingly exhausted. “I can’t think of anything else.”

  She lay back and rested her head against the pillow. Joe rose and squeezed her shoulder. “I’m so terribly sorry, Elise. Thanks for speaking with me.”

  She merely nodded and gave him a tired smile.

  He saw himself out.

  Bill Allard was Joe’s boss, making him and the commissioner of public safety the only two people between Joe and the governor. The VBI was a quirky entity, having resulted from a typically political cocktail of hysteria, heedless speed, and a pinch of spite. One motivator behind Gail’s advisor’s thinking the governor’s trooper/chauffeur might want to dish dirt on the boss was that many in the state police had interpreted VBI’s birth as a direct slap in the face.

  That very sensitivity was one of Allard’s concerns when he entered Joe’s office in Brattleboro the next day.

  “The Colonel’s curious about the Mary Fish case,” Bill announced after he’d settled into Joe’s guest chair, a fresh cup of coffee in hand.

  “Ain’t we all,” Joe quipped. “What’s Neal want to know?”

  Neal Kirkland was the colonel in charge of the state police, an old school warrior not well disposed to his troopers taking a backseat to anybody.

  “The way he heard it, we might’ve hip-checked his boy off the stage.”

  “Dave Nelson?” Joe asked, genuinely surprised. “He seemed pretty grateful at the time, and I think we’re on solid ground claiming it’s a homicide.”

  Bill hastened to finish the sip he’d begun. “No, no. Not Nelson. It’s whoever he reported to, or maybe whoever that guy reported to. You know the routine. By the time it reached Kirkland, we’d ripped them off, kicked sand on Nelson’s shoes, and called him a sissy.”

  Joe sighed. “I went through channels. If they wanted to stop us, they had the opportunity. You came all the way down here to tell me this?”

  Allard grimaced. “My sister’s getting a divorce. She lives in Green-field, so I thought I’d drop by and hear her out. You and I both know how this works, Joe—the supervisor gives his stamp of approval to you, and then bitches to his boss that he didn’t have a choice and took a bullet to keep the peace. It’s bullshit, but Neal talked to me, which means I had to talk to you, and that’s that.”

  He took another swallow before adding, as Joe suspected he would, “Except for now, we have what’s looking like a serial killer. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Joe admitted reluctantly. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to use that phrase, though.”

  “Don’t you have three murders, all by the same perp?”

  Joe sat back and scratched his temple, feeling his own frustration rising. “Maybe. What we’ve got is two homicides and one death that stinks to high heaven. You’ve read everything I sent you so far, right?”

  “Yeah,” Allard conceded. “All the way to last night’s update. You mentioned bringing in a consultant for the high-end forensic stuff. Dave Hawke can’t handle that?”

  Ah, Joe thought, the crux of the visit. “Nope—too expensive and too technical. Plus, if this Eric Marine he mentioned takes the bait, most of the expense will probably go away, absorbed by the pursuit of some greater scientific good.”

  Bill stared at him balefully.

  “Okay,” Joe admitted, “we’ve got pretty much squat right now. A few drops of blood, some evidence that may or may not have a little DNA on it, and a growing bunch of interviews leading nowhere fast.

  We need a break, Bill, and it would be nice to get it before somebody else ends up dead and the newsboys connect the dots.”

  “Ah,” Allard said, as if struck by an old lingering memory.

  “They been pounding on your door, too?” Joe asked.

  “Too? Who’s been after you?”

  “Just Katz,” Joe conceded. “The Burlington TV crew was at the Doreen scene, and they’ve made a few calls that Lester and Sam handled. But Stanley’s the only one to have gotten through to me. It’s all been about the one case, so far, but it won’t be long before something leaks out, which would make it really nice to have something to say.”

  “And what about that one pure, straightforward murder?” Allard asked. “I mean the old-fashioned stuff—interviews, surveillance, document checks, alibis, and the rest? Anything at all?”

  “That’s what I meant by the interviews going nowhere fast,” Joe told him. “We like Chuck McNaughton for something dirty, in part because we think he’s a creep, but he’s got a solid alibi. Lester’s theory is that he could’ve hired a hit, which is possible, but we don’t have a motive. He and Doreen don’t appear to have had a thing going; it doesn’t look like she was blackmailing him or about to squeal to the cops; for that matter, we’ve got nothing
saying he was cooking the books or doing anything she could’ve squealed about. His biggest transgression so far would be interesting only to his wife’s divorce lawyer, assuming she had one.

  “Plus,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “if he did hire a hit man to whack Doreen, then it’s looking like he used him to kill Mary Fish and Bob Clarke, too. Why do that? To throw us off? Seems a stretch.”

  “And Doreen’s mother’s death right after is still looking like a straight suicide?”

  “Yeah, although I will admit it brings up a small detail I can’t get out of my head.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I didn’t put it in any report to you,” Joe admitted. “But I was struck by how two of these cases seemed to hark back to the dead person’s past history—Doreen’s rape by her father and Bob’s grandfather dying drunk at the wheel of a car.”

  “ ’Specially since Doreen wasn’t raped this time, and nor was Bob drunk,” Bill filled in.

  “But that’s my point. I think Margaret Agostini may have killed herself not just because her daughter was murdered, but because she’d been told that Dory had been raped, too. But it’s just a hunch—there’s nothing to go with it.”

  Allard rose, placed his partially empty mug on the counter alongside the coffeemaker, and headed to where he’d hung his coat by the door.

  “I’m sorry, Joe. I should know better than to meddle. You’ve clearly got this as surrounded as possible right now. I’ll get out of your hair so my sister can give me a snoot full of real drama.”

  “Not a problem,” Joe assured him. “I’ll let you know what we find out.”

  Bill settled his coat on his shoulders and gave him a wistful smile. “I should’ve taken retirement when they offered it, right?”

  But Joe shook his head. “Not from where I’m sitting.”

  Willy pulled the car close enough to the snowbank to allow him to get out and keep the car out of any traffic. “Goddamned road crews. In New York at least they know how to keep the streets clear.”

  Sam stared at him. “In New York? What the hell’re you doing running New York up the flagpole? You’re the one who keeps saying what a dump that place is, including the snow removal. You hate New York. Plus, it’s warming up; half the snow’s gone already.”