Open Season Read online

  “I’ll be a little angry if you break that, you know. You’re only here because I was nice enough to let you in. I’ll get someone in to fix that later.”

  I found what I was looking for and worked it loose. It was a paper clip, bent over to form a bumper between the two ends of the curtain mechanism. I pulled the cord again and the gap disappeared.

  “I’ve got work to do. Are you finished here?”

  I leaned against the wall, twirling the paper clip between my fingers. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “Not quite. Do you have a proprietary interest in this?” I stopped the twirling and held it up before him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is this yours?”

  He let out a short laugh. “What do you mean? You just found it there. It can’t be mine.”

  “Unless you put it there to keep the curtains apart.” He didn’t answer.

  “Is that what you did?”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s a simple thing to verify if the tenants of this particular apartment have always been attractive young single women, at least while you’ve been here.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You want me to find out?”

  He backtracked. “Even if it was—so what?”

  “You’re a peeper, Mr. Boyers.”

  “That’s a lie. You can’t prove that.” His face was no picture of righteous indignation. He looked more like an actor mouthing lines without meaning.

  “Your bosses won’t ask for proof if I give them a call about you. Nor will your wife, for that matter. I am a cop, after all.”

  He stared at me; I watched him. I thought I’d let him stew a little just for the hell of it. He finally sat down on the edge of the bed. “What are you going to do?”

  “Do you admit to being a peeper?” He nodded.

  “Answer me.”

  “Yes.” The voice was a whisper. “For how long?”

  “A long time.”

  “Are there other apartments, or is this one it?”

  “This is it. It’s the only one with a window like that.”

  “So what’s your preference? When they’re taking showers? Going to bed? Making love? What is it?”

  He covered his face with his hands. His glasses fell off and bounced on the rug. “Come on, Mr. Boyers, let’s not drag this out.”

  “I watched whenever I could. If they kept to a routine, it made it easier.”

  “Did you watch Kimberly Harris?”

  “Yes. I watched them all.”

  “On the night she was killed?”

  “No. My wife wasn’t well that week, so I didn’t go out.”

  “What can you tell me about her?”

  He took his hands away and looked up at me, confused. “What do you mean?”

  “You spent hours studying a woman dress and undress, bathe herself, go to the bathroom, put on a nightgown. Surely you formed an opinion about her. What kind of woman do you think she was?”

  He picked his glasses back up and slowly put them on, meditatively. “She was the most beautiful. She knew it, too. The one who’s in here now, she’s just a grown up high-school girl—pretty, but normal. Kimberly was special. Watching her was like watching a dirty movie almost. She caressed herself—when she showered, when she put on baby powder. She wore dainty things underneath that no one else could appreciate, lace panties, sheer nightgowns. When she went to bed, it was as if she was expecting someone, she was so sexy, but no one ever came—they weren’t supposed to. She did all those things for herself. She was the only one I ever watched who masturbated.

  “Lying on the bed… It was something she prepared for, sometimes oiling herself. Sex was like some kind of special thing with her, something private she did for herself. She was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”

  “But always alone.”

  He turned his head toward me as if I’d just stepped into the room. “Yes. I never saw her with anyone.” He sighed deeply and closed his eyes for a moment. “So what happens now?”

  “Do you have any vacancies?”

  “A couple.”

  “Tell what’s-her-name here that you need to work on the apartment—something major enough that she has to move to another unit permanently. Then have this window bricked up or have frosted blocks put in. It also wouldn’t hurt if you got a little counseling. What you do for a pastime isn’t only sick, it could get you into some real trouble.”

  He stood up. I noticed he was shaking slightly. “And that’s it? You’re not going to tell anyone?”

  “Not this time. But you better not give me any reason to regret it. If you ever get caught, I’ll make damn sure you end up in very hot water. You’re in my debt. Don’t forget it.”

  I left him with a look of stunned disbelief on his face.

  11

  I DROVE INTO THE DUNKIN' DONUTS parking lot before showing up at the office. Dunkin’ Donuts is not my usual breakfast fare, but I was feeling flattened enough that a high-voltage sugar fix seemed the only way to go. It never works, of course—it just makes your system do back flips, especially on top of an aspirin appetizer. But at this point the mere act of chewing was the only way I had of showing the world I was still awake, or alive. I bought three cream-filled twists and a coffee. Back flips or not, they tasted great going down.

  As things turned out, I shouldn’t have worried about staying awake. As soon as I walked in, Max handed me a note from Murphy. It said, “Right now.” She’d read it too, of course, so instead of waving as usual, she blew me a kiss. Small comfort.

  Murphy was typing when I showed up at his door. It was not something he did with any skill or grace and was guaranteed to make a bad mood worse. “Sit down.”

  I sat. He picked up the phone, dialed an interoffice number, said, “he’s here,” and threw a newspaper across the room into my lap. “Have a read.”

  The front page headline had the wholesome flavor of a big city tabloid: MASKED MAN ON RAMPAGE. Maybe some of the old rural values were indeed going by the wayside. POLICE BAFFLED BY SERIES OF ATTACKS. The byline, no surprise, was Stanley Katz.

  The Reformer has uncovered a link between several recent but seemingly unconnected crimes in Brattleboro, beginning with the shotgun killing of Mr. James Phillips by Mrs. Thelma Reitz, both of Brattleboro, reported in this paper two days ago. Over the last 48 hours, several crimes have been committed involving the same unidentified man wearing a ski mask. According to the Reformer’s anonymous sources, one case each of animal theft, obscene telephoning, assault on a police officer, car theft, and sexual assault have been connected to the same masked man who arranged the fatal meeting between Phillips and Reitz at Reitz’s home. At this point, the police are at a loss to explain the motives of the mysterious man.

  These first two breathless paragraphs were followed by a more or less accurate account of each crime. The names of Reitz and Phillips were spread all over, as was the now-miserable John Woll, but Wodiska was missing and the Stiller-and-Rodriguez episode was alluded to only vaguely, culled no doubt from secondary sources. It seemed my efforts to tiptoe around Harris had worked so far—the jury connection was not mentioned.

  I tossed the paper back onto Murphy’s desk. “I can’t believe he dragged in dog theft. That’s tacky.”

  Frank’s eyes narrowed, but whatever he had to say was interrupted by Chief Brandt walking in. Not that Brandt said anything at first. He merely parked himself on a two-drawer filing cabinet and pulled out his pipe. We kept quiet.

  Tony Brandt was a dead ringer for an Ivy League dean. He was thin, bespectacled, and tweedy, with a long nose, soft gray eyes, and thinning hair. He wore elbow patches on his jackets, maintained a shine on the seat of his slightly wrinkled wool slacks, and had a fondness for conservatively colored argyle socks.

  That, lucky for us, was where the similarity stopped. For this, despite his looks, was no high-thinking theoretician. He was a lifelong cop, trained in the streets of Keene, New Hampshire,
and Boston and a member of our force for the past eighteen years. He’d been chief for eight. Married and with three kids, he could still be found wandering the streets late at night, picking up tips, keeping in touch with informants, compulsively being a cop.

  Despite this, he was not one of the boys, and his austerity was the single biggest reason he held the position he did among his men. In the constant struggle between labor and management, no different on a police force than in a car factory, he’d maintained his balance between gaining their respect and winning their support. Whenever he slapped you down, you knew you were to blame.

  He finished loading his pipe, lit it and said in a pleasant voice, “So, what the hell is going on?”

  Murphy’s face reddened. This was not what he wanted to hear a few months shy of retirement. “We did what we could to keep a lid on all this.”

  Brandt shook his head. “Most of what’s in there,” he pointed at the newspaper, “is either public-record stuff or the byproduct of bull sessions. Stan has a lot of friends around here. What I want to know is what’s not in the article—and what hasn’t been in the daily reports. I also want to know how it ties in with this.” He pulled a piece of computer printout from his pocket and handed it to Murphy.

  Murphy looked at it and scowled. “That was supposed to go to me.”

  “I thought so. That’s why I called this little meeting.”

  “Could you guys bring me in on this?” I asked.

  Murphy waved the printout. “This is the FBI report on your bug. They say, to quote them, ‘it’s highly sophisticated but slightly out-of-date military ordnance.’ Judging from the speed of their response, I’d say they’d love to know where we got it. It sounds like it’s hot.”

  Brandt blew out a large cloud of smoke. “Frank and I attended the same FBI course a few years back. It seems we made the same friend in Philip Danvers, who heads one of their research branches. I guess we both figured he’d be a handy man to know. Anyway, obviously he confused the goose with the gander and sent me the results of Frank’s request. So, what’s up? Between the local paper and the FBI, I smell a rat, and I sure as hell know you two are sitting on it.”

  Frank sighed. “Joe’s tied the ski mask attacks to the Kimberly Harris murder. All the cases Stan mentioned involve ex-jury members.”

  Brandt’s eyebrows rose. I took over. “At first, I thought it might be a vengeance thing, maybe coordinated by Bill Davis or done by a buddy of his without his knowledge. Or maybe someone going after one juror and tying in the others to screw us up. Or even an insurance scam or a huge coincidence. On the face of it, the vengeance angle’s the best of the bunch, except that besides Phillips, none of the jurors has been seriously nailed; even the attack on Stiller was mostly theatrical, as if to bring attention. So that made me think of something else, which is that Ski Mask wants us to reopen the Harris investigation and find out that Davis didn’t kill her. Whatever it is, Frank and I figured we better keep the cork on any Harris angle until we could prove something.”

  Murphy rubbed his eyes with his palms, but Brandt just sat there, as impassive as before. “So maybe Davis didn’t kill her?”

  “He might have, but there’s room for doubt. We may have jumped a little fast.”

  “Run it down.”

  “I don’t have much right now, except for a gut feeling that procedure was a bit rushed on this one.”

  “What’s that mean?” Murphy demanded.

  “I interviewed the Huntington Arms manager this morning. I found out he’s a peeper whose biggest kick so far was Kimberly Harris. Apparently, she performed the daily duties common to us all with unusual flair.”

  “Did we ever question him?” Brandt asked Murphy.

  Frank pulled a poker face. I knew this was chewing at him, and I didn’t enjoy seeing it. “I don’t remember. Maybe Kunkle did and ruled him out on the spot. It would be in the case file.”

  That was a lateral pass to me, which I deigned to accept. “It might be, but again, for discretion’s sake, we decided not to open the file just yet.” Brandt nodded. “I might add, though, that the confession I got from the manager sounded brand-new to me. It was not something he’d already told another cop.”

  The chief relit his pipe. “What else?”

  “I also visited Dr. Hillstrom yesterday afternoon in Burlington.” I noticed Frank’s surprised look. “She’s tickled pink someone is digging into this again. She also feels things were pushed a little too hard and were a little too easy.”

  “She was part of it.” Frank said.

  “She admits that, and she’s not saying Davis is innocent. She just feels that when circumstances stood against him, they were taken at face value instead of being analyzed more carefully. His blood type, for example, is incredibly common, and yet that’s what the prosecution used to connect him to the semen. Her point is that if we really chased down that comparison, the semen and the blood type might no longer match.”

  “Why didn’t we do that?” Again, the question was to Murphy.

  “We never do, you know that. You were there, front and center. We follow standard guidelines. The ME does her routine, the State’s Attorney does his, and we do ours. That’s what happened. If there was a screwup, it’s the system’s fault, not ours. I mean, hell, what do we know about homicide anyhow? We all felt great about nailing Davis, and there was nobody kicking sand in our faces then. This is all Monday-morning quarterbacking.”

  There was silence in the room. Things had become personal, and we all knew it. We also knew Frank was right. I hadn’t been involved in the investigation, but I had been a cheerleader all the way. At the time, the case had seemed miraculously clean and straight, and we had all shared in a lot of self-congratulatory backslapping.

  Brandt cleared his throat. “So what have you done? Is Hillstrom doing the tests?”

  “She can’t. She doesn’t know how. She did recommend a guy outside New Haven who does this stuff all the time.”

  “All right. Aside from the blood tests and the manager, what else have you got?”

  “An interesting comment Hillstrom made about the location of the semen. It seems it was found in Harris’s mouth and pubic hair, but not in the vagina, indicating that it could have been placed on the body artificially.”

  “Or that Davis jacked off on her. We’re not talking about two people making love, you know,” Frank muttered.

  Brandt nodded. “I agree that one’s thin. Besides, even if it was placed, Davis could have done the placing. Anything else?”

  “Yes. She thinks the scratching and the lamp together make for evidence overkill—she doubts Harris could have done both. Also, she said that while she never got a chance to examine Davis physically herself, she did call Memorial to talk to the emergency staff that treated him. Apparently that’s a routine part of her own investigation. The impression she got was that the blow he received was a humdinger—definitely enough to knock him out. If that’s true, it runs in the face of the theory that Harris clubbed him with the lamp just before he strangled her.”

  “But presumably that’s an educated guess—different heads having different tolerances for abuse, right?”

  I conceded the point.

  Brandt rubbed the side of his nose with his finger and thought a bit. “Is that it?”

  “We have a very motivated man in a ski mask.”

  “Jesus,” Murphy exploded, too loud in a too-small room. “You say that son of a bitch is turning this department upside down just because he wants the case reopened. Where the fuck did you get that, Joe? I mean, who is this guy? What’s his angle? This whole thing might have nothing to do with Kimberly Harris, did you ever think of that? We have every plainclothes we’ve got digging on this, plus a few uniforms; there’s all sorts of stuff they might come up with. Why are you obsessed with some cockamamie rigmarole that’ll only end up making us look like a bunch of grade-A morons?”

  “Because I’m getting some help from the outside. Last night,
somebody tried to kill me, and Ski Mask pulled my fat from the fire.”

  It was a little over-dramatic, but it made a nice point. It also stopped Murphy in his tracks. His whole demeanor changed. “What the hell happened? Why didn’t you report it?”

  “Nothing to report. Somebody turned on the gas in my apartment after I went to bed, and Ski Mask dragged me out just in time. I spent the rest of the night sleeping it off on the landing—almost froze my butt off. But that was it. I have no better description of Ski Mask than what we’ve already got and I have no idea who tried to bump me off. Ski Mask might know, because he said they would keep at it, and that they would probably rig it to look like an accident.”

  Brandt shook his head. “I doubt that. They have to assume you’ve reported the attempt. If you died accidentally now, we’d be suspicious anyhow, so they no longer have any real reason to be discreet.”

  “That’s a big comfort. He also said the key to this thing was Harris; that they were trying to cover it up and that Ski Mask and we had flushed them out enough that they were getting desperate.”

  Murphy slapped his hand on the table like a gavel. “Hold on here. You don’t actually swallow that, do you? Ski Mask saves boy wonder here from the bad guys in the nick of time so he can continue the investigation? Give me a break. How was Ski Mask in the right place at the right time? And if he was, why didn’t he tail the people who gassed your place and get his own answers? None of that makes sense. I think he gassed you and then saved your hide. That way, he looks good and we get more interested.”

  Brandt gave up fiddling with his pipe and put it in his pocket. “That does make sense, Joe.”

  I swallowed a surge of anger. They were right, and I’d been made a fool of again. “Maybe. The only thing I have against it is that I came pretty close to croaking. It was too fine a line for Ski Mask to rely on.”

  Murphy let out a groan, as I might have in his place. “I think you’re being snookered. He doesn’t need you alive. If you had died last night, that really would have gotten us going and he could have played on that. Either way, it was a no-lose play for him.” He shook the page of computer printout Brandt had received in the mail. “And even though he talked about Harris and you found this fancy bug, it doesn’t mean he was positive we’d even thought about the Harris case. For all we know, his only source of information is the newspaper and the whole purpose of his theatrics was to get the name Harris front and center in our minds.”