Red Herring Page 11

  Willy scowled at her. “Whatever.” He waved his hand at the remaining mounds of the stuff. “Ya gotta admit. This shit sucks.”

  Sammie merely shook her head. Willy hadn’t lived in New York in over twenty years, where he’d briefly been a cop. Moving to Vermont had amounted to a partial salvation, in fact, even though it hadn’t softened his attitude any.

  They were parked in the minute village of Westminster West, really a small cluster of buildings lining the curve of a road between Putney and Saxtons River. Known for its artists and left-leaning politics—regardless of whether either one truly represented the majority—West West, as it was colloquially known, was nevertheless as quaint as rural New England had to offer. It boasted the no-muss, no-fuss, archetypal gathering of church, library, and clapboarded Greek Revival homes that so caught the eye of those busloads of summer tourists. It also helped deflect the reality that trailer parks had as much to say about genuine New England as any place like this.

  “That the address?” Willy asked, pointing to a small house tethered to the road via a narrow, crooked path through the snow, as wide as a hand shovel’s blade, and now slathered with a layer of soft, slippery mud. The lights behind the ground floor’s windows cast a series of pleasant yellow rectangles upon the white patchy blanket covering the yard.

  “Michele Starr,” Sammie confirmed. A shadow passed before one of the windows. “Looks like somebody’s home.”

  They got out quietly, easing their doors shut out of long habit, and looked around the neighborhood. The village was tucked in for the night, the street empty and still, the smell of chimney smoke on the breeze, and the sense of the night air having enclosed the community like a star-packed celestial lid.

  “Goddamned cold,” Willy barely murmured, unimpressed, using his one good hand to gather his collar more tightly around his throat.

  They traveled the shoveled lane in single file, arbitrarily choosing the sucking mud over any mysteries beneath the recently rain-drenched snow to either side. A no-win set of options that Willy growled about the entire distance, his grumbling unnaturally loud in the surrounding silence. At the door, they listened carefully for a few moments, again out of habit, but heard little beyond what sounded like a muted radio program.

  Willy pressed the doorbell.

  A moment later a small, slim, older woman stood before them, a tentative smile on her face. “Yes?”

  Sam looked over the woman’s shoulder, enjoying the fresh smell of recent cooking that hit her face. An old, slow-moving cat crossed the hallway in the distance without a glance in their direction.

  “Are you Michele Starr?” Willy asked.

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  They both displayed their credentials. “I’m William Kunkle and this is Samantha Martens, of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation,” he intoned. “We’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”

  “My goodness,” she said, without opening the door any wider. “What about?”

  Sam recognized the gentle paranoia of someone whose age put her in the 1960s as an adult in her twenties. “It’s okay, Ms. Starr. We’re not after you for anything. We think you once knew Doreen Ferenc, and we wanted to know a little more about that.”

  Michele Starr remained looking receptive, although the mention of Doreen’s name clearly made an impact, but the door remained where it was, despite the cold rushing in, and her next questions were hardly inviting.

  “Why? And how did you find me?”

  Willy had reached his limit—rarely a huge leap. “Lady,” he said, “you’re not in trouble and we’re freezing our asses off. Doreen’s been murdered and we need help. We found you ’cause that’s what we do. It’s that simple. You gonna let us in or not?”

  The expression changed to shock, as if Willy had channeled Michele’s mother in reminding her to tend to her manners. The door swung back at last and their small host ushered them in.

  “I am so sorry. We’re told so often to be careful nowadays, and this horrible thing about Doreen . . .”

  They both filed in and stood slightly hunched in the hallway, letting the heat work its way inside their clothing.

  “It’s okay,” Sam said. “Totally understandable.”

  After that, the social niceties fell into place by rote. Coats were hung up, hot drinks were offered and the radio turned off, the cat was introduced to little effect, and they all ended up seated around a woodstove with glass doors, enjoying the source of the home’s warmth.

  “Feeling better?” Starr asked Willy pointedly as he took a sip from his cup of coffee.

  “Lots,” Sam answered quickly, not trusting him to be civil yet. “Thanks so much for understanding. It’s sometimes a quirky job and we catch people by surprise without meaning to. I am sorry.”

  The woman was working hard to maintain appearances. “It’s nice to have unexpected company now and then, especially when it turns out I don’t have to worry.”

  “Don’t have any skeletons in the closet?” Willy asked.

  “The price of a boring life,” she told him.

  Sam was looking around the living room, noticing an unusual number of framed black-and-white photographs, not unlike what they’d seen at Doreen’s house.

  “You read about Doreen in the papers?” she asked.

  Michele nodded mournfully, her voice indicating a crack in her politesse. “Yes. Poor girl. I actually knew her once, a long time ago.”

  “At Ethan Allen Academy?”

  Her eyebrows rose. “You have been checking up on me. Yes, during one of the summer sessions they used to host. I taught photography at the school and it was a good way for me to bridge the summer break. I don’t have any family, didn’t have a summer home, and I needed the money. It worked for everyone. Dory was one of my students.”

  “Did you also know Mary Fish?” Willy asked.

  There, Starr’s response was spontaneous and happier. She smiled broadly and her eyes softened. “Oh, yes. Mary was like the Queen of the Nile there—all things to all people. One of the nicest, most loving women I’ve ever known.”

  “And a boy named Chuck McNaughton?” Sammie added. “He was a student there.”

  There the older woman frowned. “Of mine?”

  “We know he attended the school.”

  She shook her head. “The art department was sort of cut off from the general population. English teachers got to meet everyone, but art was an elective. I didn’t know a lot of the kids who attended all four years.”

  Willy pursed his lips. Lester’s discovery earlier in the day that Dory and Chuck had both been at Mary Fish’s school for a brief moment had seemed like just the break they were craving.

  “Funny you should mention English,” Sam now said. “Because McNaughton was at the school taking remedial English, the same summer that you and Doreen were there.”

  Starr’s only response was to look at them wonderingly, which made Willy think that she was either truly clueless or among the best liars he’d ever known. But his gut told him the latter was wishful thinking.

  Still, there was something about her that he couldn’t ignore—something guarded that they hadn’t squarely hit.

  He tried a different approach, using her earlier distrust and sadness. “Michele,” he asked, “let me tell you how we do this. We spend days looking into people’s lives, layer by layer, figuring out what they were doing when and who with. It’s only after we’re finished that we finally conduct the interview. You’re a smart woman. You can figure out why we do it that way.”

  “I didn’t know the McNaughton boy,” she insisted. “I swear. I have no reason to lie about that.”

  Sammie saw her own opportunity to maneuver. “Mary is dead, too, Michele. She was found hanging by the neck a few days ago.”

  Michele sat back in her chair as if pushed by a large hand, her face drained and her mouth open. “What? Mary? Oh, my God.”

  She ducked her head, covered her face, and began sobbing.<
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  Sammie rolled her eyes in frustration, but Willy followed up quickly. “Michele,” he pressed, handing her the napkin she’d given him with his coffee. “Talk to us. What’s going on?”

  She raised her face to answer. “I was in love with Dory, but she wasn’t interested. Mary was the only reason I didn’t lose my mind and my job, both.”

  “Dory was gay?” Sammie blurted.

  “No,” Michele wailed. “That was the problem. I didn’t know what she was, but I loved her anyhow. She was only in her mid-twenties; she didn’t seem to have anyone in her life. In those days, everything was perception and guesswork; it’s not like now, when you can just ask. It was subtler, more of a courtship, and I thought I was making a connection. But when I took the next step, she slammed the door in my face. I completely fell apart.”

  “And that’s when Mary showed up,” Willy suggested.

  “She knew about me,” Michele admitted. “All of us tended to know about each other; there were signs only we recognized. But she was older and committed to Elise, and she was incredibly discreet in any case, because of her position. Still, she sought me out, and gave me comfort, and by doing that, she saved my life.”

  She wiped at her face ineffectively, still sobbing. “I can’t believe she’s dead. And she hanged herself? Why?”

  “We don’t know,” Willy said blandly.

  “What happened after Dory turned you down?” Sam asked.

  Michele took a deep breath and straightened in her seat. “Nothing. She left. Most of the summer had gone by anyhow. I never heard from her again, or even about her until I read the papers.” She paused and shook her head. “And now poor Mary. What’s Elise going to do? Mary was her life.”

  Both detectives ignored that question.

  “In your conversations with Doreen,” Sammie asked after a pause, “when you were getting to know each other, did she ever mention that her boss had a son at the school?”

  “McNaughton was her boss’s son?”

  That clearly answered the question.

  The conversation wound down from there. Sam and Willy took a couple of more halfhearted stabs at the subject, but what had seemed so full of potential hours ago now seemed to have dissolved into simply another example of Vermont’s uniquely sparse population commingling as to defy all likelihood. It was no cliché that up here, far from the urban mob, almost everyone did in fact know everyone else.

  Except for where it might have helped the case.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Eric Marine was a white-haired, bespectacled man with a face whose every feature mirrored the motion of his mouth. When he smiled, everything lifted with happiness, and when he frowned, it all sagged with disappointment. The man’s innate expressiveness, and his habit of reacting to everything said to him, led to an ever-shifting facial landscape that Joe, for one, couldn’t stop watching.

  Fortunately, Marine was looking only at Joe’s companion. “David Hawke,” he was saying, shaking the latter’s hand. “How wonderful. Such excellent papers—informative, original, even challenging sometimes.” He suddenly took in Joe. “You are very fortunate. Dr. Hawke and his team were among the early ones to grasp the significance of DNA work—extraordinary, given the small size of your state.” His other hand suddenly shot up to his forehead as he blurted, “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Joe said.

  They were standing in the lobby of Burlington’s Hilton Hotel, just across Battery Street from a sweeping view of Lake Champlain, whose iron-gray surface was flecked with whitecaps. Far in the distance, crowned by a solid plane of cold, bruised sky, the razor-sharp outline of New York’s Adirondack Mountains stretched out like an arrested tidal wave of snow-frosted rock—as dark and disturbingly ominous as the smaller, more benign Green Mountains to the east were rounded, gentler, and more inviting.

  “Dr. Hillstrom was telling me that you two gentlemen were interested in the forensic capabilities of BNL,” Marine said brightly, not pausing to add, “Of course, as you might have gathered from my talk at this conference, this is an area of some interest to me. I have been thinking for quite a while what a shame it is that our life sciences and especially our NSLS and CFN technologies have been so rarely considered as potential resources.” He laughed and held up a finger for emphasis. “Not that I don’t recognize the standard barrier, which is money, as always.”

  He walked away suddenly, forcing them to follow him to a small cluster of comfortable armchairs, grouped out of the way near a gigantic window facing the view. Joe noticed that David was smiling broadly, clearly in his element. For his part, Joe had only deciphered that BNL stood for Brookhaven National Laboratory. This was going to be a challenging conversation.

  Marine happily plopped into one of the chairs and sighed. “You people live in the most beautiful part of the country. The lab is located in a very pretty setting, too. Don’t get me wrong. Five thousand acres of fields and forest.” He laughed again abruptly. “And lots and lots of wild turkeys, not all of them employees.”

  Joe and David joined in politely, making Marine wave dismissively. “I know, I know. Bad joke. No need for flattery. My wife already tells me what a bore I can be. Still, it is so nice to get out and see another part of the world.”

  He changed gears and slapped his hands on the arms of his easy chair. “Okay, enough of that. You gentlemen have a problem, and I am wasting your time.”

  He stared at them both expectantly.

  Joe was the first to jump in. “Dr. Marine, we have . . .”

  “Eric,” the scientist interrupted.

  Joe smiled. “Right. Thanks, and please call us Joe and David. Eric, we have three homicides, two of them not known as such by anyone but us so far . . .”

  “Why?” Marine interrupted again.

  Joe thought fast to figure out what he meant. “Because one was disguised by the killer as a suicide, and the other as a car crash involving alcohol.”

  He paused. Marine nodded, smiling widely. “And all three were conducted by the same person? How intriguing.”

  “The evidence suggests it,” Joe agreed cautiously. “But that’s one big reason we’re knocking on your door. As you know, whenever we’re lucky enough to get a picture of a bad guy, or a fingerprint or a DNA sample, we always have to cross our fingers that somebody or some database will give us a match. So far, even though we have a pretty decent collection of samples, we’ve gotten no matches.”

  Hawke cleared his throat to contribute, but Marine stalled him with a raised index finger. “Hold on, David. I’d like to hear Joe’s wording first. It’s often useful to build from the layman’s view upward.”

  Joe laughed awkwardly. “Well, you’ll get what you’re paying for. Okay, as of this morning, after David delivered his latest from the third killing, we have a collection of three carefully placed blood deposits, two male, one female, all laced with anticoagulant . . .”

  “Ah,” Marine exclaimed. “Beverly told me about these, but the findings hadn’t come in for the third. So it’s looking like a calling card, too.”

  “Right,” Joe agreed, relieved that Hillstrom had done some groundwork. “We don’t know how or why, but more than anything, they connect all three cases, like three different paintings all bearing the same signature. And we also have these.”

  He reached into his pocket and extracted a stapled sheaf of paper, which he handed to the Brookhaven biologist. It was a documented listing he and David had prepared earlier of everything from Doreen’s sliced nightgown and bloodstained underwear, through Mary’s electric cord and supposed suicide note, to Bob’s truck bumper and empty Scotch bottle, along with the three mysterious blood drops and all of Hillstrom’s autopsy findings.

  Marine took his time with the pages, nodding occasionally and muttering things neither of his companions could overhear. Eventually, he placed the pack on his knee and addressed David Hawke.

  “And you can do what with all this?”

  “The standard entry a
nalyses,” Hawke replied. “Trace, DNA, and biological sampling for starters. We can also farm out things like the touch-DNA we hope may be adhering to the electrical wire used in the hanging. But I know our limitations, and I’m pretty sure that what we have so far is what we’ll end up with in the long run. I was crossing my fingers that with your resources, you could save us a lot of time and money and give all or some of this the best shot possible, instead of our nibbling away at it until we have nothing left to test.”

  “This is a hugely important case to us, Eric,” Joe picked up. “In the rest of the country, a stranger killing three apparently unrelated people is third-page news. In Vermont, if word got out, it would spread like a wildfire and the politicians would go nuts. Roughly speaking, we get ten to twelve homicides a year here, total. We really need to give this everything we can.”

  Marine pressed his lips together briefly before responding. “I will see what I can do. Speaking for myself, I can run those three unknown blood samples through several tests not available to David, and I won’t have your constraints. Just to confirm, you are following a purely investigative route, is that correct?”

  Both men nodded in unison.

  “That’s perfect. Some cutting-edge research into genetic predictors of externally visible characteristics may come in handy here. Traits like ethnic origin and hair and eye color are starting to surface with a higher and higher degree of predictability. This is a subject of interest I’ve been exploring and promoting for years.”

  “With all that in mind,” David cautioned, “we will have to follow some basic rules of evidence. Someone from Joe’s office will accompany or at least account for the whereabouts of whatever you take at all times, and my office will supply you with known control samples to be subjected to the same tests you administer to the actual ones. That way, down the line, nobody can claim that any results mysteriously appeared just because of your process.”