Presumption of Guilt Read online

  One of the security men indicated the man in the hard hat. “This is Nelson Smith. He was breaking up the slab for removal when he found…” He paused, groping for a description, and finished lamely with, “what he found.”

  “I stopped for lunch,” Smith volunteered, “and saw the sun reflecting off the white bone. I couldn’t figure it out, first. Gave me a real shock.”

  “So you saw nothing while you were working the jackhammer?” Sam asked as Joe drifted off toward the tool itself, which was lying still and quiet at the edge of the broken field.

  “No. It was just dumb luck that I stopped when I did.” Smith paused before adding, “I woulda stabbed right through it if I’d kept going.”

  Joe crouched low, bringing his eyes to within a few inches of everyone’s topic of interest.

  Sam joined him from the other side. “Damn,” she said quietly. “What d’you think?”

  Wearing a latex glove, Joe reached out and shifted a small chunk of material that was leaning against the ring finger, revealing a bony mate still half encased in untouched concrete. It vaguely looked like a dollhouse-sized version of a dinosaur dig.

  “If I were a betting man,” he said, “I’d say these two are attached to an impressively well-preserved skeleton.”

  They both looked up as Jim Matthews joined them, squatting down to their level. “So?”

  Joe tapped gently on the one fully revealed finger. “I was just telling Sam that this is probably the tip of the iceberg. That’s a guess, of course—could be these two fingers’re all there is. Don’t know why, though. If I’d wanted to get rid of a body when all this was going up, this place would’ve seemed like a gift from heaven.”

  Matthews shook his head. “Christ. So you know, both the state’s attorney and our vice president in charge of operations are here, looking to be briefed.”

  “I’ll get to them in a second,” Joe said, unhappy to be facing such conversations so early on.

  “When was the slab put in?” Sam asked.

  Jim looked at her, his expression showing a preference for facts over politics. “Nineteen seventy. I have the exact date in my office. I looked it up. They documented everything as it went in, almost brick by brick—not that they used bricks, come to think of it.”

  “Any changes since?” Joe asked. “Additions, repairs to the floor, anything?”

  “It was a metal warehouse,” Matthews said. “It went up, served its purpose, and they decided to take it down. As far as the records go, this floor’s been untouched for over forty years.” He paused before reflecting, “Wonder who this is.”

  Joe smiled grimly. “Unless we get lucky, I’d say somebody who’s going to keep us busy for a while.” He rose and said to Jim resignedly, “Better take me to the grand pooh-bahs.”

  They were waiting for him in a small security building built into the inner fence system. The interior consisted of a row of now silent, alarm-equipped, passkey-operated turnstiles, once designed to handle shift changes of hundreds of people in short order.

  The Windham County state’s attorney was a tall, slim, serious-faced woman with a thatch of close-cropped white hair and a fondness for low-heeled shoes and practical pantsuits. Her name was Janet Macklin, and Joe had heard her referred to variously as Jammin’ Janet, Manglin’ Macklin, or inevitably, Mack the Knife—presumably, all from people who’d come up short against her. While Joe dealt mostly with the AG’s office in his VBI capacity, he knew Janet Macklin and knew her to be sharp, tough, good in court, and supportive of law enforcement.

  The Vermont Yankee VP—Roger Goodhugh—he’d never met and didn’t know. VY had been sold some fifteen years earlier by its local birth parents to a Louisiana-based monolith named Entergy—to instantaneous scorn by activist opponents. Joe had always avoided the emotional turmoil around the plant’s virtues or flaws, but could see that in the person of Roger Goodhugh, the “anti’s” had an easy target to parody. Through no fault of his own, he was double-chinned, narrow-shouldered, and wide in the hips. And as Goodhugh extended a predictably flaccid, damp hand and spoke his greeting, Joe also picked up a discernibly thick southern accent. It almost seemed unfair, which immediately made Joe think kindly of him—and made him wonder if some corporate Machiavelli hadn’t worked hard to put Goodhugh precisely where he was for precisely the effect he unconsciously made.

  Joe nodded to both of them as part of the formalities. “Janet. Mr. Goodhugh. My colleague, Special Agent Samantha Martens. As you can imagine, we don’t have much to tell you yet.”

  “Nevertheless,” Macklin said quickly, “thanks for calling so fast,” cutting off Goodhugh’s soft-spoken, “Call me Roger.”

  “No problem,” Joe told her. “Given how the place attracts attention, I figured you’d want an early heads-up.”

  He looked at Goodhugh. “And thanks for all the help we’ve been given. Appreciate your adapting the security routine for our convenience.”

  “Of course,” Goodhugh said with an anemic smile. “Do you have any idea how quickly you’ll be done?”

  “We’ve barely arrived. It’ll be an excavation, like for an archeological dig. Those are not fast-moving, Mr. Goodhugh—Roger. I do have a related question for you, though.”

  “Of course.”

  “Actually, it applies to all of us. How do you want to handle the press? Word gets out about a dead body at Vermont Yankee, all sorts of fireworks could blow up if we don’t plan ahead.”

  “You have to throw them something,” Macklin said bluntly, pointing out a window. “Right now, people are phoning and texting whatever they can make up.”

  Goodhugh surprised them with his response, suggesting that he might have been made vice president for some unexpected prowess. “From the little we know, it’s ancient history and unrelated to anything radiological.” He reached into his jacket pocket and presented them with copies of a single sheet of paper. “I had our PR people write this up. It refers to y’all as just ‘authorities,’ since I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting you, but I hope it’ll do the trick for the time being.”

  Joe, Sam, and Macklin quickly read the release and exchanged glances.

  “That’s fine with me,” Janet announced.

  Joe folded it up. “Vague, almost boring, and throwing it onto us, as promised. Nice, Roger. You’ve clearly had practice.”

  Goodhugh glanced at his feet. “More than you could imagine.”

  In a large urban area, with a police department of thousands, the process thereafter would have taken a few hours. But there weren’t many cops across Vermont, from the lowest town constable to the commissioner of public safety. As a result—and as Joe had implied to Roger Goodhugh—what was immediately set in motion took much longer to occur. By nightfall, although a tent had been rigged over their crime scene and the perimeter sealed to Jim Matthews’s standards, they were still reduced to waiting for other investigators and/or technicians to appear, including a forensic anthropologist and scientists from the state’s only official crime lab, in far-off Waterbury.

  Things were done professionally and effectively in this nation’s second least populated state, but their tempo was scaled to the locale’s reality. As people were too fond of saying, there was “real time,” and “Vermont time.”

  By the next day, however, everyone necessary was in place, and the wheels put into motion to free Nelson Smith’s discovery from its tomb.

  Also, Joe and Sammie had been joined by the two previously absent members of the local VBI squad—Lester Spinney and Willy Kunkle—both of whom had been out running other cases when this one came in.

  Spinney—absurdly tall and gangly—was a native-born transplant from the Vermont State Police, drawn to the VBI because of its small size and major crimes focus. Kunkle was equally striking, but for radically different reasons. Hailing from New York and NYPD-trained, he stood out because of his demeanor. Sammie’s romantic partner and the father of their young daughter, Emma, he was saddled with PTSD, a history of a
lcohol abuse, and a crippled left arm, which he kept—for the most part—pinned to his side by shoving his hand into his trouser pocket. Kunkle was irascible, opinionated, brusque, and intolerant; he was also one of the best cops Joe Gunther had ever worked with, which played well for Willy, who owed his continued employment to Joe’s steadily running interference against everyone from the governor on down—all of whom Willy had alienated at one time or another.

  “Can’t we rule it a suicide?” Willy asked now, looking down at the calcified finger with the ring, still trapped in place.

  Predictably, Lester laughed, Sam rolled her eyes, and Joe answered evenly, “Probably not, but I like the creative thinking.”

  Given that the next stage here would involve crime scene techs, the consultant anthropologist, and the precisely applied use of more jackhammers, chisels, and finally hand brushes and spatulas, Joe opted to lead his team out of the inner security fence, across the main entry road, to an administrative building housing the company’s media relations department. There they’d been told to expect documents and photographs detailing the construction of the same warehouse that was currently being dismantled.

  These were delivered by an efficient, pleasant, and professional young woman who met them at the door, escorted them down a hallway, and set them up in a conference room whose table was neatly stacked with file folders and a laptop computer.

  She waved a hand at the array as if making introductions. “I put out the computer because I thought you might want to see the old photographs on-screen. You can blow them up that way to see any details, and arrange them into separate folders as you go. Oh,” she added as an afterthought, pointing to a machine in the corner. “You can also print them out, if you want, or put them on a thumb drive if you have one. You know how to do that?”

  Joe spoke for them all. “I think we’ll figure it out. If not, we’ll send up a flare.”

  * * *

  It took a while to find their footing. The plant had taken years to construct, and the archives covered the progression from farmland to when the switch was thrown in 1972. Every aspect had been documented, from weld and pour inspections to a thousand general site photographs. Nevertheless, they reached their goal eventually: photos and documents detailing the pouring of their warehouse slab. In the end, they not only knew which firm had done the work, but the names of the mixer’s driver and the chute operator, as well. Disappointingly, none of the pictures portrayed the actual work in progress.

  “They could’ve taken a shot of the body being dumped, for Chrissake,” Willy grumbled. “The one interesting thing that happened, and they missed it.”

  “Probably because of this,” Lester said, holding up a single sheet of paper. “It’s an ‘unusual event’ report,” he explained. “A fire in the parking lot at the same time the slab was going in. There’s a reference to how all work was momentarily halted by the distraction.”

  “You think the pouring crew was pulled away so the body could be dumped?” Sam wondered.

  “By who?” Willy asked. “A third party or one of the pouring crew? Either one of them could’ve rigged the car fire to distract the other.”

  Joe indicated another report. “This is the investigation behind the vehicle fire. Not much to it. Just says, ‘engine fire,’ without explanation.”

  “It identify the owner?” Lester asked.

  “Yeah.” Joe paused to read, “William Neathawk. High iron guy, maybe. I remember when all this was happening. They used a bunch of Native Americans to put up the steel framing. That was common back in the day.”

  “I heard about that,” Willy added. “Totally fearless, to hear the stories.”

  “Well, whatever Neathawk was, or still is,” Sam said, “we’ll have to rule him out.”

  “Good luck with that,” Willy said under his breath.

  “Good luck with any of them,” Joe agreed. “Most folks working here were nomads, moving from job to job. It’s going to be a challenge, not just finding them, but even some of the companies that employed them. Vermont Yankee itself was sold in 2000 or so. Rounding up employee lists is going to be fun. We’ll have to see if they even bothered keeping tabs during construction. My guess is that lots of people just wandered off. Assuming our skeleton was even missed, he was probably lumped in among them.”

  He noticed Willy switching from one screen image of the slab pouring to another and back again—repeatedly—comparing the two. “You got something?”

  “Something moving.” Willy allowed them to see. “That lump there—the tarp. You can see what looks like some leftover rebar sticking out the end of it.” He tapped his finger on the screen for emphasis. “When I flip from one to the other, it flattens slightly—like something was moved from underneath.”

  “And the flap changes position,” Sam added. “Like it’s been shifted.”

  “It’s right beside where the body was found,” Lester pointed out. “Against the skirting.”

  Joe shrugged. “There wasn’t time during the car-fire distraction to do much more than flip the body onto the crisscrossed rebar and cover it with concrete.”

  Willy sounded peeved. “It means more than that. This whole thing had to’ve been done in two steps. Whoever did it moved the body under the tarp the night before. Nice catch.”

  Joe straightened and took them in. “So we go back in time and check what records they have for then.”

  “Did they have night watchmen?” Sammie asked.

  “Guess we’re about to find out.”

  * * *

  Back at the site, signs of progress were unmistakable. A shallow, semicircular dry moat, reaching down to the rebar, had appeared around the body, and the debris from within it painstakingly removed and sifted for anything such as a weapon, a bullet or casing, credit cards from a long-rotted-away wallet, or any other piece of evidence. So far, nothing had surfaced. As Joe had suspected, it seemed as if the body had been quickly tipped into the foundation site—as it might have been over the gunwale of a rowboat.

  “You get lucky searching the records?” Jim Matthews wanted to know.

  “Sort of,” Joe conceded. “The body may’ve been moved in two stages—onto the site the night before, hidden, and then here, presumably forever. Problem is, we just searched the watchman logs of the night before the pour, and nothing was noted.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning absolutely nothing,” Willy said from beside them.

  Joe answered the question. “Security was a Band-Aid, mostly to prevent theft or sabotage. You had a guy with a time clock, wandering around like a bicyclist in the Pentagon. Took him all night to make two turns—pretty much hopeless.”

  Of course, Willy had to add, “Or he was in on it, and moved the body himself. Rent-a-cops weren’t held to the high standards they are now.”

  Joe sighed inwardly as he sensed Matthews stiffen moments before walking away.

  “Nice,” Joe said in an undertone. “Very diplomatic.”

  “I thought so,” Willy responded.

  Joe followed Matthews to where he was pretending to be checking a subordinate’s clipboard entries.

  “Any media response so far?”

  The man’s reaction was professional, any response to Willy’s comment kept private. “Better than we’d hoped.” He pointed toward the entrance gate. “One truck and a couple of cars out there, but nothing like the old days. Probably helped that the press release stressed this happened before the plant even went live. Things’ll heat up, for sure, but so far, so good.”

  * * *

  Slowly, the crime scene techs broadened the moat until, at last, they were on their hands and knees, their Tyvek suits filthy, chipping away at the emerging corpse like oversized vultures trying to share a meal.

  The process was all the more exacting because of the anthropologist’s discovery that the wet concrete had been fine-grained and liquid enough to form an excellent mold of the body’s contours. This suggested that, although the rem
ains were now skeletal, the mold’s reverse impression might be detailed enough to help in identifying the body. As a result, the more relevant chunks holding the victim fast were as delicately cataloged and packaged as the bones themselves, for latex casting later.

  Even Kunkle was impressed by the careful unveiling’s end results. “Jesus. I’m half waiting for him to sit up.”

  Joe crouched near the exposed cranium, studying it as if seeking a whispered explanation. “I think you’re safe,” he said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Beverly Hillstrom was impressed, as well. “I’ve never seen a case quite like it.”

  For Joe, that was quite an admission, coming from not just the state’s chief medical examiner, but one with vast experience. A confession of surprise from Beverly—given her erudition—was a rarity few had witnessed.

  Joe, however, was among them. Over two decades, he’d earned her respect through his own dependable work ethic, and had recently graduated from colleague to romantic partner. That time—and now this new proximity—had allowed him insights into Beverly that generally escaped others—a development that had made him the happiest he’d been in a very long time.

  At the moment, they—and Beverly’s diener, Todd—were standing over what had been nicknamed CONCRETE MAN—pending a more permanent identity. He lay faceup, not on one of the morgue’s two examination tables, but off to one side, on something more like a draped conference table. This was because Concrete Man was in pieces, each of which Hillstrom and Todd had spent an hour meticulously arranging in anatomical order, following their subject’s return from the radiologist, who was busy studying the results elsewhere in the building.

  The tidy array of bones reminded Joe of Wile E. Coyote, of Road Runner fame, after yet another encounter with a steamroller.

  They were standing in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, or the OCME, located in the basement of the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington. It was the only place in Vermont where the state’s roughly five hundred forensic autopsies were conducted every year.