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

  Joe scratched his forehead. “Thanks.”

  She tilted her head. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I figured you’d like to know. People start dating, they’re always driving themselves nuts, wondering what the other person’s thinking.”

  “No, no,” he said quickly. “I appreciate it. I just wasn’t expecting it. Guess I’m kind of old school—less open about personal stuff—which isn’t always so great. No, it’s nice to hear.”

  “My dad likes you, too,” she added.

  This time, he laughed outright and sat back in his armchair. “Okay.”

  “No, really,” she emphasized. “He knows Mom and he weren’t a great match, so he’s happy, too. You’ve done good work, Joe Gunther. The whole family approves.”

  He shook his head and gave her a hapless expression. “What can I say? I have ice cream for dessert.”

  “You do know how to seal a deal.”

  * * *

  The following morning, he drove her to Dummerston and introduced her to the police officers securing Ben Kendall’s home, making sure to impress how important she was to him. Progress on the house had been steady and fruitful, with well over half the rooms empty and the rest coming along. Part of the problem was that a former scoop-and-dump operation had become a forensic dismantling of painstaking proportions. Everything removed was now subject to scrutiny and cataloging, when relevant. Additionally, a real fear lingered that the booby trap so fatal to Tommy Bajek hadn’t necessarily been the worst of Ben’s surprises.

  Along those lines, Joe made sure to stress to the girl how potentially dangerous this was, and how she was absolutely to keep her distance and mind the people in charge. In response, she showed him the telephoto lens that she’d attached to her camera.

  Arriving at the office later, bearing a box of doughnuts and some coffee, he found Sammie in the same position he’d left her the night before.

  “You go home at all?”

  She turned in her seat to accept one of his gooey offerings. “Would I miss the chance to see my baby girl? No way. I left late and came back early—all the better to duck the reporters. Plus, I needed to reload this.” She held up her cell phone.

  “Reload it?” he asked, at a loss about most cell phone functions.

  She switched it on and displayed a screen saver photograph of her daughter. “I take a new one every day. Helps me feel in touch. How’s Rachel?”

  Joe smiled at the picture. “Fine. I just dropped her off at the site. She’s a good kid. Lot of her mother in her—nice combination of hardworking and funny.”

  Sam put her phone down and took a bite of doughnut before saying, “Only a man in love could say that Beverly Hillstrom was in any way, shape, or form funny.”

  Joe waved that away, embarrassed to have his personal life crop up in office banter. For all that he cared about what happened to his colleagues away from work, he remained a private man. “Anything new on your homework assignment?”

  She patted her keyboard. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but the Internet puts all sorts of miracles a keystroke away.”

  “Meaning, yes,” he guessed.

  “Yup. The writer who died the same day Kendall was shot was named Nathan Sievers. He was from Milwaukee and fancied himself a literary genius. In other words, he was impossible to work with and never got published. He conned an old college roommate, who edited a free weekly paper, to make him their overseas correspondent. With that, he got press creds from the government and paid his own way to Vietnam. What you were told about him was right on the money. He was only there to write the next best thing to The Naked and the Dead or Dispatches.”

  Joe was about to ask her a follow-up question when he was stopped dead by her literary references. “No offense, Sam, but what do you know about The Naked and the Dead or Dispatches?”

  She laughed in reaction. “Busted. I used Google to drill my way down to the editor-slash-roommate and talked to him on the phone last night. He gave me that. I don’t even know what they are.”

  “Worth reading,” Joe said, smiling. “What did the editor say about how Sievers died?”

  “Nothing. He said the military notified him that his correspondent had been killed by enemy fire during a combat exchange, and that was about it. Sievers had no family that my source ever knew, the weekly paper wasn’t about to pay to have their so-called correspondent shipped home, so Sievers was buried over there. That’s where it ended.”

  “Lonely Are the Brave,” Joe murmured.

  “What?”

  “Just another title. This guy didn’t ask about how his friend died?”

  Sammie looked rueful. “It wasn’t The New York Times, Joe. And despite the favor, I think the editor did what he did to get Sievers out of his hair. From what I heard, old Nathan could be a moralistic, preachy pain in the butt. They weren’t pals.”

  “Was he anti-war?” Joe asked.

  “Big-time, but being holier-than-thou, he didn’t want to be an armchair critic. He wanted to write from the trenches, like Hemingway.” She smiled. “Again, I’m quoting, but I do know who Hemingway was.”

  Joe adulterated his coffee as always. “You hear from Willy?”

  Sam reached for the phone. “Yeah. He said to call him when you were ready. He’s having a father–daughter day at home—decided that he’d been away too long and needed an Emma fix.”

  Joe kept quiet, but was struck by how times had changed. Back in the day, before Willy and Sam became involved romantically, Kunkle had been the hard-drinking, dysfunctional survivor of a short and violent marriage that ended with his wife’s escaping to New York, where she’d eventually died under violent circumstances. That was a long stretch from what he’d just heard, and gave him heart when he recalled not only Sam’s cell phone décor, but also his own charming, if slightly disorienting conversation with Rachel the night before. Maybe there could be light at the end of the tunnel of love.

  He motioned to the phone, smiling. “Put him on. I’m ready.” He crossed to his desk and sat down as Sam dialed home.

  “He there?” Willy’s voice came over the speaker shortly thereafter.

  “We both are,” Sam answered.

  “How’s Emma?” Joe asked.

  “You gonna give me shit about that?”

  “Right,” Joe answered him. “Six demerits for spending time with your daughter.”

  “Whatever,” Willy said. “What d’ya want to know first?”

  “You had five dead to check out from the original squad,” Joe said, “and six survivors, including a U.S. senator. Give it to me any way you want, not that you wouldn’t have anyhow.”

  “Getting to know me?” Willy snorted over the phone. “Okay, let’s go with the dead, since that’s where I started. Ben Kendall and the writer you already know about.”

  “His name was Nathan Sievers,” Joe interjected.

  “Good.” Willy paused, as if writing it down. “That’s a match. I was told Nate, by one of my sources, which didn’t give me much. Anyhow, that leaves three. I checked those out and got one suicide, one accidental car crash fatality, and one natural causes—specifically, an undetermined.”

  “That sounds tame enough,” Sam commented.

  “‘Sounds’ is the operative word,” Willy said. “These happened all over the U.S.—I’m writing a report when Emma goes down for a nap, and I’ve got documents and pictures coming in electronically or via snail mail, so I’ll spare you the boring stuff right now—but I got hold of people in each place and grilled them pretty hard. Bottom line is, there’s major wiggle room for doubt in every case.”

  “You smelling covered-up homicides?” Joe asked, his spirit sagging in the face of so much carnage.

  “Yep. The car crash was under-investigated forty years ago by a rural department in Missouri with minimal training and equipment, leaving a bunch unexplained—like how some different-colored paint ended up on a part of the car that fit perfectly where it could’ve been smacked and sent fly
ing off the road. That’s just one squirrelly detail. Another is that the dead driver had an empty bottle of booze with him, his clothes reeked of the stuff, but his blood was clean when they tested it and there was never an autopsy.”

  “So, hit and run, with maybe a victim who was unconscious or dead just prior,” Joe stated.

  He expected a sarcastic comeback, but Willy missed his opportunity for once, responding instead, “Yup, and they’re not saying I’m wrong, either. I’m not beating ’em up on it. This was back in the ’70s, everybody associated with it is dead or gone, and the guy I talked to was relying on an old file and some Polaroids. He didn’t like it any better than I did, but there’s not much anyone can do about it now.”

  “Okay,” Sam said. “That’s one.”

  “Right,” Willy resumed. “The suicide would’ve been an even more obvious set-up today, but again—way back when—they didn’t catch a thing. It was a hanging—man found in his garage, complete with a ‘farewell cruel world’ note—but the note was typed. And—you’ll love this—there was no typewriter in the house. It was right in the report. The chair he supposedly used was still upright, and placed wrong, to my eye. And the rope marks on his neck didn’t match how the rope was positioned when they found him, indicating to me that he was strangled first and then strung up. Oh yeah, and he had bruises on his knuckles, as if he’d put up a fight.”

  “Same kind of conversation with the local cops?” Joe asked.

  “Pretty much,” Willy admitted. “Not so friendly, but this one happened about the same time, in L.A., which was corrupt as hell back then, so it doesn’t matter what their attitude is now.

  “The last one,” he continued, “was even more open-ended. Guy was found dead at home, in bed. Next to him were some heart pills, but just lying in a jar, with no prescription, like M&M’s. Conclusion? Died of a heart attack. Any mention of a bad ticker in his military medical records? Nope. But his drunk wife liked the benefits, and everybody else was happy to let it lie. So, there you have it.”

  Joe trusted that he’d have the literature supporting all this soon enough, so he took it at face value and moved on. “You get anywhere on the living squad members?”

  “Superficially. I got the Fusion Center to spit out generic intel reports on each of ’em, and did some once-over-lightly digging on the side. I didn’t want to tip our hand, in case somethin’s going on like a conspiracy, so I avoided any interviews by phone, or anything else too obvious. I’m just tellin’ ya.”

  “Okay,” Joe reassured him.

  “Jack Joyce was the easiest,” Willy went on. “Super rich from birth, lots of good press for going into the service in the first place, since he’s both prep school and Ivy League, and of course a shoo-in as a politician for the same reason, even with all the anti-war crap back then. No one’s been able to boot him out since, so he’s one of the Grand Old Men of the Senate now, but not famous like the rest of the fogies, ’cause he doesn’t do squat. From what I could get from articles, blogs, book digests, and the rest, the man’s a manipulative prick who brings home the pork and otherwise lines his pockets.

  “The other four,” Willy began wrapping up, “came across like your pal Bob Morgan—underemployed underachievers with more money than their lifestyles can explain. Again, the details’ll be in my report.”

  Joe and Sam could hear the sounds of Emma crying softly in the background.

  “Uh-oh. Got an attack of the munchies,” Willy said. “Gotta feed the inheritor.”

  “Quick gut reaction to it all before you go?” Joe spoke fast.

  Willy chose his words carefully, given his usual breeziness. “There may be others, but one scenario that fits everything is that something happened out there that got five people killed—including one at the scene—and made the surviving six happy campers for life.”

  “Like a major haul of some kind?” Sammie asked. “A financial windfall?”

  Willy hedged. “Anyone’s guess.”

  Joe frowned. “Treasure Island? A trunk of drugs or doubloons? In the middle of the Delta? That sounds like a stretch.”

  Willy let out a short laugh. “What hasn’t been a stretch so far? The dead hoarder with a corpse in one of his own booby traps? No … Hold it, maybe his ancient history, ex-wife found tortured to death five states away, with no apparent connection. Nah—that clearly makes sense. I got it. The daughter of Vermont’s chief medical examiner gets stalked by two hit men, straight out of a bad movie. There you go.”

  Joe held up both hands at the phone in surrender. “Okay, okay. You made your point. So you’re suggesting that eleven men in Vietnam maybe stumbled across something of value which made some of them dead and the rest of them rich.”

  “I said that seems how it wound up,” Willy corrected him. “I have no idea what started it. On the flip side, I do know why my kid’s crying.”

  “Ben Kendall knew,” Sam suggested.

  “And so do the surviving six,” Joe added.

  After a moment—during which they could hear him cooing to Emma—Willy asked, “Who d’you wanna start with?”

  Joe smiled slightly. “Why not the proverbial bird in hand?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Paula Sagerman was a detective with the New Hampshire State Police whom Joe had met at a tri-state terrorism training several years ago. Such events served as much as meet-and-greet opportunities—or “networking,” as Joe refused to describe them—as chances to learn things that common sense didn’t already supply. Cops like him had regularly benefited from discovering worthwhile counterparts and keeping in touch. Sagerman’s immediate agreement to meet in Peterborough and accompany him to Bob Morgan’s house was proof of it.

  She was smart, ambitious, and diplomatically canny—at once reminiscent of Sammie, while demonstrating how lucky Joe felt that Sam was not cut from the hard stuff that might eventually make of Paula a commissioner of public safety or a politician. Joe wasn’t sure what in Sam seemed missing from Paula, but he suspected that it might be the self-doubt that he valued in the former.

  That having been said, he genuinely liked Paula. She had a no-nonsense, pragmatic view of things, and enjoyed telling people exactly what kind of jackass she occasionally found them to be.

  So … perhaps not a future politician.

  “Wuzzup, Joe?” she asked as she settled into his passenger seat at the spot where they’d agreed to meet.

  “I want your statutory muscle along for when I ask this guy what he’s holding back,” he explained.

  “I thought you loved me for my mind.”

  He smiled and started the car. “Not this time, but feel free to chime in if you get the urge.”

  “What’re we grilling him about?”

  “Vietnam. He witnessed something he won’t admit about a squad of men, deep in the bush. The Cliffs Notes version is that close to half of them are now dead under suspicious circumstances, while the rest are just as inexplicably well off. So what happened? Was it a My Lai without the headlines? Did it involve finding a cache of money or drugs and keeping it quiet? One of them—who just died—was a photographer. But we’ve seen his photos, and they tell us nothing. On the other hand, both his cameras were empty when he was found with a head wound. And why were the only people shot at the scene—one fatally and one almost—a writer and a photographer, respectively?”

  Paula absorbed it all before asking, “You said this guy’s named Robert Morgan. Is it just his proximity to Vermont that makes you want to milk him?”

  Joe smiled as he left the parking lot and headed out of town. “You are good, Sagerman. Yes and no. Morgan’s living nearby is handy, but it’s not the only factor. The last time I talked with him—also the first time we met—I suspected he was starting to crumble around the edges, which is why I want you to look threatening in the background. I need to impress upon him that we can buckle him up if he forces us to.”

  Paula nodded. “Cool. I guess I’ll figure out the rest as the conversation
gets going.” She paused before saying, “You know I wasn’t even alive when the Vietnam War ended.”

  He sighed wearily. “Yes.”

  “Okay, then,” she said, settled on the point. “Sounds like fun.”

  Which attitude reflected, in part, why Joe had called her in the first place.

  There was no sign of Mrs. Morgan when they reached the house on General Miller Road, and the Jeep was missing, Joe noted gratefully. Bob answered the doorbell himself, ushering them into an empty living room after Joe had introduced Paula, and offered to fix them coffee.

  Both cops turned down the invitation, and angled their chairs toward the sofa in such a way that Morgan, when seated, had to swivel his head back and forth to address them, psychologically undermining any sense of his being in control.

  “You know why I asked Detective Sagerman to join me?” Joe asked after they’d settled down.

  “Not really,” Morgan hedged his reply.

  “Last time I was here,” Joe explained, “your wife pointed out that I couldn’t act as a cop in this state. Detective Sagerman can.” He added, almost as an afterthought, “Should it become necessary.” He extracted a recorder from his pocket and turned it on. “Furthermore, I’ll be recording what’s said, just to ensure that nothing can be misconstrued or misunderstood. Is that all right with you?”

  Morgan looked at them without comment.

  “I need your permission, Bob. Out loud. I want it on the record that you’re being frank and open with us, and that we haven’t promised or threatened you with anything. Is that the case?”

  “Sure.”

  “Because,” Joe resumed, “it’s my belief that you were less than candid last time.”

  “I answered your questions,” Bob countered without much conviction.

  “How do you make a living, Mr. Morgan?” Paula asked, almost cutting him off, taking Joe’s earlier cue about the squad survivors all being well off.

  Morgan opened his mouth in surprise before answering with a stutter, “I’m a … a … a custodian.”