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

  “Came in as a ‘welfare check,’” she said over her shoulder. “This woman’s best friend supposedly called her every couple of days, as a routine. She got a run of no answers, got worried, and called 911.”

  “You talk to the friend?” Phil asked.

  “Chelsea Kline. Not yet. She talked to someone from Detectives East, just enough to give ’em a name and number. I got a couple of guys driving her to the unit for an interview—also chasing down names of people the dead woman worked for. No alarm bells yet, and the BFF sounds like the real deal. See what you think.”

  With that, she entered a kitchen at the back of the house.

  Phil stopped short. “Whoa,” he said softly.

  An older woman with short gray hair was lying spread-eagled on the floor, her wrists and ankles bound and attached by duct tape to four opposing, convenient anchor points. She was in the middle of a coagulated pool of blood, flanked by crime scene techs and a medical examiner, all busily at work like the curiously detached professionals they’d become through overexposure.

  DesAutels joined his partner against a wall. “At least it doesn’t look like she was raped,” he said, relieved.

  McLarney took in the woman’s face—her eyes wide open, her expression agonized. It’s true that her pants were still in place and fastened, but her sweatshirt had been sliced down the front, and her breasts exposed. Her many wounds made it clear that she had been tortured before dying, although not for any sexual gratification, if Elizabeth’s years of experience were any guide.

  “We know who this is?” Phil asked her.

  She consulted her notepad. “Jennifer Sisto, age sixty-two. Worked as a bookkeeper for a couple of local docs, but from home. She was a bit of a hermit, according to Ms. Kline. There’s a whole office set up in the other room—computer, fax, printer, shredder, the works. She handled billing and collections, as well as the day-to-day stuff.”

  “What kinds of docs?”

  Elizabeth gave him a look. “I wondered the same thing. Ralph and Tommy chased that down from HQ. Right now, the doctors’re looking as clean as the friend—couple of family medicine types. Marcus Welby and Dr. Kildare look-alikes.”

  “Who?”

  She shook her head pityingly. “Phil. You gotta widen your horizons. TV characters from the old days. As famous as Lassie.”

  He smiled. “Who?”

  Elizabeth crooked her finger at him. “Follow me to the office. It gets more interesting.”

  She led him down the corridor to the next room. It was filled with the equipment that she’d described, with a desk under a pair of windows overlooking the alleyway. Its most telling detail, however, was that it had been ransacked. Every shelf, drawer, and filing cabinet had been systematically emptied, and the contents heaped in the middle of the floor.

  Phil was nodding as he looked around. “Okay,” he said, speaking to himself, but so that Elizabeth could overhear. “First impressions? This was a more-than-one attacker.”

  “They found two sets of footprints in her blood,” Elizabeth confirmed.

  “Meaning they’re either stupid and sloppy,” he continued, “or don’t care, because those shoes are already ashes. My little voice says the second. Another thing? She didn’t give ’em what they wanted, which is why you have the double whammy of a torture and a tossing.”

  Elizabeth added her own opinion: “And what they wanted is small, and doesn’t involve jewelry or drugs.”

  He cast her an inquiring look.

  “I checked out the bedroom,” she explained. “Rings, earrings, necklaces—untouched. It’s been turned inside out, like here, but the bathroom? Just a once-over lightly, and all her scripts are still there.”

  “So maybe a document?” he mused.

  Elizabeth expanded his earlier theory. “Here’s an idea: If the torture didn’t get them what they wanted, there’s no saying that the tossing did, either. It could be their holy grail is still out there.”

  Phil didn’t disagree. “What about a private life?” he asked. “Most people kill people they know.”

  Elizabeth returned to her pad. “Again, per Kline, Sisto lived alone, had no social life, liked to go to a movie now and then—either solo or with Chelsea—or maybe a museum or art show. But basically, she hung out here, worked, watched Netflix, and kept to herself.”

  “No kids?”

  “Nope, and was divorced something like forty years ago, which to me rules out a pissed-off ex.”

  “Who was the ex?” Phil asked.

  “Chelsea didn’t have a name,” Elizabeth said. “But she did say he lived up in Vermont and was a total but nonviolent whack job. Sisto and he hadn’t spoken in decades, supposedly. Before it got bagged, I did have one of the scene techs check through an ancient-looking address book we found on the desk. There wasn’t much to it, and the only Vermont name belongs to a Benjamin Kendall, who lives in some place called Dummerston, which sounds like the punch line to a joke.”

  DesAutels suddenly looked happier. “What’s Vermont like right now? Not snowing yet, is it?”

  Elizabeth laughed outright. “You think the boss is gonna let us do more than make a couple of phone calls up there? You do need to eat, Phil. You are losing your mind.”

  She surveyed the disrupted office and added, “Plus, I don’t think we need to go to Vermont. My bet is that the City of Brotherly Love is the home base of these bastards.”

  * * *

  Rachel Reiling and Joe met in Burlington the next day, as arranged by her mother, at the university’s Fleming Museum just off Colchester Avenue. Beverly had to be at her office, and Joe had never met Rachel, but photographs of her on her mother’s wall pretty much removed the guesswork.

  Even so, any doubts vanished when the young woman greeted him as he entered the museum’s glassed-in, modern entrance, clumsily tacked on to the rear of the 1920s Colonial Revival building.

  “Mr. Gunther?”

  He smiled and shook her hand. “I stick out that much?”

  She was embarrassed. “Well … kind of, and Mom described you pretty well.”

  He patted her shoulder. “I was just ragging you. That was very PC. Thank you. Shall we?” He gestured toward the admission desk, where he paid for his ticket and she displayed her ID. She quickly led him through a tall, dark exhibition room, back into the building’s startlingly bright, soaring Marble Court, complete with tiled floor, grand staircase, and upper-floor balcony supported by a row of white columns.

  Joe was caught by surprise. The court dominated the building’s core, like an incongruously transplanted nineteenth-century ballroom from a Newport, Rhode Island, mansion.

  The gallery housing Rachel’s exhibition of Ben’s work was located off the ground floor. In contrast to the Marble Court, it was bland, dramatically lighted, and conventionally laid out, feeling small enough to have been part of a tasteful downtown store. The two visitors didn’t speak much as they traveled counterclockwise through the display, content for the moment to merely absorb what was before them.

  In front of one of the few Vietnam photos, however, Joe softly asked his companion, “I realize Ben refused to talk about any of this—” he pointed to an American soldier yelling at a nearby peasant, “—but did you ever look into what he was doing over there? As part of your research?”

  “I tried,” she said. “My advisor helped, not that it mattered in the long run. It turned out his job was to go where he was told to by the Signal Corps. He didn’t really belong to a particular outfit.” She indicated another photo featuring Americans. “These two could have been different assignments, in different regions. There’s no way to tell unless you can make out the insignia on the uniforms, and as you can see—” she pointed “—that’s sometimes hard to do.”

  Joe saw what she meant. The yelling soldier’s unit markings were blurred enough to make them unreadable. The same wasn’t true in the neighboring shot, but Joe conceded that, some forty-plus years later, it probably didn’t make much
difference. All this was ancient history.

  Which was a fact he found galling, because these were moments that Ben had preserved of a war that had fed on his soul forever after. It seemed to Joe that their history shouldn’t be so dulled by time.

  Of course, therein lay much of the compelling contradiction of Ben’s artistic vision.

  The Vietnam War had been a grinding, corrosive, nation-changing slog, forcing the United States to see itself—and to be seen worldwide—in a different light forever. However, that very spotlight on a stumbling superpower had all but eclipsed the conflict’s host country.

  By contrast, the Vietnam in these pictures had been captured in scenes that were missing from most images of the era, of people who, through all the mayhem, were simply struggling to exist. In his avoidance of conventional “war photos,” Ben had, by haunting implication, documented either what was awaiting decimation, or what had barely survived so many decades of violence.

  Ben had almost coyly documented a testimony to all the havoc—by placing most of it just outside each picture frame.

  As a result, the interspersing of his more recent work—the cursive and flowing portraits of his cherished hoard—reflected a carefully thought-out balancing act by the curator. The modern pieces displayed a hard beauty that was present in the older Vietnam shots, if less obvious. Making the comparison, Joe could clearly identify Ben’s evolution, as the people he’d photographed faded away in favor of their discarded belongings. In that fashion, his art reflected an aspect of his hoarding, in that the humans with whom he’d once readily interacted had been replaced by their stuff.

  At the end of the tour, Joe escorted Rachel out to a bench in the sun-soaked Marble Court. “I really appreciate your meeting me here, and I’m sorry it’s under these circumstances. Given all the years your mother and I have known each other, it’s a shame it had to be this way.”

  The young woman smiled sadly. “I guess it’s par for the course. Dead people are sort of the family business. What did you want to know?”

  “Your mom filled me in on the basics,” Joe began. “How you discovered these photographs as part of your video project. What I need to know is anything you can tell me about Ben as a human being.”

  Rachel thought a moment before responding. “I heard he died from an accident—like a cave-in or something. Are you and mom thinking something else?”

  “Not specifically,” Joe answered truthfully. “A couple of details aren’t lining up the way we’d like, but that’s standard for almost every death investigation. I remember once—years ago—looking into a supposed suicide where the man was on the bed and the rifle he used was neatly leaning against the far wall. Pretty unlikely, at first. It turned out fine—the first responder there had just moved the gun without thinking, and forgot to tell anyone. But the question needed to be answered. That’s all we’re doing here with Ben—and also because your mom asked me to.”

  She nodded. “Okay. Well, I don’t know. He was a sweet man. I really liked him. I mean, he had problems—that’s why the documentary, of course—but behind the weirdness, he was super nice.”

  “Was he ever violent in any way? Even verbally? Not at you, necessarily,” Joe added quickly. “But at anyone or anything?”

  She shook her head. “I wouldn’t call it violent, or even angry. He could get intense. That’s when he’d shut down or retreat. I had to watch out for those times, ’cause I didn’t want to burn any bridges. Once, I drove all the way down there to shoot some footage, and he was in a mood. I just wished him well, turned around, and left.”

  “What would set him off?” Joe asked.

  “It depended, and I wouldn’t always know. At first, he was just protective of his stuff and shy about my seeing it. Later, it would be other things. I’d move something to get a better shot—that would get him worked up. I’d say something complimentary about one item or another, and he’d think I wanted to steal it. On the flip side, he’d give me things now and then, but I had to be careful about actually taking them, because while they were a gift, he hated to let them go. I’d get caught between looking ungrateful and getting him worked up.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Small. Crazy, too, sometimes. He gave me a broken plate once. I thought it might be a museum piece, the way he handled it, but later, when I looked at it back home, it was like from a deli or something.”

  “What else might get him going?”

  “He could be pretty paranoid. Planes flying overhead put him on edge—especially small ones, flying low. And I wasn’t allowed to roam around unless he’d set out where I could and couldn’t go. And I never stayed for too long. Maybe three hours, tops. He was kind of a neatnik, in an off-the-wall way. I mean, he was a slob—the place was a mess and it smelled gross, especially in some spots. But he treated it like a sculpture garden, almost. He knew exactly how one stacked-up pile related to everything around it—like the inner working of a living body. That’s why I think he used to photograph it all the time, and why he hated me to move things, even after he gave up taking pictures.

  “The most fun,” she then said, changing the subject, “was when he had me join him on rounds. That’s what he called them, like a doctor. He’d drive around the area, visiting people who seemed to know him well—old car graveyards, backwoods mechanics, a building salvage place he especially liked … you name it. He’d even stop at yard sales and pick up stuff that was slated to end up by the curb. It was just the reverse of when he was at home—he was outgoing, funny. People loved him.”

  “You must’ve asked him how all this started,” Joe suggested. “As part of the documentary, maybe? Or just cousin-to-cousin?”

  “I did, but he only said, ‘It was the war.’ You could tell it was a place he didn’t want to visit. I thought I’d get more out of him after I found the Vietnam pictures.” She indicated the exhibition again. “But I had enough on my hands just getting him to let go of them. Did Mom tell you that I pulled this show off only because I already had them at her house? And that I’d promised not to use his name anywhere?”

  “She did,” Joe conceded. “Was the anonymity because of his personality, or something else?”

  Again, she reflected before answering, “It might have been something else. I didn’t think it was, at first—that it was just shyness. But when we started negotiating putting on the show, I realized his privacy concerns were second to his wanting the pictures to be universal, and not about who took them—kind of the way the Vietnam shots are about the country and not the war. That’s one of the reasons I tried so hard to make this happen. The images are beautiful and haunting because of what they don’t say.”

  She looked down at her hands. “I guess now that he’s dead, that’s even more true.”

  Joe gave her a few seconds before he reached out and laid a hand on her forearm. “Rachel?” he asked. “Would you do me a big favor?”

  “Sure,” she said immediately, looking into his eyes.

  He smiled supportively. “Thank you. I’d like to see your video footage of Ben and his environment, but I’m hoping you’ll also be willing to come down to Dummerston and give me a private guided tour. I think it would help me to see the place through your eyes.”

  She stood up, checking her watch unobtrusively. “I better get to class, Mr. Gunther, but I’d be happy to help. It’s the least I can do after everything Ben did for me.”

  Joe stood also and thanked her again, shaking her hand in departure. After she’d left, however, he resumed his seat and watched the crowd slowly shuffling in and out of the gallery entrance.

  His most nagging question had little to do with what he’d spoken about with Rachel. Rather, he was wondering why, while purportedly conducting a simple favor for a friend, he was feeling the same adrenaline buildup that attended a regular case.

  His unit, the VBI, represented the elite of Vermont law enforcement, and its ranks were filled with the best, most motivated transplants from almost every a
gency or department across the state. Scratching around the edges of an apparently accidental death had nothing to do with his mission.

  Except that something about it was beginning to bother him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Updating your porno?”

  Joe looked up from the computer screen, where he’d been watching Rachel Reiling’s unedited documentary footage on Ben Kendall. “Yeah. Found a flash drive in your drawer. Hope that’s okay.”

  Willy Kunkle, one of the three other special agents on the squad, laughed outright as he hung his jacket on the coat tree near the door. “Right. You wouldn’t stand a chance, getting into my desk. I’ve got it rigged to explode if anyone tries.”

  Joe believed him. Willy was a fellow combat vet—an ex-sniper, in fact—who embodied paranoia. Also, he was a recovering alcoholic, a transplanted New York City cop—although decades ago—and, most noticeably, the acerbic and blunt-spoken owner of a crippled left arm, which he kept anchored in place by shoving his hand into his pants pocket. It was an unlikely detail for a cop, but through the Americans with Disabilities Act, his own persistence, and—albeit never acknowledged—Joe’s help, he’d fought his way back from being disabled during a case years earlier.

  “You hear about the Dummerston hoarder they found dead at home?” Joe asked him, knowing how Willy tracked the police dailies.

  “Yeah. Thought that was accidental.”

  “It is for now. I’m just making sure.”

  To Joe’s surprise, Willy walked over and glanced at the screen, where Rachel’s images were still unfolding. Kunkle was rarely guilty of such a companionable gesture.

  What he said was even more unusual. “Interesting. Made me think about an old case in New York when I heard about it, dating back to the late ’40s. Two recluse brothers named Collyer. Lived in a four-story brownstone. People smelled something bad, cops broke in, and found one of them dead in his own booby trap and the other dead of starvation. Supposedly the second one had been paralyzed for years and dependent on the first for food. Pathetic whacko’s, of course, but famous for all that. For years after, the New York Fire Department used to call a hoarder’s house a ‘Collyer.’ They’re basically death traps. I’m not surprised your nutcase got himself killed.”