The Price of Malice Read online

  Shouting, “Stop. Police,” she went at him like a linebacker, at an angle to shove him up against the landing’s railing, and maybe even over its top. Being a small woman—and ex-military at that—had trained her to fight dirty when necessary.

  The idea half worked. She did clip the man, and he did go careening against the railing, but she was the one who went over, ending up like a damsel in distress, hanging by her hands over the void, while the man with a plan kept charging like a miniaturized rhino on speed.

  “Runner,” Sam screamed in turn, swinging her feet over to the banister below and letting go to make a clumsy landing on the uneven steps. “Stop that man.”

  Outside, Joe Gunther had just exited his car and was about to call to Zippo, still positioned at the crime-scene building, when Sam’s voice came echoing into the street two doors down.

  Both men stared in astonishment as the runner in question blew out of the entrance, leaped off the front porch in one jump, landed on the sidewalk in a crouch, and took off like a sprinter for the far distant junction of Manor Court and Canal Street.

  He didn’t make it. Cops were all over that sidewalk. And within several paces, one of them stuck his foot out and tripped the fleeing man, just as four others landed on him like bears on a seal.

  They were still sorting out who was who when Sam appeared and dove into the pile, pulling away cop after cop to reveal the man who had run her over.

  She grabbed him by the shirtfront and yanked him to his feet. “You little peckerhead,” she yelled into his face. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You are under arrest. Do you understand that?” She shook him until his head was a blur, adding, “And count yourself lucky I don’t shoot you right now.”

  She felt a hand calmly settle onto her right shoulder and twisted around angrily to stare into Joe Gunther’s eyes.

  “It’s okay, Sam,” he told her quietly. “We got him.”

  She opened her grip and let the little man fall into the arms of the cops around him.

  “Right,” she said, regaining composure. “Sorry about that. He surprised me.”

  Joe smiled. “I got that part.”

  She suddenly asked, “Where’s Les?”

  “Why?”

  “He was with me in there. This guy hit him first.”

  They both turned toward the building and saw Lester Spinney standing on the porch, holding the back of his head. He was dirty and covered with sweat, but he waved them off as they approached.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he said. “I whacked my head is all. Who the hell is that little bastard?”

  “Eddie Novack,” said a familiar voice.

  They all three looked over at Ron Klesczewski, who was standing nearby, watching his men buckling up Sam’s prisoner.

  “He stuck a gun in the face of a teller at the Exit One gas station last month—got away with a couple of hundred bucks. We’ve been wondering when he’d show up.”

  “Meaning he probably had nothing to do with our body?” Spinney ventured.

  Ron lifted one shoulder equivocally. “I’d guess not, but this is one of those neighborhoods. You never know.”

  “All right,” Joe stated, his eye back on the first building. “Why don’t you ask him about that later, Ron? Lester, go to the ER and get a clean bill of health for that head. Sam can drive you. It looks like the lab folks are wrapping up; I want to head ’em off before they leave.”

  Spinney opened his mouth to protest, but then stopped, knowing both the predictable response, and that Gunther really had no choice. Plus, were he to be perfectly honest, he’d taken a harder shot than he was admitting, and was curious about what damage he might have incurred.

  Ron, Joe, and Willy therefore left the other two and walked over to a small group of people gathered near the back of the large lab truck, who were slowly and gratefully peeling off their suffocating Tyvek suits.

  Ron pointed out his own department’s mobile command post, parked a few feet farther along, and suggested, “You want to talk, feel free to use that—it’s air-conditioned.”

  Joe approached a man with graying hair who was already stuffing his suit into a garbage bag. His polo shirt and pants looked as if he’d been caught in a drenching summer shower.

  “David?” Joe began.

  The other man turned and smiled. “Joe. It’s been a while. Pardon the damp hand.”

  Joe shook it enthusiastically. David Hawke was one of the true old-timers, dating back to when the state police replaced their troopers with scientifically schooled and accredited lab techs. Hawke was among the key people throughout the state that Joe had made an effort to make a personal friend, rather than just a colleague.

  Joe nodded toward the PD’s smaller truck. “Care to retire where it’s cooler?”

  Hawke smiled broadly. “Jesus. Might put me into shock. There enough room in there for my whole crew?”

  The other techs looked at him hopefully.

  Ron gestured with his arm. “Complete with cold drinks.”

  The small crowd ambled next door to Ron’s command post and gingerly squeezed inside, carefully maneuvering until everyone had a place to perch and something cold to drink.

  David passed his can of iced tea across his forehead before popping the tab and taking a long swallow.

  “God,” he finally said. “That is truly what the doctor ordered. This is not the worst scene we’ve ever processed, but it’s close.”

  “Speak for yourself, Doc,” said one of his junior colleagues, whom Joe recognized as the new photo tech.

  The rest of them laughed sympathetically.

  “Anything you can tell us right off?” Joe asked after a suitably polite pause.

  “With the usual caveats, sure,” David told him, continuing after another pull on his drink. “The ME will have her say about cause of death, but since transport was delayed until we got here, we did take a look, and I feel safe saying he was done in by a sharp instrument, versus something like a gun. But he was also badly beaten, so who knows? Is that convincingly enough stated for you?”

  It was humorously said, but Joe noticed Willy shaking his head at the caution. Still, he kept quiet, which was good enough for the moment.

  “Nice work, by the way,” Hawke went on, “shading the windows from the sun. It did keep the heat down a little, and may have helped the blood from degrading too much for DNA analysis.”

  Ron nodded his appreciation. “Thanks. It was all we could think of.”

  “Next time, though,” Hawke added gently, “call us and let us know of the situation. We can live with the body being moved and refrigerated, assuming you photograph and video the bejeezus out of it first. Better that than lose degradable evidence.”

  “My screwup,” Joe said quickly. “I should’ve thought of that.”

  Hawke waved it away. “Not to worry. God knows, we all have too much on our plates, and from the looks of it, I’m guessing it all came from the victim anyway.”

  “You figure out how it went down?” Willy asked.

  David pointed to one of his colleagues. “Robin’s the one with the most schooling in reconstruction. I’ll leave that to her.”

  Robin Lerner, the sole female of the team, was another forensics tech Joe knew from years past—one of several, in fact—which spoke well of Hawke’s ability to retain good people, despite Vermont’s inability to pay them appropriately.

  “The story is mostly in the blood spatter analysis,” she said, cautioning, “but that can be a tricky way of looking at something like this. You can end up seeing what you want, instead of what really happened.”

  “Whatever,” Willy muttered.

  It was offensive, but thankfully, Kunkle was well known, including up in Waterbury, where the lab was housed.

  Lerner chose to laugh, although Joe noticed the momentary narrowing of her eyes. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Point taken. Here’s my educated guess, since for the moment, it doesn’t really matter: I think Mr. Castine was i
nside the apartment, most likely answering the door, when he was attacked. It looks like it was fast, brutal, and may have involved at least a knife and possibly a blunt object, like a small bat or club.”

  “Did he put up a fight?” Willy asked.

  “Hard to tell,” she answered. “I’ll leave that to the ME. She’ll be able to wash the blood off and better examine the body’s surface areas. I didn’t see any broken fingers or obviously skinned knuckles, but the hands were a mess and difficult to visualize.”

  “I found some weapons at his apartment,” Joe contributed. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t bring another one here, but he also may not have been expecting trouble.”

  “And there were just the two of them?” Ron asked.

  Hawke answered that. “We discussed that when we were up there. There are two sets of bloody footprints—the primaries, belonging to Castine, and one set of secondaries, which were much harder to isolate and clearly document. It struck us that either the killer had been lucky that way, or very careful to avoid the blood.”

  “Doesn’t that run at odds to the rest of it?” Joe asked.

  “You mean the general savagery?” Hawke countered. “I suppose it could. It’s also possible that the attacker’s fury was very focused, very planned.”

  Willy again. “Fingerprints?”

  “A lot of those, although only Castine’s in blood.”

  Joe leaned forward on the bench seat he’d chosen. “David—or anybody, for that matter—this may be way outside what anyone can answer, but I was wondering: Could you tell if Castine had only been there last night, or if he was using this place as a home away from home? I mean, for example, did you find his prints generally throughout the apartment, or mostly in his own blood?”

  Lerner answered him. “I’d say the latter, but as you all know, fingerprints in general are a Hollywood obsession, where they’re the end-all, be-all. In a place like this, especially, where you have a different tenant every few months, and so many people coming and going anyhow, we don’t go crazy trying to catalog them. We collected what we thought made sense.”

  “Going a little further, though,” Hawke added, “I didn’t get the impression that anyone but the woman lived there. For example, we did check the toilet flushing valve and didn’t find a print of his there. Same for the rim, just in case he’d taken a leak. We didn’t find any droplets.”

  “Jesus,” Willy said.

  Lerner’s laughter was genuine this time. “You men may lift the seat, but you never wipe the rim.”

  “I do,” Willy blurted out.

  The whole group fell silent.

  “Really?” she asked appreciatively.

  Willy stood up, red-faced, and glared at Gunther. “Are we done?”

  Everyone laughed, happy for the embarrassment of a man who so routinely put them through the wringer.

  Nevertheless, Joe also rose, keeping Willy company. “Yeah, we’re set for the moment. One reason I asked, though, was that if you think Castine was on the inside, and Liz Babbitt’s right about remembering she locked the door, then how did he get in?”

  Willy opened his mouth to answer, but Joe stopped him with a raised hand. “An additional detail: Liz told me the lock wasn’t new. It hadn’t been changed since the previous tenant.”

  “That’s what I was going to say,” Willy commented sourly. “I already talked to the landlord. He said it would cost too much, and that nobody gives a damn anyhow.” He looked at Joe balefully and added, “And no, Castine never rented the dump. And yes, that does mean we need to find out how he got his hands on a key, and so, yes again, I did get a list of all the people who’ve lived there over the past couple of years.”

  Joe smiled and addressed the entire group, bowing slightly. “And people ask me,” he commented, moving carefully through the crowd toward the door that Willy was already holding open, letting in a blast of hot air, “how I can stand working with the guy. He’s a genius. We should all be so lucky.”

  They both left to a chorus of boos and groans.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Joe loosened his tie an inch and stood before the fan with his arms slightly held out, letting the wash of warm air suggest a passing breeze. At least it was finally night, and the heat had dropped a few degrees. This kind of weather didn’t hit the region often or for long, and he knew people had it worse in a hundred other places, but that didn’t make him feel any better. It was like being in a sauna with no controls and no door.

  “Right,” said Willy, walking in. “Block the fan so the rest of us can die.”

  Joe reluctantly moved out of the way, saying with sarcastic sweetness, “I’m so embarrassed, Agent Kunkle. Would you like a few moments in front of the fan?”

  Willy glowered at him and headed instead for his desk, which was wedged into the corner facing the rest of the office—a perfect reflection of the man himself.

  “Fuck you.”

  Joe pushed his lips out and murmured, “Indeed,” under his breath.

  Sammie Martens and Lester Spinney entered the office, chatting amicably. They were the two most levelheaded members of this small unit, of which five others—similarly sized—were sprinkled across the state, not including the director at the Waterbury headquarters—headquarters being a single cubbyhole office on the top floor of the Department of Public Safety building.

  Joe had a soft spot for Sam, which was in part only a reciprocal tenderness nurtured by her clear adoration of him. Whether he was the father she’d never had or the mentor she’d always craved, Joe could do no wrong in her eyes—which made her a difficult person for him to fault.

  She could be a handful, however, which he only privately admitted. Her shaking Eddie Novack like a rag doll this afternoon was a good example of her short fuse. More clinically, her choice of Willy as a lover was a shrink’s fantasy of unmitigated self-destruction, at least on the outside. In fact, they’d both made it work for longer than anyone anticipated. Like twin halves of a devilishly possessed pair of scissors, they functioned best—if sometimes destructively—when joined together.

  “How’s the noggin?” Joe asked Lester as the latter settled down behind his own desk, liberally festooned with stork memorabilia.

  Les touched the back of his head. “Not a vital organ, as it turns out. Docs were amazed when they looked inside.”

  “No gerbil?” Willy asked.

  “Several,” he came back, typically self-deprecatory, “but all fully functioning.”

  “Seriously,” Joe persisted.

  Spinney gave him a thumbs-up. “Seriously—clean bill of health. Ask my nanny.”

  “True, boss. All true,” Sam said, dumping a soft briefcase onto her desk and partly collapsing into her chair.

  Joe took up one of his usual positions, sitting on the edge of the windowsill, although not before the fan, and addressed them all. “Okay—long day. You’ve worked hard and I don’t want to keep you much longer. Everyone’s earned a good night’s sleep. I did want to compare notes very quickly, though, so we know what to start on tomorrow morning. Sam? Give us a rundown, allowing everyone else to fill gaps as they pop up.”

  “Like, who dun it?” Willy suggested.

  “If you’ve got that, now would be the time.”

  Willy smirked, but remained silent, getting the message.

  Sam, yielding to a propensity for notes and lists, opened her case and laid out a few sheets of paper before starting in. “Wayne Castine—autopsy to come, computer analysis to come, along with his phone records and interviews with coworkers, whatever family we can find, and the shrink Joe discovered he was seeing. Castine was presumably beaten and/or stabbed to death by someone who appeared at the door of an apartment he was using without permission and for reasons unknown.”

  “What kinds of reasons?” Joe asked. “Just for what-the-hell.”

  During the pause following, Lester suggested, “Discretion?”

  “He wouldn’t know when Babbitt might all of a sudden come hom
e,” Willy argued.

  “He had his own place,” Sam pointed out, “and he lived alone.”

  Joe had also thought of that. “I know he brought at least one child there,” he shared. “But it is a dump-and-a-half.”

  “Suggesting the need for a more upscale love nest?” Les finished for him, and then added, “Why not a motel room?”

  “The thrill,” Willy proposed.

  The others looked at him.

  He flushed slightly. “Come on—put it together. Guy’s a pervert, lives on the edge, probably sees himself as a real daredevil. Why not use a borrowed bed, and risk being exposed? Probably gave him a bigger hard-on.”

  The image all but killed the discussion.

  “Did we ever find the key we think he used to get in?” Lester asked after an awkward silence.

  “In his pocket,” Willy answered shortly, clearly irritated.

  “Meaning,” Joe suggested, “that there’re at least two keys in circulation.”

  “Anything special about Wayne’s?” Lester asked.

  “Willy?” Joe asked, but was testily interrupted by the man himself.

  “It’s just a key. I interviewed the landlord and got a list of previous renters. I’ll find out who Wayne got it from. I been busy, okay?”

  Joe held up both hands in surrender. “We got it, we got it. You’re hot on the trail. Sam, what did we get from the canvass and what do we have left to do?”

  “I took up Ron on his manpower offer, so we got a pretty good sweep in before everybody started talking to everybody else and muddling up their stories. The consensus on Liz is what you’d expect—she’s new to the neighborhood, does her grocery bagging and hooking and barhopping on her own, and keeps to herself. She probably has as many friends as everybody does, and we can chase them down when the time comes, but from what I’m getting, she is what she says she is: an innocent bystander who just happened to have the wrong apartment at the wrong time. I’m not leaving it there—I know what I said is a huge assumption. But for the time being, I suggest putting her on the back burner.”