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  Nelson shrugged and complied, while Willy and Joe stood back, approximately in the same spot from where the photo had been taken.

  “Huh,” Joe grunted. “You see that?”

  Willy was similarly struck. “Might be what they call a clue.”

  “What?” Nelson asked, returning with genuine interest.

  Joe handed him the picture. “Hold it in front of you and line everything up. You can see how the stool is sitting now, where it had to have been for her to use it, and you can see how she’s hanging in the shot.”

  Nelson stood motionless for a few seconds, his eyes flipping from the image to the reality before them, mentally trying to put Mary back where they had found her hours earlier, before taking her down for her rendezvous with Beverly Hillstrom.

  Willy sighed after a few seconds and wandered off, not sharing Joe’s teaching propensity. Nelson’s face reddened slightly as he almost stammered, “It looks like her feet ended up higher than the top of the stool. Isn’t that impossible?”

  Willy laughed, not turning around.

  Nelson’s astonishment overrode any embarrassment. He stared at the picture again. “But there was a note.”

  “That, I’d like to see,” Willy commented.

  Nelson walked over to a briefcase he’d placed on the counter dividing the living room and kitchen areas. He snapped it open and extracted a sealed plastic evidence bag with a single sheet of paper inside it. Joe and Willy gathered around him to read.

  “Typed,” Willy cracked. “How convenient.”

  Joe read aloud, “ ‘I’m sorry, Elise. I can’t live with you and I can’t live without you. I love you, but you’ve made my life a living hell.’ ”

  It was signed with a capital letter M.

  “A guy wrote that,” Willy said flatly.

  Nelson opened his mouth, Joe suspected in order to restate his earlier comment about Mary’s sexual orientation, but then closed it.

  “We heard her companion found her,” Joe commented, moving along.

  Nelson took one last look at the note before gazing at the older man. “Yeah. Elise Howard. They’d been an item forever, supposedly. She was at Bingo, came home, found Mary, and called the headmaster—some guy in hysterics named Nicholas Raddlecup, if you can believe that. He’s the one who called 911—of course after he came over to see for himself. From discovery to phone call was maybe twenty minutes, from what we put together.”

  “You were among the first on scene?”

  “Close enough.”

  “How was Elise?”

  “Hysterical,” he said flatly. “She’s in the hospital right now, sedated.”

  “Place was unlocked?” Willy asked, wandering around once more.

  “No one’s even sure where the key is,” Nelson told him. “The whole campus is wide open, except for the administrative offices, the lab classrooms, places like that. They like to consider the school a big happy family.”

  “It may be,” Joe said quietly, taking in the place as a whole—the way it was decorated and accessorized; the homey touches reflective of an old couple with a lot of shared history.

  “And the electric cord belonged here?” Willy asked.

  “Yeah,” Nelson answered. “It usually hung from a hook at the top of the cellar stairs.” He pointed to a slightly open door off on the side wall. “They’d just bought it to replace a ratty one Elise had been complaining about.”

  Joe noticed a movement through the window by the front door and caught sight of a short, round man with a red face, dressed in a long, virulently green coat with blue trim. He was approaching across the snowy yard—an elf on the run.

  A hurried knock was followed by the door being flung open.

  “Who are you?” the elf demanded.

  Willy bristled. “We’re the police, dipwad, and you’re not invited.”

  “That’s Nicholas Raddlecup,” David Nelson said, his distaste audible. “The school headmaster.”

  “We’re conducting an investigation here, Mr. Raddlecup,” Joe told him. “I’d like to speak with you at some point, but not right now, if that’s all right.” He pulled out a document and handed it to Raddle-cup. “That’s a search warrant making this all nice and legal.”

  The headmaster distractedly took the folded sheet of paper. “Investigation?” he burst out. “What’s to investigate? The woman strung herself up without so much as a how-do-you-do. She broke Elise’s heart, abandoned her responsibilities; she left me totally in the lurch.” He paused to shake his head before adding, “Suicide is such a selfish act.”

  “Takes one to know one,” Nelson muttered mostly to himself before retreating deeper into the house.

  Joe began closing the door. He had a northerner’s aversion to heating the outdoors. “I’ll be happy to hear all that in a bit. We shouldn’t be too long. I take it Detective Nelson knows how to contact you?”

  Raddlecup put his hand on the door to stop it. “Wait.”

  “Why?” Joe asked, his tone no longer inviting.

  “What are you people doing? Isn’t this over?”

  Joe considered saying something diplomatic, but he’d found that his reaction to this man was no better than Nelson’s.

  “No,” he said, slamming the door.

  “What an asshole,” Willy said.

  Joe stared at the floor for a second, before looking up at Dave Nelson. “Okay, let’s kick this around from a different angle.”

  “As a murder?” Nelson asked.

  “You think?” Willy grumbled.

  Joe ignored him and kept addressing their colleague. “We are told to approach every death as a homicide, and maybe we do at first, but it doesn’t take long to start seeing a duck as a duck and ruling it out as anything else.” He waved his hand to encompass the room. “This may be a perfect example—it looked like a suicide . . .”

  “But it might’ve been a homicide,” Nelson finished.

  Joe smiled. “Right. Do you have more photographs of the scene?”

  Dave returned to his briefcase and extracted a thin sheaf. “I thought you might ask, when I heard you were coming here.” He laid out a row of pictures on the countertop. Willy and Joe stood side by side, studying them closely.

  “There’s the blood,” Willy commented, pointing.

  Joe indicated the body’s bare foot, and the red drop upon it. “You see that at the time?”

  “Sure,” Nelson told him, sliding another shot to the front. “That’s why I took a close-up. But I assumed it came from up her dress someplace—that the ME would find out where.”

  “You didn’t check it out yourself?” Willy asked.

  Joe thought that was unnecessarily judgmental; he had serious doubts Willy would have stuck a flashlight up there himself.

  “Reasonable assumption,” he therefore said. “The ME prefers it when we don’t mess with her bodies, so you get my thumbs-up on that one. Besides, that’s exactly what Hillstrom did. Except she didn’t find a source for it.”

  Nelson stared at him. “Where did it come from, then?” He paused before rubbing his forehead, adding, “Oh, shit. Did they get a sample, or was it wiped off inside the body bag?”

  “They got it,” Willy grumbled.

  “So it’s the killer’s.”

  Joe shook his head. “We’re not sure it isn’t hers,” he stressed. “We’ll get that in a week or less, depending. In the meantime, we proceed as if you’re right.”

  Nelson seemed stuck on his earlier statement. “Where else could it have come from?”

  “You sure it wasn’t the girlfriend’s?” Willy asked.

  Nelson had thought of that. “I asked. It didn’t appear to be.”

  “What feeling did you get about them as a couple?” Joe asked. “Happy? Unhappy? Did you pick up any rumors last night, when all this was fresh?”

  “Everybody was stunned,” Nelson admitted. “Raddlecup said they were just like Ozzie and Harriet, whatever that means.”

  “Old TV show
,” Joe told him. “No troubles in paradise? The note sounds like there were.”

  “That’s what hit Elise the hardest,” Nelson said. “She kept holding on to the note and saying it didn’t make sense. She said, ‘We were happy, we were happy,’ again and again until they took her away. To be honest, I was glad to hear you had doubts about the note, too.”

  “How many people did you interview?”

  “Not many,” he conceded. “It was a suicide, as far as we were concerned—no signs of violence, no forced entry, the note. I asked Raddlecup if she’d been under any pressure and he said she was a workaholic and that he was always telling her to go home to Elise. He sounds like a phony every time he opens his mouth, so it’s hard to tell, but he said there was no way he could put in the hours she did and remain sane. She virtually ran the whole school.”

  “Doesn’t say much for him,” Joe said quietly.

  Nelson smiled. “I’ll give him that much. He seems to know he’s a lightweight. Anyhow, given what we thought we had, we didn’t push too hard. I did call her doc. She was on meds for cholesterol and high blood pressure. The doc said he was surprised—called her a real trooper—but that she’d been tired and overworked the last time he saw her and seemed a little depressed. So even there . . .”

  He left the sentence unfinished.

  Joe got the idea. “They have a computer here?”

  Nelson appeared to be gaining self-confidence. “For the suicide note? Yeah. In the upstairs office.”

  Bringing the note, he led the way to a steep and narrow staircase and took them up to a virtual cubbyhole across from a bedroom. The entire house was beginning to feel like the set of a Disney movie about anthropomorphized mice. Stooping under the low ceiling and huddled together like conspirators, the three of them compared what they had in the evidence bag to the top sheet in the printer’s outfeed tray—a grocery list.

  “Not even close,” Willy commented.

  “I did notice that,” Nelson said. “But I also figured that the two women might’ve liked different typefaces.”

  Willy chuckled for the first time. “Good point,” he allowed. “You’ll be yanking out the hard drive anyway, though.”

  Joe straightened and pointed at the computer. “Yeah. Someone better get a warrant for that.”

  Nelson gave him a sideways glance. “You people taking the case?”

  But Joe shook his head. “If we’re invited. The reason we’re here now is because of something the ME said. That’s why I asked you on the phone if meeting us would be okay. I’m not big on stepping on people’s toes.”

  “Not to worry,” Nelson said. “You saved me from dropping the ball.”

  Joe hoped Willy wouldn’t jump in for a cheap crack, and as usual, Kunkle surprised him.

  “How long exactly you been in a suit?” Willy asked.

  “One week,” the trooper admitted.

  “Don’t beat yourself up, then. You were supposed to think what you did.”

  Nelson pulled out his cell phone. “I’m telling my lieutenant you should get this.”

  But Joe laid his hand on his arm. “You check out her office computer?”

  This time, Nelson looked at Willy when he said, “Jesus. Just when I was feeling good.”

  Willy laughed as he headed down the precarious stairs, talking as he went. “Hey! If it matches, then we’ll look like jerks, not that you weren’t thinking that anyhow.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “What did you guys find out?” Sam asked as Joe and Willy entered the office, removing their overcoats.

  “A suicide, it’s not,” the latter said, heading for the coffee.

  “Where’s Les?” Joe asked her, settling behind his desk and checking his computer for messages.

  “Doing homework on Doreen at McNaughton Trucking,” she said. “So this woman was murdered, after all?”

  “It wasn’t natural causes,” Willy continued.

  Sammie sighed and looked to Joe.

  “She may have been hanged, instead of doing it herself,” he told her. “The suicide note looks bogus—it wasn’t printed from either her office machine or the home’s—and we can’t figure out how she could’ve climbed the stool and kicked it over, and ended up with her feet higher than the stool when it’s upright.”

  “Ouch,” she said. “There’s a goof.”

  Willy turned away from the machine, a mug in his good hand. “Which makes you wonder,” he said, “what the hell’s going on?”

  This, thought Joe, noticing Willy’s leading tone of voice, was the primary reason he kept this quasi-sociopath employed. “Meaning what?” he asked him.

  “Maybe it’s a stretch,” Willy said, pausing to sip. “But it looks like we got a rape that’s not a rape and a suicide that’s not a suicide. Both victims are older women; both have a drop of blood on ’em we can’t track to an obvious source; neither case showed forced entry or peripheral violence. They both look carefully planned and carried out, and they both turn into something else as soon as you barely scratch the surface.”

  “As if that was planned, too,” Sammie suggested.

  “Right,” he agreed. “So—no goof with the fake suicide.”

  “Like a calling card,” Sam barely murmured.

  “Along with the drop of blood,” he added.

  “But,” Joe challenged them both, “then what? Why go to all the trouble? Why the misdirection?”

  “Find the connection,” Sam said, “and you find the answer.”

  “Between Mary and Doreen?” Willy asked.

  “Yeah,” she continued. “Standard, old-fashioned link analysis. I don’t know why, but the blood we keep finding has to mean as much as the bogus setups. Sure as shit, the same guy must’ve done both women. It stands to reason both of them pissed him off somehow, and that maybe part of the explanation is in the theatrics.”

  Joe was nodding and writing on a legal pad. “I’ll get the lab to put a rush on the blood tests. Also, let’s see what overlaps might exist between McNaughton Trucking and Ethan Allen Academy. Both women were key to their organizations—invisible number two people. There could be a psycho-sexual angle tying them together—some guy who worked at both places and resented strong women pushing him around.”

  “The link could also be between the women,” Willy suggested. “Mary might’ve once been a teacher, Doreen her student—there’s about a twenty-year gap between ’em—so maybe the guy fits in there.”

  Joe sat back from his pad. “Okay. Well, Christ knows at this point. We need to do some serious digging—put a foundation under the theory. Connect the dots, like Sam said.” He pointed to her and suggested, “Call Lester and tell him what we’re after. He’s already at McNaughton; he can broaden his questions and see if Mary Fish pops up. As for the rest of us, it’s time to find out more about these two ladies than their mothers ever knew.”

  He paused a moment then, watching Sam reach for the phone and Willy head for his desk. For all the drudgery and headaches this job could involve—the lousy hours, minimal pay, exposure to bureaucrats above and dirtbags below, and politics from everywhere—there were just enough moments like this one, when the first faint glimmerings of an idea began forming, that made it all a pure joy.

  Until the phones began to ring, of course. Which his did at that precise moment.

  “Gunther—Vermont Bureau of Investigation.”

  “Joseph, my old pal. You’ve been trying to avoid me.”

  Joe felt a small shot of adrenaline. He not only recognized the local paper’s editor-in-chief, Stanley Katz—an old and respected sparring partner—but suddenly realized that only the four people in this room knew Doreen to be probably just the first half of any news story about homicide. Little did Katz know what he was actually poking into.

  “Stanley,” Joe responded in a jocular voice, loud enough for the rest of them to know who was on the line. “I’m surprised you took so long. You’re losing your touch. Nice article this morning, though.”


  Katz laughed. “Yeah, right. As if you’re going to tell me a ton more now than you would’ve if I’d called you in the middle of the night, which is nothing.”

  “That wouldn’t have stopped you in the old days.”

  “In the old days, I didn’t need all the drugs I take now. I’m in a fucking coma every night with the shit they have me on.”

  Joe laughed outright. Trust Stan Katz to reduce the general state of geriatric suffering to a one-liner. “You shouldn’t have lived the way you did way back when. I told you that more than once.”

  “You fairy,” Katz retorted. “You’ll get to dance on my grave—I’ll give you that—but I’ll still have the bigger smile on my face. Give me what you’ve got on this Ferenc lady. Raped, too, was she?”

  Katz and Gunther went back years. In more ways than one, it seemed a very long time.

  “You clearly received the press release,” Joe answered him.

  “Worthless piece of crap. Tell me about the rape.”

  “Nothing to tell yet.”

  “Tell me about the rapist.”

  Joe knew better than to react.

  “You got anything at all?”

  “We’re working on it right now,” Joe told him.

  “Ooh. There’s a headline: ‘Cops Working on Homicide.’ Better than the opposite, I suppose. Come on, Joe. You’re busting my balls here.”

  “I haven’t even started, Stanley. And you of all people know I’ll call when we get something we can make public.”

  “God, you’re a prince.”

  The phone went dead and Joe slowly hung it up. Stanley Katz’s casualness notwithstanding, this had been a warning shot, if not precisely from the Brattleboro Reformer, then from the industry it represented.

  It wouldn’t take long for the press in general to crank up its interest, especially as things got more complicated.

  Bob Clarke looked balefully out the window as he slipped his much patched winter parka over his Taco Bell uniform.

  “Great,” he muttered, watching the snow drifting from the night sky into the parking lot lights, and there coming to life like excited fireflies.