Chat Page 7

  “The sheriff would go along with that?” Joe asked, finally gaining on the idea.

  Barrows laughed. “You just watch.”

  Late that night, having missed the dinner hour, Joe found himself standing in the kitchen, scrutinizing stacks of cans in one of the cupboards.

  “What are you looking for?” his mother asked from the door.

  He turned and laughed. “Busted. I heard the TV. Didn’t want to bother you. I know it’s getting late. I was looking for some Spam or something.”

  Her eyes widened. “Spam? I should be visiting your graveside, the way you eat.” She rolled farther into the room, heading toward the fridge. “I’ll make you something. Leo’s gotten me lazy. Time I got back into cooking. How about an omelet? I’ll throw in some ham, tomatoes, maybe a little cheese?”

  It was a more than acceptable compromise. Joe kept little in his own fridge except milk and mayonnaise, along with a few jars containing substances he couldn’t identify. Eating was something he did out of hunger, drawing few distinctions between a doughnut and a salad. It used to drive Gail insane.

  He settled down at the kitchen table to get out of his mother’s way as she expertly traveled the room.

  “What’s the latest on Leo?” she asked as she worked, her voice self-consciously nonchalant.

  He smiled at her. “As if you didn’t know. I did just come from there, though. I think he’s looking a little better. He certainly has more to say, which isn’t pretty. I figure in a week, the nurses’ll kill him and that’ll be the end of it.”

  She gave him a dark look, which he knew not to take seriously.

  “He’s got company, by the way,” Joe added.

  “Who?”

  “Cops. I found a state trooper there tonight, just visiting, and Leo said there’d been others. Word got out, and guys from a bunch of departments are dropping by, just showing support. They even started a guest book you can see next time you’re there.”

  She nodded once, visibly moved. “That’s very sweet.”

  “It’s a small world I work in,” he told her. “And cops are pretty sentimental. What did the doc tell you on the phone?” he then asked, knowing she’d called.

  “That he’s past the worst of it but has a long way to go.” She cracked an egg into a bowl and put the shell down beside it, sighing. “I keep wondering if all this will change things.”

  He reached out and patted her hand. “One step at a time, Mom. Leo’s pretty irrepressible. He’ll have some physical therapy afterward, and you might be taking more care of him than he ever did of you for a while, but I’m guessing he’ll be back in full form by the end.”

  She nodded and broke another egg. “What did you learn about the accident?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “How did you know I was looking into that?”

  She looked up at him. “I would be.”

  Good point, he thought. Part of the reason he’d turned out the way he had was because she’d trained him to be curious about everything and everyone.

  “A piece of the car fell off,” he said. “That’s what messed up the steering. The sheriff’s department is going to see if they can find it tomorrow, using metal detectors.”

  She kept working, whipping the eggs in the bowl, her eyes down and her voice neutral. “That seems like a lot of work.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve teamed up with one of their deputies, Rob Barrows. He says they have an Explorers troop that are all eager beavers. Won’t cost them a cent.”

  Again she nodded. “Laura Barrows’s boy. He was in the MPs in the Army. Got out three years ago. A nice man.”

  “Yeah. Seems so.” Joe was watching her carefully, knowing something was brewing.

  After a small pause, she added, “If you know the accident was caused by something falling off, why do you need to find it?”

  Ouch, he thought. Too smart by half. “Just to make things neat and tidy.”

  She stopped whipping and fixed him with a baleful look. This one he did know to take seriously. “Joseph.”

  He pushed his lips out in defeat. “You’re good, Mom. If I knew how to scramble eggs, I’d trade jobs with you.”

  “I wouldn’t wish that on the rest of humanity,” she told him. “What’s going on?”

  He studied the tabletop for a couple of seconds, pondering his response. “Truth? Maybe nothing, and I’m not pulling your leg. It’s just that the piece I mentioned shouldn’t have fallen off a car as new as the Subaru.”

  “What else?” she asked.

  “That’s it. I told you it was probably nothing.”

  She frowned at him. “You were the same way as a child. You could never just spit it out. Parts fall off of new cars, too, Joe. All the time. What are you not telling me?”

  Joe repositioned his chair, crossed his legs and arms, and reconsidered his strategy.

  “Cops are professional paranoids, Mom. You know that, right? It keeps us focused and it keeps us safe. It also makes us look under the bed, even when we know there’s nothing there.”

  She kept studying him, the eggs temporarily forgotten.

  “So,” he resumed, “two members of a cop’s family get injured because a relatively new car falls apart, you gotta wonder why, especially when that car is serviced by a business belonging to E. T. Griffis.”

  She nodded, satisfied at last, though not happily so. “Ah.”

  “You knew about Andy?” he asked.

  “Yes. Poor boy.”

  “Well, I didn’t. Barrows just told me. When did it happen?”

  “Late this summer. He hanged himself.”

  “I heard E. T. and Dan took it hard.”

  She seemed to notice the bowl before her for the first time, gave it a couple of last swirls with the whisk, and set to work on dicing up a piece of ham. She spoke as she worked.

  “Dan confronted me in the grocery store afterward.”

  “What?” Joe leaned forward in his chair.

  She put her knife down briefly for emphasis. “I’m only telling you this because I assume you’ll hear it from someone else, and I don’t want to explain why I kept silent. It’s the worst part of living in a small community.”

  “What happened?” Joe demanded.

  “Essentially nothing. He just came up to me in the grocery store when I was there buying a few things—Leo had gone across the street—and he let me know he was unhappy with the way things had turned out.”

  Joe let out an angry laugh. “Oh, right. I bet that’s the way he phrased it. Come on, Mom. What did he say?”

  She was back to cutting up the ham. “It was unpleasant and said in the heat of the moment.”

  Now he was the one merely staring in silence.

  She let it drag on for almost a minute before finally conceding, “He said we’d be sorry. That we’d pay for it.”

  Joe rubbed his forehead. “Great. Did you know E. T. handed Steve’s Garage over to Dan?”

  That stopped her in mid-motion. “No,” she allowed.

  Joe sat back and thought for a few seconds. “What was the reason given for Andy doing himself in?” he then asked in a calmer voice.

  “The most I ever heard was that he was having problems, whatever that means.” She looked up from her task and then asked, “What did you arrest him for?”

  Joe smiled bitterly and shook his head. “For something I couldn’t prove he didn’t do.”

  “He didn’t do?” she parroted.

  “It was a burglary. The store owner interrupted it and was injured in the process—an older lady. She didn’t see who hit her, but she saw a car driving off afterward, tires squealing, and got the registration. It belonged to Andy, and when we went by his place to talk to him, the tools used in the break-in were right there in plain sight and were later matched not only to the marks left on the lock of the place he rifled, but to a blood smear belonging to the woman.”

  “That sounds pretty strong,” his mother suggested.

  “On the face of it,”
he agreed. “My problem was that he’d never done anything like that before and there was nothing in his private life to explain why he would—except for having a loser brother who happened to be facing what his type calls ‘the Bitch.’”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “I beg your pardon?”

  “That’s the habitual offender label that can turn a standard sentence into a lifetime in jail. The SA will slap it on you if he’s had enough of giving you second chances, and I happen to know that Dan was nose to nose with it big-time back then. I couldn’t prove it, but I always bet Dan was in Brattleboro when all this happened—that he’d done the job and convinced Andy to take the fall because he’d get off light.”

  “Three years doesn’t sound light.”

  Joe didn’t argue with her. “It was an election year, the SA had been accused of being too easy on criminals, the old lady was a charmer, complete with bandaged head, and did I mention that Andy copped to having done it? According to statute, he was looking at fifteen years. I figured—and I swear this is what Dan sold him, too—that he’d get a suspended sentence and probation. But that’s not how the SA saw it, and for some reason, the judge let it fly, too. It was pure Russian roulette on Andy’s part, with five out of six chances of being lucky.”

  Joe sighed heavily, remembering his irritation at the unusual outcome. “That’s what upset me when you said Dan had confronted you in the grocery store,” he added. “If Andy’s death does have anything to do with my quote-unquote sending him to jail, then Dan better not look into any mirrors, ’cause he won’t like what he sees.”

  “But you don’t know any of that for sure,” she half asked.

  There he had to concede defeat. “No.”

  The pager on his belt began vibrating quietly. He groaned and removed it from his belt and saw Sam’s callback number on the display, along with the message, “ASAP.”

  “I better answer this,” he muttered, getting up.

  “A problem?” she asked.

  “Don’t know. It’s Sam.” He moved toward the door.

  “Joe,” his mother said, stopping him.

  He crossed back over to her and kissed her forehead. “Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll figure this out.” He pointed at the bowl. “You better hold off cooking that till after this phone call, though.”

  He went into the living room to give both of them some privacy, more from instinct than any notion that his mother needed shielding.

  “Hi,” he said to Sam after she’d picked up the phone. “What’ve you got?”

  “Sorry to bother you, boss, but we found another dead guy with no ID and no obvious signs of what did him in, just like the first. This one’s in Brattleboro.”

  Joe felt his stomach rumble. He’d stop at a gas station for a sandwich on the way.

  “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Bordfem: hi

  csawurm: your cute

  Bordfem: thanks

  Bordfem: asl

  csawurm: 23 male vermont

  Bordfem: kool - 14 f vermont

  csawurm: whoa your 14?

  Bordfem: is that bad

  csawurm: Im pretty sure thats jailbait - you look older in your pic

  Bordfem: well its my school pic

  csawurm: what school?

  Bordfem: brattleboro middle school

  Bordfem: u there

  csawurm: yep

  Bordfem: u want to chat

  csawurm: yeah but I have to go soon

  Bordfem: k

  csawurm: bye youngin

  Chapter 8

  Joe paused on the threshold, completely clad in a Tyvek jumpsuit, and surveyed the room. What crossed his mind immediately was less the scene before him—a motel room remarkable only for its blandness—and more the fact that the dead body draped across the foot of the bed didn’t seem particularly unusual.

  Being in situations like this, whether they were homicides, suicides, or undetermined, had by now become a habit.

  There were four others in the room ahead of him, all dressed as he was. The smallest of them turned as he closed the door behind him.

  “Hey, boss,” Sam greeted him. “You made good time.”

  He nodded in response. “Still no ID?” he asked.

  “He might as well’ve been dry-cleaned,” another of the figures answered, turning to reveal himself as Lester Spinney, Sam’s exact opposite in both height and demeanor—he, laid back and tall; she, high strung and diminutive. Standing beside each other, they looked like an antiseptic comedy act. The two other detectives, both on their hands and knees, worked for the Brattleboro PD. One, surprisingly to Joe, who had spent decades in that department, he knew only slightly, and not by name. The other, by contrast, was Ron Klesczewski, the chief of detectives, anointed by Joe on his departure, and a close friend. The first man did no more than glance in Joe’s direction before resuming work, scrutinizing the rug inch by inch. Ron, for his part, leaped up and shook hands like a long-lost relative, making Joe realize guiltily that, in fact, they hadn’t seen each other in months, despite their having offices one floor apart.

  After pleasantries—and apologies—Joe looked into the bathroom to his right and the open closet door immediately beyond it, making sure not to step off the ribbon of butcher paper laid down from the doorway to the far wall for scene preservation. Both areas appeared untouched, all the way down to the toilet paper end still folded into a point.

  Ron caught the meaning of his survey. “He did check in,” he reassured him, “but paid cash.”

  “No luggage?” Joe asked.

  “Supposedly a small bag. If so, it’s missing,” Lester suggested.

  Joe stepped deeper into the room. The body lay facedown on the made bed, fully clothed. The TV was off, the lights on, the curtains drawn. Aside from the dead man, the room looked ready for rental.

  There was a knock on the door, and Alan Miller stuck his white-hooded head in. “Okay to come in? I’m all decked out.”

  Joe looked to Ron, who was the nominal lead investigator until or unless he ceded control of the case to the VBI.

  “Good by me,” he said. “I want to see what he looks like.”

  Alan stepped inside cautiously, lugging his metal equipment case. “Any idea who we’ve got?”

  “None,” Sam told him. “What you see is everything. I checked his back pockets already, since they were staring at me, but so far, nothing. Feel free to do the honors.”

  “No weapon?” Miller persisted.

  “We don’t even know if he was murdered,” Lester volunteered cheerfully. “Could be a natural.”

  “Or another parachutist,” Sam muttered darkly.

  Miller looked at her doubtfully but didn’t ask for an explanation. Instead, he opened his case on the butcher paper, extracted a camera, and took a few shots that would later accompany the body to the ME’s office in Burlington. Beverly Hillstrom liked seeing what her customers looked like in place.

  He then began carefully examining the body, first by simply placing his gloved hand on its abdomen to feel its temperature, before moving to the hands, arms, and legs to check for stiffness. A vague rule of thumb had it that rigor mortis takes some twelve hours to reach its peak, before a body’s flaccidity begins reasserting itself. But everyone in the room was experienced enough to know that such rules were notoriously unreliable.

  “Okay to move him?” he asked.

  Klesczewski nodded, and Miller rolled the body onto its back, farther up onto the bed. A gentle sigh escaped its lungs as it settled into its new position.

  They all studied the man’s face, as if expecting him to deliver a name. He was about five feet ten, on the edge of going fat, dressed in jeans, a chamois flannel shirt, and sneakers. He had thick, curly hair, a narrow, neatly bearded face, and absolutely nothing to say to any of them.

  To satisfy Sam, whose habits he knew all too well, Miller checked the decedent’s front pockets first. “Nothing,” he announced.

  The rest of his examination ca
me to about the same conclusion. Clothing was opened and shifted, but not removed—again according to the ME’s wishes—but no wounds, telling tattoos, or interesting artifacts surfaced. Whoever this was, he remained, for the moment, simply a corpse in a motel room.

  They’d been told in the middle of Miller’s procedure that the funeral home had arrived for transportation. The body was, therefore, eventually sealed in a heavy plastic bag and handed over to the hearse and its police escort, leaving the original team alone in the room.

  In the momentary silence following their host’s departure, Joe scratched his cheek through his Tyvek hood, feeling claustrophobic. “How many key cards did he request at the desk?”

  Sam and Ron exchanged glances—a throwback to when Sam was also on the local squad. Lester picked up the hint and moved to the phone, made a quick call, hung up after asking the same question of the clerk, and reported, “Two.”

  “That’s interesting,” Joe said. “How many cards did you find here?”

  “None,” Ron admitted in a monotone, adding, “I should’ve thought of that.”

  “Call me a pessimist,” Joe then mused, “but I’m guessing our buddy didn’t die of natural causes.”

  Sam paced the short distance to the far wall and came back again, staying on the brown paper but agitated by the same oversight Ron had owned up to. “Okay. Let’s put it together. He checks in, presumably looking for anonymity . . .”

  “And for love,” Lester added.

  “Right. But no sooner has he entered this room than his date arrives and whacks him somehow, stealing all his stuff, including both key cards.”