Ron Klesczewski came next, an hour later. “Remember that offline NCIC check I was doing on the truck’s registration?” he asked, not expecting me to answer. “Well, it paid off. A month ago, a state trooper in Connecticut stopped the truck for a broken light. He let the driver go but recorded the plate number and the rest.”
He handed me a typed sheet of paper and kept speaking, “Philip Resnick, New Jersey, DOB 4/8/51. I fed the name into the computer. He’s got priors for grand theft auto in his home state. Also disposing of stolen property, breaking and entering with intent to burgle, consorting with known felons while on probation, and a bunch of recent motor vehicle violations, all related to truck usage.”
“Any of it tied to hazardous materials?” I asked.
“Yup. Two. But no convictions. I haven’t had time to call up the locals for more details.”
“So he’s our guy?”
Ron’s enthusiasm slipped a notch. “Maybe. The truck’s leased, and it’s had more than one driver. I
think
Resnick was the latest, but the NCIC check also came up with some earlier entries listing other drivers. So I can’t swear to it. Not yet.”
“That’s okay. Let Tyler know. Maybe the name’ll help him find a match to that fingerprint. Still nothing on the PCH partial Ed Renaud claims he saw?”
Ron shook his head. “I’m not sure where to go with that.”
“Try changing the letters—P to B—something like that. I always think D and O look the same from a distance. Maybe Ed was slightly off somewhere.”
Ron nodded and smiled ruefully. “Okay. Guess I’ll find out how patient DMV is.”
I sat back in my chair, feeling good. Things were coming together gradually, logically, and with the curious harmony that touched almost every case eventually. This was the point I enjoyed the most, where I still wasn’t sure where we were headed but could sense the coordinates slowly organizing, like a flight of birds gathering into a pattern.
But there were still oddities threatening the symmetry. It looked as if Philip Resnick had been the driver of the truck, that he’d recently dumped a load of toxic waste, and that he’d been contaminated in the process. But his death remained unexplained, as did the reason why those three men dispatched him the way they did, combining stealth and carelessness so randomly. I was used to the fact that most of the crooks we dealt with had low IQs, but there’d been none of the usual stupidity here.
Tyler’s finding that finger was a stroke of luck, as was Ron’s discovery of Resnick’s identity, which the three men in the car had apparently worked hard to keep secret. But their efforts seemed contradictory. Why the elaborate charade, making Resnick into a bum and depositing him where he’d be found within hours? Why not simply tie a cinder block to his body and dump him in a pond? Or bury him in the woods?
The good feeling I’d enjoyed minutes earlier drained away. It seemed our efforts—perhaps even our successes—were being orchestrated somehow, making the man on the tracks a part of something bigger.
Maybe something ongoing.
So much for any metaphorical flock of birds uniting in perfect harmony.
The phone rang as if in response to my worsening mood.
“Joe. How’re you doin’?”
Stanley Katz was the editor of the
Brattleboro Reformer,
the daily newspaper. Both he and it had gone through some serious ups and downs over the years, the fallout being that the
Reformer
occasionally read like a real newspaper’s second cousin.
Which wasn’t entirely the paper’s fault. The police department had many of the same problems, and not just because money was tight.
Brattleboro itself was partly responsible, being neither big enough to support a muscular PD and a thriving paper, nor small enough to do without them.
Also, the
Reformer
had been bought and sold a number of times over the previous decade, finally to its own employees, which is how Katz, an erstwhile police beat reporter, had ended up at the helm. Self-ownership had proved to be good in principle, injecting pride into those who wanted to live here anyway, but for the younger, more restless, upwardly mobile junior workers, there were just too many other better-paying jobs elsewhere.
Just as with us.
“I’m fine, Stanley. What’s up?” I asked him, wary as always. We had disagreed often enough in the past to make a friendship unlikely, although we’d been known to cooperate, sometimes to the brink of what was legal.
“Just wondering about any movement on the dead bum case.”
I doubted it was that simple—he didn’t seem interested in his own question. “What did the chief tell you?”
He avoided answering. “Nothing’s happened for days. People are getting curious.”
“We’re waiting for lab reports. Nobody we’ve found saw anything useful.”
“I heard you’ve got an abandoned truck near Bickford’s, too.”
I hesitated. I could tell this was what he was after, which made me wonder what he already knew. It also meant we both hoped the other had something interesting to offer.
I began vaguely. “Yup—gave it to ANR. Pat Mason’s handling it. Call him.”
I knew he already had and the response he’d received.
Katz tried again. “Too bad about Norm Blood. It’s a guarantee he’ll lose that farm.”
“Probably.”
“Lot of family in the area. Makes for a good local story. Sad one, though. You hear of any other local names connected to it?”
Here it comes, I thought. “Nope. We handed it over pretty fast. Haz mat’s not our thing.”
“How ’bout Jim Reynolds?” His words came out in a small rush, as if he’d suddenly tired of his own game.
I was startled and didn’t immediately respond. I remembered Tyler’s mentioning Reynolds’s office being broken into. Given his prominence as a state senator and a local attorney, I now realized I should have followed that up.
I decided to play it straight. “Can’t help you, Stan. Reynolds never came up. Why?”
I could feel him wavering, wondering how much to admit. “I got a call. Guy said there might be a connection.”
“To the truck or Norm Blood?” I asked.
Now I sensed embarrassment. Apparently, Katz had been hoping for a totally different kind of conversation from this.
“Neither, really, just to haz mat in general. I figured it was the truck, ’cause that’s the only case I know about right now. You been working on anything else concerning illegal dumping?”
“Nope. That’s it. What did your informant say, exactly?”
He sounded almost relieved to stop playing cat-and-mouse. “He didn’t identify himself. He requested me by name, and asked if I’d heard Jim Reynolds was up to his waist in illegal dumping. I said no, and he told me I better hop to it or the
Rutland Herald
was going to eat my lunch—again.”
The
Herald
was arguably the best paper in Vermont, and the fact that it regularly scooped the
Reformer
on Brattleboro stories was one reason it had earned that reputation. Katz himself had once defected to them briefly, just before the
Reformer’s
last owner had sold out to the employees, who in turn had wooed Stanley back.
“What did Pat Mason say?” I asked.
“A generalized ‘no comment.’”
I paused again, my brain teeming with questions Katz couldn’t answer. “Well, Stanley, I don’t know what to tell you. We haven’t heard a peep about Reynolds.”
His disappointment turned to bitterness. “But you’ll put me first on the phone list when you do, right?”
I considered trying to smooth his feathers. He had, after all, made me a gift of sorts. But I changed my mind. “All in good time, Stanley.”
After the phone died in my ear, I dialed Tyler on the intercom.
“Who filed the report on that break-in at Reynolds’s office?”
“Bobby Miller. I just saw him in the Officers’ Room.”
“Thanks.”
I left my cubicle, crossed the building’s central corridor, and entered the department’s other half through an unmarked side door that led directly into the communal area we’d dubbed the Officers’ Room. There were several desks scattered about, each one crowned with a beige computer. In one corner was the patrol captain’s lair, glassed in like my own, in another was a fridge and a counter with a coffee machine, a microwave, and an assortment of cups, plates, and other kitchen debris. Bobby Miller, coming on duty, was loading up on caffeine.
I tapped him on the shoulder.
His face lit up when he recognized me, which wasn’t guaranteed with all the uniforms, our department being pretty typical when it came to rivalry with the plainclothes cops. “Hi, Lieutenant. How’re you doin’?”
“Fine. I wondered if I could pick your brain about a call a few weeks ago.”
“Sure.” He finished pouring cream into his coffee and took it and a doughnut over to a small conference table nearby. “This okay?”
I took a doughnut myself and sat opposite him. “You were in on the office break-in at Jim Reynolds’s, right?”
He nodded, his mouth full.
“How did that go?”
He swallowed, took a sip of coffee, and then shrugged. “Nothing much to it. I saw the back door was slightly open when I drove through the parking lot, so I called for backup. Pierre Lavoie showed up about three minutes later, and we both checked it out. The office sits by itself on a patch of lawn, with the sidewalk out front and the parking lot in back, so it didn’t take much to go around the outside and see what was what.
“By that time, Sheila had joined us, so we all three went inside. As far as we could tell, things looked pretty intact. There was one filing cabinet in an inner office that had a couple of drawers open, but that was it.”
“No stolen computers or radios or anything else?”
Finishing a second sip, he shook his head. “Nope. It all looked normal. We called Reynolds at home right after, so he could confirm if anything was missing. He got there about fifteen minutes later.”
“Did you see anyone near the building before you noticed the door, like a lookout or maybe the burglar pretending to be a pedestrian walking away?”
Miller looked unhappy with himself. “I thought about that later. I was coming from the west, which means I drove past the front of the building, up its far side, and then into the parking lot. If whoever was inside saw me right off, he would’ve had time to head out the back. I did notice a car driving down the street next to the lot, away from the main drag, but it was only after I was writing the whole thing up that I wondered where it had come from. Given the direction it was heading, I should’ve seen it just before I pulled in, either in my lane or approaching from opposite. So it must’ve been already parked on that street, waiting. I didn’t think about it at the time, though, so I have no idea what kind of car it was. I just saw the taillights out of the corner of my eye.”
I thought it likely he was right, but I didn’t want to make him feel any worse by rubbing it in.
I moved on instead. “What was Reynolds like on the phone? Were you the one who talked to him?”
“Yeah. He wasn’t happy. Kept asking if anything was missing. I told him that’s why we were calling him. But he was different once he got there. After he gave the place a quick once-over, he acted like it was no big deal.”
“You mention the open filing cabinet?”
“Specifically. I figured a lawyer would be more antsy about that than a missing fax machine or whatever. You want my personal opinion, he was more upset than he wanted us to know. When I first showed him the open drawers, it was like he was glued to the spot, he was so surprised. That’s why his change of mood was so weird—like it was forced.”
I thought for a minute about what he’d told me, allowing him time to take another bite of doughnut. After he’d finished, I asked, “Bobby, do you have any idea what was in those drawers?”
He hesitated before answering. “Not really. There wasn’t much point in our poking around in them. I did take a glance, though. I think they were case files—old ones. I remember noticing that the tabs on the manila folders were bent and a little dirty, like they’d seen a lot of use. But I suppose that could be true for ongoing cases, too, considering how long it takes to get through the system…I guess I don’t really know. Sorry.”
I stood up. “Don’t be. That’s all I needed.”
To his questioning look, I added, “His name’s come up in something else. Seemed like twice in a couple of weeks was quite a coincidence.”
Bobby Miller was apparently satisfied with that, since he went back to his doughnut without comment.
I, however, was more curious than ever. I doubted the Reynolds break-in was any standard smash-and-grab. The contents of that filing cabinet had to have been the motive. The question therefore became: Did the thief have time to do what he’d set out to do, or had he been interrupted prematurely? Was Reynolds’s change of mood a feint, or did he see at a glance that he had nothing to fear?
Jim Reynolds had worked in this town for over fifteen years, exclusively as a criminal defense attorney. He and Gail’s boss had faced off in a number of high-profile cases, and even when he’d lost—which was rare—he’d squeezed out every legal option available to him, earning him the non-flattering nickname in our office of “Robo-lawyer.”
He had also become one of the town’s high-profile citizens, joining the right groups, associating with the right heavy hitters, so that when he’d finally run for state senate, after brief stints on the school and select boards, both the announcement and subsequent victory had been all but preordained.
What had been surprising was how little we’d heard from him since, given the attention-grabbing foreplay. Admittedly, politicians in Vermont operate a little differently from those elsewhere. We run a true citizen-legislature, which generally only goes from January to April or May. Most of our legislators have outside jobs, since the best they can hope for as politicians, including extras, isn’t much more than $13,000 a year. Only the governor, the lieutenant governor, and the speaker of the House get paid year-round.
So it’s true that neither the Jim Reynoldses nor their House counterparts have the opportunities or the budgets to make the headlines their full-time colleagues do in other states. Correspondingly, because of this double existence, it is also a fact that relatively few attorneys run for state office, since it cuts so seriously into their schedules and incomes.