I’d therefore thought that having achieved what he’d wanted politically, Jim Reynolds had suddenly found himself running a part-time practice while being a part-time legislator—dividing by half any chance to be truly effective. Gail gave him more credit. She felt he was just biding his time, waiting for the right issue.
It looked like she’d been right.
He was nearing the end of his second two-year term. Legislative sessions straddle a biennium, and this January had marked the start of the second half, called the “adjournment session.” Reynolds was the chair of the powerful Judiciary Committee, but he’d failed to win the pro-tem position, which in practice is the Senate’s top dog—the lieutenant governor’s title of “president” notwithstanding—and I’d argued with Gail earlier that his enthusiasm might be running out.
Until Amos Melcourt had killed those two kids, of course. Now it looked like Reynolds had found himself a life raft and, with it, the backing of the governor and his head of Public Safety, Dave Stanton. Since Willy Kunkle had sourly revealed all this in the office several days ago, one of the promised public hearings on revamping statewide law enforcement had taken place in Rutland—to rave reviews. People had turned out in droves, almost every police agency had been used to mop the floor, and Reynolds was beginning to look like the spear-point of change.
All of which reminded me of Watergate and made me wonder if a simple botched break-in might be more than it appeared.
I DIDN’T GET THE CHANCE
to mull over the break-in of Jim Reynolds’s office any longer than it took me to leave Bobby Miller to his doughnut, cross to my side of the building, and come face-to-face with Harriet Fritter, the squad’s administrative assistant and a doting grandmother several times over. “There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“I was in the Officers’ Room—ten minutes tops.”
“There’s been a killing on White Birch Avenue. A woman stabbed with a knife.” Her face suddenly hardened. “And a baby, too.”
I squeezed her shoulder in sympathy and continued to my office to fetch my coat. “Everyone there now?”
“The first units, just barely. It came in as a missing persons first.”
I returned down the hallway, struggling into my parka. “Okay. You know the drill. Round up who we need. They have a suspect yet?”
“Not that I heard.”
White Birch Avenue is located in the southeast quadrant of town, a flat plateau dominated by a contrasting mixture of three cemeteries, the high school, the town garage, a sedate middle-class neighborhood, and some of the poorest housing we’ve got. Depending on where you are in this area, you have no inkling of the existence of its other parts, such is the division from one section to the next.
White Birch is barely a hundred yards long. Connected to South Main and dead-ending at the gates of Saint Michael’s Cemetery, it is narrow and shady to the point of being overgrown, tucked away out of sight and out of the public’s general consciousness. The homes along its length run from fairly run-down to flat-out decrepit. It is not at the bottom of Brattleboro’s food chain, but it is not far removed.
I reached it in under four minutes.
The scene was much more active than the railroad tracks had been in the middle of the night. There, the assumption had been that a bum had committed suicide. Here, there were no doubts what had happened, and as Harriet had demonstrated, a child’s involvement had cranked up emotions to the utmost. South Main Street was jammed with ambulances, squad cars, and private vehicles with either red or blue flashing lights, even though the first of these couldn’t have been summoned more than ten minutes earlier, and most weren’t necessary now. The late afternoon light hovered between day and night, making the colorful, pulsating display all the more festive in a world of uniform gray.
I parked at a distance and walked to White Birch, which already had yellow tape barring it from the growing crowd. I was happy things had been so quickly contained.
A young woman detached herself from the pack as I approached—Alice Simms, the cops-’n’-courts reporter for the
Reformer
.
“Joe, any idea what happened?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll issue a statement later.”
I passed by her, ignored the others—an assemblage of off-duty cops, firefighters, rescue personnel, and neighborhood gawkers—and ducked under the tape.
Ahead of me the narrow street led straight to the cemetery’s closed chain-link gate. One squad car and a second ambulance were parked opposite a small, dark green one-story house, sagging and stained, with a haphazard collection of junk littering its scrappy front yard. There were probably twenty thousand houses just like this one scattered all across the state.
Ward Washburn, one of our veteran patrolmen, met me on the porch.
“Who’s inside?” I asked him.
“Ron, a two-woman team from Rescue, Inc., and Dave Raymo. He was first on scene.” He pointed over my shoulder. “Here come Willy and Tyler.”
I glanced in their direction. “Good. They do a lot of tramping around in there?”
“Not sure. I heard Ron telling ’em all to keep to a narrow path, and they’re all wearing gloves.”
“Okay. Make sure you get someone guarding the back, and seal the place up tight. I don’t want anyone messing this up.”
“What about the ME and whoever the SA sends over?”
“They should put on containment suits. By the way, you string up that police line?”
Washburn’s thin, lined face allowed a faint smile. “Yeah.”
“Nice job. Fast thinking.”
I climbed back down the steps to greet J.P.
“Been inside yet?” he asked before I could open my mouth.
I shook my head. “I was waiting for those.” I pointed at the new bag he was carrying, full of the thin white overalls, booties, and caps he was hoping we’d start wearing to keep crime scenes pristine. This was the first chance we’d had to try them out—there hadn’t been any point at the railroad tracks.
He dropped the bag onto the frozen grass as I keyed the mike to my radio, simultaneously reaching for a suit. “Ron, it’s Joe—why don’t you get everyone out here so we can seal the scene.”
Moments later, the front door squealed open and four people stepped out—two women wearing dark blue jump suits and carrying bulky medical kits, followed by Dave Raymo and Klesczewski.
Ron indicated the two women as he approached. “Joe, this is Cindy Berger and Melissa Snow of Rescue, Inc. Melissa’s a paramedic and the crew chief.”
I shook hands and addressed Melissa Snow. “How did this go down?”
Dave Raymo interrupted. “I called ’em.”
I didn’t like Raymo much. He was more interested in the trappings of being a cop than the job itself. He had a special grip on his pistol, a fetish for tight-fitting leather gloves, a goofy haircut somewhere between a flat top and a Mohawk, and a swagger I thought grotesque for a public servant. He’d come to us from Massachusetts a half year ago, and I suspected he’d be moving on before another year went by.
“I got a call to check out a missing person complaint,” he continued. “Some old lady said her daughter wasn’t answering the door or the phone or anything else, and she was worried something had happened. When I got here, I looked through the windows, saw the body on the floor, called for backup and Rescue, and then we entered the premises. When the ambulance got here, I already knew they wouldn’t be needed, but I thought what the hey, and had ’em check both bodies out. CYA, you know?”
There was a breeziness about his manner that made me doubt his story. “So you also found the child?” I asked, clumsily pulling the overalls on over my coat.
Raymo hesitated and finally blurted. “Yeah, I saw the crib.”
Melissa Snow explained further. “I found him in the back bedroom. I noticed some toys lying around and went looking.”
I glanced from one to the other, registering what wasn’t being said, and decided to deal with it later. “This might sound dumb,” I said to her, “but you’re sure both people are dead?”
Raymo rolled his eyes. “Wait’ll you see ’em.”
We both ignored him. Snow answered, “The child is cold and stiff—I’m guessing hypothermia there. The woman’s head is almost severed from her body, and the blood’s frozen.”
“Where’s the victim’s mother?” I asked Raymo.
He jerked his thumb at the nearest patrol car. “I put her in my unit.”
“She okay?”
“Yeah. She didn’t see anything—too short to reach the window. You can’t see the real gory stuff from there anyhow—that’s why I called Rescue. Wasn’t sure she was dead.”
I crossed the lawn and climbed the rickety porch steps again, accompanied by Willy and J.P., all three of us looking like bulky ghosts. Ron stayed behind. “Did either of you touch anything inside?” I called out to both women as an afterthought.
They shook their heads, Melissa adding, “We were wearing gloves anyway.”
“Okay. Thank you very much. We might be asking you for fingerprints, hair samples, and shoe impressions later. Just so you know.”
As they left, I gestured to Ron. “Could you check out the mother? See how she’s doing and get a statement.”
He nodded as I pointed to Raymo. “Switch cars with Washburn and go back to the office to write up your report. We won’t be needing you anymore.”
His expression showed he took my full meaning. He turned away without comment and stalked off, stiff with anger.
Willy laughed softly. “Asshole.”
I wasn’t in the mood. “Then don’t start acting like him.”
He smiled and held the door open for me, unrepentant. “Yes, Mother. You know he’s going back on patrol—show you who’s boss.”
“I know.”
The building’s interior was as cold as the outside, although much better lit. We stood in a short, narrow entrance hall as J.P. unfurled a roll of brown construction paper and began laying it before us like a red carpet, ensuring nothing of value would be picked up by our shoes and carried out of the house. It was a little compulsive, given that we were already wearing surgical booties, but he didn’t get to do this often.
The woman was lying between an obviously ransacked living room and the kitchen, still as a fallen mannequin. As described by Melissa Snow, her head was almost detached, and blood surrounded her like hemorrhaged syrup. The biting cold seemed suddenly to sink in deeper.
J.P. took a series of photographs before getting to one knee just clear of the frozen pool. “Multiple stab wounds to the chest,” he reported, not bothering to look back at us, his head enveloped in vapor from his breath. “Defensive cuts to the hands and forearms. Fingernails look intact—might be some of her attacker’s tissue there. Hard to tell right now.” He glanced up at the walls. “Given the blood-spatter pattern, it looks like she put up a fight but never ran. It all happened right here.”
Willy Kunkle was flashing a light into the darker corners nearby. “Probably an acquaintance attack, and she was either a real slob, or somebody was looking for something.”
“Any weapon?” I asked J.P., flexing my cold fingers inside their thin latex gloves.
He took a slight hop over the body into the kitchen beyond. “Nothing obvious,” he said, looking around. He began taking more pictures.
Catering to his tidiness, I took the roll of paper and prodded it down the hallway to the back of the house with the tip of my white-swathed boot, leaving Willy and J.P. behind.
Past a communal bathroom and some disgorged closets, there were two bedrooms, both with lights on. One was obviously an adult’s—a woman’s clothing was strewn about; cosmetics, jewelry, and a hair dryer were scattered across a scarred bureau and a night table. The bed appeared permanently unmade, but again, all the drawers and closets looked like they’d been rifled. The other room was the child’s. I entered it first.
The baby lay in its crib, a beaten-up hand-me-down planted in the middle of the room. Melissa Snow had implied it was a boy. Its one thin blanket appeared slightly disturbed, so I assumed for the moment she’d checked that fact out personally. The room didn’t reflect any signs of care or affection. The walls were bare of decorations, even the torn-out magazine pictures I’d seen in other such homes. The blanket was dirty, as were the floor and windows, and the rest of the floor was buried under boxes, suitcases, and laundry bags, of the kind usually reserved for attics or garages—all, as elsewhere, had clearly been tossed around. There was so much junk that the crib looked imperiled in its midst, as if four crests of rolling flotsam were about to close in on it from all sides and swallow it whole like a small boat beneath a tidal wave.
I heard heavy, hurried footsteps approaching down the hall, and turned as an out-of-breath Sammie Martens appeared at the door, still pulling her gloves up over the cuffs of her overalls.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said.
I looked at her carefully and took my time responding. “I thought you were on the sick list.”
Her face, already pink from the cold and exertion, deepened in color. “I’m feeling a lot better.”
“Does this mean you’ll be sticking around?”
She opened her mouth to answer and then paused. I could tell, however, that her immediate reaction had been anger. “Yes. Sorry if I caused any problems.”
I stepped aside so she could get a full view of the dead baby. “You haven’t, Sam. I just want to know if we can count on you.”
This time, the anger showed. “I never let you down before.”
I motioned her to approach the crib. “The paramedic thinks hypothermia. There’s a wood stove in the front—probably the only source of heat. You see Ron when you came in?”
“In the unit, talking with some woman.” Her eyes were fixed on the crib’s contents.
I gestured up the hallway. “The victim’s mother, supposedly. I’m hoping she’ll know something about all this—a few names, at least.” I glanced back at the baby, as peaceful as if it were still asleep, aside from a waxy pallor. “Christ. What a world,” I murmured.
Sammie hesitated and then said, “I am sorry, Joe. I know I’ve been a little flaky.”
I looked up at her, embarrassed myself. “Don’t worry about it. I came down too hard on you. We can talk later. I’ll leave you three to it for now and have Ron organize the canvass, neighbor interviews, record checks, and everything else. Make sure J.P. covers all the angles, okay? There’s no rush. I’ll make sure someone comes by later with hot coffee and something to eat.”