There was a long pause, and I realized that I’d trampled their euphoria with my lack of enthusiasm. I took a deep breath, trying to override the humming in my head, and gave them both as genuine a smile as I could muster. “Looks like a home run, guys. You might as well collect all this and log it in. It’s about as strong a basis for an arrest warrant as Dunn could ask for. Thanks.”
Tyler smiled back sympathetically, but Willy just shook his head. “Go to bed, boss. You’re falling apart.”
Bed, however, was out of the question. As I walked into Ron Klesczewski’s operations room, intent on escorting the arrest-warrant affidavit all the way to the judge’s pen, I was stopped by the gleam in Ron’s eye. He cupped the phone in his hand and murmured, “I think we got something.”
I waited while he continued listening to whoever was on the other end of the line.
He finally said, “Hang on a sec,” and looked at me again. “This is Wilma Belleview-she’s the sheriff ’s dispatcher in Newfane. She just got a call from a power-company guy at Harriman Station asking if there’ve been any MVAs in the Jacksonville-Harriman Dam area. One of their field men was supposed to be working at the Glory Hole out there but he’s not answering his radio.”
MVA stood for Motor Vehicle Accident. “He have a history of wild driving?”
Ron shrugged. “I don’t know, but Wilma told them she’d call around. VSP and Wilmington PD drew blanks, so she thought she’d try us on a long shot.” He moved over to one of the neat paper piles on his table and retrieved a single, slim folder, his enthusiasm gaining momentum. “The point is, one of Vogel’s big enthusiasms a few years ago, when he was still living in North Adams, was fishing and hunting around the Harriman Reservoir. He and his buddies did that a lot, and they once got busted for trespassing onto the dam, trying to piss into the Glory Hole.”
Dulled as I was by fatigue, I was becoming infected by Ron’s energy. “How long ago did the field man head out there?”
“Early this morning.”
“Was his radio working when he left?”
“Yup. What do you think?”
I held up my hand instinctively, as if to slow down oncoming traffic. “I don’t know yet. How’s the sheriff handling it? They have anyone in the area?”
“Not really, and there haven’t been any MVAs. They weren’t planning on doing anything.”
No reason for them to, I thought, and pointed at the phone still clenched in Ron’s hand. “Better let your friend off the hook.”
Ron looked at the receiver in surprise, muttered his thanks to Wilma, and hung up. “Should we send someone out there?”
I sat down in one of the metal folding chairs grouped around the table. “How often did he visit the area?”
“Every hunting season, fished there every summer, all through his teenage years and into his twenties, at least according to family and friends.” He waved a hand across the stacks of files and folders before him. “I didn’t find anything recent, but it was obviously an old stomping ground.”
“We had any other nibbles?”
Ron shook his head.
I rubbed my forehead. I was so tired by now, I could barely function, much less jump at the notion of traveling forty-five minutes to the far end of the county because some power-company field man was playing hooky. “When did Harriman Station first try to contact their guy?”
“Three hours ago.”
“Long-time employee?”
Ron had asked all the right questions before me. “Seventeen years-rock solid.”
Despite his eagerness, or perhaps because of it, I merely felt more drained as I said, “Okay. I was going to wait for J.P. and the others to bring back what they need for an arrest warrant and then see the process through, but I might as well keep out of their hair and do something more constructive. I’ll pick one of them up on the way out of town and check out your Glory Hole.”
I got to my feet slowly, ignoring Ron’s look of disappointment at being left with his paperwork. “Then I’m going home for some sleep.”
I didn’t go into great detail with Sammie Martens when I picked her up outside Bob Vogel’s trailer park, and-after giving me a quick glance-she didn’t ask for any. She merely listened to my directions, accepted that we were being stimulated in large part by a hunch of Ron’s, and took over the wheel as I slouched down into the opposite corner and closed my throbbing eyes.
I didn’t need to admire the passing countryside. Like many people living in southern Vermont, I was intimately familiar with the Harriman Reservoir and its surroundings. Hanging like a seven-mile-long twisted streamer from Route 9’s rigid curtain rod, the reservoir nestles in a bunched-up cluster of steep, stocky, tree-choked hills vaguely reminiscent of the Appalachians-a setting unlike any other in the state. Coming south off of 9 onto Route 100, roughly paralleling Harriman’s jagged shore, it is easy to think that Vermont has been mysteriously left behind, perhaps because the driver is not actually crossing the Green Mountains, but moving among them as they mingle to become the Hoosac Range leading down into Massachusetts. It is, for locals at least, a recreational area of choice, and a place I and many of my friends visited often.
Even the so-called Glory Hole was familiar ground. A hundred-and-sixty-foot-wide concrete, curved funnel that looked like a gigantic suction hole in some child’s nightmare, it sat, as if floating, some thirty feet from the dam that had formed the reservoir back in the 1920s and which, back then, had been one of the largest earthen dams in the world-two hundred feet tall, eight hundred feet long, and thirteen hundred feet wide at the base. During extremely wet years, when the Glory Hole’s role as spillway was called upon to protect the dam from any eroding overflow, people from miles around would gather at a convenient cliff high above the hole and look straight down, transfixed, as millions of gallons of water slid over the lip of the funnel and vanished as into the bowels of some gargantuan toilet. It was a frightening, mesmerizing, deafening sight that no first visitor ever forgot, and which pulled people back time and again, whenever the waters swelled beyond their prescribed boundaries.
Now, however, was not such a time, for weather or tourists. The summer had been relatively dry, the weather was becoming cooler with each passing day, and it was too early for either leaf-peepers or deer hunters. The place, I noticed, opening my eyes as Sammie pulled off Route 100 onto the long, paved dead-end access road leading to the dam, was deserted.
“You see any power-company trucks?”
She shook her head. “Haven’t seen much of anybody. You really think this is where Vogel headed?”
“I don’t know… ” I hesitated. “To be honest, I think the main reason I’m out here is just to take a break. No reason he couldn’t have, though.” The gap in the rocks and trees to our right indicated the approach of the scenic cliff top, high above the spillway. “Pull over when you get near the fence.”
She stopped by the side of the road and pointed to the dam, which angled off below us to the far shore. A road capped its crest, and a small yellow pickup truck, looking like an abandoned toy from this distance, was parked with its driver’s door open. “There’s one of your mysteries solved.”
We got out of the car and approached the chain-link fence blocking the top of the cliff. Far below, the bone-dry Glory Hole, no less hypnotic for the absence of rushing water, came into view. It was fringed by a circular wooden pier, below which taintor gates hung to further control the water level if necessary, and from which two narrow wooden catwalks extended like clock hands-one toward the quiet, still, massive dam, and the other to the top of a concrete tower, crowned by a small shed, which stood alongside the Glory Hole, slightly farther out in the water, and which presumably functioned as a vertical service tunnel.
Our attention, however, was drawn to none of this, for near the center of the spillway’s funnel, just shy of where the downward curve began its dizzying plunge toward the black hole in the middle, the small, motionless shape of a man lay spread-eagled. One of his hands extended high above his head and was wrapped around an iron ring, set into the concrete for service crews to hook their ropes. And below him, trailing like a kite tail and vanishing into the void at his feet, was a thin, bright ribbon of blood.