I hung up and shouted into the squad room, “Is Ron in yet?”
Klesczewski appeared, still wearing his coat. “Morning. You bellowed?”
I glanced at the new phone on my desk. We’d been equipped some time ago with a new communications system, including voice mail, intercom, and a half dozen other features I hadn’t bothered to learn. Typically, J.P. and Ron had mastered it overnight, Willy and I had barely acknowledged its arrival, and Sammie was somewhere in between.
I gave him an apologetic look. “Sorry. Old habit. I just talked to the ME. Our John Doe was exposed to some nasty chemical shortly before he died. It didn’t kill him, but it did screw him up-running sores and all.” I handed him Bernie’s preliminary report. “Dr. Short called it a dioxin. You hear about that abandoned truck at Bickford’s?”
His eyes widened. “Were those dioxins, too?”
“Could be. Contact Pat Mason at ANR and tell him we may have found a connection to his case. Also, if their lab wants to compare what he found in the truck bed to the clothes the ME sent to the state forensics lab, they might find something-unless, like we think, his clothes were switched before he was killed.”
Klesczewski nodded. “Will do.”
“Short also said he lifted a footprint from the dead man’s skin. He was pretty enthusiastic about it. If it’s as good as he says, maybe we could use it as evidence later. Did Tyler tell you about the partial license plate Renaud claimed he saw?”
“Yeah. I was just about to call DMV about it.” He hesitated and then added, “Willy also told me about the governor’s plan to overhaul law enforcement.”
I looked at him more closely, surprised by the change of subject. “I think it was vaguer than that. Wasn’t he talking about floating the idea at a few public hearings first, using Reynolds as a bird dog?”
“I suppose. Still, it’s a pretty radical idea, isn’t it?”
In several ways, Ron Klesczewski was the youngest member of the squad, although Sammie was his junior by a couple of years. Tough in a fight, and as good as anyone I knew with a computer, a phone link, and a data bank, he remained almost endearingly innocent. It was not an affectation, but he was aware of how he projected and had been known to use it for mileage with strangers. During interrogations, I’d seen suspects become almost eager to talk to him, figuring he needed all the help he could get.
This time, however, he was genuinely curious. “I’m not so sure it is,” I told him. “Our type of law enforcement grew up in stages, on a strictly need basis. When we were all a bunch of farmers, the odd sheriff or constable was enough to do the trick, as were the small PDs later on, but now that we’re seeing some of what they get every day in New York and Boston, that piecemeal kind of approach can cause problems, just like it did up north.”
I was alluding to what Willy had called a “cluster fuck” earlier, which, as usual with him, was both overly blunt and entirely accurate. A man named Amos Melcourt, under investigation by one small municipal department for sexual abuse and suspected of a string of burglaries by the state police, had been visited by a part-time deputy sheriff on a third, minor violation. Inside Melcourt’s house, the deputy had seen three TV sets stacked up in the living room but hadn’t thought they might be hot and therefore hadn’t blown the whistle. A week later, Melcourt kidnapped and molested three children, killing two of them before being shot by police.
It had happened less than a month ago, and the finger-pointing had been escalating ever since. In point of fact, it was an outrage. The sexual abuse investigation should have been shared among all agencies, the state police’s suspicions-and the list of stolen property-should have been more aggressively circulated, and that poor miserable part-time deputy should have been better trained, or at least not been made to interview someone whose malevolence he couldn’t gauge.
Adding to the bureaucratic embarrassments was the revelation later that Amos Melcourt had kept a room in his house filled with pedophilic pornography, among which were photos of the three kids he later kidnapped, along with maps and a timetable of their daily routine. It had been made painfully and irrefutably clear by the press that had the deputy recognized the TVs as stolen property, a search warrant could have been issued, the secret room discovered, and the clear intent to do harm to minors established. Melcourt would now have been behind bars, instead of six feet underground, along with his two small victims.
To people like Willy, it was all water over the dam. As he regularly put it when confronted with such horror stories, “Shit happens.” To me, it was a clear indication that wake-up calls like the one being issued by Governor Howell and Reynolds were both appropriate and timely.
“It’s not that I think the whole system should be thrown out,” I explained to Ron. “For one thing, you couldn’t get rid of the sheriffs without amending the state constitution. But we do need to improve the way we keep each other informed.”
“We have computer-linked data bases, like VLETS and VIBRS and the others,” Ron countered.
“As long as the funding’s there,” I conceded. “But those computers didn’t work with Melcourt. Not everyone in law enforcement’s as handy as you are with those things. And a lot of the older or more conservative cops still see their turf as private property. Remember what that one sergeant said when he was asked why his department had kept their investigation of Melcourt to themselves?”
Ron nodded. “They didn’t want to lose it to the state police.”
“Which is exactly what should have happened. But the state police can get pretty superior, too, sometimes, going on about the traditions of the glorious Green-and-Gold. That can get under people’s skin.”
“They probably are the best in the state,” Ron muttered, a little unhappily.
“I don’t argue with that,” I agreed. “And they’ve been bending over backwards recently to share their assets and data, but that hasn’t always been true. Years back, one of their people told the Senate Government Operations Committee on the record that all sheriffs should be abolished and that all local cops were woodchucks. Ancient history now, and just one jackass’s opinion, but that kind of crack doesn’t easily fade away. And when you’re the biggest guy in the schoolyard, it’s usually smart to be the most generous-unfortunately, that’s a hard lesson to learn.”
We were both silent for a moment, Ron absorbing what I’d just said, and I embarrassed for running my mouth. I hadn’t realized until then how the Melcourt mess had gotten under my skin. Subconsciously, I adopted Willy’s attitude of simply being thankful it hadn’t been us caught in the limelight. But Ron’s curiosity had forced me to admit that some kind of overhaul was in fact past due.
I glanced out the window at the cold, gray sky, forgetful of Ron still standing awkwardly in the doorway-suddenly aware that another bulwark I counted on for stability was threatening to shift.
That Gail’s gradual evolution would cost me her company was no more assured than that the governor and his pet senator would put an end to my job, but the possibilities were there, palpably close, and they filled me with something akin to fear.
5
Investigations, even of headline grabbers like a man being hit by a train, proceed at a curiously slow pace. Trained as we are by television and the movies, we expect things to move at breakneck speed and for things like lab reports and forensic analyses to appear on demand.
They don’t.
There are certain things that happen quickly, of course. The scene is thoroughly picked over, all witnesses located and interviewed, all evidence processed and forwarded appropriately. But then-frustratingly-you sometimes have to stop and wait, with all your instincts receptive, like a hunter in the forest outwaiting the game he knows to be standing stock-still nearby.