“So what is it?” Brandt rarely gave opinions himself. He sat as Sage on the Hill at times like these, welcoming all to divulge what they knew. Some of the younger officers found this an irritating trait and accused him of trying to look wiser than he was. I, on the other hand, took it at face value. I’d spent several months in his chair recently, as temporary chief, and I knew what his role was like-not being able to investigate anything personally, being chained to the desk, and yet being accountable in the public’s eye for everything that came out of the department.
I let a minute float by before answering. “My gut tells me we’re going to have problems with this one. There might be all sorts of reasons for wanting to bury a man you just killed, but I don’t know why anyone would pick that spot.”
Brandt’s right eyebrow rose. “Seems perfect to me.”
“‘Seems perfect.’ That’s the trouble with it. This is one of the most rural states in the whole country. Even Brattleboro has as much countryside as concrete. If I’d discreetly murdered someone in my basement, and had waited several hours to put him in my car at night so I could dump him, I sure as hell wouldn’t head for Canal Street. I’d go out of town, find some forgotten ravine where I could work in peace, and bury my man for keeps.”
“Maybe you don’t have a car.”
I pondered that one. “Which makes me local to the scene, having to carry the body from my basement to Canal Street on my shoulder.”
Without a word being spoken, we both rejected that one.
“So why was it put there?” he finally asked.
“So someone would find it.”
3
The carpenter had finished for the day by the time I left Brandt’s office. I noticed the offending saw, lying tilted and silent on a sawhorse, its nerve-jangling screech as neutered as the unplugged electric cord curled up on the floor beneath it. I went down a short, interior hallway to the men’s room to treat my headache with some cool water on the face.
It wasn’t just the police department that was being revamped, but the entire Municipal Building. A half-year earlier, the ribbon had been cut on the new District Court Building across the street, and all the judges, clerks, secretaries, and sheriff’s men who had once shared our quarters had taken their paraphernalia and abandoned us like a departing storm. In the sudden void, we survivors-the police department, the town manager, the planning director, the finance director, the town attorney, the listers, the town clerk, and all the others-had crept warily out of the nooks and crannies into which we’d been stuffed for decades and had begun to explore a vast new domain.
Unfortunately-in the short run-with freedom had come remodeling, and department by department the building was being torn apart. I knew it was for the eventual good, but at the moment I couldn’t imagine a grimmer place to work, a point that was driven home by the notice on the sink in the men’s room: “Disconnected for renovation-please go upstairs.”
I sighed, mopped my forehead with my warm, soggy handkerchief, and crossed the main corridor to the unmarked door of the detectives’ bureau, located opposite the department’s administrative and patrol offices. At least now, though still looking like a battlefield and feeling like a banana republic, the building was quiet.
I found Ron Klesczewski with Harriet Fritter, the detective-unit clerk and, for me, a gift from a bureaucratically sensitive god. They were standing over Ron’s desk, shuffling through the results of the canvass. Here, all construction had been completed. An erstwhile maze of cubbyhole offices had yielded to two large rooms, the first of which was circled by four smaller ones-a lockup evidence room, an interrogation room with a small viewing closet, a lab, and an office for me. This first large room-the squad room-also held a cluster of four desks in its middle, cloistered from one another by head-high sound-absorbent panels. The second large room beyond served as a meeting/training area, with a VCR, a TV, some equipment lockers, and a conference table. All of it was pretty basic, but compared to what we’d had-once the air-conditioning was in place-it would be heaven on earth.
“Anything new?”
Klesczewski looked up. “Not yet. Enough people were wandering around last night, but it seems they all had their eyes closed. I called Hillstrom’s office to see if the autopsy had been done yet, but they’re still at it.”
I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “Who did you talk to?”
“A secretary, I guess-I got her name here somewhere.” He reached for the note pad near his phone.
I shook my head to stop him. “It doesn’t matter. I just hoped you hadn’t gotten Hillstrom herself. The last thing we want is to breathe down her neck-nothing pisses her off more. She’ll call us when she’s finished-she always does.”
Klesczewski’s face reddened, and I realized I shouldn’t have spoken in front of Harriet. Even if she didn’t give a damn, his were the tender feelings of a man in his twenties, quickly stung by criticism.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Don’t worry about it. You didn’t know. Can you leave that for a minute?”
His face cleared slightly. “Sure.”
I crossed over to my office, which occupied a corner of the squad room, and closed the door behind us. All these offices had once been taller than they were wide, in traditional turn-of-the-century style, leading some smart ass to suggest that we nail our desks to the walls to take advantage of the wasted space. The current remodelers had realized that for generations of winters we’d been warming the ceilings while the people below them froze. So now we had false ceilings, which were currently keeping the summer’s heat nice and tight around our heads.
My office was, nevertheless, aesthetically appealing-ten by twelve, nice paint job, newly installed fluorescent lighting I never used, and three tall, hard-to-open, wire-covered windows that now stretched up to somewhere beyond the Styrofoam grid overhead. I sat behind my battered wooden schoolteacher’s desk and parked my foot in the lower drawer. I motioned to Klesczewski to grab one of the two molded-plastic chairs, noticing as I did so the pink phone-message slip before me. “Call Gail,” it read.
“So, where’re we at?” I picked up the phone slip and began idly folding and unfolding it.
Klesczewski cleared his throat. “Nothing obvious in the canvass results, but I’m hoping we can find some inconsistency somewhere-a crack we can pry open maybe.”
I nodded. It was a good analogy. Canvasses rarely gave us a man holding a bloody knife in one hand and a written confession in the other, but they did supply us with people’s alibis before much thought and refinement had been put into them, a point that often played in our favor if a particular alibi later came under scrutiny.
Klesczewski continued. “Tyler’s digging through his dirt, along with a couple of people from the afternoon shift. There’ll be overtime filed.”
“That’s okay.”
“DeFlorio’s still out there, catching the home-from-work crowd.”
“That makes me think of something,” I interrupted. “We better look into people from outside the neighborhood who use that route to go to and from work.”
“Night-shift types?”
“Yeah. You got late-night grocery stores and restaurants both above and below that section of Canal. It’s conceivable somebody saw something while they were passing through.”
“They’d have to have been on foot.”
“Not necessarily. You get a pretty good view from the Elm Street bridge, if you happen to look that way. What’s Martens doing?”
Sammie, actually Samantha, Martens was the junior-most member of the detective squad, promoted from patrolman after Willy Kunkle lost the use of his arm the year before in a shooting spree with a maniac the local press had dubbed the “Ski-Mask Avenger.” That same case had turned the town on its ear, causing Brandt to leave for a while and putting me in his chair in the interim. It was old news now, but seeing Sammie Martens in plainclothes always reminded me of how out of control a case could become, through no fault of her own. I hoped I wasn’t attending the birth of an instant replay.