“And I can,” Kunkle muttered.
“Yeah. If you can find some hole in his camouflage, maybe we can get the bastard before someone else gets killed.”
“Like me.”
It was said quietly, without rancor, but it hit me hard. I hadn’t actually considered myself or any of my people at risk in all this. Willy’s fatalistic comment was a brutal reminder that whoever the killer was, if cornered, he wouldn’t hesitate to use his teeth. I looked at Kunkle’s useless, shriveled arm. He needed no reminder of how lethal these contests could become.
I leaned forward, propping my palms against one of the steel shelves, and hung my head between my shoulders, suddenly exhausted by the weight of it all. Busting petty crooks and calming domestic quarrels was poor preparation for dealing with a full-blown homicide investigation. Murders were so rare in Vermont that the state police had put together a single five-man flying squad to investigate all homicides within their jurisdiction, just so they’d gain the experience. Police departments like Brattleboro’s tended to shun the state police if they could, but their exposure to such crimes was even more limited. I straightened and let out a sigh. “Forget it, Willy. You’re right. I guess I’m losing my grip.”
He tilted his head to one side and said coldly, “So this is where I say, ‘Bullshit, my heart never left the service; let me do it one last time for you, boss, just like the good old days,’ right? Well, you got the bullshit part down okay. I stuck my neck out once for you guys; peaceful old Vermont’s done me a hell of a lot more damage than ’Nam ever did. You can get somebody else to get their ass shot off for you.”
I knew he was right, but I couldn’t suppress my own growing sense of futility. Somewhere, I knew, there was a weak spot, some fissure in the dam confronting me. I had hoped Willy Kunkle might be the dynamite I needed to turn that weak spot into a gaping hole. But that apparently was not to be.
As I exchanged the library’s cool embrace for the hot and soggy air outside, I found some of Willy’s anger caught in my own throat. He’d been absolutely right, of course. Enlisting him would have been a foolish risk, for him personally, for me politically, and for the legal integrity of the case. But none of that was going to stop me from kicking this case open, one way or another.
Whoever was pulling the strings was privy to a lot of inside information and was counting on us to work within the rules. The trick would be to deny him the first and to play a little loose with the second.
29
The phone call caught me after hours again, alone at my desk, poring over the growing pile of transcribed interviews. I was taking longhand notes, a tissue under my right hand so it wouldn’t stick to the page.
It was Dispatch, on the intercom. “I think you better get over here.”
I did so at a half trot, peeling bits of tissue off my hand. Dispatch’s tone of voice had not been encouraging, and I wondered what new bombshell was about to land at our feet.
“What’ve you got?” I asked, as I turned the corner.
“An MVA on the Canal/Main Street bridge.”
An MVA was a motor-vehicle accident, and the location was a four-road, two-parking-lot intersection with no traffic light-the town’s OK Corral for opposing automobiles. “So?”
“It’s John Woll.”
I borrowed a patrol car and played the blue lights down to the scene. Rescue, Inc.’s boxy orange-and-white ambulance was just pulling up from the other direction. The short concrete bridge spans the Whetstone Brook where Main nominally becomes Canal in a dip between two hills, right across from the Brattleboro Museum, where I’d met Blaire Wentworth earlier. In the dark of night, the whole area was alive with lights, flashing blue, red, and white off the buildings, the trees, and the pale faces gathered around the wrecked car.
I parked just short of the congestion and walked over to the driver’s side of the car. Its nose had become one with a cement pillar securing the south end of the bridge’s railing.
John Woll was sitting at the wheel, his face covered with blood, bubbles of which ran gently from his mouth and down his shirtfront. His eyes were open and unmoving, staring straight ahead out the shattered windshield. Beyond him, on the car floor, I saw the glint of an empty bottle.
“John?”
He didn’t react, which was just as well. I was immediately eased out of the way by several Rescue personnel, who went to work quickly and quietly, putting a cervical collar and an oxygen mask on him, wrapping his upper torso in a brace-like vest, and then transferring him to a long wooden backboard.
“You going to the hospital?”
I turned to see Billy Manierre’s concerned, fatherly face over an open-necked sport shirt.
“I’d like to, but I don’t want to get in your way.”
“No problem. Ride with me.”
I arranged to have another officer return my borrowed patrol unit to the lot, and Billy and I followed the ambulance in his car.
“What happened?” I asked.
Billy sighed. “He was alone, I guess he fell asleep at the wheel.”
“You saw the bottle?”
He nodded. “I saw several more in the back, too.”
I shook my head in frustration. “I should have known this would happen, or something like it. Did anyone call Rose?”
Billy turned the car into Belmont Avenue, in front of the hospital, and from there nosed his way into the parking lot. “Rose left him.”
I was surprised at that, her words of idealistic support still echoing in my head. “They have a fight?”
“Don’t know. The only three words I got out of him were, ‘She left me.’”
He parked and we got out of the car, hearing the ambulance’s back-up alarm beeping in the night air as it edged toward the emergency room’s loading dock. “He’s in a world of hurt, Joe.”
His voice had the pain of a grieving father.
We sat watching a muted TV in the waiting room while they tended to his needs, giving him X-rays, IV medications, and neurological tests. A nurse came in at one point and asked if we’d like the sound turned up. We immediately declined, preferring the silence.
A half hour later a middle-aged woman with an enormous purse stepped into the room from the lobby. She was small and trim, with shoulder-length straight red hair parted down the middle and held back in a ponytail. She paused when she saw us.
“Are you Lieutenant Gunther?” she asked me.
“Yes.” I rose and shook her hand.
“Barb Southworth.”
I gestured behind me. “Billy Manierre.” Billy half rose and waved.
“John’s told me about both of you. He thinks very highly of you.”
“Glad to hear it. You’re a friend?”
She smiled. “More like a war buddy. I’m an alcoholic, too. John had one of the nurses call me. He wanted me to talk to you.”
A nurse appeared from the hallway. “Did one of you want to interview the police officer?”
Billy stood up and tucked his clipboard under his arm. “I’ll handle the paperwork. You two chat.”
Southworth caught the tone of his voice. “How far is John in trouble?”
“Tonight’s little trick alone is a criminal offense, and the papers are going to have a ball with it. How long have you known him?”
She sat in the chair next to mine. “Several years. We met at the Retreat.”
The Retreat, along with being a mental-health center, also treated for substance abuse. “AA?”
“Yes, but we were there at different levels. I was on the bottom and had little left to lose except my life. John had a long way to go. He was there because his job depended on it.”
I caught the implication, as well as the time reference. Their meeting would have been right after John had been caught drinking on the job at the elastics factory. “Didn’t he kick the habit?”