He finally withdrew his hand, turned off the light, and waited for me to lift the cabinet so he could retrieve the books and return everything as we had found it.
Outside, in the reception area, he handed me back my flashlight. “It’s a transmitter, wired right into the building’s electrical supply. Did you see any wires above the false ceiling downstairs?”
“Sure. There were several of them. Looked like they were part of the overhead lighting.”
Tyler nodded. “Probably were. Anyway, it allows him to eavesdrop for as long as he likes without ever having to worry about batteries running low. Very slick. I looked for a manufacturer’s ID, but it’d been melted off, probably with the tip of a soldering iron. With that kind of care, I doubt we’d get fingerprints off it. Anyway, if I dusted it, he’d probably catch on. It’s hard to leave everything exactly as you found it.”
There was a distant clattering outside. I carefully stuck my head out into the hallway and saw Buddy’s assortment of cleaning supplies piled up outside a door at the far end. As I watched, the supply-closet was kicked open and a foot pushed a pail with a mop in it out into the corridor. I ducked back inside before Buddy saw me.
“We better get back downstairs.” We waited until he’d moved all his things into the office he was cleaning, and then we tiptoed back to where our presence wouldn’t seem odd.
“How far does it transmit?” We were standing in the rear lobby, near the back entrance, and yet I still found myself whispering.
“I don’t know specifically, but given its size and simplicity I wouldn’t say much beyond a couple of hundred feet, farther if it was outside.”
“So, the receiver’s inside the building?”
“Probably, but we won’t know where unless we either tear the place apart from top to bottom, or we hire some specialist out of Boston or somewhere, whose equipment is fancy enough to trace the signal’s path to the receiver.”
“The state police don’t have something like that?”
Tyler chuckled.
“Only in their dreams.”
Nevertheless, I was pleased. Whoever our quarry was, we now had his prints, which I still was convinced would yield something, and we knew he was listening, which I hoped I could use against him. Also, Fred McDermott had rung the bell again, this time twice in one day. It wouldn’t be long now before we had enough against him to possibly make something stick.
I grinned at J.P. in anticipation. “Go home; get some sleep. First thing tomorrow, we’ll see if we can’t jerk this guy around a little.”
33
As things turned out, none of us got much sleep that night. I worked at home until midnight, writing instructions for the next day’s game plan, and hadn’t been asleep two hours before the phone jarred me back awake. Billy Manierre’s sad rumble filled my ear. “Joe, you better come on over to John Woll’s place. Been a shooting.”
In the moment it took for that information to sink in, Billy had hung up, leaving me in silence and despair.
I didn’t know who had shot whom, or if John or Rose Woll were even involved, but as I drove through the dark, abandoned streets, I didn’t have many doubts. Billy’s tone had told me more than his words. There had been a death, and I was all but certain that John’s problems had finally ground to a halt.
The familiar chaotic twinkling of emergency lights greeted me at the beginning of Brannen Street. I parked at the bottom of the short hill and climbed on foot, walking past a string of patrol cars. Everyone on the force was by now aware of this address. The mere mention of it by the dispatcher had been enough to gather us all, as if for a dress rehearsal of the funeral that would soon follow.
Billy was waiting for me at the top of the exterior staircase.
“John?” I asked him.
“In the bedroom.”
The tiny apartment was harsh with the squawks from police radio speakers and the shuffling of heavy, regulation shoes. I asked Billy to vacate his people, and I wended my way through the narrow hallway, watching the glum, almost embarrassed expressions on the downcast faces I passed. These were not hardened cops; where the sight of a fellow officer, bloodstained and lifeless, might have been a familiar enough sight to veterans in New York or Boston or Miami, it wasn’t to the Brattleboro force. The confusion on their faces was telling.
John was sitting in the rickety rocking chair opposite the bed, the one I had used when I’d last talked with him. He was dressed in his undershorts and a T-shirt, his bare feet slightly pigeon-toed. One arm hung like forgotten laundry, its fingers dangling just inches off the floor, reminding me of Kunkle; the other lay nestled in his lap, curled around the butt of a black and menacing semiautomatic pistol. He’d shot himself in the heart, the blood of which had turned his torso a dark, still-glistening red. The entrance wound appeared raven-black and jagged in the half-light, ringed by a charcoal halo of burned gunpowder.
I felt Billy standing beside me and was suddenly aware of both the tomblike silence inside the building and the muted noise of a large, shuffling crowd outside. I wondered, just for a moment, if that’s what a body could hear from the inside of its coffin, had its hearing not been silenced.
“How did it come in? Gunshot?”
“No. Rose called it in. She’d been trying to get hold of him, not getting an answer. She came over and found him.”
“She still here?”
“No. I sent her to the hospital with one of the boys. She was out of control; I thought for a while she might try to do herself in. She may yet.” He paused, looking at John as he might a troubled, sleeping child. “What a waste. I’ve never understood suicide.”
“Did the neighbors see or hear anything?”
“No, and there were several of them around.”
I frowned at that and looked again at the gun. “You’d think they would have heard something.”
Billy shrugged. “Maybe. Judging from the hole, though, it looks like he made a silencer of his own chest.”
It was true. The wound looked like it had burst from within, as would have happened when the explosive gases from the shot reflected off the shattered sternum, but that scenario snagged on something in my mind and made me look about the room.
“Who was the first one here, besides Rose?”
“I was. Couldn’t sleep, and I heard it over the radio. Only took me a couple of minutes to get here.”
“How’d it look?”
Billy frowned. “Like you see it, pretty much.”
“Nothing to make you think anything other than suicide?”
His expression didn’t change, but his eyes cooled and flattened. He, like I, was now wary of where we were headed. The element I’d introduced not only added to the pain he was already feeling, but it carried a sting along with it, an implication that assumptions had been made too quickly, and that a possible homicide scene had been altered by almost a dozen patrolmen tramping through the apartment. We both knew that we were balanced on opposite edges of a threatening pit: I, after all, had asked to have the premises vacated, while he, reaching back to more trusting, compassionate instincts, had taken what he’d seen at face value, which the rule books stridently warned against.
He didn’t answer my question immediately. “I made sure only a couple of us got this close. ’Course, I don’t know what Rose might have touched.”
I nodded, and allowed him his out. “Good. I’m sure everyone was careful. It’s a hard impulse to step on, rubbernecking.”
“Especially when you know the guy,” Billy agreed, but his voice betrayed him. He’d been at this too long not to know he’d committed a major blunder. Any forensics expert will attest that on a microscopic level, a scene as trespassed upon as this looks like Main Street after a parade. Any hope of separating and identifying hair samples, stray fibers, or shoe impressions vanishes.
We would do this by the numbers from now on, but my only real hope at this point was that John himself, through his autopsy, might tell us something of the few minutes preceding his own death.