She looked up at me. “Oh, no-most of them do.”
“Would it be all right if I sent somebody by to collect their names and addresses later today?”
Her eyes slid away from my face and grew unfocused and dull. “That would be fine.”
I moved partway to the door and then hesitated. “Are you all right, Mrs. Tuttle? Is there someone I could call to keep you company?”
She smiled slightly-sadly, I thought. “No. That’s all right. I don’t really know what to do with company anymore.” She paused, and added, “It doesn’t seem like anyone in my family was much good at it.”
The noise from the people milling around outside my office drowned out Beverly Hillstrom’s opening words on the phone. I caught the edge of the door with my foot and swung it shut. “I’m sorry, Doctor. What was that?”
She spoke a little louder. “I said, ‘It’s definitely a homicide.’ Your Mrs. Sawyer was strangled. The assailant used his left hand on the mouth, and his right hand on the throat. I’ll be faxing you the details as soon as I have them typed up.”
“Did you find anything else? Drugs, alcohol-”
“Phenobarbital? No-I’m afraid not, Lieutenant.”
I hesitated a moment before changing subjects, still rankled by the release of Milo’s cause of death to the media. “By the way, does your office have a protocol concerning when a cause of death is made public? Some specific time lapse, for example?”
Either I hadn’t kept my tone of voice lighthearted enough, or Hillstrom had been adversely hit by this general topic before, because her response was a frosty, “Do you have a complaint?”
“No. I just dropped the ball when I forgot to ask you to sit on the Milo Douglas results earlier, and I wanted to know what kind of time window I have available for future reference.”
Apparently mollified, she answered, “There is no protocol. Unless told otherwise, we release our findings as they are completed. In point of fact, I hadn’t gotten around to Mr. Douglas before the media contacted us.”
I sat dumbfounded for a moment. “They called you? Who did?”
“Your own paper-the Reformer. I don’t recall who, precisely.”
“I’ll be damned,” I murmured.
“Is there a problem?” she asked, her voice guarded again.
“No, no. I’m just wondering how they found out about it.”
19
The meeting started late-testimony to the number of people who had been asked to attend. The whole squad was there, along with Jack Derby, Tony Brandt, Gail, our head of Patrol, Bill Manierre, and three of his people-Sol Stennis, Marshall Smith, and a new transplant from the Burlington PD with ten years’ prior experience, Sheila Kelly. Kelly was here because much of the last three years on her previous job had been spent on financial fraud cases.
I leaned forward and rapped the conference room’s tabletop with my knuckles. The buzz of conversation slowly subsided. “I just hung up on the Medical Examiner. Adele Sawyer is now an official homicide. That means we’ve got to reorganize and reassign the cases we’ve been working on. So far we have Mary Wallis-missing under suspicious circumstances; Milo Douglas-dead from rabies, but through no known means of infection; Shawna Davis-cause of death unknown but considered a homicide; the hotel/convention center complex project-possible shenanigans ranging from corruption to blackmail; and now Adele Sawyer. Some of these cases overlap, but for clarity’s sake I’m keeping them separate.”
“Given the workload we’re facing, I’m moving Milo and Shawna to the back burner. Nothing new has come up on either one of them, and if we’re right about Shawna’s close ties to Mary Wallis, then I’d just as soon put more heat under the Wallis case, on the chance she might still be alive.”
I got up and went over to the white board mounted on the wall, a felt-tipped marker in hand. “Because, despite some differing opinions in this room, I don’t think Wallis took off under her own power. I think she was grabbed. She knew something, and someone was afraid she would eventually tell it to us.”
I wrote “Shawna” and “Milo” next to each other at the top left corner of the board but left the spaces below them blank. “Unfortunately, while Mary Wallis is a top priority, we’re stuck for options on what to do for her. We’ve put everything available into motion. Photos and descriptions have been issued to all major agencies in New England, along with the bigger newspapers. The Reformer has agreed to play the story big and get it on the wire services. And each of her personal contacts has been asked to let us know as soon as they hear anything. We’ve been reduced to waiting for a break.”
I wrote “Mary” on the board and left it blank under her, also. “Okay-the building project. This one gets a little more complicated. Ron, Gail, and Justin Willette worked together to come up with a few possibilities here. There’s a chance that during the permitting process, the wheels might’ve been greased to speed things along. One person has claimed he was coerced to support the deal.”
I glanced at Gail, who merely nodded her assent. “Ned Fallows,” I went on, “says Tom Chambers blackmailed him with proof of some prior malfeasance, the nature of which Fallows won’t identify.”
There was a predictable muttering around the table.
“Fallows is also saying he won’t corroborate that story, no matter how much pressure we put on him.”
“Screw him,” Willy said. “Hit him with a subpoena and force him to talk.”
“About what?” I asked. “Right now all we’ve got are two conversations I had with him. His attitude is that if he clams up, we’ll have no proof he was forced to vote for the convention project-nor will we find out what crime he committed in the first place. We need to do the same digging Tom Chambers did to force Fallows to spill the beans.”
“And that,” I waved a hand in his direction, “is what I want Ron to do.”
I put “Chambers” and “Fallows” up on the board under the heading “Project” and drew an arrow connecting Ron’s name to Fallows’. “We’ve also got a few other players we need to look at.” I added Eddy Knox, Rob Garfield, and Lou Adelman’s names. “These three are only guilty of being unusually supportive of the project so far. We need to examine their lifestyles, bank accounts, past histories, and finally conduct interviews with them. I’d like Sammie spearheading that, working with Marshall Smith.”
I wrote all that down, with more arrows, and then circled “Tom Chambers” in red. “Here’s the catch. How to dig into the town’s richest political hotshot-not to mention one of our esteemed leaders-without his catching wind of it. The answer, I hope, lies in Chambers being the one common denominator among everyone in this group,” I tapped Fallows’s name and the three men Sammie and Marshall were assigned to. “Plus Harold Matson, the Bank of Brattleboro’s president.” I added his name to the list.
“The B of B got its fat saved by Ben Chambers. If we think the permitting process was tainted, there’s a chance the funding was, too. J.P., find out how the financing was put together. I want you to work with Sheila Kelly-her expertise in this area should be an asset.
“Assuming Fallows is right about NeverTom Chambers being corrupt, my hope is we’ll be able to catch Chambers in a pincer movement, between what we can get from the zoning and planning people, and what we can find out about the recent financial bailout. My other hope is that by following this approach, it might lead us to finding out what happened to Mary Wallis.”
There was a muted stirring among most of the people in the room. I capped the pen in my hand and let them quiet back down. “For those of you who think we’re putting too many eggs in one basket by focusing on the building project, let me remind you how we all agreed earlier that coincidence was a bad thing to rely on.” I waved my hand at the board behind me. “Well, if all this isn’t coincidence, then what ties it together? The convention center has cropped up-however vaguely-with Milo, Mary Wallis, and through Wallis to Shawna Davis. At fifteen million dollars, it’s the biggest real estate deal this town’s ever seen, and that sum doesn’t include the financial benefits a lot of people are hoping will come their way once the center’s up and running.”