Sadly, even in rural Vermont, this degree of self-protectiveness was looking only slightly ahead of its time. The first stop off the interstate from the overpopulated south, Brattleboro, in many people’s opinion, had slid from being gateway of Vermont to doormat in a scant thirty years. With its uninspiring but steady economy, its generous welfare checks, and its plethora of services for the poor, the town was a natural for those fleeing urban blight. We had seen an alarming growth in homeless people, youth gang members, domestic violence, and petty crime. Also, where just fifteen years ago the police department had dealt with a single murder every few years, not a twelve-month period went by now without at least one homicide and several near misses.
Gail’s behavior might have aroused my skepticism once, regardless of her reasons. Now it never occurred to me to challenge it.
I used two keys to enter by the kitchen door, and saw that she’d fixed a sandwich on a plate for me, with a note reading, “Come up and visit. Am contemplating suicide.”
I peeled back the top slab of whole wheat, unsure of what lay underneath. I recognized fake bacon strips made from soy, and some lettuce and tomato, but there was another item that escaped me. Too hungry to care, I sank my teeth into it and retrieved a Coke from the fridge. Food was not an area where Gail and I shared much common ground. She was a lacto-vegetarian, and I was someone who ate anything that had stopped moving. But since I didn’t care in any case, I ended up eating well without having to think about it, while still enjoying the occasional Spam and pickle sandwich.
I balanced the soda can on the plate and walked through the darkened house, drawn by the gentle glow from the stairwell. As I rose into the warmth and light of the second floor, I could hear a man’s muffled voice emanating from Gail’s cluster of rooms at the far end of the hall, beyond our master bedroom.
This was where her choice of homes had been especially inspired. We each had three rooms at either end of the house that we could manage as we wished. She’d turned hers into exercise, meditation, and study areas. I’d made all of mine a Salvation Army warehouse.
I knocked at her office door and entered. Gail was sitting in a large armchair, her feet up on an ottoman. A portable computer was in her lap, and an instructional video was running on a small TV set placed on a chair before her. A professorial type droned in front of a blackboard, pausing occasionally as the camera cut to a piece of text. Gail was fast asleep.
I hesitated, my hand still on the doorknob, knowing she both needed the rest and would want to be woken up.
She solved my dilemma by opening one sleepy eye and giving me a small smile. “Caught me.”
I tilted my head toward the TV. “Must be the company you keep.”
She located the remote by her thigh and froze the professor with his mouth open.
I leaned over and kissed her. “Thanks for the sandwich.”
“How did it go at the paper?” she asked, arching her back and stretching her arms high above her.
“All right. Ted was his affable self. Katz thought we weren’t giving him all we had.”
“Which we weren’t.”
“Who’s your friend?” I asked of the immobilized video.
“That’s the bar-review course I told you about. I either do it by mail using these things, or attend classes in Burlington or South Royalton. Not much of a choice. It’s not that bad-you just caught me at a bad time.”
“You going to call it quits?”
She gave a weak laugh. “Fat chance. I think I’ll give Mr. Energy here a rest, but I’ve still got a stack of discoveries to process on the Miller case from Bellows Falls. The defense is already claiming we’re stalling.”
I bent forward and kissed her again. Her lips parted under mine and her fingers slid up the inside of my leg. My plate still precariously balanced in one hand, I slipped the other under her sweatshirt.
She moaned softly and broke off, her face flushed and her eyes bright. She was pulling at my belt. “I think I’ve come up with a way to recharge my batteries.”
There was a large skylight over our bed, tonight a frost-rimmed window onto a glittering spray of bright, hard stars. It struck me as a meaningful asymmetry-this framed picture of merciless cold and Gail’s warm naked body stretched out on top of mine. I enclosed her in a gentle bear hug, appreciative of how the day had balanced out.
It was the wrong move to have made. Her head rose sleepily from the crook of my neck, and she peered at me through a veil of long brown hair. “Better hit the books.”
I knew not to argue. I massaged her shoulders briefly, slid my hands down her back, and let her go. Reluctantly, she slid off me and sat on the edge of the bed, using the moonlight from above to select her clothes from among the trail of entangled pants, shirts, and underwear stretching toward the door.
“What’s the plan for tomorrow?” she asked, crossing the room and dressing, piece by piece.
“Resume the canvass and the search, get a preliminary list of all the hairdressers that use permanent purple dye, work the computer in detail-get the groundwork ready for when we hear back from the lab.”
She stopped abruptly, halfway into her pants. “Damn, I forgot. I got a lead on that symbol you described. I ran it by a friend of mine who’s seriously into astrology and the occult. She said your sketch looked like the symbol for the Church of Satan in San Francisco.”
“Great,” I murmured dourly.
“Yeah. I thought you’d like that. Supposedly, it appears in something called the Satanic Bible. I don’t know where you’d get a copy of that, or even if you’d want to. She said it was a popular symbol among teenagers-a tattoo and graffiti favorite-so your victim may have known nothing about the church.”
She sat back down on the bed and pulled on a pair of thick woolen socks before leaning over and giving me one last kiss. “That useful?”
“Could be. I’ll let you know next time we pass in the night.”
She gave me a dirty laugh. “See you in twenty-four hours then,” and she vanished out the door.
Now the skylight merely looked cold, and I gathered the covers around me. No matter how trivial or common that Satanic symbol might be, I knew it meant trouble. As soon as the press and the politicians got hold of it, the heat on this case would increase-along with the troubles we’d have conducting a nice, quiet investigation.
4
I have only four people on my detective squad. Last year the town manager chose to treat the homicide of a fifth member as a form of natural attrition, and didn’t replace him. We not only lost a friend and colleague but got saddled with his workload as well.
Besides Sammie Martens and J.P. Tyler, our forensics man, I had Ron Klesczewski and Willy Kunkle. Ron was young, sensitive, dependable, painfully earnest, and a whiz at keeping paperwork organized and flowing-the man to have as coordinator in the middle of a big case. Originally my second-in-command, he was handicapped by enough self-doubt that he’d finally opted to return to the security of the rank and file.
Willy was the exact opposite: arrogant, insubordinate, willful, and, I suspected, physically abusive in the field-although none of his snitches had ever complained and none of us had ever caught him. Willy kept his own hours, only reluctantly attended staff meetings, and made his contempt for most people well known-excluding J.P., whose scientific bent he both respected and depended on. He was, nevertheless, remarkably good at his job. Badly dressed, infrequently shaved, and burdened with a useless, withered left arm-the gift of a sniper years ago-Willy Kunkle lived among the derelicts he occasionally sent to jail. But I trusted what lay underneath his unappealing exterior without reserve. What drove him cut deeper than career, ambition, or even everyday morality. He was fueled by private demons so rooted and complex that I never doubted his steadiness or dependability. I was stuck with Willy for as long as I could stand him.