The Marble Mask Read online

  The Marble Mask

  Archer Mayor

  Contents

  Preface

  1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10

  11 · 12 · 13 · 14 · 15 · 16 · 17 · 18

  19 · 20 · 21 · 22 · 23 · 24 · 25 · 26

  Excerpt

  Biography

  Bibliography

  Preface

  THE MARBLE MASK has multiple points of origin, most of which play to my driving curiosity, but several of which also touch on my love of history. I lived in Europe during my youth, at a time when the Second World War was still very fresh in people’s memories, and I reveled in reading the many books about that conflict, addressing aspects both widely known and less so. Among the arcane was the fate of so much of the art for which Europe is renowned. Paintings, statuary, artifacts, mosaics, even entire buildings either vanished or were destroyed—in part or in whole—lost in the cauldron of global conflict.

  This is hardly news, of course. Movies like Burt Lancaster’s The Train deal with the subject. Still, my interest remains keen—where is so much of this unaccounted-for treasure? The subject of my own book’s title owes much to this lingering question. It also allowed me to dabble a little in World War Two history myself, describing the role of the quirky band of US/Canadian fighters—partially trained in Vermont, it turned out—who were nicknamed The Devil’s Brigade.

  Finally, if not history, the question of time played on my mind when I considered the galvanizing piece of evidence that starts off this novel—the discovery of a frozen body on top of Mt. Mansfield. The body had been in that state for years, it turned out. But how could that be, when its place of rest thaws every summer?

  Read on, and share what I discovered…

  Archer Mayor

  May 2012

  Vermont

  Chapter 1

  “JOE. YOU STILL THERE? Talk to me, buddy.”

  I didn’t open my eyes. It was so dark I felt if I did, more light might fall out than enter, sapping what little energy I had left. I remembered having the same sensation once as a kid, when my brother Leo and I had hidden in one of our father’s grain boxes in the barn, closed the cover over us, and shut out all light and air. Lack of oxygen hadn’t been the issue, though—we were out of there, pale and laughing too loudly, long before suffocation became a threat.

  It was darkness that had defeated us—invasive, all-absorbing, reaching in through our wide-open eyes to extract whatever was keeping us alive. Squeezing my lids shut had been like hanging on to a cliff edge with my fingertips.

  Which made me wonder if suffocation could be a problem here, entombed as I was. Certainly I felt sleepy, which I’d heard was one of the signs, but then that counted for cold, too, and God knows I was cold.

  “Joe? We need to know if you’re still okay. Give us an indicator at least—hit the transmit button a couple of times if you don’t feel like talking.”

  I really didn’t. I was talked out—talking to them, talking to myself. I wasn’t even sure where the radio was anymore. I’d shoved it under my coat when I’d pulled my arms out of the sleeves to turn my parka into a thermal straitjacket and better preserve my body heat.

  Besides, assuming I could find it, I doubted my fingers could operate the damn thing. That was probably why they’d told me to just hit the transmit button—they were guessing I was almost gone.

  I thought about that for a moment, which was no mean feat in itself. My mind had been wandering for hours, easily bringing up images of my parents, life on the farm, Leo, times during combat I’d thought were the coldest a man could endure.

  Until tonight.

  But pondering the here and now was both a challenge and a bore—an impediment to more pleasant things. The vague memory that I hadn’t lost the radio at all, but was still holding it in a numb and useless hand, barely caused a flicker of concern. I was far too busy leafing through my life’s album, evoking sunny, hot, open places.

  And pictures of Gail.

  I saw her above me, straddling my hips as I lay on the floor, her eyes narrowed, her mouth open just slightly. There was a faint shimmer of sweat on her upper lip as she raised her arms slowly, smoothly, and stripped off her T-shirt.

  “Joe? It’s Willy. Hang in there, pal. You croak, they’ll nail me for sure. Don’t be so goddamned self-centered.”

  What a guy, I thought—always the right word at the right time. What must his parents have been like?

  I tried retrieving that last image of just seconds ago, remembering only that it had been of something pleasant and warm. I was beginning to feel warm again myself, in fact. At long last.

  “Won’t be too much longer,” Willy resumed. “They say the storm’s almost over—at least enough to try another sortie. Give us some kind of signal, though, will you? This playing coy shit is driving me nuts.”

  He’d always been an impatient man—always in a hurry and with nowhere to go. Not like Sammie, for example, equally driven but headed straight up the professional ladder.

  Gail was ambitious, too, although a lot more complicated—one of the reasons we no longer lived together. Not that the love could be diminished—no matter the test.

  I furrowed my brow, or thought I did. Sam and Willy and Gail and I were becoming blurred in my mind. Maybe there were similarities I’d never glimpsed before—he and I sort of stuck in our ways, the two women either using us as anchors, or fighting the pull of our inertia.

  Surely there had to be more to it than that.

  The radio spoke again, sounding like the last man to enter a noisy, crowded room—too far off to be understood. And I had too much to ponder anyway.

  Let it go, I thought. Let me be.

  Chapter 2

  THREE DAYS EARLIER…

  “Vermont Bureau of Investigation—Joe Gunther.”

  “It’s Bill. You’re sounding very official.”

  I looked across my small sunlit living room at the snow-covered trees outside, feeling more unemployed than official. “Try hopeful. This is the first time I’ve used this phone since you guys put it in last month. Is this a good-news call?”

  “Good and bad—we’ve got a job, but you’re going to be flying damn near solo.”

  Bill Allard was the chief of the newly formed VBI. Supposedly an exclusively major crimes unit with statewide jurisdiction, but as yet nonexistent except on paper, it had become a victim of the Department of Public Safety’s face-saving “analysis paralysis.”

  “What’ve you got?” I asked him.

  “You hear about the hiker who froze to death on Mount Mansfield?”

  “Vaguely. There was something about it on the radio yesterday.”

  “The Stowe PD was trying to keep it under wraps, making it sound like an accident, but the medical examiner just ruled it a homicide. Anyhow, someone must’ve leaked it, because at the governor’s weekly news conference this morning, a reporter asked if VBI was going to be called in. He didn’t turn a hair, said, ‘They’re on it as we speak,’ and went on to the next question. I scrambled to have the AG call Stowe’s chief and offer him our services before the press told him he’d already accepted.”

  “The state police’ll love that.”

  “Love it or not, it looks like we’re out of the closet.”

  I was a little less sanguine. “Or Doctor Frankenstein’s lab.”

  · · ·

  Sammie Martens took her eyes off the road to stare at me. “What the hell was he thinking?”

  I shrugged and pulled out into the fast lane to pass an eighteen-wheeler slowly grinding its way uphill. We were shouldered in between Vermont’s Green Mountains on one side and a serpentine river on the other, heading west on the interstate toward Burlington and the chief medical exam
iner’s office.

  “He was being governor,” I explained. “Someone popped him a question and he answered accordingly. He didn’t have to be thinking of anything so long as someone made it look like he was. Not that I’d complain,” I added. “Without this, God knows when we might’ve been activated.”

  “What do we know about the dead guy?” Sammie asked.

  “Not much that makes sense. He was found frozen stiff high on the mountain, presumed to be a lost hiker with a Canadian ID, but missing a few body parts and according to Allard not looking at all like your run-of-the-mill tourist—whatever that means. Bill only said there was something about him that had everybody wondering. So now it’s up to Vermont’s version of The Untouchables to fill in the blanks, with or without resources, manpower, infrastructure, or equipment.”

  “Untouchables, hell,” she said half to herself. “Unheard of is more likely.”

  I didn’t agree with her there. Even if nonfunctional, we were almost as well known as Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, at least locally—and as popular as the plague with every cop in the state.

  The Vermont Bureau of Investigation had been the Legislature’s reaction to a hot-button killing the year before, in which a communications breakdown among several police departments had led to a known criminal’s remaining free until after he’d killed two kids. The original pipe dream—pushed by the same man who’d been elected governor on the strength of it—had been to replace the state’s sixty-eight separate law enforcement agencies with a single coherent force. Instead, hounded by a lobbyist free-for-all, the Legislature had compromised by creating a face-saving sixty-ninth—a small, elite unit which, unlike the state police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation—BCI—whose ranks were filled only by state troopers, would be staffed by the cream of the crop from all departments.

  But only if they supported it.

  As with most grand visions, VBI was being seen so far as a device to steal away every department’s top people and best cases.

  The irony was that, initially, I’d been one of those critics. A career veteran of the Brattleboro PD and the lieutenant in charge of its detective squad, I’d watched with disgust as an interesting trial balloon had been deflated by confusion and lack of support. When the time had come to fill VBI’s ranks, I hadn’t even applied.

  Now I was its field-force commander—the number-two man. A leap of faith I hadn’t quite finished rationalizing.

  Sammie seemed to be puzzling along similar lines, as well she might, being another newly anointed VBI special agent who’d been cooling her heels at home ever since. “What’re we supposed to do here? Take over the case? None of this is turning out the way I thought it would.”

  I shook my head sympathetically. “Until I’m told otherwise, I’m looking at us more like the forensic lab, or the arson guys, or the bomb-disposal squad. We deliver manpower, expertise, contacts, and our own prosecutor to whoever asks for us, and we leave them with the collar, the kudos, and the headlines if we’re successful.”

  “The Lone Ranger,” she muttered, “making the town sheriff look good.”

  “Kind of,” I agreed. “If we do it right, we’ll get all the tough cases, act pretty much autonomously, and let whatever department head requested us handle the reporters, politicians, and the cranks. It’s a cop’s dream come true.”

  Hearing it out loud made it sound pretty good.

  “If you weren’t sure what this was,” I asked her, perhaps hoping she wouldn’t ask me the same question, “why did you sign up?”

  Sammie flushed slightly. I knew she’d applied to VBI early on without telling me, while still on my squad in Brattleboro. She was smart, tough, persistent, and normally loyal, which I knew was embarrassing her now. But she’d always been hard-driving and ambitious, and I’d never expected her to stay with us forever—all of which was moot anyway, since I was once again her boss.

  She began hesitantly. “I thought I could maybe learn a few things.” She groped for something more meaningful in the face of an obviously different reality. Finally, she gave up. “It looked like an interesting opportunity.”

  I took her off the hook. “Me, too. Does what I just described help?”

  She reflected a moment and then smiled. “It sounds great. You think it’s realistic?”

  I laughed. “Beats the hell out of me. How we perform right now’ll probably tell us.”

  · · ·

  The ME’s office in Burlington is tucked into a corner of Vermont’s largest medical center, a happy beneficiary of the state’s efforts to lock horns with competing hospitals in bordering New York and New Hampshire. Once located above a dentist off-campus, Dr. Beverly Hillstrom’s office was now extraordinarily well appointed and the source of considerable pride. Which was entirely fitting—over many years, and despite Vermont’s small size and tight budgets, she had created one of the most efficient and highly respected medical examiner systems in the Northeast. These modern facilities were a long-overdue reflection of that.

  She greeted us as soon as we were announced and escorted us down a gleaming hallway to the autopsy room at the far end, making well-mannered small talk along the way. Tall, slim, and Nordic in appearance, Hillstrom was of indefinable age and unmistakable bearing. Having worked closely together for years, we still referred to one another by title, and not once had she shared a single detail of her personal life. Yet the depth of our friendship was without doubt. She’d proven it many times, extending me courtesies she rarely granted others.

  Titles, however, were causing her a problem right now.

  “Lieutenant—in point of fact, that’s no longer accurate, is it?” she asked as we neared the wide, blank door of her autopsy room.

  “Not technically. I don’t mind if you want to stick with it.”

  She shook her head. “No, no. That wouldn’t do. How should I address you?”

  I was still ambivalent about that. “It sounds a little silly, but we tore a page from the FBI book—officially I’m a Special Agent in Charge, or a SAC. Not that I’m in charge of anything yet. Why don’t we just make it ‘Mister,’ with the understanding that I’d really prefer ‘Joe.’”

  She swung back the door and ushered us over the threshold, frowning slightly. “No. Mister is fine.”

  The room before us was broad, deep, bright, and neatly arranged, with a skylight overhead and two operating areas extending from the wall like twin boat slips. Laid out on one of the metal tables was a body so unusual in appearance it looked more like a lab experiment than an autopsy candidate.

  Standing next to it were two men, Hillstrom’s longtime lab assistant Henry, and Ed Turner, a state trooper assigned to this office as its law enforcement liaison.

  Turner raised his eyebrows as we entered and greeted us with a reserve I knew we’d better get used to. He was, after all—and until or unless these prejudices were sorted out—a member of a “rival” agency. “Well, look at this—the feds that aren’t. What’re you doing here?”

  I laughed and shook his hand, sensing Sammie tense beside me. “Just helping out the Stowe PD. How’ve you been keeping?”

  Hillstrom, sensitive to matters of turf, quickly took over. “We have an approximately mid-forties male, in good physical condition aside from a few missing parts, who appears to have suffered a single fatal puncture wound to the heart, although we’ll have to wait for toxicology to rule out anything additional. The body itself has thawed out,” she explained further, “although some of the organs are still a little hard. We’re trying to speed things up by flushing them with warm water, but I don’t want to move too quickly.”

  Sammie had been studying the open body with professional interest, staring down at its unusually dark red interior. Hillstrom’s finding, however, made her look more carefully at the chest. “He was stabbed?” she asked.

  Her confusion was understandable. The ME’s patient was anything but traditional—his skin was red fading to a leathery brown, instead of the usual sickly yel
low, his eyes were strangely sunken and dry, and his nose, ears, and fingers were dark, as if dipped in soot. He also was missing one arm and both feet, the amputations so clean, they looked cut through by a razor. But there was no sign of any violence aside from some bloodless scratches on the side of his face.

  “You’re reacting to how he looks,” Hillstrom responded. “That’s what stumped the Stowe police and the local assistant medical examiner, I’m embarrassed to say. It’s also what led them to think that he might have been just a hiker who got lost and died of natural or environmental causes, perhaps scraping his face in the process.”

  She pulled on a pair of gloves, moved closer to the man’s chest, and parted a few strands of his chest hair, revealing a tiny hole in the skin the size of a ruptured pimple. “There’s the point of entry.”

  Sammie leaned so far over that her nose was inches from the wound. “What was it? It almost looks like a small-caliber bullet wound.”

  “He was run through,” Ed Turner answered, “like with a shish kebab skewer.”

  I could see from Hillstrom’s expression that she disagreed with the allusion, but she merely changed the subject. “Another interesting detail can be found with the victim’s extremities, including the ears.” She lifted his one remaining hand. “Notice the shriveling of the fingertips—their weather-beaten quality?”

  “Almost looks like a mummy,” Sammie softly observed.

  Hillstrom smiled broadly. “Very good, Agent Martens. That’s exactly right.”

  “Implying he’s been around for a while,” I suggested.

  “Longer than you think, I bet,” Turner added, his earlier reserve now gone.

  “Look at his duds.” He crossed over to a pile of clothes on a nearby table and spread the top garment out for examination—a curiously constructed wool herringbone jacket with a belt across the back. It was worn, tattered, and faded.

  Sammie glanced at it from where she was standing. “Looks like something out of a pseudo good-old-days catalogue.”