Occam's Razor Page 17

  · · ·

  The next morning, I met with Sammie, Ron, and Willy. Several weeks had gone by since Philip Resnick had been pulped by the train, and we were no closer to finding his killers than we had been that first night.

  On the bright side, the car, the three men, Resnick’s identity, and his connection to the abandoned truck hadn’t made it into the papers yet, which were still referring to the victim as an unidentified vagrant.

  Which they wouldn’t be doing for much longer.

  “We still think Reynolds is involved?” Willy asked with characteristic bluntness.

  I looked at Ron for an answer.

  “If he is, he’s being very cagey,” Ron answered.

  “Cagey?” Sam butted in. “You really think he framed himself with a bogus copy of his own car just to throw off suspicion? It’s unreal.”

  “I agree,” Ron resumed. “But it still may be possible. Speaking of which, a Crown Vic matching Renaud’s second description was reported stolen in Keene, just before Resnick was killed. Also, I looked over Brenda’s journal again, seeing if I could find a pattern to those missing pages, but the whole thing’s just too chaotic to begin with.”

  I sat back and rubbed my eyes. “Damn, this is frustrating. An office break-in where nothing’s missing, a car at the crime scene that turns out not to have been there, a few missing pages in a dead woman’s journal that might’ve mentioned anybody. I mean, I can write off the phone calls to Katz as political high jinks, but some of this stuff has got to have something to it. Reynolds just keeps coming up.”

  “Or we’re being led to think that way,” Sammie said quietly.

  Willy crushed his plastic coffee cup and threw it into the trash. “We missed out when his office was broken into. If one of us had been there, we might have gotten a look at those files.”

  I turned to Ron again. “You been able to go over his old court records yet?”

  He gave me a tired look. “I looked, but there’re hundreds of ’em. He’s a hardworking man. So I stuck to checking for index references to Resnick or Timson or hazardous materials or trucking—and got nowhere. The only other option is to open the files and go over them page by page.”

  There was a gloomy break in the conversation. “How ’bout Katahdin?” I finally asked.

  “I tried it.” He didn’t need to explain further.

  I sat up slowly, a sudden thought stirring. “Where’s Reynolds licensed to practice?”

  Ron pawed through some notes. “Vermont, New Hampshire—” He suddenly stopped. “And Maine.”

  All three of them looked up at me.

  “Get hold of the Portland court clerk,” I told Ron. “See if Reynolds hasn’t been over there defending Katahdin Trucking. And Sammie, I want you to get back in touch with the New Jersey people Ron called earlier about Resnick, and find out everything you can about him—not his criminal record, but his family, colleagues, drinking buddies, personal habits. Anything you can. I want a family tree of associates we can compare to anyone we might have on file.”

  · · ·

  Deputy Medical Examiner Bernie Short sounded tired on the phone.

  “What can I do for you, Joe?”

  “Get some sleep, would be a wild guess.”

  “Yeah, well, forget that.”

  “How much longer till Beverly gets back?”

  “Too long. Late summer.”

  “I’ll cut to the chase, then,” I said. “Your office did a Lisa Wooten a few years ago, from down here.” I gave him the exact date and reference number. “All I can find in my files is ‘drug overdose,’ but we’re working a case right now where someone’s claiming the stuff that did her in was deliberately poisoned. Can you give me the details?”

  His voice remained flat. “Hold on.”

  He was back on the line in surprisingly short order. “Nope. Heroin cut with confectioner’s sugar. Usually what happens is they try to kick the habit for a while, lower their tolerance for the stuff, and then shoot up with the dose they were used to but can no longer handle. Boom, they’re dead.”

  “So, definitely no poison?”

  “You want a copy of this?” he asked instead.

  “The SA’s office might,” I told him. “I’ll let them know. By the way, you couldn’t tell if the dose that killed her was bigger than her norm, could you, assuming she hadn’t tried to kick the habit?”

  His answer was short but eloquent: “Nope.”

  I hung up and redialed. “I did your bidding on Lisa Wooten,” I told Gail when she picked up. “I’m afraid you’re not going to like it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She was a straight overdose. Bernie Short said the only adulterant was sugar. Whoever told Owen Tharp that Brenda poisoned Lisa’s dope was lying.”

  “Shit.” The line went dead.

  I hung up slowly. I didn’t blame her—I even held myself partly responsible. She’d just committed a cardinal error—uncovering a fact beneficial to the defense—and I hadn’t been sharp enough to see it coming. Reggie McNeil would probably have dug it up eventually, but the fact that this little exculpatory tidbit had been a gift from the prosecution was a card he was sure to play up. If Owen had been deliberately lied to in order to get him motivated to kill Brenda, it could be made to weigh heavily in any jury’s considerations.

  Jack Derby was not going to be pleased.

  · · ·

  My contemplation of Gail’s fate was cut short by a shadow falling across my desk. “Daydreaming, Joe?”

  Al Hammond—tall, distinguished, gray-haired, and the Windham County Sheriff since God was a teenager—stood on my threshold smiling.

  I offered him a chair. “Haven’t seen you in a while. What’ve you been up to?”

  “Watching television,” he said pleasantly, his eyes very steady.

  “Meaning you saw me on the news?”

  “Saw you and had the transcript faxed down to me. You really backing this idea?” His tone was stiffly noncommittal.

  I decided to play the same game. “What did your reading tell you?”

  “It didn’t tell me you were against it.”

  “I’m not—not until it’s something other than a vague proposal on its way through a bunch of committees. I’m not necessarily for it, either.”

  “You think the concept of a single police force is a good thing?” This time, his voice gave him away, if only slightly, not that I needed a road sign. Sheriffs were political by statute, and this one seemed to have been born that way.

  “I think almost seventy different agencies are too many. But you’re safe. Why do you care?”

  “Because being in the constitution and surviving as a reality are two different things, as you damn well know. We could be reduced to a crosswalk officer per county and still be in the constitution.”

  I baited him a little. “So it’s about turf?”

  Those cool, gray eyes narrowed slightly. “It’s about function. Nothing exists for long if nobody needs it. Sheriffs predate every other police agency in this state. For good reason.”

  “Welfare fraud investigators are four pay grades below a Vermont state police sergeant,” I countered. “When Welfare was told to tighten their belts, they handed investigations over to the VSP. But what was good for their budget turned out bad for the state’s. In a few counties, VSP is scheduling fraud investigations during overtime hours, and allowing anyone eligible to conduct them. I know a captain who is legitimately taking advantage of that, and for a lot more money than Welfare was paying in the first place. Does that make sense to you?”

  “A single agency would have the same problems. Plus, you’re talking about the state police—hardly the paragon of efficiency.”

  I tried again, hoping to avoid the standard inaccurate target-shooting at the VSP. “Amos Melcourt killed those two kids up north because a part-time deputy sheriff was put where he shouldn’t have been, supposedly because money was too tight to allow for anything better. That wouldn’t be
true in a more centralized system with a state-mandated budget.”

  Hammond opened his mouth to respond, but I interrupted. “Al, I’m not picking any fights here. All I’m saying is that just because something worked during the Revolutionary War doesn’t mean it should stay the same into the twenty-first century. These seventy-odd departments have about one thousand full-time cops working for them. It’s not much, but it means different uniforms, cars, equipment, weapons, training… you name it. They say that if every department in Chittenden County alone shared a single dispatch center, they could all save some two million dollars. Think of the money we could have—without raising a single additional penny in taxes—if we could all share our resources like that. We’re already beginning to use the same computer data, we’ve been fighting for years to get automated fingerprinting, the FBI has launched a centralized DNA bank, and other states are creating legislation allowing their cops to participate. We’re on this train whether we like it or not. I’m just saying we ought to acknowledge the fact and figure out how to make it work for us, whether it’s one big department or six regional ones or whatever. We ought to kick it around a bit.”

  Hammond wasn’t interested. He rose to his feet and looked down at me for a moment, finally saying, “It sounds great, Joe. And if you and I and a few others were the people who were doing it, I might even go along. But we’re not. It’s the likes of Jim Reynolds and Mark Mullen and our jackass Governor Howell that’re going to be cobbling this together, and they’re going to be working under VSP direction. You mark my words: If this thing goes through—and I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it—it’ll have the stamp of the Green-and-Gold all over it.”

  He stalked out the door, his back ramrod straight, like the state trooper he had been more than twenty years earlier.

  15

  I PICKED UP THE PHONE ON THE FIRST RING out of instinct but was still half asleep when I placed it against my ear.

  “Joe? Lieutenant? Hello?”

  I opened my eyes. It was still the middle of the night. “What?”

  “It’s Ron. Sorry I woke you up. I just got a call about that stolen Crown Vic from Keene.”

  My brain was beginning to function, if not my tongue. “Right.”

  “They found it in the woods near Marlboro, covered with branches and snow. The three guys must’ve driven it there right after they killed Resnick and let Mother Nature take care of the rest.”

  I looked at the digital clock by the bed. “It’s two in the morning, Ron. You telling me somebody just found it?”

  “Two cross-country skiers were enjoying a moonlight run, found the car, called the state police, who called me. I’m on call tonight. It might be the break we been after.”

  I couldn’t fault him the wishful thinking. “Okay. Put a man on it till daylight, but call J.P. now and let him know. Ask him if he thinks it might not be a good idea to have the state’s mobile crime lab give us an assist, just in the interest of time. But be diplomatic, okay? He can be a little thin-skinned about those guys.” I almost hung up, and then caught myself. “Also, get hold of someone with a flatbed truck to transport the car to a closed facility for examination—and a brand-new tarp to wrap it in. J.P.’ll know how to handle it. Tell him I’m real keen on this.”

  “Will do.”

  I felt obliged to add, “And thanks for calling.”

  · · ·

  The big car sat in the borrowed town garage like a stolen artifact of inestimable value, surrounded by men and women garbed entirely in white Tyvek costumes and crouching in the middle of a huge pale paper apron extending to the garage’s rough-hewn walls. J.P. and the mobile lab crew had been at it for several hours by the time I arrived. The paper around the car was littered with labeled evidence bags and Polaroid pictures.

  J.P. came to meet me as soon as I crossed the threshold. I pointed at the car. “You find anything yet?”

  “Yeah. There’s no doubt it was the same one at the railroad tracks. The gravel in the tread matches, the bogus license plate reads like Reynolds’s, although an obvious fake in good light, and we found blood high on the back seat where they must’ve propped the victim up during the ride.”

  “So, two in the back and one driving?”

  “Probably. Can’t tell for sure. The car’s a few years old and the real owner’s no neatnik, so it’s going to be hard to differentiate what trace evidence belongs to the killer and what doesn’t.” He gestured to the envelopes I’d noticed earlier. “We found a ton of it, in any case, and a shitload of latents. We’re going to have to reference-print everyone who’s ever been in this car in order to rule out what we’ve got. Even if it’s possible, I doubt it’ll be worth the time or expense.”

  He then led me to a bench near the back of the bay, to where more evidence bags were piled. He selected one and held it up for me to see. Swathed in its slightly cloudy embrace was an oversized dirty ball peen hammer.

  “This is what we think did him in—before the train, of course. Pretty good amount of blood on its business end. Found it in the trunk.”

  I peered at it closely. “Funny tool to keep in a car.”

  “It wasn’t kept in the car,” J.P. confirmed. “I called the owner in Keene. All he had was the usual junk.”

  He replaced the hammer on the counter and picked up a Polaroid lying beside it. “Here’s the kicker, though—if we’re lucky.”

  I recognized it as an extreme close-up shot of the hammer handle’s butt end. Stamped in the oil-darkened metal was a short string of numbers.

  “Remember that program we ran a few years ago?” J.P. asked. “Where we were trying to get people to mark their valuables and register them with us? I think that’s what this is. Makes sense, too. One of these goes for a hundred bucks or so—weighs a ton, all metal construction, primo goods.”

  I waved the photograph at him. “Can I keep this?”

  He let out one of his rare, thin smiles. “I thought you would.”

  I put it in my pocket. “Nice work—keep your fingers crossed.”

  · · ·

  Franklin’s Machine Shop had been a Brattleboro institution for as long as I could remember. Owned by at least the third generation of Franklins, it had always been on Flat Street—in a small, unassuming one-story warehouse, with windows so greasy they were essentially opaque—and had always restricted its advertising to a single, hubcap-sized metal sign hanging over the wooden sliding front door.

  I had been a periodic customer of Franklin’s over the decades, especially when I’d needed something either custom-made, or that had stopped being sold elsewhere twenty years earlier. If you needed an old flywheel, for instance, or a replacement drive pulley for an ancient snowblower, Franklin’s was the place to shop.

  Not that it was a hardware store, of course. There were no display cases or clerks or pristine overhead lighting. In fact, there was barely any lighting at all. Even at the height of a summer’s day, the interior of Franklin’s remained cavelike, tenebrous, and cool. Looming like metal skeletons, huge piles of odds and ends formed corridors, or were stacked behind and on top of long, scarred, debris-covered wooden worktables. Here and there, stamping machines, drill presses, metal cutters, and who knew what else also stood around like fossilized wallflowers at a soundless party, each accompanied by a single extinguished gooseneck lamp. There was just enough cleared space around these tools for an operator to stand, but generally there was no operator to be seen. If Franklin’s had ever had a heyday, it lay as far back in memory as the heavy leather belts that still crisscrossed its ceiling. Nowadays, either Franklin worked alone or he was accompanied by some relative killing time between jobs.

  I hadn’t known Franklin’s real first name until I’d looked it up in our computer just fifteen minutes earlier. Inevitably, he’d always been referred to as Ben, like his father and grandfather before him. I now knew he was the third in a line of men named Arvid.

  As serious as the reason for my visit was, that ti
dbit wasn’t something I was about to ignore.

  “Hey, Arvid,” I shouted as I entered the shop, noticing only the faintest touch of warmth from a centralized, rumbling upright furnace that looked like a locomotive begging for food.

  There was a metallic crash from somewhere in the gloom, and a cigarette-ruined voice shouted back, “If you’re not from the IRS, you’re some kind of wise-ass.”

  “I’m not from the IRS.”

  A shadow detached itself from the darkness, looking as oil-stained and solid as the machinery surrounding it, and an old, slightly stooped man with enormous blackened hands and a filthy baseball cap appeared before me. His face showed neither pleasure nor recognition.

  “Should’ve known it was you. You got nothin’ better to do than hassle me?”

  We didn’t shake hands. It wasn’t something really old friends did. “Nope. Been keeping busy?”

  “Enough. What d’ya got? Another cheap piece of junk crap out on you?”

  “Not this time. I think we might’ve found something belonging to you.” I handed him the picture of the ball peen hammer.

  He hesitated taking it, carefully wiping his hand on the front of an insulated vest that looked as though it had been washed in oil. Despite the lack of light, he didn’t squint to make out the image. He merely glanced at it and returned it to me. “No shit. Never thought that stupid program of yours would work.”

  “So it is yours?”

  He studied me impassively for a moment. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “You didn’t report it missing.”

  He turned to a nearby workbench and picked up an oddly configured cylindrical object, possibly part of an old drive shaft, and cradled it in his palm, feeling its cool smoothness with his fingertips. Ben Franklin was rarely without something metal in his hands. It seemed to calm him as the feel of rich earth might a farmer.

  “You know how much stuff I got in this place?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, I don’t neither. For all I know, that thing’s been under a pile the whole time. Never knew it’d grown feet.”