Bellows Falls Read online

  That put Duncan in a corner. If he said no and we proved him wrong, he’d look like an idiot. If he said yes, then all room for objection evaporated. My mention of Jasper’s homicide hadn’t been anecdotal. I’d brought it up to show that Lenny could be tied to a capital case—and that Duncan Fasca should tread carefully.

  He steered for middle ground. “Maybe.”

  I saw the hint of a smile appear on Jonathon’s face, which made me careful not to gloat. “Duncan, look. I know what a pain in the ass this is. But by your own admission, Lenny could be dirty, which means his time may be up anyhow. Why don’t you come on board with us and show these guys the price of playing both ends against the middle? We could go after him ourselves, but it would be a lot easier with your help.”

  Fasca shook his head, his face an angry scowl. “That’s easy for you. If it turns out to be a wild-goose chase, you haven’t lost a thing. I end up with a snitch who never talks to me again. This guy’s good. He’s been real useful to me. You know that, Chief. I don’t want to be run over by a bunch of hotshots from out of town who could give a shit what they leave behind.”

  “I don’t think that’s the case here,” Giordi said, his voice carrying a veiled warning.

  Reluctantly, Fasca had all but conceded. “Yeah, well, like I said, easy to say.”

  “You join us, you can find out for yourself,” I suggested. “If you’re interested, I’d like you in on the initial meet. You can steer the conversation yourself. That way, if we all agree we’re barking up the wrong tree, maybe you won’t lose him.”

  Fasca didn’t answer immediately, but by now his resistance was purely for show. “He might not play if he knows I’m bringing someone.”

  The answer to that was too obvious to mention. The room remained silent a few moments longer, until Fasca finally threw in the glove. “All right, I’m screwed either way, so I might as well go along.”

  He suddenly leaned forward and stared at Tim Giordi. “But I want it known I’m doing it under protest, okay?”

  Tim kept a straight face. “You got it, Duncan. Why don’t you pull what you’ve got on Lenny?” He jerked a thumb at Jonathon and me. “They’ll be wanting a full profile on him prior to any meeting. I’ll send them your way as soon as I’m through.”

  Fasca heaved himself out of his chair and nodded sharply in our direction. He left without saying a word. The mood in the air instantly lightened. Jonathon raised his eyebrows at me. “You sure giving him that much clout was a good idea?”

  Giordi answered for me. “He’s not much on manners, but Duncan’s a hard worker. You point him in the right direction, and he’ll chew through walls. He just has to feel he’s got some element of control. I appreciate what you did, Joe, and I think you’ll be happy with the results.”

  · · ·

  Duncan Fasca was as good as Tim Giordi’s word. He took Jonathon, Audrey, and me to a small conference room and briefed us for over an hour on everything he knew of Lenny Markham, which, as it turned out, left ample room for Lenny to be functioning as we suspected he was. To my eyes, he was a classic hustler, working every angle, faithful to no one. Reviewing Fasca’s limited perspective on him, I thought back to the context in which we’d first heard Lenny’s name. Molly Bremmer had described him not as Norm’s trainee but more as a colleague. Given the insight I had now, I wondered if Norm had recruited Lenny, or if Lenny had smelled an opportunity. If the latter were true, then the relationship between the two of them became more complex—and possibly more dangerous.

  The briefing was valuable for another reason. It allowed us to see Duncan in his element, showing off his work, sharing his insights. I could see Jonathon Michael getting used to the man and growing to accept him. He was as Giordi had described him—tenacious, persistent, and not very appealing—but he was also insightful in his way, and certainly knowledgeable about his beat. What he told us of Lenny was at least as useful for what it revealed about Burlington, which unfortunately for me resulted in a slight dampening of my admiration for the town. As eclectic and appealing as it remained, the Queen City’s tattered petticoats were now exposed, and I found them depressingly familiar.

  Nevertheless, by the time Duncan Fasca finally reached for the phone and called Lenny Markham for a meeting—“one on one”—I felt I knew enough about our target to be comfortable talking with him.

  The phone call didn’t last long. Both speakers were used to the routine. Duncan hung up after a couple of minutes and announced, “Flynn Theatre, tomorrow morning, ten o’clock, on the grid. He’s got a job there.”

  Jon looked at him quizzically.

  “The grid,” Audrey explained, surprising us all, “is like a huge metal catwalk, ’bout forty feet over the stage. It’s a good way to get around, and to see without being seen, but it’s not a place for people who don’t like heights.”

  In the silence that greeted her explanation, she added, “I had a summer job at the Flynn once. It’s a beautiful old place—lots of nooks and crannies.”

  “Which is probably why he chose it,” Jonathon said unhappily. “Is it safe?”

  Duncan waved his concern away. “The Vermont Symphony Orchestra’ll be practicing at the same time, for Christ’s sake. It’s not like it’s the North End at midnight. He chose it ’cause he’s there anyway, and none of his cronies would be caught dead in a real theater, that’s all. He doesn’t want to blow his cover.”

  A young woman poked her head through the doorway. “Is there a Joe Gunther in here?”

  I raised my hand. “Yeah.”

  “You have a call on line three.”

  I thanked her and picked up the phone on the conference table. “Gunther.”

  “It’s J.P. I think we found Jasper Morgan.”

  Chapter 17

  IT WAS DARK BY THE TIME Jon and I reached Brattleboro, and raining harder than I would have thought possible outside a movie set. The water fell in a torrent, pouring off roofs of cars and buildings in hundreds of cascades, gathering in the streets like a diverted river.

  I pulled into the abandoned motel’s parking lot, now staked out with yellow “Police” barrier tape and occupied by a number of official vehicles. My shoes vanished underwater as soon as I stepped from the car, and I instantly felt the first cool, wet trickles of rain slipping in between my raincoat and neck.

  Wearing high boots and slickers, and opening umbrellas over their heads, J.P. Tyler and Gail emerged from the lobby entrance to greet us.

  “Christ,” I told them, “has it been raining like this for long? I’ve felt like I needed gills since we hit this side of the state.”

  “About an hour,” Gail answered, slipping her arm through mine so we could better share her umbrella. “It just opened up. From Bellows Falls north they’ve been getting hammered all afternoon. It wasn’t even sprinkling here till this hit.”

  “That’s what prompted me to use the dogs now,” J.P. almost shouted over the sound of the water. “The weather’s supposed to be bad for days, and I didn’t want to wait.”

  Jon asked the obvious. “What dogs?”

  “J.P. had cadaver dogs brought in from Maine,” Gail explained.

  “I thought with the huge amount of blood,” he added, “and the relative freshness of the scene, we might get lucky.” He gestured around to the side of the building. “It’s over here. I’ll tell you on the way.”

  We waded over to the side of the parking lot and down a slippery grass embankment, heading for the rear of the old motel and an overgrown, scrub-choked wasteland similar to much of what lurks behind the Putney Road’s storefronts.

  “Of course,” Tyler continued, “freshness isn’t that big a deal. These dogs have found bodies up to twenty-one years postmortem. But the weather—before this shit hit us—was ideal for a search. Not too hot, nice gentle breezes at both ends of the day, open land for the most part. Dogs need to locate and trace what they call the cone of the scent, and everything I could see looked good for that. I also really l
iked the layout of the scene.” He waved his arm at the soaking darkness around us. “Dead adult body, quasi-urban environment, the shooter and probably one other with him… It was likely the corpse hadn’t been carried too far, and buried fast and not too deep.

  “Anyhow,” he summed up, “it worked. The handler arrived with two dogs, started with just one, and inside an hour we had what we were looking for.”

  Following his powerful flashlight’s beam, which sparkled madly from the millions of prismatic raindrops in its path, we crested a small rise and came to a narrow field in front of a solid wall of trees. Before us was a large tent, spilling brilliant light like a huge overturned cup of milk, and sheltering a half dozen people clustered around a dismally familiar excavation.

  “They got the tent up just before the rain,” Gail said quietly. “Even before they started digging for real.”

  “I didn’t want to take any chances,” Tyler added.

  The group parted as we ducked under the tent flaps, revealing a carefully exposed, shallow rectangular trench. Mercifully, it was empty, its contents zipped into a black body bag resting alongside.

  I crouched between the hole and the body, feeling the water squish out of my shoes. I had to speak loudly over the thrumming on the canvas above us. “What’s the rundown?”

  “Outside of the grave itself,” Tyler answered, “we didn’t find anything. We crawled around, used metal detectors, ran the whole routine. In daylight you can’t see any buildings except the motel from here—at least none with any windows facing this direction. Sammie had Kunkle and Ron and a bunch of patrol officers canvass the area, like we did when we found the blood, but nothing’s come up yet. They’re still at it—that’s why they’re not here now—but it doesn’t look good for witnesses.”

  I nodded my head toward the black bag. “And him?”

  “We just zipped him in before you got here. The assistant ME was about to take him up to Burlington.”

  I glanced up, surprised, and saw Alfred Gould standing in the group. “Sorry, Al. Didn’t see you there.” I looked around at everyone. “Sorry to all of you, in fact—should’ve said hi. You know Jonathon Michael from the AG’s office?”

  The men were mostly our patrol officers. One worked with Al. Another I took to be the dog handler. They all nodded their greetings without comment.

  “Any preliminary findings?” I asked Al Gould.

  He squatted by the body’s other side and pulled the zipper down a couple of feet, revealing a badly decomposed, musty-smelling remnant of a human being, its wildly mussed, dirty hair contrasting starkly with the neat skeletal grin just below it. Any remaining skin was dark and gelatinous, sloughed off entirely in places.

  “It’s better than it looks,” he said, pointing at the skull. “The clothing retarded decomposition, so under his T-shirt the skin’s pretty much intact. He’s also wearing a pair of jockey briefs, but nothing else, so the notion that he was in bed looks good. The two bullet wounds seem to be through and through—one just under the ribs, the other in the neck. From the trajectory angles and what J.P. told me of the scene, I’d say the abdominal wound came first, exiting just below the left scapula. That would be consistent with someone lying supine on a bed, his feet toward the killer, and with the killer also being low down, as if sitting on the dresser opposite. The second wound caused most of the bleeding, of course. I’d guess it pretty much tore away the carotid.”

  He straightened and redid the zipper. “Hillstrom’ll give you all the details, probably by late tomorrow, and there’ll be more to go on then, but those’re the basics.”

  Beverly Hillstrom was the state’s medical examiner, famous for her detailed analyses. “Thanks, Al.” I looked up at Tyler. “And you’re sure it’s Morgan?”

  J.P. shook his head. “Not scientifically. We contacted his dentist, so X-rays’ll be sent up north, too. But we found his name stenciled in the back of his Retreat-issue T-shirt. Nothing we’ve found yet says it’s not him.”

  Tyler hesitated, and then said, “We do have another problem, though, and none of us is real sure what to make of it.”

  He gestured to me to follow him. I rose, circumvented the open grave, and walked some twenty feet to the other end of the tent, where a large sheet of cardboard lay covering the ground.

  “The dog picked up on this, too,” Tyler said, and slid the cardboard over to one side. At first, I couldn’t tell what he was showing me, other than a slight depression in the earth. Then I noticed a smaller, dirtier, more disintegrated version of the skeletal leer I’d just left.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Al guesses it’s a kid, but that’s about it. Those few teeth and some bone fragments are all we found. The grave’s a lot shallower, so we’re thinking animals made a meal out of it, pulling most of the skeleton apart like they usually do. It’s obviously been here a long time.”

  He looked up at the tent fabric above us, which was shimmering from the pounding outside. “Once this mess clears up, we can take this whole field apart, section by section. There might be more like this one. That’s why I asked the dog handler if he could stay over. Sammie said it was okay.”

  “You talk to Willy about this one?” I asked.

  “No. We found it by accident. We were putting up the tent and working on the other grave, when the dog alerted to the second one. We had to shift things a bit to protect them both, but that’s all we had time to do. Willy had already left to help with the canvass.”

  “He told me Jasper had made an example out of a runner who ripped him off. The kid disappeared, the point was made, and things went smoothly from then on. We never heard a thing about it.”

  Tyler was staring at me incredulously. “What about the parents?”

  “I asked the same thing. Apparently you and I are living in a dream world. They figured he’d run off—never thought twice about it. That’s why I asked about Willy. If he can locate them, and the crime lab can extract some DNA from what’s here, maybe we can put a headstone over this little guy. Is Al going to take care of him, too?”

  “In a day or so. This hasn’t been properly excavated yet, and I figured Morgan had priority.”

  “You did right,” I said to his unasked question. “Take your time, do it by the numbers. It’s not going to make any difference if we let him sleep a little longer.”

  · · ·

  The water poured across our skylight as if a hose were poised just out of sight above it. The noise on the roof, though much more muted, reminded me of the excavation we’d left a few hours earlier. Gail and I were in bed, the lights out, entangled in one another’s arms. We were still slightly damp from having made love with an almost desperate passion, driven by a need to avoid the images we’d so recently witnessed.

  The reprieve had been purely temporary, however, and I knew her thoughts, like mine, were back in the tent filled with too much light and sadness.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said after a while.

  “Sure.”

  “What’s it like for you, seeing that?”

  I paused a long time before answering. “I can’t remember the first combat death I saw in Asia, or the first dead body I saw as a cop. They’ve all sort of blurred together. But I’ve wondered sometimes if with each exposure, I haven’t come away with a small piece of that person’s soul. It makes me think that one of these days I’ll hit overload. Probably not, though. People get used to worse things than I’ve ever seen.”

  “So you don’t feel tears, or anger, or even depressed?”

  I was uneasy with the question, although not for myself. I was worried I hadn’t paid attention to her under the tent, that some momentous spiritual shift had occurred inside her that my carelessness had allowed to run rampant. When Gail had returned to law school and later become a deputy state’s attorney, I’d been pleased and flattered by the process, even though it had been taxing on us both. I’d felt her moving toward me philosophically and emotionally and had responded in kind
, making of our buying a home together a symbolic act. Now, in this one question, I feared the threat of a tremor and wondered if it all hadn’t happened too fast, with too many assumptions taken arrogantly in stride.

  But I kept this to myself and merely answered as honestly as I could. “No. Sadness sometimes, probably born of frustration. Mostly, I just feel I’m on the outside looking in.”

  The rain filled the silence that followed, oddly reinforcing our sense of security in this house—the shelter we’d built over our shared life.

  “This might be a little corny,” I added. “But you’re a big factor in making a lot of it easier to take.”

  She let out a deep sigh.

  “How ’bout you?” I finally asked, the simplicity of the words belying the concern tucked beneath them.

  She turned her face toward mine. “I was worried it wasn’t right to feel that way—that I was missing something. Or turning cold.”

  I laughed, greatly relieved. “I don’t think you’ll ever have to worry about that.”

  We kissed, and she resettled herself and gradually went to sleep. But the conversation stayed with me long into the night. I’d spent a lifetime pursuing, controlling, or arresting people who frequently either got killed or killed themselves. But the further back I reached to see their faces, the more I realized my comment about what a stabilizer Gail’s love had become for me went deeper than I’d thought. One of the biggest differences between those bodies and me, in a spiritual sense, was that they were alone, and I was not. It was a revelation a good many other cops could claim, too, of course, but as I’d been finding out recently, not all of them.

  In the end, that thought gave me comfort, and—as I too fell off to sleep—a reawakening hopefulness.

  Chapter 18

  FROM THE SIDEWALK, BURLINGTON’S FLYNN Theatre on Main Street is at best unprepossessing. One and a half stories high, it is by all appearances solid and well built, with a white stone facade demurely but elegantly carved with its name, but in that it is no different from an old bank building or a pretentious post office. The striking thing about it is the marquee crowning its bank of front doors like a jester’s gaudy hat. Multi-hued, ornate, and speckled with hundreds of flashing colored bulbs, at night it draws in theatergoers like moths to a flame.