Occam's Razor Read online

  I fixed my coffee as I spoke. “You name it. You claim you’re thinking in terms of efficiency, the public good, and planning for the future. Almost every cop in uniform thinks of job security. You’re threatening that.”

  “That’s not true. The number of police officers won’t necessarily change. Just the way they’re organized. They’ll all be in one department, with their leader ranked at cabinet level, and with the same access to the state budget as any other agency. They’ll have better pay, more benefits, and many more opportunities for advancement and diversity. If tagging moose is your thing, and you used to be stuck in the Burlington PD, in this new organization you can just ask for a transfer to the wildlife unit. Equipment will be first-rate, training will be improved, and the political clout will be as never before. It’s an absolute win-win situation. Occam’s Razor, practically applied.”

  I wondered if he was trying to put me in my place. “Occam,” I answered, “was talking about theological philosophy, not employment concerns.”

  He made a funny tucked-in gesture with his chin, as if I’d just punched him gently in the chest, which perhaps I had. During my short stint in college, I’d spent most of my time with my nose buried in books—including a few on philosophy and ethics.

  I used his surprise to press him further. “Are you saying that part-time deputy sheriff who let Amos Melcourt slip by will have a job?”

  A look of irritation crossed his face. “Of course there will be standards to meet. That’s only reasonable. You can’t have any woodchuck who chooses to just sign up.”

  “Maybe not, but with the sixty-eight different employment possibilities we have right now, that woodchuck has a better chance of being hired than he would with your single police force. And all the guys who are currently in uniform but who might be just barely hanging on—they’re going to fight you with everything they’ve got. And that’s not even mentioning the pride factor. You really think the Green-and-Gold are going to tolerate being anything else? Being forced to be on a par with someone out of Bellows Falls or Brattleboro or Windsor?”

  He shook his head tiredly, obviously bored by the very debate he’d set in motion. “Look, all that really doesn’t matter. The police, no matter who they are, don’t have a strong constituency in the Legislature. Once the public hears the details of the final bill and sees the logic behind it, all that naysaying will be identified as the narrow self-interest it is. The police are essentially a military organization. They’ll do as they’re told.”

  “They may be military in appearance,” I pressed him, “but they exist because civilians created them. Selectmen and voters all over this state won’t be too thrilled with having their homegrown, handpicked departments replaced with some top-heavy, faceless state agency, no matter how rational the explanation. Bellows Falls measures a single square mile, and is maybe eight minutes away from one of the larger state police barracks, but year after year they fund their own PD, despite all the statistics that tell them it’s nuts. Local control’s still a big thing here. Why do you think it took Vermont so long just to get 911 adopted? And that looked like a total no-brainer.”

  He gave me the indulgent look of a long-suffering parent. “This is not some flash-in-the-pan, election-year notion, Lieutenant, as you know full well. As early as 1990, the Windham Foundation hosted a conference on this topic, and the general consensus from everyone attending—from sheriffs to local cops to the state police—was that this course of action made the most sense in addressing a raft of problems we’ve been saddled with for decades. In fact, that same year, the various agencies in Chittenden County pooled together to form CUSI, with a focus on sexual assault cases, and it’s proven very effective, as has its St. Albans-based counterpart, the Northwest Unit for Special Investigations. Things move slowly, I know, and sometimes it takes a tragedy like what happened up north to give them the push they need, but that doesn’t mean they can’t eventually happen. You just need enough people to believe in the cause.”

  I resisted pointing out that while the Windham Foundation meeting he’d mentioned had concluded that policing could be improved using a regional approach—and not a single police agency—everyone in attendance had also agreed that none of them would live long enough to see any of their recommendations become reality.

  “In any case, I’d like to make you a proposal,” he continued. “When all this comes to pass, I’d like you to consider a leadership position in this new organization.”

  I deflected the offer, which I didn’t see as his to make in any case. “Have you come up with a name for it yet?”

  He smiled broadly. “Tentatively, yes. The Agency for Criminal Justice has been kicked around, but that sounds a little flat to me. I prefer the Vermont Bureau of Investigation—VBI for short.”

  “Very flashy. Sounds like an army dressed in business suits and barn boots.”

  He lifted his snifter in a toast. “You can laugh now, but I’ll see this thing through. To your health.”

  I returned the gesture without comment.

  · · ·

  Gail was reading in bed when I got home. “Where’ve you been? I called the office an hour ago.”

  “Having an out-of-body experience with Jim Reynolds. Strangest conversation I’ve had in a long time.”

  She smiled sadly. “That’s saying something, given the ones we’ve been having.”

  I sat beside her and squeezed her hand. “Those haven’t been strange. They’ve been painful.”

  She took my hand and kissed it. “So what did you talk about?”

  “I went there to give him the third degree. I ended up watching him drink cognac, treat his wife like a servant, and make references to Occam’s Razor.”

  “Who?”

  “Exactly what he was hoping I’d say, except I fooled him. William of Occam was a fourteenth-century theologian who came up with a theory that said, more or less, that too much bullshit makes for cluttered thinking. And encourages the employment of too many managers, who in turn do their best to keep things cluttered.”

  She looked at me questioningly.

  “Okay, so maybe he used different words and was mostly talking about a bloated clergy. In any case, it’s been handed down to us as that favorite of all management tools: Keep It Simple, Stupid—KISS. That’s what Reynolds claims his bill is—a massive pruning of redundancies.”

  “I suppose he’s probably right.”

  I got up and started getting ready for bed. “From what I heard this morning, Derby’s apparently trying to get you familiarized with William of Occam.”

  Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “What did he say?”

  “That you’re giving him hives fretting about Owen Tharp’s motivation.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Not a word. To borrow a phrase from the legal profession, it was a spontaneous utterance. I was telling him how the two homicide cases were bumping into each other in terms of crossover witnesses. He said McNeil was going to love exploiting that, and then he nailed me with how my girlfriend was giving him enough trouble as it was.”

  She didn’t bite at the girlfriend crack, admitting instead, “I am.”

  I paused in mid motion and looked at her. “A lot of trouble?”

  She tilted her head slightly. “Could be. You and I have been over this ground before. I don’t have any doubts Owen Tharp killed that woman, but I’ve got some major ones that it was as simple as everyone’s hoping. McNeil and I have started trading pretrial information, and there’s not much I can see in Owen’s past that would make him go to Croteau’s house and kill her without cause.”

  “He had cause. He thought she’d killed his girlfriend.”

  “Exactly,” she said, sitting forward for emphasis. “And we now know from the girlfriend’s autopsy he was lied to. In his confession, he didn’t say something vague like, ‘The dope was poison.’ His exact words were, ‘Brenda put poison in her dope.’ That’s a specific accusation. The autopsy doesn’t bear it ou
t, Owen wasn’t a witness to Lisa’s death, and nothing indicated at the time that she’d been murdered. So someone must’ve fed him that line, thereby directing him like a guided missile toward Brenda Croteau.”

  I scratched my head. “I don’t know, Gail. There’s no evidence of that.”

  “Are you kidding? Look at the kid. He’s everybody’s lapdog. They treat him like shit and he comes back for more—again and again and again. He’s the perfect weapon. He craves affection, isn’t too bright, and is prone to violent outbursts, and according to the lab results, he was higher than a kite on the night of the killing.”

  “So why isn’t McNeil knocking your door down with a devil-made-him-do-it defense? He could plead diminished capacity, send Owen to a rubber room for a few years of gentle treatment, and have him back on the streets before he turns thirty.”

  She thought a moment before answering. “Two reasons: one, he just might—it is early yet—and two, his client may be protecting the person who pushed his buttons. If Owen thinks that shooting his mouth off will land a father figure in jail, he’s going to do the noble thing. He’s a romantic, after all—he already thinks he avenged his sainted girlfriend, and she, for all we know, was a hooker who gave him a single roll in the hay, if that.”

  By now I was sitting on a chair across the room, one sock in my hand, listening intently, my mind in a turmoil.

  “I’m not arguing the point,” I said. “It could’ve happened that way. But what can you do about it? It’s not like you have the wrong man in jail. And Derby will have your hide if you open a can of worms this late in the game, especially when all you’re working from is a theory.”

  She stared at the small hill her knees made under the blankets, reflecting on what I’d just said. Then she raised her eyes and gave me a half smile, filled with all the sadness and disappointment we’d been trying to deal with these last few days.

  “I guess I need help.”

  20

  I ROSE EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, out of long-standing habit, got ready for the day in a bathroom down the hall so I wouldn’t disturb Gail, and went downstairs to fix a cup of coffee and some toast.

  It was still as dark as the middle of the night, making the house more intimate than I ever found it during the day. Somehow, with most of the lights off and all the artwork and elegant furniture obscured, I felt more at ease with my surroundings. Less like a visitor.

  I washed my cup in the sink, put on my overcoat, grabbed the bag where I kept my gun, radio, paperwork, and various odds and ends, and headed outside.

  The freezing air grabbed my nostrils like a pair of pliers, making me blink and catch my breath. It was short-lived, as always, and even comforting in an odd way, instilling in many of us who chose to live here a sense that by merely staying alive this time of year, we weren’t doing too badly.

  I crossed the driveway to the garage, triggering the usual battery of motion-detector spotlights, which both ruined the mood and replaced the starlight with a confusing tangle of harsh glare and deep shadow. Inside the garage, I pulled my keys from my pocket—and suddenly froze.

  Outside the garage, I heard the faint squeak of frozen snow under a carefully placed foot.

  I dropped down, circled the car, and waited, crouching behind its passenger-side wheel well, breathing through my mouth, my chin tucked down so no vapor cloud would rise above my barricade and give me away.

  I heard someone approach, pause, then turn slightly. After a long silence, a voice said tentatively, “Joe?”

  I rose from my hiding place and found Stanley Katz standing awkwardly, looking slightly frightened.

  “For Christ’s sake, Stan. You ought to know better.”

  He laughed nervously. “Holy shit. I didn’t know where you went. It was weird.”

  “Keep your voice down. Gail’s still asleep. What’re you doing here?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about Reynolds. You read yesterday’s paper?”

  “I had it shoved down my throat, thank you very much. What the hell were you thinking?”

  He looked offended. “Printing the truth. It was all accurate, wasn’t it?”

  “My God. Where’re you parked?”

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “On the street. I’ve been here half an hour. I wanted to catch you alone.”

  I started my car to warm it up but then headed to where he’d indicated. “Let’s talk there. My heater takes ten minutes to kick in.”

  He followed me without comment. Inside his smelly truck, I asked him, “A man goes into a bar, stays an hour, then leaves. On the way out, he stumbles, falls against another patron, mutters something incomprehensible, and wanders off. What’s the conclusion?”

  Stanley looked at me quizzically. “He had too much to drink?”

  “Wrong. He’s a teetotaler. But he was visiting a friend, has a speech defect, and stumbled because he’s near-sighted. If you’d written the story the way I first told it, it would be accurate, but everybody reading it would’ve reached the same conclusion you did.”

  “Meaning you got nothing on Reynolds.”

  I was surprised. A younger Stanley Katz would have started preaching along some thin line of logic, defensive to the end. This new cut-to-the-chase, realistic approach was much more appreciated. “Right. I think both you and I are being had. I don’t have any proof of it—any more than I have proof against him—but every time I hit him with the little I dig up, he comes back with a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

  “So he’s a good liar.”

  “Or he’s telling the truth. It is possible, Stan. It happens.”

  Katz thought a moment. “What’d you find in Maine?”

  “That he defended a trucking company, bumped into Phil Resnick, and backed off as soon as he heard Resnick had Mob connections in Jersey.”

  He looked at me wide-eyed. “He does?”

  “Down, boy—stay with me here. Remember that night we visited Reynolds’s house and checked his car? It was because we’d heard it had been used to carry Resnick’s unconscious body to the tracks. Then we found the real car, dummied up to look like Reynolds’s—a clear-cut frame. Same thing with that tip you gave us about Reynolds being involved with Brenda Croteau. There were some pages missing from her journal, but nothing even vaguely linking her to him—on any front. And again with the deal in Maine—smoke but no fire. I think the game plan here is to combine our wild goose chases with the rumors you’ve been fed so you can write a story you think you’re putting together on your own.”

  He mulled that over. “Either that or you cooked this whole thing up to get me to back off.”

  “Back off what? We don’t have a case against Reynolds. I thought you’d want to know you’re being used.”

  “So big-hearted. Why do you care?”

  He had me there. “I’d like to know who your police source is. If he’s on the take instead of just being a motor mouth, I want his hide.”

  But he was already shaking his head. “No way.”

  I didn’t argue with him. I hadn’t expected him to agree. “Then do me a favor. Break a tradition—look this gift horse in the mouth. Draw your own conclusions.”

  “How’s my story affected the department?”

  I supposed that was something all reporters wanted to know, especially after they thought they’d hit a homer. “You haven’t done us any favors, and I think in the long run you’ll be wiping egg off your face. Whoever your Deep Throat is, he’s going to be feeling some heat.”

  “What about Derby?”

  I looked at him. “Why? You have something personal in this?”

  Now he did look defensive. “No, but he’s been acting real political lately. I just wanted to know how he’d reacted.”

  I opened the door to a tidal wave of freezing air. “Ask him yourself.”

  He rolled down his window as I crossed the street. “What? What did I say? There’s nothing wrong with that. What’re you so touchy about all of a sudden?”
r />   I didn’t bother answering. Aside from thinking his curiosity a little juvenile, I hadn’t found it that offensive. It was the suggestion of irresponsibility behind it that had propelled me out of his truck—that and the need to be free of him in general. Much as we scratched each other’s back now and then, I didn’t want it to become second nature. Besides, I’d done what I’d wanted to do—made Stanley a little pickier about the morsels he was fed and, more subversively, perhaps compelled him to act as a bird dog on our behalf.

  If I could convince him that he’d been used to smear Jim Reynolds, then there was little that would stop him from trying to discover the truth behind the ruse. I’d seen Stanley Katz get angry before, and use a keyboard like a shotgun when his pride was stung.

  · · ·

  At the squad meeting that morning, I followed Brandt’s recipe of the day before and told everyone our first priority was to analyze Billy Conyer’s past with a microscope—chasing down everyone he had contact with and finding out what they were up to—while being very careful not to sabotage the SA’s prosecution of Owen Tharp. I made it clear they were to think about what they were asking before they asked it. We each took names, culled from all the sources we’d accumulated from interviews, Brenda’s journal, and common knowledge, and set out to create a combination timeline/genealogy of the late Billy Conyer’s universe, hoping we could discover who his two colleagues had been, and maybe whoever had turned him into a killer.

  Afterward, I signaled Willy Kunkle to follow me into my office.

  “Shut the door,” I told him as I sat at my desk.

  He took his time getting comfortable, tucking his useless left elbow between his body and the arm of my plastic guest chair, as if buying himself time. I imagined he thought he’d earned yet another trip to the doghouse and didn’t want to rush things.

  “You all set?” I finally asked him.

  “Sure. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I got something extra I thought you might enjoy. All that stuff I just said about not stepping on the SA’s toes doesn’t apply to you.”