The Ragman's Memory Read online

  Tony stood up, a small smile on his face. “Mind if I join you?”

  It was an unusual request. The chief was less a cop than an administrator nowadays, but he had come up through the ranks. I also knew that for this bust in particular, he wanted to be there when the tables were turned on one of the most antagonistic selectmen he’d ever had to deal with.

  “It would be a pleasure,” I told him.

  · · ·

  BTC Investments owned one of the old brick buildings that stood on High Street’s steep slope, just before it T-boned into Main. Tall, narrow, and unremarkable architecturally, these structures looked painfully jammed together, as if the first one at the bottom of the hill had suddenly ground to a halt at the traffic light and forced all the others to collide and compress like passengers in a bus wreck.

  It was an abandoned wreck at this time of night, however—dark and silent. In midweek, midwinter, and after hours, Brattleboro tended to fold up like a backwoods village. Glancing up at the address as I got out of the car, I could see why the patrol unit earlier had made such a quick and accurate assessment of BTC’s occupancy—theirs were the only lights on in any of the surrounding buildings.

  There were four of us—Tony, J.P., Sheila Kelly, and me. The other team, led by Sammie Martens, was already on its way north, to Eaton Avenue and the Chambers home.

  “Front or back way?” J.P. asked as we gathered on the sidewalk.

  I looked at the door facing us. “Might as well go through here. I don’t even know where the back door is. Most of these buildings have been turned into mazes.”

  We trooped inside, located the ancient, phone-booth-sized elevator, and rode creakily to the top floor. Just as we were almost there, Sheila sniffed the air. “You smell something funny?”

  The door slid open as if in response, and the small space we were in filled with the acrid tang of smoke.

  “Damn,” I swore, running toward the door marked “BTC Investments,” around which I could see thin, gray tendrils leaking into the hall. “J.P.,” I called back over my shoulder, “find a fire alarm.”

  With the other two close behind me, I paused only briefly at the door, checking it for heat, and then threw it open and burst in. Ahead of me was a large, high-ceilinged room, possibly once an enormous storage area, now segmented into office cubicles by interlocking waist-high panels. A wide, central walkway led straight from the front door to the back of the room; and it was there, as if lost in a fog, that Ben Chambers, a wet handkerchief tied across his mouth and nose, stood grabbing documents from a row of open filing cabinets and stuffing them into a metal trash can filled with burning paper.

  I broke into a run.

  I was about twenty feet away when he saw me, a thick wad clutched in his hand like so much laundry. But instead of bolting for a back door, or merely yielding to overwhelming odds, he caught me by surprise. Ignoring what must have been excruciating pain, he dropped the papers, grabbed the hot metal trash can in both bare hands, and threw it at me with all his strength.

  I instinctively dove to my right, behind one of the cubicle panels, and crashed heavily onto the floor against a desk. The can sailed overhead and exploded in the middle of the walkway, in front of Sheila and Tony. Sheila let out a scream as her momentum carried her right into the flames.

  I scrambled to my feet and saw Chambers vanishing toward a far corner of the room. Tony had already grabbed Sheila from behind, pulled her free of the flames, and was stripping his coat off to extinguish the few flickers on her clothing.

  Seeing me hesitate, he shouted, “Go, go, go. Get the son of a bitch.”

  I turned on my heel and gave chase.

  Chambers had disappeared down a narrow, dimly lit hallway. Pausing on its threshold, I closed the door behind me to cut off the noise and listened. Vaguely, as if from very far off, I heard the clattering of footsteps, half-running, half-falling down a set of stairs.

  I moved quickly along the short hall, checking each door until I found the one opening onto a brick-walled stairwell. There, the sounds I’d heard so dimly echoed clearly from below. I headed down, three steps at a time, just barely keeping my balance. “Chambers—stop where you are,” I shouted. “This is the police.”

  My words sounded tinny and futile against the fear I knew was driving the man ahead of me. I didn’t bother repeating myself.

  Like two magnetized toys with similar polarities, we sped downstairs, never closing the distance between us, never setting eyes on one another. We ran as if isolated and alone, both of us stimulated by the pounding of the other man’s feet on the metal-edged steps.

  Near the bottom, a loud crash killed the effect, and suddenly the only sounds left in the stairwell were my own. I descended the last two flights to find a second hallway, this one wider and longer, at the back of which was a wide, heavy fire door. Again pausing only briefly, hearing the muffled din of approaching sirens from outside, I pulled open the door and found myself looking down a last set of stairs into a dark, cold, and very quiet cellar.

  Using the light spilling out of the corridor behind me, I groped for a switch, flipped it on, and slowly, gun drawn, began edging my way down. Reminiscent of the cave-like, dirt-floored basement in which I’d interviewed John Harris, this one was strung with intermittent bare bulbs, casting as much shadow as light, and heading off along a labyrinthine selection of passages.

  Pausing on the last step, however, I began thinking the choices facing me were perhaps of little concern. Chambers had not used the light switch, and upon opening the fire door, I hadn’t heard a sound, both of which implied he had gotten himself cornered—or that he wasn’t far from where I was standing.

  I placed my back to the nearest wall, suddenly aware that our roles might have just been reversed, and silently cursed my forgetting to grab a radio on the way out of the squad room.

  But backup would be on the way eventually. If I was right about Chambers being boxed in, my staying put wasn’t such a bad strategy. Nevertheless, acutely aware of the dark niches and shadows confronting me, I began looking around, plagued by the concern that he might have somehow gotten away, and that the basement was silent for good cause.

  My eyes went to the dirt floor and there found the explanation. Scratched into the greasy soil was a fresh quarter-circle arc, radiating out from what appeared to be part of the wall. Crouching down, I studied the wall, actually a rack of wooden planks spanning two ancient brick pillars, and found where it was discreetly hinged. I moved to the other side, looking for a door pull or handhold, and heard the tiniest of noises—just enough to make me move my arm up defensively—before I was catapulted backward by the door flying open against me.

  My left arm absorbed what would have been a direct shot to the head, but I was thrown against the opposite wall and had the wind half-knocked out of me. Sprawled on my back, I saw Ben Chambers loom briefly before me, a two-by-four in his hands. I aimed my gun in his direction and fired.

  Unharmed, he turned and ran into the darkness behind him, the sound of his retreat increasingly muffled, dull, and subterranean. As I struggled to my feet, dazed and with my arm throbbing with pain, I realized where it was he’d been hiding. The back of this building faced the Harmony parking lot, a block-sized quadrangle enclosed by a ragged wall of banks, businesses, and apartment buildings. In the days before oil, coal had been used to heat several of these places, and I had heard of at least one tunnel, supposedly long since filled in, designed for the distribution of coal throughout the block. As I stumbled down this narrow, musty, utterly black void, my arms outstretched before me, a tiny detached part of my brain marveled at the fossils left in the wake of a town’s march through time. I wondered at the happenstance that must have led to Ben’s discovery of this curiously convenient relic—and at the personality that had chosen to keep it secret.

  Following the sounds ahead of me, I continued running blind until a dull glimmer of light and a blast of cold air from another door being thrown open indicated
I wasn’t just nearing the end of the tunnel, but approaching the outdoors as well. Where I ended up, after passing through a second disguised panel, was a large, dark, former coal bin, filled with cardboard boxes belonging to the businesses overhead, and equipped with an ancient iron ramp leading up and through a gaping bulkhead. Through it, I could see stars, a streetlight, and part of an alleyway wall.

  Wary of a second surprise as I surfaced to street level, I climbed the ramp gingerly, to be greeted by the angry bellow of a car horn somewhere down the alley to my left. Emerging into the night, I saw Chambers waving his arms in the middle of Elliot Street, in front of a pickup truck now skewed crookedly across the road. As I began running down the alley to intervene, the truck’s driver exited angrily from his cab and was smoothly laid out by one swipe of Chambers’s club. Barely breaking stride, Chambers threw the weapon aside, slipped behind the wheel, and gunned the engine.

  I reached the street just as the wheels spun back to life, slithering wildly for a grip on the snow-clad surface of the road. The truck slid past me, just missing its former driver. Without thought or plan, I threw my gun into the bed and grabbed the tailgate with both hands, hoping to vault gracefully into the truck and put an end to this frantic idiocy. Instead, I was instantly pulled off my feet, and ended up hanging on for dear life, watching the road speed by below my nose.

  Slowly, fighting the pain in my left arm and the lurching motion of the truck, I chinned myself up to the gate and after several attempts managed to get a knee onto the rear bumper. There, hanging on grimly, I paused, gasping for breath.

  Chambers was speeding west along Elliot, away from downtown and parallel to the Whetstone Brook. Elliot is only a half mile long before it becomes Williams beyond a four way intersection, and it was only here, where Chambers had to slow briefly, that I was able to hook my leg over the tailgate and begin to work my way forward.

  This, however, was still not easy. Chambers had seen me hitch on, and began jerking the steering wheel back and forth, trying to throw me off. Clutching on to the side-rails, my feet wedged against the wheel wells, I impotently watched my gun as it careened around the truck bed like a gravity-resistant pinball.

  Such maneuvering, however, was ill-suited to the road conditions, and eventually Chambers overdid it. The truck began sliding sideways down the street, the spinning of its wheels now only exacerbating the loss of control. All thought of catching this man was overwhelmed by the desire to simply survive.

  The end of our madcap journey came with merciful grace. Bypassing all guardrails, utility poles, parked cars, and trees, we plowed into a thick, soft, energy-absorbing snowbank. The impact sent me flying through the air like a basketball, but even in mid flight, I was glad to be free of the truck. I landed half in the freezing water amid a thick cluster of dead reeds.

  My anger overwhelming any remnants of caution, I scrambled up the stream bank, vaulted over the half-buried hood, and wrenched open the door. Ben Chambers, small and frail, his eyes wide and his sooty forehead smeared with blood, stared at me plaintively.

  “Please—don’t hurt me.”

  I looked at him in stunned silence, torn between responding and tearing his head off, and finally managed instead, “You’re under arrest.”

  28

  I EMERGED FROM THE INTERROGATION ROOM after an hour and a half with Ben Chambers, my adrenaline pumping, the end of the case in sight, finally having heard the answer I’d been hoping for since the night Mary Wallis disappeared.

  J.P. Tyler met me in the tiny hallway outside the viewing room, where he’d been videotaping the interrogation. “Get it all?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do me two favors. Round up Smith, Lavoie, and Stennis for SRT duty, and call Gail at home and have her meet me here. Tell her Mary is still alive and that we’re about to launch an operation to free her.”

  I saw Ron sitting at his desk, phone in hand. He swung around at the sound of my voice and pointed at the receiver, “I’m lining up a no-knock warrant for the trailer right now.”

  I gave him a thumbs-up and took Dr. Andrews by the elbow as he followed Tyler out of the viewing room. I had asked him to observe the interrogation to give us what insight he could. “Doctor, would you walk with me down to the basement? I’m assembling the Special Reaction Team, and we’ve got to change into our gear downstairs. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about Junior on the way.”

  Andrews looked slightly startled at all the sudden activity. “Of course.”

  I steered him out of the squad room and toward the stairs leading down. “Why did he do all this? It made more sense when we thought NeverTom was the crook.”

  Andrews smiled slightly. “Don’t sell NeverTom short. He got where he is through a combination of blackmail, corruption, and intimidation that he’s practiced his entire adult life. That and the ghost of their father’s influence was what Ben was reacting against. People thought that after Ben Senior rejected Junior and turned his attention to Tom, Junior happily sought refuge in his books and philanthropy and making more money. In fact, he went into a slow simmer of rejection and envy, building up steam over the years until he finally blew. It was less obvious than NeverTom’s sociopathic personality, which found a therapeutic way to vent itself against political enemies, and in the end, as with anything that’s been penned up for too long, it was much more destructive.

  “The classic love-hate twist to it all,” he continued, as I opened the door at the bottom of the stairs for him, “is that Ben set out to get his revenge on his brother by becoming his ally—he’s the one who recognized that more could be made from the convention center than just a little political mileage. To him, it was a way to make a fortune, and ride his brother’s coattails as high up the social ladder as possible, all the while knowing that it was he, and not Tom, who was responsible for that success.”

  “But by saying Ben blew his cork, how do you explain the care and time he took in killing Shawna and Milo?” I asked.

  Andrews shook his head apologetically. “For Ben, it was a sudden release of sorts, even if it was meticulously planned. He basically took his father’s and brother’s behavior and exaggerated it to make it his own. Where the other two plotted and planned and killed people figuratively, Ben did it in fact. As he said during the interrogation, his killing of Shawna was an experiment. It was a maiden voyage into a new lifestyle. Look at all the complexities of that crime—the Satanist overtones, in case the body was discovered before it totally disintegrated; the fact that he kept Shawna alive for a week so he could show her to Mary Wallis and prove his absolute power. That worked so well, Mary didn’t know Shawna wasn’t still alive until the skeleton was positively identified. And even then, Ben had a plan in place. He not only triggered the Satanist diversion by making an anonymous phone call, but when he grabbed Mary, he threw suspicion onto her by planting Shawna’s wallet in her house, even forcing Mary to put her fingerprints on it.”

  “This signature pattern is repeated with the Milo killing. During the interrogation, Ben simply said Milo tried to blackmail Hennessy and him and therefore was taken care of. What he didn’t dwell on was the complex methodology, which again was less appropriate to the task than to satisfying his own psychological needs. Why use rabies? Because it’s arcane, experimental, takes brains to pull off. Anyone could’ve knocked Milo over the head and dumped him in a ditch. He would’ve been frozen solid by morning. But to use rabies was a sign of genius. A genius who needed recognition, of course, which is again why he made another anonymous phone call.

  “The same pattern of camouflage and deflection is evident even while he was ostensibly helping NeverTom’s cause,” Andrews continued. “He used his brother’s phenobarbital on Shawna, cut up the rabid raccoon using his brother’s worktable and tools, and made it appear Tom was Eddy Knox’s sponsor at the Keene country club. Not only would all that get Tom into trouble if everything fell apart, but it imbued Ben with a secret power over the very person who had m
entally tortured him his entire life.”

  I paused near the end of the high, dark, basement hallway we’d been traveling. “Let’s back up a bit. Why did he grab Mary Wallis and put her under lock and key? Why not kill her?”

  “A couple of reasons, as I see it. First of all, he had to do something after Shawna was proven dead, because his hold over Mary had suddenly vanished. He tried threatening her at first, which is why she seemed so secretive and fearful to you, but he soon realized that would yield only short-term results—that Mary would probably tell what she knew if you promised her protection. As to why he didn’t kill her, that’s a little less practically motivated. People who kill in this fashion need to justify the act in their own minds. That way, they aren’t so much butchers as unappreciated servants of society—it’s a form of vigilante mentality. Remember how he described Shawna, Milo, and Mrs. Sawyer?”

  “A hooker, a bum, and a bitchy old woman with one foot in the grave.”

  “Right—blemishes on the face of society, in his view. But Mary Wallis, regardless of politics, wasn’t a blemish—she was a community leader. That’s why Ben had to stop her in the first place. She was powerful enough to halt the construction project, so killing her created a moral problem. Also, I think in his demented way, he was hedging his bets in case he got caught. His whole demeanor changed when he told you about Mary still being alive, as if she had now become proof of both his good will and his rationality.”

  I stopped beside the door to the locker room, letting some of the people J.P. had summoned file by us. I offered Andrews my hand. “Thank you for your help—with Bernie, too. We probably couldn’t have done this without you.”

  Andrews smiled but shook his head. “Oh, I doubt that. People like Ben Chambers just think they’re invincible. It would have caught up to him sooner or later. For one thing, he wouldn’t have been able to keep such a success to himself. Being caught allows him to finally bathe in the limelight.”