Occam's razor

2

Ron Klesczewski stopped me at the bottom of the stairs, just shy of the building’s front door. We could see through the glass the first wave of morning traffic filling the streets, passing before us in quick, familiar flashes.

“I screwed up. I should’ve read her better.”

I laughed and shook my head, having told him on the way down what Edith Rudd had seen. “I don’t think so. If I’d been the first one in, she would’ve handed me what you got-pure luck of the draw. She had to tell one of us the truth. It was piled up inside her like water behind a dam. You know if the canvass has dug up anyone else?”

He unclipped a portable radio from his belt. “I’ll find out.”

I stopped him. “It’ll keep-I was just wondering. I’m going back to the office. We’ll all compare notes around lunchtime, anyhow.”

We parted company on the sidewalk, Ron heading for the next door on the block, and I walking north, through Brattleboro’s heart, toward the Municipal Center at the far end of Main Street.

I needed to do more, however, than just jar my sleepless brain with a brisk walk in the bone-chilling air. I found it useful, when I needed to think, to get away from home and office both and to wander the streets I’d patrolled since first becoming a cop. For decades now, I’d watched Brattleboro going through its growing pains, from the post-World War backwater days to the arrival in the sixties of the interstate and the hippies, both of which had infused the town with their separate brands of vitality. There were communities like this that were all but dead in the water, and others so bent on making a buck that they’d turned themselves into strip malls. But Brattleboro, with its mixture of old and new, homegrown and flatlander, rich and poor, conservative and liberal, had acquired an opinionated, contradictory, irritating, but life-saving energy that seemed destined to defeat the doldrums that had doomed so many other towns.

The interstate, and Brattleboro’s proximity to the Massachusetts border, had brought darker things, too, of course, and I was wondering if what Edith Rudd had seen last night wasn’t one of them. In the past ten years, our homicide rate had climbed to one a year, and sometimes more. The disintegration of the cities to our south, Vermont’s reputation for being friendly to the down-and-out, and the role of this town as an employment hub all conspired to make it an incubator for illegal activity. Increasingly, we’d had to deal with everything from youth gangs to drug sales and school violence. Whacking some poor rummy and placing him on the train tracks still made us sit up straight, but it no longer stood out as it would have ten years ago.

It also didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Why kill a bum, when, since he was delivered by car, pocket change and/or spontaneity probably hadn’t had much to do with it? Why place him on the tracks, perhaps already dead, and make such an effort to destroy his head and hands? Why disguise him as a bum in the first place, when, as I was beginning to suspect from his clean underwear, he wasn’t a bum at all?

For some reason-and at great risk-the man’s body had been deposited where it would quickly be found, while pains had been taken to keep his identity a secret.

By the time I reached the Municipal Center, my nose and cheeks had gone numb, a problem quickly remedied by the wall of hot, desert-dry air that smacked me in the face as soon as I opened the front door.

Well over a hundred years old, like its brethren down the street, the building had been repeatedly chopped up by successive tenants, each one in need of a completely different floor plan. Heating this constantly changing environment had, I believed-despite protests to the contrary-finally defeated the people in charge, who had settled on the time-proven principle that if you make it hot enough at the bottom, the top will eventually get warm.

Unfortunately, the police department was located on the ground floor, with its holding cells, locker room, and gym in the basement. Had we been Bedouin Arabs, this might’ve been ideal, but we weren’t, and it wasn’t.

Shedding my outer clothing as I walked down the central hallway, intending to enter one of the two side doors leading to the detective bureau on the right, I was stopped by a uniformed officer exiting the patrol division’s large communal office area on the left.

“Joe, you got a sec?”

I took my hand off the doorknob. “Sure. What’s up?”

Marshall Smith had been with us almost ten years, longer than most, and yet had maintained a newcomer’s hesitancy, as if ready to accept the first invitation to go away. “I just got back from a call at the parking lot between Bickford’s and the railroad tracks. There’s a wrinkle to it Captain Manierre thought you should hear.”

“Be my guest,” I said, twisting the doorknob.

Smith held back. I noticed then he was still dressed for the weather. “Actually, I was wondering if you had time to take a look at it now.”

I began putting my coat back on. “Why not?”

We left by the double doors at the rear of the building, which gave onto a large parking lot we shared with the State Office Building across the way.

“So what’re we going to?” I asked as we aimed for one of several white patrol cars lined up in a neat row-a highly visible symbol of police spending that never failed to catch flak at the annual town meeting.

Marshall swung in behind the wheel of one of them. “It’s an abandoned truck-a ten-wheeler dump unit.”

He started the already-warm engine and headed toward the street. The heater immediately began blowing hot air across our faces. “The manager at Bickford’s noticed it a few days ago,” he resumed. “People leave their vehicles there all the time, usually because they’re carpooling, but rarely more than overnight. And nobody leaves a truck for that long. There’s too much money wrapped up in it. They’re guessing it might’ve been there for almost a week.”

“This a company rig?” I asked as we gained speed up the Putney Road, which starts out as one of the high-class sections of town but then becomes, over the confluence of the West and Connecticut rivers, a commercial strip as uniquely Vermont as a Coca-Cola can.

“Not so you can tell. There’s nothing on the door, no papers inside the cab. Since there’re no license plates, I ran the vehicle identification number through the computer and found it was leased from Timson Long Haul outside Leverett, Mass, but the guy I talked to there wasn’t too helpful. Said he didn’t have his records handy, and that he’d have to dig around and call me back. He’s probably cooking up something bogus right now. I was doing an off-line search of the registration through NCIC, just to see what I could find, when Ron radioed in saying you were heading for the office.”

I mentally reviewed what he’d done so far, looking for something to add. As far as I could tell, there was no reason for me to be in this car. Some departments insisted on detectives running all investigations. We didn’t work that way. Brandt firmly believed that in order to hang on to our patrol officers-since the detective squad had no turnover to speak of-they should be given every opportunity to process cases on their own. Smith seemed to have been doing a good job of just that.

We’d swept by most of the malls, gas stations, and fast-food places on the strip and were nearing the town’s northernmost interstate exit when I felt obliged to admit as much. “Sounds like you’ve got everything pretty well locked down.”

Smith glanced at me and smiled. “That’s because I saved the best till last.”

He swung right at the traffic light, onto Route 9 heading for New Hampshire across the bridge, and then immediately pulled into the parking lot beyond Bickford’s Restaurant on the corner, a place I frequented as often as I could, but which Gail wouldn’t even enter, given her refined vegetarian palate.

The truck-an old Mack, stained and moth-eaten by rust-stood against the far bank, as if trying to disappear into the brush just beyond it. Smith rolled to a stop nearby and got out.

“Here’s the kicker,” he said and walked to the rear of the dump truck’s body. He pointed to a pool of dark liquid at his feet. “Don’t touch it, but give it a whiff.”

I did so gingerly, straightening back up immediately, my nostrils stinging despite the frigid air. “Jesus Christ. What is it?”

“Beats me, but I doubt it’s legal. That’s all that’s left, by the way-that and a few puddles in the back. They already got rid of whatever they were carrying.”

“I hope to hell you were careful crawling around this thing,” I told him.

“I was, believe me.”

I stepped away and surveyed the truck generally. As Smith had said, the plates were missing, front and rear, but otherwise it looked like any one of a thousand anonymous, battle-scarred units you see driving around every day. Which may have been exactly the point.

I opened the driver’s door and hoisted myself up level to the worn, cracked seat. Smith appeared below me.

“I’m guessing you searched in here?” I asked him.

“For the driver’s log, routing slips, or a bill of lading. I didn’t tear it apart when I didn’t hit pay dirt, though. Wasn’t sure if you’d want J.P. to check it out with his bag of tricks.”

Standing on the running board, I leaned in and looked around, simply taking in my surroundings. If the driver of this truck was like everyone else I knew, he’d made his vehicle an extension of his home, filled with creature comforts, accessories, and trash. But there were only a few items, and all curiously impersonal-a pack of gum, a few empty soda cans, several maps with nothing written or marked on them.

“Find anything?” Marshall asked after several minutes of this, either to stem his own boredom or take his mind off the cold.

I plucked one of the soda cans off the floor by its pop-top ring and held it up to the light. Its shiny surface was clean of fingerprints. “It’s what I’m not finding that’s interesting. This guy went to some effort not to leave anything we could trace.”

The sun visors yielded nothing, nor the door pockets, nor what passed for a glove box. I flattened out and checked the floor under the seat, finding it abnormally clean. Finally, I ran my fingers along the wedge where the seat met the back. I found some wrappers, a couple of never-used seat belt anchors, and a single scrap of paper with writing on it.

I read it and anticipated Smith’s question. “It’s a set of directions. You better call ANR.”

Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources is the third largest in the state. It includes the departments of Fish and Wildlife; Forests, Parks and Recreation; and Environmental Conservation, as well as a chemical analysis facility near but separate from the state forensics lab, and some eight hundred employees. Over the years, Vermont has laid claim to being one of the most environmentally aware states in the Union. The Legislature, prompted and/or supported by a variety of governors, has passed an enormous number of laws controlling what can and cannot be done to the Vermont countryside, hoping to maintain our deservedly famous rural appearance, and creating a chronic-and largely artificial-rift between tree-huggers and pro-business types. In the process, a few snags have surfaced, some of which have been unintended consequences. The truck Marshall Smith had introduced me to was a case in point. By making waste disposal such a complicated, expensive, strictly licensed enterprise, our vigilant environmentalists had inadvertently created a booming black market in illegal dumping.

And waste disposal wasn’t the sole focal point. Everything from water runoffs to backyard burn barrels to the appearance of new construction had also become regulated. By this point, the Agency of Natural Resources was being called upon to investigate up to fourteen hundred complaints every year-with only eight field agents to handle the load.

Not just beleaguered, these eight felt themselves estranged as well.

While they weren’t certified law enforcement officers, and thus had no powers of arrest, they were still seen as cops by the people they pursued-but as nit-picking, sandal-wearing bureaucrats by the cops. And they’d been shuttled around like orphans as well. Spurned by Fish and Wildlife-the very police force within their own agency-they’d been attached to the Attorney General’s office for a while, then to the newly formed Environmental Court, except, of course, when they could bring a case to the feds. It all went a good way in explaining why, if and when one of the ANR investigators finally did show up at a site, he tended to act a little wary, at least until he could gauge his reception.

It therefore struck me as a minor miracle, once Marshall Smith had phoned the agency, that he was told they’d send someone down later that afternoon. We’d either gotten lucky or we’d struck a nerve. I told Smith to set up some security for the truck and radioed for a patrol car to take me back to the office.

As interesting as this had been, it wasn’t as pressing as what was going on downtown.

Sammie Martens was small, slight, ambitious, and as high-strung as anyone I knew over eight years old. A survivor of a less than ideal upbringing, a successful and decorated veteran of some very rigorous military training-back when the brass was trying to prove women couldn’t cut it in combat-Sam had made short work of the patrol side of our department, being promoted to sergeant and transferred to the detective squad just a few years after hiring on. I didn’t doubt she aspired to more-my job, the chief’s, and probably beyond-but I also knew her to have a fierce loyalty to those she trusted and admired. She’d risked her job for me in the past, without expectation of reward, making it clear it was merely part of the package when it came to her brand of friendship.

She and Willy Kunkle, the fourth member of my squad, were waiting in my cramped cubicle of an office to give me an update. It had now been twelve hours since we’d found the body on the tracks.

“Phase one of the canvass is complete,” Sammie said. “We hit every apartment or business that has a window overlooking the scene, and in all but about four cases, we found somebody to talk to. The ones with nobody home will be followed up, and where we were told a family member or whoever wasn’t in when we visited, we took their names so we can chase ’em down later. But it’s not looking too promising, and from what Ron told me about your talk with Edith Rudd, you already got the basic gist. Nobody saw anything except three nondescript guys in a car with no lights. The victim always looked either dead, drugged, or unconscious, the car was always described as a dark sedan with no visible license plates, and nobody heard a single sound during the whole routine-no shouts, no shots, no nothing. Like they were ghosts.”

“Or just slightly better at their job than the average idiot we deal with,” Willy added sourly.

Perpetually down at the mouth, hypercritical, and dismissive of everyone else’s efforts, Willy Kunkle made an effort to be unpleasant. An alcoholic veteran of the Vietnam War who’d abused his wife until she ditched him and neglected his job until he was almost fired, he’d been ironically turned around-somewhat-by a sniper bullet on a case some ten years ago. Now saddled with a withered, crippled left arm, whose hand he kept stuffed in his trousers pocket, he’d taken his smoldering rage and focused it against the people he was being paid to pursue. About as antithetical to the concept of community policing as Tony Brandt’s worst nightmare, Kunkle nevertheless had a knack for getting at least one segment of our population to cooperate-successfully enough that none of us wanted to know his methods. Strangely, given his otherwise rebellious personality, Willy could also exhibit a fierce loyalty and had joined Sammie in risking his job for me back when the Attorney General’s office was out to end my career. But where her motivation had been to place justice above the law, his had simply been to give the system a kick in the ass.

Well used to his one-liners, Sammie continued unperturbed. “The other point everyone pretty much agrees on is the timing. They put the body on the tracks about half an hour before the train came through.”

“What about the train?” I asked. “Did the crew see anything?” She shook her head. “I called. It was news to them. They’ve kicked off their own internal investigation, and the feds’ll probably get pulled into it ’cause of the jurisdictional thing. But I got the engineer on the line before he’d been told to clam up, and he says he didn’t see a thing.”

“Probably drunk, stoned, asleep, or all three,” Willy commented. “Those guys are amazing-overpaid, underworked, and total losers.”

This time Sammie ignored the stupidity of the remark but did address the subject matter. “He did sound nervous-maybe ’cause he was under scrutiny, maybe ’cause he did foul up. They are supposed to keep one eye on the track, especially at crossings and in congested areas.”

“Did you get the feeling any of the witnesses you interviewed might’ve been playing dumb?” I asked.

Sam began shaking her head, but Willy cut in with a laugh. “Dumb, maybe, but definitely good-looking. I bet she’d like to question him a whole lot more privately.”

Sammie hit his good arm with the back of her hand-a solid blow that made me wince in sympathy. Kunkle just kept laughing.

“Asshole,” she muttered.

I silently raised my eyebrows at her.

She turned bright red-a first, to my knowledge. “We interviewed four guys who were having an all-night poker game. One of them saw the car out the window on his way to the bathroom. He didn’t see the body being dumped and only remembered it because the headlights were out.” She glared at Willy and added, “It’s a total dead end.”

“That’s not what you told me,” he said with a leer.

She made to hit him again, but this time he quickly moved out of range, fast and smooth.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Enough. What about my question?”

“I don’t think so,” she said firmly, fighting to regain her composure. “But we haven’t finished yet. Could be one of the people we’re still looking for is missing for good reason.”

I waved toward the door. “All right. Put it all down on paper. And let me know what develops.”

I listened to them arguing as they disappeared into the labyrinth of sound-absorbent panels that divided the squad room into tiny private work areas. In the years I’d known her, I’d never once seen Sammie refer to, or keep company with, any male companion. By all appearances, she’d handed her life over to the department, to such an extent that I’d even recommended she acquire some outside interests. She’d looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

But it was an interesting turn of events, if Willy was even remotely on target, which from Sammie’s reaction I was guessing he was. Not only had she finally succumbed to some man’s charms, but she’d done so at the drop of a hat, and in the middle of a murder investigation.

I’d never doubted her loyalty, her competence, or her ability. I’d had occasion to question her judgment, although not in a long while. And I definitely wished her some happiness in her private life. What concerned me right now was that this new and sudden heartthrob had been found at a midweek, all-night poker game-not an inspiring sign.

I hoped she knew what she was getting into, and made a mental note to discreetly keep tabs on her, as both a boss and a friend.