Scent of Evil

1

A human hand stuck out of the fresh dirt like a pale succulent plant, except this plant was wearing a silver ring, which twinkled fiercely in the burning sun.

“Want us to check it out?”

I turned at the quiet voice, looking over my shoulder to the top of the embankment. Two young men in white shirts with “Rescue, Inc.” shoulder patches stood above me. The taller one had a medical kit in his hand. Behind them, only half visible from where I stood, was a large, boxy ambulance, its flashing lights anemic in the bright sun.

I shielded my eyes with my hand, feeling the sweat on my forehead. It was the hottest recorded August in Vermont history, with no reprieve in the forecast. I motioned to a fresh path in the slope connecting the street to the narrow dirt ledge we were occupying. “Maybe just one of you. Try to keep on the path so you don’t add to the footprints.”

The tall paramedic who had spoken sidestepped carefully down the path and joined me and Detective Sergeant Ron Klesczewski on the ledge. Klesczewski and I stepped back from the funnel-shaped hole in which the hand was nestled. The medic got to his knees and reached down to the bottom of the hole. I could see the sweat glistening on the hairs of his arm, and the damp impression his shoulder blades and spine made on his uniform shirt.

He felt for a pulse, checked for capillary refill by pressing the pale fingernails, and finally manipulated the fingers themselves. Even I could see they were as stiff as wood and clean. If the heavy ring was any indication, it meant we might be dealing with a man of means. Fancy rings are uncommon among Vermont men, they get in the way when you’re working with your hands, and can be downright dangerous around machinery. More to the point, however, the possibility that wealth was a factor here, and therefore publicity, made me particularly unhappy.

The medic got up and shook his head. “Sorry.”

The tone of his voice made me look at him more carefully. His gold name tag said John Huller. He was somewhere in his mid-twenties, with blond hair, a fair complexion, and eyes pale and sad. I regretted we’d had to call him and his partner in on this. For them, trying to save lives was often difficult enough; confirming obvious deaths seemed unnecessarily trite. Unfortunately, that was protocol.

I nodded to Huller. “Rigor mortis in the fingers?”

“Yes.”

I mulled that over. On average, rigor was complete in six to twelve hours, nearer to six in this heat, with flaccidity returning in twenty-four to forty-eight hours again-the hotter, the sooner. Since daylight seems to inhibit most clandestine gravediggers, I had to assume the hand with the ring, and whoever was attached to it, had been planted last night.

“Okay. Thanks for coming.”

I watched Huller scramble up the embankment. This part of Canal Street crossed what originally had been a broad swale descending from the hills behind us to Whetstone Brook below. Some town fathers, well over a hundred years ago, had terraced that gap with an earthen embankment, on which Canal Street had then been built, buttressed by a stone retaining wall on the low side. Unfortunately, engineering arrogance had failed to heed the small spring that was buried under this wide balcony of dirt and rubble, and nature, three weeks ago, had finally reasserted itself. The old retaining wall had crumbled from spring-fed erosion, taking a good two-hundred-foot section of Canal Street with it.

The people of Brattleboro had become thoroughly riled-not a rarity in this outspoken town; and amid pointed questions as to why the road crew had patched ever-widening cracks in the road over the years without looking for their cause, the Department of Public Works had quickly set about replacing the old retaining wall with a heavily reinforced concrete dam, capable of shoring up an eight-lane freeway.

It was on this half-completed dam-or rather the leveled dirt fill packed in behind it-that I now stood with Klesczewski. The dam still had about eight feet to go before it reached the level of the street above.

I took out my handkerchief and mopped the sweat from my brow. From our manmade terrace, we could look down across the brook, over the warehouses lining Flat Street, and the trees interspersed throughout, and up the opposite slope to where Elliot Street was hidden by the town’s typically intermixed hodgepodge of residences and small businesses. Despite the openness and proximity of running water, there wasn’t the slightest hint of a breeze. The whole lumpy, hilly, topsy-turvy town might as well have been stretched out flat on an Arizona frying pan.

“I take it the State’s Attorney and the Medical Examiner have been contacted?”

Klesczewski let out a small snort. “You can take it their offices have been notified. And Tyler should be here any minute with his toys.”

J.P. Tyler was as close as our police department got to a forensics team. He did what print lifting, photographing, and chemical analysis he could, given the tools and training we could afford. What he couldn’t handle we sent either to the State Police Lab in Waterbury or to the F.B.I. in Washington.

Klesczewski was still talking. “I took the liberty of telling Dispatch to round up all the detectives and to activate the night-patrol shift early for a neighborhood canvass.”

I smiled at that. “All the detectives” came to two besides Klesczewski, Tyler, and myself, who headed the squad. On the other hand, the uniformed night shift consisted of six people, including the shift sergeant. Adding them to the five-man day shift and ourselves would create a good-sized crew for Klesczewski’s proposed door-to-door canvass of potential witnesses. I only hoped someone wouldn’t knock over a bank at the far end of town in the meantime.

Ron Klesczewski had reached the same conclusion I had concerning the time of death. “I take it we’re asking about something happening last night.”

“That’s what it looks like. Who found him?”

Ron pointed up the embankment to a man sitting on the running board of a large dump truck, smoking a cigarette in the shade. There were other workers around, but they were clustered farther off, as if the smoker had acquired some dubious aroma. “Name’s Ernie Wallers. He was doing the soil borings, to make sure they’d compacted the earth hard enough, when he hit… that.” He checked his watch. “We were called only about fifteen minutes ago.”

“He’s the one who dug the hole, too?”

“Yeah. The foreman said it kind of bummed him out.”

Even from fifty feet, I could see Wallers’s cigarette was clamped in the fist of one hand. “Bummed out” was the most lighthearted label I would have hung on him.

“You talk to him yet?” I asked.

“No. Lavoie was the responding officer-he talked to him a bit and gave me the gist of it. I thought you might like the first real crack.”

Ron Klesczewski had been made my number-two man only five months ago. He deserved the promotion, and had proved more valuable than I might have guessed, especially in managing the office, but he still had a bit of the blushing bride in him-a shyness about seeming too bold.

I patted him on the shoulder as I eased by, heading for the path up to the road. “Thanks, Ron. Did Lavoie take pictures of all this?”

“Yeah, a whole roll.”

Lavoie was good with a camera-J.P. wouldn’t have to worry about the results. “You better tell Tyler that when he comes-it’ll save time. I’d like this guy dug up as soon as possible.”

“You got it.”

I’d left my jacket in the car, but even so I was soaked with perspiration, especially after struggling up the loose-dirt embankment.

Like many a native Vermonter, I didn’t do well in the heat. I paused to catch my breath on the road. There was no traffic to worry about-the street had been closed for weeks, which made keeping the press and the general population at bay much easier-a luxury I’d soon be without.

A death of this sort in a town the size of Brattleboro, with an average of one homicide every three years, would be front-page news for days, and that was only if we cleared it up fast.

I approached Ernie Wallers casually, taking time to wipe a spot on the truck’s running board before sitting next to him. It felt good to be out of the sun.

“Pretty bad deal, huh?”

He shook his head, his eyes on the ground in front of him.

“Sure as hell didn’t make my day.”

“I’m Lieutenant Joe Gunther, from the police department. You’re Ernie Wallers, right?”

He gave me a cursory glance and a slight nod. “The guy was murdered, wasn’t he?”

“Dunno yet. It’s a pretty good guess. I hear you were taking soil samples when you found him; what made you dig him up? Didn’t he just feel like a rock or something?”

Wallers straightened slightly and took a deep drag on his cigarette, which was burning perilously close to his fingers. “No way. We’re putting clean fill in there-I would’ve dug it out if it had been a rock. Besides, it was a little soft when I pushed. I didn’t know what the hell it was-just that it wasn’t supposed to be there.”

I looked around. “What do you use for your soil borings?”

He pointed to a long, thin cylinder a little thicker than a walking stick. One end of it was protruding from the back of a nearby pickup truck.

“You pound that in, or twist it?”

“Twisting’s best. That’s what I was doing.”

I made a mental note to have Tyler check out the end of the probe, and to match whatever he found to the mark it would have left on the body. “Did you notice anything unusual about the dirt before you went for a sample-like footprints or any signs of digging?”

He shook his head. “Just the opposite. I tested there because it looked cleaner than anywhere else. There were footprints-we walk back and forth along there all the time-but not as many, like they’d only been put there today.”

“And that layer of dirt has been there longer than that?”

“Yeah.” Wallers’s voice was picking up interest, now that I’d warmed him up. He got to his feet and I followed him over to the jagged edge of the road. He pointed to the two-hundred-foot long ledge below us. “The way this works, we build up a few feet of wall, and then we fill in behind it, from left to right. Then we tamp it down with a compactor, do some borings to make sure the soil is compressed to within specs, and start all over again. We’d compacted the spot I was testing around mid-morning yesterday. It took us the rest of the day to finish that layer to the far end, and today we’ve just been building wall. So we’ve been walking on that particular dirt for almost two days.”

“Why did you think that one spot was cleaner?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t give it any thought; not then. It just caught my eye, so I drilled it. I have to do a bunch of borings along the whole length of this thing anyway, so it doesn’t much matter where I do them.”

“Can you think back and remember if any of the footprints looked unusual or out of place?”

He smiled. “You mean before I dug that hole and covered them all up?”

I didn’t answer. It was a rhetorical question for him and spilled milk for me-at least he’d been curious enough to dig in the first place, and smart enough to stop once he’d uncovered the hand.

Wallers bent his head and thought for a moment, his eyes half closed in concentration. I was pleased with his deliberate cooperation. In over thirty years as a policeman in this town, I’d encountered every conceivable reaction to questioning like this, from obsequious babbling to a wild punch. Thoughtfulness was a cherished rarity, especially at the start of a felony crime investigation.

He rubbed the back of his neck and gave a rueful smile. “I don’t know. The more I think about it, the less sure I am.”

“About what?”

“Well, I think there was something different. We all wear construction boots, with lug soles.” He made an impression in the dust to prove the point. “Maybe there were others there that were smooth, like yours.”

I stepped back, so that my print was next to his. He studied them both for a moment. “I can’t say for sure. Maybe I’m making it up with all the excitement. It was like an impulsive thing to bore right there, you know? I wasn’t really paying attention.”

I squeezed his elbow. “You’ve been very helpful. Sorry this had to happen.”

He gave a little humorless laugh. “Something I can tell my grandchildren some day.”

I left him and walked back to where Klesczewski was gathering an ever-growing collection of police officers, patrolmen, necktied detectives, and a group of men and women who had obviously been called away either from home or from the off-duty, part-time jobs many of them held down to buttress their meager municipal wages.

“Everyone here?” I asked him.

“Close enough to start handing out assignments.”

I nodded and glanced over the embankment. Tyler-short, thin, bespectacled, and in constant nervous motion-was organizing a small team of policemen/archaeologists to grid, sketch, collect, bag, and label the dirt covering the body. It would take them hours to dig down four feet, and days to sift the dirt and completely analyze what they found.

I turned my back on the construction site and the Whetstone Brook valley beyond it. Across Canal Street, the topography was just the reverse. Behind a low, four-business block of buildings fronting the street and a residential alleyway in back, the ground rose steeply to a wooded plateau that looked deceptively unpopulated. It actually held almost a fourth of the city, but from where I stood, I could just see the roofs of a couple of the older homes high against the skyline-the rest looked like wooded wilderness.

“Not a great place for finding casual eyewitnesses, is it?”

Ron Klesczewski was standing next to me, scanning the same view.

He was right. The street had been blocked off for days; the four businesses opposite the scene were closed at night, as were the warehouses on the other side of Whetstone Brook. To the right of the small block of businesses was a school, to the left were four similar weather-beaten homes of dissimilar colors. On our side of Canal, there was a destitute apartment building clinging to the slope at one end of the retaining wall, and tiny Ed’s Diner at the other end, neither of which had many windows facing the gap between them. Last but not least, this was one of the town’s most rundown sections, populated by people whose pride ran more on what they wouldn’t tell the police than on what they could.

I sighed and turned toward the hot and sweating group clustered in the dusty middle of the street. “Looks like we have a murder. It’s an educated guess that it occurred sometime last night. Go for the obvious places”-I pointed at the dilapidated apartment building and the four small houses opposite it-“but don’t miss the possibility that people were out strolling, that windows were open, that things might have been heard but not seen.”

I aimed my fingers across the narrow valley at the buildings clinging to the slope below Elliot Street. “I’d check over there. It looks far away, but some people have binoculars and telescopes. On a hot night, they tend to hang around the windows, trying to catch the cool air. The high-rise is good for that.”

The high-rise was actually the Elliot Street Apartments, a seven-story, modern brick federal housing project, whose broad but distant front directly faced us. I’d found in the past it had many of the same advantages of a first-class intelligence listening post-it was tall, centrally located, had balconies facing every which way, and was jammed with aspiring spies.

“One thing to remember, for those of you who haven’t done too many of these canvasses: We don’t have anything so far. The trick is to make people open up, to give you what they’ve got. Don’t rush them, don’t finish their sentences for them, let them gossip if necessary. Somebody might know somebody who knows somebody who saw something, and we won’t find that last somebody unless we’re all ears right now. Good luck. Ron will give you specific assignments.”

I broke away from the huddle and crossed to where State’s Attorney James Dunn was getting out of his car. By Vermont law, an appointed representative from the SA’s office is supposed to make an appearance at the scene of a possible homicide. Usually, it’s the low man on the SA’s totem pole. In Brattleboro, it’s usually The Man Himself.

James Dunn was tall, pale, thin, and arrogant-a stone gargoyle who’d given up his perch to settle disdainfully among us mere mortals. He was good at his job, knew the law inside out, played no favorites, and kept his private passions to himself, except for this one-he loved to see the bodies. No matter the hour or the weather, if we ever came upon a corpse, or even someone close to being one, James-never Jim-Dunn made the show. He never got in the way and was occasionally useful, but I thought this morbid appetite a little odd. And it often made me wonder about his social life.

“You found a hand?” he asked with a single raised eyebrow.

“A right hand; buried behind the retaining wall. We’re assuming it was put there last night.”

He slammed his car door and took long, elegant strides toward the embankment. He was also a bit of a dandy-a lifelong bachelor with an affinity for English clothes. Even in this heat, he wore a dark and natty suit and refused to yield even the slightest sheen of sweat. “Is the hand attached to anyone?”

“Presumably. We’re finding that out now.”

J.P., whether following established technique or simply giving in to curiosity, had dug another funnel in the dirt, similar to the one that encased the hand. At the bottom of this one was a man’s face.

Tyler was delicately whisking away granules of dirt from the body’s mouth, nose, and half-open eyes with a camel’s-hair brush when we arrived at the edge of the road. He leaned back upon hearing us and glanced up. “Look familiar?”

My own mother wouldn’t have looked familiar. Flat and one dimensional at the bottom of the hole, the pale face looked more like an ancient ceremonial ivory mask, waiting to be discovered and hung on some museum wall.

Both Dunn and I shook our heads to Tyler’s question. He resumed his excavating.

I heard Detective Sergeant Dennis DeFlorio, his voice small and tinny, calling me on the radio I had hooked to my belt. “Go ahead,” I answered.

“You still on Canal Street?”

“Ten-four.”

“Can you meet me on the south end of Clark?”

Clark was the short, horseshoe-shaped residential alleyway behind the small block of businesses facing Canal. Its one-way entrance cut between the businesses and the school to the block’s right, and its outlet appeared back on Canal several hundred yards closer to downtown. Its only function was to provide access to some browbeaten apartments that were shoved hard against the steep wooded slope I’d been studying earlier. As elsewhere in this geographically topsy-turvy town, every square inch of flat land had buildings clustered on it like cows bunched together on hillocks during a flood.

I started down Clark Street and found DeFlorio coming toward me, his round face red and glistening. The opposite of James Dunn, Dennis was short and fat, given to soiled ties, loose shirttails, and to buckling his belt somewhere out of sight under his belly.

“What’s up?”

“Well, I figured if I lived here, Clark being the dump it is, I’d be out taking a walk on a hot night, just to get away, you know? Like last night.”

The one slightly irritating thing about Dennis was his propensity to beat around the bush, as if every declaratory sentence had to be prefaced by an enticing roll of the drum.

“So where did that lead you?”

He looked surprised at my thick-headedness. “I know nobody could of seen or heard anything from here, but I figured I’d ask anyway, especially to see if my theory was right.”

“And it was.”

“Yeah. I think I nailed down the time of death.” He flipped open the cop’s ubiquitous notebook he held in his soft, damp hand. “A guy named Phil Didry said he was walking along Canal around three this morning when he saw a police car parked with the engine running, right where the body is buried.”

“One of our cars?”

“Yeah, I figure someone on the graveyard shift. All we got to do is find out who it was, and we’ll have a pretty good idea when the body got planted.”

I looked quizzically into his beaming face. “I don’t follow you.”

DeFlorio’s smile faded slightly. “Don’t you see? We can ask him what it looked like-the dirt. If it was disturbed, then the burial happened before three; if it wasn’t, then it happened later.”

“Dennis, the dirt never did look disturbed.”

He looked at me blankly, trying to register this anomaly.

“Did your witness see the policeman?”

“No. I don’t think he wanted to hang around. None of these people are too pure, you know.”

“So what makes you think our patrolman was over the embankment? He might have dropped into Ed’s Diner for a coffee.”

DeFlorio made a fast mental run for safety. “I know that-I just meant on the off chance that if he did take a look, it would help nail down the time.”

I pursed my lips and nodded thoughtfully. “It’s an excellent point, Dennis. We’ll check it out.”

I shook my head as DeFlorio retreated back up the street to shake out some more gems. Not that his witness wasn’t a good find, but DeFlorio’s conclusions rubbed in a fact as painfully obvious to me as it seemed inconceivable to Hollywood: Cops are neither routinely corrupt nor preternaturally heroic, and damn few of them are endowed with the instincts of a Sherlock Holmes. They put in their hours, spending half of those doing paperwork and the other half dealing with cranky citizens, and then they go home.

In Brattleboro, their problems are compounded. The pay approaches the absurd and-where a homicide or bank robbery comes around once in a blue moon-the boredom can be mind-numbing. It was not an environment to attract either geniuses or careerists. Observations like that, however, can cut close to the bone. I’m no genius either, but no one could say I hadn’t made this business a career. It’s all I’ve done professionally since getting out of the service in the mid-nineteen fifties. Of course, my introduction to police work was different. The pay when I entered wasn’t so balefully lopsided, and the neighborhood foot-patrol cop was a popular and respected figure in a small, almost provincial town where crimes were infrequent, unsophisticated, and easy to solve, and the need for a detective squad didn’t even exist. We’d also had to contend with a quarter of today’s paperwork. By the time it had all begun to change, I’d found myself too settled in to do otherwise.

Klesczewski met me back on Canal, where I noticed James Dunn was still hovering at the edge of the road, like a raptor looking for mice far below.

“What did Dennis want?”

“He found someone who saw one of our patrol cars parked out here around three this morning.”

Klesczewski raised his eyebrows. “That might be handy. You know who it was?”

“Not yet. I’ll get hold of George Capullo later.” Capullo was the sergeant for the graveyard shift, and the one who handed out assignments.

“Well, I got something, too. It’s not much, but I figured you ought to take a look.” I thought back to the way DeFlorio had delivered his report; had it been Klesczewski, he would have escorted me to meet the witness and forced me to interview him all over again, just so nothing was left out. It had never surprised me the two men generally kept their distance from one another.

I followed Klesczewski toward Ed’s Diner and the concrete barricade the road crew had set up weeks ago, which we were now using as a police line to keep out the public. My heart sank a little as we drew near, for standing on the other side of the listless yellow police line we’d strung across the road was the Brattleboro Reformer’s courts-’n’-cops reporter, Stanley Katz.

My relationship with Katz was emblematic of all that was wrong between the press and the police. We didn’t like each other, didn’t trust each other, and each of us was generally convinced the world would be a better place without the other. Stanley couldn’t hear the time of day from me without smelling a cover-up, and I couldn’t read beyond his byline on an article without feeling that he’d hyped up the gore and screwed up the facts. The irony was that we knew neither perception was accurate, but our reactions were chemical not rational, a fact to which we’d finally become resigned.

Katz’s narrow face broke into a wide grin at our approach. “Who belongs to the hand, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know, Stanley,” I said, as I squeezed between two of the concrete barricades and under the rope. Klesczewski, who couldn’t tolerate even speaking to Katz, was heading around the corner of Ed’s and down across the sloping Elm Street bridge.

I saw WBRT news reporter Ted McDonald drive up, park haphazardly near the curb, and struggle to get his massive bulk and tape recorder out of the radio station’s undersized car in one failed fluid movement. His eyes focused on me like a dog’s on dinner.

“Joe,” he shouted cheerfully.

I waved to him and heard Katz’s quiet groan. That gave me a gentle pang of pleasure. McDonald was a good old boy, born and raised in Brattleboro, as faithful to the town and its denizens as he was to the flag, and a throwback to the less complicated days I’d been thinking of mere moments ago. In his hourly four-minute news spots, he pretty much reported what he saw and what we told him, with no hype and no prejudicial inflections, which to me was eminently acceptable. Katz had once told me he thought McDonald was a dim-witted, stoolie woodchuck, the last part of which was a derogatory name given local rural folk. Katz was from Connecticut, which we woodchucks saw as a condemnation speaking for itself.

I waited for Ted to join us, enjoying Katz’s heightening but resigned disgust.

McDonald’s face was beet red and dripping with sweat. He began fumbling with his tape recorder but stopped when I shook my head. “Sorry, Ted, it’s still too early. We’ve found a body behind the retaining wall, but we haven’t even finished digging it up. We have no who, when, how, or why to give you.”

Katz gave a condescending smile to the older reporter. “It’s obviously a murder-they just haven’t determined the cause.”

McDonald’s face brightened, but I smiled and shook my head. “Don’t let him jerk you around. Nobody’s said it was a murder-right now, it’s an unexplained death.”

Katz fell in beside me as I set off to rejoin Klesczewski. “But he was murdered, right?” Ted lumbered silently behind, noisily pushing buttons on his machine.

“We don’t know that.”

“You think he died of natural causes and buried himself? Very considerate.”

“It’s early on, Stanley. Once we’ve exhumed the body and the medical examiner has had a chance to take a look, we or the state’s attorney’s office will issue a statement.”

“How was he killed?” Ted asked.

“We’ve got a hand sticking out of the dirt. We’d like to see the rest of the body first.”

“So he was killed.” Katz smiled.

“He’s dead-that’s all we know. We don’t know who he is, we don’t know how he died, and we don’t know if he was killed. We don’t know anything at the moment.”

“So what are you doing now?”

We were halfway across the bridge, which sloped steeply from Canal to the Whetstone Brook’s low north bank. Below us, Klesczewski had already jumped the guardrail at the far end of the bridge and was sidestepping down to the edge of the river. I let out a sigh. The sun and the conversation were giving me a headache. “I’m trying to patiently explain that I have nothing to say.”

Katz tried a more benign approach. “How about off the record? What does the guy look like? What did Dunn have to say?”

“Nothing. I’m not ducking you, guys. I just don’t have anything.”

“How about the age of the body? I mean, is it half rotted or does it look fresh?”

I lifted one leg over the guardrail in order to join Klesczewski. “I got to go to work. Talk to you later.”

Ted, who by now had gotten the message and was undoing all his button pushing, muttered, “Thanks, Joe.”

Katz made to follow me.

I placed my hand gently against his chest. “Where’re you going, Stanley?”

I half expected some small lecture on the rights of a free press, but even Katz had grown beyond that. Besides, we both knew the unwritten rules of the game, and despite our sparring we observed them. He gave me an infectious grin. “Thought I’d go fishing?”

I shook my head, unable to suppress a smile myself. “Nice try.”

I left him on the street and climbed down the bank to where Klesczewski was moodily staring at the water, waiting. “So-what have you got?”

“It’s over here.” He led the way under the bridge, keeping to the rocks to avoid disturbing the damp soil.

Once in the shade, I paused and blinked to get used to the low light. It was suddenly delightfully cool, with the sound of water splashing off the concrete bridge that arched overhead, and the shadows flickering with reflected spots of sunlight. There was a slight but permeating odor of rotting vegetation.

“Nice place.”

Klesczewski pointed to the narrow wedge where the bank met the underside of the bridge, some six feet up from the water’s edge. “You’re not the only one who thinks so.”

Running parallel to the brook, a small shelf had been scooped out of the embankment, and on it was a two-inch-thick mattress of old newspapers. Scattered around the shelf was an assortment of everyday trash-bottles, food wrappers, odd scraps of paper, most of it fairly fresh.

“The Dew Drop Inn, complete with air-conditioning-and recently occupied.”

Klesczewski nodded. “That’s not all.” He retraced our steps to the opening, so we were half in the shade and half back in the glare. He pointed again to the ground.

I squatted down, keeping my hands on my knees. Resting on top of the moist, pungent earth was an unusually fat, chewed-up wad of gum, still pink and clean.

“What do you think?” I asked.

Klesczewski looked vaguely uncomfortable. He hadn’t led me all the way down here to hear me ask that. But he had led me, so I knew he’d reached some conclusions.

“Somebody’s living here, or at least they were, up to a few hours ago. Maybe they saw something.”

I looked again at the gum, poking at it with a pen I’d removed from my pocket. It was dry, but not rock hard, and its cleanliness attested to its having been spat out within the last half day. “We can’t afford a twenty-four-hour watch on this place, but tell Patrol to keep an eye peeled for anybody coming back here in the next few days. I’d like to talk to the gum-chewer.”

I glanced over my shoulder, straight across the water and up the opposite bank to where I could see Tyler and his team bent over their work. He didn’t know it yet, but Tyler’s day was going to be full of excavating. At least here, he’d be in the shade.