Chat

Chapter 13

The office of the chief medical examiner, whose title was reduced throughout law enforcement to simply OCME, was located across town from the Burlington Police Department, in the cumbersome embrace of the awkwardly rebuilt Fletcher Allen Medical Center, Vermont's largest hospital and the home of the University of Vermont's nationally regarded medical school.

The OCME hadn't started here. As Joe first maneuvered through Burlington's dense traffic and then poked through the hospital's confusion of hallways and interlinked buildings, he recalled how Beverly Hillstrom had once kept an office down the block, above a dentist's office, and worked on her cadavers in the hospital's basement, not far from the loading docks.

It was a credit to her longevity, her efficiency, and her political prowess-not to mention a few friends in the right places-that all that had been replaced with a clean, modern, highly professional workplace, albeit one hard to locate for the uninitiated.

Joe was certainly not among those, having been here dozens of times. As a result, once safely aboard, he was honor bound to spend a few minutes with whichever staffers he encountered on his way to Hillstrom's corner office, catching up on local gossip.

"I thought I heard your voice," Beverly Hillstrom greeted him when he finally reached her threshold. She stood and came around her desk to kiss him on the cheek, an unheard-of familiarity in the old days, when, for years, they had addressed each other formally, by title-an eccentricity she maintained with everyone else outside the office.

He surveyed her with a smile. She was perfectly squared away, not a hair out of place, her clothes unwrinkled and pristine-an image of uncanny precision enhanced by her dust-free, immaculate office. If he hadn't gotten to know her all-too-human and vulnerable side, she might have remained as scary as she appeared to almost everyone else. But she had granted him that access at one point, and while he understood that it allowed him no special liberties now, he was grateful that it had welcomed him into a highly restricted personal inner sanctum.

"You look great, Beverly," he told her.

She smiled, flushing slightly. "Well, I should. Life is good, both here and at home."

He knew not to pry, but that was happy news. Their single night of intimacy had been partly created by her husband walking out on her. Joe had since heard that the two of them had been working to mend that rift. Clearly, things were paying off.

She considered him seriously. "I heard about your family and the accident, Joe. How are things progressing?"

"As well as can be expected," he told her. "My mom is completely fine. My brother survived, which is saying a lot, but he's touch-and-go in a coma."

"I know it will sound trite," she said. "But if there's anything at all I can do…"

"I know," he interrupted her. "And I appreciate it. I promise, I will call if I need to."

She nodded once. "Good." She then brightened somewhat and changed the subject, moving them both to firmer ground. "A wild guess tells me," she continued, "that you're now going to try to upset my apple cart a little. You are here for at least one of your John Does, are you not?"

He laughed, as much at the comment's phrasing as at its content. Hillstrom was unique among his friends in her use of an almost textbook English. "I am, but I'm hoping it'll just help things along. We've discovered something that might tie in to the first one we sent you-the floater in the stream. Do you still have the clothes he arrived in?"

She nodded and moved toward the door. "We do, although we were about to ship them to the crime lab for safekeeping." She passed over the threshold and headed toward the lab in the back, speaking as she went. "So you're not here for the body at all?"

"I may be," he explained, "but I've got to start with the clothing."

"Ah. A mystery in the unfolding. I like a little intrigue."

She eventually took him to a wing off the autopsy room, beyond the coolers where, he knew from past experience, the two men he'd shipped her were still stored, and placed a couple of oversize plastic tubs on a nearby examination table.

"Brattleboro John Doe Number One, as we're calling him-or at least his personal effects," she announced, standing back.

Joe stepped up to the table and opened the tubs. Unlike when he'd first seen them, the clothes were now dry, though still soiled by some of the debris they'd picked up in the water.

By instinct, he started with the upper torso coverings, reconstructing the layering from skin contact to outermost garment, and then began poring over the fabric's surface, inch by inch.

Hillstrom finally yielded to curiosity. "What are you looking for?"

Gunther laughed. "Maybe nothing, but it was too interesting to pass up. We're pretty sure we found out where this guy spent his last night. He checked into a cheap motel with a small overnight bag, no car, paid in cash, and used a phony name-Norman Rockwell, in case you're tempted to change your John Doe."

Hillstrom wrinkled her nose. "Not the way this is going, I'm not. Rockwell deserves better."

"If it helps," Joe suggested, "my team's calling him Wet Bald Rocky, versus Dry Hairy Fred." He resumed his scrutiny. "Anyhow, we're playing with the idea that he met someone at the motel, which person then immediately rendered him harmless before transporting him to the stream."

Hillstrom was already nodding in comprehension, following where he was leading. "And it's the rendering him harmless that you're looking for? What did you find in that motel room?"

He paused to look over his shoulder at her. "You're good. It was a single identifying tag belonging to a Taser cartridge."

"A Taser!" she exclaimed. "But they work with wired barbs. I would have found skin defects on the body."

"Only if the barbs reached the skin," Joe explained. "They don't have to in order to work." He straightened, holding up the decedent's leather belt, adding, "They just need to close the circuit. By digging into something like this."

She came in close to see what he'd found. In the center of the belt's surface was a small hole with a minuscule jagged edge to it, as where a tiny barb might have left a tear upon being extracted.

"Oh, my Lord," she murmured. "It is possible, isn't it?"

He laid the belt back down. "It does connect. It would help if we found evidence of a second impact site."

She'd already grabbed hold of his upper arm. "Come here. Let's take a look at him, now that we know what we're after."

She led him to the storage cooler, which had two horizontal doors stacked one atop the other, and opened the upper one. A wash of cold air spilled out as she seized the edge of the drawer inside and pulled out a tray laden with the plastic-wrapped body of the man they'd found in the water days ago.

Quickly donning latex gloves, she expertly exposed the naked corpse, its torso pragmatically sewn back shut with a series of widely spaced stitches, and with Joe's help, she rolled it onto its side to reveal its back.

"That was the back of the belt, right?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said softly, already craning to study the blanched, fleshy surface before him. He touched the mottled body near its lumbar area. "Around here. If the shooter knew what he was doing, the second barb should have hit somewhere at or just below the shoulder blades."

"Here," she said, tapping the cold skin with her fingertip. "It's not an actual defect… more like a pimple."

She crossed the room to fetch a strong magnifying glass and applied it to the spot she'd found.

"That's it," she announced after a few seconds of study. "During an uneducated survey, it's nothing much to note. But with scrutiny, it's clearly not a pimple-more like a tiny burn."

Joe spread his fingers just above the body's back, measuring the distance between the lumbar spine and the small red dot. "About a foot and a half," he announced. "Which means the shooter was standing pretty close when he fired."

He returned to the pile of clothes to find some piece of clothing that might reveal a barb having been roughly torn lose. He found it in a tightly knit polar fleece vest-a mere couple of strands hanging loose from the fabric.

"Bingo," he said, bringing the vest back over to Hillstrom and holding it next to the cadaver.

"Lines up perfectly," she agreed.

She stepped back to consider him thoughtfully. "But what does that tell you, exactly?"

"Not much that's provable," he admitted. "It does suggest how to incapacitate a man in a motel room and then drown him fifteen miles away."

Joe drove from Burlington to Chelsea next, hoping to catch Rob Barrows in his office. He left the interstate at exit 4 and journeyed east through Randolph Center and East Randolph to take the Chelsea Mountain Road up and over Osgood Hill. This was also a roundabout way to reach Thetford and New Hampshire beyond, and more reminiscent of the challenges the state offered its travelers a mere half century earlier, before most of them were seduced by the ease and comfort of I-89. These now less used roads were, by contrast, old Vermont to Joe's mind, set among a countryside as prickly as a porcupine's back with trees, and so encumbered with streams, ravines, and claustrophobic, pressed-together hills as to make progress before the advent of paved roads a quasi-heroic effort. Still, for all that, atop Osgood Hill, cresting a rise and emerging from the woods, he was abruptly rewarded with a sweeping view-long, curving fields, the sparkle of otherwise hidden water, and the solid massiveness of distant ancient mountains-and was won over yet again by his state's uncanny ability to both challenge and nurture those willing to carve out a living in its midst, while shaping them into something hardy, independent, self-sufficient, and sometimes a little cranky in the process.

Joe found Rob Barrows at the sheriff's headquarters in Chelsea, at the top of the northernmost of the village's two greens-an eccentricity particular to the town. The sheriff's office was tucked behind the United Church of Christ, in a nineteenth-century red-brick building neighboring Court, School, and Church Streets-a trio of names simultaneously bland, comforting, and a little peremptory, as if the founders of the village had better things to do-and more land to grab-in the late 1700s than to linger here and apply their imaginations.

"Hey," Barrows said as Joe entered the officers' room, a small, cluttered space that served a variety of roles. "I thought you were going to give me a call, not actually make the trip."

"Nice day for it," Joe answered neutrally, choosing a chair beside Rob's desk. He did not go into how staring at his brother's inert form in the hospital for a half hour at a time was more than he could stand, even in his mother's company. "What did you get out of that?" He pointed at the equally blank-faced, remarkably filthy computer that they'd removed from Steve's Garage.

Barrows had been at his own console when Joe entered, and he now waved at his screen in explanation. "Just been following up on that," he said. "I got the software to get around the password. Hit pure gold. For one thing, he's cooking the books-the legit stuff is what we saw at the shop; the kickbacks and bill padding and bogus work claims are all behind the password. When everyone gets out of the hospital, I'd seriously recommend you get another mechanic."

Joe opened his mouth to respond, and to ask about Leo's car, but Rob was clearly building up steam and continued instead with "I also found out that somebody at Steve's has been filling his time with more than cars. I made a copy of his hard drive and transferred it to my computer so I wouldn't be tampering with evidence, but take a look at this."

He turned to the machine and began moving around from window to window, talking as he went. "Whoever's behind the password's been using one of the more popular chat rooms, in part looking for old car parts, but some other, much more interesting stuff as well."

He paused to cast a glance at Joe. "I won't bore you with all the computer geek stuff unless you're into that."

"Not me," Joe assured him, focusing on the screen. "But you said, 'whoever's behind the password.' You don't know?"

"I know Dan Griffis posted the profile using his real name, but technically, until we get more proof, he could claim somebody else did that to frame him. I just said what I did to be cautious, but do I think it's Dan? Sure. To be honest, old Barrie McNeil didn't look like he had the smarts to do more'n turn the thing on, if that.

"Anyhow," Barrows resumed, "I used a forensic software program we got to not only look at what he's been up to, but to read his supposed 'deleted' files, too. You can see he calls himself CarGuy-cute-and that he plays here a lot. I found more chats than I can shake a stick at, and most of it's recent."

The computer's cursor moved nervously across the screen, opening windows, closing others, almost as if it had a mind of its own, Rob narrating as it went along.

"A ton of this is pretty boring, so I went to the picture files as soon as I found a reference to a snapshot CarGuy wanted his contact to see. Worth a thousand words, right?" He laughed briefly as the computer burst forth with color photographs, primarily pornographic.

"So far, so good," he commented contentedly, "but not too surprising, either. Usual raunchy stuff. Until…" He paused while he scrolled to the right set of pictures. "… You get to this-it's what he was referring to in his chat."

He sat back to allow Joe a full view of several baggies of white powder, neatly arranged on a tabletop for their portrait.

"Heroin, I'm guessing," Rob announced. "I already cross-checked with the back-and-forth that led me here. CarGuy is dealing drugs on the side. I captured a whole conversation where he and SmokinJoe-whoever he is-set up a buy that took place two days ago."

Joe straightened and looked elsewhere to adjust his eyesight for a moment. "Did you…?"

But Rob cut him off. "Get warrants for all this? Yep. Step by step, all the way down the line. I've been calling the SA as I go, making sure everything's legal."

Joe nodded. "Okay. That's all I was wondering."

Rob was smiling broadly. "There's more, of course. Other deals, other dealers, other pictures. I doubt our office'll get to play with any of it for long. Maybe the drug task force will want it, or even the feds-I'll let the sheriff duke that out-but it's a cool start, and I love that we're the ones who got it going."

He returned to the keyboard. Given Rob's high spirits, Joe felt bad that he was, by contrast, mostly disappointed. Nothing mentioned so far tied Dan Griffis or the garage to what had put Leo in the hospital.

"No connections to my brother's accident?" he almost murmured.

"Not yet," Rob admitted, his voice upbeat. "I did take advantage of all this to do a search for your mom's name, and Leo's-just to see."

Once more the cursor was leaping about, and text blocks of chat dialogue cut in and out across the screen, making Joe slightly dizzy.

"Like I said," Rob continued, "there's a huge amount of material here, and I doubt what I found'll be the last of anything illegal. I mean, even the porno stuff is likely to get us something. But I didn't hit on any of your names-except in the billing and service documents, of course."

Joe suddenly sat straighter in his seat. "Go back."

Barrows froze his hand. "Where?"

"Maybe one click. I saw something. One of the handles, or whatever you call them."

"Screen names?" Rob asked, moving back.

"Yeah," Joe said, pointing at the screen. "What's going on here?"

Rob paused to study the document before them. "It's a general chat room. Bunch of people all talking at once. You do this sometimes, like at a party, when you're looking for someone special. When you do, you can ask that person to kind of step away for a private chat, like you were going into another room, just the two of you."

"What's the topic here? Drugs again?" Joe asked.

"Nope, it's the other favorite. Sex."

Joe tapped the screen with his index finger. "What about this one? What's he after?"

Rob leaned forward and began studying the exchange, scrolling through the short and, to Joe, virtually incomprehensible one-liners where almost every word was reduced to its purely phonetic root, if not merely replaced by initials-for example, "LOL" for "laughing out loud." The dialogue before him now might just as well have been written in a foreign language.

"Ugh," Rob finally said, sitting back.

"What?"

"Well, it's sex, all right, but what that guy's looking for is young girls. There's a load of that shit on the Web. You see it everywhere. CarGuy's not biting, though, doesn't even address your man-different interests." He twisted around to face Gunther. "Why?"

"It's the name," Joe admitted.

Rob returned to the screen. "Rockwell? Where'd you run into that?"

"I don't know for sure if I did. I've got a John Doe case we're working on where all we've got for ID is the motel registration-N. Rockwell. I laughed when I saw it, because it reminded me of the painter." He pointed at the computer again. "Probably a big stretch. It's not that unusual a name."

Barrows was already typing, moving to another display. "Everybody has to register a profile with the chat room. It's a legal thing. They all lie, of course, but you're supposed to be able to check each other out if you connect. Most pedophiles pretend they're nineteen, or something." He laughed shortly and added, "Course, we lie, too, when we're trying to catch 'em. But the format is basically name, age, where you're from, what your hobbies are, and so on."

He paused so Joe could see what was before them. "Of course," he then added, pointing out a warning message, "there's always the flip side, too. They put a lock on their profile. We'd have to get a subpoena to open it, and, for that, a good reason to request one. Slim chance, given the innocuous language I saw."

Joe nodded, his enthusiasm undaunted. Despite what he'd just said, he actually didn't think that the name Rockwell surfacing twice in odd circumstances was too likely. They had to be connected. "Going back to the chat where CarGuy was, too, can you tell if Rockwell does hook up with anyone?"

"Maybe" was the answer, as Barrows went back to work.

"Yeah," he said a few minutes later. "Looks like Mandi144 and he hit it off. They certainly go off together."

"And Mandi is…?" Joe asked leadingly.

Rob broke away from the computer to give him a sour look. "Well, let's put it this way: She says right up front that she's fourteen in the general chat. I'm guessing your Mr. Rocky wasn't." Joe nodded slightly. "My Mr. Rocky is also dead."

JMAN: U hav a pic or cam? Mandi144: cams broke – howz this? JMAN: wow. Hot Mandi144: U have a pic? JMAN: no. Im 6-1, tho. 170 Mandi144: no pic? How cum? JMAN: I can get 1. Id lik u 2 see me Mandi144: me 2 JMAN: Id lik u 2 do mor than that Mandi144: me 2 JMAN: how old r u again? Mandi144: 14. problem? JMAN: not a cop? Mandi144: lol. I look lik a cop?