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Chapter 4

It was snowing in a Bing Crosby sort of way-fat, lazy, photogenic flakes that, in the end, wouldn't amount to much. Under normal circumstances, it was the kind of weather that Joe loved to stand in, designed for kids to catch snow crystals on their tongues.

Except that he was no longer a kid, and was staring at a scene where no sane parent would let any child run free. He was standing in an auto graveyard on the eastern reaches of Thetford Township, a few miles north of where Leo went off the road, confronting a long, low wall of precariously stacked cars, piled like absurdist bricks and extending from one edge of the property to the other.

The snow cover had softened some of the visual carnage, but there wasn't much hope for the raw materials-a virtual billboard of the crushed, sharp-edged, broken detritus of an all-consuming industrial juggernaut. It was a vision only enhanced by its otherwise bucolic surroundings. All around the yard, gently vanishing into the blur of falling snow, were tree-crowded hills, fields, and forestland.

This section of the Connecticut River Valley was absurdly pretty, slicing between New Hampshire and Vermont, and decorated with covered bridges, backwater bays, and cow-sprinkled farms. The background of ancient mountains behind the massive, undulating, dark river told a tale of humanity's struggle with nature, since both these weather-beaten New England states had eschewed their peaks for the water's edge and turned the river into a commercial highway for over two hundred years, luring pioneers, aboriginal and white, who had forged far inland and upstream for reasons benign and not.

Held up against such a portrait of heritage and beauty, not even a car graveyard stood much chance of becoming a significant eyesore.

"Who're you?"

Joe turned at the voice coming from the low building to his left. A man had appeared at a door haphazardly cut into the sheet metal siding. He was bearded, long-haired, and dressed in the standard-issue green uniform of mechanics and road crew workers everywhere, complete with name tag stitched above his breast pocket. The man was labeled "Mitch."

Joe pulled his badge from his pocket. "Police. I was looking for a car brought in last night. A Subaru."

"That's sealed up. Can't get to it. Sheriff's got the key."

That's one of the things Joe had wanted to hear. It seemed Deputy Barrows was efficient as well as accommodating. "You ever get a look at it?" he asked.

Mitch shook his head. "I wasn't on. You here to pick it up? The boss wants it gone. It's taking up space."

"The sheriff not paying you?"

"Sure, but we're not a storage unit. We got work to do. We need the bay." He waved at the picturesque falling snow, adding, "'Specially in this shit."

"Won't be much longer," Joe reassured him with no basis whatsoever. "Who's the boss?"

"E. T. Griffis."

Joe had turned toward his parked car, getting ready to leave, but he faced Mitch again at this. "E. T.? No kidding."

"You know him?" Mitch asked.

"Everybody knows him."

Mitch cocked his bushy head to one side. "Everybody local. That you?"

Joe smiled before heading back to his car. "Used to be. I'll tell the sheriff to get that car out of here soon."

Joe continued up the road. It had been a poignant and disturbing journey so far-from the hospital, to the crash site, to where the car was stored, and now on to the family farm-perhaps exacerbated by the very beauty he'd been admiring earlier. The familiar name of E. T. Griffis commingled with his sentiments to form a curious mixture of comfort and pain. One generally revisited one's place of upbringing for support, not to wonder if it might become the watershed where everything falls apart.

Because that was a distinct possibility: His entire family was so small that the present situation had the potential of leaving him all by himself.

The mention of E. T. also served to highlight what few degrees of separation there were within Vermont's scant population. A small, square man with blunt hands and a manner to match, E. T. had been a near mythological fixture in the greater Thetford area for as long as Joe could think back. He seemed to own at least a piece of every rough-edged business around. And his impact on Joe hadn't stopped with nostalgic memory-years earlier, Joe had also arrested his youngest son, Andy, for a crime committed in Brattleboro, revealing an abrupt fragility to E. T.'s aura of indomitable feudal lord.

Joe could sympathize. He had received such reversals himself over time, starting as a young man, when he lost his seemingly indestructible father. After that, life had never seemed quite so secure, and the more of it he'd seen, from combat to police work to the vagaries of the daily grind, the more he'd been confirmed in his skepticism. His wife had been taken by cancer; colleagues had died in the line of duty; Gail, years ago now, had been raped and forever transformed. His personal experience had not been lacking in drama, nor his emotional wariness left wanting for evidence. That a local monolith like E. T. Griffis had begotten a son who would later end up a jailbird was mere proof of the futility of denying humanity's clay feet.

Joe Gunther had become a student of hard knocks. As he approached the homestead, he was under no delusions that life would suddenly surprise him by cooperating.

The farm was less than it had once been. In fact, it wasn't a farm at all anymore. Much of its land had been sold off to neighbors to retire debts and establish a nest egg. But the core remained, and certainly its appearance was unchanged. All his life, Joe had learned to come up the winding drive and trust that his heart would beat easier. Even now, despite its inhabitants being in the hospital, the place still lent him hopefulness by simply standing strong.

Ostensibly, Joe was here to feed the cat, turn off the lights, check the doors, and do whatever else hadn't been considered by two people thinking they'd be out for a couple of hours. In fact, he discovered that this housekeeping applied more to himself. He took his time wandering through the rooms, absorbing the scents and scenery that had populated his upbringing, and tried to position his thinking to accept whatever might be coming. He didn't want to be pessimistic, but he did want to be prepared.

He stood, finally, in the living room, his mother's center of operations. There was a docking station of tables and a desk laden with reading material, a phone, a recently added only-the-basics computer, all facing a large, empty-eyed TV set. Only her wheelchair was missing to make it complete, and it looked barren as a result. He used the opportunity to remember to check on the wheelchair's welfare in the back of the ruined car. When Mom woke up, she'd be clamoring to get back here and tend to her piled-up projects.

Gail had arrived at the hospital about an hour earlier, carrying two briefcases and clutching a cell phone as if it were a lifeline. She and Joe had hugged awkwardly before she moved directly to his mother's bedside to gently stroke the old lady's hair and murmur her greetings. Joe had left shortly thereafter.

He sighed, shook his head, and went back outside into the falling snow. Visiting the farm had been useful emotionally, but his instincts told him it was time to get busy. It rarely paid to linger and ponder overmuch.

Outside the door, under shelter of the roof's overhang, he pulled out his phone, taking advantage of the farm's exposure to the New Hampshire hills across the river, and their cell towers. He dialed a number in Burlington, in Vermont's far northwest corner.

"Office of the chief medical examiner. This is Suzanne."

"Hi, Suzanne. It's Joe Gunther. I was wondering what you might have found out about that John Doe we shipped you-the damp, bald one."

Suzanne laughed. "For that, you want the chief. You really got to her this time."

In part, Joe was glad to hear that. He and Beverly Hillstrom went back a long way and had developed, he believed, a possibly unique relationship, cemented last year when, after he'd broken up with Gail and Beverly had been left by her husband, they spent a single night together. In theory, a terrifically bad idea. In fact, the best thing that could have happened to either of them. It had cemented the trust they shared, and had granted each a brief respite in which to reassess their lives. In Beverly's case, she'd been able to reconcile with her husband; in Joe's, the night with her had allowed him to better distance himself from Gail's departure.

They had never referred to that encounter since, but the nominal formality that had existed before had been replaced by something much warmer and more valued.

"Joe," she said when she came on the line. "You usually let me put them in the cooler before you chase me down with questions."

"I'm sorry, Beverly. I've got nothing with this guy. I hope it's all right."

"Of course," she said. "I just finished up. But keep your fingers crossed for good tox results, because I didn't find a thing-aside from a run-of-the-mill drowning, of course."

"Nothing?"

"Not a scratch or a bruise. And his organs are in the same condition. I wouldn't call him a health nut. He clearly didn't make a point of exercising, and his personal hygiene could have stood improvement. But all his parts and pieces were working fine."

Joe thought back to the man's clothing, which had seemed unremarkable to him. "You think he was a bum?"

Hillstrom's response was immediate. "More like he was heading down the social ladder. He struck me as a man who lives alone and doesn't get out much, or lives with someone who doesn't care that he only bathes occasionally. For what it's worth, and based on a theory I would never share with anyone else, I think he was pure middle class. And from the style of his clothes and their present condition, I'd guess his fall from grace dates back less than a year."

"What theory?" Joe asked, intrigued, remembering only now a frayed pant cuff and the worn heels of the man's shoes.

"Toenails," she said flatly, adding, "which I will deny if you quote me."

"You guess their social class from their nails?" he asked, taken by surprise.

"Something like eight times out of ten, I'm right," she told him. "It's hardly rocket science, but the worse the toenails are, the worse is the decedent's economic situation. This clearly only becomes useful when a person's other outward indicators are conflicting, as with a bum dressed in a fine suit. Which," she added, "is a little of what you've got here-a man on the skids, but whose toenails reflect a regular, if nonprofessional, attention to personal appearance. Do with it what you will."

He laughed, shaking his head at the phone. "You don't have much to worry about there. I won't touch that with tongs. I appreciate it, though. And I will wait for the tox."

"Speaking of which," she said, "we did do the standard alcohol test on him-the prelim. He'd had maybe a couple of beers, that's all."

"Anything distinctive in his stomach?"

"No, I'm sorry. He ate too long prior to death."

Joe stared sightlessly at the mesmerizing blur of snowflakes falling before him, lost momentarily in thought. Beverly knew him well enough to let half a minute go by.

"Okay," he finally said. "I can't thank you enough."

"You already did," she said, and hung up.

He punched in Sammie Martens's number.

"Anything new?" he asked after she answered.

She knew he was in business mode, and kept to it for the moment. "Zilch. I expanded and double-checked the VSP canvass of the area, went over where we found the body with everything from a metal detector to a thermal imager, and ran the guy's prints through AFIS, which admittedly only rules out major crimes-and only those that've made it into the database. Still, he's not there. I'm now working on the theory that he was dropped from a plane, wearing a parachute, and that we should be out hunting for a used-parachute thief. How're you faring?"

"Nothing. I just called the ME. Waste of a dime. Isn't a mark on him, inside or out. If your jumping-from-an-airplane idea is right, he didn't even die of a heart attack. She called it a run-of-the-mill drowning."

"But the tox is still pending," she stated.

"Right," he agreed. "It's the only straw we have left." After a pause he added, "Well, maybe not entirely. Circulate his picture to all the motels in a ten-mile radius. He might not have been a local."

"Got it," she said, and then asked, "How's the family?"

"Leo's a wreck but awake. Mom looks fine but won't wake up."

Sam was clearly nonplussed. "Wow. That sounds bad."

Joe pursed his lips. "Could be," he admitted.

"What're you going to do?"

He hesitated. "About what?"

"You going to stay up there to be with them?"

That, of course, was at the heart of what was gnawing at him. "What's it sound like if I say I'd rather be down there with you guys?"

"Like you think they're in good hands and that you're already getting stir crazy."

"I'm not really," he conceded.

"What, then?"

He was less sure of himself here. "I'm sort of poking into this."

She instantly took his meaning. "The accident? You think something's funny?"

"I just want to rule it out. Leo said he thought it was the car, so I'm having the sheriff look into it."

Sam kept with him. "Like the brakes?"

"He didn't say. Just that it wasn't the road conditions. He was a little out of it."

"So it could've been a blown tire?" she asked doubtfully.

Joe shrugged, standing all by himself. "I don't know. I haven't seen the car yet."

He was greeted with dead silence. They both knew how many cars went off the roads in New England in the winter-and how many of those accidents were the result of sabotage. Even Joe had never heard of a single instance.

"Leo knows cars," he added lamely.

"He service this one himself?" she asked, following a more rational line of thought.

"No. Mom wouldn't let him."

He could almost hear Sam switching gears with her next comment. "If I were you, boss, I'd stay up there a little longer. Get this car thing out of your mind one way or the other. You come down here to play with us now, you'll only drive us nuts thinking about it."

He nodded, knowing she was right. "All right. Thanks for the advice."

She laughed. "That's a first. I don't think I've ever done that for you before."

He joined her. "Don't sell yourself short, Sam. You have no idea what an influence you are. Keep Willy from burning the place down till I get back."

"Roger that."

Joe closed the phone, reviewing his situation. Sam was right, of course, and perhaps wiser than she knew. He was between a rock and a hard place emotionally. The John Doe needed his full attention, but to ride shotgun with Deputy Barrows on a doubtlessly futile case would keep him busy, near the hospital, and out of his team's way.

He stepped out into the snow, which, as expected, had tapered off to just a few desultory, drifting flakes, and scuffed down the path between the house and the barn, enjoying kicking through the fresh crystalline cover and sending it flying into tiny swirls of white.

At the barn door, he fumbled with the clumsy hasp and put his shoulder to the door, swinging it open on groaning hinges, just wide enough that he could slip inside.

It was a typically cavernous barn, open in the middle, soaring up to half-seen rafters high overhead, and surrounded by long abandoned animal stalls, now filled with junk. Joe groped for the old-fashioned light switch and turned on a bank of haphazardly placed fluorescent tubes that dangled from the cross beams. Leo was an impatient and practically minded electrician.

Joe smiled at the scene: a virtual car park of dusty vintage vehicles, some of them dented and scratched, none of them covered. Leo loved them and collected them for the memories they evoked and for the hours he could spend tinkering with them. He wasn't the least bit interested in museum-level preservation. He drove these things when he could get them to run, and he didn't mind if they got dinged now and then. It was a casual man's casual love affair.

Joe shook his head and switched off the light again. Christ, he hoped they got home in one piece.

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