Occam's razor

14

Gail was hunkered down in her upstairs armchair like a mole in a burrow, surrounded by pillows and paperwork. “I’m starting to wonder what you look like in daylight,” I told her.

“I’m starting to wonder what daylight looks like. How was Montpelier?”

I tried making light of the bitter aftertaste still lingering after hours in the car. “The usual circus. It was interesting seeing Reynolds at work. Very crafty.”

“You made it on the news tonight.”

I sat on the floor with my back against the wall. “Great. A colleague from the state police cornered me right after and accused me of fratricide.”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t worry. It was just background footage to the reporter’s voice-over. They didn’t even use your name.”

I took off my shoes and wriggled my toes into the thick carpeting, eager to change subjects. “Thank God for small favors. How’s it going with the Owen case?”

She made a face. “Could be better. Derby and I are starting to wrangle. He wants me to go hell for leather-Felony Murder Rule, double homicide, maximum sentence.”

“And you don’t?” I asked, remembering how Brenda’s head had barely been attached to her body.

“I’m not against it, necessarily. I just think we sometimes charge people like you’d hunt deer with a machine gun. It’s grandstanding and it’s sloppy. We don’t know yet what really went on in that house, and what led up to it. It’s at sentencing that the penalties should be meted out, once all the cards have been put on the table. That’s what separates Vermont from the feds-we have more latitude.”

I slid down to rest on my elbows. “Derby must love you, especially during an election year. I didn’t think it was the prosecutor’s job to worry about motive.”

She gave me a sour look. “Don’t you start, too. Any idiot knows the jury’ll want to hear a motive, whether it’s our quote-unquote job or not. If we don’t pay attention to that, McNeil will eat us for lunch. Besides, intent is part of our burden of proof, so whether we like it or not, we’re going to have to step onto that thin ice.”

“He said he went there to kill her. He’d been waiting for several years to find out who spiked his girlfriend’s dope with poison.”

“He didn’t bring a weapon, he killed her where she stood, and he drove his aunt’s truck there to do it. Hardly a plan born of deep thought.”

I was silent for a moment, thinking of how tense the situation must have become at her office. I felt a certain sympathy for her boss. Charging a perpetrator with everything and then compromising with a lesser sentence after trial-or better still, using those charges to cut a pretrial deal-was standard practice. I wondered if Gail’s social welfare past wasn’t getting in her way.

But she was still talking. “My God, Joe, if I’m asking these kinds of questions-first time on a murder trial-don’t you think McNeil’s been over the same ground thirty times by now? Derby’s so desperate to get something locked in by November, he’s not thinking straight. Besides, I doubt that confession will make it to trial. I already told you that. You ever read it?”

“Sure.”

“Then you saw where he said he first went there to get her to come clean, and only after a little prodding from Kunkle said he wanted to kill her for what she’d done. If McNeil doesn’t get it thrown out, it’ll only be so he can shove it up our noses in front of the jury and make it look like coercion.

“Plus,” she added, “that bloody knee-print never panned out. The stained clothes we got from Owen’s aunt didn’t include pants, and now she’s saying he never wore jeans anyhow.”

“That’s pretty convenient,” I said. “Who says she’s telling the truth? The pants could’ve been jeans, and they might’ve vanished precisely because they were soaked in blood. It was Brenda’s DNA on what little the aunt did hand over, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Gail admitted without enthusiasm and then added more hopefully, “but not much. A bit on his jacket and a few drops on one shoe.”

“Boy,” I said softly after a long pause, “doesn’t sound like you and Derby are even working the same case. Could Owen get off?”

“Of course he could,” she answered angrily. “Just ask anyone who thinks O.J. Simpson was guilty. The point is, you enter a case like this with something other than blood in your eye. Jack basically wants to throw a rope over some tree branch and ride off into the sunset to general applause. It ain’t going to work that way unless he wakes up.”

I got to my feet, shoes in hand, and kissed her again-this was the second debate of the day I didn’t want to touch. “Sorry you’re having a tough time. He’ll probably settle down once McNeil begins showing what he’s up to. You haven’t even seen his witness list yet, have you?”

“No,” she admitted glumly. “But when we do, your squad better expect a phone call. I know in my gut we’re going to be digging into Owen’s past deeper than they will at the Pearly Gates.” She suddenly reached up and grabbed my wrist. “Speaking of which, could you do me a favor? Call Hillstrom’s office and find out if it actually was poison that killed Owen’s girlfriend-Lisa Wooten.”

“You got it,” I said. But mundane as it sounded, the request hit me as somehow wrong. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

The next morning, I met with Sammie, Ron, and Willy. Several weeks had gone by since Philip Resnick had been pulped by the train, and we were no closer to finding his killers than we had been that first night.

On the bright side, the car, the three men, Resnick’s identity, and his connection to the abandoned truck hadn’t made it into the papers yet, which were still referring to the victim as an unidentified vagrant.

Which they wouldn’t be doing for much longer.

“We still think Reynolds is involved?” Willy asked with characteristic bluntness.

I looked at Ron for an answer.

“If he is, he’s being very cagey,” Ron answered.

“Cagey?” Sam butted in. “You really think he framed himself with a bogus copy of his own car just to throw off suspicion? It’s unreal.”

“I agree,” Ron resumed. “But it still may be possible. Speaking of which, a Crown Vic matching Renaud’s second description was reported stolen in Keene, just before Resnick was killed. Also, I looked over Brenda’s journal again, seeing if I could find a pattern to those missing pages, but the whole thing’s just too chaotic to begin with.”

I sat back and rubbed my eyes. “Damn, this is frustrating. An office break-in where nothing’s missing, a car at the crime scene that turns out not to have been there, a few missing pages in a dead woman’s journal that might’ve mentioned anybody. I mean, I can write off the phone calls to Katz as political high jinks, but some of this stuff has got to have something to it. Reynolds just keeps coming up.”

“Or we’re being led to think that way,” Sammie said quietly.

Willy crushed his plastic coffee cup and threw it into the trash. “We missed out when his office was broken into. If one of us had been there, we might have gotten a look at those files.”

I turned to Ron again. “You been able to go over his old court records yet?”

He gave me a tired look. “I looked, but there’re hundreds of ’em. He’s a hardworking man. So I stuck to checking for index references to Resnick or Timson or hazardous materials or trucking-and got nowhere. The only other option is to open the files and go over them page by page.”

There was a gloomy break in the conversation. “How ’bout Katahdin?” I finally asked.

“I tried it.” He didn’t need to explain further.

I sat up slowly, a sudden thought stirring. “Where’s Reynolds licensed to practice?”

Ron pawed through some notes. “Vermont, New Hampshire-” He suddenly stopped. “And Maine.”

All three of them looked up at me.

“Get hold of the Portland court clerk,” I told Ron. “See if Reynolds hasn’t been over there defending Katahdin Trucking. And Sammie, I want you to get back in touch with the New Jersey people Ron called earlier about Resnick, and find out everything you can about him-not his criminal record, but his family, colleagues, drinking buddies, personal habits. Anything you can. I want a family tree of associates we can compare to anyone we might have on file.”

Deputy Medical Examiner Bernie Short sounded tired on the phone.

“What can I do for you, Joe?”

“Get some sleep, would be a wild guess.”

“Yeah, well, forget that.”

“How much longer till Beverly gets back?”

“Too long. Late summer.”

“I’ll cut to the chase, then,” I said. “Your office did a Lisa Wooten a few years ago, from down here.” I gave him the exact date and reference number. “All I can find in my files is ‘drug overdose,’ but we’re working a case right now where someone’s claiming the stuff that did her in was deliberately poisoned. Can you give me the details?”

His voice remained flat. “Hold on.”

He was back on the line in surprisingly short order. “Nope. Heroin cut with confectioner’s sugar. Usually what happens is they try to kick the habit for a while, lower their tolerance for the stuff, and then shoot up with the dose they were used to but can no longer handle. Boom, they’re dead.”

“So, definitely no poison?”

“You want a copy of this?” he asked instead.

“The SA’s office might,” I told him. “I’ll let them know. By the way, you couldn’t tell if the dose that killed her was bigger than her norm, could you, assuming she hadn’t tried to kick the habit?”

His answer was short but eloquent: “Nope.”

I hung up and redialed. “I did your bidding on Lisa Wooten,” I told Gail when she picked up. “I’m afraid you’re not going to like it.”

“Tell me.”

“She was a straight overdose. Bernie Short said the only adulterant was sugar. Whoever told Owen Tharp that Brenda poisoned Lisa’s dope was lying.”

“Shit.” The line went dead.

I hung up slowly. I didn’t blame her-I even held myself partly responsible. She’d just committed a cardinal error-uncovering a fact beneficial to the defense-and I hadn’t been sharp enough to see it coming. Reggie McNeil would probably have dug it up eventually, but the fact that this little exculpatory tidbit had been a gift from the prosecution was a card he was sure to play up. If Owen had been deliberately lied to in order to get him motivated to kill Brenda, it could be made to weigh heavily in any jury’s considerations.

Jack Derby was not going to be pleased.

My contemplation of Gail’s fate was cut short by a shadow falling across my desk. “Daydreaming, Joe?”

Al Hammond-tall, distinguished, gray-haired, and the Windham County Sheriff since God was a teenager-stood on my threshold smiling.

I offered him a chair. “Haven’t seen you in a while. What’ve you been up to?”

“Watching television,” he said pleasantly, his eyes very steady.

“Meaning you saw me on the news?”

“Saw you and had the transcript faxed down to me. You really backing this idea?” His tone was stiffly noncommittal.

I decided to play the same game. “What did your reading tell you?”

“It didn’t tell me you were against it.”

“I’m not-not until it’s something other than a vague proposal on its way through a bunch of committees. I’m not necessarily for it, either.”

“You think the concept of a single police force is a good thing?” This time, his voice gave him away, if only slightly, not that I needed a road sign. Sheriffs were political by statute, and this one seemed to have been born that way.

“I think almost seventy different agencies are too many. But you’re safe. Why do you care?”

“Because being in the constitution and surviving as a reality are two different things, as you damn well know. We could be reduced to a crosswalk officer per county and still be in the constitution.”

I baited him a little. “So it’s about turf?”

Those cool, gray eyes narrowed slightly. “It’s about function. Nothing exists for long if nobody needs it. Sheriffs predate every other police agency in this state. For good reason.”

“Welfare fraud investigators are four pay grades below a Vermont state police sergeant,” I countered. “When Welfare was told to tighten their belts, they handed investigations over to the VSP. But what was good for their budget turned out bad for the state’s. In a few counties, VSP is scheduling fraud investigations during overtime hours, and allowing anyone eligible to conduct them. I know a captain who is legitimately taking advantage of that, and for a lot more money than Welfare was paying in the first place. Does that make sense to you?”

“A single agency would have the same problems. Plus, you’re talking about the state police-hardly the paragon of efficiency.”

I tried again, hoping to avoid the standard inaccurate target-shooting at the VSP. “Amos Melcourt killed those two kids up north because a part-time deputy sheriff was put where he shouldn’t have been, supposedly because money was too tight to allow for anything better. That wouldn’t be true in a more centralized system with a state-mandated budget.”

Hammond opened his mouth to respond, but I interrupted. “Al, I’m not picking any fights here. All I’m saying is that just because something worked during the Revolutionary War doesn’t mean it should stay the same into the twenty-first century. These seventy-odd departments have about one thousand full-time cops working for them. It’s not much, but it means different uniforms, cars, equipment, weapons, training… you name it. They say that if every department in Chittenden County alone shared a single dispatch center, they could all save some two million dollars. Think of the money we could have-without raising a single additional penny in taxes-if we could all share our resources like that. We’re already beginning to use the same computer data, we’ve been fighting for years to get automated fingerprinting, the FBI has launched a centralized DNA bank, and other states are creating legislation allowing their cops to participate. We’re on this train whether we like it or not. I’m just saying we ought to acknowledge the fact and figure out how to make it work for us, whether it’s one big department or six regional ones or whatever. We ought to kick it around a bit.”

Hammond wasn’t interested. He rose to his feet and looked down at me for a moment, finally saying, “It sounds great, Joe. And if you and I and a few others were the people who were doing it, I might even go along. But we’re not. It’s the likes of Jim Reynolds and Mark Mullen and our jackass Governor Howell that’re going to be cobbling this together, and they’re going to be working under VSP direction. You mark my words: If this thing goes through-and I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it-it’ll have the stamp of the Green-and-Gold all over it.”

He stalked out the door, his back ramrod straight, like the state trooper he had been more than twenty years earlier.