Occam's razor

4

The retreat meadows are one of Brattleboro’s most attractive misnomers. Meadows no longer, they are actually a single large body of shallow water where the West River spills into the Connecticut on the northern edge of downtown.

There had been meadowland there once, of course, but a downstream dam built years ago had raised both rivers and forced the floodplain to forever submerge. The Retreat part of the name came from the facility overlooking the water-a highly regarded psychiatric and addiction treatment center that looked more like a small college than a place for those in crisis.

The Meadows are quite extensive, dotted with islands, fringed with reed banks, and looking for all intents and purposes like a lake of ancient lineage. They are also one of Brattleboro’s primary attractions, popular in the summer for boating and fishing, and frequented in winter by skaters and a haphazard collection of ice fishing shanties.

Ice fishing is one of those peculiar northern pastimes, born of necessity and maintained through habit. Once in a long while, someone will actually drill a hole, plant a stool by its edge, and drop in a line, utterly dependent on good weather and thick clothing. The standard, however, has moved beyond such a primitive approach. Shanties, most often home-built, occupy a sliding scale of sophistication, from surrounding the fisherman on his stool with four plywood walls and a roof, to giving him a wood-burning stove, a stereo system, a wooden floor, a cot, and several windows to enjoy the view outside. Many men claim their shanties, and the vast amounts of time they spend in them, have enhanced the serenity of their marriages.

I’d been told it was just such a man I was to visit.

Sammie had put me on to him, he being one of her missing potential witnesses. His wife had been instructed to tell him to call us when he came in. Whether she had and he hadn’t, or whether he’d simply never returned home, I wasn’t above making house calls on a sheet of ice.

His refuge wasn’t hard to find-small, red, with a shed-type roof and a crescent moon carved in the door. No windows. “Just like an outhouse,” as his wife had said.

I knocked on the rattly door, conscious of how quiet it was out in the middle of the lake, the town’s heartbeat reduced to a muted, distant hum. I was unsure how it felt exactly-either like being among a scattering of chess pieces on an enormous pale board or, paradoxically, being a bird in flight. The unadulterated distance from the shore and all it represented made me feel strangely remote-a thousand feet above the surface, hovering over a cloud.

“Who is it?” The voice emanating from the moon was low and throaty, as if the man inside had a cold.

“Mr. Renaud? It’s Joe Gunther. Brattleboro Police,” I said softly, aware of the shanties nearby leaning slightly toward us, listening in.

“For Christ’s sake.”

The door flew back on its leather hinges, almost knocking me over. My feet skittered on the smooth ice as I regained my balance. Edward Renaud stood before me, unapologetic, filling the narrow doorway with a huge, bulbous frame, clad entirely in black-and-red-checked wool, including a hat with earflaps.

“I got a license.”

“I’m sure you do,” I said, extending a hand. “I’m not here about that.”

He took hold of my hand with the tips of his blunt fingers, as if cutting down on the amount of washing he’d have to do later.

“I was wondering if I could ask you about last night,” I added.

He looked at me for a moment and then stepped back into the gloom of the shanty. “I gotta watch the line.”

I crossed the threshold into a small, dark, curiously comforting space and closed the door behind me, less for privacy and more to sample the environment this man so obviously enjoyed.

A narrow bench ran the length of three of the shanty’s walls. Renaud’s massive bulk filled one side entirely. I settled gingerly near the door, feeling dwarfed. The fishing hole between us was black and mysterious, but the ice around it glowed softly with the prismed morning sun, filling the tiny space with a faintly religious aura.

“It’s nice in here,” I commented.

“I like it.” Renaud had the voice of someone whose lungs are never totally free of fluids. Judging from his appearance, I had no doubt his heart was running on reserve.

“You were home last night?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see anything unusual out your back window, around one in the morning?”

“Who says I did?”

I couldn’t decide if he was being coy for the hell of it, wanted me to rat on his wife, or if he was genuinely concerned someone might’ve seen him and wished him ill. In any case, I got the feeling he knew exactly what I was after.

I tried for neutrality. “We’re asking everyone in your neighborhood.”

Given my doubts, his response couldn’t have been more bland. “Yeah, I did. Car came up along the tracks. Three guys did something around the side I couldn’t see, and then they left.”

“Could you see what they were up to?”

“No. A corner of the building’s in the way. I could only see half the car.”

“So you heard about it later?”

“My wife told me somebody got squashed by the train.”

“What was it that caught your eye? And what were you doing up that late anyhow?”

“Taking a leak. Their lights were off. Seemed funny.”

I hoped he’d been playing me like a fish from the start. “Did you get a good look at the car?”

“Dark blue Crown Vic. Four-door,” he said without hesitation. “Maybe mid-nineties.”

“And a license plate?”

“Only half of one. PCH. Made me think of perch.” He pointed to the hole in the ice, smiling slightly in triumph, feeling suddenly generous. “Like them down there. I saw it ’cause the car drove toward me when it left, and I could just make out the first half. The rest was numbers, but that’s all I could tell.”

“Did you see any of the men?”

He shook his large head. “Too dark.”

I stood up reluctantly, seduced by the shanty’s tranquility, and pushed the door open to the now blinding light. “Thank you, Mr. Renaud. You’ve been a big help.”

He stayed still, his eyes fixed on the hole. “Sure.”

I gently closed the door so as not to disturb his meditation any further.

“Jesus H. Christ.”

I entered our detective bureau from the small conference room next door. Willy Kunkle, feet up on his desk, newspaper across his lap, was shaking his head in disgust. Tyler was sitting at an adjacent workstation, typically not saying a word.

“Frigging politicians,” Willy continued. “Never miss a chance to get some mileage off somebody else’s misery.”

I hesitated to ask, not being overly fond of such conversations, but then figured it might be worse if I ignored him. “What’s up?”

“You know that cluster fuck they had up north, where the kids got whacked? Now the governor and our own Jim Reynolds are jumping up and down, claiming something’s-got to-be-done, quote-unquote. God help us. They’re babbling about maybe the whole system needs to be changed.”

Jim Reynolds was a local attorney trying to make his mark as a state senator. Gail liked him and thought he might go places. I agreed with his general philosophy, but he didn’t impress me much otherwise-there was too much calculation deep in his eyes to make me think his own self-interest didn’t count above all else. Which is what made Kunkle’s comment that much more interesting. “What whole system?”

“You and me-I quote, ‘Governor Howell and Commissioner of Public Safety Stanton have asked Senator Reynolds to be the point man on a series of public hearings concerning the feasibility and advisability of revamping Vermont’s entire law enforcement structure.’”

Kunkle tossed the paper onto the tabletop. “Howell’s also quoted asking why, if New York City has eight million people and two police forces, does Vermont, with one-fifteenth the population, have some sixty-eight different police agencies?”

I paused at my office door. “That’s not such a dumb question.”

Kunkle opened his mouth to respond but then closed it when Tyler said quietly, “Reynolds was in the dailies week before last.”

We both looked at him. The dailies are the reports filed in the computer by all shift officers for the edification of the rest of us. They cover everything from homicides to stray animals and allow us to share the town’s vital signs.

“Why?” I asked him.

“His office was broken into. Nothing missing, according to him. A patrol passed by the back door in the middle of the night and saw it had been jimmied. They probably scared away whoever it was.”

Neither one of us had anything to say to that.

“Is Ron around?” I asked instead.

“Not yet,” Willy answered, as Tyler lapsed back to contemplating his paperwork. “He’s got the late shift again.”

I handed Willy a slip of paper with “PCH” written on it. “That’s a partial plate on a late-model, dark blue Ford Crown Victoria. When he gets in, see if he can get DMV to chase it down, will you?”

Kunkle looked at it appraisingly. “This the car from last night?”

“According to Edward Renaud.” I turned to J.P. “You get anything like tire marks or anything from near the railroad tracks?”

He frowned. “Nope. Looks like they came, they dumped, and they left without a trace. I tried collecting enough of the skull to get an idea what the guy looked like, but I didn’t get far. I shipped the pieces up north anyway-let them play with it. I was hoping for a finger at least, but the train really did a job. His hands couldn’t have been better positioned. I looked all over the place. The only angle I got left is to check local dog owners-see if some pooch brought home a little tidbit.”

Kunkle dropped his legs to the floor. “God Almighty, J.P. You ought to get out more. I’m going for coffee.”

I retreated to my office, an eight-foot-square corner closet with two windows looking onto the parking lot and a third separating me from the squad room. Tyler followed me in with a sheet of paper in his hand.

“This was faxed in from the ME’s office early this morning. A complete report’s coming by mail.”

I took it from him and glanced at the illegible signature at the bottom. “Hillstrom didn’t do it?” I asked, slightly disappointed.

“She’s on a teaching sabbatical for the year. That’s Bernie Short.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Bernard Short was Beverly Hillstrom’s relatively new deputy. A nice guy and a good pathologist, he hadn’t yet instilled in me the trust I had for his boss. Hillstrom and I went back a long way, and we fed each other’s mania for scratching at the details, regardless of protocols, cost overruns, or time allotments. From what I’d been told, it wasn’t a relationship she shared with many others, which made me all the more grateful for the attention.

I scanned the preliminary report with limited expectations and was therefore doubly surprised by its contents. I reached for the phone and dialed the ME’s office in Burlington.

“Hey, Bernie, how’re you holding up?” I asked him, once Short had been put on the line.

His answer was disarmingly honest. “Nervous as hell. I’m sweating bullets I’ll mess something up. Good thing the office folks here know how everything runs.”

“Well,” I reassured him, “if the prelim you just sent me on that John Doe is any indication, you’re doing all right. You wrote you found evidence of chloracne in the genital area, indicating a possible exposure to harsh, chlorine-based chemicals. Could you expand on that a little? I’ve got something cooking down here where that might make sense.”

“Oh, sure. Actually, it kind of surprised me. It’s not something you see a lot. The only other case I’ve ever handled was when I was doing my residency. A factory worker checked into the hospital after splashing himself with a liquid dioxin-some kind of oil. He wiped it off at the time and didn’t think anything more about it, but less than a week later, he came down with severe chloracne-rash, oozing sores, skin discoloration, epidermal hardening. It was pretty nasty.”

“And that’s what this John Doe had?”

Bernie Short equivocated a little. “He had chloracne. I don’t know how he got it. I did look at his sebaceous glands under the microscope. They were hardened, which fits the scenario, and his liver showed signs of degeneration. I’ve ordered a special tox scan, so we should know for sure in a few weeks.”

I quickly reread the report in my hand. “You also mention telltale bruising in the left scapular area. What’s that about?”

His enthusiasm picked up immediately. “That was pretty neat. I’m looking forward to showing it to Dr. Hillstrom when she gets back. When I rolled him over, I noticed a very mild discoloration just below the left shoulder blade. Usually, you just note something like that-get it in the record. But I wanted to try something Dr. Hillstrom had mentioned. Bruising is bleeding under the skin, of course, but if the blow’s perimortem-around the time of death-the blood doesn’t have time to spread out and make that characteristic blue-black appearance. So I cut around what little bruising I could see and peeled the outer layer of skin back. There I found a near-perfect footprint. I took a picture of it-it’ll be in the full report.”

“Nice work, Bernie,” I said with genuine warmth. “I hope Dr. Hillstrom gives you a gold star. By the way, were you able to pinpoint cause of death? I have witnesses who make it sound like he might’ve been dead before the train hit him.”

The hesitation on the other end told me I’d pushed him too hard, which I regretted, given what he’d just delivered.

“Those are actually two questions in one,” he answered gamely, though his disappointment was obvious. “And I’m afraid you won’t be able to do much by either one of them. Cause of death might have been anything from a baseball bat to the train, to a shotgun blast to the head-impossible to tell…Well,” he suddenly paused, “probably not a shotgun-at least not one firing pellets. I checked the surviving skull fragments and found no sign of them. Might’ve been a deer slug, of course…Anyhow, he didn’t die from whatever agent caused the chloracne. Time of death is a little iffy, too. My guess is that he was alive either when or moments before the train hit him-the pulpified tissue was markedly hemorrhagic, and according to your field notes, there was a lot of blood on the ground where the body was recovered.”

I filled the sudden silence that followed this long-winded equivocation with, “But you’re not going to commit a hundred percent to saying he died when the train hit him?”

He sounded embarrassed. “I think he did, but Dr. Hillstrom would probably insist on my sticking to the old adage, ‘He died between when he was last seen alive and when he was first found dead.’ I’m sorry if that’s not terribly helpful.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “I’ll let the lawyers worry about that if it ever gets to court. You’ve been a big help.”

He sounded relieved. “Okay. Well, call any time.”

“I do have one last question. In the prelim, you mention the standard ‘well-nourished male, normal in overall appearance.’ Would that fit the average street person?”

“Not one who’d been following that lifestyle for a while, but you got to start sometime. I just assumed he was a beginner and that the usual signs hadn’t surfaced yet.”

“So I wasn’t out of line thinking that his clean underwear was at odds with his beaten-up clothes.”

Short didn’t answer for a couple of beats. “That’s a discrepancy I didn’t think about. His socks looked regular, too-I mean compared to some I’ve seen.”

I smiled at the phone, childishly pleased at having a gut reaction borne out. “Good talking to you, Bernie, and thanks again.”

I hung up and shouted into the squad room, “Is Ron in yet?”

Klesczewski appeared, still wearing his coat. “Morning. You bellowed?”

I glanced at the new phone on my desk. We’d been equipped some time ago with a new communications system, including voice mail, intercom, and a half dozen other features I hadn’t bothered to learn. Typically, J.P. and Ron had mastered it overnight, Willy and I had barely acknowledged its arrival, and Sammie was somewhere in between.

I gave him an apologetic look. “Sorry. Old habit. I just talked to the ME. Our John Doe was exposed to some nasty chemical shortly before he died. It didn’t kill him, but it did screw him up-running sores and all.” I handed him Bernie’s preliminary report. “Dr. Short called it a dioxin. You hear about that abandoned truck at Bickford’s?”

His eyes widened. “Were those dioxins, too?”

“Could be. Contact Pat Mason at ANR and tell him we may have found a connection to his case. Also, if their lab wants to compare what he found in the truck bed to the clothes the ME sent to the state forensics lab, they might find something-unless, like we think, his clothes were switched before he was killed.”

Klesczewski nodded. “Will do.”

“Short also said he lifted a footprint from the dead man’s skin. He was pretty enthusiastic about it. If it’s as good as he says, maybe we could use it as evidence later. Did Tyler tell you about the partial license plate Renaud claimed he saw?”

“Yeah. I was just about to call DMV about it.” He hesitated and then added, “Willy also told me about the governor’s plan to overhaul law enforcement.”

I looked at him more closely, surprised by the change of subject. “I think it was vaguer than that. Wasn’t he talking about floating the idea at a few public hearings first, using Reynolds as a bird dog?”

“I suppose. Still, it’s a pretty radical idea, isn’t it?”

In several ways, Ron Klesczewski was the youngest member of the squad, although Sammie was his junior by a couple of years. Tough in a fight, and as good as anyone I knew with a computer, a phone link, and a data bank, he remained almost endearingly innocent. It was not an affectation, but he was aware of how he projected and had been known to use it for mileage with strangers. During interrogations, I’d seen suspects become almost eager to talk to him, figuring he needed all the help he could get.

This time, however, he was genuinely curious. “I’m not so sure it is,” I told him. “Our type of law enforcement grew up in stages, on a strictly need basis. When we were all a bunch of farmers, the odd sheriff or constable was enough to do the trick, as were the small PDs later on, but now that we’re seeing some of what they get every day in New York and Boston, that piecemeal kind of approach can cause problems, just like it did up north.”

I was alluding to what Willy had called a “cluster fuck” earlier, which, as usual with him, was both overly blunt and entirely accurate. A man named Amos Melcourt, under investigation by one small municipal department for sexual abuse and suspected of a string of burglaries by the state police, had been visited by a part-time deputy sheriff on a third, minor violation. Inside Melcourt’s house, the deputy had seen three TV sets stacked up in the living room but hadn’t thought they might be hot and therefore hadn’t blown the whistle. A week later, Melcourt kidnapped and molested three children, killing two of them before being shot by police.

It had happened less than a month ago, and the finger-pointing had been escalating ever since. In point of fact, it was an outrage. The sexual abuse investigation should have been shared among all agencies, the state police’s suspicions-and the list of stolen property-should have been more aggressively circulated, and that poor miserable part-time deputy should have been better trained, or at least not been made to interview someone whose malevolence he couldn’t gauge.

Adding to the bureaucratic embarrassments was the revelation later that Amos Melcourt had kept a room in his house filled with pedophilic pornography, among which were photos of the three kids he later kidnapped, along with maps and a timetable of their daily routine. It had been made painfully and irrefutably clear by the press that had the deputy recognized the TVs as stolen property, a search warrant could have been issued, the secret room discovered, and the clear intent to do harm to minors established. Melcourt would now have been behind bars, instead of six feet underground, along with his two small victims.

To people like Willy, it was all water over the dam. As he regularly put it when confronted with such horror stories, “Shit happens.” To me, it was a clear indication that wake-up calls like the one being issued by Governor Howell and Reynolds were both appropriate and timely.

“It’s not that I think the whole system should be thrown out,” I explained to Ron. “For one thing, you couldn’t get rid of the sheriffs without amending the state constitution. But we do need to improve the way we keep each other informed.”

“We have computer-linked data bases, like VLETS and VIBRS and the others,” Ron countered.

“As long as the funding’s there,” I conceded. “But those computers didn’t work with Melcourt. Not everyone in law enforcement’s as handy as you are with those things. And a lot of the older or more conservative cops still see their turf as private property. Remember what that one sergeant said when he was asked why his department had kept their investigation of Melcourt to themselves?”

Ron nodded. “They didn’t want to lose it to the state police.”

“Which is exactly what should have happened. But the state police can get pretty superior, too, sometimes, going on about the traditions of the glorious Green-and-Gold. That can get under people’s skin.”

“They probably are the best in the state,” Ron muttered, a little unhappily.

“I don’t argue with that,” I agreed. “And they’ve been bending over backwards recently to share their assets and data, but that hasn’t always been true. Years back, one of their people told the Senate Government Operations Committee on the record that all sheriffs should be abolished and that all local cops were woodchucks. Ancient history now, and just one jackass’s opinion, but that kind of crack doesn’t easily fade away. And when you’re the biggest guy in the schoolyard, it’s usually smart to be the most generous-unfortunately, that’s a hard lesson to learn.”

We were both silent for a moment, Ron absorbing what I’d just said, and I embarrassed for running my mouth. I hadn’t realized until then how the Melcourt mess had gotten under my skin. Subconsciously, I adopted Willy’s attitude of simply being thankful it hadn’t been us caught in the limelight. But Ron’s curiosity had forced me to admit that some kind of overhaul was in fact past due.

I glanced out the window at the cold, gray sky, forgetful of Ron still standing awkwardly in the doorway-suddenly aware that another bulwark I counted on for stability was threatening to shift.

That Gail’s gradual evolution would cost me her company was no more assured than that the governor and his pet senator would put an end to my job, but the possibilities were there, palpably close, and they filled me with something akin to fear.