Occam's razor

9

Generally, winter’s brief daylight hours only aggravate people’s moods in Vermont. The morning after my meeting with Willy and Sam, however, I was all too happy to get two hours of extra sleep before I knew J.P. and his crew-by dawn’s tardy light-would be out searching White Birch Avenue.

I drove there straight from home and found them already setting up. Tyler had a team of ten people, including, I noticed, both Sam and Willy. He was equipping them out of the van he’d brought for the purpose, keeping track of his assignments in a three-ring binder.

“What’s the plan?” I asked him during a lull, noticing he was wearing earmuffs and fingerless gloves, like one of Scrooge’s underpaid scribes.

“Three teams: one inside the house to pick up where we stopped last night; another combing about a ten-yard perimeter around the outside walls; and the last working from one end of the street to the other. With this many people, it shouldn’t take too long-maybe most of the morning. I’ll let you know before then if we find anything interesting, though.”

I smiled. “That your subtle way of telling me to buzz off?”

He didn’t see the humor, looking at me with round, slightly surprised eyes. “No. Ron radioed here about five minutes ago. Said he just missed you at home. He’s got something at the office he wants you to see.”

Anyone else would have tacked on a note of curiosity, especially in the midst of two felony cases. Not Tyler. He took most of life as a series of facts or events that could either be analyzed or tucked away for future reference. I’d watched his family grow over the years-a wife and two children, now both teenagers-fully expecting at least one of them to sprout green hair and go slightly bonkers. But so far, they all seemed content to emulate him, going through life doing good, doing well, and not making much of a fuss.

I didn’t mind being dismissed. Poking through trash-strewn bushes or a frozen, blood-splattered house wasn’t my idea of fun. I preferred picking people’s brains to going through their leftovers, even though it was the latter that often clinched the case in court.

I didn’t even reach the office before I discovered what was on Ron’s mind. He came running out into the parking lot without a coat and met me as I swung out of my car.

“I got something you should hear,” he said, his rapid breathing encircling his head with fog.

“You’ll freeze to death before you can tell me. Let’s go inside.”

“I heard back from DMV on that plate number I’ve been trying to unscramble. I don’t know why they took so long, but the number is registered to Jim Reynolds.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. “Reynolds? How’d they come up with that?”

Ron was already beginning to shiver. “Ed Renaud said he saw a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria with a plate beginning with PCH. Reynolds owns that exact car, license number PDH-835. There are some with PCH which aren’t Crown Vics, and Crown Vics that don’t have PCH, but only Reynolds’s has anything even close to PCH.”

I took pity on him and finished walking to the PD’s back door, quickly punching in the combination and ushering him through. “You talk to him yet?”

“No. I only just got it.” He hesitated and then added, “Plus, I didn’t want to jump the gun, especially after this.” He pulled a newspaper from his pocket and unfolded it so I could read the headline.

“REYNOLDS: NO MORE MAYBERRY RFD.” And in smaller type, “Senator Proposes Bill to Revamp Vermont Law Enforcement.”

“Tell me what it says,” I said as I peeled off my coat, collected my mail and messages, and headed for our squad room on the other side of the building.

He fell into step behind me. “It’s the same thing he’s been test-flying at those public hearings for the governor-to replace us with a single police force.”

“The state police?” I asked, cutting through the Officers’ Room to grab a cup of coffee.

“Not according to this. It would be a whole new entity.”

I walked into the main corridor. “What about the sheriffs?”

“It doesn’t say. None of that really matters anyway. All he’s done is refer the bill to his own Judiciary Committee. It doesn’t mean it’ll survive the week. The reason I brought it up is that it’s a hot potato, it’s anti-local law enforcement, and if we hit him on this railroad death without being damn sure of ourselves, we’ll get creamed by the press for smearing him to protect our turf.”

We cut through the administrative office and the conference room and stepped into our own bailiwick. I looked around at the clustered desk cubicles, now all abandoned because of the White Birch Avenue search. “What do you propose?” I asked him.

“Big-time background check,” he answered unsurprisingly, computers and their paper trails being to him what forensics were to Tyler.

I nodded by way of agreement. “Okay, but discreetly. He hired Win Johnston to watch his back, so Win’ll have his nose to the wind. Stick to either public records or closed police sources. No interviewing of family or friends. Okay?”

He was pleased by my instant endorsement. “Sure. Okay. I’ll get right on it.”

I went back across the way to bring the chief up to date.

Tony Brandt recommended a different tack. After I updated him on Reynolds’s office break-in, his hiring of Winthrop Johnston, the sighting of his car at a probable murder scene, and the call I’d gotten about him from Stan Katz, Tony opted for the direct approach.

“He’s running for the state’s top job, for Christ’s sake, or he will be as soon as he makes enough hay out of this bill. I think you should hit him with what we got, even vague as it is. That way, he can’t complain later he didn’t know of our suspicions from the get-go. It pulls the politics right out of it.”

He leaned forward for emphasis. “Plus, if he is guilty, one brief chat with you will make him sweat bullets like nobody’s business, especially when you tell him you’re there because Katz pointed the way. He may even solve this thing for us-which also means you better assign people to watch his wife and secretary ahead of time, just in case that conversation leads to any sudden flurry of activity there. We don’t need a certain automobile to spontaneously catch fire by accident, do we?”

I had to respect Tony’s zeal, especially since I knew he’d voted for the man. I rose to my feet. “Okay. I’ll keep you informed.”

The drive to Montpelier takes under two hours-north along Interstate 91, halfway up the state’s eastern edge, and then northwest on I-89 through the middle of the Green Mountains. It is a trip epitomizing the Vermont so well-known to the rest of the country-deep, ancient, river-cut valleys slicing through dramatic waves of forested mountains, dappled here and there by white-coated clapboard villages and the ever-rarer cow-appointed field. Even looking as it did now-made drab and scabby by winter’s blight without the face-saving grace of a pristine coat of snow-one could sense the richness awaiting spring and summer. Vermont is not a wilderness like what stretches for untold miles out west amid the Rockies. This is land as much carved by humans as by glaciers long gone. A stroll in the densest woods will yield countless stone walls built by farmers who went broke around the time of the Civil War. Vermont, touted today as a bastion of undisturbed nature, has been worked and reworked by inhabitants who at one time had eighty percent of it under cultivation, but who have never really figured out how to exploit it to their own best advantage. At every election, along with the standard arguments about education, taxation, and jobs, the debate about how to use Vermont’s photogenic acreage rages on-all while tourism remains the state’s largest industry.

That was one reason this sudden interest in law enforcement was so peculiar. Never before had the subject been of much use to politicians, who, as long as they paid lip service to the state police and sheriffs-otherwise generally neglected-could all but ignore the rest of us with impunity. Few people in government cared how municipalities dealt with crime, and those who did were content to think that the state police or a few federally funded task forces were enough to keep chaos in check. The almost seventy agencies being talked about now had been largely left to themselves to standardize communications, integrate databases, and join the growing national trend to fully share information. The state police, for all the flak they got for being elitist, aloof, and self-serving, were actually responsible for many of these breakthroughs, but there remained a lot of bad blood for past transgressions never forgiven or forgotten. It was unfortunately typical that the preventable deaths of a few children had been necessary to get the topic on the political agenda. It would also be typical, I thought, if the whole subject just as conveniently disappeared once the current electoral season ran its course.

Which was why I had mixed feelings about Jim Reynolds coming under our scrutiny in such an odd manner. In a world where political leaders were increasingly susceptible to ruin through bad PR alone, I wondered about the timing of this discovery.

Not that history hasn’t taught us how arrogant, stupid, greedy, and short-sighted the political animal can be.

Montpelier is located right in the middle of the Greens, straddling two rivers that periodically dam up with gigantic ice floes and flood downtown with freezing water. A purely political creation, it cannot tout the commerce of Burlington, the skiing of Stowe, or the granite quarries of Barre as its reason for being. It thrives because, in 1805, it won out in the battle over what town would become the state capital.

In this context, it is fitting that Montpelier’s two most prominent features are a tiny, gaudy, gold-domed capitol building, and the lurking presence of a tree-cloaked, gargantuan life insurance company perched atop a hill and overlooking the town like some faceless, obscurely threatening capitalist shadow. The one had all the slightly absurd sparkle of democratic pomp and hopefulness, often confused with power, while the other oozed of money and influence, about whose clout few had any doubts.

In between them lay a modest, bustling town of white-trimmed red-brick buildings, accessorized here and there with the inevitable monolithic government structure-gray, bland, and built of granite. Montpelier is cradled in the palm of a cluster of hills and exudes a feeling of warmth and community, although, in fact, it is missing some of a normal town’s sense of balance. Heavy on restaurants, bars, hotels and inns-befitting a transient population used to being catered to-it lacks some of the basics that a similarly sized permanent crowd might have naturally expected, like a shoe store.

One stubbornly provincial detail has been maintained, however. Despite the seasonal onslaught of cars, flocking to the State House like bees to a hive, parking stinks. If I hadn’t uncovered all of Montpelier’s nooks and crannies from prior visits, I would have discovered them by the time I finally squeezed my car into a dubiously-legal spot a half mile from my destination.

The walk was pleasant, though. It was brain-numbing cold, but aside from having to rub my nose now and then to revive its circulation, I didn’t pay this much heed. It is said that Vermont is annually visited by nine months of winter and three more of damn poor sledding. While it’s really not that bad, we’ve learned to take poor weather in stride.

It was also sunny, which made the approach to the capitol building particularly gratifying. One of only fourteen state legislative domes to be coated in gold, Vermont’s is all the more astonishing because of the structure it caps. The State House is perhaps the smallest of its ilk in the nation and, while handsome, is rather plain, making its topknot as quaintly out of place as a silk derby on a farmer.

Constructed of light gray granite, the building is the awkward result of a tangled birth. Actually the third incarnation of a legislative home, after the fiery deaths of its predecessors, it is fronted with an enormous columned Greek portico-all that’s left of structure number two-which now looks as if it had been glued on as a classy afterthought. Adding to the lopsidedness, the dome does not sit back, like a lord in a rowboat, but instead crowds to the front, making the decorative columns look more like buttresses put in place to keep the dome from falling into the front yard.

As if in homage to a debate-based form of government, many of these peculiarities rose from bitter arguments between the original Boston architect and his practical-minded, stubborn superintendent.

The end result, however, belies such visual snags, for the State House is in the end a jewel box of a building, reflecting all the excesses and ambition of a diminutive rural state long lost in the wake of a bustling nation’s consciousness. Where Albany and Washington, DC, have their perfectly proportioned, cold temples by the handful, it seems fitting that Vermont’s sole offering-much cherished and restored-looks as if it has been constructed of dearly purchased, high-quality spare parts. It is a reflection of pride and pragmatism commingled.

As I entered the unguarded side door-there is only one security officer in the building and no metal detectors-I was reminded of another, more blatant example of the philosophy underlying this true house of the people: The legislators have no offices of their own. Of the hundred and fifty representatives and thirty senators, only two-the speaker and the president pro tem-have private places to call their own, complete with secretaries. Everyone else has an antique desk in either the House or Senate chamber, a large, shared, computer-equipped common room, a cramped committee room, or a briefcase on the lap. If you want to find the people you elected, there are few places they can hide and even fewer subordinates to run interference for them. It’s always been one aspect of democracy I’ve liked the most.

It also made locating James Reynolds fairly easy. All I had to do was wend my way through the milling crowd of lobbyists, lawmakers, and assorted others, climb one of the two ornate iron staircases to the second floor, and walk over to the glass-paned double doors leading into the startlingly small Senate chamber. I immediately saw my quarry sitting in a long, curved row of connected school desks, furiously scribbling on a yellow legal pad as one of his colleagues was pawing the air in mid speech.

I cracked open the door, motioned to one of the doorkeepers, and handed him a note, “For Senator Reynolds.”

He nodded and crossed the chamber to deliver my message. Reynolds thanked him, glanced at what I’d written, looked up at me with a surprised expression, and immediately left his desk.

He met me at the door, grabbed my arm, and propelled me toward a second, narrower staircase leading up to the visitors’ gallery overlooking the chamber. “Too noisy here,” he said, a broad smile contrasting with the tenseness in his voice. “I know somewhere quieter we can talk.”

At the top of the stairs, he steered me away from the galleries toward a small, low, locked panel that looked like a discreet closet door. He dug into his pocket and extracted a key. “I’m not supposed to have this, but you take what you can in this job.”

The small door opened onto a rough wooden corridor lined with electrical boxes, ductwork, and bundles of wiring. A second opening to the right led up a final set of stairs, made of bare, unfinished two-by-sixes.

We finally emerged through the floor of the State House dome, which towered a good sixty feet above us in a giddying grid of raw trusses and crude bracing-in startling contrast to its sleek, gilded exterior. Encircling us were twelve tall decorative windows, alive with the buzzing of hundreds of trapped flies, incongruously out of season, beating against the warm, sunlit glass. A rough wooden catwalk crisscrossed overhead to a final small door, almost invisible at the top.

“They sometimes bring school groups up here to show them how it was put together.” He gestured directly overhead. “There’s a little balcony way up there, too-it’s quite a view.”

I didn’t answer, waiting for the public persona to settle down to normal. Looking around, I saw dozens of names scribbled on the rough lumber surfaces surrounding us-simple signatures of people who apparently thought the most impact they could have on this building and its occasionally self-inflated inhabitants was to furtively leave their mark in an unseen place.

Reynolds glanced at the note he still held in his hand. He was a big man-broad, tall, trunk-like in build, with a thick mane of unruly hair.

In court and on the stump, he used that to his advantage, frequently raising both arms to better resemble a bear, while occasionally flashing a boyish smile as if to show he wasn’t without heart. It was a physical demonstration of the ambiguity that helped make him all things to all people-and which hinted at a lack of sincerity to those who got too close or looked too hard.

He waved the note at me. “What did you mean by this?”

I’d taken Brandt’s recommendation to heart. The note had read, “I’d like to know why your name keeps cropping up,” and I’d signed it, “Lt. Joe Gunther-Brattleboro Police,” to put the question into context.

I extracted it from his fingers and placed it in my pocket. “Mostly I just wanted to get your attention. It is true, though, and Tony Brandt thought we better talk.”

His expression was unhappy and guarded. “Maybe you should be a little more specific,” he said slowly.

“There was a break-in at your office you downplayed at the time but later hired Win Johnston to investigate. I got a call saying you might be involved in the illegal dumping of hazardous waste-right after we discovered a broken-down empty truck that had just made a midnight delivery in Dummerston. And finally, your Crown Victoria was seen at the end of Arch Street, carrying three men who deposited a body on the railroad tracks, which was then pulverized by the night freight.”

Up to the end, his face wore the neutral expression I’d seen him use in court. But the last item got a reaction. His eyes grew wide and incredulous. “When the hell was that supposed to have happened?”

I gave him the date we’d decided upon. “January sixth.”

He shook his head. “That’s bullshit. I was up here that night.”

“With anybody? In the middle of the night?”

He became angry. “What the hell’s that mean? I have an apartment downtown. I was alone. I don’t use that car, anyhow. It’s my wife’s and she keeps it in Bratt. My car’s got Senate plates.”

“You could have driven home and back, with nobody the wiser.”

He stared at me, his mouth half open. He reached behind him and groped for the railing at the top of the stairs, leaning heavily against it. “This is like a bad movie. I thought that guy was a bum who committed suicide.”

I was impressed. Hitting someone out of the blue could have all sorts of unintended benefits, especially with lawyers, who were trained to recover quickly. Honest-to-goodness bafflement was a rarity.

“That’s what we’ve let the press believe so far. But we have witnesses to the contrary.”

The politician in him began to revive. He looked at me closely. “How many people think it was my car?”

“Just my squad. It won’t stay there for long, though. Never does.”

He rubbed his forehead. “Jesus H. Christ. How the hell…? Does my wife know? Did you talk to her yet?”

I shook my head. “Thought I’d see you first. The car’s registered in your name.”

He waved a hand absentmindedly. “They all are. Who was the victim, if he wasn’t a bum?”

I decided to keep that to myself. “We don’t know yet. We’re still checking.”

Reynolds rose and began pacing the wide expanse amid the windows, further stirring up the flies. “Look, I can tell you right now I have no idea what this is about. But I know what kind of impact it’s going to have. I’ll do all I can to help, and you can count on my wife for the same cooperation.” He stopped before me. “But will you at least try to keep a lid on it until you’ve got something solid? It’s not just the embarrassment. I’m doing something downstairs I hope’ll change this entire state-make it safer for its citizens and create a better place for you to do your work. It’s precedent-setting. If we get this bill passed, it’ll be a real sign we’re no longer tied down by traditions and habits that date back to the horse and buggy. And we could do it. Vermont more than any other state in the Union has proved how bipartisan pragmatism can be made to work for the good of all. We can get the job done if we don’t let the kinds of bastard that’re behind this get to us.”

I held up my hand. “No offense, Senator, but I don’t really care. It doesn’t change how I do my job.”

He tucked his head and smiled apologetically, even shuffled a foot. “Sorry. Got carried away. You can’t believe how that hit-what you just told me. There’s nothing to it, but it could sink me all the same.”

“What about hiring Johnston?”

He hesitated. “That was for protection. I didn’t find anything missing after that break-in, but I wanted to know who did it and why.”

“One of our officers noticed a couple of file drawers were open, as if someone had been rifling through them.”

He dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “Sloppy housekeeping on my part. I left them open by mistake.”

“Doesn’t your secretary tidy up before she leaves?”

He laughed. “I’m the one who usually closes up. She works regular hours. Believe me, mine’s no nine-to-five job.” He shook his head. “Look, nothing happened at the office-don’t waste your time. It’s the other thing that worries me-politics can get pretty dirty, even here, if the stakes are high enough. And they couldn’t get much higher.”

“Meaning seeing your car at the railroad tracks is a setup?”

“I don’t know what it means,” he answered carefully. “I know it didn’t happen, or if it did, it was without my knowledge. Assuming your witness actually did see my car-and you better check his reliability-it means someone’s very serious about getting me out of the way. The same goes for that rumor about me being involved in illegal dumping.”

He straightened slowly, almost imperceptibly, until I was fully and belatedly aware of his towering over me. “It would be a shame, given what I’m trying to do here, to have your department used as an instrument of libel. Once the truth came out, the fallout would be enormous.”

There was a long pause, during which I merely looked him in the eye. Then he turned on his heel and went back downstairs.

It had bordered on being a personal threat. I’d seen him in action before. It wasn’t a bluff.