The Dark Root

3

Several weeks later the snow vanished completely, replaced by the first crocuses poking up through the remnants of winter’s drab coat. The days became longer and warmer in fits and starts. The town of Brattleboro, sprinkled across a crazy quilt of hills, ravines, and twisting streams in Vermont’s southeastern corner, turned gradually leaf-green, hiding its two-century-old industrial grit under a brand-new flourish of spring-fresh foliage. Its residents, shut inside for months, began trickling out into the streets and playgrounds and parks, to look around at the world like newly awakened bears-a small segment of whom were eager for a first square meal.

In response to them, our business began its seasonal adjustment.

Petty vandalisms, car break-ins, graffiti rampages, parking-lot parties, back-street drag races-all the warm-weather crimes endemic to a large quasi-rural town of thirteen thousand people made their annual reappearances. The self-styled teenage homies came out feeling restless, and got busy venting the cabin fever they’d been storing up over the winter. All according to established routine.

And all of which made the phoned-in report of an explosive car fire in the middle of Route 30 enough to empty the office of almost everyone who didn’t have to stay there.

Especially since the driver was reportedly still in the car.

Route 30 is the main artery from town heading northwest into Vermont’s interior. It is a favorite route of skiers in winter, leaf-peepers in the fall, and kayakers and canoeists in the spring, the last of which are attracted by the broad, shallow, rock-strewn West River, which hugs the road along the valley floor for over twenty-five scenic miles, north of Brattleboro.

But this time, negotiating the breakdown lane alongside a growing line of stalled drivers, my attention wasn’t drawn to the rushing water. Violent deaths in this area were still rare enough to get the adrenaline pumping, and regardless of what had caused it, I knew this fire was going to be front-page news, and a number-one concern of the town manager, the selectmen, and the press, until we put it to rest.

About two miles out of town, pinched between a fifty-foot-high cliff to the west and the river to the east, I found a flattened, still-flaming, blackened hulk of a car, seemingly pinned in place by a tall, thick, tapering column of black, oily smoke.

Parked around it, looking paradoxically festive, stood a shiny collection of fire trucks, rescue vehicles, and police cars, all festooned with variously colored flashing lights. A few firefighters dressed in turn-out gear and breathing apparatus were casually hosing down the wreck from a safe distance. It was clear neither the car nor its driver would benefit from any more heroic effort.

The initial excitement over, the other responders were killing time, standing together near one of the trucks, waiting until things could be cleared away and the road reopened. A maintenance crew and a flatbed truck had already been requested, and traffic was being rerouted along the Upper Dummerston Road, which luckily paralleled Route 30 along this one stretch, above the cliff to my left.

I found an unobtrusive place to park and approached the group. Patrolman Sol Stennis, an enthusiastic one-year veteran of our force, was among them.

“Some mess,” he commented quietly.

I glanced over at the smoking car. In the few gaps the breeze created in the acrid cloud surrounding it, I could clearly see the charred skeletal remains of the driver, slumped over the blackened steel hoop of the steering wheel.

“You find out anything?” I asked him.

He removed his hat and rubbed his forehead. “I asked around when I first got here, but I couldn’t find any witnesses to the actual explosion. I talked to the people who called it in on their car phone-a couple from Williamsville-but they came up on it after it was already burning.”

“There was no other car?”

“Not that anyone knows of, and there’s no impact debris that I could find. I tried looking at the blacktop for skid marks, but by the time I got here, it looked pretty much like this.”

We were standing on a thin film of foul-colored water extending in all directions, obliterating anything that might have been underneath. The road was straight and flat along this section, well paved and wide-shouldered. It was the middle of the afternoon, the weather was clear, and there were no trees, telephone poles, or boulders nearby that the car might have struck. And yet, it looked like it had lost a fight with a freight train. Beyond the damage the flames had done, it was twisted and bent beyond all reason.

Stennis followed my gaze. “Think it might have been a car bomb?”

I shook my head. “It looks more pushed in than blown apart. I wish we could get close enough to read the plates.”

I looked up at the nearby cliff. It was a mix of beige rock and clinging vegetation, the latter of which thickened near the top, becoming a row of spindly trees that peered down at us like quiet, elderly onlookers.

Except for one of them. I crossed the road toward the river, glancing over my shoulder until I had a flatter angle.

Stennis tagged along. “What is it?”

I pointed to the cliff ’s distant edge. “See how that tree’s been torn up? Lower limbs ripped away on one side, bark stripped near the bottom? And a little below it, caught on that bush about halfway down. See that branch?”

“Damn,” Stennis muttered next to me. “The son of a bitch must’ve come off the Upper Dummerston Road.” He studied the otherwise unblemished cliff, visualizing the arc the car must have taken to end up where it was now. “Jesus. He must’ve been flying.”

I ignored the unintended pun. “Where’re you parked?”

He pointed to a patrol unit just north of the logjam of emergency vehicles.

“Good. We’ll take your car and circle around from the north.”

We were threading our way between trucks when I looked over my shoulder for one last glance at the scene. The Brattleboro Reformer’s Alice Sims, just leaving her own car, caught sight of me and came running, waving her note pad.

“Shit,” I muttered. “Hang on, Sol. I better make a no-comment.”

“Joe,” Sims called out as she caught up to us, “what happened?”

Alice Sims was the local newspaper’s “courts-’n’-cops” reporter, a job she’d inherited from Stanley Katz, who’d since been bumped upstairs to editor-in-chief. Like Katz, who in his prime had defined the word shark, Alice could be fiercely tenacious. Unlike him, she didn’t find it necessary to be personally offensive in the process. Dealing with her-especially with memories of him-was a comparative pleasure.

“Don’t know yet. I just got here.”

“Was it a bomb?”

I raised my eyebrows, feigning surprise at the very subject that had come up not two minutes earlier. “Whoa, Alice, this isn’t Detroit. We’re starting with the premise of a car accident. There is absolutely nothing to indicate a bomb at this point.”

She turned to face the still-crackling fire, her voice incredulous. “You saying that was a fender-bender?”

I shrugged and pointed to the fire chief standing by the largest of the trucks. “Ask him. He was here first. We’re just beginning our homework. I’ll let you know what we find out.”

She followed my advice, and Sol and I resumed our way, but I could already hear the clock ticking. Whatever this was, we already knew Alice was at least partially correct-this had been no simple accident, even if it hadn’t featured a bomb.

By now, the southbound traffic had been turned around and detoured back to the road we were headed for, which fed into Route 30 about a half mile north of the crash site. The upper road differs from its more-traveled neighbor in almost all respects. Tree-shaded, narrow, twisting, and hilly, it is the pastoral introvert to Route 30’s high-speed extrovert. Along most of its length, the road keeps far from the edge of the bluff overlooking Route 30, allowing for properties to be developed on both sides of it.

Not far below the northern intersection, however, geography dictates a single exception. Here, the river to the east and the hills to the west squeeze the two roads to within seventy-five feet of one another, and they become separated only by a narrow grassy shoulder, a ragged row of trees, and fifty feet of altitude. At this confluence, we found two fresh, clear furrows of a car’s wheels slashing diagonally across the threadbare grass to the edge of the drop-off. No guardrail had ever been planted here, either because of a shortage of funds or the lack of any apparent need.

“Damn,” Stennis murmured as we slowly rolled by and parked in the short driveway of a house several hundred feet farther on.

Due to the roadblock below, traffic was unusually heavy, which didn’t help me in collecting additional evidence. I risked becoming road kill several times to check the asphalt for telltale signs. Stennis nervously accompanied me, occasionally waving at passing cars in an ineffectual effort to slow them down. We continued in this fashion for over a half mile, while I slowly filled my pocket with odd pieces of vehicular scrap, most of it plastic.

Stennis was visibly relieved when I finally moved to the shoulder for the walk back. “What’ve we got?”

I pointed at a couple of angry, fresh skid marks in the middle of the road, as yet unaffected by the passing stream of cars. “Those come in a series almost-at regular intervals-and they’re from two cars, like they might’ve been punching it out at high speed. At the best, it means some high jinks run amok, but in any case it’s a homicide.”

Sol picked up on my growing sense of dread. “Alice’ll love that.”

“Let’s hope she doesn’t find out right away.”

He stared at me, slightly startled. “It won’t take her long after we cordon this area off.” He pointed ahead to where the car had left the road.

“I want to use a low-profile approach, at least for starters. There’s not much here anyhow. You take the necessary pictures and measurements now, and I’ll have J.P. do the rest later. I’ll order a canvass of everyone on the street-find out if they saw or heard anything. And maybe we can plant some innocuous citizen-complaint story in the paper about along here-it might stimulate a witness who saw something when they were driving through. It’s hard to believe two cars could have duked it out in broad daylight without somebody noticing it.”

“Why not just tell the paper what we found? Alice’ll probably put two and two together anyhow and get pissed off that we played cute,” Sol said.

“Could be, but right now you and I are the only ones who know how that car ended up down there-except for whoever helped launch it. That could be an advantage. And if nothing else, it’ll spare us fending off a lot of questions we can’t answer yet.”

“What about the canvass? That’s not too subtle,” he persisted.

“We can still use the hot-rodder ploy-tell people we’re trying to corroborate the complaint.” I patted my pocket. “In the meantime, I’ll give this stuff to J.P. See if he can’t match it to some make and model. And I’ll have a statewide be-on-the-lookout issued for any cars with fresh front-end damage. The local body shops can be checked out, too.”

I stopped suddenly. “Did you notice anyone unusual or out of place down below, watching the fire-maybe making sure their handiwork was terminal?”

He mulled it over for a few seconds. “There were some kids.”

I began to shake my head, but he interrupted me. “No. I mean kids from Brattleboro, not this neighborhood. Sally Javits and the Beaupré brothers. They must’ve heard about this pretty quick to get all the way out here this fast.”

“Who do we have down below?” I asked, pointing toward the lip of the tree-shrouded cliff.

“I heard Smith checking in.”

“Have him find out if Javits and the Beauprés are still there.”

Stennis keyed the radio mike he had clipped to the epaulette of his uniform jacket and relayed the inquiry. Several minutes later, I heard Smith report back empty-handed. Stennis just raised his eyebrows at me.

We’d reached the edge of the torn-up strip of grass. “Find them. But again, make it discreet. I don’t want them knowing we’re looking for them, and I don’t want anyone else thinking they’re snitches.”

I left Stennis by the side of the road and walked alongside the deep furrows in the earth.

The ruts showed the wild tearing of a car out of control, fighting momentum and energy in a desperate effort to avoid the plunge ahead. But the end had been inevitable. Examining the damaged tree from close up, I saw that the car had already been airborne at the time of impact, launched into space by an inconspicuous shelf of rock some six feet shy of the edge. The car had obviously taken off into the void with such speed, the tree must have been the only reason it hadn’t flown clear to the river.

I stepped as close to the cliff ’s rim as I dared, but aside from the smell of burning rubber and the column of smoke curling up from below, I could see nothing of what had brought us here. In less than a month, I thought, even the scant signs we’d found of a person’s final moments of panic would be dulled by time, weather, and the onslaught of spring growth.

I hoped our case wouldn’t suffer a similar fate.

Over the next day and a half, J.P. Tyler, our department’s forensics specialist, could do little with the debris I’d collected from the Upper Dummerston Road, nor did he read much more from the skid marks than I had. He confirmed my hypothesis, however, that there’d been two cars, traveling at up to a hundred miles an hour, and that one had butted the other from behind.

The canvass didn’t add much more. The two cars had been heard by some, seen by a few more, and been variously described as black, green, blue, brown, and “dark”; as hatchbacks, sports cars, sedans, coupes, and one “cabriolet”; and as having been occupied by anywhere from one person to four, none of whom had been identified. One of the witnesses said he’d heard shots. The newspaper story the next day about mysterious hot-rodders didn’t produce a single phone call.

The wreck, as expected, yielded a bit more. A 1986 Dodge Duster, registered to Alfred John Hutchins-address Brattleboro-it had been stolen twenty-four hours earlier. The plates had been crudely altered, with a 3 changed to an 8, and a C to an O, and the car had been newly repainted, although not by Mr. Hutchins. These few details were presented by Tyler with morose apologies. Of our five-member detective squad, Tyler was only perfunctorily interested in day-to-day police work. Forensics was his joy, and he always felt doubly let down when he hit a blank wall-by his own dearth of training and equipment, and by the limitations of the science in which he placed such faith.

We shipped the charred skeleton off to the state’s medical examiner, Dr. Beverly Hillstrom, but I was pretty sure that unless we could find a dental chart to match it, it would remain a John Doe for some time.

Alice Sims had not yet done the deductive math Sol Stennis had worried about-connecting the crash site to our canvass of the Upper Dummerston Road. We’d diverted her with leaks about the stolen car and our search for the driver’s identity. But I knew it wouldn’t be long before she put it together and let everyone know we were dealing with homicide.

It was therefore with considerable relief that I received a call from Sol at ten o’clock that night at the office.

“I think I found those three kids. You know the pond at the top of Rice Farm Road?”

I did. Located on a long, winding dirt road connecting Brattleboro’s north end to the village of West Dummerston six miles farther up, the pond was an artificial water hole carved into the top of a hill overlooking the West River Valley. Because of its peculiar location, fishermen, canoeists, and hikers could enjoy the twin pleasures of being on a pond and a mountaintop simultaneously.

I told Stennis to pick me up. During his brief tenure on the force, he’d made an art of keeping tabs on the town’s restless youth, and in a hub employment center like Brattleboro, with a daytime population of forty thousand people, a police force of twenty-eight quickly learned not to puff up its detectives at the expense of the patrol officers. Becoming a detective was still a reward, as in all departments, but we, more than most, encouraged our patrol to become independent investigators.

It was early spring yet, and while the leaves had come out, the nights were still cool and the bugs hadn’t quite hatched. It was the peaceful hiatus between winter and summer and never lasted long enough for my liking. I sat back in Stennis’s passenger seat, enjoying the breeze through the window. The sepulchral blur of the woods raced close by us in the darkness, absorbing like a dark blotter the glimmer of our headlights.

The southern approach to the pond was as dramatic as the site itself, emerging as it did from the folds of the forest. At one moment, we were climbing in low gear, encased by trees on one side and a steep dirt embankment on the other, when abruptly the bank ceded to the pond’s smooth, flat expanse, not five feet from the driver’s window. It was like taking an escalator from the bottom of a lake and suddenly breaching its surface, without a ripple. A little farther on, the road leveled out so near the water’s edge that the latter’s black, glassy plane began mere inches from our tires. It perfectly mirrored the canopy of stars overhead, doubling its impact and making me feel I was floating in space.

“There they are,” Stennis muttered, oblivious to the scenery.

Ahead, parked on a tiny peninsula, was a single small car, its lights out, looking more like a washed-up boulder from a distance, except that in its midst glowed three tiny orange eyes-cigarettes belonging to ghostly inhabitants.

Stennis pulled up alongside and switched on his brilliant, side take-down lights, wiping away the stars, the illusion of private spaciousness, and quite on purpose, establishing our dominance. His voice, however, was just as conspicuously quiet and gentle. He spoke first to the girl in the back seat. “Hi, Sally. Been a while.”

Large, broad-shouldered, her pale face almost perfectly round, Sally took a purposeful drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. She made a visible effort to ignore the blinding effects of the light.

“Hey, Stennis.” Her voice was hard, flat, but not unfriendly, showing she was both used to this kind of approach by the police and always in control, in style if not in fact.

Sol picked up his flashlight and shined it into the shadows of the car that his rooftop lights couldn’t reach, directly into the faces of the two young men sitting in the front. Both of us watched how their pupils reacted, how their expressions changed. They mimicked their more assertive companion, with less success, but boldly enough that we could tell they were clean-the cigarettes were just that, and those were only sodas balanced on the dash.

“Mike. Pete. How you doin’?” Stennis asked.

The one at the wheel was Mike Beaupré, the older brother by a year. “We’re doin’. ”

“What’re you up to way out here?”

“Staying out of trouble,” Sally answered from the back.

Sol nodded and killed all his lights, acknowledging that he was taking them at their word. “Any trouble in particular?”

I saw her smile in the glow of her cigarette. “You should know.”

“We don’t do too bad.”

Mike chuckled. Cadaverously thin, with his baseball cap perched back on his head and a sharply protruding Adam’s apple, he looked like an animated scarecrow. “Only when you catch us.”

“I haven’t had to come after you in a long time.”

“You just haven’t caught him at nothin’,” Peter called out from beyond his brother. He was the low man on the totem pole. The three had been inseparable friends since childhood and, despite their youth and unremarkable appearance, were tough in ways I’d never been at their age. While they all had records, none of their crimes had been more than petty in nature. But their experience had given them stature among their peers, and they were worthy of our grudging respect. Which was why Stennis was allowing the conversation to follow the etiquette of the street.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he now said, following up on Peter’s quip. “You might’ve settled down a little in the past year.”

Mike mulled that over, gently bobbing his head. “Gettin’ older.”

It was a comment an uninformed adult would have smiled at, but we knew the backgrounds of these kids-the neighborhoods and families that had shaped them. None of it compared to the ghetto of a big city, of course, but their lives had still been marked by neglect and violence and poverty.

Stennis returned to the point, now that the social amenities had been observed. “You’re a long way from downtown tonight.”

“Think you’d be happy ’bout that,” Sally said guardedly.

“I’m not complaining. A little curious, maybe.”

“We needed a break, man,” Pete spoke up. Mike nodded silently.

“The burned car?” I asked quietly. Sally turned her head and stared at me. I didn’t have the rapport Sol had with them, but they knew me as a straight player.

After a long pause, she said, “Yeah.”

“Who was the driver?”

“Benny Travers.”

Sol let out a low whistle. “No shit.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Her face was hard to read in the gloom. Travers and she had been more rivals than friends, both street-level wielders of influence, but with significantly different management styles. While Sally was more of a consensus builder, albeit with a hard right hook, Travers had been a typical bully. Older by ten years and more traveled than Sally, he’d done hard time, had a rough reputation, and being originally from out of state, hadn’t had the local ties that we tried to work to our advantage.

“He got whacked,” she finally answered.

“By who?”

“Don’t you know shit?”

“We know you were at the scene before we were.”

The implication hung in the air for a long, still moment.

“I got a call,” Sally finally said.

“Who from?”

She looked around restlessly, as if suddenly constricted by the small car. “I don’t know.”

“We think Sonny did it,” Mike said.

Stennis was incredulous. “Sonny Williams? You’re shitting me.”

Sally was contemptuous. “Not Williams. Jesus. Williams couldn’t whack himself, for Christ’s sake.”

“A new player,” I said quietly, as a point of fact, although it was the first I’d heard of him, too.

“No shit,” Mike muttered angrily.

Sol remained undaunted. “Who the hell’s Sonny?”

“Bad news.” Sally’s face was hard, shut down-scared, I suddenly realized.

“He in town tonight?” I asked.

“Could be. Some of his boys are.”

“Do we know them?”

She shook her head. “You will. Benny was nothin’-a free advertisement.”

“What does this Sonny want?” Sol asked, obviously frustrated at having completely missed a new development in his streets.

“Some of the action, of course,” Sally said bitterly. “He’s moving to get a gang going… Fucking chink.”

I sat forward and stared at her. “He’s Chinese?”

“I’d be pretty stupid to miss that.”

“Where’s he from?”

Sally was suddenly angry. “Jesus, Gunther-fucking China. What d’you think?”

But Mike knew what I meant. “I don’t know where he’s from-maybe the West Coast. But some of his boys’re from Montreal.”