The Marble Mask

Chapter 2

THREE DAYS EARLIER…

“Vermont Bureau of Investigation-Joe Gunther.”

“It’s Bill. You’re sounding very official.”

I looked across my small sunlit living room at the snow-covered trees outside, feeling more unemployed than official. “Try hopeful. This is the first time I’ve used this phone since you guys put it in last month. Is this a good-news call?”

“Good and bad-we’ve got a job, but you’re going to be flying damn near solo.”

Bill Allard was the chief of the newly formed VBI. Supposedly an exclusively major crimes unit with statewide jurisdiction, but as yet nonexistent except on paper, it had become a victim of the Department of Public Safety’s face-saving “analysis paralysis.”

“What’ve you got?” I asked him.

“You hear about the hiker who froze to death on Mount Mansfield?”

“Vaguely. There was something about it on the radio yesterday.”

“The Stowe PD was trying to keep it under wraps, making it sound like an accident, but the medical examiner just ruled it a homicide. Anyhow, someone must’ve leaked it, because at the governor’s weekly news conference this morning, a reporter asked if VBI was going to be called in. He didn’t turn a hair, said, ‘They’re on it as we speak,’ and went on to the next question. I scrambled to have the AG call Stowe’s chief and offer him our services before the press told him he’d already accepted.”

“The state police’ll love that.”

“Love it or not, it looks like we’re out of the closet.”

I was a little less sanguine. “Or Doctor Frankenstein’s lab.”

Sammie Martens took her eyes off the road to stare at me. “What the hell was he thinking?”

I shrugged and pulled out into the fast lane to pass an eighteen-wheeler slowly grinding its way uphill. We were shouldered in between Vermont’s Green Mountains on one side and a serpentine river on the other, heading west on the interstate toward Burlington and the chief medical examiner’s office.

“He was being governor,” I explained. “Someone popped him a question and he answered accordingly. He didn’t have to be thinking of anything so long as someone made it look like he was. Not that I’d complain,” I added. “Without this, God knows when we might’ve been activated.”

“What do we know about the dead guy?” Sammie asked.

“Not much that makes sense. He was found frozen stiff high on the mountain, presumed to be a lost hiker with a Canadian ID, but missing a few body parts and according to Allard not looking at all like your run-of-the-mill tourist-whatever that means. Bill only said there was something about him that had everybody wondering. So now it’s up to Vermont’s version of The Untouchables to fill in the blanks, with or without resources, manpower, infrastructure, or equipment.”

“Untouchables, hell,” she said half to herself. “Unheard of is more likely.”

I didn’t agree with her there. Even if nonfunctional, we were almost as well known as Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, at least locally-and as popular as the plague with every cop in the state.

The Vermont Bureau of Investigation had been the Legislature’s reaction to a hot-button killing the year before, in which a communications breakdown among several police departments had led to a known criminal’s remaining free until after he’d killed two kids. The original pipe dream-pushed by the same man who’d been elected governor on the strength of it-had been to replace the state’s sixty-eight separate law enforcement agencies with a single coherent force. Instead, hounded by a lobbyist free-for-all, the Legislature had compromised by creating a face-saving sixty-ninth-a small, elite unit which, unlike the state police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation-BCI-whose ranks were filled only by state troopers, would be staffed by the cream of the crop from all departments.

But only if they supported it.

As with most grand visions, VBI was being seen so far as a device to steal away every department’s top people and best cases.

The irony was that, initially, I’d been one of those critics. A career veteran of the Brattleboro PD and the lieutenant in charge of its detective squad, I’d watched with disgust as an interesting trial balloon had been deflated by confusion and lack of support. When the time had come to fill VBI’s ranks, I hadn’t even applied.

Now I was its field-force commander-the number-two man. A leap of faith I hadn’t quite finished rationalizing.

Sammie seemed to be puzzling along similar lines, as well she might, being another newly anointed VBI special agent who’d been cooling her heels at home ever since. “What’re we supposed to do here? Take over the case? None of this is turning out the way I thought it would.”

I shook my head sympathetically. “Until I’m told otherwise, I’m looking at us more like the forensic lab, or the arson guys, or the bomb-disposal squad. We deliver manpower, expertise, contacts, and our own prosecutor to whoever asks for us, and we leave them with the collar, the kudos, and the headlines if we’re successful.”

“The Lone Ranger,” she muttered, “making the town sheriff look good.”

“Kind of,” I agreed. “If we do it right, we’ll get all the tough cases, act pretty much autonomously, and let whatever department head requested us handle the reporters, politicians, and the cranks. It’s a cop’s dream come true.”

Hearing it out loud made it sound pretty good.

“If you weren’t sure what this was,” I asked her, perhaps hoping she wouldn’t ask me the same question, “why did you sign up?”

Sammie flushed slightly. I knew she’d applied to VBI early on without telling me, while still on my squad in Brattleboro. She was smart, tough, persistent, and normally loyal, which I knew was embarrassing her now. But she’d always been hard-driving and ambitious, and I’d never expected her to stay with us forever-all of which was moot anyway, since I was once again her boss.

She began hesitantly. “I thought I could maybe learn a few things.” She groped for something more meaningful in the face of an obviously different reality. Finally, she gave up. “It looked like an interesting opportunity.”

I took her off the hook. “Me, too. Does what I just described help?”

She reflected a moment and then smiled. “It sounds great. You think it’s realistic?”

I laughed. “Beats the hell out of me. How we perform right now’ll probably tell us.”

The ME’s office in Burlington is tucked into a corner of Vermont’s largest medical center, a happy beneficiary of the state’s efforts to lock horns with competing hospitals in bordering New York and New Hampshire. Once located above a dentist off-campus, Dr. Beverly Hillstrom’s office was now extraordinarily well appointed and the source of considerable pride. Which was entirely fitting-over many years, and despite Vermont’s small size and tight budgets, she had created one of the most efficient and highly respected medical examiner systems in the Northeast. These modern facilities were a long-overdue reflection of that.

She greeted us as soon as we were announced and escorted us down a gleaming hallway to the autopsy room at the far end, making well-mannered small talk along the way. Tall, slim, and Nordic in appearance, Hillstrom was of indefinable age and unmistakable bearing. Having worked closely together for years, we still referred to one another by title, and not once had she shared a single detail of her personal life. Yet the depth of our friendship was without doubt. She’d proven it many times, extending me courtesies she rarely granted others.

Titles, however, were causing her a problem right now.

“Lieutenant-in point of fact, that’s no longer accurate, is it?” she asked as we neared the wide, blank door of her autopsy room.

“Not technically. I don’t mind if you want to stick with it.”

She shook her head. “No, no. That wouldn’t do. How should I address you?”

I was still ambivalent about that. “It sounds a little silly, but we tore a page from the FBI book-officially I’m a Special Agent in Charge, or a SAC. Not that I’m in charge of anything yet. Why don’t we just make it ‘Mister,’ with the understanding that I’d really prefer ‘Joe.’”

She swung back the door and ushered us over the threshold, frowning slightly. “No. Mister is fine.”

The room before us was broad, deep, bright, and neatly arranged, with a skylight overhead and two operating areas extending from the wall like twin boat slips. Laid out on one of the metal tables was a body so unusual in appearance it looked more like a lab experiment than an autopsy candidate.

Standing next to it were two men, Hillstrom’s longtime lab assistant Henry, and Ed Turner, a state trooper assigned to this office as its law enforcement liaison.

Turner raised his eyebrows as we entered and greeted us with a reserve I knew we’d better get used to. He was, after all-and until or unless these prejudices were sorted out-a member of a “rival” agency. “Well, look at this-the feds that aren’t. What’re you doing here?”

I laughed and shook his hand, sensing Sammie tense beside me. “Just helping out the Stowe PD. How’ve you been keeping?”

Hillstrom, sensitive to matters of turf, quickly took over. “We have an approximately mid-forties male, in good physical condition aside from a few missing parts, who appears to have suffered a single fatal puncture wound to the heart, although we’ll have to wait for toxicology to rule out anything additional. The body itself has thawed out,” she explained further, “although some of the organs are still a little hard. We’re trying to speed things up by flushing them with warm water, but I don’t want to move too quickly.”

Sammie had been studying the open body with professional interest, staring down at its unusually dark red interior. Hillstrom’s finding, however, made her look more carefully at the chest. “He was stabbed?” she asked.

Her confusion was understandable. The ME’s patient was anything but traditional-his skin was red fading to a leathery brown, instead of the usual sickly yellow, his eyes were strangely sunken and dry, and his nose, ears, and fingers were dark, as if dipped in soot. He also was missing one arm and both feet, the amputations so clean, they looked cut through by a razor. But there was no sign of any violence aside from some bloodless scratches on the side of his face.

“You’re reacting to how he looks,” Hillstrom responded. “That’s what stumped the Stowe police and the local assistant medical examiner, I’m embarrassed to say. It’s also what led them to think that he might have been just a hiker who got lost and died of natural or environmental causes, perhaps scraping his face in the process.”

She pulled on a pair of gloves, moved closer to the man’s chest, and parted a few strands of his chest hair, revealing a tiny hole in the skin the size of a ruptured pimple. “There’s the point of entry.”

Sammie leaned so far over that her nose was inches from the wound. “What was it? It almost looks like a small-caliber bullet wound.”

“He was run through,” Ed Turner answered, “like with a shish kebab skewer.”

I could see from Hillstrom’s expression that she disagreed with the allusion, but she merely changed the subject. “Another interesting detail can be found with the victim’s extremities, including the ears.” She lifted his one remaining hand. “Notice the shriveling of the fingertips-their weather-beaten quality?”

“Almost looks like a mummy,” Sammie softly observed.

Hillstrom smiled broadly. “Very good, Agent Martens. That’s exactly right.”

“Implying he’s been around for a while,” I suggested.

“Longer than you think, I bet,” Turner added, his earlier reserve now gone.

“Look at his duds.” He crossed over to a pile of clothes on a nearby table and spread the top garment out for examination-a curiously constructed wool herringbone jacket with a belt across the back. It was worn, tattered, and faded.

Sammie glanced at it from where she was standing. “Looks like something out of a pseudo good-old-days catalogue.”

Turner shook his head. “Not pseudo. We’re thinking it’s the real McCoy. Check out the rest of it.”

We gathered around him as he displayed it all-wool pants and shirt, cashmere sweater, silk underwear. It reminded me of an old movie about a debonair city slicker going country for the weekend.

I reached out and fingered the material. It was coarse and brittle despite its high quality, and much of it was in shreds, especially along the same side as the scratches on the body’s face. “How old is it?”

Turner laughed. “Wild guess? Nineteen forty-five, six, or seven-in that range.”

“You having a good time?” Sammie asked testily. “How’re you so sure?”

He waved a hand in apology. “I’m sorry. This one’s just so far off the charts. Here.” He extended a small plastic bag to her from a sampling of similarly protected documents. Inside was a single piece of thick paper.

Sammie studied it a moment, turned it over, and finally gave it to me. “It’s a Canadian driver’s license, expires nineteen forty-seven. Name of Jean Deschamps.”

I glanced at it. “That’s it?”

Ed passed the other documents around. “No, no. He had all the usual stuff-money, business cards, kids’ photos, picture of a guy in uniform, what looks like an ancient credit card for a Sherbrooke oil company, presumably for his car. There’s also an identity card with his photograph, birth date, and address. It all looks like it came straight out of a museum.”

“Let’s see the paper money,” I requested. He handed me another envelope. “There’s about five hundred dollars, Canadian,” he said. “Good for a short vacation.”

I didn’t need to check for dates to know the currency predated 1952. Queen Elizabeth’s profile was conspicuously absent from any of the bills, in favor of her father, King George VI.

“Not right after the war, it wasn’t,” I countered. “Adjusting for inflation, that’s worth close to three thousand dollars, and even that’s misleading, since three thousand back then bought a lot more than it does now.” I waved my hand at the pile of clothes. “And those aren’t for hiking-they’re just dandified countrywear.”

“I think so, too,” Beverly Hillstrom said from behind me.

I turned to her. “So, what are we looking at? A man dead for fifty years, or something disguised to make us think so?”

“The answer,” she said, “might lie in the depth of his refrigeration. Generally, in hypothermia cases, we can either see or regain some degree of flaccidity shortly after we take possession of the body, even with the complication of rigor mortis. Here we have a subject frozen through and through at something around twenty degrees below zero, centigrade-a unique situation in my personal experience. And I would say that what Agent Martens identified as mummification is also in part what I would call old-fashioned freezer burn.

“Finally, add that to the equation,” she waved her hand at the clothes and documents, “along with the three amputations and the postmortem scrapes on his face, and I would venture that our friend has not only been in this state for a very long time, but that he was brutally handled recently, resulting not in the severing but the breaking off of some of his anatomy. I studied the points of separation carefully, and they show little sign of the weathering the rest of the body’s suffered, and no signs whatsoever of slicing, chopping, or sawing.”

“Pretty unlikely Mount Mansfield had much to do with any of this,” I suggested, mostly to myself.

Beverly Hillstrom smiled slightly. “I would agree.”

“What about the amputations?” Sammie asked.

“One hypothesis,” Hillstrom answered, “might involve dropping. If the frozen body hit a rocky outcropping or an icy surface at the proper angle, parts of it could have broken off or even shattered upon impact, as with a marble statue. That would also explain the lacerations and the torn clothes.”

I looked over at Ed Turner. “Did the Stowe PD search the area?”

He nodded. “They didn’t find anything.”

“The body could have been dropped prior to its final delivery on the mountain,” Hillstrom suggested. “Mr. Deschamps was not a small man and in that condition must have been quite difficult to handle.”

“So we might find an arm or a foot in a dumpster somewhere,” Sammie ventured. I glanced around the room, restless with all this abstract musing. Until I recalled a small reaction of Hillstrom’s earlier. “What do you think caused that puncture to the heart?” I asked her.

She returned to the side of the presumed Mr. Deschamps and placed her finger gently on his chest. “It may not be possible to prove, but my suspicion is that it looks odd because it’s rare-another indicator that all this happened long ago. I think he may have been killed by an old domestic standby, both in fact and in the movies: an ice pick. You don’t see many of them nowadays. And certainly not as a lethal weapon.”