The Ragman's memory

2

Christine Evans stood by the bird box in Norah Fletcher’s backyard, her large, parka-clad body planted like a challenge to the inscrutable landscape beyond the fence.

“Birds are near the bottom of the pile when it comes to stripping a carcass,” she said, her flat-footed vernacular tinted with the nasal tones of a native Bostonian. “The larger animals come first-bears, dogs, foxes, raccoons, possums, skunks. You wouldn’t believe the pecking order.”

She suddenly swung away from the view and fixed me with an inquisitive stare. “You’re sure the hair didn’t belong to some longhaired animal?”

J.P. Tyler, our small squad’s forensics expert, looked frail and anemic next to Evans’s energetic, pink-faced bulk. He shook his head in response. “It’s human. It has traces of purple dye, like from a punk hairdo.”

She accepted that with an unsentimental grunt. “Doesn’t matter. It’s all the same to our furry and feathered friends. Anyhow, I think you’re right-you probably will find other remnants if you know where to look.”

She indicated the rest of the block with a sweep of her arm. “Under garages, in old tool sheds, culverts, storm drains-hiding places like that. Animals don’t travel great distances with food, but they like to feel secure when they chow down.”

She then pointed toward the woods lining the field. “That’s the other place to search, but I wish you luck. Every nook and cranny is fair game. The only good news is that you won’t have to look too far into the trees. The first few dozen feet ought to do it.”

“What if that’s where the body is?” I asked her. “Couldn’t the hair have been the only thing to make it out this far?”

She shook her head. “I’d stick with your first idea,” she answered. “The body’s in the field, and I bet it’s not too far off. Chickadees are efficient that way. They’re not going to fly far to gather nest materials, especially a thick hunk of hair, and they’d be nuts to bypass the field for the woods.”

Sammie Martens said to Tyler, “I guess we got our marching orders. Better ask everyone we interview if we can poke around their properties, as well.”

They left to coordinate the small army of officers we’d summoned for the neighborhood canvass. Christine Evans pushed out her lips pensively and added an afterthought. “Until the snow melts, you might have to be happy with what you’ve already got.”

We didn’t find much. The interviews were a bust. Like Norah and her mother, nobody on the street had seen, heard, or smelled anything amiss during the previous summer. No one had gone missing, no one with purple hair had been seen hanging around, and no one had made a discovery similar to Norah’s. At the last house on the block, however, nearest to where the field met the woods, we did find a man who’d lost his dog to a hit-and-run the previous August, and whose abandoned doghouse contained a small collection of fragmented, gnawed-upon shards with an ominous bony look to them.

Not that we were immediately impressed, including Tyler, much to his later discomfort. Finding bones in a doghouse, after all, was not unheard of, and this owner admitted that bones were a treat he’d regularly supplied his pet. It was more in the interest of thoroughness, therefore, that we asked Christine Evans to give us her educated opinion.

She’d been in Norah’s house throughout most of the search, keeping the Fletchers company while remaining available to us. As a result, she brought them both with her to check out what we’d found, her benignly domineering style reminding me of a Scout leader conducting a nature trip. Still, despite Ann Fletcher’s apparent tacit approval, I wondered about prolonging Norah’s exposure to what she herself had set in motion.

Evans, however, obviously believed otherwise. Arriving at the doghouse, she gathered Norah next to her before its arched doorway and played the beam of an officer’s borrowed flashlight onto the pale ivory gleam of the scattered fragments, starkly revealed amid the otherwise pitch-black shelter.

It took her about thirty seconds to reach a conclusion. “Most of those are animal bones, but that small piece in the far corner is part of a human zygomatic arch, where the mandible hinges to the rest of the skull.” She touched Norah’s cheek to demonstrate.

“Wow,” Norah murmured, easing my concern.

“Can we get a closer look?” Evans asked, shoving her head deeper into the opening.

I threw a questioning glance at Tyler.

“We’re all set-photographs and measurements are done.”

Behind him, the late dog’s owner, an older, bare-headed man with a red nose and a frost-dusted mustache, added, “It doesn’t have a floor. You can tilt it back.”

“Good,” Evans laughed. “I was wondering how I could squeeze in there.”

Four of us followed the owner’s advice and tilted the doghouse back, exposing its littered dirt floor like the innards of some large, wooden clam.

The light had dulled, the sun fading early in the winter months, so the contents of the small dwelling, now surrounded by four snowbanks instead of the walls that had once protected it, were suddenly illuminated by a half-dozen flashlights, whose bright, hovering disks swept across the hard-packed surface like theatrical spotlights.

“How big was your dog?” Evans asked the homeowner.

He held his hand out just below his waist. “Big-he was a mastiff. Really powerful.”

She looked at the rest of us. “Domesticated dogs especially tend to go after the skulls-they remind them of balls.”

Tyler, his embarrassment at missing the identification washed away by her enthusiasm, crouched by her other side and leaned over the exposed site, adding, “He probably buried what he didn’t crush up. You can see how the earth is disturbed near the back.”

Side by side in the snow, Evans and Tyler began conferring like old colleagues, pawing at the frozen earth like hampered archaeologists trying to piece together what they could.

Tyler glanced over his shoulder, his frustration plain. “We need hammers and picks to get through this crap.”

Norah Fletcher’s quiet voice floated up in the wake of this comment, reminding us that these scattered shards were more than mere parts of a puzzle. “So it really is somebody?”

Tyler, as was typical when his focus was jarred by some emotional consideration, looked startled and self-conscious. Evans, on the other hand, proved how good a teacher she could be. She sat back on her haunches and draped a burly arm around the thin girl’s waist, explaining to her in a near whisper the intricacies of human anatomy and of animal behavior, replacing some of the sudden chill in the air with a broader appreciation of what life sometimes throws in our faces.

By the time she’d finished, and after Norah’s pale face had regained some of its studious poise, a patrolman appeared with two trenching tools and a hammer he’d borrowed from a neighbor. Evans took advantage of the interruption to get up and escort Norah to where Ann Fletcher was standing uncomfortably on the fringes of our little group.

“I think we’ve probably had enough science for one day. Besides, I happen to know you’ve got homework,” Evans said, as Norah slipped her gloved hand into her mother’s.

Norah merely nodded, the full impact of the doghouse’s contents lingering despite her teacher’s best efforts.

As they turned to go, I stepped before them and crouched down so Norah and I were eye-to-eye. “I appreciate what you did. When we find out what happened here, it’ll be because you cared enough to come forward. Not many people are that observant, or show that much responsibility.”

A subtle pride radiated from behind those large glasses. She murmured, “You’re welcome,” before looking down at the ground. I no longer felt so badly about exposing her to more than what might have been appropriate. Good experiences sometimes come in odd packages, something I sensed even Norah’s mother might agree with.

I straightened and shook Ann Fletcher’s hand. “Thank you.”

“I tried to stop her,” she answered apologetically, still obviously distressed at how events had snowballed.

“You were being protective. What she did does you credit-you obviously taught her well.”

She smiled slightly, which was all I wanted to see. “Goodbye, Lieutenant.”

Tyler appeared at my elbow. His earlier frustration at the frozen ground had faded. “I didn’t mean that literally, about the pick and hammers. It’d be too destructive. We can throw a tent over the whole thing, put a space heater inside, and have the ground totally thawed within twenty-four hours. That okay?”

I turned back toward the site. “Sounds good to me. God knows how long this has been here. Anyone else come up with anything yet?”

Sammie appeared from around the back of the nearby garage. “Stennis found what looks like chicken bones on the shelf of one of the storm drains, and Lavoie got a long bone from a culvert. Both were photographed in place and bagged. Evans thinks the long bone’s from a deer. The crime lab’ll tell us for sure. I also called the State’s Attorney’s office on the cell phone.”

“They sending anyone over?” I asked.

Sammie shook her head. “Said we could brief them later.”

We returned to where Christine Evans was back on her knees scrutinizing the dirt before her.

“There may be more,” she said, pointing with a gloved finger. “See that scat?”

Sammie’s face turned sour as she focused on several two inch long, dark, twisted droppings, their ends distinctively marked by pointed, upturned spirals.

“What about it?” I asked skeptically.

“It’s from a fisher-part of the marten family-related to the weasel. They don’t like open ground, but they’re bold enough to come onto human property.”

She suddenly flashed a disarming smile at the largely ignored homeowner who was standing beside me. “Speaking purely scientifically, it’s a good thing your dog died when it did. Had he lived, he not only would’ve pulverized these fragments, but no fisher in his right mind would’ve had the guts to forage anywhere near here. As it is, this scat tells us there may be more to find, and maybe where to look for it.”

“The fisher took something?” I asked.

“The scat’s a little old, so it wouldn’t’ve been recently, but it’s a good guess.”

I noticed Tyler nodding, a pleased look on his face. This was turning into his kind of investigation.

“You said they avoid open country,” I said. “Does that mean we need to search the woods for where this one might’ve gone?”

Evans rose to her feet, steadying herself by placing her hand on J.P.’s shoulder. “Yes, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find. Look for a large, craggy, crevice-filled old tree-probably just a few hundred feet from here. You may not find much, though. Fishers aren’t very big. On the other hand, they aren’t bone-gnawers, either. This one would’ve gone for whatever meat was still attached to a smaller fragment. Find out where he had his meal, and I think you’ll find the bone it was attached to.”

I glanced up at the sky. The fading light was sufficiently offset by the quickly vanishing storm clouds. “We’ve got maybe an hour and a half before it gets too dark,” I told the others. “Let’s see if we can find the right tree.”

It took barely half that time. Sammie pulled the entire team together and strung them out in a line facing the woods, whose dark latticework of intertwining bare branches was offset by a bright frosting of snow.

Entering the forest was like infiltrating a dense and eccentric crystalline structure whose very size and darkness muffled and absorbed our movements. The sensation forced my thoughts back to the body lying under the cold, impersonal snow, lost and forgotten.

There were a couple of false starts-trees whose appearance could have fit Christine Evans’s description. But when we found the real thing, there were no doubts. Barging through a tight cluster of skinny saplings, our arms crossed before our faces for protection, several of us stumbled into a clearing dominated by a crippled monster of a beech tree. Gnarled, bent, lightning-shattered, but determinedly alive, it half-lay across the land like a wounded elephant, holding itself up on a tripod of enormous branches, each the thickness of a normal full-grown tree.

“Jesus,” Sammie murmured in awe.

There was a moment’s stunned silence as we absorbed the majesty of the scene and were touched by the Herculean effort this tree had made to survive.

“Wow,” Christine added. “I’ve got to get some kids out to see this.”

“This what you were after?” I asked her.

But she was already looking for ways to ascend the staggered trunk into the sprouting of branches high overhead. Sammie summoned the others on the radio, and soon Evans, Sammie and I were surrounded like circus acrobats by a semicircle of small, upturned faces. The three of us had split up at the first major junction, to pursue our own separate tangle of twisting branches, looking for any hole, crevice, or half-rotted crack, all the while keenly aware of the tree’s slippery surface and the long drop to the ground.

It was because of this latter distraction that I almost missed what I was after, only returning to a narrow split in the wood beneath me because I thought I’d seen a glimmer, as from the reflection of a single cat’s eye.

I straddled the thick branch nervously, wondering what I’d seen-and wary of something suddenly bursting out of the hole. Cautiously, I played my light down into the darkness, leaning forward only as I became convinced that what I’d found was safely uninhabited.

The crack I was poised over opened onto a large rotted-out cavity beyond. Playing the light around inside, I saw the debris of steady animal use-acorn hats, bits of vegetation, clumps of matter I couldn’t identify, and the by now familiar pallor of a neatly cleaned piece of jawbone. But the bone hadn’t been the glimmer that had caught my eye-embedded within it, as bright as an ember, was a single gold tooth.

This discovery suddenly personalized the remains we had found, and settled like a weight in my chest. From the moment I’d seen that huge, empty, ominous frozen field, I’d been fending off a sense of foreboding. For despite my hopeful words to Norah Fletcher, it had not struck me as a reasonable spot for some old vagrant to choose as his final resting place. It had reeked of a dumping ground. Now, for no particularly rational reason, this tooth, in all its jaunty clarity, struck me like the confirmation of a homicide.

Gail Zigman, my best friend and companion for many years, and my housemate for the past ten months, was the newly anointed legal clerk for the Windham County State’s Attorney’s office. It was in that capacity that she was watching me quizzically from across her boss’s conference table, a pen poised over the pad before her.

It was the State’s Attorney, however, who’d asked the question. “Are you going to be able to keep a lid on this until you have more to go on?”

I shook my head. “The paper’s already called us, and Ted McDonald waylaid the chief during a break at a meeting he was attending at the high school. So it’s already gotten out. We’re going to have to give them some explanation.”

Ted McDonald was the corpulent, fast-moving news director of the town’s single radio station-WBRT-a home-grown good ol’ boy whose laid-back manner belied a surgical ability to extract information.

Jack Derby, newly elected barely a year ago, betrayed a forgivable concern. “How’re you going to present it?”

“I don’t have too many options-”

I was interrupted by a knock on the door. Chief of Police Tony Brandt stepped into the room. He took a chair by the door, keeping the three of us at arm’s length. From the tone of his voice, I could tell it hadn’t been one of his better days, with or without Ted McDonald. “I apologize for being late. I was getting an update from Sammie Martens, who was nice enough to stick around and let me know what the hell was going on.”

Sammie had already called ahead to warn us. “Sorry, Tony,” I said. “To be honest, there wasn’t much to talk about. That’s why we didn’t drag you out of your meeting.”

He took the apology without comment. “So I gathered. I take it McDonald picked this up on the scanner?”

“I guess,” I answered. “I was just saying I didn’t see any harm in giving them the straight poop-maybe someone’ll come forward with a missing person report.”

“We’ve got nothing at all so far?” Brandt persisted.

“I sent the hair, the bone fragments, and the piece of jaw with the gold tooth up to the crime lab to see what they can find. We’re guessing it’s somebody young. Tyler looked at the hair under his microscope and detected traces of purple dye, so maybe it was a punker, male or female. Also, the jaw included three other teeth, but no wisdom tooth-he said it hadn’t erupted yet-another possible sign of someone younger. ’Course, if you want to play a worst-case scenario, there’s nothing to say all three samples don’t come from different bodies.”

“Swell,” Derby murmured.

“That’s not what you’re going to tell the press, are you?” asked Gail. For years, she had been a selectman in this town, before a midlife reevaluation-precipitated by a traumatic sexual assault-had led her to revive a twenty-year-old, never-used law degree. That background made her as politically savvy as anyone I knew, a fact Jack Derby hadn’t missed from the moment she’d applied for the six-month clerkship.

I shook my head. “No, no. I’ll play it straight. But I have a bad feeling about this. The gold tooth will probably lead to a dentist, and the X-rays to an identity, but I doubt it’ll end in a whimper. Young people don’t generally wind up dead in a field without some help.”

“Sammie said there was a design on the tooth,” Tony commented.

“Yeah,” I answered slowly. “That is something I’m going to leave out, but I hope it’ll make finding the identity easier.” I leaned far over the table and borrowed Gail’s pad, tearing a back page out of it before giving it back.

“The tooth I found in the tree is the first bicuspid on the right side of the maxilla, or upper jaw, according to Evans. That’s the one right beside the canine, heading back toward the molars. And the gold isn’t a filling. It’s a colored aluminum cap, covering the whole tooth. The design faces outward, it’s been crudely scratched onto the cap’s surface, like with a knife point or something sharp, and it looks kind of like this.”

I held up my quick sketch of a utility pole with two crosstrees stuck into the mathematical symbol for infinity. “Ring a bell with anyone?”

The rest of them either shook their heads or remained silent.

“It looks astrological, but I’ve never seen it before,” Gail said. “I could ask around.”

I slid the piece of paper over to her. “Thanks.”

Jack Derby removed his tortoiseshell half-glasses and rubbed his eyes, looking like a tired college professor after a long day of reading term papers. He blinked at us blearily before asking, “Why not release the design? Wouldn’t that be helpful?”

“Maybe,” Tony Brandt admitted. “But not until we figure out its meaning,” he added with an ironic smile. “We’ve had enough surprises already.”

“The paper and Ted’ll be happy enough without it,” I said. “Especially if we make it look like we’re being open and cooperative.”

The silence greeting that last remark was revealing. We all knew from experience that a distracting cloud of politics, posturing, and publicity would soon be complicating our lives. The truth, and how much and which parts of it were revealed, would become hostage among those who could make the most currency from it-including everyone around this table.

I walked Gail to her car behind the bank building where the SA had his office. The total clearing of the clouds had made the night air so cold it felt brittle, an impression accentuated by the harsh shadows thrown out by the parking lot lights. Gail’s car was a shimmering white under a thick layer of sparkling, crystalline snow. It was now almost ten o’clock.

“You didn’t want to send those samples to Hillstrom instead of the crime lab?” she asked me.

Beverly Hillstrom was the state Medical Examiner, an old and trusted colleague with the persistence of a bloodhound, and the usual first recipient of any corpse-or parts thereof. “It was her choice. The lab’s the only one in Vermont that can do a DNA analysis, and that’s what’s going to give us the most exact information. She said she’d drive down to Waterbury and take a look at the samples before they start chopping them up-kill two birds with one stone. I got the distinct impression neither she nor the lab people were overworked right now. Our good luck-this would’ve taken a week or more otherwise. Now they’re saying they’ll get back to us in forty-eight hours.”

I took Gail’s briefcase while she brushed the snow from her car door with her mittened hand and groped for her key in her purse.

I hefted the bag. “This thing weighs a ton.”

She let out a weary sigh as she fitted the key to the door. “Homework. Between the clerkship, boning up for the exam this February, and a correspondence bar-review course I just started, I feel like I’m drowning in this crap. Tell you one thing-if I do pass the bar and get a job, it’ll feel like a vacation.”

She took the briefcase back from me and tossed it heavily onto the passenger seat, retrieving a combination brush and ice-scraper to clear off her front and rear windows. “You coming home now? We could grab a sandwich before I hit the books.”

I shook my head. “Got to talk to the newsboys. It’s only an hour or so before deadline, and I want to make sure we get our two cents in.”

She smiled tiredly. “Some couple. We saw a hell of a lot more of each other when we lived apart.”

I kissed her cheek. “Things’ll get better. I’ll check in on you when I get home.”

I saw her out of the parking lot before I cut back through the alleyway to Main Street, and began walking toward the spire-bristling, one-hundred-year-old, red-brick Municipal Center where my own office was located.

Despite the arctic cold, it was a beautiful night. The traffic was all but nonexistent, the snow had softened the harsh contours of the century-old industrial-era downtown, and I knew from experience that the usual nocturnal criminal activities would be held in check by the pause that typically followed winter storms.

My own mood didn’t match the surrounding peacefulness. The discovery of stray body parts was the obvious cause, but there was more. I had been a cop in Brattleboro for over thirty years, and while a town of twelve thousand people-albeit swelling to over forty thousand during the day-was hardly the crime capital of New England, I’d seen my fair share of uncivilized behavior.

Too much, perhaps. I thought back to Gail’s face in the harsh light of the parking lot. “Sexual assault” didn’t describe what she’d been through. We’d caught the man responsible, and Gail’s recovery had made her psychologists glow with self-satisfaction, but she’d changed in the process. Not intellectually, nor emotionally, nor even sexually, but she was no longer the same person I’d known before the attack. An intense ability to focus had been subtly upgraded to a quasi-obsessive drive. She was fueled by complex passions now-to be the best at her work, to see justice done, to put a stop to what had happened to her. There was a grim determination in her eyes that made me yearn for the untainted enthusiasm of old.

I knew that much of her original nature would return in time. It was still early-not even a year-and she was probably overloading her plate to dull the lingering fears and insecurities. She’d spent the past few months in South Royalton, at the Vermont Law School, taking an intense refresher course in criminal proceedings. The bar exam was a month and a half away, which meant endless hours of hitting the books. And she’d jumped when she’d heard of the six-month clerkship in Derby’s office.

On top of her therapy sessions… And our moving in together.

I stopped opposite the darkened library and looked back down Main Street stretching out to the south like an abandoned urban canyon, sand-bagged with snowbanks. I’d known Brattleboro all my life, although raised on a farm seventy miles north. It was a vibrant, lively, querulous place-populated by a life-saving mixture of blue-collar and retired hippie-and I’d seen it survive the economic body blows that had decimated other New England towns. But whether it was my years taking their toll, the price I’d seen Gail pay for who and what she was, or the fact that I’d just spent the afternoon watching a teacher turn the discovery of a few body parts into a learning experience for a child, I was feeling a sense of loss and despair.

I didn’t know what had led to that person ending up dead under the snow off Hillcrest Terrace. I wasn’t sure I’d ever find out. But I had to make the attempt, to give those few scattered remains a little life after death, so they could speak for themselves.

I realized then what my trouble was-what was making my other sorrows that much sharper. It wasn’t so much that someone had died. I didn’t have enough details yet to have an opinion on that. It was that he or she had died quite some time ago, and that only a few birds and other scavengers had taken notice of it.

A life, it seemed, should amount to more than that. It was the chance this one hadn’t that saddened me the most.