The Skeleton's knee

11

Five hours had been spent disinterring our nameless skeleton, and in that time, an inordinate number of haphazardly parked cars, trucks, and other vehicles had washed up on Fred Coyner’s front lawn, like debris left over from a flash flood.

It took twenty minutes or more in the rapidly fading light to sort this mess out, a period in which Hillstrom, Leach, the hearse driver, and several other early birds-now all buried in the back of the pack-had to sit in their cars or stand around and wait. I, too, wanted to leave so I could attend the postponed squad meeting at the office, but I spent the enforced delay coordinating the conclusion of our search for the gun, which we still hadn’t found. At this point, I was none too optimistic about our chances, so I put a couple of experienced patrolmen to the task, rather than members of my own team.

When I finally emerged from the woods, the driveway was almost clear. Coyner’s house, in contrast to the bustle of moving vehicles, was as dark and still as it had been all day, seemingly abandoned by its owner in the face of overwhelming odds.

“You talk to him about the body yet?” a quiet voice asked me as I stood alone near the edge of the lawn that overlooked the darkening valleys below.

I turned from the house, surprised both by the gentle tone and by the fact that its owner had never been known to use one. Stanley Katz, abrasive, cynical, ambitious, and unrelenting, covered the “cops-’n’-courts” beat for the local daily Brattleboro Reformer. He was also, I had to reluctantly admit, one of the best reporters they had; for all his obnoxious ways and superior manner, he went after a story with grim determination, not caring who might be injured, so long as the facts were considered accurate up to deadline time. On the sliding scale of Truth, he sometimes hit lower than midpoint, but not because of any lack of integrity. The nature of his job was to report a story often before it was finished, a handicap that almost guaranteed an occasional shot in the foot.

Not that any of this meant I liked him. Like everyone else I knew who’d suffered at his hands in print, I thought the man was a pain in the ass.

I therefore took my time responding to his question, weighing the pros and cons of a simple “no comment” versus a running dialogue about Fred Coyner, whom I wasn’t even sure Katz knew about. I finally hedged my bets and reacted solely and specifically to the question: “No.”

Katz, small, narrow, and perpetually pale, merely nodded. “That was a bullet Leach found, wasn’t it?”

“It looked like one, but that may not mean much.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“There’re quite a few people running around with old bullets in them.”

I expected an incredulous outburst at that, which is partly why I brought it up, but again he merely nodded, his hands still nonchalantly buried in his pockets, as if he was merely passing the time of day, instead of pursuing a story.

I finally turned to face him fully. “You all right, Stan? You seem a little under the weather.”

He gave me an echo of the shifty-eyed leer that had often made my blood boil in the past. “Why? Because I haven’t given you the third degree? You shouldn’t hold yourself so high, Joe. While you’ve been sitting in a hole for the past five hours, I’ve been grilling almost everyone here, including members of your illustrious profession. Besides, you don’t talk to me much, anyway.”

“That never stopped you in the past,” I persisted, sensing something else.

He shrugged and glanced toward the hundred-mile panorama facing Coyner’s house. It was almost dark by now, the distant, broken horizon a thin crimson line fading to dim starlight high above. As if mirroring the sky, pinpoints of light had appeared in the shadowy valleys beneath us, leading me to wonder, as I often did at night, what all those people were up to and whether their activities would eventually cause our paths to cross.

“I resigned today,” Katz murmured, half as explanation and half, I thought, as confession. “Effective next week.”

I was stunned. Katz and the Reformer had been one and the same for years, as inseparable, some would have said, as death and the plague. His announcement, therefore, left me groping among several emotional responses. I was sad for the paper, which would only suffer from his departure; happy for us, from whose back he would finally be plucked; and curious about the community’s response, which, like most small towns, viewed any and all change with an initial burst of befuddlement.

I decided to let him be my guide. “Jesus, Stan, I hope that’s good news for you.”

Now his grin returned with most of the familiar malevolence in place. “Well, Joe, if it is, it ain’t going to change much for you. I’ve already sold my talents to the Rutland Herald, which, as you know, is just over the mountains. Which means,” he added, with a condescending pat on my shoulder, “that I’ll still be as tight on you as a tick on a dog.”

So much for the lessening of our burden, not that I actually believed him. Rutland was a large town, quite capable of keeping his exclusive interest. “That’s nice, Stanley. I hope you starve to death.”

I was halfway to my car, seeing that the traffic jam had finally untangled itself and that both Hillstrom and the hearse driver had started their cars, when I heard Katz swear loudly behind me. I turned, to see him staring openmouthed at a small hatchback vanishing down the driveway.

“Miss your ride back?” I asked.

“Yeah-that son of a bitch-I told him to wait.”

“That’ll teach you to jump ship.” I continued toward my car.

I could hear him running after me. “Hey, Joe, wait a minute. Can you give me a lift?”

I opened my door. “I don’t know, Stanley. You were a little hostile a few minutes ago. Didn’t leave me in a great mood to do you any favors.”

He stopped and looked around, checking his options. But aside from the hearse and the medical examiner, I was it. He was now looking downright peeved. “Come on, goddamn it, don’t jerk me around.”

I shook my head. “Get in.”

We were the last of the caravan, and as I reached the first curve of the driveway, I glanced into my dark rearview mirror, half-expecting to see Coyner climb out of the woods to return home. There was nothing.

“Thanks, by the way,” Katz muttered.

“No problem. So why the big change?”

“It was just time,” he answered carelessly and immediately switched subjects. “What’s your angle on our bony friend with the flashy kneecap?”

I ignored him. “Was it the new Midwestern bosses and their bite-sized news?” The Reformer had been purchased several months ago by a minor USA Today clone, which had promptly changed the page-one banner to bright red and had reduced its articles to ten column inches maximum, with no overruns to other pages. It was now peppy, perky, and pointless to read. Katz’s articles had been among the few to make the blood circulate, and the only ones allowed occasionally to extend the length limitation.

“Something like that,” he answered. “So are you treating this as a homicide?”

“You should’ve been happier than a hog in heaven-chief investigative reporter, or whatever they named you.” Stanley looked out the window at the tenebrous, flashing shadows of passing trees, his neck rigid with irritation. After a few venomously silent moments, during which I smiled happily in the dark at Hillstrom’s taillights before me, Katz finally let out a long sigh.

“All right, although I don’t know why you give a damn. I left because of the politics, the paperwork, and the pissing contests-not unlike this one.”

“Worse than before?”

His voice rose an octave. “Before was a picnic. Compared to this bullshit, it was like turning out a newsletter for the Brownies. Now you use one hand to type and the other to check your back for knife handles.”

I settled back to listen, only half-interested in his complaints, delighted instead that I wouldn’t have to play informational footsie with him anymore.

I’d agreed to drive Stan back to his office, just off Exit 3, before returning downtown. I therefore followed both Hillstrom and the hearse onto the interstate at Exit 2, amused that Hillstrom was probably thinking my eagerness to have the skeleton analyzed had gotten the better of me and that I was going to follow her all the way to Burlington.

What happened instead bordered on the surreal. We had barely picked up speed off the entry ramp when a horizontal spray of red tracers spat out of the darkness from the low ridge to our right. It engulfed the hearse just ahead of Hillstrom’s car and caused both vehicles to swerve violently.

“What the hell is that?” Katz shouted in alarm.

The deadly flashes of light kept lashing out at the hearse in short spurts, forcing it to brake sharply.

“Gunfire,” I answered, swinging my own car over to the left breakdown lane. I threw open the door and dragged Katz out after me, sliding into the median-strip ditch that separated the northbound lane from the southbound. I quickly raised Dispatch on my portable radio. “M-80 from O-3. We’re under machine-gun fire on I-91 northbound, just above Exit 2. Repeat: We’re under machine-gun fire. The shots are coming from the east side, about due west of the Frog Pond behind Harris Hill. Send everyone available to seal off the area and close off the interstate, north and south.”

I began running in a low crouch toward the two cars ahead of me, both of which were also haphazardly parked in the breakdown lane. The machine-gun bursts continued in deadly earnest, brief, controlled, and aimed exclusively at the hearse. In the lights from Hillstrom’s car, I could see steam rising from the hearse’s engine, and I could smell gas from the ruptured tank.

I reached the driver’s side of the medical examiner’s car, pulled open the door, and found her staring at me from a prone position on the front seat, her eyes wide with terror.

“You hit?”

“No.”

I reached in, grabbed her hands, and pulled her out into the ditch’s shallow shelter next to Katz, who had followed me, muttering obscenities.

Only then, knowing I couldn’t reach the hearse’s driver, did I direct my attention to the source of the machine-gun fire. I drew my pistol, steadied it on the hood of Hillstrom’s car, and fired three shots at the stuttering red-hot bull’s-eye that hovered in the distant blackness.

My mind was no longer in Brattleboro, Vermont, but somewhere in the mountains of Korea, where night after night I’d lain still and silent behind my rifle, straining to pierce the darkness of the night, a box of grenades by my side. In Korea, too, they’d used incendiaries at times, hoping to hit an ammo dump or a pile of gas tanks, and we’d taken advantage of the one major drawback of using such ammunition: You can follow it right back to the muzzle that fired it.

The machine-gun fire suddenly stopped, just in time. Despite the now-overpowering reek of gas from the hearse, it hadn’t yet burst into flame.

I circled the front of Hillstrom’s car, paused for an incongruous bit of traffic, and sprinted across the road, yelling, “Stay put-don’t check out the driver ’til I give the all clear.” The absurdity that I might be hit by a car on the interstate while trying to take out a machine-gun nest rattled in the back of my mind.

I slid up against the far guardrail, expecting another burst of fire to catch me at any moment, but all remained quiet. I paused a moment to catch my breath, then vaulted over the protective guardrail and made for the grassy slope ahead. I could hear a growing chorus of siren wails approaching from all sides.

The bank led up to a short wall of trees, beyond which was an undeveloped low ridge overlooking the interstate. As I reached the tree line, the first squad car squealed to a showy stop below me. Two patrolmen jumped out, guns drawn.

“Lieutenant, you get him?”

I took cover behind a small tree. “I don’t know, but he’ll sure as hell get you if you don’t move.”

They did an embarrassed double take and scrambled for the trees to either side of me, climbing the slope like two cats with their tails on fire.

“Who’s coordinating you guys? You were right in the line of fire.”

They looked sheepishly at each other. The one named Hartley, a relative newcomer to the force, balefully admitted, “We didn’t check in. We just heard you needed help and responded.”

I shook my head and used my radio again. “M-80 from O-3; who’s coordinating on the shooter?”

“O-3 from O-2,” I heard Assistant Chief Billy Manierre’s reassuring growl. “I got it. Where are you?”

“Tree line east of the interstate, with two backup. I returned fire and haven’t heard anything since. He may be on the run.”

“All right. We’ve almost got the area boxed in. Give me five minutes and I’ll call you back.”

I sent Hartley and his partner far out to either side, to better intercept anyone coming off the ridge and to reduce the chance of all three of us being caught in a single burst of fire. I looked over my shoulder at the three cars and saw Katz following my footsteps in a hunched-over hundred-yard dash. The interstate was now mercifully empty of traffic.

He reached my side barely able to speak. “See anything?”

“I see someone who shouldn’t be here. You willing to die to get a story?”

He shrugged. “Sure-what the hell.”

That made it a hard point to argue, and I wasn’t going to test it by sending him back across the shooting gallery. “Then I guess today’s your lucky day. Stick right behind me, all right? If you don’t, I’ll shoot you myself.”

“O-3 from O-2.” I keyed the radio mike. “Go ahead.”

“Ready to close in from all four sides.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

The area we were slowly hemming in belonged mostly to the Retreat, Brattleboro’s largest landowner, and its second-largest employer. A substance-abuse and mental-rehabilitation facility founded over a century and a half ago, the Retreat had turned its real estate holdings into farmland, woodlots, and recreational areas, giving Brattleboro much of its rustic flavor.

That was of little comfort to us now, however, confronted with a half-mile square of hilly, pitch-black wilderness instead of an easily patrolled grid of residential streets.

Our problems were compounded by the haste needed to contain the area. Over the radio, I heard Manierre coordinating, in addition to our own men, several responding state troopers, Windham County deputies, a state motor vehicles inspector, and even two patrolmen from Hinsdale, New Hampshire, just across the river.

The three of us, with Katz nervously dogging my heels, left the comfort of the interstate’s openness for a claustrophobic tangle of dense, dark, and disorienting underbrush. The noise we made, stumbling and pushing our way past the enveloping branches, added to the dread that we, and not some disembodied sniper, were the ones increasingly at risk. To either side of me, I could hear the two patrolmen cursing and talking to themselves, doing their best to sustain their courage, praying the next shadowy clump of trees ahead wouldn’t suddenly come alive with a crimson burst of machine-gun fire.

It wasn’t easy. The farther we buried ourselves in this wilderness, the more the tension became punctuated by sounds far off, the flickering of half-seen flashlights, and the incessant urgent mutterings of our portable radios. As the four sides of this roughly coordinated search grid converged, the danger increased that one of us might mistake the other for a target and convert this well-intentioned effort into tragedy.

This very point was driven home when Katz, slightly to my right, stepped on a rabbit, which immediately bolted into the bush, causing him to shout out in alarm and Hartley-just barely visible on the flank-to swing toward us, gun raised.

“It’s okay,” I shouted, freezing in midstep, half-dropped into a crouch.

“Who’s there?” came a voice from off to the side, reinforced by the nervously flitting beam of a powerful flashlight.

“Joe Gunther and three others. You the other flank?” Instinctively, I and the other two officers also waved our lights about. I could feel the relief flooding the air among us, thick in Katz’s voice as he muttered, “Thank God.”

We found Billy Manierre in a small clearing near the Frog Pond five minutes later. A large, white-haired, avuncular man, representing, along with Brandt and myself, the old guard of the department, he was always dressed in uniform-a recruiting poster testament to how high a patrolman could go.

He was holding a map in one hand and a flashlight in the other, grilling one of his team leaders on their coverage of the scene. Greenhill Parkway, a seldom-used, isolated residential street, had not been blocked off.

The young officer wilting under Manierre’s questioning tried his best to explain, but his stammered excuses could never address the root of the problem, as both Billy and I well knew. We were a “full service” department, which meant we offered everything a big city department did. But while every branch of a major metropolitan police force was fully funded and staffed, ours were sometimes represented by a single individual, often one with several other hats to wear. As tonight’s efforts had amply demonstrated, our lofty aims, combined with our lack of personnel and experience, sometimes fell a little short of the mark.

Greenhill Parkway was a dead-end street paralleling the interstate and leading off Route 9. It didn’t even border the area we’d just searched, but, rather, pointed like a finger into its heart. Billy was by now convinced that leaving it open had allowed the shooter to jump calmly into his car and join the backed-up traffic on Route 9 while we were noisily setting up our dragnet.

I returned to the interstate, to find Beverly Hillstrom in the company of Ron Klesczewski, a tow-truck crew, and a fire engine company that was hosing down the punctured hearse. Farther off, several state troopers were beginning to direct the newly released traffic.

“No luck, I take it?” Ron asked.

I shook my head. “How’s the driver?”

“Serious but stable,” Hillstrom answered. “He was hit twice in the leg. Why was someone trying to kill us?”

“I don’t think he was necessarily trying to kill anyone. I think he was after our friend here.” I peered through the remains of the hearse’s back window at the black plastic body bag on the stretcher. “You had a chance to check him out yet?”

Ron, no doubt still smarting from his day-long ordeal at the State’s Attorney’s office, muttered, “You’d think he was dead enough already.”

Hillstrom opened the back of the wounded station wagon and climbed in. “He’s dead enough, Sergeant, but he may have things to tell us yet. Lieutenant, if you had any worries earlier about my bringing in a specialist to examine these bones, you can relax. It will be done.”

She carefully checked the body bag for bullet holes. “There’s one near the head, and another lower down. If there’s any damage, it shouldn’t be difficult differentiating it from any older trauma. For all that gunfire, I’d say the sniper wasn’t a very good shot.”

“He was aiming for the gas tank,” I replied.

She nodded soberly, realizing that by mere proximity, had the hearse exploded, her car would have been burned to a crisp. “Well, if you’ll help me get this fellow into my backseat, I’d like to get to work on this as soon as possible.”

I looked at her and smiled, wondering if she’d been as rattled as I, and knowing I’d never find out. “You mind if I arrange a state police escort?”

She smiled back a little tiredly. “No. I think I’d like that.”