Dead to the World

by B. D. Smith

  “Sure,” Lou responded. I’ll check with her when she gets back from lunch.”

  After a few more casual questions Anne and Doug thanked Binford and headed back into town. On the way Anne suggested enlisting Binford’s intern, Rebecca Hull in their efforts to learn more.

  “Becky Hull played basketball for the Foxcroft Academy before going off to the University of Maine. She often joined our informal pickup games on the weekends and after school, and I got to know her and her family really well. Becky is usually quiet and doesn’t say much, so people tend not to notice her. But she’s very sharp and doesn’t miss much. I can talk to her. What do you think?”

  “As long as she’s very clear that all we want is for her to keep her eyes open and let us know if anything seems off. If she’s willing, make it clear that Binford could be dangerous, so she should not take any chances. No snooping around, no Nancy Drew fantasies – just doing what she’s supposed to do as an intern, and talking to you when it’s safe, about what’s going on.”

  Anne looked up Becky’s number and called her when they got back to town, and she quickly signed up to be their eyes and ears inside the race control center. Becky had already picked up on Binford’s mercurial mood swings and had decided to keep a very low profile. She had considered quitting but needed the internship experience for college course credit. And Becky already had some interesting information to pass on. Binford had just told Doug and Anne that she had spent the morning reviewing footage of Nigel’s crash at the entrance to Bucks Cove, but Becky said Lou had arrived late that morning and ever since she got in had been piloting drones and appeared to be tracking something or someone.

  15.

  Peter Martell stopped by with disappointing news later that afternoon.

  “Sorry Doug. I didn’t get any usable prints off the Lund. Looks like they wore gloves. I did get a partial footprint on one of the seats – probably someone stepping into the boat. We’ll see what we can do with it back at the lab, but don’t hold your breath.”

  “Sounds good Peter. Anything you can come up with on the footprint would be great.”

  Reaching out to shake Doug’s hand, Peter replied.

  “Katie is packing a bag and we’re out of here. Thanks for encouraging her to stay with me in Augusta until this is all sorted out. From what she says this Binford woman is unhinged.”

  Later that night, Tom Richard returned Doug’s call from earlier in the day.

  “Hey Doug, I’m still waiting on a callback from someone who served with Binford in Iraq, so no info on that yet. But I have talked to a buddy in HR about why she left the state police, and it’s pretty creepy. Apparently Binford decided that her lieutenant, Marge Johnson, was not treating her with sufficient respect, or maybe didn’t respond in the way she wanted to her flirting. So late one night Louise unexpectedly showed up in Marge’s bedroom and wanted to talk it over. Fortunately, Marge is a hostage negotiator and knows all the right moves in such situations. She was able to sweet talk Louise out of her dark mood, and they ended up having a few beers at the kitchen table and then Louise left.”

  “What happened then?” Doug asked.

  “I’m not sure about the exact sequence of events, but Binford was quietly reassigned to an obscure job in the cold-case records archive, and after a few months she realized she would be stuck there forever and quit.”

  “OK – thanks Tom. Any update on Nigel Underwood’s condition? Still in a coma?”

  “As of late this afternoon, there’s no change – stable but comatose. And Doug, getting back to Binford for a minute – we need to look at the possibility that she was behind the murder of Don Robertson. What if she was trying to kill Ximena, and Doug was just collateral damage? Maybe we have been looking at the wrong suspects and the wrong motive all along? Maybe Robertson’s murder was the result of Binford’s scheme to knock off Ximena and didn’t have anything to do with the patio boat race, Nigel Underwood, or that other killing – John Eastman.”

  “You’re right Tom. Anne and I talked about it a bit, and Binford definitely moves up in our list of suspects. Maybe tomorrow you could go around to where Louise lives – I think she has a house up by the university in Orono, and take a look around. Peek in some windows, check out the garage, that sort of thing. Maybe we’ll get lucky. But no clandestine B&E Tom. Let’s avoid any fruit of the poison tree problems down the road.”

  “The mere suggestion offends me,” Tom replied with mock outrage. “I would never consider such a thing, particularly in daylight hours.”

  The next morning, after a leisurely breakfast with Rosemary, who had slept over at his place, Tom checked in at the Maine State Police barracks in Bangor and looked up Louise Binford’s home address in Orono. Cruising by the house first to make sure there was no one about, he continued on to the end of the block, turned the corner, and parked by the alley that ran behind Binford’s house. Walking down the alley until he reached her backyard fence, Tom pulled a spotting scope from his jacket pocket. Crouching down, he scanned Binford’s small two-story brick house, looking for security cameras. Not seeing any, he opened the unlocked gate and cautiously approached the house, checking for any tripwires or other surprises that might have been set for unwanted guests. Although he still hadn’t heard back from his source about Binford’s military record, Tom knew that she had served several tours in Iraq with special forces units, and was very careful as he conducted the reconnaissance. Slowly circling the house, checking for any opportunity for access through unlocked windows and doors, Tom came away disappointed. The house was locked up tight, shades were drawn, and there were few bushes or other plantings to shield him from view.

  He walked back toward the alley, pausing by the ramshackle garage to look in the door, which was partially ajar. It was dark in the garage, with the only illumination coming from the gap between the doors where Tom was looking in, and from a small side window that was partially painted over. Pulling one of the doors open wider, Tom could see that the space was mostly empty. A rusted lawnmower and assorted yard tools – a hoe, rake, and axe, were piled haphazardly in one corner. In the other back corner, a vintage Triumph motorcycle missing its front wheel was partially covered by what looked to be a worn tarpaulin. Seeing the tarp, Tom perked up. If the tarp covering the motorcycle in Lou’s garage was a match with the tarp fragment that had been used to block the air flow up the chimney in the cabin where Don Robertson was found dead, it would be the hard evidence needed to charge Lou Binford with murder.

  Under the legal concept of “curtilage,” the garage, like the house, could not be legally entered and searched without a court approved search warrant. Tom could not resist a closer look at the tarpaulin, however, and entering the garage, took several closeup photos of it from different angles. Stepping back through the door he had pulled open, Tom swung it back to its original location and then took a photo of the motorcycle and tarp through the gap. Checking to make sure he had left no footprints, he then exited Binford’s back yard and returned down the alley to his car.

  As soon as he got back to the office Tom uploaded the photo he had taken of the cycle and tarp through the open garage doors and sent it to both the evidence analysis lab in Augusta and to Doug. Then he sent Doug the additional photos he had taken of the tarp from inside the garage, knowing that Doug would understand their problematic nature. Since they were not obtained in a legal manner the inside-the-garage photos Tom took could never be used in court. But if the closeups suggested that the tarp was a good match to the fragment recovered at the Robertson murder scene, they would just have to figure out a way to get a search warrant for the garage so the tarp could later be legally “discovered.” Maybe with a better camera, long lens, and bright lights they could go back and take more photos through the open doors to get what they needed for a search warr
ant. And if the tarps didn’t match, based on the photos, then they needn’t waste any time following up.

  At the same time that Tom was sending out the photos from her garage, Louise Binford was sitting in front of her computer at the roller rink, listening to her intern giving an account of the previous morning’s boat accident in the South Cove.

  Listening to Becky drone on, Binford couldn’t help returning once again to the memory of how Ximena had humiliated her at the Bear’s Den over a year ago when she and Katie had come up for the weekend. Katie had been visiting her mother, who didn’t think much of Lou, so Lou went for a beer at the Bear’s Den. Ximena had been sitting at the bar that night when Louise took the empty seat next to her and struck up a conversation. They seemed to hit it off right away, and after buying each other drinks and getting more and more friendly, even flirty, Lou thought, Ximena got up to use the restroom, and Louise followed her.

  Ximena was at the sinks, washing her hands when Lou walked up and embraced her from behind, nuzzling her neck and whispering a few explicit endearments. Ximena immediately broke the embrace, laughed drunkenly, and good-naturedly told Lou to “fuck off” before pushing past her and exiting the bathroom. Lou took a piss and then followed her out. Ximena had moved to a table where she was excitedly talking to three men sitting with her. They were all listening to her with rapt attention. As Ximena caught sight of Lou coming out of the bathroom, she blurted something out to her companions and wagged her thumb in Lou’s direction. As the men looked up at her with mocking leers, hand gestures, and raised glasses, Lou turned and stormed out of the Bear’s Den.

  The humiliation of that moment, with drunken losers laughing at her, had remained raw for Louise all these months, and her frustration was bubbling up again when she received a call from her next-door neighbor in Bangor.

  “Hey Lou. You told me to call if I ever saw something suspicious at your place while you were out of town. So get this. Just a little while ago me and Alison were upstairs watching TV and smokin some weed when I saw this big guy slinkin across your backyard toward your house. He went all the way around the house, checkin doors and windows, and then went back to the garage. He peeked in the doors, which were open a bit, then went in the garage. I saw some flashes in there. I figure he probably took some photos. After he came out he took a few more shots through the open doors, and then went back out to the alley and walked away. I know you ain’t got shit in that garage, so I got no idea what he was takin photos of.”

  Lou listened with growing anger and apprehension, and after thanking her neighbor for the heads up, she quickly ended the call.

  “Fuck me,” she thought. “That had to be Tom Richard, the sneaky prick.”

  Becky had resumed her long boring monologue, but Lou ignored her and decided to get some fresh air and think this through. Exiting the roller rink, she walked over to a bench by the water and sat, looking out across the lake toward Borestone Mountain looming on the horizon to the north.

  “What was he looking for?” she thought. “What would he find worth photographing in the garage?”

  She tried to think of what all was in the garage, which she rarely used. Lou could remember a few rusty garden tools left behind by the previous renter, and her old Triumph Bonneville motorcycle, which had a blown engine. And the tarp covering it. Then it dawned on her. Tom had been photographing the tarp left behind by the previous owner. The one that she had used to cover the Bonneville. The story about a tarp being used to cover the chimney in Robertson’s death was all over town by now, and Lou realized they were hoping they might be able to match the tarp in her garage to the murder weapon.

  “Well, well,” she thought. “Fuck me. Maybe they also suspect me of running over Ximena in the South Cove.”

  Lou was briefly tempted to call Tom Richard and tell him that he had her permission to take all of the photos he wanted in her garage, but immediately decided not to. Better to act as if she didn’t know what they were up to. Let them simply flail away. At the same time, Louise was insulted that Tom and Doug considered her stupid enough to hold onto a piece of evidence that could so easily link her to a murder. Gazing out across the calm surface of the lake, Louise also began to suspect that it was Katie that pointed Doug and the others in her direction.

  “That bitch,” she thought. “She’s gonna regret ratting me out.”

  Tom’s hope that the tarp photos would provide hard evidence linking Lou Binford to the murder of Don Robertson were soon dashed. When Doug checked Tom’s incoming photos on his phone, he quickly sent a text in response.

  “No match – different color, wrong grommets, no paint spatter.”

  “Oh well,” Tom thought, “It was worth a try.”

  Back in his office at the Maine State Police barracks, Tom checked to see if his special forces source had emailed him anything new about Binford’s service records, but nothing had come in. There was, however, an email response with several attached files to the initial inquiry he had made to New Jersey authorities regarding Nigel Underwood. They confirmed that there was an LLC company registered under the name “Underwood Events” in the state. But no one named Nigel Underwood was associated with the company. Adrian Capler was listed as the registered agent for the firm, and very little other information was provided in the certificate of organization filed by Underwood Events with the state.

  Curious now, Tom settled in for an on-line search for information on Adrian Capler in a number of different law enforcement data bases. In a little over an hour he had found two other aliases associated with Underwood/Capler. According to arrest records and court records from jurisdictions in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, Underwood had also used the names Edward (Ned) Unger and Andrew Conan at various times. In the last two decades Underwood had been the subject of a string of fraud investigations, a few of which had resulted in fines, but he had never served jail time. There were no outstanding warrants for him or any active ongoing investigations, but it was clear he was a con artist with a long record of scams he had pretty much gotten away with.

  Tom emailed Doug and Anne summarizing what he had found, and attached files detailing a number of Underwood’s arrest records and court proceedings. He then called Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center to check on Underwood’s status and was surprised to learn that he had woken up from his coma a few days ago and was showing rapid signs of improvement. Nigel was now responsive and had been moved out of the ICU that morning. After checking with Underwood’s physician, the nurse Tom talked to indicated that he could interview Underwood that afternoon.

  Located right on the Penobscot River at the northeast edge of downtown Bangor, the EMMC was a sprawling red brick complex that had clearly grown incrementally over the years. Tom flinched at the familiar smells that wafted over him as he walked in the main entrance. He had spent far too much time in hospitals, both as he grew up and during his time in the military. Tom’s mother had spent the last few years of her life in hospitals and hospices in northern Maine as she battled cancer and Tom had always dreaded having to visit her – watching her slowly waste away, the antiseptic smells and scuffed linoleum in the hallways, the careworn nurses, and the seemingly endless moans of people in pain. His time in military hospitals had only added to his hospital aversion. When an IED blew up his Humvee during his second tour in Iraq, Tom had escaped with only a concussion, ruptured eardrum, and leg burns and lacerations. But he saw too many much more serious injuries among his fellow war wounded patients to ever be able to erase them from his dreams.

  Passing the nurse’s station on Underwood’s third floor ward, Tom noticed a large man in a rumpled dark suit sitting in a chair halfway down the hallway.

  “Must be one of Nigel’s bodyguards,” he thought, approaching the man.

  As he got closer he realized the bod
yguard was fast asleep, his chin resting on his chest and a “Guns & Ammo” magazine open on his lap. Deciding against waking up the dozing guard – no point antagonizing the man, Tom quietly slipped past him, opened the door to Underwood’s room and entered. Nigel was watching TV, his head wrapped in bandages and his elevated right leg encased in a bright green fiberglass cast.

  Nigel looked startled and let out a weak bleat as Tom entered the room. Dropping the TV remote, he tried to grab the nurse call button to summon help. Taking several quick steps, Tom moved the call button out of reach and with a friendly smile, introduced himself.

  “Don’t be concerned Mr. Underwood, I’m not a threat. My name’s Tom Richard. I’m with the Maine State Police, and I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes. It won’t take long, and then you can get back to your TV show.”

  Taking out his state police identification, Tom held it up close in front of Nigel’s face. Underwood, displaying a remarkable spectrum of yellow to red to purple bruises down the right side of his head, stared back at Tom with an addled expression.

  “You can’t be in here. Get out.”

  “It’s OK Nigel. The doctors say it’s OK. And your guard is still right outside the door.”

  Tom decided it was better to not further alarm the patient by mentioning that the guard in the hallway was fast asleep and drooling.

  “How are you feeling Nigel? Have they told you when you’ll be released?”

  Underwood gazed back at Tom but said nothing. Tom tried again.

  “Do you remember anything about the crash?”

  Still no response from Underwood, who shifted his gaze to the door, silently urging it to open and for someone to rescue him.

  “Apparently, Nigel, someone removed the buoy that marked the rock you crashed into. We’re thinking they tried to kill you, and that they almost succeeded. Any idea who would want to harm you?”