Presumption of Guilt

by Archer Mayor

  “When you said you were sending me a case that had been entombed for forty years,” she continued, “I imagined a much more damaged skeleton.” She spread her gloved hands out, as if introducing a work of art. “But this is remarkable. I may have let popular prejudice override my scientific expectations.”

  “How so?” he asked, surprised.

  “This means of disposal is a cliché of early-twentieth-century fiction,” she said. “Usually in the context of the famous ‘overshoes’ of Prohibition fame. I’d always assumed that the stories played on a mere handful of actual cases. But concrete encapsulations are not uncommon currency—to the point where they were addressed in the Journal of Forensic Sciences a while ago. I’ve never seen it in Vermont, however. Also, for some reason, I thought that the acid in the concrete would be much more destructive of the skeletal calcium. I forgot that concrete has a high level of calcium, inhibiting the very leaching of bony matter I was anticipating.”

  Joe was amused. He always enjoyed it when she got nerdy on him, ramping up her already fancy prose style. “This was a special mix,” he offered. “I don’t know about the chemistry, but the quality and consistency of concrete was above and beyond the norm.”

  “I thought it was a warehouse floor.”

  “Yes and no. Every aspect of construction was so closely supervised that we were told they applied the same standards across the board, whether it was the reactor building or a slab off to one side. Plus, given the amount of material called for over the whole four-year project, they set up their own manufacturing on-site, where it could be pumped or trucked around at their convenience. Anyhow, that’s why this guy’s final resting place wasn’t your run-of-the-mill garage floor.”

  She nodded. “Well, our good fortune. And I gather that they salvaged molds from around his face and one hand. That might prove helpful if they decide to make latex impressions later on, to help in identifying him.”

  Joe agreed. “Fingers crossed. There’s probably not much out there for comparison, like dental records and X-rays. All this happened pre–computer filing.”

  She shrugged, still taking inventory. “It’s a trade-off. They’re making such inroads with DNA and the like, we may be able to get more out of this poor fellow than you think. Anyhow, let’s see what he can tell us.”

  As she bent over her work, he asked, “So it is a male? The anthropologist at the scene said so, too.”

  “Oh, yes,” she confirmed. “I’d say a six-foot male Caucasoid of approximately thirty years of age, based on the skull and pelvic synthesis.”

  “You don’t have his name?” He laughed.

  She looked up and smiled back. “That’s where you earn your keep, I’m afraid. But, knowing you, I’m sure you will.” She touched a small blue stain high on the pelvic girdle and announced, “He was wearing blue jeans. Did you find rivets at the scene?”

  Joe had color photographs laid out along the table’s edge. There were more than a hundred of them, taken as the body emerged into view. He extracted a shot that clearly showed a small round metallic nubbin resting on a bony background.

  “Like this?”

  “Classic,” she said. “The one part of a pair of jeans that never seems to completely disappear—that and the zipper. Belt buckles, boot grommets, jewelry, watches, eyeglasses, credit cards. All good stuff. I take it the killer wasn’t accommodating enough to leave this man’s wallet in his pocket.”

  “No such luck,” Joe confirmed. “We did collect some of the other items you mentioned, though, including the ring here.” He indicated another picture. “Sadly, the inscription inside only has initials. Nice confirmation—if and when we make an ID—but not too useful now.”

  The back door swung open to admit a bespectacled man in a white lab coat carrying a laptop. Beverly’s face creased into a wide smile. “Dr. MacColin Stare. Gracing us with your presence, no less.” She turned toward Joe. “Special Agent Gunther, of the VBI, Dr. Stare, from Radiology. Dr. Stare was kind enough to drop what he was doing to process our friend’s scans, but I didn’t expect such rapid and personal service.”

  MacColin Stare was melting under her praise, and bashfully gave Joe a limp, moist handshake, making Joe wonder how often the man ever stepped into the sunshine. The thought stopped him from commenting about how appropriately Stare’s name was matched to his specialty—that and the fact that it was a foregone conclusion the poor guy had heard it before.

  “Well, I thought you might appreciate it,” Stare said, smiling, “especially given the circumstances. This is sounding like a modern Agatha Christie novel, although I doubt she would’ve used a nuclear reactor as a setting.”

  As he spoke, he cleared some room, with Todd’s help, on a nearby counter and fired up his laptop. “I have a couple of things you might find interesting,” he said, scanning through a series of detailed X-rays. “I know, for instance, that he was muscular, hardworking, and right-handed—from his skeletal development—but I realize you’d like me to cut to the chase. I was going to take you up the body, section by section, but this’ll be worth it anyway.”

  To Joe’s untrained eye, the set of images Stare selected appeared to show a shoulder.

  “Ta-dah,” the radiologist announced, moving aside.

  Beverly leaned forward. “Is that a Hill–Sachs?”

  Of course it is, Joe told himself silently.

  “Very good, Doctor,” Stare congratulated her. “The classic cortical depression in the posterolateral head of the humerus, along with—” He interrupted himself to scroll down the image slightly until he reached a visible aberration in the long bone hanging from the same shoulder. “—this,” he added.

  Beverly had returned to the table and fetched the body’s upper right arm bone. “A healing fracture to the humeral shaft,” she said, at last showing Joe something he could recognize. “Incurred close to the time of death,” she added, studying it closely.

  Stare’s face brightened. “Exactly. And just to show off a little, look at the comparison between both upper limbs. The right is grossly hypertrophied, which would fit a man conditioned by swinging a hammer for most of his life—like a carpenter. I’ve seen it before.”

  “So what happened here?” Joe asked, returning to the humerus.

  “That’s why I consulted with orthopedics before I came down,” Stare admitted. “It had me going—the combination of it. I mean, it had to have hurt. And no kidding around. It’s a double whammy, after all—a fracture/dislocation.”

  “What did you learn?” Beverly coaxed.

  “One of the orthopods recognized it right off—typical ladder-fall injury, he said, and I can totally see it. Look here. You’re heading down, maybe carrying something, and all of a sudden, you slip, your feet go out from under you, and your arm gets tangled up between the rungs. Twist and snap. Slam-bam. A Hill–Sachs and a fracture, combined.”

  “Ouch,” Beverly sympathized.

  “He definitely went to the hospital for this,” Stare confirmed. “Not that they did any surgery. But the way the humerus is healing, you can tell he must’ve been in a wrap-and-sling rig.”

  “Could this mean he was bound up when he died?” Joe asked.

  “That’s what I’d guess,” Beverly confirmed as Stare nodded enthusiastically. “This bone fusion looks to be only two weeks old or so.”

  “Making him all the easier to overpower,” Joe mused. He thought back to an observation Beverly had made, prior to Stare’s arrival. “You said earlier that the killer wasn’t accommodating enough to leave this man’s wallet in his pocket. Is that your way of saying it’s definitely a homicide?”

  In response, she led them both to the display table and pointed to a spot high and slightly off center of the skeleton’s chest. “This rib is positioned directly over the heart. See that small furrow? It’s a typical tool mark for a knife. I noticed it when we were laying this out. There’s another, right next to it, indicating at least two separate thrusts, both sharp-edged and perimort
em. If there was any doubt about this being a homicide, those little scratches put an end to it.”

  * * *

  Sally Kravitz glanced at her father’s profile, just visible in the night. “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” she whispered.

  He took his eyes off the darkened house opposite the bushes concealing them to gaze at her with concern. “We can stop immediately,” he offered.

  She touched his forearm reassuringly. “No, no. That’s not what I meant. I’m really happy you invited me. It’s just that it’s so … you know … private. In all sorts of ways. You’re sure I’m not invading your space?”

  He chuckled. “Are you kidding? I feel like I’m handing you the keys to the family business.”

  She shook her head, beaming with pleasure. Her father was a certified nut. She knew that. But he was the smartest, kindest, most sensitive and devoted nut she’d ever known, and the center of her universe, which probably made her a bit odd, too.

  And she was in this with him, whatever the outcome. She wasn’t exactly sure what “this” was, of course. When it came to job descriptions, her father’s was hard to pin down. On the surface, he was a Brattleboro character—Dan Kravitz, the invisible everyman everyone seemed to know, if not necessarily by name. The man without a home; without a fixed job; who could do everything; who said nothing; who’d worked at more jobs—from washing dishes to cleaning gas station garages to unplugging culverts—than any twelve people she could think of. She’d seen a beer commercial featuring a bearded guy with two bimbos, claiming to be the most interesting man in the world.

  They had no clue.

  Because to her, Dan Kravitz would forever be his own alter ego: not the menial everyman with an eerie ability to keep clean, but rather what the papers had coined “the Tag Man” a couple of years ago. He was the never-identified burglar who for a while had committed a rash of illegal entries in which he’d deposited a Post-it note marked, “You’re it,” and made a point of eating a little of each upscale home’s fanciest tidbits before leaving—like a literate mouse, visiting in the night.

  At the time, it had caused a sensation—and a boost in the upper crust’s demands for better security systems.

  Of course, her father’s nocturnal visits had been more than that. And—she could admit on a purely disengaged intellectual level—a little creepy. But not where it applied to Dan. For reasons no doubt entirely genetic, she had never once shaded him with any hint of creepiness. He was a researcher, an archaeologist, the Boswell of Brattleboro’s human heart.

  Okay—a slight overstatement. He broke into rich people’s homes and studied their habits, collecting facts as others might scoop up the silver, and entered what he learned into a filing system the NSA might envy—if on an entirely local level. And—truth be told—he had left those sticky notes on the homeowners’ night tables while they were sleeping.

  But somehow, through Sally’s skewed view of it, Dan had managed to make his outings at once beguiling and scientific. Her self-acknowledged delusion was encouraged by her realization that the police knew of his activities. Her father had actually stumbled upon proof of a crime, and helped the police—or at least Willy Kunkle—bring it to a successful conclusion. He had also sworn off the high-visibility Tag Man role—officially—and had sunk from judicial sight.

  Less officially, he had merely stopped leaving the Post-it notes. Whatever boastful impishness had prompted him to plant them in the first place had apparently been placated. Either that, or he had taken his daughter’s nascent interest in his covert life as reason enough to dial back the showmanship while he ramped up his role as a mentor.

  Either way, she was grateful. An original thinker herself, hitched to this single parent and his withdrawn, nomadic personality since her birth, she’d been wondering what to do after high school, while finding no joy in the conventional choices before her, which partially explained why she was taking a “gap year” before college.

  “What do you think?” she whispered, studying the house across the lawn.

  He’d been here earlier, prepping the field. She knew that. Her apprenticeship wasn’t to be rushed. He’d already sprung the locks and made sure the house was empty, to minimize the risks. Later, he would train her in security breaching, and expose her to the thrill of drifting through a house where the inhabitants were present, if asleep—or not.

  But for the moment, she would shadow his moves, get used to the feel of the work, and discover if she was willing and able to inherit the mantle. There would be plenty of time, and her training would be thorough and carefully administered. She knew herself to be in tutelage to a master, though of what, she still wasn’t sure.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “My God, David. That’s eerie.”

  Joe held the off-white death mask in his hands gingerly, as if cradling an ailing child. Its pale, sightless eyes stared past his shoulder, seemingly transfixed by something behind him. Joe almost turned to double-check.

  Instead, he returned it to David Hawke, the state crime lab’s director. “I had no idea the mold would turn out so well.”

  Hawke placed the mask on his desk. “Me, neither. Lucky break. For what it’s worth, we also managed to get this.” He shoved over a plastic hand with two perfect fingers and three crude extremities, making it look like an abandoned sculpture project. Next to it was a fingerprint card with two readable impressions in black ink.

  “Not bad,” Joe complimented him. “And speedy, too. I didn’t expect this so fast.”

  It was early in the day, the morning after Joe’s visit to the morgue. He’d spent the night with Beverly, who lived just south of Burlington, and had been surprised to get a call from David on the drive back to Brattleboro—convenient, given the lab’s location along the way, in Waterbury.

  “You caught us at a good time,” Hawke told him. “Plus, who could resist jumping on this one? Way too cool. Unfortunately, I ran the prints through the system and got nothing, but you can’t have everything. What did you learn from Hillstrom? I take it you went up there for the so-called autopsy.”

  “I did,” Joe confirmed. “It’s definitely a homicide—a knife to the heart. Although she stressed that an additional cause may have played a part, too—like a bullet that left no evidence on the bone. She’s leaving that part undetermined.”

  “Careful woman,” Hawke said. He indicated the mask. “He look like you imagined?”

  “Hillstrom and the radiologist—and the anthropologist before them, for that matter—all said he’d be a white guy, maybe in his thirties. So this looks right. I like the mustache and sideburns, too. Very ’60s and Ringo Starr, if a little fatter in the cheeks. I keep forgetting how much hair people wore back then.”

  Hawke picked up the facsimile and admired it. “It’s still a little rough, as befits the medium, but better than the first example of this technique I ever saw. You hear about the statues of the dead in that Pompeii museum? A dozen or so bodies they found during the excavation, frozen in place by Mount Vesuvius’s volcanic ash?”

  “I’ve seen pictures,” Joe said.

  “That’s what I thought we’d get when I worked on this last night,” David explained. “Kind of the same circumstances—ash and concrete, both poured over bodies like caramel. But this is so much sharper.

  “We got the DNA sample by courier, by the way, from the teeth. I sent it to CODIS for comparison. I’ll run it through our in-state system, too, just to see if we get lucky. Course CODIS’ll probably take months, it being a national database. Too bad we’re not a TV show.”

  “A hit in-state would sure be convenient,” Joe said hopefully.

  “Would be,” David agreed. “’Cept you said on the phone that the Yankee project involved over a thousand workers, mostly from away. That right?”

  Joe smiled at the reference to “away,” which in Vermontese meant out of state. “True, and maybe he had nothing to do with Yankee. If you knocked off somebody within hailing distance of one of the bi
ggest digs in Vermont history, wouldn’t you consider dumping your handiwork into the hole and having somebody else cover it up?”

  David Hawke nodded. “Guess I might. Didn’t they do that in a Columbo episode?”

  Joe laughed. “If we catch him, I’ll be sure to ask the killer what his favorite TV show was.” He paused a moment before adding, “I hate to admit knowing this, but didn’t that show start in the early ’70s—after this guy died?”

  Hawke raised his eyebrows. “So much for that theory, then.” He pushed both the hand and the mask over to Gunther. “Take ’em. They’re yours—they’re 3-D printer copies of the original latex molds.”

  * * *

  “Dad, you have any shirt stays I can borrow?”

  Lester Spinney stepped out of the bathroom, removed his toothbrush from his mouth, and peered at his son: a deputy sheriff from the waist up, complete with badge, clip-on tie, and pen-and-pencil set; and—down to the floor—a pantsless, knobbly-kneed teenager in tighty-whities and athletic socks.

  “You don’t want to go out like that? Just stay in your car—nobody’ll notice.”

  “Dad. C’mon. I’m running late.”

  Lester relented, knowing the commute time from their home in Springfield, at the top edge of Windham County. “I haven’t worn a pair of those in years, but they used to be in my top left-hand drawer. Dig around in the back, and ignore the condoms.”

  “God, that’s gross.”

  Lester laughed and returned to the bathroom, skirting by his wife at her sink and pinching her bottom through her nurse’s scrubs.

  “Ow. What did he want?” she asked, applying a hint of eyeliner.

  “Shirt stays. You remember: those upside-down suspenders that connect your shirt to your socks. Make you look like a squared-away recruitment poster at all times.”

  Susan Spinney laughed. “You used to tell me you were terrified you’d get shot someday and they’d find those in the ER when they cut off your pants. God forbid.”