Presumption of Guilt

by Archer Mayor

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  BB Barrett put down his newspaper and rose from the lawn chair with a grunt, his 260-pound frame resisting all the way. Hank Mitchell, he reflected, shaking his head and gazing at his deep blue swimming pool, its surface rippling in the breeze from the valley below. Who would’ve thought that name would ever crop up again? Gone and forgotten for damn near a half century. Incredible.

  He moved to the edge of the pool and examined the bottom, where remnants of winter’s passage stubbornly clung as a faint but noticeable streak of pale brown sediment. He’d always loved the notion of an in-ground pool, and enjoyed reading within proximity of its shimmer and soft slapping sound. But he rarely got into the damn thing, and he hated the constant maintenance it required. He’d even mentioned to his wife that they let it go wild, maintaining his enjoyment while eliminating the pool’s need for care and feeding. Needless to say, she wasn’t amused—even though he hadn’t been kidding.

  He shuffled over to the shed in the corner of the low fence encircling the area and extracted the vacuum, hose, and long, ungainly pole he needed to reach the pool’s lowest depths. Lugging it to the water’s edge, he unceremoniously dumped most of it overboard, keeping a hand on the pole’s far end.

  Then he hooked the hose to the suction pipe under a small hinged plate and began pacing back and forth, working the vacuum head below across the brown stain on the bottom. There was at least that small reward: The results were clear to see.

  He had entered a state of repetitive-motion dreaminess when something abruptly snapped him back to the present. He paused, looked up at the distant horizon, and listened. There was the nearly inaudible hum of the distant town, an equally subtle chirping of distant birds, and, of course, the breeze. But that was it.

  Shaking his head, he crooked his arm to prepare for another sweep across the pool, when he felt a sharp jab in his side, accompanied by a muted pop.

  “Ouch,” he said gently. “What the fuck?”

  He reached back under his right arm to feel for what had hit him, expecting either a small bird or a large bug. Instead, he felt a hole, and discovered blood on his hand when he looked at it.

  “Holy shit,” he said, now alarmed.

  Still holding the pole, he turned to see behind him, his eyes widening in amazement as he did.

  He never said another word. A second pop resulted in another hole, this one in the center of his chest. He dropped the pole at last and tentatively touched the leaking hole, as if it were the most delicate of orchids—which it faintly resembled.

  And then, as he watched, a third hole appeared, not an inch from his fingertip. There was a humming in his ears now, and a strange light-headedness, as if he might be on the verge of levitating.

  The coolness of the water closing over him came as a soothing and delightful contrast to this confusion. Why haven’t I done this more often, he wondered?

  * * *

  “Wow,” Willy said, gazing into the pool. “Fat does float.”

  Joe frowned, not that he could argue the point. BB Barrett’s body looked like a cresting pink jellyfish, his arms and legs suspended in the blue water like bulbous tentacles. Mostly blue water, that was, given the reddish tinge extending from the body like a blush.

  Bonnie Barrett, the wife whom BB had rarely referred to by name, had called it in, coming home to find her husband faceup in the pool.

  Joe had thought it noteworthy that she’d made no effort to reel him in. On the other hand, the recorded 911 call had sounded suitably hysterical. And the man had been—and remained—a whale.

  He sensed she’d recover. For the preliminary interview, he’d offered her a seat in BB’s old den off the pool. “I always hated this room,” she’d said dismissively, leading him elsewhere. Redecorating was evidently already seeping into her thoughts.

  She’d had nothing to offer. Married only a few years, they hadn’t had much to do with each other. She’d referred to herself as a trophy wife, sounding content with the role. As she’d pointed out, waving her hand around, the benefits were nothing to sneeze at.

  Reemerging into the sunshine, Joe found most of the component parts of a homicide investigation in place and at work. The medical examiner, the crime lab folks, the rest of the VBI team, support troops from the Brattleboro PD—all accounted for. It was the muggings, the burglaries, the penny-ante dope deals that often suffered from sloppy procedure—felony murder cases tended to work like the proverbial well-oiled machine.

  Which didn’t preclude some being more challenging than others. After the assistant medical examiner, a young man named Jerry Senturia, had fished BB out of the drink, the first surprise was delivered as a small group of investigators crouched around the sodden remains and Senturia pointed out the two holes in Barrett’s chest.

  “That’s small caliber, like a .22,” he said, lifting the body’s right arm. “And there’s a third one here.”

  “Huh,” Lester grunted. “Not what I’d use.”

  Willy was still standing, looking down. “Worked, though. And it’s quiet. That type of ammo is all over the place, and a .22 is probably the most common firearm in the country. Maybe you should learn how to aim better and rethink your next murder.”

  Lester didn’t disagree. “Clearly.”

  “All right,” Joe cautioned them, sensitive of too many ears in proximity—not to mention the widow, somewhere in the house. “What was used will still be in the body, judging from the lack of exit wounds. Multiple shots implies multiple shell casings, if we’re lucky, so let’s cover every square inch around here, reaching out to the tree line.”

  “You’re assuming it was a semi-auto,” Willy said. “Shooter coulda policed his rounds or used a revolver.” He glanced at Lester. “Like I woulda done.”

  Joe stood up. “Well, we won’t know till we root around.”

  That process took many people many hours, even with additional manpower coming in from the state police and the sheriff’s office, and the crime lab techs laying out a search grid and orchestrating things. By the end of it, they had precisely what they’d started with—nothing.

  As Lester put it tiredly, late in the afternoon, “No shells, no footprints, no cigarette butts, no dropped pens. It’s like this dude was shot by a flock of birds.”

  “Nope,” Willy argued. “No bird shit, either.”

  * * *

  Joe arrived at the medical examiner’s office after hours. He’d called ahead, out of courtesy, but he knew his kindred spirit well—Beverly was still there, wrapping up stray ends.

  He punched in the door’s combination number, went straight through the darkened facility to her inner sanctum, and received her embrace at the door, wrapping her in a bear hug.

  “I know it hasn’t been very long,” he told her, savoring the warmth of her in his arms. “But this really feels good.”

  She kissed his earlobe.

  As was their style, however, five minutes later, they were standing side by side before a wall-mounted computer display, looking at X-rays of BB Barrett’s corpulent remains.

  “Just a nerdy observation,” Beverly was saying, “but I rarely see a pattern quite like this, where all the projectiles end up approximately in the same place, despite having entered from three different portals. It’s almost as if Mr. Barrett were made entirely of ballistic jelly, rather than bone, organs, and tissue like the rest of us.”

  “To be fair,” Joe said. “There was a lot of jelly. Were the slugs .22s?”

  “Yes, they were,” she said, “and their penetration was consistent. That doesn’t tell us much, of course, since we have no idea of either the grain load of the cartridges or the type of weapon used. That is correct, no?”

  “Yeah,” Joe said mournfully. “Sadly true. We’re instinctively thinking it was a handgun, but we found less than nothing to corroborate it.”

  “And no casings,” she confirmed.

  He shook his head.

  “Does that tell you anything?”
<
br />   He laughed. “On TV, it would. I love it whenever the hardened but beautiful detectives immediately say, ‘Clearly a professional hit.’ I’ve actually worked a couple of professional hits, and neither one of them used a .22.”

  “For what it’s worth”—Beverly pointed at one of the X-rays—“I can tell you that the first shot was the most counterintuitive. It was this one—entering Mr. Barrett’s back, posterior to his right armpit. The wound track was intersected by one of the later ones, indicating that it was administered first. It stands to reason that he turned after receiving it, and was then struck twice in the chest.”

  “Which was the lethal one?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t know which of the two chest wounds was fired before the other,” she answered precisely. “But this one pierced his heart, shredding half the aorta at this juncture. The other would have proved lethal on its own, but taken longer. Even the very first one was effective—it’s doubtful he would have survived it had the other two never been fired. It was a very effective cluster.”

  “Could you tell anything from the slugs themselves?” Joe asked.

  “I measured them for caliber, but that’s where I stop. I leave all the right-twist, left-twist analyses to the experts. Know your limitations, is my credo. You’ll have to consult with your friends at the lab.”

  “Easily done,” he said, slipping his arm around her waist. “You had dinner yet?”

  She twisted around and smiled. “I do have an appetite, but let’s eat after we’ve satisfied it. Would that suit you?”

  “I believe it would,” he said.

  * * *

  David Spinney scrutinized his computer before adding a name to the list on his pad. He hadn’t been completely forthcoming at the ER. He blamed his fragmented memory for only now being able to recall the details of that one attacker’s tattoo. But that didn’t excuse his then keeping the information to himself.

  In truth, Dave had been swamped by mixed emotions since the kidnapping two days ago. The intense focus he’d seized upon at the time, and the purpose he’d put it to—trying to remember voices and times and events—had collapsed into a jumble of less useful feelings. Variably fearful, angry, resentful, embarrassed, guilty, and plagued by self-doubt, he hadn’t been able to absorb reassurances from parents and colleagues. In the end, sleepless and frustrated, he’d resorted to a long, thoughtful walk around town in the middle of the night, before retreating to where he was now—in front of the office’s computer, digging through every law enforcement database available, in search of the one visual snapshot he’d retained of the entire traumatic episode.

  The tattoo, he now recalled in clear detail, was of the dragon Smaug, from the Hobbit movies. And tattoos were one of the many distinguishing marks that police records had been preserving with ever more accuracy for years. Dragons, unsurprisingly, had become about as common a tattoo as MOM, decades earlier. But Dave was hopeful that the people entering the data nowadays were—like him—more cognizant of newer popular icons than older cops like his father, who wouldn’t have distinguished Smaug from Puff the Magic Dragon.

  So far, Dave was proving his instincts right. By entering the gender of his attacker, an approximate age range, the location of the tattoo, and its precise identity, he’d already hit on three possibles.

  One of which resided in southeastern Vermont.

  Dave knew that he was still on an uphill climb. For everyone entered into the computer, there were legions of tattooed people out there who’d never been stopped by a cop, or—if so—hadn’t had their body art documented. Nevertheless, it was a start, and more than what he’d given Lester and Joe.

  And why hadn’t he? Because to right the wrong done to him, he needed to solve his own case, by himself.

  * * *

  It was shortly before eight the next morning when the squad reconvened at the office. Since BB Barrett was found floating in his pool, they had spent hours, late into the night, scouring through his life, trying to identify whoever had fired three bullets into him. The results had not been rewarding, and the political and media pressure—unlike when Hank Mitchell had resurfaced—had been proportional to the town’s losing one of its wealthiest and most prominent citizens.

  As was becoming a habit, now that the VBI was so frequently associated with high-profile investigations, Joe had set up a media hotline directing all press inquiries to a response desk in Waterbury, where the organization was headquartered and where its director, Bill Allard, could personally manage the party line. The move didn’t stop those reporters who had the local cops’ cell phone numbers, but at least it had reduced a flood to a manageable trickle of distractions.

  Joe sat back in his desk chair and placed his feet on the edge of a half-open drawer, letting out a sigh of relief.

  “Hell of a day. I’ve read what I could of your updates—including last night’s—so thank you all for keeping the information flowing. It’s been a big help. Unless I missed anything, I think I got that we’ve interviewed or reinterviewed the wife—Bonnie—the newspaper delivery guy, the UPS driver who dropped off a package at ten, and the mailman who did his own thing about three hours later. Also, everyone whose number showed up on BB’s cell phone, a few of the same people we talked to about Hank days ago, and everybody Bonnie Barrett listed as an alibi for yesterday morning. Last but not least, the crime scene was processed, BB shipped north for autopsy, his house searched, the house’s alarm service checked, and—” He paused before wrapping up. “—I don’t know what else. Anything?”

  “Nothing that matters,” Willy said. “Just like everything else on your list. Waste of time.”

  “Maybe,” Joe came back. “Maybe not. Who knows what we’ve set in motion? There’s a chance BB got himself whacked because we stirred up some old memories after Hank was dug up. Could be we hit a sore spot.”

  “You think he was killed because Hank came back to haunt, so to speak?” Lester asked.

  Joe raised his eyebrows suggestively.

  “Why?” Lester pressed him. “Hank was no Jimmy Hoffa. It didn’t make a splash when he disappeared—same as when we found him.”

  “Willy said it after Dave was grabbed,” Joe explained. “It’s one of those coincidences we’ve learned to distrust. And if we’re not ruling out Dave’s kidnapping as being possibly connected to the Hank case, why rule out BB’s killing? Especially since—unlike with Dave—BB and Hank actually knew each other.”

  Joe dropped his feet to the floor and sat forward to make his point. “I’m not saying this is all interconnected. But we should absolutely keep it on the table.”

  Sammie was doubtful, recalling her conversation with Willy earlier. “Even his nearest and dearest figured he’d pulled up stakes for a lifestyle change. Why would all this be happening over some nobody who’s been dead for forty years?”

  Willy, however, took a different view. “It would if someone didn’t know he’d been dead all that time.”

  “Far out,” Spinney said under his breath, after a moment’s consideration.

  Sammie frowned. “Then that would turn it into a revenge on BB by somebody like Greg or Sharon.”

  “Or one of Hank’s drinking buddies,” Willy added. “Hank was a well-loved man, which suggests Lacey Stringer, as well.”

  Sam rubbed her temples for a couple of seconds. “Hold on. That maybe covers BB. But where’s Dave fit in? Assuming that’s still a warning to us to back off looking into Hank.”

  “‘Assuming’ is the operative word,” Joe told her. “Just as we don’t want to miss a possible connection between the BB and Hank killings, we also don’t want to mess ourselves up by saying they’re definitely related. That’s even truer for Dave.”

  Her eyes widened. “What? Which is it, then?”

  “Right now?” Willy said, amusing himself. “Both.”

  “Or neither,” Joe added.

  Willy laughed. “Let’s not forget the holy quartet, after all.” He held up one finger at a time. “Lu
st, lucre, liquor, and lunacy—the four corners of ninety percent of all homicides. Chances are good Bonnie Barrett whacked her hubby so she could redecorate his den.”

  “Or not,” Joe emphasized once more. “In medicine, the old saying is, if you hear the sound of hoofbeats—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Sammie interrupted. “Chances are it’s horses. But it may be zebras. The way this is going, it’s sounding like everything’s a zebra. How do we run not one, but two homicides based on that? And a kidnapping? We have to have at least a couple of theories to run with, don’t we?”

  Her frustration showed on her face, stirring Joe’s sympathy. Sammie Martens did not like ambiguity. There was right and wrong, and a bunch of crap in-between mucking everything up.

  “We’ve barely started,” he pointed out, hoping to help her out. “All the interviews we’ve conducted in the past twenty-four hours? Those were just in case we got lucky and the bad guy burst into tears and fessed up to shooting BB, soon as we walked in. So much for that. Now we need to start chipping away at their alibis, putting their backgrounds under the microscope. If this idea about everything being connected is right, then the same ripple effect that went from Hank being discovered to BB being killed will still be in motion. Somebody benefitted from BB’s death. It might’ve been emotional, or financial, or something I’m not thinking of. But it’s there. You don’t plug a guy with three bullets and just go back to the way things were.”

  He stood up and looked at them all. “Our job now is to find out whose life has just changed and how.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The best time to sneak up on a paranoid, Dan believed, was when he thought he was most prepared to meet the enemy. Of course, it was Dan’s own obsession that informed this theory, and explained why he was again inside Johnny Lucas’s house one week later, in the middle of the night, with Lucas and his wife sleeping upstairs.

  Even by Dan’s risky standards, this was extreme. His only concession, however, was that this time, he’d left his daughter out of the equation. Otherwise, it was business as usual, based not on hubris, but on the reasonable assumption that since Lucas was in residence, he’d be less inclined to have the internal alarm activated.