by Archer Mayor
The receptionist reached the far wall and stood aside at an open door labeled “Director,” beyond which a second woman sat at a desk near yet another door.
“Mr. Gunther for Director Freeman,” she intoned before giving Joe a quick smile and disappearing.
Joe didn’t look back, passing instead into the anteroom and smiling at the new factotum. “He’s expecting me,” he told her, repeating what he’d said to the first one.
She looked vaguely irritated as she rose and moved to the inner door. “Of course.”
She mimicked her predecessor’s motions, twisting the knob and stepping back with a small flourish, announcing him to the person inside. For a split second, he saw this happening eight times in a row, with eight women each going through the same motions, and with him suddenly standing back out on the street.
But there were no more doors ahead. Just a man rising from his desk with the smoothness of a limousine leaving the curb, circling around to shake hands and point out which chair to occupy, as his secretary faded away.
“To what do I owe the honor?” Floyd Freeman asked, staying out in front of the large desk and taking the companion guest chair. Very polished, in fact literally—Joe noticed he had manicured fingernails. “It’s not often the state’s top cop drops by.” Freeman laughed and concluded, “I hope I’m not in any trouble.”
Gunther had considered this moment, even anticipated some of the language. But instead of responding as he’d thought he might, he merely extracted a small tape player from his pocket and laid it on his knee.
Without a word spoken, he pushed the Play button.
Beverly Hillstrom’s precise voice entered the quiet room. She was speaking on a phone in the middle of an ongoing conversation.
“I realize that we’ve had our professional differences, Mr. Freeman. And I’m sorry to say that it appears we’ve had our personal ones, too, dating back to the death of your au pair, Ellen Turnley . . .”
Freeman slid forward in his chair, but was stopped in midreach for the recorder by the fierceness of Gunther’s glare. “What is this?” he asked instead, his eyes narrowed, as Joe hit the Pause button.
“It’s something I’d like you to hear.”
“That was a private conversation,” he said. “I doubt this is even legal.”
“That’s an interesting place to go,” Joe answered him. “Before we do, though—and we will—I’m hoping you’ll humor me.”
Freeman hesitated, his imagination snagged on Joe’s possible meaning. Finally, he slid back and made a show of crossing his tailored legs casually. “Fine,” he said. “Carry on.”
Joe rewound the tape a few inches. “. . . had our personal ones, too, dating back to the death of your au pair, Ellen Turnley—”
“That has nothing to do with this,” Freeman’s recorded voice cut her off. “What you did back then was unprofessional and clearly politically motivated, but I have totally put it behind me. My complaints against you and your department concern the way you hemorrhage money for frivolous reasons.” He let out an exasperated sigh. “Beverly, for Christ’s sake. I’ve told you all this before: You stop wasting money, and I’ll stop slapping your butt. Unless you’re into that kind of thing.”
“What I’m not into, Mr. Freeman,” she answered icily, “is being blackmailed.”
“Oh, come on,” he burst out, his voice bright with superiority. “The fact that you were a bad girl once probably shouldn’t be held against you. God knows, I don’t. But then, a lot of people are nastier than I am.” He paused before adding, “And you’ve pissed off a ton of them, Bev.”
Freeman held up his hand. “Can we stop this?” he asked Joe.
Joe interrupted the tape again. “Why?”
“Because I don’t see the point,” the other man went on. “You’re obviously an ally of Hillstrom’s, and by either challenging my integrity or trying to scare me, you’re hoping to force me to betray both good management practices and a matter of principle. But like I said to her: Nothing personal. You’ve been a cop for a long time. Maybe too long, from what I’m seeing right now. Be that as it may, I think someone with your record should be respected for what he’s done, and maybe forgiven a lapse of judgment. You leave now and I’ll let bygones be bygones, with no reprisals against you or Hillstrom.”
He laughed and tilted his head as if he’d just heard a good joke. “I mean, Christ, Joe. A man with your mileage must see what a slippery slope this is, right?”
Joe had actually been of two minds about going this route and had sympathized with Beverly when she bridled at his suggestion to bug the phone call. So while he’d believed her cause to be just and reasonable, he’d also needed some insight into Freeman’s point of view before proceeding.
There had indeed been questions concerning a slippery slope. They’d been quickly rendered moot. On tape, Floyd Freeman had struck him, just as he was doing now in person, as a manipulative, amoral opportunist. A crook who simply hadn’t yet been caught. Perhaps Freeman was correct in one thing, though: Maybe Joe had been a cop for too long. However, he’d convinced himself that a career dedicated to doing the right thing was an adequate counterbalance for running a little fast and loose with a slimy guy like this.
He appraised Freeman with a long, quiet look and commented, “I think you chose the slope long before I got here.”
He started up the tape again to head off further debate. “. . . You’ve pissed off a ton of them, Bev,” they heard Freeman say.
That was followed by a long pause as Hillstrom struggled to maintain her composure. When she spoke next, her voice was tight. “The medical examiner’s office is made up of seven employees and a few dozen part-time death investigators who might as well be volunteers. The law enforcement agencies, the attorneys, the funeral homes, the hospitals, and the public we serve have, year after year, commended us for our efficiency, courtesy, professionalism, and integrity, despite the fact that we are almost continually understaffed, underfunded, and overtasked with responsibilities.”
“Spare me the sob story, Bev,” Freeman interrupted. “Everybody in state government has the same bitch-and-whine, and everybody has had to learn to do more with less. You’ve just been too coddled and spoiled by people who won’t say no to you.”
“That’s because I say no before they can,” she came back. “My office efficiency audits are the best you have. I’ve even heard you quote them when you need to brag. That’s why none of this has anything to do with my abilities. You simply want me gone for personal reasons. You may say it’s not the Turnley case, but we both know it is. You blame me for ending your political rise to fame.”
“That’s nonsense,” Freeman retorted, but in those two words alone, Joe could once more hear the frustration and anger, sharp and hard.
So had Hillstrom at the time of the actual conversation, and it had kept her on track, away from the managerial doublespeak that Freeman kept using as a stalking horse.
“How can you say it’s nonsense?” she asked. “If my performance was as terrible as you claim, you could fire me. It’s not and you can’t. So you’ve retrieved the Morgenthau case in the hopes that political pressure will do what a job assessment cannot. All because you cheated on your wife with a teenager whose blood will be forever on your hands.”
At this point, the present-day Freeman snapped. He took a lunge at the recorder still balanced on Gunther’s knee and sent it skittering across the carpeted floor as Joe half rose, grabbed his wrist, and twisted it to force him back into his chair.
“I want to hear this part,” Joe said, his face inches from Freeman’s.
From near the wall, the thin sound of the recorder still reached them. “Listen, you stuck-up bitch,” Freeman was saying, “that fucking little whore threw herself at me. She spread her legs and I took care of her, something you’d have no clue about. The fact that she was a mental case had nothing to do with me, until you made it your mission to ruin me. I cannot tell you how happy I was when
that idiot governor of ours gave me this job. I made it my mission, lady, to fuck you like you fucked me, and I am on top of the world that it’s finally working.”
Gunther had crossed the room and picked up the machine in the middle of this diatribe, placing it carefully on the edge of Freeman’s oversize desk and perching alongside it so that he was now staring down at the other man.
“You think I’m blackmailing you?” the voice was still ranting. “That doesn’t even touch it. I’m giving you the butt fuck of a lifetime.”
At last, Joe turned off the recorder.
Freeman sat motionless, his defeated body language at odds with the furious scowl on his face.
“None of that’s legal,” he repeated, his voice a verbal pout.
“Nobody’ll care, if it gets out,” Joe told him, extracting some documents from his jacket pocket. He handed one of them to Freeman. “It’s a matter of principle, like you said earlier, just like this—it’s a sworn statement from a retired lab tech in Connecticut attesting to the fact that it wasn’t Beverly Hillstrom who cooked the books all those years ago, but her boss, and that she took the blame to protect him. I’ve got a whole case file backing that up.”
Freeman didn’t bother reading it. “Who cares?” he said unconvincingly. “She still broke the law.”
Gunther nodded. “That’s the second time you’ve invoked the law. Tricky instrument sometimes. Can come back to bite you.”
He handed over another copied document, which Freeman did look at.
“That’s a certified British government birth certificate for Ellen Turnley. Turns out she lied about her age to get the au pair job. According to the law you just quoted, you raped a child.”
Freeman was looking ill, all fight drained out of him.
Gunther picked up the recorder and carefully retrieved all the paperwork, bundling them together as he walked to the door.
He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “You might want to call a lawyer, Floyd. I think you’re going to have bigger problems to tangle with than Beverly Hillstrom.”
Lester Spinney tore the latest arrival off the VLETS Teletype and read it quickly to determine where to file it. Primarily the harbinger of BOLs, or “Be on the Lookouts,” for the state’s wandering, as yet unaccounted for miscreants, the Teletype also served to deliver relevant news of all stripes, including, as here, a missing-person report.
“High Top,” he murmured quietly. “Now, there’s an alias.”
“High Top?” Sam asked from across the small room.
“Can’t really blame him,” Spinney sympathized. “His real name’s Conrad Sweet.” He crossed over to a row of in-boxes, each reserved for different crimes or events, and deposited the latest arrival. Lester Spinney was the only one of the four Brattleboro-based VBI agents not to have come from the police department downstairs. His background was the state police, where he’d felt increasingly stifled by bureaucracy and oppressive oversight, and which he’d exchanged—all benefits intact and with a sigh of relief—for the freer, more autonomous style of the Bureau. He was a very tall and angular man of almost perpetual good humor, and jokes aimed in particular at his physique, mostly images of storks, festooned the area surrounding his desk, testifying to his easygoing demeanor.
“Where’re you putting him?” Sam asked, her irrepressible curiosity surfacing.
“Missing persons,” he answered, adding as an afterthought, “He’s from Bennington.”
That caught her attention. She turned toward her computer console. “Conrad Sweet, you said? Common spellings?”
There were only the two of them in the office at the moment, explaining why there’d been no rejoining wisecracks from Willy Kunkle.
Spinney changed directions and laid the report on her desk with a smile. “Go get ’em, tiger.”
She laughed and typed the name into Spillman. “Ooh, bad boy,” she said moments later. “Earned that nickname, too. Major druggie. Not too bright, either, according to the times he’s been busted. Looks like he fed his habit the old-fashioned way—by stealing.”
“Think we’ll end up with him?” Lester asked from his desk.
Sam picked up the fax and read it carefully. “His probation officer reported him missing, added a footnote that High Top’s never missed a meeting in the past—not once.”
Lester nodded meditatively. “Guess we will, then.”
Sammie Martens sat back in her chair, still gazing at the screen. “What interests me is the Bennington connection. You know what they say about how things come up in clusters . . .”
She leaned forward suddenly, as if yielding to some internal debate. “What the hell,” she muttered, “I’m going to run his involvements. See if any names come up that might be interesting.”
Lester looped a gangly arm across the back of his chair and looked at her. Without comment, he’d also brought up High Top’s record on his screen. He raised an eyebrow. “You wanna work from the top as I work from the bottom?”
She laughed at him. “Gotcha. Go for it.”
Joe was in his car, heading south on Interstate 91, when his cell phone rang. He pulled over to the shoulder before answering. This wasn’t so much for safety, since he couldn’t swear that actually speaking on a phone was any more dangerous than chatting with a passenger—unlike dialing the damn things, which he thought was suicidal. He was simply being practical—there were so many mountains and so few cell towers in Vermont that maintaining a clear connection while in motion was unlikely. “Can you hear me now?” was no joke around here.
Not that he minded stopping. Two of the perpetual joys of working in this part of the world were the scaled-down pace and the sheer beauty of the surroundings. Pressing the phone to his ear, he had the pleasure of seeing the Connecticut River snaking away before him in the distance, marking the political boundary between Vermont and New Hampshire and looking for all the world as it might have two hundred years ago, when farms similar to these crowded the water’s edge, for both the sustenance and the flatter ground.
“Gunther,” he answered.
“Joe, it’s Beverly Hillstrom.”
He smiled at the familiar formal tone combined with the use of his first name.
It had been several fast-moving days since his encounter with the now free-falling Floyd Freeman, and Joe and Hillstrom had spoken several times, as much exchanging information as working out a new middle ground in their relationship. There was no question of their ever repeating what had happened that one night. They both knew that without discussion. But at the same time, referring to each other as “Dr. Hillstrom” and “Agent Gunther,” as they had for decades, now seemed childish. Always the diplomat, however, he’d left it to her to set the new ground rules. He’d been flattered and touched by her choice to stick with first names.
Nevertheless, he knew he shouldn’t get carried away, and thus kept to business. “Hi,” he said, “you got something for me?”
“I think so,” she told him. “Since my hands have been untied, I ordered the extra tests on Michelle Fisher. In fact,” she added with a touch of vindictiveness, “I ordered a five hundred test panel on her, plus a few others for safety’s sake. Good thing, too, because what came up wouldn’t have appeared short of that.”
“And what is it?” Joe asked, allowing her some theatrical buildup.
“Volatiles in the bloodstream—through the roof,” she answered him simply. “I’ve faxed the lab results to your office, but from my experience, I’d look at that gas stove again.”
Joe didn’t respond, his brain fogged in a tangle of new calculations.
“You there?” she finally asked.
“She died of a propane overdose?” he finally asked.
“That would be consistent,” she answered carefully.
“Wow,” he said softly. “I guess that’s what they mean by hearing the other shoe drop.”
“It couldn’t have been accidental?” she asked. “It’s been known to happen.”
&
nbsp; Although sitting alone in his car, Joe shook his head at the phone. “The stove was off, the furnace, too, and all the windows were open. Plus, she would’ve smelled it. She wasn’t sleeping.”
“Oh, that’s interesting,” she mused. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“It’s like a suicide that isn’t,” he said.
“Which officially makes it a homicide,” she agreed.
“At long last,” he murmured, reflecting on the path he’d taken to reach it. “I’m not sure I’ve ever worked so hard just to get to the starting block.”
She laughed gently in his ear. “Personally, I’m glad you did.”
After he’d left Freeman, all but sure of the man’s fate—certainly in terms of his hold over Hillstrom—Joe had visited her at her office to break the news. There, with the door closed, she’d given him what they both knew would be a final kiss—something to savor in the future.
“So am I,” he told her, and resumed driving toward Brattleboro.
Chapter 12
They weren’t in bed, weren’t naked, hadn’t even kissed since Nancy’s arrival. Which was a first as far as Ellis could remember. So far, their affair had been so torrid that sex had been the prelude to every meeting, as if nothing could proceed without it—like gulping air before plunging underwater.
Not this time, though, which was just as well. He doubted he could have performed, given his state of mind. And he wasn’t alone, ever since he’d told her what he’d witnessed.
“Jesus, Ellis,” she said, sitting on his sofa beside him with her legs tucked up beneath her. “What did you do with the body?”
“Buried it.”
Her eyes grew even wider. “Where? With what?”
“Right there, by the river. We got sticks and stuff—a piece of board I found in the mud—and dug a grave.”
