Bury the Lead

by Archer Mayor

The specter of his dependence on booze rose like a mist in his memory—its anesthetizing appeal, its easy availability, and the comfort of its rituals. He could sense, as surely as an outgoing tide, the ebbing dependability of his willpower.

  It didn’t help that he was running low on his prescribed alternatives.

  He and Sam had side-by-side sinks, with hinged mirrors before each. He stepped over to hers and opened it, his eyes scanning the lipsticks, mascara, and creams, to where they rested upon a familiar-looking prescription bottle. She’d suffered an injury months ago, something minor and passing. He picked up the bottle, read the label, and shook it. OxyContin—the strong stuff. More than half full. They’d joked when she stopped taking it that they ought to sell the rest for Emma’s college fund.

  God knows, they knew how and where to get a good price.

  He opened the bottle with surprising dexterity, given the one hand, poured half its contents onto the counter between the sinks, replaced the container, and closed the mirror—almost in a single smooth gesture—willing his action to the immediate past.

  In a show of respect to his fading resolve, instead of simply pocketing the pills for later in the day, he took his own bottle and loaded most of them into it, leaving a couple out. He returned the bottle to its place, feeling its renewed weight, and kidded himself that only a minor correction had just taken place.

  Willy’s primary care doc had once suggested the pain might worsen with time, or vary in intensity, and thus require intervention. So why would he begrudge his patient another refill a little before schedule?

  Willy knew better than to believe his own fantasy, however. He’d heard that lie voiced by others, and in himself, too often over the years. But, he then persisted—in a cartoon parody of good angel versus bad—who knew his own body more intimately than he? Surely he was more deeply versed in the effects of addiction than any doc. And how many years had he been sober by now?

  Still, he was torn by the debate’s glaring false notes. Not to mention the practical considerations: how to duck any random drug tests that might be waiting down the line. Unlikely, but not impossible.

  Because he was absolutely sure of one thing: If he got caught with the level of narcotics in his system he suspected he’d have at this rate—far above the therapeutic dose—it would take more than Joe Gunther to save his skin.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “We got a hit on the four-wheeler.”

  Joe looked up from his laptop. The crime lab had left the mountaintop, most of the police vehicles had dispersed from Bromley’s parking lot, and in exchange, the resort had lent the VBI office space adjacent to the lodge.

  Lester was standing in the doorway.

  “What?” Joe asked him.

  “The canvass turned up a lift mechanic who says it belongs to a friend of his.” He consulted the pad in his hand. “Bud Thurley. Real name Thadeus, according to our database.”

  Joe was impressed. “Thadeus Thurley? His parents must’ve hated him. Why do we have him in the system? Or did that come from the DMV?”

  “Oh, no,” Lester clarified. “He’s misbehaved. Not for anything overly dramatic. Three DUIs, including one where he hit a pedestrian—nonfatal. He did time for that. Two disorderly conducts, a receiving stolen property, some other stuff. When he’s not acting out, he’s a logger and runs a small lumber mill.”

  “He the guy in the video?”

  “No, that would be too easy. The mechanic pegged on the machine only. No clue about the rider.”

  “We have a location on Thadeus?”

  Lester grinned. “Right. Using that on him’ll loosen him up, fer sher—remind him of his mother, probably. Yes, we do, and as suspected, it’s not far from here.”

  Joe rose from his borrowed desk. “I promise to call him Bud.”

  * * *

  “How’s Sue enjoying her new job?” Joe asked as they got under way in Lester’s car.

  “A lot, so far,” he answered. His wife had recently changed nursing jobs, after decades at their hometown hospital. “It’s smaller than Springfield, so not as busy, but she’s up for that, at long last, and she loves working for the woman who recruited her.”

  “Victoria … What was it, again?” Joe attempted.

  “Garlanda. Wild name, at least for around here. They were BFFs in nursing school, and thick as thieves forever after, even though Victoria’s a lot older. She’s a bit of an overachiever, if you ask me, but a good egg, and a great friend to Sue. Also a mentor. She never got married or had kids, so it was all about the job. But she’s distributed her good fortunes throughout, like this job for Sue, so I’m not complaining. Better pay, too.”

  Joe stuck his elbow out the open window and enjoyed the breeze washing through the car’s interior. Summer for him was more catharsis than mere seasonal threshold. There were places with harsher winters than Vermont, but Joe imagined no one embraced this transition more happily than he. And he loved winter. He was a native born and bred, so it was in his DNA, and while people joked that guys like him preferred to vacation in Maine and die in Florida, he could envision nothing less attractive than a place without distinct seasons.

  “How ’bout you?” Lester asked. “You and Hillstrom still getting along? We gonna hear wedding bells soon?”

  Joe burst out laughing. “Right—from two workaholics whose jobs are as far apart as the state’s boundaries. Very likely.”

  Lester cast him a glance. “You never know, boss. Don’t forget that bumper sticker.”

  “‘One Day at a Time’?” Joe quoted. “Never one of my favorites. Nah, we’re good the way we are.”

  In the following lull, he wondered if Lester might be right. If he and Beverly continued as a couple with the same success as now, why not entertain an evolution of some sort? Neither of them was getting younger, nor could they work at the same pace forever. Joe was nevertheless surprised to be thinking along such lines, after a life increasingly resigned to an almost fatalistic bachelorhood.

  It was more rule than exception that two people like him and Lester Spinney would prefer to talk about family and romance over how an anonymous young pregnant woman had been beaten to death and dumped by the side of a trail. Possibly such banalities shielded them against humanity’s penchant for violence.

  But more likely, it hinged on the fact that Joe had been operating at this investigative level long enough to have lost count of the homicides he’d worked. The empathy he’d experienced at Jane Doe’s autopsy was transient, and rare enough to have struck him with the same startlement as Lester’s comment about marriage.

  The trip to Bud Thurley’s mill was barely twenty minutes, which still brought them as far as imaginable from Bromley’s world of leisure and entertainment. They found it at the end of yet another logging road, hemmed in by walls of impenetrable, freshly leafed-out trees. In a sudden clearing, they entered a rough-cut amphitheater of felled hardwoods capped by a broad, clear ceiling of blue sky and surrounded by haphazardly parked pickups, two rusty logging trucks, a dozer, log grapples, a skidder, and a construction trailer, all scattered across an equipment yard pockmarked with potholes, stumps, and rocks, and carpeted with shattered tree bark.

  A chain-driven conveyor led into a large, dark, flimsy, open-walled shed, from which a howl of screaming generators, saws, splitters, and more poured into the air like locusts, sweeping up and out into the atmosphere. The entire clearing thrummed and vibrated as might the interior of an open-topped trash can of gigantic proportions, beaten upon by a thousand unseen metal bats.

  In the South especially, during the timber industry’s formation two hundred years earlier, this was the epitome of a peckerwood sawmill—a noisy, itinerant, often dangerous, and usually ramshackle operation that moved from one opportunity to the next, dependent on contracts and available source material.

  Both men exchanged astonished looks as they emerged from the car.

  “Jeezum,” Lester said, approaching to shout into Joe’s ear. “This is nu
ts. I hope whoever’s in there is either deaf or wearing hearing protection. Good thing we’re not OSHA.”

  Joe was thinking that OSHA might be the least of the place’s problems, when the door to the trailer opened and a stocky man with a mean face appeared at the top of the aluminum steps and angrily gestured to them to approach.

  “Who’re you guys?” he yelled as they drew near.

  Both men instinctively flipped open their jackets to reveal the badge each had clipped to his belt.

  The man scowled and stepped back, leaving the door open.

  Inside, they found him at a desk that wouldn’t have qualified for a curbside FREE sign. His body language spoke of a preference to be manning a machine gun. As it was, he fiddled with a large, closed Buck Knife before him, turning it clockwise and counterclockwise with his stubby fingertips.

  “Close the door.”

  Surprisingly, the noise abated significantly, to where a normal conversation could take place, assuming both parties stayed focused.

  “What d’you want?”

  “Maybe to be of service,” Joe said pleasantly, eyeing a metal foldout chair opposite the desk before deciding to remain standing for the height advantage. “You missing a four-wheeler?”

  The man stared at them, his mouth slightly open. His fingers stopped moving. “How’d you know that?”

  “It came up,” Lester answered vaguely. “What’s your name, by the way? Mine’s Spinney. He’s Gunther.”

  “Bud Thurley.”

  “Date of birth?”

  “Ten-fifteen-sixty-eight. And, yes, I have a record.” Thurley’s tone was contemptuous.

  Les removed his pad despite already knowing all this, and slowly wrote down the information, thereby making his own show of disdain. “For?”

  “Ran over a guy with my car. Flunked the breath test. Ancient history. Where’s my four-wheeler?”

  Joe changed his mind and sat in the chair, establishing that they weren’t leaving anytime soon. By contrast, he kept his voice conversational. “Tell us about that. What happened?”

  A veteran of past police encounters, Thurley was quickly deflated by Joe’s gesture. When he spoke again, he was more resigned than pugnacious. He slipped the knife into his pocket. “I wish I knew. It’s hard enough keeping everything running without supplying local losers with free equipment.”

  “How long you been in this location?” Joe continued. “I noticed the machine shed.”

  “Couple of years. I log and mill, both. The National Forest people like that. Very crunchy granola to them, and cheaper. It’s a living, if barely. I’m not complaining.”

  Joe took his word for it. He reached back for the envelope Lester had brought in and slid a photo from it onto Thurley’s desk. “This the local loser and equipment we’re talking about?”

  The sawmill owner leaned forward to study the print from Bromley’s surveillance camera. “That’s my machine. I got no clue who the guy is.”

  Joe frowned. “Not someone who ever worked for you?”

  Thurley sat back. “It’s not that big an operation. Who is he?”

  “When did the four-wheeler go missing?” Spinney asked instead.

  Their host looked from one of them to the other. “Last week,” he said slowly.

  “You didn’t report it?”

  “I don’t got insurance on it and I don’t like you people. It was a lose–lose, if you get my meaning.”

  Joe stood up. “I do. Mind if we talk with your employees?”

  “Yeah, I mind. We’re facing a deadline. I can’t afford the downtime.”

  Joe turned to Lester and addressed him as much as Thurley. “Okay. We’ll get out of your hair, then.”

  Lester hesitated, surprised by the easy capitulation. But he didn’t resist being steered toward the door and into the earsplitting outdoors.

  Back in the car, however, he unleashed his curiosity. “And we’re just walking away because…?” he asked.

  “He don’t got insurance and he don’t like us people,” Joe said, staring straight ahead and smiling.

  He faced his partner as the latter started the engine, adding, “But I’ve got a notion he knew right off who was riding that four-wheeler. I doubt he was lying about the lack of insurance, though. My guess is he was stewing over this until we gave him the thief’s identity.”

  Spinney did an awkward U-turn inside the uneven logging yard and began retreating down the access road. “So we stick a tail on him and see where he leads us?”

  “Unless you got a better idea.”

  * * *

  The spontaneity of Joe’s plan meant they didn’t know when Thurley might act—if he would at all—including immediately following their departure. Thurley’s past criminal history, as far as they’d researched it, certainly suggested a man with poor impulse control.

  Lester therefore pulled into a spot from where they could watch the logging road’s juncture with the highway, while Joe—after issuing the standard small prayer for cell coverage—pulled out his phone. In turn, he called Sammie and their dispatch to let them know what they were setting in motion. He wasn’t going to get complicated at this point, hoping Thurley might act sooner rather than later, so he requested a two-car detail only, to last late into the night ahead. If things looked like they’d stretch out longer, then they could move to a plan B.

  In homage to Joe’s grasp of character, however, it was barely after quitting time when a string of the same pickups they’d seen parked at the mill began filing onto the highway—followed by the one registered to Bud Thurley.

  Lester was watching them through a pair of binoculars.

  “That him at the wheel?” Joe asked.

  Les lowered the glasses and put the car into gear. “Yep, and he’s alone. You really think he’ll lead us straight to the thief?”

  Joe shook his head, speed-dialing his phone. “Nope. If I were him, I’d wait till late. Catch the guy in bed, probably half a bottle into a self-induced coma. I could be wrong, though.”

  He updated Sam—now in a car down the road with Willy—on what Thurley was driving, and in what direction he was headed.

  * * *

  A mile away, Sam dropped the phone into her lap and relayed, “Older Ford 150, white with rust over the wheel wells, and a diesel fuel pump mounted behind the cab.” She added the registration.

  Willy Kunkle, in the passenger seat, reached up and adjusted the vanity mirror so he could monitor the traffic approaching from behind.

  His arm was feeling fractionally better. The OxyContin had kicked in. “How solid is this?” he asked.

  “It’s a best guess,” Sam said. “We don’t even know if what was wrapped up on the back of the four-wheeler is our girl at all. But the driver wasn’t an employee, the machine seems to’ve been stolen, the timing’s about right, and Joe’s thinking this lumber mill owner recognized the thief. Seems worth the effort, given what else we got.”

  “Here he comes,” Willy announced.

  As prearranged, they let both the pickup and Lester drive by before entering the road, all of them now heading south on Route 30, past Bromley.

  “You set things up with Louise?” Sam asked, her eyes on the road.

  Louise had almost become their live-in babysitter by now. An ex-cop herself, and a widow with children long out of the house, Louise was a godsend. She was dependable, affordable, almost always available, and a joy for their daughter to behold, to the point where Sam struggled, worried that Emma’s affections were teetering more toward Louise than herself.

  With Sam’s checkered childhood, her prior poor history with men, and an emotional insecurity masked by a constant urge to overachieve, such concerns were inherent to her character.

  “Yeah,” Willy told her, shifting in his seat, hoping to become more comfortable. “I asked her to spend the night. She was good with that.”

  * * *

  Joe turned out to have been prescient as well about Thurley’s roundabout plan for the nig
ht, even if the man’s destination was a surprise.

  The string of them ended up in Manchester Center, among the wealthier towns in the state, and a place with a high gloss markedly at odds with the scrappy clearing in the woods they’d just left. This was a well-known, very commercial, heavily frequented intersection featuring an uninterrupted string of restaurants, bars, designer clothing stores, and—in Manchester Village itself down the road—some of the most exuberantly overpriced Greek Revival mansions available in Vermont, clustered prettily around a resort and spa the size of a landlocked ocean liner and frequented by suspiciously well-preserved people dressed in the carefully casual and high-priced offerings of the local Orvis flagship store.

  As Joe and Lester’s car drove by with the flow of traffic, Sam and Willy tailed Thurley into the parking lot of a diner on the edge of town.

  “We’ll wait out of sight,” Joe said on his phone. “Enjoy dinner if you can keep a low profile.”

  “While we starve?” Lester asked him after he’d hung up. He was a man of regular eating habits, despite his emaciated appearance.

  Joe reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an energy bar, which he handed over. “Perish the thought. Bon appétit.”

  Lester didn’t hesitate, accepting the snack.

  An hour later, the caravan started again, next following Thurley to a bar closer to the town center. There, the four cops rotated as customers, staying in dark corners and ordering ginger ales and seltzers, while keeping an eye on their target as he socialized with friends and strangers and failed to pick up any woman with low-enough standards to appreciate what he was offering.

  That last ambition prompted Willy to send a text suggesting, “Don’t know, boss. If he’s trolling for mermaids, I doubt he’s planning to roust our vehicle thief.”

  With Lester typing what he dictated, Joe responded, “He’s got time to make trouble, regardless. Let’s stick with him.”

  Thurley didn’t take long to satisfy their curiosity. Staggering slightly, he stepped into the parking lot, rubbed his face with both hands, glanced around until he recognized his truck, and fumbled to fit his key into the door lock.