by Archer Mayor
“We can just pull him over for DUI, if it comes to it,” Lester said, preparing to follow.
Joe remained silent, watching the battered truck hesitate on the edge of the highway, and then begin returning north, along the road they’d used earlier.
“Headin’ home?” Lester asked.
Joe doubted it. If he’d read his man correctly, he was not prone to delayed self-gratification. All they’d witnessed so far was a case of strategic timing. As he’d implied to Lester earlier, this slice of humanity was heavily populated by night owls who, when they finally collapsed for a few hours’ sleep, did so without reserve. Joe figured Thurley was counting on his target doing just that.
Sure enough, just as their unwitting guide neared the Route 7 intersection on the north end of Manchester Center, he cut left, heading for the town’s lower-rent area.
Not a mile on, he entered a trailer park by the side of the road. His followers pulled over and watched as his headlights lurched across the feeder road’s rough surface before stopping halfway along, resting on a small, worse-for-wear single-wide before being extinguished.
“Close in from both sides,” Joe ordered over the phone. “Block him in. No lights or noise.”
It was done quickly and quietly. Less than a minute later, the four of them met up beside Thurley’s empty truck, which was wedged against the same four-wheeler featured in the Bromley surveillance tape. There was one dim light on near the front door of the nearby trailer, and sounds of objects breaking toward the back, accompanied by a startled shout for help.
“That’s it,” Joe said as they rapidly donned ballistic vests retrieved from their car trunks. “Let’s go.”
Sam entered first with a 12 gauge, followed by Lester, Willy, and Joe. Trailers were nobody’s favorite when it came to emergency breaches. Standard self-protective approaches were hindered by tight quarters and narrow corridors. Thus, the preference to fan out yielded to a high-man, low-man, two-person frontal attack—with the hope that the welcoming party wasn’t equipped with either a shotgun or something fully automatic.
Instinct aids tactics, however, and not one of this team feared that Thurley was either aware of their presence or awaiting their arrival. As they’d suspected from the start, he was angry and focused. By now, he was also drunk and fully occupied. They followed the sounds of a fracases down the length of a cluttered, smelly hallway into the darkened back bedroom, where, amid their own excited flurry of flashlight beams, they found Bud Thurley trying to throw punches at a skinny, half-dressed man who kept rolling away across a badly stained bare mattress, on which he’d been sleeping moments before.
The four cops fell on top of the pile, pulling the men apart, everyone yelling at once, until two separate clusters were huddled in opposite corners of the half-destroyed, dingy bedroom, each with a man pinned beneath it.
“Hit the lights,” Joe called out to anyone who could find a switch.
An anemic fluorescent strip wrapped in cracked yellow plastic flickered alive overhead, making the scene look captured from a late forties melodrama.
Joe and Willy had the frail-looking homeowner, who appeared more exhausted than any of them. Joe released the man’s arm and straightened, looking around for weapons or anything else potentially dangerous. He carefully retrieved from the floor the same large Buck Knife he’d observed on Thurley’s desk earlier, its blade now exposed.
“What the hell d’you think you’re doin’? Breaking into a man’s house?” Thurley yelled. “This is private property.”
The universal stare of astonishment he received stopped him from saying more.
Sammie, holding him in a painful armlock, shook her head. “You’re shitting me,” she said in an undertone.
“Take him up front and get a statement,” Joe told her and Lester.
He turned toward their inadvertent host after the other three had left. “What’s your name?”
The lighting didn’t help, but the poor man looked truly awful. He was skeletally thin, jaundiced, sweaty, and haggard. The look wasn’t helped by his being dressed only in a soiled, torn T-shirt and a pair of dubiously hued boxer shorts.
Sensing his weakness, Willy eased him onto the edge of the bed, still holding his arm, but now supportively.
“Mick,” was the barely audible response, accompanied by a wet cough.
Joe sat beside him. “Keep going. Take your time, and keep in mind you’re not in any trouble here. You’re not in custody.”
“Durocher. Mick Durocher.”
“That stand for Michael?”
“Yeah. Michael. Sure.”
“What’s your birth date, Mick?”
Slowly, working around another cough, he gave it to them. Joe studied him more closely. The date made him forty-eight. He looked eighty.
Joe pulled out the security camera picture taken at Bromley and placed it on the bed between them. “This you riding the four-wheeler, Mick?”
Willy had retreated to the door, and gave his boss an inquiring look, his body language asking if Joe wanted to be alone. Joe released him with a subtle nod of the head.
Durocher looked at the picture and nodded. “Yeah.”
Joe laid another print on top of the first, this one taken earlier, when the vehicle had been aimed uphill. “What d’you have strapped on the rear deck?”
“That’s Teri,” was the quiet, matter-of-fact reply.
The silence in the room encouraged Durocher to add, “Teri Parker. The girl I killed.”
During this, Willy had backed into the narrow hallway, near the bathroom. At the far end of the trailer, Lester and Sam were interviewing Thurley, who was filling the air with protest. Seizing his opportunity, Willy eased into the bathroom itself.
It was a predictable pigsty, cluttered, filthy, the toilet unflushed and the shower reeking of mildew. While compulsively neat in his own life, Willy never reacted to how others chose to live. Having lived near the bottom of the heap through war, addiction, PTSD, personal loss, and more, he wasn’t one to summarily condemn others. Criticize and bully when it suited him, perhaps, but rarely judge.
Besides, he had other things on his mind. Listening carefully to the conversations at both ends of the trailer, he stealthily opened the mirror over the stained sink before him.
As he’d hoped upon setting eyes on the ailing Mick Durocher, there were several orange prescription containers.
He selected the most powerful of the analgesics from among them, and slipped it into his pocket.
CHAPTER FOUR
The following morning, at their Brattleboro office, Joe waited for the last of his squad to settle down—Sammie, fresh from dropping off Emma at preschool. Recently, either she or Willy was the latecomer, since they alternated that duty. The only one without a child, Joe could only empathize with the admittedly happy responsibility his two cops had created for themselves.
It had been a long night for all of them, and they looked it, including—Joe found surprising—Willy, who routinely appeared untouched by days without sleep.
“Okay,” he began, sitting on the edge of his desk. “I realize at best we’ve each maybe caught a short nap since processing Mick Durocher into jail, searching his trailer, seizing the four-wheeler and the rest of it, but has anyone had a chance to look into Teri Parker’s background?”
Their small office occupied the second floor of the town’s municipal building, an unlikely and minimally secure arrangement conjured up at the creation of the VBI, and never readdressed. Rumors were building that might change, especially since the police department, once housed downstairs, had moved into new quarters on the north end of town. Rumors, however, were all they’d amounted to so far.
Lester, while he’d dropped by his house in Springfield to take a shower and change clothes, had spent the rest of the night here, and spoke first. “Twenty-six years old, lived in Barre, on Prospect Street, according to her last Spillman entry.”
Spillman was the older of two cross-indexed poli
ce databases that housed, in a perfect world, every citizen’s encounter with law enforcement, criminal or not. If you were the backseat passenger in a car stopped for speeding, for example, the cop responsible was supposed to collect your name and date of birth, just so there was an official memory of the company you were keeping on that occasion.
It was, like most computer systems, as reliable as the people supplying its data.
“What’s she down for?” Willy asked, shifting in his seat and wincing, the slight relief of the night before having evaporated.
Lester kept his eyes on his computer screen as he answered, oblivious to his colleague’s pain. “All told? A couple of speeding tickets, an out-of-date inspection sticker, one prohibited act—”
“She was a hooker?” Willy asked sharply.
Lester held up a finger while he read further. “Never indicted. Picked up, but charges were dropped. Never printed, which would’ve been nice.” He backed away from the screen. “There’s more, mostly little stuff. Obviously, we’ll go through all the involvements, check out who knew who. More to the point, boss, what did Mick have to tell you? He go into detail?”
Joe held up a thumb drive. “One of the most straightforward confessions I’ve ever gotten. After we all split up and I put him in the box, he went through Miranda and signed his waiver like he was applying for a bank loan.”
They’d recently received a wall-mounted flat screen, interconnected with their computers, which allowed them to share a monitor without having to cluster around a desk. Joe plugged the drive into his laptop, entered a command, and sent the video to the display.
The camera angle showed the small windowless room that Joe had used at the Marble Valley Correctional Facility in Rutland, Vermont, not far from Manchester Center. It was white, stark, and equipped with a steel table, two chairs, and a waist-high bar attached to the wall, designed to keep prisoners cuffed in place.
As Joe escorted the faltering Durocher into view, sat him down, and ran him through Miranda, including the part where he forewent counsel, he did not bother shackling his prisoner to the wall.
He then recited Durocher’s name, his own, and the date, time, and location of the interview before inquiring if his prisoner wanted anything to drink.
“No,” was the response. “I killed her.”
Joe, sitting opposite, studied him before asking, “Who did you kill?”
“The girl.”
“What was her name, for the record?”
“Teri Parker.”
“And how did you kill her?”
“With a piece of wood. A two-by-four.”
“How long was it?”
Durocher thought for a moment. “Maybe four feet?”
“You don’t know?”
“It was about four feet. I don’t know exactly. It was a standard two-by-four.”
“And where did you hit Ms. Parker?”
“The back of the head.”
“How many times?”
“Once. Maybe twice. No, once.”
“You aren’t sure?”
“It was once, from behind. I was really pissed.”
“Pissed, as in mad, or pissed drunk?”
That jarred what had been an almost robotic delivery. Durocher stopped and tilted his head, thinking back. “Both, I guess.”
“What had you been drinking?”
“Beer.”
“Was she drunk, too?”
“Sure.”
“You guessing, or do you know?”
“She was drunk. That was beer, too.”
“What brand of beer?”
Durocher stared at him. “What?”
Joe repeated the question.
“Who the fuck…?” the man began, before yielding with, “Bud.”
“Budweiser,” Joe enunciated. “Not Bud Light?”
“Don’t like it.”
“How many beers had you drunk?”
His eyes grew round. “How’m I supposed to know that?”
“In six-packs, then? How many?”
“Maybe a case for the two of us.”
Joe nodded for the first time, as if only now hearing something he liked. In fact, he was recalling that Teri Parker’s blood alcohol content at autopsy was zero. “Where did this happen, Mick? Is it all right if I call you Mick?”
“Sure.”
“Where, Mick?” Joe repeated, following a brief silence.
Durocher rested his head in one hand, his elbow on the table. “Near home.”
“Manchester Center?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Keep going. Indoors or out?”
“Out.”
Joe changed positions, crossing his legs and scratching his cheek. “Mick. This is your statement. You’re the one talking here. You made it clear you wanted this off your chest, and I want to honor that. But I can’t read your mind. You gotta tell me what happened.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe we can approach it from another angle. How did you first meet Teri?”
Mick rubbed his forehead and straightened, trying to clear his thoughts. “In a bar. Manny’s. I picked her up.”
“Give me a break,” Willy growled in real time, rippling across the tension in the squad room. “He couldn’t pick up a dead cat.”
“Quiet,” Sam ordered.
Joe took the comment in stride. “When was this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Work with me, Mick. A week ago? A month? More?”
“A month,” Durocher said, almost at random.
“Okay. Tell me.”
“Well, you know. We hit it off for a while. Before things went bad. That’s when I killed her.”
“Good,” Joe encouraged him. “Getting a timeline. That’s helpful. Let’s back up. Where’s Manny’s?”
“Windsor.”
“You go there a lot?”
“Off and on.”
“That’s over an hour from your home. Why so far?”
Durocher suddenly jerked in his chair, making its legs squeal on the concrete floor. He slapped his hand on the table. “What the fuck, man?” he burst out. “Let’s get this done. I killed her. She pissed me off and I whacked her.”
Joe’s voice sounded like a nurturing parent’s. “Mick, you want people to believe you?”
Mick stared at him. “What?”
“How do we know you’re not a nutcase who confesses to every murder he hears about? You see what I’m saying? We gotta make sure all the details add up, that you’re the right man.”
Durocher absorbed that. “Okay.”
“Why were you in a bar in Windsor?”
“I had a job near there. In White River.”
“Details.”
“They ordered a demolition. A bunch of old factory buildings. I think it was an EPA thing, or maybe not. Anyhow, I got hired to help with the cleanup. Just shit work, draggin’ stuff around. It was a huge job—more ’n a city block.”
“Who’d you work for?”
“It wasn’t exactly legal. A guy paid me under the table. As a favor.”
“What guy?”
“Ted. That’s all I got. I met him. We got to shootin’ the breeze. He said he had this job and would I like to make a little cash.”
“Where did you meet Ted?”
“I don’t remember. Another bar.”
“Manny’s again?”
Durocher hesitated. “No. I don’t remember. Probably near home.”
“Where do you usually drink near home?”
“The Ski Pole.”
“So it was there?”
“Maybe.”
“Where was Ted from?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“How did you get to talking?”
“You just do, you know?”
“You talk to people a lot when you drink?”
“I guess. He’s not gonna remember me anyhow.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Like I said, it was under the tabl
e. The feds’ll bust his balls if he said he offered me a job. He’ll deny it.”
Joe backed away from the topic. “So you got the cleanup job in White River Junction. Is that when you started going to Manny’s, or did you already know about it?”
“I started then.”
“There’re no bars in White River?”
“I heard about Manny’s, and I didn’t want to drink near where I was workin’.”
“About how many times do you think you went there, grand total?”
Durocher straightened from the slump he’d resumed. “Jesus. Who the fuck knows?”
“I sure don’t, Mick. You tell me.”
“Not many. Two, three. As long as the job lasted.”
“Earlier, you said you went there off and on. Which is it?”
Mick’s eyes narrowed. “You calling me a liar?”
Joe dropped it to keep him talking. “And you met Teri on one of those occasions?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about that.”
“Not much to tell. We hit it off, we fucked in my truck, I went home.”
“Where did she live?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t ask.”
“But you kept in touch,” Joe suggested.
“Yeah. The next night.”
“What happened then?”
“Same thing, only I brought her home.”
Not a man given to self-admiration, Joe had been studying himself on the screen through all this, judging his own performance. Despite the hundreds of such encounters he’d conducted, not one had ever gone as he’d planned.
This was proceeding fine, for what Joe considered largely a piece of fiction on Mick’s part. Believing that, and of course knowing how the interview went, allowed him now to daydream a little, if only for a moment, and drift back to his first encounter with Teri Parker, lying exposed on Beverly’s autopsy table. Who knew then, seeing this slip of a girl—pretty, young, and momentarily without a history—what memories and experiences had died with her? He recalled how melancholy had been the revelations of her past, as he’d laboriously extracted them from purportedly the last man in her life.
He watched as he continued to ride herd on Durocher’s narrative, getting him to explain, piece by piece, how Teri and he had begun an on-again, off-again relationship of “a few” weeks.
