Bury the Lead

by Archer Mayor

  “Making whatever murder charges they throw at him null and void,” Lester said.

  “Correct,” Joe agreed.

  “Very convenient,” Sam commented.

  “Mick’s a designated fall guy?” Willy asked.

  “It’s a theory,” Joe said. “Which just got more convoluted when we found that he used to work for GreenField Grocers, and for Bob Beaupré personally.”

  “Really?” Willy blurted out. “Amazing what you can miss in twenty-four hours.”

  “He was the boss’s chauffeur for a few months,” Joe explained. “Beaupré has a habit of plucking high performers off the line and rotating them through this assignment. Makes him look like one of the boys, and makes the rank and file talk about him in glowing terms. He even has an especially beaten-up pickup he uses for the job.”

  “Nobody sees through that?” Lester mused.

  “Jesus, Les,” Willy scolded him, clearly not close to needing a nap. “Such a socialist. This is God handing out favors from on high. It’s not something you question. Get with the program.”

  “Mick washed out in under a year,” Joe went on. “Hit the bottle again. But that was a few years ago and, as far as we know, when all contact between Beaupré or GreenField stopped. But it’s a hell of a coincidence, and not one I’m willing to take in stride.”

  Sammie addressed Lester, “You gotten anywhere on the arson?”

  Les shook his head. “Not the way I’d like. We got a good system and we’re flushing everybody through it, but so far, nuthin’. The gap left by our not knowing exactly when those time bombs were planted has not been helpful, nor the fact that the one Jonathon Michael found turned out to be free of fingerprints or anything else. Plus, even with the employee badges and CCTV, there are still ways a complete outsider could’ve bypassed security.”

  “Yeah,” Willy argued, “but we’re not going there already, are we? I mean, it makes sense that it was an inside job.”

  “I know, I know,” Lester agreed. “I’m just sayin’.”

  Joe reached into his pocket and pulled out his vibrating smartphone. He read its screen and reported, “Interesting timing. That was the crime lab. The AG collected Mick’s DNA and submitted it for analysis, as promised.” He slipped the phone back into his pocket. “It doesn’t match Teri Parker’s fetus’s, and they didn’t get a computer hit off CODIS.”

  “Perfect,” Willy said. “We gonna ask everybody to spit in a cup next, just to see if we get lucky?”

  Joe wasn’t going to turn down any suggestion outright. “If it comes to it, we might.”

  “Going back to the arson for a sec,” Sam said. “We’ve been looking at it like it was a grudge of some sort. What if it was a competitor? Some other warehouse trying to gain an advantage?”

  “Pat Smith and I have been working under that premise, as well,” Lester replied. “There are competitors, for sure, but according to her, the northern New England market—where GreenField has the biggest investment—isn’t stuffed with them. C and S, in Brattleboro, for example, may be the Goliath up around here, but it doesn’t do that much in Vermont. They’re more a national outfit, and GreenField and they don’t bump into each other much. The irony is, it’s more likely GreenField who’d be firebombing them for a bigger share. Not the other way around.”

  “What more did we get out of Teri Parker’s past?” Willy asked.

  “That’s my next stop,” Joe said. “What with Mick’s slam dunk going south, your arm crapping out, the warehouse fire, and our trying to figure out what the hell’s going on, I asked the Waterbury office to drop by her place early on and seal it till one of us could give it what it deserves. That time is officially overdue.”

  “We’re getting nowhere fast,” Willy said sourly.

  Joe couldn’t say he was wrong. He looked at Sam and inquired, “You good with leaving Mr. Chipper to heal on his own for a while? Field trip to beautiful downtown Barre?”

  “Can’t wait,” she replied with a smile at Willy.

  He tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. “You guys go have fun. You heard Sue anyhow: Won’t be long before the arsenic kicks in.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Across blue-collar New England, in neighborhoods tucked away from historical downtowns filled with Victorian mansions of bygone magnates, there are clusters of other antiquated buildings—featureless, purely functional, and drab—whose sole purpose from birth was to house the working class. They could be considered the architectural version of the tired, proud oldsters bearing flags at parades, often outfitted with canes and nasal cannulas, who refuse to let people forget what went before—and of its cost.

  A few towns have whittled away at these eighteenth-century proletarian enclaves, converting them or tearing them down—a form of urban renewal most northern New England communities can’t afford. More often, civic leaders have allowed Realtors and landlords to bring such buildings barely up to code and stuff them with renters struggling to survive.

  From Brattleboro to St. Albans, Bennington to St. Johnsbury, there are thousands of these marginally maintained structures, their entryways festooned with mailboxes, indicating the multiple families within. It boggled Joe’s mind to think of how many people had paced their floorboards over the decades, hoping for any opportunity to live elsewhere.

  Neighborhoods of this nature were sprinkled across Barre. Where next-door Montpelier was the state capital and well known for politics and business, having evolved gradually into its current trendy, hipster incarnation, Barre better represented a place more stamped by a stalled industrial past.

  Not that the town wasn’t still well known for what had put it on the map. “Barre granite” remained renowned worldwide for its fine-grain and handsome appearance. But the days of using this stone to build entire downtowns—from buildings and bridges to monuments and cobblestone boulevards—had withered. Limited demand persisted, and supply remained ongoing—rumors were that the granite bed ran ten miles deep—but the area’s heyday was past, and with it the economic vibrancy that had once made it shine.

  “Shades of Washington and Canal Street,” Sammie echoed Joe’s thoughts, invoking Brattleboro’s version of where they were entering, a stroll from Barre’s city center.

  Joe had called ahead, and Perry Craver, a VBI agent stationed nearby in Waterbury, emerged from his car as Joe and Sam walked up the sidewalk.

  They exchanged greetings before Teri Parker’s old residence, a factory housing unit built when Barre’s population quintupled at the end of the 1800s—the granite business’s glory days.

  “I asked the local PD to sit on it, more or less, ever since we sealed it,” Perry was explaining as he led them up the front steps and into the lobby. “Since we figured we had the doer in jail, nobody was thinking along chain of custody lines, so that probably means the PD did an occasional drive-by, just to see if they saw lights on inside.” He looked directly at Joe as he added, “I’m sorry if I screwed up there.”

  “Not a problem.” Joe set him at ease. “We were all thinking that way, plus we suddenly got a little shorthanded.”

  They were clomping up the old wooden staircase to the second floor as Perry added, “I did check when I got here just now. If anyone has tampered with the seal, they’re really expert, ’cause I couldn’t see anything different from when I set it in place.”

  “Relax,” Joe said, patting him on the shoulder.

  By now, they were at the front door of a street-facing apartment, at once padlocked and sealed with yellow police tape, which Craver indicated with a showman’s flourish. “Ta-dah.”

  Without comment, Sammie sliced through the seal with a switchblade that had mysteriously appeared in her hand as Perry opened the padlock with a key from his pocket. This he handed to Joe.

  “Has anyone been interviewed about her?” Joe asked him, taking the key.

  Perry looked troubled again. “No. Like I said. We thought it was a done deal. We talked about it at the office, figu
ring if a trial date ever came up for Mick Durocher, we’d do some backup interviews then. But with his confession, that seemed unlikely.”

  The agent let out a sigh. “I know you keep saying it’s no big deal, but I feel like I dropped the ball.”

  Sammie left them talking and entered the apartment. Her silence told Joe, and perhaps subliminally Perry, that she would have interviewed neighbors, coworkers, family members, and anyone else—regardless of presumed slam dunks—had she been the agent in charge. That level of thoroughness was second nature to her.

  “You didn’t,” he reassured Perry one last time. “Everything’s fine, and it does seem the place hasn’t been touched since you were here, so give yourself a break.”

  He half stepped across the threshold and gave Perry a wide smile. “We’ll take it from here, and let you know if we need any more help. If we’ve got time, we’ll drop by the office, but in any case, say hi to everyone.”

  Craver nodded, only slightly mollified, and took his leave.

  Joe entered on Sam’s heels and closed the door behind him. “He’s beating himself up,” he said sympathetically.

  “He should,” she replied. “He fucked up.”

  Joe didn’t argue. He valued her tenacity and work ethic. If it came equipped with a little harsh judgment now and then, so be it.

  As was his habit—and hers, too, he being that much of an influence—Joe stood quietly by the door for a while, studying the room before them section by section, more absorbing its information than cataloging it.

  It wasn’t big. An efficiency with a separate bathroom. Kitchenette in one corner, closet in another, two dirty windows, side by side. The walls and floor were bare and dirty, the mattress lacking a box spring or frame. Piles of clothes, indiscriminately clean and soiled, were spread around haphazardly. There was a chest of drawers, a cheap armchair, a clock radio and a lamp on the floor beside the mattress, next to a couple of fashion catalogs, and little else. Unusually, there was no TV.

  Sam spoke first. “Talk about sparse.”

  “Not counting what you could collect from a yard sale,” Joe agreed, “the rest would fit into one suitcase.”

  Slipping on latex gloves, they set out to explore different parts of the room in detail, each imagining Teri Parker living here—eating, sleeping, getting ready to go out, coming home after a long day. In their minds, they tried to make the place come alive—to visualize every item they handled being used by her in context.

  Sadly, in the end, it amounted to very little.

  Plus, more suspiciously, there were gaps.

  “Check this out,” Sam said, holding up a thin electrical cord.

  “Recharger?” he queried.

  “I’d say for a phone,” she reported. “We never found one, did we?”

  He frowned. “No—not with her, not at Mick’s, and not where he said he killed her. We also found no records in her name associated with any Vermont cell carriers.”

  “Something else,” Sam added, holding up a second wire.

  “What’s that?” he asked from across the room.

  “To either a laptop or a tablet,” she said. “The charge cord’s different than a phone’s.”

  “Two for two, then,” Joe mused. “I’d call that a clue.”

  He entered the dead girl’s bathroom and surveyed her belongings. “This is clearly where she spent her quality time,” he announced over his shoulder.

  Sammie appeared in the doorway and let out a low whistle. “No kidding. Look at all this crap.”

  There were lotions, shampoos, creams, nail polish bottles, ointments, aerosol cans, stacks of various soaps, and sundry other so-called beauty supplies lining every flat surface, including several makeshift shelves, and along the baseboard.

  “Her history implied she’d been a hooker, at least off and on,” Sam recalled. “I guess some of this makes sense. Gotta take care of the assets. Seems a little much.”

  Joe smiled to himself, doubting that he’d seen a hint of makeup on Sammie in all the years he’d known her.

  “Interesting,” Joe said, reaching down and holding up a pregnancy test kit. “Looks like a new box.”

  Sam crouched by the full trash basket and began extracting its contents with a gloved hand, until she found the item she was hoping for. She brandished the same sort of plastic chemical strip that she’d used herself years earlier, when discovering the happy news about Emma.

  She had her doubts that Teri Parker’s reaction had mirrored hers. She showed it to Joe.

  “Positive?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  A thin, hesitant voice reached them through the apartment’s outer door. “Teri? Hello? Is somebody in there?”

  Joe glanced at Sam and raised his eyebrows. “This might be useful.”

  Both cops moved into the other room. Sam stood to one side of the door as Joe carefully opened it. “May I help you?”

  The chunky young woman outside took a startled step back, her mouth half open. She was dressed in leggings and a tank top with too much cleavage, exposing much of her brassiere, as was the fashion among many. “Who’re you? I heard voices.”

  Joe showed her his identification. “My name’s Joe Gunther. I’m from the Vermont Bureau of Investigation.”

  “You’re a cop?” she asked. “Where’s Teri? What’s happened?”

  “What’s your name, miss?” he asked gently.

  “Dot.” She gestured generally down the hall. “Dorothy. I live next door.”

  “Dot what?”

  “Naylor. What’s happened to Teri?”

  “You didn’t notice she’s been gone?” Joe asked, pointing at the remnants of yellow tape still sticking to the doorframe. “Or that the apartment was sealed?”

  Naylor seemed to take that in for the first time and rubbed her forehead with her palm. “I sorta been out of it for a couple of days. I been sick.”

  A door slammed upstairs. Joe looked up and gestured to the woman. “Why don’t you come inside? Maybe you can help us.”

  She complied hesitantly, startled anew to see Sam standing by the door, who then closed it behind them. Technically, the apartment was a protected scene, and shouldn’t have served as an interview room, but given the exchange with Craver earlier, and the lack of ready alternatives, Joe wasn’t overly concerned.

  “This is Special Agent Martens,” Joe introduced her. “Dot Naylor.”

  The two women nodded to each other without comment.

  “Would you like to have a seat?” Joe asked Dot, indicating the one chair.

  But their guest was staring around the room. “What did you do?”

  “To what?” Sam asked.

  “This,” Dot said, indicating the whole apartment. “You messed everything up. Why’d you do that? What’d she do to you?”

  “We found it this way,” Joe explained. “How was it normally?”

  Dot spread her hands out to both sides. “She was no neat freak, but it was never like this.”

  “Did she have a computer or a smartphone?” Sam asked.

  But answering that was too premature for Naylor. She stared at Sammie. “A computer…? What’s going on? Why’re you here? I heard voices and people walking around. Where’s Teri? Did you people lock her up?”

  Joe took her supportively by the elbow and guided her to the chair, where she sat. “We’ve got some hard news, I’m afraid,” he said. “Teri’s died, and we’re trying to find out why. We’re terribly sorry.”

  Dot looked from one of them to the other, bewilderment stamped on her features. “What?” she asked softly. “How?”

  “We can’t go into details,” Joe continued. “But it would help if you could tell us a little about her. There are so many things we’d like to know.”

  Joe crouched beside the chair and took Dot’s hand in his own. “Such as: Did she have a computer?”

  Naylor still appeared in shock. “Sure. Who doesn’t? She didn’t use it much. It was a hand-me-down from an old
boyfriend.”

  “She preferred her phone?” Joe suggested.

  “Yeah. She was on it all the time.” She wiped her nose on the back of her free hand and mumbled, “I can’t believe this.”

  “You were close?”

  “We were friends,” she replied. “Ever since she moved in. We hit it off.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Couple of years.”

  “She have a job?”

  “A bunch. Same as me. At the bottle-recycling place, bagging groceries, a week or two at McDonald’s. She didn’t like that. She was on unemployment a few times. She was a chambermaid for a while. I forgot that one.… I don’t know. Stuff like that.”

  “You’re leaving out the hooking,” Sam stated flatly.

  Dot stared at her, appalled. “You’re mean.”

  “That doesn’t make her wrong,” Joe said quietly, with a small and encouraging smile. “It also doesn’t make Teri a bad person.”

  Dot cast her eyes down, despite her outrage and sorrow. “Maybe she did a little, when she needed to.”

  Joe’s knees were hurting by now, so he rose from his crouch, stepped back, and began pacing the room slowly, speaking as he went.

  “Okay. Tell us about her friends, who she hung out with, what she did with her free time. Draw us a picture of what you two did together.”

  Dot scowled. “Why? I don’t get it. If she’s dead, why do you care?”

  Joe stopped a moment to ask her, “How do you think she died?”

  “I don’t know. OD?”

  “Did she use?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?” The familiar refrain.

  “What, lately?”

  “Heroin, but not much. When it suited her.”

  Joe reapproached but remained standing, looming above her. “Teri was murdered, Dot. Beaten to death.”

  Dot’s face crumpled in on itself and she started crying. Both cops waited her out, not offering comfort. In time, she stopped, wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve, and took a deep breath.

  “Who did it?” she asked, sniffing.