Occam's Razor

by Mayor, Archer

  The woman was lying between an obviously ransacked living room and the kitchen, still as a fallen mannequin. As described by Melissa Snow, her head was almost detached, and blood surrounded her like hemorrhaged syrup. The biting cold seemed suddenly to sink in deeper.

  J.P. took a series of photographs before getting to one knee just clear of the frozen pool. “Multiple stab wounds to the chest,” he reported, not bothering to look back at us, his head enveloped in vapor from his breath. “Defensive cuts to the hands and forearms. Fingernails look intact—might be some of her attacker’s tissue there. Hard to tell right now.” He glanced up at the walls. “Given the blood-spatter pattern, it looks like she put up a fight but never ran. It all happened right here.”

  Willy Kunkle was flashing a light into the darker corners nearby. “Probably an acquaintance attack, and she was either a real slob, or somebody was looking for something.”

  “Any weapon?” I asked J.P., flexing my cold fingers inside their thin latex gloves.

  He took a slight hop over the body into the kitchen beyond. “Nothing obvious,” he said, looking around. He began taking more pictures.

  Catering to his tidiness, I took the roll of paper and prodded it down the hallway to the back of the house with the tip of my white-swathed boot, leaving Willy and J.P. behind.

  Past a communal bathroom and some disgorged closets, there were two bedrooms, both with lights on. One was obviously an adult’s—a woman’s clothing was strewn about; cosmetics, jewelry, and a hair dryer were scattered across a scarred bureau and a night table. The bed appeared permanently unmade, but again, all the drawers and closets looked like they’d been rifled. The other room was the child’s. I entered it first.

  The baby lay in its crib, a beaten-up hand-me-down planted in the middle of the room. Melissa Snow had implied it was a boy. Its one thin blanket appeared slightly disturbed, so I assumed for the moment she’d checked that fact out personally. The room didn’t reflect any signs of care or affection. The walls were bare of decorations, even the torn-out magazine pictures I’d seen in other such homes. The blanket was dirty, as were the floor and windows, and the rest of the floor was buried under boxes, suitcases, and laundry bags, of the kind usually reserved for attics or garages—all, as elsewhere, had clearly been tossed around. There was so much junk that the crib looked imperiled in its midst, as if four crests of rolling flotsam were about to close in on it from all sides and swallow it whole like a small boat beneath a tidal wave.

  I heard heavy, hurried footsteps approaching down the hall, and turned as an out-of-breath Sammie Martens appeared at the door, still pulling her gloves up over the cuffs of her overalls.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said.

  I looked at her carefully and took my time responding. “I thought you were on the sick list.”

  Her face, already pink from the cold and exertion, deepened in color. “I’m feeling a lot better.”

  “Does this mean you’ll be sticking around?”

  She opened her mouth to answer and then paused. I could tell, however, that her immediate reaction had been anger. “Yes. Sorry if I caused any problems.”

  I stepped aside so she could get a full view of the dead baby. “You haven’t, Sam. I just want to know if we can count on you.”

  This time, the anger showed. “I never let you down before.”

  I motioned her to approach the crib. “The paramedic thinks hypothermia. There’s a wood stove in the front—probably the only source of heat. You see Ron when you came in?”

  “In the unit, talking with some woman.” Her eyes were fixed on the crib’s contents.

  I gestured up the hallway. “The victim’s mother, supposedly. I’m hoping she’ll know something about all this—a few names, at least.” I glanced back at the baby, as peaceful as if it were still asleep, aside from a waxy pallor. “Christ. What a world,” I murmured.

  Sammie hesitated and then said, “I am sorry, Joe. I know I’ve been a little flaky.”

  I looked up at her, embarrassed myself. “Don’t worry about it. I came down too hard on you. We can talk later. I’ll leave you three to it for now and have Ron organize the canvass, neighbor interviews, record checks, and everything else. Make sure J.P. covers all the angles, okay? There’s no rush. I’ll make sure someone comes by later with hot coffee and something to eat.”

  Back outside, I stripped off my containment suit, balled it up, and stuffed it into a red garbage bag J.P. had left for that purpose. Ron got out of the car, leading a woman in her forties by the elbow.

  “Lieutenant, this is June Dutelle.”

  I shook her hand, noticing as I did so that she seemed curiously remote from her surroundings, as if she’d been delivered to the wrong airport and couldn’t speak the language. “Glad to meet you,” I told her. “Sorry it’s under such circumstances. Why don’t we go back into the car? I’m freezing.”

  We all three returned to the warm embrace of the patrol car, seeing through its windows the tired old house beside us, its peeling, battered hulk flickering in the strobes like an advertisement of the grief within. From the front seat I leaned forward and killed the flashing lights. Ron and June Dutelle were sitting in the back.

  “Mrs. Dutelle was telling me,” Ron began, “that she’d been having trouble locating her daughter Brenda for over a day. She didn’t answer the phone, missed a date they’d set up, and didn’t come to the door when Mrs. Dutelle knocked on it.”

  I couldn’t resist smiling at his stilted use of her name, remembering Edith Rudd. “Do you prefer June or Mrs. Dutelle?” I asked her.

  She smiled timidly. “June’s fine. Dutelle was my husband’s name.”

  I just barely heard Ron sigh. “When your daughter didn’t answer the door, why didn’t you walk in to see what was up?”

  “That was a rule she had,” June answered. “She set boundaries. She said that if more mothers and daughters did the same thing, there wouldn’t be so much trouble between them. I was never allowed inside unless I was invited. ’Course, all those boundaries were for me. I never closed any doors to her.” Her voice gained an edge of irritation. “Any time of night or day, I was always willing to babysit, sometimes with no notice at all. Brenda would just appear and drop him off, dirty diaper and all.”

  “She worked odd hours?”

  June Dutelle laughed bitterly. “Her idea of work was to stand in line at the welfare office. This was when she wanted to see her friends and didn’t want a baby hanging around her neck, ruining things.”

  “I take it the boy’s father isn’t in the picture?”

  Her eyes widened. “Jimmy hasn’t been near any of us since Brenda first got pregnant.”

  “What’s Jimmy’s full name?” Ron asked quietly.

  “James. A. Croteau. Lived in Burlington, last I heard.”

  “So your daughter’s name is Dutelle?”

  June shook her head sadly. “Oh, no. They got married. Lasted about a month. I suppose she still is married, legally.”

  Ron shot me a glance at June’s use of the present tense.

  “This is a pretty expensive house for a single person on welfare,” I noted. “Did you help her out with the rent?”

  The older woman’s face shut down. “You should see the hole I live in. Brenda has her own money—I don’t know how. I didn’t want to know.”

  “Who did she hang out with?” I asked.

  June looked through the side window for a moment. Her voice was wistful when she answered. “I don’t know that, either. Not really. Those boundaries she talked about went a long way. I was just the babysitter, when you get down to it.”

  I let her silence fill the small space inside the car, until its own weight prompted her to continue. “She has a girlfriend named Janice Litchfield. She’s a wild one. I hold her responsible for most of what Brenda got into. Then there’s Jamie Good, who’s anything but.”

  Ron gave a slight shake of his head as he wrote down the names in his notepad. We
all knew Jamie Good.

  “The others,” June continued, “I don’t remember. They come and go. Most of the time, I never hear their names anyway. Janice and Jamie were the most regular. They go back years—all went to school together.”

  “From what you just said,” I commented, “I’m guessing Brenda got herself into a jam once or twice?”

  When June Dutelle turned back to face me, her face was damp with tears. She’d gotten so practiced at suppressing her feelings, I hadn’t noticed her slide from shock into grief.

  “Well,” she barely whispered, “I guess that’s over now.”

  Through the rear window behind her, I saw two shadows approaching up the street. “It’s okay,” I said softly. “We can finish this later. Do you have someone at home to keep you company? Or someone who can stay the night?”

  She nodded. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Ron here will see about getting you home. I take it you drove here?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all right. We’ll have someone bring your car home, too. I don’t want you driving yourself right now.”

  “Thank you.”

  I slipped out of the car and met the two people I’d recognized through the window: the local assistant medical examiner, a GP in real life named Alfred Gould, and Carol Green, one of Gail’s fellow deputies from the State’s Attorney’s office.

  “Is it just my imagination,” I asked her, out of earshot of the car, “or are you the only one they allow out after hours?”

  She gave me a tired smile. “Just lucky, Joe. Besides, it’s just barely quitting time. Is this as bad as it sounds?”

  I escorted them both to J.P.’s pile of equipment. “’Fraid so, and we’re doing it by the numbers, so I’d appreciate your both suiting up and staying on the paper carpet J.P.’s laid out inside.”

  Gould put down his bag to comply, asking, “How fresh are they?”

  “A day or so. There’s no heat in the house, so they’re both frozen solid. The hypothesis right now is the stove died after the mother was killed. Whoever did her in may not have even known about the child till later—not that he cared even then.”

  Carol pulled one leg of the overalls on angrily. “Yeah, well, if you guys catch the son of a bitch, he’s going to find out we don’t give a damn what he knew or didn’t know. He’s got two murders on his hands, like it or not.”

  “This blind justice talking?” I asked, half in jest, a little startled by her vehemence.

  “Not if I can help it,” she answered.

  7

  THE REFORMER’S ALICE SIMMS WAS GOING to hold me to my promise. She intercepted me as I tried to duck under the police line as far from the thinned-out crowd as I could get.

  “Walk you to your car, Joe?”

  “Sure. Still too early to say much, though.”

  “Try me.”

  I gave her little more than what she and a few hundred other eavesdroppers had already heard over the scanner. “Appears to be a double homicide, woman and infant, unknown manner and cause, unknown identities, unknown time, unknown suspect or suspects.”

  “You find a weapon?”

  “Not so far, but we’ve barely begun looking—don’t want to rush things,” I added, hoping the philosophy might be catching.

  It wasn’t, of course. “Was it a gun, a knife? What?” She was walking and writing in a notepad at the same time. Her head ducked down, her hair covering her face, she was headed straight for a telephone pole.

  I grabbed her elbow and guided her clear. “Watch your step.”

  She looked up quickly. “Could it be a murder/suicide?”

  “I can’t say that for sure.”

  She stopped and dropped her hands to her sides. “Well, say something, for crying out loud. Whose house is it, at least?”

  I shook my head. “You’re moving too fast.” I checked my watch. “You’ve got five hours till deadline, more if you push it. Let me do the basic homework so we don’t both look like idiots later, okay? I’ll call you, I promise.”

  She grudgingly went along with it, although I knew she’d pursue other sources in the meantime. She snapped her pad closed and let me leave in peace.

  Heading back to the office, however, I decided to test Willy’s theory about Dave Raymo, who was supposed to be laboring in front of a keyboard, writing his report. I reached for the radio under my dash and called him up.

  He answered tersely, his tone of voice betraying his surprise at being found out so quickly.

  “Meet me at the bottom of Main and Canal,” I told him. “The Food Co-op parking lot.”

  Predictably, I got there first, although I didn’t doubt he was waiting around a nearby corner, convincing himself that such a taunt would successfully salvage some juvenile pride—it was the kind of head game he held too dear. I merely left the engine running, thankful for a good heater, and watched the early evening crowd slowly converge on the Co-op.

  He arrived eventually, his left elbow incongruously resting on the driver’s side windowsill—a casual look except for the obvious fact that he must have been freezing half to death.

  He rolled to a stop so that our windows were opposite one another, forcing me to expose myself to the cold as he’d chosen to.

  “What’s up?” he asked, his voice flat, adding with feigned nonchalance, “I had something I had to do before headin’ back to the barn.”

  “I don’t think you want to be feeding me an attitude right now.”

  He pursed his lips and kept silent.

  “Maybe you can use your screwing around to some benefit,” I told him. “Before the night’s over we’ll have interviewed the Rescue crew, our own dispatch, the backup team you called, and all the neighbors on that street. We’ll have a pretty good idea what really happened when you first showed up. So now’s your chance—you want to change your story before it’s too late and you’ve made it part of the record? You told me you called Rescue and backup, and then ‘we’ went in. Who did you mean by ‘we’?”

  He knew there was only one way out. “I went in alone,” he confessed angrily. “I didn’t wait for the others. I thought the woman might need help in there. I didn’t want to waste time.”

  “What about the Rescue crew? Why weren’t they warned it was a homicide—to stay at a distance?”

  His voice climbed a note, just shy of a whine. “They showed up too fast. I was still checking the house out. I had to make sure it was safe.”

  “So they just walked in, totally unaware?”

  After a pause, he admitted, “Yeah—just as I was checking out the kid’s room. That’s why I missed him. It didn’t even look like a nursery—I thought it was all storage.”

  I sympathized with him there, at least. “You know what might have happened if someone had been waiting inside—to you and the Rescue folks both?”

  A flash of irritation crossed his face. “I know, I know. It won’t happen again.”

  I resisted the urge to reach out and twist his ear like a child’s. “That’s between you and your supervisor. I want to know exactly what you saw when you entered that building.”

  “What’re you after?” he asked suspiciously.

  “What you’re going to be putting into your report, Dave. The truth. What you saw, smelled, heard—everything that happened.”

  He scowled, which came easily to him. “I didn’t hear or smell anything. Everyone was dead. And I didn’t touch anything.”

  “How ’bout the lighting? Did you or the Rescue people turn on any lights to see better?”

  “No.”

  “Not even the baby’s room? Why have a bright overhead light on in a room with a sleeping baby?”

  All suspicion drained from his face and he shook his head. “No. That is weird. That room should’ve been dark. The whole place was lit up like a Christmas tree.”

  I put my car into gear, confirmed in my guess that the killer—or killers—had searched the place from one end to the other. “Okay, Dave. I’m
glad you didn’t get yourself killed—or anyone else.”

  The surliness returned. “Thanks,” he said, and hit the gas, squealing out of the parking lot ahead of me in some parody of male dominance.

  · · ·

  I found a message to call Bobby Miller when I returned to the office. He was on the same shift as Raymo and so presumably out in his cruiser somewhere. I told dispatch to let him know I was back.

  The phone rang five minutes later.

  “Lieutenant? Something came up this afternoon I thought you should know about. Right after I went on duty, I got a call from Winthrop Johnston. You know him? He said you were old friends.”

  “We are. He’s a PI. Ex-state trooper.”

  “Right—that’s what he told me. He wanted to know about the break-in at Jim Reynolds’s place.”

  I stood without moving for several seconds, digesting this. Jim Reynolds was becoming a radar blip that wouldn’t fade. “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. I said I’d have to clear it with you. He was real nice about it. Said he understood and that he’d wait for you to call him. He made it sound like it was just a boring piece of paper shuffling he was doing, but it struck me as a funny coincidence.”

  “Me, too. He didn’t say what he was after?”

  “Nope.”

  I thanked him, hung up, and dialed Johnston’s number from a list I had taped to my desk—not of snitches, whose names I kept more securely tucked away, but of bankers, business leaders, artists, teachers, and one private investigator—all keen observers, all well traveled, and all willing to act as sounding boards if they thought the questions I had made sense.

  Winthrop Johnston, universally known as Win, had been born in Hardwick, in northern Vermont, attended the University of Vermont, and had worked with the state police for thirteen years before deciding to go independent. He’d been a PI for over a decade, working out of Putney, just north of Brattleboro, and had established a reputation as a straight arrow, walking the tightrope between actual broken laws and legal improprieties with a sure-footedness often lacking in his colleagues.