Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

by Mayor, Archer

  He turned and looked at me carefully. “If this thing works out, and we flush Vogel out, Dunn’s going to own him. We’ll do the paperwork and the background research and all the rest as usual, but Bob Vogel is going to sit on the SA’s velvet pillow—his golden key to reelection. And nothing better happen to threaten that. For whatever reasons, James Dunn is playing for keeps this time, and I don’t think anyone should forget it.”

  He checked his watch suddenly and murmured, “Well, I better get back,” as if our seemingly impromptu little chat had been the sole reason for his visit.

  · · ·

  I was still mulling over Tony’s ominous prophecy when I heard Tyler calling me from the trailer’s front door an hour later, the white dust mask he’d been wearing dangling like a miniature feed bag from around his neck. I slid off the car hood I’d been using as a bench and crossed over to him.

  “I think we got him” was all he said, gesturing for me to follow him inside.

  They’d opened the windows, so the smell was less intense. In a bizarre reversal of the norm, their search had actually tidied things up a bit. Kunkle was standing in what passed for the kitchen with a triumphant look on his face, but he left the exposition to Tyler.

  “Everything’s been sketched, photographed, and documented, so you don’t have to tiptoe too much, but you might still want to watch what you touch.”

  I gave him a quizzical look, which Kunkle responded to more bluntly. “The guy beat off a lot, all over the place, including on the mirror.”

  I repressed an involuntary shudder, much to Willy’s satisfaction. “What’ve you got?”

  Tyler stepped over to the counter next to the cluttered, greasy sink and pulled open a drawer. Inside, among other utensils, was a newly bagged and labeled carving knife—short, broad, and ugly. “First: a knife, stained with what a preliminary field test tells me is blood. Obviously, Waterbury’ll have to check it out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it matched Gail’s type.”

  He stepped through to the narrow hallway in the waist of the trailer and pulled open a closet door. Hanging from a nail on the inside was a loop of cotton rope similar to the small nooses we’d found dangling from Gail’s bed frame. Tyler merely pointed at it, adding, “Item two. Again, I’ll have to match the cut end to what we’ve already got, but it looks likely.”

  I nodded and continued following him down the hallway and into the bedroom, passing the bathroom door with its smeared full-length mirror along the way. “Watch yourself,” Kunkle chuckled, as if warning me against a chained rat.

  Tyler stood at the far side of the disheveled, foul-smelling double bed. What sheets were still on it were stained dark and covered with scab-like blotches. Despite having visited countless places as bad or worse, I felt my throat tighten.

  “This is the gold mine,” Tyler resumed, in a singularly odd metaphor. “You can tell he favors the right side of the bed.”

  “No shit,” Kunkle murmured.

  “I reasoned that if he were to hide anything under the mattress, it would be on the side he wasn’t occupying.” He lifted the mattress so that the light from the window played on the box spring and asked, somewhat indelicately, “Item number three—look familiar?”

  Spread out like a crushed butterfly was a scanty pair of women’s underwear, gaudy and colorful, with a small red heart sewn on its crotch. Gail had bought it as a joke several years earlier.

  I merely nodded. Willy had the rare good taste to keep quiet.

  J.P. gestured to a pile of clothes in the corner, on which the red shirt Willy and I had seen Vogel wearing earlier was perched at the top. “The shirt speaks for itself, but this… ” he moved to another closet and pulled down a small box from the back of a high shelf, “is the real bonanza, if you ask me. The kind of thing prosecutors love. It was actually tucked even further out of the way, between the roof and the false ceiling, behind one of the acoustic panels.”

  The box contained several four-by-five glossy photographs, which Tyler spread out carefully on the bed with his latex-clad fingertips. “These still need to be dusted using fancier equipment than I’ve got. If they’re as hot as I think, it’ll be worth the effort.”

  I leaned forward and studied them. They were of various views of Brattleboro—of its sidewalks, crosswalks, and storefronts—but all of them featured Gail, alone or chatting with other people, dressed for summer weather in a tank top and shorts, and looking, to my saddened imagination, remarkably youthful, happy, and carefree. The pictures had obviously been taken on the same sunny day, close to one another in time, as if the photographer had found his quarry outside and downtown and had shot off a half roll in quick succession.

  I straightened back up. “That’s eight photos. You find any others?”

  Tyler shook his head. “No, but they were in a Green Mountains Lab envelope with the negatives.” He patted his pocket. “And the negs match the prints. I’m guessing he shot these and left the rest of the roll unexposed. Probably either he or the lab threw the blank film away.”

  “How ’bout a camera?”

  There was a pause. Willy and J.P. glanced at each other. Tyler finally said, “Guess not.”

  I rubbed my aching eyes with my thumb and forefinger. “We’ll have to check into that. Anything else?”

  “There’re about thirty porno magazines under the bed,” Kunkle said.

  “Kiddy or adult?”

  “Straight adult—no boys, no kids. Some of the girls look like teenagers, but that’s pretty standard.”

  There was a long pause, and I realized that I’d trampled their euphoria with my lack of enthusiasm. I took a deep breath, trying to override the humming in my head, and gave them both as genuine a smile as I could muster. “Looks like a home run, guys. You might as well collect all this and log it in. It’s about as strong a basis for an arrest warrant as Dunn could ask for. Thanks.”

  Tyler smiled back sympathetically, but Willy just shook his head. “Go to bed, boss. You’re falling apart.”

  · · ·

  Bed, however, was out of the question. As I walked into Ron Klesczewski’s operations room, intent on escorting the arrest-warrant affidavit all the way to the judge’s pen, I was stopped by the gleam in Ron’s eye. He cupped the phone in his hand and murmured, “I think we got something.”

  I waited while he continued listening to whoever was on the other end of the line.

  He finally said, “Hang on a sec,” and looked at me again. “This is Wilma Belleview—she’s the sheriff ’s dispatcher in Newfane. She just got a call from a power-company guy at Harriman Station asking if there’ve been any MVAs in the Jacksonville-Harriman Dam area. One of their field men was supposed to be working at the Glory Hole out there but he’s not answering his radio.”

  MVA stood for Motor Vehicle Accident. “He have a history of wild driving?”

  Ron shrugged. “I don’t know, but Wilma told them she’d call around. VSP and Wilmington PD drew blanks, so she thought she’d try us on a long shot.” He moved over to one of the neat paper piles on his table and retrieved a single, slim folder, his enthusiasm gaining momentum. “The point is, one of Vogel’s big enthusiasms a few years ago, when he was still living in North Adams, was fishing and hunting around the Harriman Reservoir. He and his buddies did that a lot, and they once got busted for trespassing onto the dam, trying to piss into the Glory Hole.”

  Dulled as I was by fatigue, I was becoming infected by Ron’s energy. “How long ago did the field man head out there?”

  “Early this morning.”

  “Was his radio working when he left?”

  “Yup. What do you think?”

  I held up my hand instinctively, as if to slow down oncoming traffic. “I don’t know yet. How’s the sheriff handling it? They have anyone in the area?”

  “Not really, and there haven’t been any MVAs. They weren’t planning on doing anything.”

  No reason for them to, I thought, and pointed at the phone still clenche
d in Ron’s hand. “Better let your friend off the hook.”

  Ron looked at the receiver in surprise, muttered his thanks to Wilma, and hung up. “Should we send someone out there?”

  I sat down in one of the metal folding chairs grouped around the table. “How often did he visit the area?”

  “Every hunting season, fished there every summer, all through his teenage years and into his twenties, at least according to family and friends.” He waved a hand across the stacks of files and folders before him. “I didn’t find anything recent, but it was obviously an old stomping ground.”

  “We had any other nibbles?”

  Ron shook his head.

  I rubbed my forehead. I was so tired by now, I could barely function, much less jump at the notion of traveling forty-five minutes to the far end of the county because some power-company field man was playing hooky. “When did Harriman Station first try to contact their guy?”

  “Three hours ago.”

  “Long-time employee?”

  Ron had asked all the right questions before me. “Seventeen years—rock solid.”

  Despite his eagerness, or perhaps because of it, I merely felt more drained as I said, “Okay. I was going to wait for J.P. and the others to bring back what they need for an arrest warrant and then see the process through, but I might as well keep out of their hair and do something more constructive. I’ll pick one of them up on the way out of town and check out your Glory Hole.”

  I got to my feet slowly, ignoring Ron’s look of disappointment at being left with his paperwork. “Then I’m going home for some sleep.”

  · · ·

  I didn’t go into great detail with Sammie Martens when I picked her up outside Bob Vogel’s trailer park, and—after giving me a quick glance—she didn’t ask for any. She merely listened to my directions, accepted that we were being stimulated in large part by a hunch of Ron’s, and took over the wheel as I slouched down into the opposite corner and closed my throbbing eyes.

  I didn’t need to admire the passing countryside. Like many people living in southern Vermont, I was intimately familiar with the Harriman Reservoir and its surroundings. Hanging like a seven-mile-long twisted streamer from Route 9’s rigid curtain rod, the reservoir nestles in a bunched-up cluster of steep, stocky, tree-choked hills vaguely reminiscent of the Appalachians—a setting unlike any other in the state. Coming south off of 9 onto Route 100, roughly paralleling Harriman’s jagged shore, it is easy to think that Vermont has been mysteriously left behind, perhaps because the driver is not actually crossing the Green Mountains, but moving among them as they mingle to become the Hoosac Range leading down into Massachusetts. It is, for locals at least, a recreational area of choice, and a place I and many of my friends visited often.

  Even the so-called Glory Hole was familiar ground. A hundred-and-sixty-foot-wide concrete, curved funnel that looked like a gigantic suction hole in some child’s nightmare, it sat, as if floating, some thirty feet from the dam that had formed the reservoir back in the 1920s and which, back then, had been one of the largest earthen dams in the world—two hundred feet tall, eight hundred feet long, and thirteen hundred feet wide at the base. During extremely wet years, when the Glory Hole’s role as spillway was called upon to protect the dam from any eroding overflow, people from miles around would gather at a convenient cliff high above the hole and look straight down, transfixed, as millions of gallons of water slid over the lip of the funnel and vanished as into the bowels of some gargantuan toilet. It was a frightening, mesmerizing, deafening sight that no first visitor ever forgot, and which pulled people back time and again, whenever the waters swelled beyond their prescribed boundaries.

  Now, however, was not such a time, for weather or tourists. The summer had been relatively dry, the weather was becoming cooler with each passing day, and it was too early for either leaf-peepers or deer hunters. The place, I noticed, opening my eyes as Sammie pulled off Route 100 onto the long, paved dead-end access road leading to the dam, was deserted.

  “You see any power-company trucks?”

  She shook her head. “Haven’t seen much of anybody. You really think this is where Vogel headed?”

  “I don’t know… ” I hesitated. “To be honest, I think the main reason I’m out here is just to take a break. No reason he couldn’t have, though.” The gap in the rocks and trees to our right indicated the approach of the scenic cliff top, high above the spillway. “Pull over when you get near the fence.”

  She stopped by the side of the road and pointed to the dam, which angled off below us to the far shore. A road capped its crest, and a small yellow pickup truck, looking like an abandoned toy from this distance, was parked with its driver’s door open. “There’s one of your mysteries solved.”

  We got out of the car and approached the chain-link fence blocking the top of the cliff. Far below, the bone-dry Glory Hole, no less hypnotic for the absence of rushing water, came into view. It was fringed by a circular wooden pier, below which taintor gates hung to further control the water level if necessary, and from which two narrow wooden catwalks extended like clock hands—one toward the quiet, still, massive dam, and the other to the top of a concrete tower, crowned by a small shed, which stood alongside the Glory Hole, slightly farther out in the water, and which presumably functioned as a vertical service tunnel.

  Our attention, however, was drawn to none of this, for near the center of the spillway’s funnel, just shy of where the downward curve began its dizzying plunge toward the black hole in the middle, the small, motionless shape of a man lay spread-eagled. One of his hands extended high above his head and was wrapped around an iron ring, set into the concrete for service crews to hook their ropes. And below him, trailing like a kite tail and vanishing into the void at his feet, was a thin, bright ribbon of blood.

  13

  "JESUS CHRIST," SAMMIE MURMURED ducking down, her eyes already scanning the area around us. “You think he’s still alive?”

  Squatting next to her, I craned my neck to look at him again.

  “He’s got a firm grip on that ring, not that that necessarily means anything.”

  I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted. “You down there. Can you hear me?”

  For a moment nothing happened. Then, almost imperceptibly, one leg moved about eight inches.

  “Jesus,” Sammie repeated. “If he lets go, he’s had it.”

  I scuttled back to the squad car, not knowing what we had—if the man had fallen by accident, if he’d been pushed or shot, and, if so, whether his attacker was still nearby, perhaps sighting on the two of us right now.

  I unhooked the mike from the car’s radio. “M-80 from O-3.”

  Dispatch answered immediately, “Go ahead, O-3.”

  “I’m at our intended destination with one civilian down, possible hostage situation, unknown and un-located perpetrator. Get me all the help you can, including an ambulance and a high-angle rescue team, but stop them at the entrance to the access road until I give further word.”

  The reply was crisp and unemotional. “10-4. M-80 out.”

  Sammie joined me crouching by the open door. “So now what? That guy doesn’t look like he has too much left in him.”

  I pulled two armored vests from the back seat, handed one to her, and slipped into the other without attaching the Velcro tabs. The exhaustion that had been dragging me down for untold hours, clogging my brain and affecting my concentration, had vanished completely, replaced by an almost frightening hyper-vigilance. “This road hits a hairpin curve about two hundred feet farther downhill and then doubles back to a parking lot on the dry side of the dam. We should have pretty good cover and a safe approach to the Glory Hole from there—assuming no one’s waiting for us.”

  “Right,” was all she said, before slipping on the vest, circling the car, and getting back behind the wheel.

  The sylvan peacefulness of moments ago had been abruptly wrenched into something almost perversely opposite. Without a single
hostile sign or sound, our surroundings now were threatening and dangerous—the trees potential sniper nests, the rocks and bushes obstructions to a clear, safe view all around. We rolled the car slowly down the hill and around the corner, our eyes straining against the dark green of the bordering trees for anything suspicious, dimly aware of the massive bulk of the dam growing to our right as we circled around below its potentially protective shoulder.

  As soon as we got to the small parking lot at the end of the road, some thirty feet below the dam’s crest, we raided the car trunk, and lugging a shotgun, a radio, a coil of rope, a pair of binoculars, and some extra ammunition, we made our way though the bordering trees up the steep slope to the top. To our left, extending eight hundred feet to the hills across from us, and several thousand feet down to a seemingly tiny streambed far below, was the vast, open, grassy sweep of the dam’s restraining slope. Normally a sight of inspiring beauty and industrial ingenuity, it was now just a potential killing field of gigantic proportions—a place to avoid at all costs until the threat, if any, could be located.

  Just shy of the narrow utility road where the abandoned pickup stood, we ran out of tree cover.

  Sammie—small, athletic, almost wiry—was barely breathing hard after the strenuous climb. She crouched by the last tree trunk and looked around at the quiet countryside. “How d’you want to play it?”

  I wiped the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve. “The road’s got a low cement wall on the water side. If we tuck up close to that, it ought to protect us pretty well from everywhere except the cliff we came from.”

  She looked over her shoulder. “What about from the trees?”

  “The angle from the top of the dam ought to cover them—just keep low once you get there.”

  She pursed her lips, took a deep breath, muttered, “Right,” and took off across the last twenty feet at a dead run, her feet digging into the slope like a sprinter’s. I watched all around as best I could, knowing there was little I could do with a shotgun in any case, and was infinitely relieved when I saw her reach the top and roll out of sight across the road.