Red Herring

by Archer Mayor

  “Bad news, boss.”

  Joe paused while hanging up his coat by the office’s front door and looked over at Sammie Martens. She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the day before.

  “That you got no sleep last night?” he asked.

  She laughed and shook her head. “Hardly. That’s never a problem. Margaret Agostini was found dead this morning at the old folks home. Suicide. Looks like she locked herself in the bathroom last night around ten and put a trash liner bag over her head.”

  Joe walked farther into the room. So far, the two of them were alone. “Jesus,” he said. “You check this out yourself?”

  “Just got back. I heard the Bellows Falls PD put out a call for an ME while I was heading home from Keene, where I’d just interviewed Chuck McNaughton—there’s a charmer. So, on impulse, I gave ’em a call and sure enough, it was the old lady. I figured I might as well keep driving. They’ve sent her up for an autopsy, but it looked straightforward to me.”

  Joe busied himself at the coffeemaker, setting things up for the four of them, knowing he and Sam would be joined shortly.

  “How so?” he asked, not bothering to face her.

  “Door blocked from the inside with a wedge, mostly,” she told him. “They had to break it down once they figured out someone was inside. She’d put a couple of pillows under her blankets to make it look like she was still in bed. That’s how the midnight bed check missed her.”

  “What was Brenda Small up to during all this?” Joe asked mildly.

  But Sam wasn’t misled. “Think she whacked her?”

  “No,” he admitted. “But I’d be dumb not to ask.”

  “I did ask,” Sam said. “Anything’s possible, but let’s just say it’s pretty unlikely from what I found out. Everything’s telling me this one’s exactly what it looks like.”

  Joe finished setting up the machine and leaned against the counter. “An old, crippled, brokenhearted woman kills herself after her dearly loved daughter is raped and murdered. Can’t argue with the logic.”

  “What logic?” Lester asked as he entered the room and draped his parka across the back of his chair. “Coffee ready yet? The heater in my car conked out. Colder’n a witch’s tit.”

  “Margaret Agostini committed suicide during the night,” Sam told him. “I checked it out and Joe was just saying that it made sense to him.”

  Lester froze in midmotion and stared at them both.

  “What?” Joe asked.

  The other man shook his head in disbelief. “After we split up at Doreen’s house, I got somebody from the Nevada State Police to break the news to her brother. I didn’t want to call him direct till he’d heard. Anyhow, it was last night when we finally hooked up on the phone and I asked him a few questions. We’re talking a hard-luck family here.”

  “How so?” Sammie asked.

  Spinney crossed to the coffeemaker and bent over double so that he could monitor the slow dripping from the bottom of the filter. Willy entered while he was doing so and uncharacteristically sat at his desk without a word.

  “Father was a drinker; abused everybody in the family, one way or the other, mostly by whaling on ’em,” Lester explained, finally giving up and straightening again. “Hey, Willy.”

  “Hey yourself,” Kunkle muttered.

  Lester resumed. “Doreen, though, was a special case—Mom walked in on the old man raping her one day. That was the last straw. She threw him out, called the cops, and he was tossed in the can for a few years. The family pulled up stakes and left.”

  “Where was all this?” Joe asked.

  “California somewhere. Mark—that’s his name, Mark Ferenc—said he was too young to remember. Near LA was the best he could do—Claremont, Riverside, Corona. He said they moved around a lot.”

  Joe moved to the office’s sole window, behind his own desk, and gazed out onto the narrow parking lot. They were housed on the second floor of Brattleboro’s century-old municipal building, over the police department, and he had a view of their white cruisers lined up and dusted with snow.

  “What’cha thinkin’?” Willy asked, well used to his body language.

  Joe turned around. “That Lester just filled in the background to a lot of what we’re dealing with—the closeness between mother and daughter; the reason Doreen never married and might’ve even been celibate; the impact that a rape especially must have had on Maggie. It all could go back to what happened in California.”

  “Meaning California might’ve come here?” Willy asked.

  “The dad?” Sam asked, startled.

  “That so unbelievable?” Willy challenged her.

  “He’s dead,” Lester interrupted.

  Joe was scrutinizing Willy. “You look like you’ve been up all night, too. Find anything?”

  “As long as you don’t ask me how,” Willy cautioned him with a smile.

  Joe pursed his lips. Willy was the unit wild card. Committed and tenacious, he was also a recovering alcoholic, a crippled ex-military sniper, and a PTSD survivor who saw every rule as a suggestion. They had never lost a case because of his unorthodox methods, but most observers felt that was merely a matter of time.

  His results were his saving grace. No matter how he did what he did—or how many people he pissed off in the process—Willy Kunkle brought home the goods, and he did it cleanly; or maybe just without ever being caught.

  “Don’t worry about that, Willy,” Joe reassured him. “I don’t want to know.”

  “Okay,” Willy said, propping his feet up on his desk. “As far as I can tell so far, Doreen Ferenc was squeaky clean. She worked hard and steady, kept her nose clean and her skirts in place, devoted herself to the betterment of McNaughton Trucking as if it were the Red, White, and Blue, and took care of her mother like some kid out of a nursery rhyme.”

  “Nothing about any hanky-panky with either father or son?” Joe asked.

  “Nope. Nothing about any hanky-panky with anything or anybody. Most boring broad I ever looked into. Can’t say the same about Chuck and/or Sue, though,” he added with a leer.

  Joe’s brows furrowed.

  “Susan Allgood is the younger McNaughton’s secretary, slash lap pet,” Sammie explained. “I interviewed him at the Keene airport, after he came in from spending the last few days in Oklahoma City, presumably with a bunch of witnesses.”

  “Including Sue,” Willy said.

  “For real?” she asked. “I didn’t get him to actually spit that out.”

  Willy laughed. “Interesting choice of words.”

  “You’re gross.”

  “You should know.”

  “Children,” Joe stopped them. “Enough.”

  The other wrinkle to Willy Kunkle’s complicated profile was his relationship with Sam—a now years-long pairing that no one had thought would last more than an explosive two minutes. But despite their volatility with each other, they seemed to make it work, much to everyone’s relief.

  “I talked to Sue,” Willy conceded. “She got in a little earlier than her boss, since he put her on a commercial plane, but she was half drunk and totally sleep-deprived when I found her, so she didn’t offer much resistance. She pretty much copped to screwing the boss on one hand, and knowing he was puttin’ it to the company on the other.”

  “He’s ripping off the firm?” Lester asked.

  “According to her,” Willy told him, waggling his open hand from side to side. “Might make for a good way to get at him when the time comes. The man does stink. I know he’s crookeder than a dog’s hind leg.”

  Joe scratched his forehead. “One thing at a time, Willy. Let’s stick with the homicide.”

  “He didn’t do it,” Willy said flatly. “At least not with his own bare hands. That what you wanted?”

  “But he could have had it done,” Lester suggested. “If Doreen knew what he was up to, it wouldn’t matter if she was blackmailing him or just could’ve if she wanted to. She’d be a threat either way.”

/>   The phone rang. Joe glanced at the readout on the device’s small screen, held up his finger for silence, murmured, “Medical examiner’s office,” and answered.

  “Joe? It’s Beverly.”

  Joe smiled instinctively. In the far-flung professional community he’d inhabited for decades, there were certain people who’d earned his highest esteem. Beverly Hillstrom, the state’s chief ME for over twenty years, rated above even them. The two were colleagues, confidants, advisors, true friends, and—on the basis of a single night years ago—even lovers. Beverly Hillstrom had a passion for investigation and the integrity to keep it perpetually fueled. In that, he’d proven she had a soul mate in Joe Gunther.

  “Good timing, Beverly,” he told her—virtually the only person in law enforcement permitted to address her by her first name. “You caught all four of us in a morning briefing.”

  “Excellent,” she said, her voice crisper and more authoritative. “Would you like to put me on speaker?”

  “Absolutely,” he reacted and hit the appropriate button.

  “Good morning,” she began. “I have conducted the autopsy on Doreen Ferenc and merely wished to confirm what I assume is the obvious—she is now officially a homicide, death due to the severing of her aortic artery, accessed through her back at about the T-12 level with what appears to be a pointed, narrow, double-edged, bladelike object.”

  “A stiletto,” Willy said softly.

  Hillstrom surprised them all by saying, “Quite possibly, Mr. Kunkle.”

  She added, “I will be sending you the full report, of course, but I thought you’d like to hear at least that much, along with the possibly pertinent addition that I agree with my field investigator, Mr. Judge, in his opinion that no signs of physical rape were evident. I take it that I don’t need to emphasize that I am not saying no rape took place—merely that there is no evidence of it.”

  “Got it, Doctor,” Joe said, addressing her formally but with a smile for the rest of them. Her scholarly manner and matching syntax were famous—and often mimicked—across the state.

  “Do not mock, Joe,” she cautioned him. “You know how these things get misconstrued.”

  “No mocking from me, Beverly,” he told her. “Point taken. Did you find anything else on her, like signs of a struggle?”

  “I’m sorry to say no,” she answered him. “I checked her throat, wrists, chest, and thighs literally microscopically, but other than the usual minor scrapes and bruises that we can all pick up in the course of a day, I found nothing of note.”

  The squad-room audience was stumped.

  “One detail I might mention,” she continued, Joe thought almost to make them feel better. “It concerns her black underwear. When found, they were hanging off of one foot, as if placed there during the course of a rape, or certainly during some sort of sexual activity. Curiously, however, I found them to be stained with blood, faint traces of which I also found along the backs of her legs.”

  “What did that tell you?” Joe asked, following a telling pause.

  “That she was stabbed before the item was removed,” she said, sounding faintly dismayed at his denseness. “It suggests either some postmortem paraphilia, or that the body was arranged to make an initial impression.”

  “The rape was staged,” Willy stated.

  “What’s paraphilia?” Lester asked.

  “A sexual response to an abnormal stimulus,” Joe told him.

  Lester stared at him.

  “Getting your rocks off while wearing your kid’s dirty diapers on your head,” Willy drove home.

  “Thank you for that image, Mr. Kunkle,” said Hillstrom. “Was there anything else at the scene that might suggest a sexual abnormality?”

  Again, no one said anything for a couple of seconds. “Not noticeably,” Joe finally answered.

  “Then judging from the blood drop and the body’s overall presentation, I, too, would suspect staging,” Hillstrom went on. “In fact, I and my diener tried reenacting what might have happened, based on the scene photos we received. We concluded, consistent with the angle and placement of the wound and the distribution of blood on the couch, that the killer possibly sat behind the victim on the edge of the couch, stabbed her in the back—most likely controlling her with his other hand—and then let her collapse supine. That would have perfectly positioned her for the removal of the underwear and the spreading of her legs. That is, however,” she added with emphasis, “no more than educated conjecture.”

  “What did you mean by the blood drop being staged?” Joe asked, returning to the beginning of her statement.

  “The deposit on her forehead, unrelated to any wound. It might have ended up there by circumstance, but it seemed carefully placed to me. Nowhere else was there any blood appearing out of context.”

  “Couldn’t it have come from the killer?” Lester asked.

  “Absolutely, which is why it is being analyzed,” she said. “But if you combine the rape-suggestive position and the carefully arranged underwear, and then add some attention-getting blood, I query if the last appeared accidentally. It seems more of an overall pattern.”

  She paused and then added, clearly as an afterthought, “Of course, my own objectivity may have been tainted by repetition. One has to be careful of cross-influence between cases.”

  “Jesus, Doc,” Willy protested. “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “Willy,” Joe snapped, but was interrupted.

  “No, no. He’s quite right. I get a little too wrapped up in my own thoughts on occasion. I don’t make myself clear. My apologies, Mr. Kunkle.”

  Willy rolled his eyes, but Joe stabbed his finger at him, his meaning clear.

  “No problem, Doc,” Willy reluctantly complied.

  “What I meant,” she continued, unaware of all the pantomime, “was that this is the second case in two days where a deposit of blood appeared out of context.”

  Joe leaned forward, his attention seized. “What?”

  “A suicide,” she said airily. “It came in last night, from north of you—Ethan Allen Academy. An elderly woman found hanging from a beam by her companion. Left a note; no one seems to think it’s anything else. But there was a small deposit of blood on her foot, with no clear source. I thought I should mention it.”

  Joe studied his companions, seasoned investigators all, who were facing a blank wall in one case and had just now heard a distinct echo bouncing off from another.

  “Hold on to that old lady, Beverly,” Joe requested. “I think we’ll want to take a look at her.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “That’s where she was hanging. Here’s the photograph.” The Vermont state police detective handed Joe a computer printout. “Sorry about the quality. We have a crummy printer at the barracks.”

  His name was David Nelson. He was dressed in a suit, with a completely shaved head—square-shouldered, flat-bellied, and monotoned in voice. A poster boy for the state’s largest, best-trained, best-equipped—if occasionally too highly self-regarding—law enforcement agency. The VSP’s oft-quoted in-house sobriquet was “the Green and the Gold,” which, while literally representing their uniform colors, unfortunately also smacked of the very pride that irritated so many of their law enforcement colleagues.

  Not that Joe was one to complain. Most of his own elite VBI ranks were filled with former troopers, who, pride aside, were in fact damned good at their jobs.

  Willy Kunkle sidled closer to peer at the photograph. “Fat,” he murmured. “Couldn’t have taken her long once she had that strain on her neck.”

  Nelson looked at him, faintly shocked. He was brand-new to plainclothes, as he’d admitted during introductions, and a transplant from near the Canadian border. Surprisingly, in a state this small and thinly populated—certainly by full-time cops, of which there were barely a thousand—neither Willy nor Joe had ever met the man.

  “A power cord,” Joe said softly, tapping the photo with his fingertip. “That’s unique. It’s
usually clotheslines or lamp wires.”

  “And a woman,” Willy added. “Not their favorite method.”

  “She was a lesbian,” Nelson suggested.

  Both VBI men looked up from the photograph to peer at him.

  Nelson blinked in return, sensing that he’d misstepped. “Well, you know . . .”

  “Right,” Willy agreed with him. “Amazing she didn’t cut her head off with a chain saw.”

  Joe sighed inwardly. Nelson’s comment had been legitimate, if poorly presented, but Willy was never one to show mercy for an easy kill.

  Willy pointed to a stool sitting in the corner, looking out of place. “That what she used?”

  In the picture, Mary Fish’s feet dangled several feet off the floor, the stool lying toppled beneath her.

  “Yeah,” Nelson conceded, his voice tighter. Joe suspected the poor guy had already been ribbed about meeting up with two VBI cops. By gubernatorial decree, the Bureau had been born largely to replace the VSP’s plainclothes branch—the BCI—as investigators of statewide major crimes. A black eye of major proportions, an unusual setback for Vermont’s most influential law enforcement agency, and a partial explanation of why someone of Nelson’s relative lack of experience was even here. The BCI detectives were still alive and functioning as second-rank investigators, but without their sharpest members, who’d fled to the VBI, and minus the prior presumption that they were the best and the brightest.

  Joe sympathized. Once chief of detectives for the Brattleboro PD, he wouldn’t have liked the VBI hovering overhead either, waiting to pounce on the choicest cases. For that very reason, he had urged the architects of the new outfit to make sure that the Bureau could only enter if invited by the host agency. Nevertheless, resentments festered, in large part because while other agency bosses were only too happy to call for help in traditionally budget-busting major cases, their own rank and file lived for the glory of a good headline-grabbing showstopper.

  “Could you do me a favor, Dave?” he asked the trooper now, hoping to coax him in from the cold. “Could you put that stool where she must have had it to climb on?”