Red Herring

by Archer Mayor

  He climbed the three steps up to her and kissed her worn, warm cheek. “Hey, Mom. How’s she doing?”

  But she knew him better than that. She stroked his face, fixed his eyes with her own, and asked, “You drove all the way up here to ask that?”

  “Only in part,” he admitted.

  “It’s about young Bobby?”

  He tilted his head slightly to one side. “I think so; I need to find out more.”

  “I’m glad,” she said, and rolled back to let him in.

  The home’s interior matched its faint odor of faded lavender sachet—neat, a little cluttered, totally embracing.

  “She’s asleep right now,” Joe’s mother told him in a quiet voice. “I can wake her if you think it’s important.”

  Joe equivocated. “You’ve spoken to her, right?”

  She understood his meaning, as she had his entire life. This woman had made it her mission to teach her two sons how to truly read, express themselves, and think past the obvious.

  “Until she ran out of words,” she said.

  He nodded and rolled her over to a nearby chair in the living room, onto which he perched so they could continue speaking, their heads close. “Then I think I’ll just talk with you.”

  She took that in before asking him, “So, you have suspicions?”

  “I do, but they’re vague and circumstantial, and I need some science to give them weight.”

  “Like an autopsy?” she guessed.

  He smiled. “Exactly like an autopsy, and some crime lab stuff, too.”

  She seemed pleased by his response. “I told her she’d done the right thing. Our idiot state’s attorney didn’t want one, but Candice told the police she would raise hell if it didn’t happen. She hated the idea of it—them cutting him up—but I assured her she was right. It would eliminate all doubt.”

  “That he was driving drunk, you mean?”

  “One way or the other,” she answered carefully. “I didn’t know him like she did. She swears he didn’t drink—at least not beyond a single beer every few months. I’m less sure about any teenager’s ability to be so firm in his convictions.”

  He closed his eyes briefly, receiving her words and careful phrasing like a catechism. She valued the English language as others did fine art, and he reveled to this day in hearing her speak.

  “How had he been behaving recently?” he asked.

  “Normally, according to her. There were no unusual money problems, no romantic entanglements, no conflicts with his friends. He didn’t like working at Taco Bell, but only because he thirsted for better. Candice said that’s what baffles her most: There wasn’t the slightest indication that something was wrong.”

  She laid her hand on her son’s knee. “What do you think you have?”

  “Maybe nothing,” he admitted. “There’re details here that might connect this to a couple of other cases I’ve got, but I don’t know yet. I just had to come up and look at it myself.”

  She seemed satisfied with that. “I wish I could help. But from what I’ve been told, there’s nothing to pursue here, at least not from Candice. She’s as baffled as if she’d just been hit by a meteorite.”

  He studied the floor. “That lack of an explanation is one of the connections with the other two cases.”

  He shook his head as if emerging from a daze and stood up. “Oh, well, like I said, probably time and a few lab rats will give me more.”

  His mother hesitated before asking, “Have you heard from Gail?”

  He looked down at her, taken off guard by the change of topics.

  “Gail? No, not in a long time. She’s up to her neck in the governor’s race.”

  “She called me a few days ago,” the old woman said, sounding wistful. “She sounded sad.”

  He pursed his lips and kept quiet. His mother was genuinely fond of Lyn, and very happy for Joe that they’d found each other. But Gail had become like a daughter over the years, a bond the two of them would enjoy forever.

  “She was probably just tired,” he finally suggested.

  “Well, that’s no doubt true,” she agreed. “But she was wrestling with something in particular.”

  He sat back down. “Spit it out, Mom.”

  “She wanted your help, but was too embarrassed to ask.”

  “Embarrassed?” Joe exclaimed, embarrassment not being one of Gail’s common emotions. Also, while they’d parted on highly civilized terms, and maintained a genuine friendship, they’d also not kept in frequent contact, recognizing time’s value as a healer.

  “What’s she after?” he asked. “It can’t be that bad.”

  But his mother shook her head. “She didn’t tell me. That’s why I asked if she’d called. I guess she’s still unsure if she should bother you.”

  Joe paused, weighing the older woman’s combination of concern and awkwardness.

  “I’ll call her from the road,” he promised. “It’ll be good to catch up anyway. We haven’t talked since she threw her hat in the ring.”

  He stood back up and walked to the door, his smiling mother coming after him. “Beware what you ask for,” she warned him, clearly relieved to be free of her obligation. “That campaign is all-consuming. I guess that’s the way it always is, or has to be. But last time we spoke, it was all she could talk about. And the minutiae! ‘Reynolds said that, and Ivory said the other, and I can’t believe Mattison would pull a stunt like saying Reynolds’s last press conference had some elements of merit.’ It’s amazing any of them stay sane.”

  Joe listened as he buttoned his coat and pulled on his gloves. These were all familiar names, as they were to most people in this tiny, politically aware state. Governor Jim Reynolds—Gail’s true opponent—who’d actually signed the VBI into being a few years back; Jyll Ivory, the Progressive candidate, also running for the top spot; and Peter Mattison, the House Speaker, a Democrat like Gail and one of the losers to her in the primary, but who, being more conservative, older, and probably a closet misogynist, still wouldn’t rally around the party flag and at least shut up. They and their peers, opponents, detractors, and rivals seemed to Joe like riders on a merry-go-round—forever circling before the public eye, clamoring for attention and a variety of golden rings, and rarely changing over the years.

  He’d give Gail that much. She’d stepped down as a state senator to make this run, but otherwise, she was a relative neophyte. She’d only held office as a Brattleboro selectman before winning her senate seat a couple of years previously, and she worked hard to be known as low-key, effective, pragmatic, and respectful of others. On that basis alone, she was likely to get his vote.

  Joe kissed his mother again at the door, thanked her for her help, promised to pass along anything that might give Candice comfort, and exchanged the warmth of the house for the cold of another ice-blue, eye-scorching, sunny day.

  He couldn’t deny that he was curious about Gail’s seeking him out. She was an intelligent woman with whom he’d once thoroughly enjoyed sharing a life. She spoke her mind, believed in causes, and yet had always made time for the two of them.

  But there had also been an element of intellectual drive, beating ever more loudly in the background, foretelling—if only in hindsight—how things might change. The fact that a violent and traumatic rape had been the catalyst had thus been misleading in one peculiar way: It had suggested that some of Gail’s subsequent choices had been based on emotional turmoil rather than intellectual need. Being a high profile rape victim had historically marked the beginning of her political ascent—she’d refused anonymity and led candlelight awareness parades down Brattleboro’s Main Street. But Joe knew that all the necessary elements—Gail’s impatience with the status quo, which included him, the frustration with her own achievements, and, finally, her own innate ambition—had been simmering all the while, like the proverbial pot waiting to boil.

  The rape had been a nightmare, and had left a permanent scar, but her career path afterward had been built on the
energy the rape had helped unleash. Hardly a recommendation, but he hoped from his place on the sidelines that perhaps she’d turned it into that scrap of flotsam that would keep her from yielding to an undertow of sorrow.

  The outcome of this election was clearly going to play a huge role in that.

  Burdened with thoughts of all this, and with growing suspicions about Bob Clarke’s death, Joe climbed back into his car and headed not for home, but toward Interstate 89 and Burlington, following the route young Bob had taken hours earlier in the back of a hearse.

  Once under way, he hit the hands-off remote on his cell phone and ordered up Gail’s number.

  “Hello? Answering for future Vermont Governor Gail Zigman,” came a cheery unfamiliar woman’s voice.

  Gunther burst out laughing.

  “Hello?” she repeated, placing a slight edge on its brightness.

  “Sorry,” Joe managed. “Didn’t mean to be rude. This is Joe Gunther, returning Gail’s phone call in a kind of roundabout way.”

  The response became guarded. “Okay. Will you please hold?”

  There was an audible click as she disappeared to confer with someone else about this potential crank. Joe, for his part, negotiated the traffic routinely collecting in the right lane for the Woodstock exit, after which the road pretty much permanently opened up for the diagonal route all the way across Vermont’s Green Mountains to Lake Champlain on its western edge. It was a road he’d traveled hundreds of times, in all sorts of weather and at all times of day, never tiring of it once. The visual soul of Vermont, as he knew it and loved it, was in evidence all the way, from mountains to valleys, rivers to pastures, cities to lonely farms. With his windows closed and cut off by the growl of his engine, he could still smell and hear what his memories had instilled of baled barn hay and the rush of ice-choked streams. He knew this state as a diagnostician knows the quirks of the human body, and never tired of discovering more.

  “Hello? Is that you, Joe?”

  This voice, he knew. “Hey, Gail. Am I tearing you away from some rubber chicken dinner?”

  “Don’t I wish. No, I was on the other phone, trying to raise money. It’s what politicians do instead of breathe, pee, or eat.”

  “Congratulations on winning the primary, by the way. Mom was telling me this has taken over your life.”

  “It’s got to,” she admitted, sounding both enthused and weary. “But it makes me yearn for when I ran for selectman—a couple of debates in the school gym, one or two interviews and a few yard signs, and that was that. God—the good old days.”

  “Rough competition, too,” he commented politely, immediately fearing that he might have opened a door to more than he wanted to hear.

  Which made her response a relief. “You don’t want to know. I have never met a more pigheaded, mean-spirited, small-minded, self-serving bunch of needy egomaniacs.”

  He was laughing again. “And this is the company you’re fighting hard to keep, right?”

  She joined him. “Right. And if you ever quote me—assuming I win—I will issue you an order to kill yourself.”

  “And issue the ME an order to declare it natural causes,” he suggested.

  “You got it.”

  “Still,” he said, knowing her well, “you’re having a ball.”

  She sighed. “Yes, more’s the pity. And it is the only way I know to get things done in the long run. As the Chinese say, ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’ No more protesting out on the streets for me.”

  “Jeez,” he said. “I hope you’re not saying stuff like that in public.”

  “No, no. I try to keep a cork in it. Don’t want to lose whatever momentum I may be gaining.”

  “Things are looking good?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, sounding surprised. “This state hangs on to its incumbent governors like grim death, which makes the latest numbers a minor miracle. I just wish my own party members would be as supportive of me as they are critical of him.”

  Joe sensed he was pushing his luck maintaining control of the conversation, so he took advantage of her pause to jump in. “I bet. Mom was telling me how frustrating it was. She also said you were fussing about asking me something.”

  Gail’s voice became tinged with embarrassment, and as a result, true to form, slightly aggressive. “Dumb idea. One of my people came up with it. You’ll think it’s obnoxious.”

  There was the challenge, he thought, coming on top of the earlier hemming and hawing to his mother. “Try me,” he urged. “I’ll let you know if I do.”

  “All right,” she agreed without hesitation. “Do you know the state trooper who’s assigned to drive the governor around?”

  “Sure,” he said, surprised. “Well, I know a couple of them; he actually has a detail that does that. They work in shifts.” This wasn’t a big secret, but still unlikely to be common knowledge outside of the state police. However, as Gail well knew, Joe made it a practice to know what many others didn’t.

  “How ’bout the name Felix Knowles?”

  He frowned. “He’s one of them.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  He paused, wondering not only where this was going, but about its very nature. He wasn’t used to fielding such questions from Gail.

  “Not much,” he conceded. “Why?”

  He heard an element of relief, despite her actual wording. “I thought so,” she said with a laugh. “I told them it was a waste of time.”

  “What was?”

  “Asking you for the dope on Knowles.”

  “And you’d want that for . . . ?” he asked leadingly.

  She laughed uncomfortably. “Oh, you know politics. It’s complete nonsense. In a staff meeting, somebody came up with the suggestion that Knowles might be pissed off at the governor for some reason, and that that might make him a good source for our side. It’s just the kind of idiocy that floats up sometimes. Awkward, really.”

  He watched the road ahead of him slipping beneath his car like the display in a video arcade game. He blinked a couple of times and glanced into the rearview mirror to see a sports car planted on his tail. He signaled and shifted into the slow lane.

  “I’d say it was a little beyond awkward,” he commented.

  Again, that familiar aggression crept into her voice. “It’s what you have to do—break off the bad ideas from the good ones. It’s just a process.”

  “But you didn’t break it off,” he pointed out.

  He could almost see her looking around whatever room she was in, seeking some excuse to cut this short while knowing she had to say something.

  “Joe, I’m doing this for the right reasons. You know that. I’m sorry if I stepped on your toes, but you actually called me. Not to fault your mom, but this conversation wasn’t supposed to happen. I haven’t sold my soul here.”

  “I know that,” he reassured her, if halfheartedly. “It must be tough, having all this crap hitting you from everywhere.”

  He heard voices in the background, and Gail answer behind a hand cupped over the phone’s mouthpiece. When she returned, she was back in forward gear. “I’m so sorry. I have to cut this short. I really wish I didn’t have to.”

  “No problem,” he told her, almost rushing her. “Me, too. Take care and good luck.”

  “It was nice talking to you, Joe. I mean that.”

  I bet, was his initial reaction, but he caught the genuine softness in her tone, and recognized the atonement implied.

  So he matched her as best he could with, “You, too, Gail. Don’t let them get to you.”

  In the silence after they hung up, he considered her dilemma—surrounded by monomaniacal advisors, wannabes, and occasional hacks, eating poorly, sleeping little, posturing constantly, fielding questions daily on everything from health care to her use of dangly earrings. It wasn’t surprising that a bad idea might occasionally wend its way to being acted upon.

  But it still made him angry. And it frustrated him
to know that while she’d been correct in associating herself with the good guys—one of which she was—she’d also yielded to temptation and not acknowledged its moral emptiness.

  He shook his head, as if debating with a ghost in the passenger seat. A diplomat, he felt he could be when necessary. A politician? He had his doubts.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The three of them—Joe, Beverly Hillstrom, and David Hawke, head of the state crime lab—had decided by conference call to hold an emergency meeting in Beverly’s office. Physically, she was the farthest off, functioning from the depths of Burlington’s Fletcher Allen Health Care hospital complex, next to Lake Champlain and under fifty miles from the Canadian border, but she also had only a single deputy medical examiner to help her out, who happened to be out of town.

  And, of course, she was the current custodian of Robert Clarke’s body, as well as Doreen Ferenc’s and Mary Fish’s.

  The medical examiner’s office was a bright, modern, if diminutive facility, a far cry from the small suite above a dentist’s office that Joe had first visited decades ago. It was tucked into a hospital that seemed to have been under construction since Jesus was learning the alphabet—during which time more than one of its executives had been brought before a judge for cooking the books. Sadly, the so-called OCME had also slowly evolved from a sunlit satellite located on the complex’s fringes to a totally encapsulated, windowless haven, swallowed whole by the surrounding behemoth.

  But haven it was, in large part because of Hillstrom’s personal style—an uncanny tempering of almost icy efficiency with a passionate belief in her employees and their shared mission. It was a combination that bred both respect and loyalty from people far beyond her immediate reach.

  Joe walked the length of the office’s short central hallway, after braving the mother building’s maze to get here, and met his two companions in Beverly’s picture-perfect, compulsively neat corner sanctum. David Hawke rose from the small conference table and exchanged handshakes. A small, athletic man with steady, watchful eyes, Hawke shared a reputation in his own lab almost on a par with Hillstrom’s.