Red Herring

by Archer Mayor

  That, of course, was his first mistake.

  “How do you know my name? And where the hell are my lawyers?”

  Hildreth was so thin, he barely made a lump under the sheet. His gaunt face was skintight and bony, his dark cheekbones flushed with fury.

  Joe sat on the windowsill by the bed, choosing to get straight to the point. “Sir, that’s what I’m here to tell you. We found a sample of your blood at a crime scene recently. Understandably, we’re trying to find out how it got there.”

  Hildreth’s reaction caught him off guard. He seemed to levitate, if slightly, with rage, and poked a skeletal finger at Joe. “How did you trace that blood to me?”

  Joe’s eyes widened slightly. “Ahh, we ran it through the state data bank. Found your brother, and through him, we found you.”

  “Peter?” he screamed faintly, suddenly grabbing his chest. “That son of a bitch.”

  A nurse stepped into the room. “Is everything all right?”

  “No, it is not,” Hildreth yelled at her, and began to cough.

  The nurse looked at Joe apologetically. “I’m sorry, sir, but . . .”

  Joe was already standing. “Not to worry. I understand. Mr. Hildreth, I’m sorry to have upset you.”

  But Hildreth was coughing too harshly to care any longer.

  Willy was slouching in the hallway outside, his good elbow propped on the nurse’s counter. “Shoulda had me in there with you, boss.”

  Joe was still shaking his head slightly. “Why’s that?”

  “I woulda given him a good slap.”

  Joe paused to admire his colleague. “You’re just saying that ’cause you know I love it so much, right?”

  Willy straightened and raised an eyebrow. “I take it he didn’t say anything the whole hospital didn’t hear.”

  “You got that right.”

  They walked down the hall together, by a janitor holding a mop standing off to one side, half hidden by a wheeled crash cart parked against the wall.

  The janitor waited until they’d passed and then, abandoning his mop, strolled down to where a group of nurses was standing just outside Hildreth’s room.

  “Wow,” he said to the first one as he approached, “that was some blow-out.”

  The nurse shook her head angrily. “What was the point? Goddamn cops. They come in like storm troopers and get what? Nothing. The man’s dying, for God’s sake. Let him be.”

  “They were cops?” the man asked.

  “Yeah. Vermont Bureau of Investigation,” another chimed in. “Big frigging deal. Think they’re the FBI or something.”

  “They’re not that bad,” a third said. “They used to be Bratt cops. Jones is a pain—you know that. He screams at us all the time. I felt sorry for Joe.”

  “Joe who?” the janitor asked.

  “Gunther,” she volunteered. “He’s the older one. The one with the gimpy arm actually is a jerk. That’s Kunkle. But Joe’s a sweetheart.”

  “Why would they want to talk to someone on this floor?” the janitor persisted. “Aren’t they all dying?”

  “They are that,” the first nurse agreed. “They wanted to talk to him about a drop of blood or something. I didn’t hear everything, but it sounded weird to me.”

  “A drop of blood?” the man repeated.

  “Yeah. Funny, huh? Given the pints we’ve extracted from that man for one test or another, a single drop is like a joke.”

  The janitor began retreating down the hallway, looking grim and distracted.

  “Where’re you going, Ike?” one of the women asked. “You want to have lunch with us? It’s almost noon.”

  “No thanks,” he said, not looking back. “There’s something I gotta do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Gail Zigman smiled broadly, waved both hands in the air in a broad farewell, and stepped back from the speaker’s podium. Before her, the assembled audience was seated around a scattering of dinner tables, clapping enthusiastically, but making her think of frogs clinging to lily pads.

  “What’s next?” she asked the young woman perpetually at her elbow. She was named Sally, had been supplied by a Democratic organization from outside the state, and had never even been to Vermont before joining the campaign. But she was enthusiastic, bright, and highly organized. She was also both Gail’s scheduler and primary late-night chauffeur. Gail kept forgetting her last name.

  “This is almost it for tonight,” Sally told her, guiding her off to the left of the stage and toward a door on the north wall of the banquet room. Gail was pretty sure they were at the Sheraton in Burlington, but was wondering if it wasn’t actually the Rutland Holiday Inn. She didn’t bother asking. In a few minutes, they would be back on the road anyhow.

  “We have a small press conference just outside,” Sally was saying. “After that, it’s a two-hour drive to St. J. You have an early-morning Rotary there tomorrow. We thought it would be better to travel tonight and let you sleep till five-thirty. Keep you fresh.”

  Gail laughed. “Right. You guys are spoiling me rotten.”

  They stepped through the side door, into a small semicircle of journalists. A couple of lights had been set up by the hotel to help the photographers, but they made it hard for Gail to see the faces opposite her.

  “How’s your confidence level, Ms. Zigman?” came an anonymous voice.

  Gail resisted shielding her eyes, hearing the cameras clicking and knowing how she’d look in the morning papers.

  She smiled brightly. “My opponent’s latest comments about teacher/student ratios made pretty clear how out of touch he’s become with the true interests of Vermont voters. I think even he’s begun to realize that it’s time for a change.”

  There were several chuckles, accompanied by, “Gail, the Woodchuck Blogger wrote this morning that a member of the Brattleboro Women First organization was complaining how you, as a rape victim, weren’t making sexual abuse of women a big enough issue in your campaign. How do you respond?”

  “The Woodchuck Blogger won’t even identify himself,” she reacted. “And now he’s—or she’s—supposedly reporting on the basis of another anonymous source. Is this guy afraid to leave the house, or what?” She allowed for more titters before resuming. “I am a survivor of rape. That is a fact. It is not a personality trait. I have addressed the subject of sexual violence against women, and children, and the elderly, and the mentally challenged, just as I have addressed many other crucial issues in our culture. But I will not be a single issue candidate because of a personal misfortune. I owe the voters of this great state more than that, and I think they have come to expect more of me.”

  “What about the bill currently being considered banning cell phone use by drivers?”

  Gail reached into her jacket pocket and extracted her own phone. “I darn near live by this thing. I text on it, speak on it, access my e-mail on it. I told it to do my laundry the other day, with mixed results. But I do not drive while using it. I think that’s dangerous, and I think doing so should be against the law.”

  “You’re wearing pants suits a lot lately. Are you trying to imitate Hillary Clinton?”

  “They’re comfortable in cold weather. I’ll start wearing skirts when you do, Jim.”

  “Jyll Ivory says you’re a Republican in Democratic clothing and that you’ve compromised away your principles.”

  Gail forcefully responded, “Jyll Ivory is a smart, ambitious, take-no-prisoners poster child of the Progressive Party. I admire and respect her intellect. She’s not a college professor for nothing. But she’s never held elective office, never had to haggle to get anything done, never worked for an hourly wage, and never understood the value in occasionally settling for a seventy-five percent victory instead of pride-fully walking away from the table, her head held high, with a one hundred percent failure. Vermonters are practical people; they like getting things done, even if the results aren’t always neat and shiny and pure as the driven snow.”

  “A dying m
an named Robert Hildreth filed an invasion of privacy suit today against the Department of Public Safety,” a male voice said from the back. “He said that the crime lab, by request of the VBI, had ordered a familial DNA search done of a blood sample within the state’s criminal DNA database. Mr. Hildreth says that he’s on his deathbed with cancer, cherishing what little time he has left, and that he’s being harassed by the police simply because his brother’s biological information is on file.”

  Gail cast Sally a quick look, who murmured, “I don’t know anything about this.”

  “What’s your question?” Gail asked, trying not to squint into the glare. She was now pretty sure she recognized the Fox News reporter assigned to cover the campaign.

  The answer wasn’t what she wanted to hear. “The police officer behind it all was VBI field force commander Joe Gunther, with whom you once had a long-term romance. Is there any chance this old relationship has influenced your silence on what is clearly an invasion of privacy issue?”

  “My silence, as you put it,” she countered, “has nothing to do with anyone’s influence, Mr. Granierre. This happens to be the first I’ve heard of this issue. I’ll look into it immediately and share my thoughts with all of you tomorrow.”

  Sally stepped up beside her and leaned into the microphones. “The future governor has a long drive ahead of her . . .”

  “Surely you have an opinion,” Granierre shouted over her. “Invasion of privacy is just that. It is what it is.”

  Gail put her hand on Sally’s shoulder to show command. “But what, precisely, is this, Mr. Granierre? Everyone who stands before a judge pleads innocence. Does that mean it’s true? Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. Let’s get all the facts here first, before leaping to conclusions. You may want a quick and thoughtless knee-jerk reaction, good for one of your famous sound bites. The voters of Vermont deserve better. Thank you for your questions. I’ll see you all tomorrow. Drive safely on your way home.”

  She stepped back and swung in behind Sally to quickly march down the hallway toward the rear exit into the parking lot.

  Outside, braced by a wall of cold night air, she waited until she heard the door slam behind them before pulling out her phone and sighing, “I guess I better call Joe.”

  Gini Coursen watched her son hurriedly coming in and out of the kitchen, carrying items from various parts of the house and dumping them onto the breakfast table.

  “Tell me what’s happening, Ike.”

  “Nothing, Ma. I just have to go for a while.”

  Her voice climbed a note. “For a while? What am I supposed to do? I need you.”

  Ike froze in midmotion for a second, his hands trembling with frustration. He didn’t want to tell her that only his part of the plan had gone wrong. “Call Louise. I don’t know. She’ll take care of you.”

  “She will not. She’s a lazy bitch who steals my stuff.”

  Ike turned on her and yelled into her face. “I don’t know, Ma. I’m not your nurse.”

  She grabbed his arm and froze him with a hard, calculating look. “What went wrong? Something went wrong.”

  “The cops’re getting wise.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I almost bumped into a couple of them at the hospital,” he answered vaguely.

  “So what? They don’t know about you.”

  Ike pulled away violently. “That’s easy for you to say,” he screamed, red-faced. “You’re not the one whose butt’s in a sling.”

  Almost as quickly, his mother changed back to the needy supplicant. “Honey, honey. You’re my reason for living. You don’t think I know what you’ve done for me? You turned my life around, righting the wrong that was done to Benny.”

  She caught up one of his hands in her own. “You gave me hope that there was justice in the world. How else was I going to get back at those bitches—do unto them as they did unto me? Stuck in this damn house . . .”

  Almost reluctantly, he squeezed her hand in turn. “I know, Ma.”

  “So,” she tried again. “Why do you think those cops were interested in you?”

  “One of them came by the gun shop earlier,” he admitted, feeling on slightly safer ground. “I don’t know why. He was looking for customer lists. But he was definitely working on the murders; he got all vague when I asked him.”

  “That may not mean much,” she said thoughtfully, gazing off. “They’re looking at everything right now. They’re confused. And that call to the paper you made was a stroke of genius, putting even more pressure on them.”

  He paused a moment, as if doubting himself, and then rallied, crossing to the living-room section of the room, opening the drawer to the small table by the couch, and extracting an old Colt .45 he kept there.

  “Still, I gotta get out of here, just in case.” He held up his hand to interrupt his mother, whose mouth had opened in protest.

  “Ma, damn it all. The two places where I work, they show up. That’s more than coincidence. If they come by here for some reason, I better be gone. You just tell ’em you haven’t seen me. I’ll take one of the beaters outside they can’t trace to me. They got no bone to pick with you. And I know what you think about Louise. Maybe I’ll try to drop in now and then, when I know the coast is clear.”

  He reached for a duffel bag he’d previously dumped on the floor and began stuffing it full, adding a short, semiautomatic assault rifle that he’d placed on the table previously, along with several boxes of ammunition.

  “Don’t you worry, Ma. This’ll blow over soon enough. We can get back to life as usual, and you’ll know that the whole thing with Benny was set right.”

  She smiled for his sake and nodded complacently. He was correct about the last part. Her firstborn, the only living creature she’d ever truly loved, had at least been avenged, even if he’d never return to her. But Ike was living in a dream world if he thought this would blow over. She knew cops. They didn’t quit.

  And this bunch sounded like they were on to something.

  She watched her son finishing his packing, heading for God knew where. She didn’t want to know. Nor would she truly miss him, except for his general usefulness. He was as much a bore as he was handy to have around.

  Well, she thought, you take the bitter with the sweet. That’s what they say.

  Joe and Willy pulled up next to Sam’s car in the parking lot. Lester was beside her in the passenger seat. They were outside a convenience store in West Brattleboro, where they’d decided to meet by phone, partway between Brattleboro and Wilmington, which Sam and Les had just left. It was dark, and unseasonably cold, but at least with no more snow in the forecast.

  They’d parked cop-style, driver’s door to driver’s door, so that Joe and Sam were inches apart. In the sodium lamplight flooding the gas pumps beyond, Joe was struck by Sammie’s appearance.

  “You okay?”

  She shook her head. “Fine. I got a bug, is all. It’ll pass.”

  “Don’t breathe on me,” Willy told her across Joe.

  “Nice,” Joe commented, before returning to Sam. “What’ve you got?”

  “Ike Miller,” Spinney said. “I met him at the Back Stop when I was checking out gunpowder suppliers. He gave me a crash course on reloading and sent me out to the front office for a list of customers. Nothing went off in my head. We just got back from there; he’s gone. My contact, Ed Silverstein, said he called in and quit, just like that, and to mail him his last paycheck.”

  “He lives with his mother off of Augur Hole Road,” Sam chimed in. “Somewhere in the boonies. Also has a part-time job at BMH as a janitor, which gives him access to both blood and the basement morgue, and he had his car oil-undercoated by Sky Thurber. So far, he’s the only one to fit so much of the Brookhaven profile.”

  “BMH,” Willy repeated tellingly.

  “What?” Sam asked, reading into his tone of voice.

  Joe told her, “We just left the owner of one of those three blood drops—he’s in a hospice room at
BMH. The nurses told us they used to draw blood from him all the time, because of his leukemia.”

  “That’s the other thing we found out,” Lester chimed in. “Once we made the BMH connection, I got hold of its morgue records. A week before Dory was killed, both a male and a female were in cold storage at the same time. The woman was a blond with blue eyes and the guy had been dead longer than her by a couple of days.”

  “I’m guessing you ran Ike through the computer?” Joe asked.

  “Six ways toward the middle,” Les admitted. “Standard bad boy stuff—disorderly, DUI, petit larceny, minor possession, simple assault, lots of person-of-interest references. No jail time and no felonies.”

  “We also put the word out to all our people,” Sam added, “to run the name Ike Miller through any lists they haven’t submitted yet. We haven’t heard back, but that just happened. He’s clearly on the lam, though, for what that’s worth.”

  “Because of the Back Stop?” Joe asked.

  “And BMH,” Les said. “I called them about him specifically. He was there today and pulled a vanishing act without a word. The supervisor I talked to was pissed.”

  “You go by the Augur Hole Road address?”

  Both Sam and Les shook their heads. “Figured we better talk with you first,” Sam explained. “We have enough for a search warrant, don’t you think?”

  Joe shook his head. “Not yet. I want one last totally concrete connection between Miller and that address, specifically.”

  He stared out the front window for a moment, watching some customers go in and out of the convenience store.

  “How many people-of-interest entries were listed in Ike’s involvements? You said lots.”

  “About ten,” Lester said.

  “Let’s split them out,” Joe told them. “We’ll go back to the office, divide them up, and make a family tree of Ike’s friends. I want to find out how things function at that address. What happens there, who comes and goes, what the layout is, the works.”

  He looked over at Sam, who was wiping her forehead. “That’ll give us enough for a warrant, I bet, and it might give you time for a nap or something, ’cause I have the feeling you’re not going to head for bed or the ER like you should.”