The Company She Kept

by Archer Mayor

  “He’s a deputy sheriff now, isn’t he?”

  “Yup, but probably not for much longer. Time’ll tell. He’s done well, but it’s not his first choice of places to work.”

  Willy didn’t respond, back to staring out the window. He didn’t actually care about what happened to David Spinney, or the rest of Lester’s irritatingly wholesome family. It was his own daughter, barely learning to sit up, who had stimulated the question. Willy was an older parent who’d once sworn never to have children, and he’d been thrown by how much she filled his thoughts daily. It worried him. His past strength had been in cutting people out of his life, in part because he had such a low tolerance for most of them, but in part, too, because he wasn’t convinced that he deserved their company. He saw himself as deeply flawed—even a bad man, if not for his persistent effort to avoid crossing the line. But the line remained. As a recovering alcoholic, he knew it in palpable terms; as a self-doubting father, mate, and colleague, he feared its proximity as he might have feared a trip wire attached to a land mine.

  “Chestnut Hill?” Spinney asked, slowing down on Western Avenue as he approached the top of the hill heading into downtown Brattleboro.

  “Take a left on Cedar and a right on Acorn Lane,” Willy advised. “It’s easier to see where you’re going.”

  That was a matter of opinion, Lester thought as he followed directions. Susan Raffner lived in one of the town’s more unusual neighborhoods, clustered around an ancient and no longer functional reservoir—access to which was challenging at the height of summer, and flat-out scary when banked by snow and covered with ice, as now. The challenges were compounded by the area being, as the name implied, on a hill, and fed only by a twisting series of narrow, steep, urban versions of poorly paved “goat paths.” The sheer quirkiness of the locale seemed designed for an apparent character such as Raffner.

  Lester crawled to the top—a loop road circling the reservoir and servicing a small number of homes—and was struck by how the romantic-sounding name contrasted with Chestnut Hill’s mixed-bag reality. The reservoir was in fact a half-empty, crumbling, concrete-lined, weed-tangled frozen pond, primarily reliant on rainwater for its contents, and surrounded by a rusty chain-link fence. It was, put bluntly, ugly, if maybe not to the people living around it. And the surrounding architecture, as it often did in Brattleboro, added to the muddle by running the gamut from graceful and historical to forgettably recent and plain.

  Susan had lived in a somber, two-story, shingle-clad example of the older category—a building at once historic and graceless. As the car rolled to a stop before it, both men observed how deserted the entire neighborhood seemed. This, they also knew from experience, would be short-lived.

  They were only the vanguard of a specialized crowd that would invade as soon as the scene overlooking the interstate had been completely gone over. Crime techs, investigators, uniformed backup teams, and supervisors were all due shortly—and those were just the professionals, not the media and the gawkers sure to follow. But for the moment, it was Les and Willy on their own, which was just the way they liked it. They weren’t even here to officially conduct a search and inventory—but merely to give the place a discreet and preliminary survey, albeit with a search warrant they’d secured along the way.

  There was, however, one other person there already—a Brattleboro patrolman, sitting in his cruiser with his radio on. As he got out of the vehicle upon their arrival, they heard the soft wailing of country music leaking into the frozen air.

  “I help you?” he asked.

  Willy had been foraging around in the backseat of their car, hunting for his notebook. At the voice, he straightened and faced the man.

  “Oh,” the young officer said—taking in a local legend. “Agent Kunkle. I didn’t know it was you.”

  Lester—by contrast tall, gangly, and disarming—chuckled at the touch of fear he detected. Willy didn’t respond, making his way up the barely shoveled walkway to the front door instead.

  “You been expecting us?” Lester asked.

  “Somebody,” the officer replied. He stuck out a hand. “Travis Newman.”

  “Lester Spinney. I work with Willy, upstairs from you. VBI. Why don’t I know you?”

  “Just started,” Newman explained.

  “Move it, Les,” Willy called out from the door. “Need the key.”

  Lester raised his eyebrows, impressed that the young cop had already been warned about Kunkle—including a description. “Duty calls. We’ll talk some other time. Welcome aboard.”

  “Thanks,” Newman said, heading back to the cruiser’s warm cocoon.

  Les pulled out the key they’d secured from Raffner’s purse and dangled it before him as he approached his colleague. “Your wish is my command.”

  “That’ll be the day,” Willy grumbled.

  Lester unlocked the front door before they both struggled into white Tyvek suits and booties. The entrance hall was dark, warm, and cluttered, thereby revealing to Spinney’s eye the habits of a person as disheveled in private as she’d been polished and organized to the outside world.

  Willy, whose own home was fastidiously tidy, let out a contemptuous puff of air. He’d never been fond of Raffner’s politics or manner. “Typical,” he muttered, pausing in the hallway.

  “She live alone?” Spinney asked, standing beside him. He lived in Springfield, a forty-five-minute drive to the north. He’d heard of Susan Raffner, but didn’t know the locals as Willy did.

  “Far as I ever knew,” Willy said, moving slowly into the room to their right, his head swinging from side to side as he took in everything. He adjusted his single latex glove by yanking on its cuff with his teeth in a well-practiced motion.

  They entered a living room where most every flat surface was covered with books, documents, newspapers, and magazines, most of them apparently abandoned in mid-course—dog-eared, folded back, placed facedown at a certain article. It reflected a mind in a rush—impatient, driven, and curious.

  After a few minutes of absorbing their surroundings, both men moved to the purported dining room across the hall. Purported because the table designed to hold meals no longer had room for a sandwich. It seemed that Raffner had seen any flat surface as fair game, and so had made every inch of this one the base of a small mountain of more paperwork, including box after box of stuffed manila folders, their contents peeking out like a multitude of breast-pocketed handkerchiefs.

  “Wow,” Lester said. “How did she keep track of anything?”

  “Who said she did?” Willy countered.

  The kitchen was next, toward the back of the house. Even here, there was a scattering of reading material, but the dominant clutter was at least in context. In no order that they could determine, there were jars, plastic bags, and boxes of powders, grains, cereals, and things they couldn’t identify clustered along the counters and cabinet edges like small Disney characters jamming a set’s balconies and sidewalks. The two cops mostly observed it all, sometimes reaching out to see past an obstruction, but otherwise content to simply interpret the nature of the woman who’d owned it all—and who’d attracted such a grisly death.

  By the evidence available so far, the mind and spirit of that late resident had been committed to an impressively broad swath of social causes.

  “And a vegetarian,” Lester added softly.

  “Golly,” Willy replied. “What a shock.”

  Upstairs, they found an overstuffed, computer-equipped office, three bedrooms, and two bathrooms—one clearly intended for guests who took relative sanitation and the effects of mold in stride. Of the bedrooms, one had been moderately cleared for the occasional visitor, another had been sacrificed to the same purpose as most of the downstairs, and the last was an utterly surprising and totemic lair-within-a-lair, anchored by an enormous bed of rumpled and cast-about pillows, blankets, and even a few stuffed animals. At long last in this activist warehouse dedicated to intellectual passions, here was a clearly marked reserv
e for purely sensual delights.

  From the Georgia O’Keeffe prints on the wall, to the lesbian literature near the head of the bed, the two cops felt the palpable heartbeat of a woman in love with the sexuality of other women.

  “Okayyyy,” Lester said after taking it in. “Is this a surprise?”

  Willy was looking around like an art lover at an exhibition. For all his brusqueness and irritability, his primary targets were liars, hypocrites, and people coasting on the effort of others—or of society in general. He might not have agreed politically with Susan Raffner, but he’d never questioned her tenacity and zeal. All he saw here was the inner expression of someone who’d lived as she believed.

  “A pleasant one,” he answered sadly, thinking of his own continual struggle with an inner galaxy of emotional turmoil and guilt.

  Lester cast him a covert glance. Though not a simple man, Spinney was not overly complex. He accepted life as it came, made adjustments if he could, and lived with what remained. That being said, he was no unquestioning observer, which helped explain why he found Willy an excellent source of human education.

  He nodded silently, understanding his partner to be enjoying a kinship moment with someone for whom he’d only expressed contempt while she was alive.

  Willy opened a nearby dresser drawer and extracted a vibrator, nestled among some silky underwear.

  “Phew,” Lester commented, absorbing it all. “I better take notes on what to buy Sue next Valentine’s.”

  “Please,” Willy groaned, as he circled the bed, toward the night table, and crouched to study a small plastic baggie lying on the floor. Without disturbing it beyond yawning it open to better see inside, he let out a small grunt.

  “What?” Lester asked.

  “The requisite Mary Jane,” Willy said, straightening up. “I wondered—with all of this”—he gestured generally—“if she indulged in a little something to get mellow.”

  Les looked more closely from where he stood. “Well, this seems like it was the room for mellow—a love nest of Lesbos.”

  Willy glanced back at the bag. “Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m actually surprised there’s not more—maybe this is just a grab stash, fed off a mother lode somewhere else. Looks like pretty cruddy quality, too.” He then smiled, his expression clearing as if moving on to other matters, and added, “The crime scene boys are gonna love this dump. We’ll lose ’em for days in here.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Most cops don’t like dead bodies, which is hardly startling. Because TV has pushed the notion that they’ll see ten corpses by the end of their first shift, people assume they don’t mind keeping company with the recently departed. But in Joe’s experience, a lot of cops could be quite squeamish.

  That wasn’t true for him. He’d been in combat as a young man, where he’d become familiar with death in quantity. Later, he’d come to see the dead less as sentimental bearers of memories and nostalgia, and more as conveyers of interesting and possibly important details. Their souls resided in the minds of those who’d known them, in his opinion. Their bodies were just that—the remains left behind.

  As things had turned out, this was a good outlook, because the woman in his life—whom he’d trusted professionally for decades, but who’d just recently won his heart—was the state’s medical examiner, Beverly Hillstrom.

  Her office, called the OCME for short—the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner—was an impressively modern and pleasant, if small, facility located somewhere in the basement of the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, which by contrast was a sprawling, oddly laid-out behemoth of a complex, parked on the edge of the university campus.

  Joe escorted Susan Raffner’s body through the underground passages to the door designated for such deliveries, and witnessed the handoff from the hearse driver to the OCME staffer who accepted her. Then, despite it being after hours, he continued into the small suite of administrative offices, following the glow of a light down the otherwise dim hallway.

  Beverly Hillstrom, uncharacteristically dressed—if still stylish in his eyes—in blue jeans and a work shirt, turned around from a filing cabinet as he entered her small corner office, and draped her arms around his neck before giving him a welcoming kiss.

  He ran his hands down her back and said, “Jeez, I should make late-night deliveries more often.”

  “You do just fine,” she told him, and kissed him again.

  After which, true to form, they easily fell into their professional roles. Homicides were still rare enough to merit a special callout by the ME, even late at night, and they both wanted to keep the momentum begun by the discovery of Susan Raffner.

  “She was really a state senator?” Beverly asked, leading the way to the far side of the office suite and the locker room where they could both change into scrubs.

  Joe wasn’t taken aback by her ignorance. The chief medical examiner had to do her share of lobbying in Montpelier, but it still didn’t amount to much, given Vermont’s part-time citizen legislature. Most of the state’s politicians were unknown outside the capitol building—even ones as outspoken and energetic as Susan.

  “Yup,” he told her as she preceded him. “And the governor’s best buddy.”

  Beverly looked over her shoulder, familiar with Joe’s history with Gail. “Really? They were friends? No wonder this was given such a high priority. I was impressed by the tone of the officer who called me.”

  She pushed open the door to the locker room and gestured to him to follow her. “Sharing this room after hours should rank up there with smoking in the bathroom. I do take it that you want to be present for this one.”

  “I do.”

  He knew the drill. They both switched from street clothes into scrubs, taking just a moment, while still in their underwear, to exchange another kiss, this one compellingly seductive.

  “Something to think about for later,” she suggested.

  Back outside, Beverly continued leading the way, this time down the facility’s main corridor, outside the admin suite, toward a broad door blocking the end of the hall. This was the entrance to the autopsy room.

  On the way, he noticed that the gurney holding Raffner had vanished from where they’d left it, inside the receiving door. “You summon extra help?” he asked.

  She didn’t bother glancing back. “Todd. No fun doing one of these without a diener. And Mike—the new law enforcement liaison—he’s here, too.”

  She pushed open the heavy door and held it for him, escorting him into a large, gleaming, L-shaped room with two autopsy bays. As advertised, Todd was there already, and had—as befit his job description—shifted the body, still in its sealed bag, from the gurney onto the autopsy table. Mike appeared as if on cue from another door.

  The three men silently exchanged nods as Joe and Beverly assumed positions across from each other, and Beverly exposed Susan’s pale, lifeless shape. She was still dressed as she’d been at the scene, rumpled and stained with mud and melted snow, in a pair of pants and the sliced-open sweater, blouse, and bra.

  “Where was she found?” Beverly asked, reacting to the lack of a coat.

  “Hanging by the neck, overlooking a scenic view on the interstate,” he told her.

  Beverly looked up at him. “Outside? Is she rock hard?”

  “No, no. I had the funeral home guys crank up the heater on the way here. They weren’t happy, but I’m hoping it did the trick. She should be just thawed enough for you to go ahead.”

  As Todd and Mike busied themselves taking photographs and removing layers of clothing—Mike bagging the evidence for later delivery to the crime lab—Beverly leaned over the crude carving just above the dead woman’s breasts.

  “Ouch.”

  Joe was startled. “Does that mean she was alive when that happened?”

  Beverly straightened quickly and laid a hand on his forearm. “No, no. I’m sorry. I was commenting generally. No, this was done postmortem—as if that wasn’t bad enou
gh.”

  Tempering her moment of spontaneity, she shifted to where the rope was still looped around Susan’s neck. “I can tell you straight off,” she said without hesitation, “that the hanging wasn’t the cause of death. From past examples I’ve seen of such sequencing, she was dead for a while before this was done, as well.”

  Joe had thought as much. The way Susan was dressed suggested an indoor death, not to mention that the trace evidence at the scene had been consistent with a drag-and-drop scenario, versus something demanding more action on the killer’s part—or any signs of resistance from the victim.

  Of course, there were other possibilities, as his next question implied: “Does that rule out her being rendered unconscious and then killed by hanging?”

  Beverly was keeping her eyes on her subject, moving her gloved hands about as Todd’s efforts revealed more and more of the body to the bright overhead lights. “I wouldn’t say that it rules out her having been rendered unconscious, as you so delicately put it.” Here she cut him a quick look and an implied smile, which he couldn’t appreciate through her mask. “But I can say that her cause of death wasn’t this.” She tapped the rope with a fingertip.

  “So, she was assaulted elsewhere, given her clothing,” he reiterated, “cut into and hanged after death, and presumably put on display, all to make a point.”

  Beverly resisted agreeing unequivocally, as suited her scientific approach. “Could be.” She picked up Susan’s arm and bent it slightly, adding, “And judging from what I’m seeing right now, your heater idea worked, if barely. She’s still very cold, but I’m willing to give it a shot.”

  She then paused, Susan’s hand still in the air. “Judging from the rest of her fingernails, I’d call this a clue.”

  He bent forward to scrutinize what she’d found. The fingernail of the body’s right index was raggedly broken at the quick, leaving behind a smear of dried blood. “Damn. Painful.”

  “We’ll be sure to scrape under the rest of them,” she said, at which point Mike immediately set to work. “You never can tell when you might get lucky.” She indicated several bruises across the ribs, previously hidden by clothing. “These, too, are telling, I would think.”