by Archer Mayor
“Where is she?” Joe asked, hoping to cut through the escalating emotion in his brother’s voice.
Leo paused. “I had to put her in the hospital. That’s why I’m calling so late.”
Joe stood up, still speaking. “Where are you?”
“I’m there, too—Mary Hitchcock.”
That was the old name of what had become decades earlier the Dartmouth—Hitchcock Medical Center, in Lebanon, New Hampshire, which made it about a seventy-minute drive from Joe’s home in Brattleboro, Vermont, near the Massachusetts border.
“Take a breath, Leo,” he counseled, locating his shoes by the door. “Have you eaten yet?”
“No.” Leo sounded calmer—and grateful.
“Grab a sandwich,” Joe said. “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”
* * *
It was a late night as well for Dr. Tina Sackman, working at home in Moretown, Vermont, a tiny village bordering the Mad River, near her office at the crime lab in Waterbury.
Vermont had a disproportionately impressive forensic facility, given the state’s small size. It was spacious, modern, well equipped, and very professionally staffed. From the old days when an ever-changing rotation of state troopers cycled through the lab, learning the ropes—more or less—before yielding to the next newcomer in line, this modern incarnation, made up entirely of civilian experts in their fields, was a remarkable improvement.
Given, of course, the realities of a largely rural state with little industry, a small budget, a hefty tax burden, and a population of just over a half million.
Which in turn meant that for all its impressive attributes, the lab had a few noticeable gaps. One of them being a freestanding latent prints department.
Nevertheless, some of the staff, like Dr. Sackman, despite being employed as a biologist primarily focusing on DNA analysis, took an interest in disciplines outside their fields, like photography, blood pattern analysis—and evidentiary prints. It was her belief that while you should trust your colleagues and rely upon their experience, it was helpful and flattering to acquaint yourself with their fields.
It also didn’t hurt to admit—in Tina’s case—that she was interested in becoming director of the lab someday, and thought her chances of success wouldn’t be hurt by knowing as much about each section’s discipline as possible.
Right now, she was putting together a graduate-level lecture on issues concerning what most laypeople called fingerprints. Her own field played a growing role here, of course, given how advances in forensic science had encouraged the melding of DNA and latent prints. Increasingly, criminals were being convicted as much on the genetic material mixed in with their prints as on the latent impressions themselves—especially when those prints were mostly smudges. The whole area of study was being called “touch DNA.”
As with all lectures, however, virtually regardless of the audience, a show-and-tell approach made absorption that much easier. So Dr. Sackman had decided to use a recent headline-grabbing, successfully closed case as her starting place—the shooting of a Vermont state trooper three years ago by a man he’d killed with return fire just before dying.
It had thankfully been an open-and-shut case, with no margin for error, and investigators had been able to present a solid narrative of events in a timely fashion, even before the last of the forensics had wended its way back from the lab.
But therein lay part of Sackman’s current problem, and the primary reason she was still up at this hour. In her effort to use the double-death case as an example of her lecture’s thesis, she had hit a major obstacle. She’d found what she considered a gap in the ironclad narrative detailing what had transpired that night between Senior Trooper Ryan Paine and the motorist he’d pulled over, Kyle Kennedy.
She straightened from her labors and stared dejectedly at the paperwork on her desk, realizing that she now faced two obligations: to return to the archives and find another case, and to notify someone of her troubling suspicions.
The first was going to be a pain in the neck, and would certainly result in a less catchy crowd-pleaser for her audience. The second was less challenging. She pulled her laptop before her and began typing an email to Lester Spinney, an old state police acquaintance who she knew had joined the state’s elite major crimes unit, the Vermont Bureau of Investigation.
* * *
Abigail Elizabeth Murray was ten years old—precocious, stubborn, and willfully independent. Fortunately for her, as far as she was concerned, she also lived in Windsor, Vermont. According to whatever adult was opining, this was a mixed blessing, because Windsor was either an old industrial New England throwback, out of luck and void of options, or it was the historic cradle of Vermont’s constitution, quaint, pretty, ripe for improvement, and poised to make a comeback if only the right combination of money and entrepreneurship would recognize and finance its potential.
None of which interested Abigail. She lived in a tiny rental on Jarvis Street, high on the bank of the Connecticut River, with her mishmash of a family consisting of her mother, her mother’s boyfriend, and three siblings, each with a different last name. The boyfriend called it a box of gerbils, but to Abigail—in the spring and summer, at least—it was the jumping-off spot for heaven on earth. She didn’t care that its waterfront location—potentially prime in any other town—was on a potholed dead-end avenue trapped between the garbage-strewn riverbank and the remnants of a torn-down Goodyear factory—suspected of being an industrial waste site.
In her view, the virtual wasteland separating her street from the village farther inland was a playground at once vast and intricately confusing. In successive parallel swatches, from the river toward Main Street, high on the bluff, it had dark old conduits designed for industrial runoff, abandoned ancient buildings filled with mysterious offerings, acres of concrete slab littered with piled treasure, and a railroad track that marked its boundary like the dotted line on a printed form the lower half of which was designed to be removed and discarded.
Abigail loved Windsor.
This morning, with the night’s chill just yielding to the sun rising over the New Hampshire hills on the far shore, she was rooting alongside the railroad tracks, looking for anything interesting.
Unlike her friends, she enjoyed this time of day, and in general happily rolled out of bed to greet it. The domestic noises she lived with hadn’t begun, few people were up and traveling within the neighborhood, and the air outside was quiet and fresh—and starting to get warm, which was always a plus. Abigail liked winter, but spring and summer were like her mom’s embrace—soft and warm and filled with good smells.
Railroads fascinated her, with their locomotives larger than her house, their carriages filled with people destined for mysterious places. In Windsor, the old station house had been converted into a fancy restaurant, leaving passengers to detrain on the concrete slab just shy of it—something she thought emblematic of the whole town, not that she could have put the thought into words.
Nevertheless, whenever she could, she made a point of witnessing Amtrak’s two scheduled stops per day, one northbound, the other south, just to see who was getting on or off. She rarely recognized anyone. That wasn’t the point. In fact, the enjoyment was only enhanced by ignorance. Who were they? What were they up to? And what had they seen beyond Abigail’s horizons?
But if the train was nowhere near, as now, she still had the tracks to entertain her, if illegally, and there again, she was often mesmerized by what she found. Despite her having been told that the carriages were tightly sealed, incapable of leaving more in their wake than a passing thought, she found something new every time she explored. She’d slowly processed everything from discarded pens and lighters and crumpled scraps of paper to odd hunks of metal, a cell phone or two, and, weirdest of all, a toy soldier with a small parachute still attached, which now resided near her bed at home.
Weirdest that was, until today.
She crouched down—the picture of a child in a near desol
ate landscape, like a scrap of humanity scrounging for discarded bits of rice—and eagerly gathered up her discovery.
* * *
Colin Guyette was one of only two Windsor police officers with any notion of the “old days”—meaning before the closings of Goodyear, Cone-Blanchard, and the Mt. Ascutney ski resort. And he wasn’t all that old. He’d been a kid in the ’80s—or at least a young man. But the era remained fresh in his mind, as did the painful contrast between those headier days and now.
He had been on the police force a long time—steady, dependable, hardworking—a local boy with no ambitions to move someplace flashier. Which had helped him to survive the succession of selectmen and/or police chiefs who had ended the careers of so many of his colleagues. Guyette was like a boulder in midstream, all but immune from the passing ravages of politics and fashion.
He was a sergeant by now, which was as high as he aspired to go, and his one concession to the passing years and their toll on him was that he worked the day shift exclusively, leaving the more action-packed evening hours to those more eager to deal with them.
He was therefore on duty when dispatch announced the presence of someone in the lobby. Out of habit, he stepped into the front office first, his eyebrows raised in inquiry. The young woman at the radio console motioned to the bullet-resistant window overlooking the building’s waiting room.
“She said she has something to show a policeman, and only a policeman.”
Guyette opened his mouth to respond as the woman quickly held up a hand to stop him. “I have no clue. She was very specific.”
He shut his mouth, glanced at the skinny girl sitting on the bench by the door, and nodded. “If that’s what she wants, that’s what she’ll get.”
He circled around to the electronically locked door leading into the lobby and approached the child, displaying a friendly smile. “I been told you have something to show me.”
The girl took him in solemnly for a moment, as if appraising the validity of his uniform. She then pursed her lips, possibly in approval, reached into her jacket pocket, and silently extended her hand, her fingers opening to reveal her prize.
Nestled in her palm were three broken, bloodstained teeth.
CHAPTER THREE
Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center jarred with its rural setting, in Joe’s eyes. He’d been coming here since they imploded the old Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover to great fanfare in the 1990s, but upon every visit, especially at night, like now, he empathized with its nickname among medevac chopper pilots: the Emerald City. It was vast, modern, towering, bright green, and white, and as urbane and architecturally ambitious as its wooded surroundings were not.
It was also the best such facility within a huge radius, rivaled only by a distant competitor in Burlington, Vermont, and of course the clusters of major hospitals in and around far-off cities like Boston or Springfield, Mass. If you had a big problem and you lived within a two-hour drive, chances were good you were going to end up here.
In the case of Joe and Leo’s mom, who lived fifteen minutes up the river, checking into DHMC was virtually instinctive.
Finding it, however, versus finding anyone within it were two different prospects. Joe didn’t even bother trying to seek out the room number Leo had given him on the phone, and asked reception for directions instead. Only then, following a near marathon course down corridors and up stairs, including through a so-called mall with sixty-foot ceilings, did he find his brother anxiously pacing around a nurse’s station.
“Where is she?” Joe asked without preamble, putting his hand on Leo’s shoulder, as much to slow him down as to make physical contact.
Leo looked at him a moment and threw both burly arms around him in an unexpected hug. “Joey. Jesus, man. You came.”
Leo was the family extrovert. Joe favored their late father—a thoughtful watcher.
“Of course I did,” he said, patting Leo on the back. “How’s she doing?”
Leo broke off to wave down the hall. “Doc’s with her now. She’s hurtin’, and you know her—tough old broad. Never says a thing. She is now, though.”
“They sure about the Lyme disease thing?” Joe asked.
It was the wrong question. Leo’s eyes welled up. “I try to watch her. You’d think it’d be like falling off a log—her in a wheelchair. But she gets out, down the ramp, and onto the lawn in the time it takes me to take a leak. Tick must’ve got her then. I never thought about it.”
Joe laid his hand on his brother’s cheek. “Leo, for Christ’s sake. You couldn’t’ve seen this coming. Let it go. Anyone tell you what to expect?”
“Shit. I don’t know. She could die. She was acting crazy, Joey. None of it makes sense.” Leo’s attention was abruptly drawn to a distant figure in a lab coat. “That’s her doc.”
Joe turned to meet the woman as she drew near. “I’m Joe Gunther, Doctor. My brother phoned me. What’s the news?”
“Dr. Lacombe,” she responded a little stiffly, glancing at Leo as if expecting him to say that Joe was an impostor. Seeing no such reaction, she indicated a small alcove nearby. “Let’s step over here for a minute.”
The three of them moved beyond potential foot traffic, thin as it was this late at night.
Lacombe gestured to a small scattering of chairs. “Sit, sit. Are you all the family Mrs. Gunther has?”
“Yes,” Joe answered. “Just the two of us. Our father died decades ago. What do you think’s going on?”
“The common label is Lyme encephalitis. It’s a variation on Lyme disease that attacks the brain.”
“Can you fix it?”
Lacombe had apparently already reached a conclusion about Joe’s likely preference for the unadorned truth. “No. I mean, we could waste time trying, and maybe get lucky, but while we can certainly stabilize her in the short term, she’d be better served at a more specialized facility.”
Leo hunched over, his hands between his knees. Joe kept his eyes on the doctor. “This is no teenager, Doc,” Joe said. “Are you talking about an end-of-life place?”
Lacombe’s eyes widened in surprise. “What? No, no. Let me back up.” She hesitated a moment and then asked, “What do you do, Mr. Gunther?”
“He’s a cop,” Leo answered.
The doctor straightened and smiled, clearly relieved. “Okay. You’re used to bad news. What I’m saying is just the opposite—that your mother is in incredible shape, aside from this. Her vitals are strong, her history is unremarkable, despite the immobility. Everything in her record indicates she’s facing many more years of good health. This situation could be lethal—it’s true—but it could also be survived, virtually without a scratch. I just don’t know. That’s why I’m suggesting more specialized care. I’m not speaking in euphemisms here. Please don’t misunderstand.”
Joe nodded. “Okay. Got it. What’s the timing on this? You said something about helping her in the short term.”
Lacombe pulled a card from her lab coat pocket. “This is the place I’d recommend. The Francis Rehabilitation Institute, nicknamed the Frank or the FREE because of its impressive endowment. It’s near St. Louis, Medicare covers the costs, and the endowment does the rest for those in need, which includes putting up family members.” She gave Joe a pointed look and added, “I’d recommend that, too, by the way, because of her age and the disease presentation in this case. Are you ready and willing to accompany your mom?”
Joe opened his mouth to answer, but Leo spoke first. “I’ll do it.”
He faced his younger brother directly, speaking kindly but forcefully. “You are the driving force behind your butcher shop, Leo. You’re sure as hell the guy loyal customers travel miles to see at the meat counter. Without you—or knowing what stretch of time the doc’s talking about—there’s no telling how business might suffer.”
“Joey…,” Leo began before Joe cut him off by asking Lacombe, “How long?”
Lacombe hesitated. “No way to know. It could be two weeks; it cou
ld be much longer.”
“I’m your man,” Joe said. “I probably have years of time off in the bank by now. I’ll do it.”
Again, Leo tried to speak.
“No,” Joe said flatly. “You’re the Rock of Gibraltar—always there, always available. Let me do this—brother to brother. It would do me good and make me feel a little less useless.”
To his surprise, Leo considered that for a couple of seconds before saying, “You got it.”
* * *
“No shit?” Willy asked.
Lester Spinney leaned back, linking his fingers behind his neck and stretching his legs into the narrow aisle between the four desks squeezed into the VBI squad room—an impressive sight, given his extraordinarily long and skinny frame. “Nope. Check your email. We got a new boss.”
The office was located on the second floor of Brattleboro’s municipal building, above the police department, and virtually unknown to anyone in town. The Vermont Bureau of Investigation was a major crime-only unit made up of elite detectives culled from agencies across the state—although mostly the state police, as in Lester’s case. They were specialists, primarily called upon by departments or prosecutors in need of their expertise. They didn’t have uniforms or marked cars or a prominent public image. Their charter made it clear: They were to assist and fade away, leaving the limelight to others.
“Joe’s mom needs special care out West somewhere,” Lester was saying as Willy settled in behind his desk. “He found out last night and he’s already home packin’. Bada bing, bada boom.”
Willy wasn’t particularly interested in his boss’s domestic troubles. “Who’s God while he’s gone?”
Lester was enjoying breaking the news. “You’ll love it. The mother of your bouncing baby girl.”
The reaction was typically Willy. He ducked his head so Les couldn’t see his expression, opened his drawer, and said evenly, “She’ll do a good job.”
Les instantly regretted his approach. “Sure she will. Didn’t mean to spring it on you.”
