by Archer Mayor
“Sorry to disturb you, sir. I was told you’d be expecting me.”
“You have an envelope?”
It was instantly pulled from an inner pocket and proffered. “Yes, sir.”
The young man didn’t immediately let go of it, however, his training and instincts coming to the fore. “I was told to get your name before I handed it over—just to be sure.”
Jared Wylie smiled unpleasantly as he snatched the envelope away. “No you weren’t. Get lost.”
The door slammed shut in the trooper’s face.
Inside, Nick Gargiulo watched his boss rip open the unaddressed envelope.
“Son of a bitch,” Wylie said, pleased by its contents.
“Good news?”
“The stupid cow turned on her phone,” he said. “They got a ping. According to this, she’s in Burlington.”
Gargiulo smiled in turn. “Guess that means I’m going to Vermont.”
Wylie’s expression was grim. “Don’t come home empty-handed.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lester stood before the bulletin board in the lobby of the Vermont State Police barracks in Rutland, absorbing not one iota of the information thumbtacked before him. He was here to meet with James “Sturdy” Foster, a member of the agency’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations—the same branch that Lester had left to join VBI, and whose major crimes responsibilities had been curtailed as a result of the VBI’s creation. A lot of time had gone by since, and Joe Gunther and Bill Allard, VBI’s director, had worked extensively to maintain and nurture cordial relations, but feelings had run raw at the beginning, and Lester to this day encountered remnants of those times, from accusations of his being a deserter to the VBI’s being the expedient product of a single, long-gone governor’s pen, and therefore deserving of disposal.
This old baggage was relevant now, since Sturdy had not only chosen to stay with BCI, but had also been the lead investigator on the Paine versus Kennedy shoot-out. In addition to ancient rancor, therefore, there possibly lurked a claim that Lester was reopening the Paine case because he believed that the BCI had loused it up—or, worse, had cooked up evidence.
To say he was on edge only scratched the surface.
Sturdy Foster, however, wasn’t so nicknamed without cause. When he threw open the inner door to the barracks and welcomed Spinney in, Lester sensed that his misgivings had been anticipated. Foster made his greeting friendly and welcoming, and directly addressed the major issue potentially standing between them.
“According to your phone call, you got poked by an unhappy scientist,” he commented as they walked down the hallway to his office. “They saying I screwed something up?”
Lester matched his tone to his host’s. “They bent over backwards not to say that. But by pure dumb luck, they did find something I’d never seen before. That’s why I wanted to fly it by you first. You know the ins and outs of this thing better than anyone.”
Foster credited his tactfulness with a supportive “Okay. Well, let’s take a look at it, then, and see what you got.”
Foster escorted him into an office cut from the how-to-drive-a-state-worker-mad handbook—starting with narrow slit windows placed too high on the wall to allow anyone a view of anything—and offered him a metal chair, commenting, “Sorry for all the frilly amenities.”
Lester laid Tina Sackman’s file folder on the desk and flipped it open to the first document. “You want to plow through it first or hear my takeaway? Your choice.”
Sturdy made himself comfortable, leaning far back in his chair, which Les found to be interesting and perhaps telling body language. “Fire away.”
“In brief,” Lester began, “while the fingerprints the lab lifted from Kennedy’s revolver all belonged to him, two of them were exactly the same print, carbon copies, while the rest were too perfect to belong to anyone shooting a gun. Also, none of them had any DNA attached.”
“None at all?”
“Nope. They’re like transpositions from some neutral, nonhuman source.”
Sturdy didn’t react for a long, slow count, fixing his guest with a steady, impenetrable gaze. “Nonhuman,” he finally repeated.
“As if transferred from a source other than a finger, like an old fingerprint card or a wax impression or a rubber mold or something. The person who brought this to me—Tina Sackman—said she couldn’t tell.”
“And the lab didn’t catch this at the time because?”
Lester shuffled through the file to a document deeper inside the pile. “That’s pretty interesting. Or I thought so. Since I started this job, I’ve always compared any lift I’ve collected to what’s in AFIS. I think it’s what we all do. But I’ve never once compared one lift to another. Why would you? That’s what Sackman did, and when she found the duplicate set, she looked closer. That’s when she called me.”
Foster absentmindedly chewed the inside of his cheek before asking, “Got anything else?”
Lester played the only card he had: “Only that a case with no margin of error now has a murder weapon where all the latents appear to have been planted by a third party.”
Foster slowly sat forward, reached out, repositioned his stapler, and returned to his previous position, all without uttering a word.
Lester stayed quiet.
“There is one very large elephant in the room you haven’t mentioned,” the older cop finally said.
Lester winced slightly, knowing he’d been overly optimistic. “I’m not saying you screwed up, or that you’re the third party,” he said quietly.
“Thank you for that. Why not?”
It wasn’t the response he’d expected. “I read the reports,” he replied. “And I mean all of them—yours and everybody else’s who worked the case. I couldn’t see where anyone had exclusive access to the gun. I thought of it. I won’t deny. But I couldn’t make it fit. I looked at how the lab might’ve cooked up the results, too, but that didn’t work, either.”
Foster nodded, as if to himself. “So, what’s your theory?”
Les felt like he’d passed inspection, if perhaps only temporarily. He turned both palms toward the ceiling. “That’s why I’m here. Damned if I know. I figured I’d start with you, for the insider’s guide, and then maybe—I hope with your help—start looking at the case all over again, from the ground up.”
Foster gave a final, single curt nod. “All right. Tell me what you need.”
Lester smiled with relief. “Great. I can’t thank you enough. How ’bout laying it out for me from the beginning.”
“On the night in question,” Foster began, “Ryan Paine was on patrol as usual, outside Halifax. He called in a stop per protocol, including his location and a 10-28 for a vehicle registered to Kyle Kennedy. He was never heard from again. Dispatch issued an 11-20 after the suitable time lapse, like they’re supposed to, repeated it several times without success, and dispatched backup to find out what had happened. As luck would have it, two cruisers showed up at almost exactly the same time—one of ours and a sheriff’s deputy—and found Kennedy dead of a gunshot wound inside his vehicle, and Paine on his back in the middle of the road, his weapon out and a hole in his throat. Both men were dead, there was blood everywhere, given that Paine’s carotid had been severed, and we never found a witness to any of it. It was an empty stretch of road, with no homes nearby, and late enough that traffic was nonexistent.”
“And ballistics matched perfectly,” Lester recalled.
“Right. Paine’s weapon was missing a single round, later found in Kennedy’s chest at autopsy—right through the heart, if you can believe that. Kennedy had a Taurus .357 revolver. Assuming he went in with a full cylinder, only one bullet had been fired, consistent with the hole in Paine’s throat.”
“But it was never found?”
“No. Given the proximity and the fleshiness of the target, the bullet kept on going into the puckerbrush. The lab people busted their humps trying to find it, but with no luck. On the other hand, they did an a
ngle analysis of both trajectories, which fit the narrative to a T.”
Lester imagined how Sturdy came across on the stand at trial—another context in which his nickname made sense. “Where was Kennedy’s gun found?”
“On his lap inside the vehicle, sprinkled with his own blood, and”—he gave a small smile—“covered with his prints.”
“But was his hand on it or just near it?”
Foster hesitated. “Near it only. And before you ask, there was no GSR found, either.”
Lester already knew that from the reports he’d read. However, gunshot residue was not a given in a shooting, although more likely with a revolver. Depending on a variety of factors, it might or might not be found on a shooter’s hand—popular belief and too many forensic TV shows notwithstanding.
“Let’s step back from the actual scene for a sec,” he suggested. “What about the two guys in general? Did they know each other?”
“Kind of,” Foster told him. “Ryan Paine was what I call a locked-in-the-job trooper. Not ambitious, not a self-starter, not a volunteer by nature—a punch in–punch out type. He got assigned his first barracks because of where he was already living—in this case, west of Guilford—and never made a move to change that. As a result, he got to know the same neighborhood players, basically because neither he nor they ever went anywhere, except maybe to jail now and then. That’s the context where we later found out that he’d run into Kyle Kennedy in the past.”
“Kennedy was a bad boy?” Lester asked, still playing ignorant.
Foster knew the routine, however. It was never a bad idea to rehash known information. You never knew what new might pop up.
“Kennedy was a woodchuck,” he said. “Neither bad nor good. Just regular. He drank and drove, he slapped his girlfriends around sometimes, he did a little weed, didn’t get his car inspected on time, bought cigarettes for minors, was loud and disorderly, and so on. A jerk by society’s standards, but by ours? Pretty average.”
“And Paine nailed him for a few of those?”
“A couple, at most. And we never found where they had a run-in, like with Kennedy threatening to sue or anything. If Paine had later told me he’d never heard of Kennedy, I wouldn’t’ve been surprised. Guys like him’re a dime a dozen. You stop paying attention.”
“Any charges involving guns?”
“Nope.”
“How ’bout Paine? What was his home life like?”
“Wife, now living with some new boyfriend in the house she’d shared with Paine. There was a stepchild, belonging to her, who’s since grown and moved cross-country. Paine’s long-divorced mom also lived nearby. Looked plain vanilla to us. That said, I don’t know that he was looking at keeping his job with us for much longer.”
“Oh?”
“Not to speak ill of the dead—a dead hero, for that matter—but his last performance evals were pretty bad. We have a strong and protective union, but even they were running out of excuses. It was Rule 32 stuff—training, weapons recertification. There’s irony for you, given the last bull’s-eye of his life. Still, he’d been putting off his obligations and burning up goodwill by not meeting anybody halfway. I didn’t get anyone to tell me this afterwards, but I’m pretty sure it was about to get ugly.”
“He was going to be fired for acting retired while still on the job,” Spinney filled in. “If only there were such a category.”
Foster nodded. “Just a gut feeling, based on what I was seein’.”
“Had he had his come-to-Jesus talk with his supervisor?”
“More than once. He had thirteen years on the job. You know how it goes. People feel they’re owed a few extra swings. He might not’ve ever qualified as trooper of the year, but he put in his time, and had never fucked up big-time.”
“Or been caught at it,” Lester said less charitably.
Sturdy didn’t take offense. “Or that.”
“Any rumors surface after the dust settled? About either one of them?”
Foster pushed out his lips contemplatively. “Not that I heard. His mom died recently—lung cancer, I think. She wasn’t in great shape when I met her. At the funeral, she was a basket case. You were there, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, lost in the crowd. I think everyone in law enforcement was there, from all around New England. It was a zoo in uniforms.”
Foster laughed. “That it was. Anyway, the old lady went downhill after that, I guess.”
“And the widow?”
“Dee Rollins,” Sturdy reminisced. “She was a tough nut. Not someone I’d marry, but she passed all the tests at the time—properly distraught, nothing in her background to raise suspicions, not that there was much room for suspicion anyhow, given the circumstances. Still, we checked her out, just to be thorough. She’d been married once before—that’s where the kid came from. Had been with Paine for fifteen years. Don’t know what she’s up to now aside from the new boyfriend—and I just heard about that incidentally.”
“Did you or anyone else put an interview into her?” Lester asked.
“As in, did we turn up the heat a little?”
“I know there was no particular reason—,” Lester began.
But Sturdy cut him off, still sounding unperturbed. “Ya gotta remember how hot this was. I mean, three years later, we can say, ‘Oh, yeah, this was headline news,’ but it was more than that. You referenced the funeral. There were thousands there, including from beyond New England. This wasn’t our first law enforcement death, but by gunfire it was. This ain’t New York—everybody from both U.S. senators on down were weighing in. There was no way I was gonna grill the mom and widow, or the adult stepkid—not with the scenario we’d worked out and which has stood the test of time—latent prints or no latent prints. I would’ve had my head handed to me. So, the answer is, yes, I met them both, and conducted interviews, but more than that? No.”
The conversation stalled for a moment as each of them mulled over what they were facing. Lester spoke first, purposefully keeping things practical: “All right. So, a cop slowly melting into his boots, about to be fired; a crook of no distinction and with no history of violence; and a midnight encounter with bullets flying. Dispatch had no clue why Paine pulled him over in the first place, correct?”
“It’s not generally said over the air. You know that. Comes at the end, when the stop’s wrapping up and Dispatch’s told whether it was a ticket or a warning—and for what. The only exception might be for a high-speed chase or when a trooper requests backup, neither of which happened here.”
Lester nodded, not wishing to overstay his welcome. He wanted this man as an ally, after all. “Okay. I appreciate the guided tour. As I said at the top, I’ll be poking through it all, trying to make sense of the fingerprint angle. I hear you loud and clear about the facts probably being solid, but it’s a kinky detail, and I feel I ought to check it out.”
But despite his diplomatic tone, Foster was already shaking his head sympathetically. “No, no, no. Don’t tiptoe on my account. In fact, what I’m thinking may piss you off, but you might consider inviting IA to the party, so everyone’s butt is covered.”
“Internal Affairs?” Lester parroted, impressed.
Foster hitched a shoulder. “That’s how this conversation started, wasn’t it? With my thinking you were maybe accusing us of planting those prints? Ninety percent of the time, IA clears the cop being looked at. Those’re good odds, and since I was the lead on this one—and know for a fact no malfeasance occurred—I got everything to gain asking them in. I can’t explain what your scientist discovered, and maybe it’ll lead to some new insight on the case—God knows, we don’t know everything—but I seriously doubt anyone’s pecker’ll be going into the wringer. Asking IA to play’ll make us look like saints in the meantime. There’s no downside, as I see it.”
Lester smiled, shook his head, and stood up to leave. “It’s your call, Sturdy. You’re a better man than I.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Joe,
how’re things progressing?”
Joe settled back against the pillow in his small, sparsely furnished, but kindly provided room, the cell phone cradled against his cheek. The Residence, as the staff called the entire building, was built like a dorm for grown-ups, with decorative touches and architectural details the average college kid would overlook—or destroy without thought. The floors were polished hardwood, curtains covered the windows, each room had a bathroom, there were communal kitchens on each floor. It was a livable compromise between a soulless hotel and a furnished apartment building from which the permanent inhabitants had mysteriously vanished.
A relieved smile creased his face. “Hey, yourself. I’m okay. How’s life at the morgue?”
“Very funny. Is this where I say, ‘Still as the grave’? You know I hate that kind of humor.”
“Yes, Doctor. I do. My deepest apologies.”
“Humbug,” Beverly said severely. “How’s your mother?”
“I’m not the one to ask. They plug me in here and there, mostly to supply a familiar voice and presence, but they’re the ones with the know-how. Supposedly, she’s showing promise, but I can’t tell much of a difference yet. She still seems pretty out of it to me.”
“It hasn’t been very long,” Beverly tried soothing him.
“I know. I’m not bent out of shape. It’s more that I just feel awkward. I’ve watched Leo deal with her over the years, as natural as you like, and even then—when she was a hundred percent—I wasn’t sure how he did it. I guess I’ve been on my own for too long.”
Beverly laughed quietly. “Why do you think I deal with dead people? My bedside manner? I know you cops have nicknamed me the Ice Queen. For what it’s worth, I think you’re very good with people, your mother being a case in point. I also know for a fact that she adores you, so your being there is probably the best thing for her—perhaps even better than your brother.”
He let that sink in for a moment before grudgingly saying, “I guess, maybe. I do feel useless, though. What’s been going on with you?”
