Bury the Lead

by Archer Mayor

“That’s why we’re here. You know anyone who might’ve wanted to hurt her?”

  “She have a boyfriend?” Sam specified.

  “She saw a bunch of people.”

  “Anyone named Mick, or Michael Durocher?” Joe asked.

  Dot looked surprised. “Mick? No. I never heard that one.”

  Joe tried a more general approach. “Of the guys you know about, who stands out?”

  She considered that a moment before saying, “She had a sugar daddy she was milking.”

  “What was his name?”

  “She never said. He was particular about that.”

  “You ever see them together?”

  “No. It’s not like they went to Burger King and hung out. He bought her the phone you’re looking for. Over-the-top fancy. She had a way of finding the rich ones.”

  “You never heard her on the phone talking with him?” Joe asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Who was the phone carrier?” Sam asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  Of course not, thought Joe. “Anyone else? You implied Teri was seeing several men.”

  “I can’t say he stands out, like you said, since I never met him neither, but there was another one who was kind of a hot ticket.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Maybe ’cause she talked about him? I don’t know. There were a lot of guys I didn’t hear about.”

  “What did she say?” Sammie asked. “Good things? Bad?”

  “He never hit her,” Dot said, her tone brighter.

  Sam and Joe glanced at each other. This was high praise in some circles.

  “Okay,” Joe urged her. “Where does he fit in? Were Teri and he a current item, at the same time as the sugar daddy, or are you talking ancient history?”

  “Oh, no,” she replied, her earlier grief having drifted off. “It’s recent. Kind of.”

  “What’s that mean?” Sam asked.

  “You know love affairs,” Dot stated philosophically. “Up and down, all the time. This one had its lumps, but she really liked him.”

  “Can you give us details?” Joe wanted to know.

  But there, she let them down. “Nope. Nuthin’. Teri wouldn’t tell me a word. That was like a law between them: Keep your mouth shut. Just like with the sugar daddy.”

  “Why?”

  She laughed. “Like I know? Beats me. She just said he was superprivate, and she was okay with that. Plus, she didn’t want to screw things up with the older one, either, so it paid to be … Whatever.”

  “Discreet?”

  “Right. That.”

  “How did they meet?” Sammie asked.

  “Dunno. One day she just said she’d met this guy. That was it. She was in love and wouldn’t tell me anything more.”

  “Did the sugar daddy—or the other one, for that matter—buy her anything else?” Joe asked. “We noticed she had a lot of cosmetics.”

  Dot’s face brightened. “Oh, yeah. That was wild. And it was the younger guy. Boxes and boxes. She said he had an inside source. Could get her anything she wanted.”

  “Where from?”

  There, she drew a blank. “I dunno. She never said and I never asked. It was good stuff, though. She gave me more than I’ll ever use. I sold a bunch of it. She didn’t care.”

  Joe straightened slightly. “You still have some?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you show us?”

  She looked at them doubtfully. “Really? They’re just bottles and stuff, like at a store. There’s nuthin’ to ’em.”

  But she was rising at the same time, and led them down the hallway to her apartment.

  It was a near copy of Teri’s, if more crammed with belongings than a Salvation Army store—cheap furniture, clothing, stuffed animals, boxed and canned food, and random items like a cluster of sparkly whirligigs hanging from one wall and a fluorescent-hued feather boa draped above a window.

  With no choice to do otherwise, they proceeded single file through to the bathroom, where Dot swept aside the shower curtain to reveal stacks of cardboard boxes in the tub, the uppermost of which had been opened to display a dizzying array of the items she’d described.

  Joe glanced at her in wonder. She seemed clean and reasonably cared for, but for all this bath product, it was obvious she didn’t use much. And now he had to wonder about her access to the shower.

  “What’s in the other boxes?” he asked.

  She pulled a few onto the floor to reveal the contents of those below, speaking as she did, “Mac and cheese, cans of soup, there’s one full of aprons here. There’re some cleaning products.… All sorts of shit.”

  “And you didn’t ask for any of it?”

  “Nope. Some of it comes in handy. But like I said, I sell the rest if I get a chance.”

  Joe and Sammie stared at the booty for a few moments before Sam read aloud the one label most common among the boxes: “GreenField Grocers.”

  “Yeah,” Dot said without interest.

  “Did Teri give this benefactor a nickname, maybe?” Joe asked. “The younger of the two, right?”

  “Yeah. Sure,” Dot said. “She called him J.R.”

  Joe nodded a couple of times before indicating the boxes. “I hate to say this, but we’re going to have to keep those for a while.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Joe and Sam were driving back from Barre after spending two more hours with Dot Naylor, grilling her for ever-smaller scraps about the late Teri Parker. They were worn out and frustrated with their lack of results. The mention of the mysterious J.R. notwithstanding, the indications had been clear that somebody—the sugar daddy, J.R., or someone else entirely—had most likely cleaned out Parker’s apartment of any incriminating evidence before the dead girl’s body had even been found. On the basis of that possibility, Joe got hold of Perry Craver and told him to chase down every person who’d had anything to do with Teri Parker, and to interview them about any and all of her past boyfriends.

  “At least we got one line to pursue,” Joe said hopefully, looking out the front passenger-side window as Sam took them east through the timeworn Green Mountains on I-89, following the prehistoric tracings of millennia of waterways.

  “The all-too-elusive J.R.?” she asked.

  “He’s a big one,” Joe agreed. “We should give that tidbit to Les and see if the initials match any of his GreenField suspects—or anyone nicknamed Junior. It sure looked like J.R. was ripping them off to impress his girlfriend. As for the sugar daddy…”

  “Yeah,” Sam filled in the silence he’d left. “Not much to go on there. Too bad the phone was stolen. That could’ve been a gold mine.”

  Joe’s own cell went off on his belt. He pulled it out and read the screen.

  “Beverly,” he announced, and hit the answer button. “Hey, there,” he said. “Are we on the same road, heading in the same direction for once?”

  Beverly laughed tiredly. “Don’t I wish. I know we were hoping to meet up and give the Windsor house another visit, but I’ve been delayed by a case.”

  He knew she routinely conducted her autopsies in the morning. It was now nearing late afternoon. “Oh? Bad one?”

  “Mysterious might be a better word, with ‘bad’ waiting in the wings. I’m in deep with the state’s epidemiologist, the CDC, and an attending at Upper Valley Surgical Specialists on a possible infectious disease death.”

  “Good Lord,” Joe reacted. “Mind if I put you on speaker? I’m in the car with Sam.”

  Beverly sounded surprised. “I don’t mind at all, but why?”

  “Willy’s a patient there,” Joe told her before hitting the speaker button and laying the phone on the console between them.

  “Hey, Doc,” Sam called out.

  “Samantha,” Beverly acknowledged her. “I hope your boss is treating you like the talent you are.”

  “He bows to me all the time,” Sammie told her. “It’s starting to get creepy.”

  Joe brought h
er up to speed: “Beverly just told me she’s dealing with a possible infectious case from UVSS.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Sam said, her smile collapsing. “That mean something serious?”

  “Probably not,” Beverly reassured her. “Have you noticed any unusual activity there? Staff looking nervous or hurrying off to sudden meetings?”

  “No,” Sam said. “What would that tell us?”

  “Just that their tranquil world has been ruffled. Hospitals can lay on the melodrama sometimes. The attending I spoke with had no idea what I was talking about, and I swore him to secrecy, but I was curious if you’d noticed anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Nope. Can’t say I have.”

  “How’s Willy progressing?” Beverly asked, her interest less in Kunkle than in Sam. Her burgeoning friendship with her did not include Willy, whose tactics and manner Beverly usually found abrasive, if not offensive. “I didn’t realize he’d had his procedure done there. I would have presumed Dartmouth-Hitchcock. Joe’s been very tactful about discussing this, which I applaud, by the way.”

  “You know Willy,” Sam said as Joe smiled in response. “Lester’s wife works there, as of recently, so I think that helped persuade him. That and the pain, of course. He wasn’t into shopping around.”

  “He’s feeling better now?”

  Sam laughed. “He said it was like a miracle. That’s not the kind of word he uses.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Beverly deadpanned. “Wish him Godspeed from me.”

  “Will do.”

  “Do you want us to poke around UVSS ever so gently?” Joe asked. “At least see if we notice any heightened activity?”

  “No, no,” Beverly reassured them both. “As I said, this will no doubt prove trivial. Counterinfection protocols exist for good reason, but they rarely yield anything alarming.”

  “When will you find out?” Joe asked.

  “Difficult to say. Perhaps as early as tomorrow afternoon or the day after. In wild, untamed Vermont, as ironies have it, we often get results more quickly than in the civilized world. A lack of urban gridlock. Any analysis still takes time, however.”

  “But you’re not worried?” Sam asked, her voice calm but her mind definitely considering the unstated risks.

  “I’m conservative,” Beverly replied. “I’ll await the results.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Joe said, laughing, both of them unaware of Sam’s growing concern.

  “While I have you both on the line,” Beverly continued unexpectedly, “I was wondering about your take on the lab results from Michael Durocher’s buccal swab not matching the sample I extracted from Teri Parker’s fetus.”

  “That’s all we heard,” Joe said. “Speaking scientifically, and since you’ve apparently read the fine print, there’s no doubt about that, is there?” Joe asked.

  “None. I am sorry,” Beverly said sympathetically.

  “No problem,” Joe said. “All part of the process. Keeps life interesting.”

  “That it does,” she agreed. “I better get back to work. The phone’s lighting up. Good luck, and—again—apologies about tonight.”

  “Don’t give it a thought,” Joe reassured her.

  “Good luck to you, Beverly,” Sam said, falsely lightheartedly, as Joe’s finger hovered over the phone’s off button. “Don’t hesitate to let me know if Willy’s about to be quarantined.”

  They were silent for a few moments following that conversation, before Sam finally asked, putting her anxiety on hold, “Who’re you putting money on as the father? Sugar Daddy or J.R.?”

  “Yeah,” Joe said slowly, adding, “And which one of them set up Mick Durocher to take the fall? And why?”

  * * *

  Bob Raiselis was a happy man. Through a neat alignment of coincidences, he’d just celebrated his twenty-third anniversary, received a raise from GreenField for ten years of faithful service, and gotten a text that morning from his daughter announcing she’d just gotten the promotion to head teller that she’d convinced herself she wouldn’t.

  Bob took special pride in this last bit. Not only did he think the world of his daughter—and believed her to be the brightest child he’d ever known—but he’d also been the one to cajole her into applying for the bank job in the first place.

  It was enough to swell a father’s proud heart.

  Raiselis adjusted his sunglasses, took a sip of his coffee, and checked his mirrors. He’d been driving big rigs for twenty-seven years, and derived the same pleasure from being high above the road as a cowboy does in the saddle or a pilot at the controls. The array of instruments, knobs, levers, and shifters—even the noises and vibrations informing his senses—was as delicately familiar to him as the intricate contents of a clock to an horologist.

  Tractor trailer drivers had once been termed “knights of the road.” The phrase hadn’t weathered well, but the big rigs themselves still attracted the occasional compliment, if mostly from among young kids in awe of their sheer size.

  The fact that Bob’s work environment was seventy-three feet long, over eight feet wide, thirteen-and-a-half feet tall, had eighteen wheels, and weighed about seventy-three thousand pounds was merely something he took in stride. The similar wonderment with which he’d first approached such a monster had long since been replaced by a technician’s obsessive concern with equations, balances, weights, and measurements—and road and weather conditions—not to mention the arcane, ever-changing federal and state regulations that monitored his livelihood.

  People often thought truck driving was restricted to big and beefy types, because of its dependence on brute strength. More accurately, skills in math and interpreting closely worded statutes were increasingly in demand.

  He was just settling into his “day at the office,” as he termed it to his family, having left the White River warehouse forty-five minutes earlier with a load of produce destined for Hartford, Connecticut. He was approaching Brattleboro, the weather was sunny and comfortable, the road clear, dry, and thinly traveled, and he’d just come off a good night’s sleep.

  It was, as pessimists like to say, the perfect setup for a disaster.

  It began slowly. A sense of unease, followed by something more palpable—the slightest of shimmies, from far back in the rig.

  Bob’s eyes automatically dropped to his instrument cluster, then to his mirrors. In the left one, he couldn’t be sure, what with the speed and glare, but was it smoke?

  He looked ahead for an escape route or a pullover, feeling a single sharp tremor as he lifted his foot off the accelerator. That drew him again to the mirror, like a man transfixed by a snake too close to avoid.

  The smoke had burst into a blaze, the tremor into a chassis-rattling malfunction. He touched the brakes to little effect, began working the shifter to slow things down, but even as he methodically enacted his emergency procedures, one by one, he saw in that infernal mirror how his load was beginning to slither out across the lane, flames spewing forth and tires smoking like gas-soaked campfires.

  He could feel his influence over events disappear as the cab began screeching and howling in protest, as metal, roadway, and tons of momentum swelled up next to him, flooding the air like an all-encompassing tidal wave. The surrounding glass began to crack and burst, gravity itself altered beneath him, and even the horizon ahead—so predictably reliable after so many decades—shifted, tilted, and finally vanished altogether amidst a concluding crescendo of explosive noise.

  * * *

  There was still smoke in the air when Rachel crested the rise. Avoiding the streets feeding into the blocked interstate ramps, she’d parked at a distance and begun cutting across people’s properties, climbing fences, ducking under clotheslines, and once outsprinting an outraged and thankfully aging terrier, until she’d wriggled over a final chain-link barrier and found herself, as hoped, poised directly above the mangled wreck.

  It was spectacular in scope. Every photographic element she could have wished for was there. Am
bulances, police cruisers, fire trucks, and wreckers, all sparkling with different-colored lights. The bitter stench of burned rubber mixed with the delicate scent of wildflowers on the hill at her feet, which she immediately captured on camera by crouching low and placing the blooms as a foreground to the tangle below. There were skid marks, gouges in the pavement, a tractor trailer ripped apart as if by a giant can opener. Fluids poured toward the ditches—dark oil, gasoline, viscous runoff from pallets of smashed fruit cans.

  And blood.

  Toward the head of the truck, which lay on its side like an exhausted whale, a smear of blood extended from inside the flattened cab and across the crumpled hood, dripping onto the roadway like melting ice cream.

  Rachel used her longest lens to capture that image, even knowing that the paper wouldn’t run it. But the adage was no less true now than it had ever been: “Film is cheap.” Even if film was no longer involved.

  She found her mind clear, calculating, filled only with concerns for angles, lighting, focus, and framing. She saw the driver’s dead hand protruding from a window—pale and crimson-stained, dangling above the black paint of the truck’s door—and photographed it as coolly as she might have a senior posing for the yearbook.

  Multiple shots later, she worked her way downhill, taking portrait after portrait of firefighters, EMTs, police officers, and others immersed in their work—faces grim, eyes narrowed, voices low and direct. This was a demonstration by professionals, much practiced and trained for, by people in their comfort zone. Given the lack of visible emotion on display, she might have been documenting the construction of a dam site instead of the disassembling of a gory and fatal vehicle crash.

  And there were other injuries. The truck had swept across both lanes like a windshield wiper, collecting several cars in the process and launching them into the ditches and ledge without effort. She took pictures of a paramedic starting an IV line on a dazed pickup driver, and another of a small child sitting quietly on the bumper of an ambulance, watching her mother being bandaged nearby.

  “Hey,” came a male voice from behind her.

  Rachel turned to see a Brattleboro police sergeant approaching, his expression stern.