The Ragman's Memory

by Mayor, Archer

  “No ties to Brattleboro?”

  I shook my head and spoke with a full mouth. “No ties anywhere except to her hometown. When we first came up with Shawna’s name, we did a complete computer search. Nothing came up. The joke would be if the bones aren’t hers at all.”

  “You see today’s paper?” Gail asked after a brief pause. I gave her a dour look, feeling twinges of familiar dread. “No. What did they do?”

  “Nothing bad. They screwed up a little on the details, saying the piece of jaw you found was from the mandible instead of the maxilla, and they pumped up what you found a bit, making it sound like you’d sent a small graveyard of bones to Waterbury, but it was basically okay. They toed the line on the possible cause of death, quoting you that there was no sign of foul play so far, and they kept the little girl’s name out of it. Still, it’s causing the expected ripple around town.”

  Given her many political contacts in Brattleboro—she’d served on the board of selectmen for years, among other high-visibility organizations—I knew Gail wasn’t referring to local gossip. I also knew she hadn’t brought up the newspaper article to make idle conversation. “Who from?”

  She shrugged vaguely. “Some of the church groups, the halfway house, a few mental health people—the last two worried their customers’ll be hassled by the PD for questioning. And the selectmen… I heard the town manager’s phone was ringing off the wall with all the official hand-wringing about more violence in our streets.”

  She turned her attention back to her meal, but I’d caught her meaning. Any political heat was troublesome enough, even as a routine part of the process. The fact that it was building so fast, based on the discovery of a few small bone shards, was unusual. It gave me the queasy feeling there might be something stirring I knew nothing about.

  · · ·

  The follow-up story on the “mystery bones” ran on the front page the next morning. I had called Christine Evans—Norah’s science teacher—the day before as promised, and she’d been more than happy to talk to Katz and his reporters. A photograph of her appeared beneath the headline, and she was heavily quoted throughout the article, expounding on the habits of scavengers and the aging of bones. I appreciated her keeping Norah’s name out of it, but my earlier affection for her was dampened by what I’d since discovered about Shawna Davis. That anyone should benefit from the remains of a girl so neglected in life was an irony I couldn’t appreciate.

  Except that we still had only circumstantial evidence linking Shawna to our body—an ambiguity we needed to settle.

  J.P. Tyler knocked on my open door as I was finishing the paper. “I got a fax from the lab early this morning and followed it up with a phone call.”

  I waved him to the plastic guest chair by my desk.

  He sat down gingerly, a sheaf of papers clutched in his hand. J.P. was not a “people person”—an inhibition that only worsened when he was faced with someone superior in rank, regardless of how accommodating they tried to be. Still, it made me extremely grateful that while our budget was as anemic as any other department’s in town, we could still afford to equip, train, and entertain Tyler enough to keep him with us.

  “First off,” he began a little ponderously, “most of the bone tissue we sent them was human. What we thought came from animals, did. And the PCR DNA test they ran links the hair to the skull and the teeth. But that’s about as definitive as they want to get so far. They think the person was a young Caucasian female, but they stress that these are statistically-based findings and have a twenty percent or better chance of being wrong. It might’ve been better if we’d had more to give them, but even with the other skull fragments we excavated from under the doghouse, it wasn’t as much as they would’ve liked. They favor long bones and the pelvic girdle—that’s where most of the aging and sex studies they use for base data have concentrated.”

  Despite the care and speed the lab had expended on our behalf, I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of irritation. I’d put Shawna Davis’s face on this cast-off corpse hoping the lab would reward my faith. Now I not only didn’t know if I had a bona fide homicide on my hands, I didn’t even have a rock-solid identity for the victim.

  “What else?” I asked.

  He held out half the papers in his hand, all of them long computer-generated printouts with rows of lie-detector-style spikes on each one, accompanied by near-hieroglyphic annotations lining the margins. “These are toxicological analyses of the hair sample. None of them can tell sex or age either, but hair is a good indicator of other things. It grows at a little over a centimeter per month, and retains many of the chemicals ingested by the host.”

  He leaned forward and began spreading out the sheets, pointing at the various spike patterns. “Some of these are legal drugs—like dextromethorphan—that’s found in a cough syrup called Robitussin DM, for example—so we can guess she either had a cold a couple of months before she died, or maybe she took it to get high. Anyhow, there’s also some marijuana—at multiple points—and finally,” he concluded, extracting a sheet from the bottom, “this: phenobarbital.”

  “Sleeping pills?”

  “Stronger—it’s a barbiturate. The longest-lasting available. The kicker is that it surfaces right at the root of the hair shaft, implying she was on it at the time of her death, although they tell us to allow a week’s margin for error with all this.”

  “So she committed suicide?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. The reading indicates a prolonged exposure—like a week or so. Taking a guess, I’d say she was sedated.”

  My earlier irritation began to fade. “Can you tell if the amount was high enough for that? Maybe she just had a bad week getting to sleep.”

  Tyler sat back. “I thought of that. Mass spec analyses aren’t as refined as urinalyses when it comes to specific amounts, but I checked the Physician’s Desk Reference for dosage recommendations, and it said that 120 milligrams of phenobarbital, three times a day, is the most you’d want to give an adult for sedative purposes. It’s true that different bodies metabolize chemicals at different rates and react to varying quantities, but this reading’s consistent with that dose—and there’re no other indicators along the hair shaft showing prior phenobarbital use. Had there been, it might have explained a growing tolerance for the stuff and a consequent need for more of it. The hair goes back almost twenty months, by the way.”

  “But there’s no way to say the phenobarbital killed her?”

  Tyler shook his head.

  “You said earlier the hair had been dyed. You get anything back on that?”

  He showed me another printout. “I gave the information to Sammie earlier. She’s checking on it now. The infrared analysis pegs the dye to only two manufacturers. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to eliminate the hairdressers that don’t use this color, and maybe a few others that don’t use these brands, and end up with somebody who remembers her.” He glanced hopefully at Shawna’s photograph I had taped to the wall before me. “One thing that might help is that the hair grew one and a half centimeters after the dye was applied, or about six weeks before she died.”

  Through my open door, I saw Ron arrive at his desk. “Got the phone records,” he said when he saw me.

  I beckoned to him, asking Tyler, “That it?”

  Tyler nodded and rose. Ron noticed the printouts in his hand. “You get any DNA?”

  Tyler looked at him curiously and then riffled through his collection. “Yeah—somewhere here.”

  Ron explained his interest. “I was thinking that if we could get any DNA from the bones or teeth, we might be able to match it to Shawna’s PKU test on file in Massachusetts.”

  I stared at him blankly.

  But Tyler lit up. “Right. Every child born is supposed to have a PKU test. Stands for phenylketonuria—it’s done to check for mental retardation. And the blood sample is usually kept on record at the State Health Department. It’s just an identification card with a small dot on it, but
it would be enough for us.” With rare exuberance, he patted Ron on the shoulder. “I’ll get right on it.”

  Ron watched him leave, a small smile on his face.

  “How’d you think of that?” I asked him.

  The smile broadened. “I’m a new papa, remember? We just went through all that. Kind of stuck in my mind—all those vital records.”

  Spoken like a true information nut, I thought gratefully, hopeful again that the identity issue could be settled. “You get a chance to look at those phone records?”

  The smile slipped away. “Yeah—nothing to Brattleboro. For that matter, there weren’t many long-distance calls at all.”

  “Okay. It was worth a shot. If you get any spare time, you might want to check the other numbers anyhow. Is Willy around?”

  “I saw him talking to one of the patrol guys in the parking lot. Don’t know if he was coming or going.”

  It turned out Willy was going, but I jogged outside and caught up with him just as he was starting his engine. He rolled down his window, scowling. “What?”

  “You talk to any of your Satanist contacts?”

  His look turned to disgust. “If I’d found anything, I would’ve said so. Besides, you only told me to think about it.”

  “And then you went poking around.”

  “Fuck you.” Willy didn’t like admitting defeat.

  “What did you find out?”

  “They’re all a bunch of thin-skinned assholes. What I got was a lot of holier-than-thou, alternate lifestyle bullshit. As far as I could tell, nobody’s contacted them to join up recently, and they haven’t been out recruiting. And it doesn’t look like they’ve been butchering virgins lately either. Can I go now?”

  I stood back and let him slither out of the parking lot, his tires spinning on the hard-packed snow.

  I didn’t share his obvious disappointment. Considering the little we had to work with, and the short time we’d been on the case, we were actually making pretty good headway. That satisfaction, however, was purely professional in nature. Emotionally, I was facing a darker picture. Tyler’s report, even with his scientific qualifiers, made it ever more likely that Shawna Davis’s death was a homicide.

  6

  SAMMIE MARTENS WAS WAITING FOR ME impatiently in the squad room when I returned from the parking lot. “I found the hairdresser who might’ve dyed Shawna’s hair,” she said.

  “Okay. Let me get my coat.” I took a thick, quilted Navy pea jacket from its peg and slipped Shawna’s photograph into my pocket.

  Sammie drove us to the south side of town, to Canal Street. An extension of Main, Canal began at one of the town’s most confusing intersections. Two parking lots and four roads emptied into this crossroads, which was further hemmed in by several large buildings and the bridge over the Whetstone Brook—the town’s most significant geographical division.

  A hundred and fifty years ago, the Whetstone had been a major power source for a string of grist and saw mills stretching miles away to the west—one of the primary reasons West Brattleboro had started life as the dominant of the two towns. Now, the brook was a social boundary, separating Brattleboro’s patrician north side from its more lowbrow, commercialized southern half. Whenever we were called for domestic disturbances or alcoholically lubricated brawls, we most often headed south.

  The irony was that much of Brattleboro’s vitality also resided on this side of the water. The high school, the park, and the old warehouses of the Estey Organ Works—once the world’s foremost provider of parlor organs—were all here, along with one of our largest grocery stores, most of the garages, the hospital, and half the town’s fast-food outlets. In fact, before the Putney Road was metamorphosed into a “miracle mile,” Canal Street, along with lower Main, had ruled the commercial roost.

  But it had since acquired a tired, weather-beaten look, especially when compared to the Putney Road’s shiny glitz. The interspersing of decaying, multifamily residences, while giving Canal a more human feel, also injected an element of marginal despair. And because it was boxed in by the old wooden reminders of a past long gone, Canal had nowhere to go, while the Putney Road was former farmland and had acre upon acre left to heedlessly invade.

  As a result, Canal was where a business went that either had spotty financing, or hoped to cater to a largely poor-to-working-class population. It was also the home of Clipper Academy—a launching pad for aspiring hairdressers and a place to go for a very cheap cut, assuming you had low expectations and a flair for spontaneity.

  The manager, wearing a miniskirt and tottering on skyscraper spikes, greeted us at the door from under multihued eyebrows and a glistening, curly mass of black hair. She spoke loudly to be heard over the intermittent shrieking of air wrenches from the garage beyond a shared cinder block wall. “Good morning. May we help you?”

  Sammie, whom I’d never seen in makeup, nor wearing anything besides pants, practical shoes, and a short haircut, appeared speechless. I gave our hostess a discreet look at my badge. “I hope so. We’re from the police department, and we’re trying to trace the whereabouts of a client of yours.” I showed her Shawna’s picture.

  She looked at it carefully, holding it with stiffened fingers so her two-inch nails wouldn’t get in the way. “It’s a terrible cut.”

  “Does she look familiar?” Sammie asked.

  “No. When did she come here?”

  “We’re not sure,” I answered. “It might’ve been a year ago—maybe six months.”

  She shook her head, still looking at the picture. “We get so many people, and most of them for just one visit. You don’t have a name?”

  “Maybe. Does Shawna Davis ring a bell?”

  Her face lit up and she returned the photograph. “Well gosh, that makes it much easier. We keep a record of everyone who comes in, along with the student who did the work—it’s part of our teaching program.”

  While she was talking, she circled around to the back of a curved counter and retrieved a fat book much like the dentist’s from the day before. “That’s last year’s.” She got out a second one and laid it on top of the first. “And that’s the year before.”

  She opened the top one to a sample page. “They’re basically appointment books—day by day. You look under this column here, on each page, for the client names. Some of this other stuff is coded, so when you find who you’re after, I can translate for you.”

  She gave us both a bright, toothy, lipstick-smeared smile. “Okay? I gotta get back to work before someone gets a crew cut by mistake.”

  Sammie and I watched her totter away between rows of mismatching barber chairs, most of which were manned by young, nervous neophytes holding scissors with expressions of wonder and apprehension. It made me happy I’d been cutting my own hair for decades, even if the end result was what Gail called a “prison ’do.”

  We each took a book and began leafing through its contents, pausing occasionally at some nearly indecipherable scrawl, our eyes preconditioned for anything approaching “Davis.”

  About a half hour later, I found it, clearly written, along with the date—April 23rd of the previous year. I showed the entry to Sammie. “If J.P. was right about her dying a month and a half after she got her hair colored, that would put her death into June. When did Norah say her chickadees built their nest?”

  “Early July.”

  I caught the eye of the manager, far to the back of the salon, and beckoned to her. “Last June was hotter’n hell. By July, a corpse left in the sun would have decomposed enough for hair to slough off. Ron’s PKU test, if he finds it, will make it official, but Shawna looks pretty good as our victim.”

  The manager approached us, still beaming. “Find what you were after?”

  I pointed out the entry. “Yes, thank you. You said you could tell us what all these numbers mean.”

  “Right. This is the code for the procedure—a cut and dye—purple and orange. The cut was half shave, and half left long—very popular. Let’s see,
the hairdresser was… Hang on a second.” She went back behind the counter and retrieved another ledger. After a minute spent flipping through its pages, she announced, her voice flattening, “Susan Lucey.”

  I broke into a smile. “You’re kidding. Is her address still Prospect Street?”

  She looked at me with eyes wide, confirming I had the right Susan Lucey. “You know her?”

  I laughed. “Yeah. I take it she hasn’t changed much over the years.”

  The manager suddenly became guarded. “I don’t know. She didn’t do too well with us. And she lives on Washington now.” She handed me the book so I could read the address.

  I shook her hand. “Not to worry. Thanks for your help.”

  “She’s a hooker, isn’t she?” Sammie asked me as we crossed the sidewalk to the car.

  I caught the disapproval in her voice. In her way, Sammie was quite old-fashioned, and prostitution was one of the things she utterly condemned. But the older I became the less judgmental I felt—there are a lot of prostitutes out there, after all, and only a few of them are women selling their bodies for sex.

  Plus, I genuinely liked Susan Lucey. She’d been a big help to me on a case years before—at personal risk to herself, as it turned out—and I’d never forgotten the favor. And she had spirit—plying her trade in Brattleboro, Vermont, was not the sign of an overachiever, but she carried herself with a pride I respected. As the saying had it, “She walked like she was going places and looked like she’d been there.”

  I was struck by the change of address. Prospect Street, where she’d previously lived, followed the crest of a bluff overlooking Canal and most of the town, like a sentry’s high catwalk. A few years back, as with the neighborhood behind it, Prospect had been much the worse for wear—a neglected offshoot of a more boisterous commercial age and now an example of society’s frayed edge.

  But times had improved, and with them Prospect Street’s fortunes. While still no yuppie enclave, it was looking much better. It saddened me to know that Susan had not been able to keep pace and had instead been forced back—a single, significant block—to the kind of environment where she seemed fated to spend her whole life. Not that Washington Street was a ghetto—it even sported some very handsome, well-maintained houses. But it was also a harbor of endless economic struggle, where a single bad year could mean the loss of a home. Cheek-to-cheek with those occasional gingerbread showpieces were tired, old, patched-together multi-tenant dwellings that stood like reminders of a very thin margin.