The Ragman's Memory

by Mayor, Archer

  Sammie was the first to broach the subject, following me into my glass-walled cubicle and dropping the paper on the desk. “You see this?”

  I removed my coat and hung it behind the door. “Yup—Katz called me at home this morning and warned me about it.”

  “Did he name his source?”

  I laughed. “Right. Who’s your candidate?”

  “Beats me. The article implies there was more than one.”

  “I wonder how NeverTom’s taking it?” I wondered aloud, amused at Katz’s oblique dig at the selectman. “Anything new on Ned Fallows?”

  “No. The state police put a BOL out on him last night, but so far—”

  Willy Kunkle appeared at the door. “Got something right up your alley,” he interrupted, making Sammie purse her lips in irritation. “Some guy on Deacon Place just called, said his dog showed up this morning with a frozen coon carcass in his mouth—all cut up and weird-looking. Animal Control is on the way already. The guy said he normally wouldn’t have called, except that the ‘weird’ part reminded him of rabies, and the cuts were done with a knife. He’s a surgeon, so I guess he would know.”

  News that somebody had carved up a rabid animal revived the impatience I’d been feeling at Hillstrom’s silence about how Milo might have caught the disease. I retrieved my coat and headed back out the door with Kunkle, telling Sammie, “We’ll talk when I get back.”

  It was an extraordinary morning, as bright as a diamond, the snow white and reflective and untrammeled as a newfound beach. The sun on the horizon was the image of an acetylene torch—blazing, blinding, and yet virtually without heat. The air felt cold enough to freeze your eyes open.

  We took my car and headed north along the Putney Road. Deacon Place is attached to a tiny horseshoe-shaped enclave marking the northernmost reaches of the Putney Road’s high-income district, just shy of the short bridge marking the beginning of the “miracle mile” section of the road.

  This overlooked neighborhood affords one of the most scenic, peaceful, and expensive views over the West River floodplain, known locally as “the meadows.” As we pulled into Vermont Avenue—the southern leg of the horseshoe—I was struck once again at how some areas, regardless of the bustle all around them, manage to appear as sylvan and pristine as a country village.

  We didn’t talk during the short trip. Willy wasn’t inclined that way generally, and I was too busy thinking to bother. The discovery of a dissected, rabid animal, though interesting enough, wasn’t the only reason I was making the drive out here. As Willy already knew, the location of this find was as relevant as the animal itself—Tom and Ben Chambers lived on Eaton Avenue, in the same tiny neighborhood.

  Animal Control’s small dark-blue pickup truck, its rear bed fitted out with a cluster of closed cages, was parked opposite the house we were looking for. I pulled up behind it just as Amy Siddons, the control officer, appeared at the house’s back door. She gestured to us to follow her inside.

  The doctor in question was Michael Brook, a large, bearded, one-legged orthopedic surgeon at Brattleboro Memorial. A skilled physician with an encyclopedic knowledge and a near-compulsive curiosity, he was also a good friend who’d seen me through some bad times in the past. That notwithstanding, my encounters with him had always occurred at the hospital or in his office. I’d never asked or known where he lived and was startled and pleased to see him now. He greeted us in the kitchen, piled our coats onto a table, and immediately ushered us into a spacious, well-lit pantry, complete with an elegant, highly polished, copper-top counter. There, laid out beside a row of cut crystal glasses and an assortment of expensive liquor bottles, were the sliced-up remains of a frozen raccoon carcass, spreadeagled on its back. I leapt to the conclusion that Mrs. Brook was out of town.

  “I knew right off it was rabid,” he began, slipping on a pair of latex gloves. “Even frozen, you can see the thick mucus typical of hydrophobia slathered on the coat. And those porcupine quills around the nose are a classic sign of a wild animal being too disoriented to take the most basic precautions. Also, the coat is patchy and unkempt. That’s not indicative of rabies by itself, but taken in context, it’s a pretty good guess. ’Course, only a brain analysis can prove any of it.”

  Amy Siddons, hanging back by the door, said, “Dr. Brook, I better get going. Your dog should get a rabies booster, and you should watch it for any unusual behavior over the next forty-five days, but that’s about all that needs to be done.” She looked at me and added, “I’ll leave a special container in the kitchen for that.”

  Brook turned a dazzling smile on her. “Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you very much.” He waited until she’d left the house before adding, “I don’t think she likes this aspect of the animal kingdom much.”

  “Where did your dog find it?” Willy asked, who seemed little more interested than Amy.

  “Beats me,” Brook answered. He was bent over the small body, poking and prodding with his rubber-tipped fingers. “The thing is, Joe, you can see what’s been done to this creature. It’s incredible—like some sort of weird science experiment. Made me think of all that Satanist stuff the paper was screaming about a while ago.”

  He pointed to the head. “This hasn’t just been hacked up. Parts have been surgically removed—not with any skill, incidentally—but with distinct purpose. Look here—see? The tongue’s been cut out, the insides of the cheeks scraped, and the palate’s been split open to access the brain, which looks like it’s been scooped out. It’s almost as if someone was scavenging for a witch’s brew—you know, eye of newt, wing of bat? Really strange.”

  I had no doubts he was right and was all but sure I knew what the recipe was for—and who had been the recipient. “Tell us how you got it, Mike.”

  Brook straightened and peeled off his gloves, dropping them on the carcass. “Cricket brought it in,” he said, nodding toward the dog. “I let him out first thing every morning. By the time I’ve shaved, showered, and fixed breakfast, he’s usually back at the door, begging to be let in, especially this time of year. Only today, he had that in his mouth. Given that it’s frozen, I doubt it’s still contaminated, but I thought you’d be interested by the carving.”

  “I am,” I answered. “Mind if we walk around the property a little?”

  He waved his hand toward the door. “Be my guest. I still have a few things to do before I head for the office. You all set on your own?”

  “Does the dog roam the whole neighborhood?” Willy asked as we were putting on our coats.

  “One end of Eaton to the other, but generally not beyond that. He’s pretty territorial.”

  We thanked him and stepped outside.

  “Lucky we got that new snow,” Willy said, pointing with his chin toward the narrow track cut into the snow bank—the width of a mid-sized dog.

  We followed Cricket’s tour of the neighborhood, meandering, inquisitive, occasionally indecisive. At points, I could visualize him standing stock-still, his nose to the breeze, waiting for inspiration. Willy and I cut across property lines, through hedges, and traveled in circles, hoping the tracks would take us north, toward the Chambers house.

  Cricket was obviously a creature of habit, starting with back doors and garbage cans, then expanding to the backs of garages, frozen compost containers, hibernating gazebos, and other relics of summer. It wasn’t until we were at the bottom of somebody’s sloping lawn, with a sweeping view of a dazzling, flat, white expanse of frozen water that he’d apparently headed in a beeline toward the property I was most interested in.

  I picked up the pace then, ignoring my near frozen feet and Willy’s increasing complaints behind me, and ran clumsily by ice-bound boat docks and dead gardens until I was standing on the shoreline of Tom and Ben Chambers’s property. There, the smooth furrow of a curious dog on his fast morning rounds was replaced by a wide, trampled, dirt-strewn half circle, attached like a soiled snow angel to the side of a fallen tree trunk. Here, Cricket had found his sought-after reward, s
tuffed under the log and wrapped in the remains of a now eviscerated dark brown trash bag.

  “You got your portable?” I asked Willy, whose voice had been stilled by our discovery. “Get J.P. here—now. And I want a search warrant for brown plastic, thirty-gallon garbage bags, surgical instruments, any animal parts, hair, or remnants, and any surfaces stained by or utensils used for the handling of said parts, hair, or remnants. Probable cause is the possible use of said animal in Satanist rituals, the unburied disposal of a potential health hazard within one hundred feet of a water source, the killing of a fur-bearing animal out of season, and anything else you or the SA can think of that a judge’ll sign—tell them to be creative.”

  “You want the bags included?” Willy asked incredulously.

  “J.P. showed me a Journal of Forensic Sciences article about how garbage bags from the same box can be microscopically linked to one another, even if they weren’t in sequential order in the box—something to do with how they’re made at the factory. Anyhow, I’m hoping that even if NeverTom cleaned up the rest of his mess, he won’t have thought about the bags.”

  I turned and looked up the long, curving lawn to the enormous home perched at its top. “Find me a way to get into that house, Willy.”

  · · ·

  Ron Klesczewski located me in my office pretending to shuffle paperwork while I waited for Willy to produce the search warrant. “I got it,” he said, closing the door behind him. “At least I think so—what Tom Chambers has on Ned Fallows.”

  I let him grab a chair. “I started thinking,” he resumed, “maybe it wasn’t related to the zoning board, so I broadened my research, looking in every town record I could find for Fallows’s name. Remember several years ago, that fire in the Cotton Mill Hill warehouse? Gutted part of the building? Most of the damage was on the first floor, to an upholstery business, but upstairs, in the back, there was a big storage room—all stereo equipment and electronics—easily damaged by smoke and heat. Everything was declared a total loss. The arson report was inconclusive, but the investigator made a note about how the smoke got into that upper storeroom—a door was left open that should’ve been shut, and a window was conveniently broken to draw the fire in the right direction. But the fire showed no suspicious origin, the upholsterers were way underinsured, and so nobody pursued it.

  “Here’s the trick, though. The electronics represented the entire stock of a small, pricey, unsuccessful stereo store on Main owned by Ned Fallows. His banker just told me Fallows was having problems meeting his mortgage payments. The equipment was mostly out of date—basically unsellable in a trendy market—and there was a lot of it. But since the insurance was for replacement instead of current value, Fallows got top dollar to buy brand-new, cutting-edge stock. After which, and after spiffing up the store, he sold the whole business within a couple of months of the fire, making him either real lucky, or someone who pulled a fast one and got away with it.”

  Ron moved to the edge of his chair with enthusiasm. “Digging a little deeper, the lucky-guy picture begins falling apart. Fallows didn’t run the store—he had a series of managers instead, the latest one being someone named Ricky Steves. Steves had been on the job for about four months before the fire, and had come to Brattleboro from North Carolina, where he has a criminal record for arson.

  “My banker contact told me that after the sale of the store, Fallows paid off all his debts, retired the mortgages on the business and his house, and went back to being a Realtor and a teacher—as well as a member of the ZBA. The kicker is that according to town tax records, only a few months after the store was sold, Steves got a high-paying job for BTC Investments as a ‘consultant,’ although the low-level BTC workers I talked to never saw or heard of the man. BTC, of course, stands for ‘Benjamin and Thomas Chambers.’”

  “Son of a bitch,” I murmured.

  “Right. After collecting a paycheck for about a year, Steves left town without a trace. I couldn’t find him in any computer we’re hooked to.”

  Ron sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. “So, what can we prove? Nothing. But I bet Tom Chambers is holding some sort of documentation laying out how Ricky was hired by Fallows to torch the business for the insurance. That’s the leverage NeverTom must’ve used to get Fallows to cheerlead the project through the ZBA. The irony is, rumors at the time said Fallows would back the project anyway, given his past voting record. Makes you wonder if Chambers twisted Fallows’s arm just for spite—to show he could knock him off his pedestal. That must be a bitch for Fallows—knowing that voting his conscience had made him look like he’d been corrupted.

  “Of course,” Ron added, “there’s no way in hell we’re going to get all this confirmed, not unless Tom Chambers finds religion and bares his soul. But at least we’ve got enough for a little leverage.”

  I didn’t argue the point, but I dearly hoped we had more than that. Not only was I concerned about Ned’s wandering around loose, his intentions vaguely ominous, but Mary Wallis’s disappearance continued to nag at me like a chronic ache. Despite the consensus that she had either fled or been killed, I couldn’t suppress the feeling that she was still alive—but that like Shawna before her, her time on this earth might be running out.

  · · ·

  By mid-morning, Willy Kunkle and I were at Tom and Ben Chambers’s door, armed with a warrant and accompanied by a search team.

  NeverTom was not happy to see us. “What the hell do you want?”

  Willy handed him the paperwork and gestured to the others to file in. “For you to get out of the way.”

  I could see Chambers considering whether to block the door with his body. Instead, to my relief, he moved aside, waving the warrant at me. “God damn you. I want to know what’s going on.”

  I stepped inside and closed the door. “I won’t expect you to like this,” I began, “but we have reason to believe a raccoon was killed and dissected in this house, parts of its body removed, and the rest wrapped in a garbage bag and illegally disposed of on your property. Since the raccoon showed signs of being rabid, we felt the need to check this out. I suggest you read the warrant for the details.”

  Tom Chambers’s face, never placid at the best of times, grew red to the point where I became mildly concerned for his health.

  “You bastards. It’s not enough you libel me in the newspaper, and skulk around town asking questions and smearing my reputation. Now you come up with some weird little scam to invade my home. You and your chief and that arrogant crippled asshole in there had better start looking for new jobs, buddy.” He stabbed my chest with his finger. “Because I’m going to have every one of you fired.”

  I snatched up his finger in my fist, watching his eyes widen slightly in alarm. “Mr. Chambers, you are entitled to do anything you want, under the law. Threatening me and denigrating my officers is not included in that. If you want to call your lawyer, go ahead. I don’t give a damn. But if you so much as think about getting in our way while we’re working here, I’ll bust you so fast you won’t know what hit you. Is that understood?”

  He retrieved his hand and held it against his chest, as if giving it comfort. “You’re history,” he snarled and retreated to another room.

  I took a deep breath and turned to see Kunkle looking at me from a doorway, a grin on his face.

  · · ·

  Surprisingly to me, J.P. and his team found several items beyond the half-empty box of dark brown garbage bags I’d been hoping for. A small bonanza was located in the basement, where under a strong fluorescent light, and alongside a washer and an old-fashioned sink, a wooden worktable, scarred and worn, displayed a large oval pale spot in its center.

  J.P. pointed at it. “Bleach—fresh, too. And there were animal hair shafts on the floor and stuck to this sheetrock knife.” He opened an evidence envelope to show me. “Found it hanging on the pegboard over there with the other tools. Trash has been picked up several times since this was done, so we didn’t find anything there, and t
he sink doing double duty for the washing machine means the trap’s been cleaned of any residue I could get. Still,” and here he held up a small plastic bag, “I did find a couple of additional hairs caught in the drain grate.”

  He moved over to the far side of his large evidence-gathering case and picked up a small cardboard box. Inside was an old metal ricer, popular for making mashed potatoes. “Interesting, huh? The only kitchen tool down here. It’s been hit with bleach, too.”

  I merely scowled in response.

  “Here’s something else,” he said with satisfaction and pulled out an open box of coffee filters. I still didn’t say anything, so he prompted, “Filters and a press… The raccoon had its brain scooped out, remember?”

  I finally reacted. “You saying he made cider out of the brain?”

  “Seems reasonable. That’s where rabies resides—there and in the saliva. The other part of the coon that was scraped was the inside of its mouth and tongue. It’s not a scientific way to harvest a virus, but there’s no reason it couldn’t work… In fact, I guess we know it did.”

  My memory returned to an earlier hypothesis I’d shared with Tony Brandt. “Hiding the injection site somewhere among all the sores, flea bites, and acne.”

  Tyler finished the thought. “All he had to do was get Milo comatose on booze. By next morning, he never would’ve known.”

  “You find a hypodermic?”

  He shook his head sadly. “No—this is all pure conjecture. Except for the hair and the bags, we don’t have anything, and I doubt they’ll be able to match the hair to the specific dead animal. They’ll probably just confirm it came from a coon.”

  “You checked everywhere?”

  He raised his eyebrows equivocally. “We did a reasonable search—by the book. For all I know, we’re standing on enough evidence to put him away for life.” He tapped his foot on the earthen floor. “But we may never find out.” He hesitated a moment and then added, “We did bump into something upstairs, in the master bathroom, but it wasn’t on the warrant, so I didn’t even touch it—a prescription bottle of phenobarbital, made out to Thomas Chambers.”