Occam's Razor

by Mayor, Archer

  “Nope. That’s it. What did your informant say, exactly?”

  He sounded almost relieved to stop playing cat-and-mouse. “He didn’t identify himself. He requested me by name, and asked if I’d heard Jim Reynolds was up to his waist in illegal dumping. I said no, and he told me I better hop to it or the Rutland Herald was going to eat my lunch—again.”

  The Herald was arguably the best paper in Vermont, and the fact that it regularly scooped the Reformer on Brattleboro stories was one reason it had earned that reputation. Katz himself had once defected to them briefly, just before the Reformer’s last owner had sold out to the employees, who in turn had wooed Stanley back.

  “What did Pat Mason say?” I asked.

  “A generalized ‘no comment.’”

  I paused again, my brain teeming with questions Katz couldn’t answer. “Well, Stanley, I don’t know what to tell you. We haven’t heard a peep about Reynolds.”

  His disappointment turned to bitterness. “But you’ll put me first on the phone list when you do, right?”

  I considered trying to smooth his feathers. He had, after all, made me a gift of sorts. But I changed my mind. “All in good time, Stanley.”

  After the phone died in my ear, I dialed Tyler on the intercom.

  “Who filed the report on that break-in at Reynolds’s office?”

  “Bobby Miller. I just saw him in the Officers’ Room.”

  “Thanks.”

  I left my cubicle, crossed the building’s central corridor, and entered the department’s other half through an unmarked side door that led directly into the communal area we’d dubbed the Officers’ Room. There were several desks scattered about, each one crowned with a beige computer. In one corner was the patrol captain’s lair, glassed in like my own, in another was a fridge and a counter with a coffee machine, a microwave, and an assortment of cups, plates, and other kitchen debris. Bobby Miller, coming on duty, was loading up on caffeine.

  I tapped him on the shoulder.

  His face lit up when he recognized me, which wasn’t guaranteed with all the uniforms, our department being pretty typical when it came to rivalry with the plainclothes cops. “Hi, Lieutenant. How’re you doin’?”

  “Fine. I wondered if I could pick your brain about a call a few weeks ago.”

  “Sure.” He finished pouring cream into his coffee and took it and a doughnut over to a small conference table nearby. “This okay?”

  I took a doughnut myself and sat opposite him. “You were in on the office break-in at Jim Reynolds’s, right?”

  He nodded, his mouth full.

  “How did that go?”

  He swallowed, took a sip of coffee, and then shrugged. “Nothing much to it. I saw the back door was slightly open when I drove through the parking lot, so I called for backup. Pierre Lavoie showed up about three minutes later, and we both checked it out. The office sits by itself on a patch of lawn, with the sidewalk out front and the parking lot in back, so it didn’t take much to go around the outside and see what was what.

  “By that time, Sheila had joined us, so we all three went inside. As far as we could tell, things looked pretty intact. There was one filing cabinet in an inner office that had a couple of drawers open, but that was it.”

  “No stolen computers or radios or anything else?”

  Finishing a second sip, he shook his head. “Nope. It all looked normal. We called Reynolds at home right after, so he could confirm if anything was missing. He got there about fifteen minutes later.”

  “Did you see anyone near the building before you noticed the door, like a lookout or maybe the burglar pretending to be a pedestrian walking away?”

  Miller looked unhappy with himself. “I thought about that later. I was coming from the west, which means I drove past the front of the building, up its far side, and then into the parking lot. If whoever was inside saw me right off, he would’ve had time to head out the back. I did notice a car driving down the street next to the lot, away from the main drag, but it was only after I was writing the whole thing up that I wondered where it had come from. Given the direction it was heading, I should’ve seen it just before I pulled in, either in my lane or approaching from opposite. So it must’ve been already parked on that street, waiting. I didn’t think about it at the time, though, so I have no idea what kind of car it was. I just saw the taillights out of the corner of my eye.”

  I thought it likely he was right, but I didn’t want to make him feel any worse by rubbing it in.

  I moved on instead. “What was Reynolds like on the phone? Were you the one who talked to him?”

  “Yeah. He wasn’t happy. Kept asking if anything was missing. I told him that’s why we were calling him. But he was different once he got there. After he gave the place a quick once-over, he acted like it was no big deal.”

  “You mention the open filing cabinet?”

  “Specifically. I figured a lawyer would be more antsy about that than a missing fax machine or whatever. You want my personal opinion, he was more upset than he wanted us to know. When I first showed him the open drawers, it was like he was glued to the spot, he was so surprised. That’s why his change of mood was so weird—like it was forced.”

  I thought for a minute about what he’d told me, allowing him time to take another bite of doughnut. After he’d finished, I asked, “Bobby, do you have any idea what was in those drawers?”

  He hesitated before answering. “Not really. There wasn’t much point in our poking around in them. I did take a glance, though. I think they were case files—old ones. I remember noticing that the tabs on the manila folders were bent and a little dirty, like they’d seen a lot of use. But I suppose that could be true for ongoing cases, too, considering how long it takes to get through the system…I guess I don’t really know. Sorry.”

  I stood up. “Don’t be. That’s all I needed.”

  To his questioning look, I added, “His name’s come up in something else. Seemed like twice in a couple of weeks was quite a coincidence.”

  Bobby Miller was apparently satisfied with that, since he went back to his doughnut without comment.

  I, however, was more curious than ever. I doubted the Reynolds break-in was any standard smash-and-grab. The contents of that filing cabinet had to have been the motive. The question therefore became: Did the thief have time to do what he’d set out to do, or had he been interrupted prematurely? Was Reynolds’s change of mood a feint, or did he see at a glance that he had nothing to fear?

  Jim Reynolds had worked in this town for over fifteen years, exclusively as a criminal defense attorney. He and Gail’s boss had faced off in a number of high-profile cases, and even when he’d lost—which was rare—he’d squeezed out every legal option available to him, earning him the non-flattering nickname in our office of “Robo-lawyer.”

  He had also become one of the town’s high-profile citizens, joining the right groups, associating with the right heavy hitters, so that when he’d finally run for state senate, after brief stints on the school and select boards, both the announcement and subsequent victory had been all but preordained.

  What had been surprising was how little we’d heard from him since, given the attention-grabbing foreplay. Admittedly, politicians in Vermont operate a little differently from those elsewhere. We run a true citizen-legislature, which generally only goes from January to April or May. Most of our legislators have outside jobs, since the best they can hope for as politicians, including extras, isn’t much more than $13,000 a year. Only the governor, the lieutenant governor, and the speaker of the House get paid year-round.

  So it’s true that neither the Jim Reynoldses nor their House counterparts have the opportunities or the budgets to make the headlines their full-time colleagues do in other states. Correspondingly, because of this double existence, it is also a fact that relatively few attorneys run for state office, since it cuts so seriously into their schedules and incomes.

  I’d therefore thought that having
achieved what he’d wanted politically, Jim Reynolds had suddenly found himself running a part-time practice while being a part-time legislator—dividing by half any chance to be truly effective. Gail gave him more credit. She felt he was just biding his time, waiting for the right issue.

  It looked like she’d been right.

  He was nearing the end of his second two-year term. Legislative sessions straddle a biennium, and this January had marked the start of the second half, called the “adjournment session.” Reynolds was the chair of the powerful Judiciary Committee, but he’d failed to win the pro-tem position, which in practice is the Senate’s top dog—the lieutenant governor’s title of “president” notwithstanding—and I’d argued with Gail earlier that his enthusiasm might be running out.

  Until Amos Melcourt had killed those two kids, of course. Now it looked like Reynolds had found himself a life raft and, with it, the backing of the governor and his head of Public Safety, Dave Stanton. Since Willy Kunkle had sourly revealed all this in the office several days ago, one of the promised public hearings on revamping statewide law enforcement had taken place in Rutland—to rave reviews. People had turned out in droves, almost every police agency had been used to mop the floor, and Reynolds was beginning to look like the spear-point of change.

  All of which reminded me of Watergate and made me wonder if a simple botched break-in might be more than it appeared.

  6

  I DIDN’T GET THE CHANCE to mull over the break-in of Jim Reynolds’s office any longer than it took me to leave Bobby Miller to his doughnut, cross to my side of the building, and come face-to-face with Harriet Fritter, the squad’s administrative assistant and a doting grandmother several times over. “There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “I was in the Officers’ Room—ten minutes tops.”

  “There’s been a killing on White Birch Avenue. A woman stabbed with a knife.” Her face suddenly hardened. “And a baby, too.”

  I squeezed her shoulder in sympathy and continued to my office to fetch my coat. “Everyone there now?”

  “The first units, just barely. It came in as a missing persons first.”

  I returned down the hallway, struggling into my parka. “Okay. You know the drill. Round up who we need. They have a suspect yet?”

  “Not that I heard.”

  White Birch Avenue is located in the southeast quadrant of town, a flat plateau dominated by a contrasting mixture of three cemeteries, the high school, the town garage, a sedate middle-class neighborhood, and some of the poorest housing we’ve got. Depending on where you are in this area, you have no inkling of the existence of its other parts, such is the division from one section to the next.

  White Birch is barely a hundred yards long. Connected to South Main and dead-ending at the gates of Saint Michael’s Cemetery, it is narrow and shady to the point of being overgrown, tucked away out of sight and out of the public’s general consciousness. The homes along its length run from fairly run-down to flat-out decrepit. It is not at the bottom of Brattleboro’s food chain, but it is not far removed.

  I reached it in under four minutes.

  The scene was much more active than the railroad tracks had been in the middle of the night. There, the assumption had been that a bum had committed suicide. Here, there were no doubts what had happened, and as Harriet had demonstrated, a child’s involvement had cranked up emotions to the utmost. South Main Street was jammed with ambulances, squad cars, and private vehicles with either red or blue flashing lights, even though the first of these couldn’t have been summoned more than ten minutes earlier, and most weren’t necessary now. The late afternoon light hovered between day and night, making the colorful, pulsating display all the more festive in a world of uniform gray.

  I parked at a distance and walked to White Birch, which already had yellow tape barring it from the growing crowd. I was happy things had been so quickly contained.

  A young woman detached herself from the pack as I approached—Alice Simms, the cops-’n’-courts reporter for the Reformer.

  “Joe, any idea what happened?”

  I smiled and shook my head. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll issue a statement later.”

  I passed by her, ignored the others—an assemblage of off-duty cops, firefighters, rescue personnel, and neighborhood gawkers—and ducked under the tape.

  Ahead of me the narrow street led straight to the cemetery’s closed chain-link gate. One squad car and a second ambulance were parked opposite a small, dark green one-story house, sagging and stained, with a haphazard collection of junk littering its scrappy front yard. There were probably twenty thousand houses just like this one scattered all across the state.

  Ward Washburn, one of our veteran patrolmen, met me on the porch.

  “Who’s inside?” I asked him.

  “Ron, a two-woman team from Rescue, Inc., and Dave Raymo. He was first on scene.” He pointed over my shoulder. “Here come Willy and Tyler.”

  I glanced in their direction. “Good. They do a lot of tramping around in there?”

  “Not sure. I heard Ron telling ’em all to keep to a narrow path, and they’re all wearing gloves.”

  “Okay. Make sure you get someone guarding the back, and seal the place up tight. I don’t want anyone messing this up.”

  “What about the ME and whoever the SA sends over?”

  “They should put on containment suits. By the way, you string up that police line?”

  Washburn’s thin, lined face allowed a faint smile. “Yeah.”

  “Nice job. Fast thinking.”

  I climbed back down the steps to greet J.P.

  “Been inside yet?” he asked before I could open my mouth.

  I shook my head. “I was waiting for those.” I pointed at the new bag he was carrying, full of the thin white overalls, booties, and caps he was hoping we’d start wearing to keep crime scenes pristine. This was the first chance we’d had to try them out—there hadn’t been any point at the railroad tracks.

  He dropped the bag onto the frozen grass as I keyed the mike to my radio, simultaneously reaching for a suit. “Ron, it’s Joe—why don’t you get everyone out here so we can seal the scene.”

  Moments later, the front door squealed open and four people stepped out—two women wearing dark blue jump suits and carrying bulky medical kits, followed by Dave Raymo and Klesczewski.

  Ron indicated the two women as he approached. “Joe, this is Cindy Berger and Melissa Snow of Rescue, Inc. Melissa’s a paramedic and the crew chief.”

  I shook hands and addressed Melissa Snow. “How did this go down?”

  Dave Raymo interrupted. “I called ’em.”

  I didn’t like Raymo much. He was more interested in the trappings of being a cop than the job itself. He had a special grip on his pistol, a fetish for tight-fitting leather gloves, a goofy haircut somewhere between a flat top and a Mohawk, and a swagger I thought grotesque for a public servant. He’d come to us from Massachusetts a half year ago, and I suspected he’d be moving on before another year went by.

  “I got a call to check out a missing person complaint,” he continued. “Some old lady said her daughter wasn’t answering the door or the phone or anything else, and she was worried something had happened. When I got here, I looked through the windows, saw the body on the floor, called for backup and Rescue, and then we entered the premises. When the ambulance got here, I already knew they wouldn’t be needed, but I thought what the hey, and had ’em check both bodies out. CYA, you know?”

  There was a breeziness about his manner that made me doubt his story. “So you also found the child?” I asked, clumsily pulling the overalls on over my coat.

  Raymo hesitated and finally blurted. “Yeah, I saw the crib.”

  Melissa Snow explained further. “I found him in the back bedroom. I noticed some toys lying around and went looking.”

  I glanced from one to the other, registering what wasn’t being said, and decided to deal with i
t later. “This might sound dumb,” I said to her, “but you’re sure both people are dead?”

  Raymo rolled his eyes. “Wait’ll you see ’em.”

  We both ignored him. Snow answered, “The child is cold and stiff—I’m guessing hypothermia there. The woman’s head is almost severed from her body, and the blood’s frozen.”

  “Where’s the victim’s mother?” I asked Raymo.

  He jerked his thumb at the nearest patrol car. “I put her in my unit.”

  “She okay?”

  “Yeah. She didn’t see anything—too short to reach the window. You can’t see the real gory stuff from there anyhow—that’s why I called Rescue. Wasn’t sure she was dead.”

  I crossed the lawn and climbed the rickety porch steps again, accompanied by Willy and J.P., all three of us looking like bulky ghosts. Ron stayed behind. “Did either of you touch anything inside?” I called out to both women as an afterthought.

  They shook their heads, Melissa adding, “We were wearing gloves anyway.”

  “Okay. Thank you very much. We might be asking you for fingerprints, hair samples, and shoe impressions later. Just so you know.”

  As they left, I gestured to Ron. “Could you check out the mother? See how she’s doing and get a statement.”

  He nodded as I pointed to Raymo. “Switch cars with Washburn and go back to the office to write up your report. We won’t be needing you anymore.”

  His expression showed he took my full meaning. He turned away without comment and stalked off, stiff with anger.

  Willy laughed softly. “Asshole.”

  I wasn’t in the mood. “Then don’t start acting like him.”

  He smiled and held the door open for me, unrepentant. “Yes, Mother. You know he’s going back on patrol—show you who’s boss.”

  “I know.”

  The building’s interior was as cold as the outside, although much better lit. We stood in a short, narrow entrance hall as J.P. unfurled a roll of brown construction paper and began laying it before us like a red carpet, ensuring nothing of value would be picked up by our shoes and carried out of the house. It was a little compulsive, given that we were already wearing surgical booties, but he didn’t get to do this often.