Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

by Mayor, Archer

  “I appreciate it,” I said for her benefit and patted a pile of folders she’d put to one side. “These the ones you’re finished with?”

  “Yeah.”

  I pulled them over in front of me and opened the top file. Patty glanced at me, obviously disappointed at being left with no other option besides getting back to work.

  Folder by folder, down through the pile, I began to reconstruct activities I’d known nothing about—all credits to Ron’s efficiency. Fanning out from the immediate canvass of Gail’s neighbors, the investigation had reached far afield to reconstruct a whole month’s prior activity on her street. There were interviews of rural-route postal carriers, utility-company employees sent out to remove a broken branch from the wires, a Federal Express driver from Keene, New Hampshire, who’d delivered a package two weeks ago. Residents had been queried about any parties they’d held recently, guests or visitors they might have had, or any unusual occurrences that might have caught their attention—from strangers lurking to dogs barking at odd hours. Wherever possible, names had been taken down to be checked against the computer networks available to us.

  While I’d never panned for gold, it struck me as being a similar process—patiently washing through thin covering layers, watching for the tiniest glint.

  I struck such a glint at 2:35 in the morning, long after Patty had abandoned me to find some company by the coffee machine across the hall.

  I’d been going over files covering events over two weeks old, and I was by now pretty thoroughly immersed in the neighborhood’s residents and their habits. Like an overeager new arrival on the block, I’d made the effort to remember everyone’s name, whose pets and children belonged to whom, what their hobbies and interests were, and even which ones I tended to like or dislike, for whatever reason. Their voices, as reflected in the canvass transcripts and notes, took on individuality, and over the hours I grew familiar with the neighborhood’s daily cadence.

  It stuck out, therefore, when cranky old Mrs. Wheeler hired a one-time yard man to give her lawn a final mowing before the frost settled in.

  He hadn’t done anything to bring attention to himself, hadn’t gone up and down the street drumming up additional business, hadn’t sat in his car at lunch and watched people’s comings and goings. He’d merely appeared one day in a beaten-up, ancient station wagon, unloaded some hand tools and an old mower from the back, done the job, and left, never to be seen again.

  And that’s what caught my eye. In a neighborhood with a regular, predictable rhythm, his appearance—as mundane and uneventful as it had been—was nevertheless unusual.

  The interview with Mrs. Wheeler, neatly indexed in another of Ron’s folder boxes, revealed two other things: that Mrs. Wheeler’s regular yard man had suffered a garage fire a few weeks back, destroying much of his equipment and forcing all his customers to fend for themselves until the insurance came through; and that the temporary, one-time replacement had been named Bob Vogel. The tantalizing possibility that the fire, Vogel’s appearance, and Gail’s rape were interrelated was inescapable, if as yet totally unfounded. Unfortunately, the name of the regular yard man, seemingly incidental at the time of the interview, had not been recorded.

  I crossed the room to where Ron had set up a computer terminal and unleashed the machine onto Bob Vogel’s scent. I began with a quick name search of our own criminal files, although I was pretty sure that if Vogel had been a client of ours, I would have remembered him. I was therefore not too surprised to come up empty-handed. I switched to Meadowbrook Road—Gail’s street—and launched a query for complaints originating from there that might have featured either Bob Vogel or his vehicle within the last month. Again, I found nothing, and again, I wasn’t too surprised. I moved next to the Vermont Criminal Information Center’s databank for an overview of all the state’s criminal offenders. This time, the absence of Vogel’s name was a little more troublesome—it meant either I was barking up the wrong tree, pursuing an alias, or that Bob Vogel had appeared from out of state.

  I paused to rub my eyes. Despite the adrenaline that had accompanied my little discovery, I was beginning to fade and knew I’d have to call it quits soon. I straightened my back, stretched, and called up the FBI’s National Criminal Information Center to gain access to the Interstate Identification Index—the Triple I—a listing, by state and/or municipality, of most people with felony records.

  Realizing this was my last swing at getting any quick results—and that lots of legwork lay ahead if it failed—it was with a small sigh of relief that I finally saw, “Vogel, Robert” appear on the screen. I called up his file and sat back, admiring how close we’d come to missing him, even while doing all the right things.

  Robert Vogel was on probation in Vermont on a Massachusetts burglary charge, which explained why Lou Biddle hadn’t thought to bring his file to our intelligence meeting, and why I hadn’t found him in my search of Vermont law breakers—a non-Vermonter, his name had never come up.

  My real satisfaction, however, lay in what the computer showed Vogel to be. It turned out that although he was still paying society for burglary, he’d already paid his legal dues for rape by serving a full four-year term in a Massachusetts penitentiary; he’d also been previously charged with two additional rapes, neither resulting in conviction.

  I stared at the screen for several minutes, its fluorescent green letters hypnotic in their intensity, before I suddenly realized that despite my excitement I was on the brink of falling asleep. Soon, I thought, soon, as I switched off the computer and slowly walked over to the fax machine. I typed up a brief note for Lou Biddle to call me as soon as he got to his office, punched up his number, and sent it off over the wires.

  At that I straightened, stretched, and gave in to exhaustion, satisfied that the day had at least ended with a shred more hope than it had begun.

  · · ·

  Four hours later I rued the enthusiasm that had prompted the sending of that fax. Lou Biddle’s voice on the other end of my phone not only gave me no joy, it was even, for the first few moments after I picked up, a complete mystery to my sleep-clotted brain.

  “Joe, what the hell’s the matter? You sound sick.”

  I cleared my throat and struggled to open my eyes against the light from my bedroom window. “Sorry—long night. Do you have a Robert Vogel in your files, on probation here for a Massachusetts burglary?”

  “Not in my files, but maybe one of the others has him. Helen, probably. I’m sex offenders only.”

  “Could you find out? Now?”

  There was a moment’s surprised hesitation. “Sure. Hang on.”

  I spent the five minutes he left me hanging getting tiredly out of bed. Just before he returned, I wondered how Gail had fared through the night—and what use I was going to be to her if I kept up this pace. I realized now that, despite the promising end results, last night’s marathon had been more than a little self-indulgent, triggered by some subtly pervasive urge to vaguely mimic Gail’s ordeal with one of my own making. It had been exactly the type of display I’d been struggling to avoid.

  Nevertheless, Lou sounded duly impressed when he got back on the line. “I got him. How the hell did you dig this guy up?”

  “He mowed the lawn of one of Gail’s neighbors a couple of weeks ago. You free for the next hour?”

  “Next half hour, yeah.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  The local probation and parole branch of Vermont’s Department of Corrections was located a mere stone’s throw from where Mary Wallis had hammered Jason Ryan with her shoe—down among a cluster of buildings bunched together on the flats between the water’s edge and the high bank on which the Putney Road was perched. Fifteen minutes after hanging up on Lou Biddle, I pulled into his parking lot.

  I found him in his office, comfortably settled in an ancient tiltback office chair, a cup of coffee cradled in his hands and his feet propped up on his desk.

  He pointed to a coffee machine by t
he door. “Help yourself. You look like you need it.”

  I gratefully followed his suggestion. “Did you get a chance to read that file?”

  He leaned forward and pulled it off his desk. “Yup. You may have a hot one here. Three rape charges, the last one with a sentence. He served the rape in full and is doing the burglary on probation.”

  “I take it they were connected?” I asked, clearing his guest chair of a stack of books and sitting down.

  “Yeah. The burglary kicked in because he was witnessed entering the apartment window of the woman he assaulted.”

  “She lived alone?”

  “Yeah. He attacked her in her bedroom in the middle of the night—tied her down using slipknots, threatened her with a knife, blindfolded her… The whole ball of wax. I’m sorry I didn’t hand him over to you yesterday.”

  I reached for the file, my exhaustion turning to adrenaline. “Not to worry—who’d you say his probation officer was?”

  “Helen Boisvert.”

  “What’s her reading on him?”

  “Dunno—I just ran in and grabbed the file. She’s in, though, which is just as well, ’cause I’ve got to hit the road.”

  I took the hint and stood up, thanking him again for the coffee.

  · · ·

  Helen Boisvert had worked for the Department of Corrections for over twenty years. Originally from the state’s so-called Northeast Kingdom region—remote, sparsely populated, and proudly independent—she’d been brought up on society’s fringes, one of six kids of a dirt-poor logger and his wife. Her highly regarded abilities as a probation officer were due in part to the fact that only her own moral strength and determination had stopped her from becoming one of her own clients. Half her siblings had spent time in jail, and two of her brothers had met violent deaths. But as she’d told me once, extracting herself from that environment and ending up in corrections, after earning an M.A. in psychology, was as natural to her as an Eskimo training to be a cold-weather scientist.

  She was nestled in an office just like Lou’s, which looked more pleasant but smelled a lot worse, due to its occupant’s lifelong addiction to cigarettes. She was lighting one up as I walked in.

  “I hear you’re interested in one of my boys,” she said through the smoke. I returned her file to her. “Bob Vogel—but not for burglary.”

  She raised her eyebrows, immediately following my lead, and tossed me that morning’s Brattleboro Reformer. “You think he did that?”

  Knowing that it was coming, even with Gail’s blessing, didn’t make the front-page story any easier to take. “Selectwoman Raped at Home” ran from one edge of the page to the other, across several related articles and a photograph of Gail at a recent meeting. I returned the paper without reading it further. “It’s a possibility.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked, struck by her tone of voice.

  “Because this took place night before last, and he missed his meeting with me yesterday morning.”

  “Have you talked to him since?” I was suddenly worried he’d already taken off.

  “Oh, yeah—he came in later. Said he overslept, that his alarm didn’t go off. Interesting coincidence.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “A little nervous I might nail him for messing up, but otherwise he was the same as always.”

  “Which is?”

  She took a deep drag, finishing the cigarette, and ground it out in an already half-full ashtray. I imagined her forceful personality allowed her to flaunt the state’s no-smoking rules.

  “Bob Vogel is an unrepentant shit,” she finally said. “He toes the line with me because I can pull his chain, but we both know it’s a waste of time. As soon as he’s free and clear, he’ll be back in trouble—unless he’s already jumped the gun.”

  I removed the jacket I’d been wearing against the fading morning chill and placed it on the floor next to my chair. “Lou said Vogel’s last assault fit the MO of the guy who raped Gail—what about the two rapes he didn’t get prosecuted for? Were they the same?”

  Helen pulled another cigarette from the pack lying on her desk and lit up. “I couldn’t say for sure. I only know about the last one, and even there I don’t have all the details. He moved up here ten months ago, and we only got this preliminary file about four months back, which is par for the course—they’re either drowning in cases down there or they don’t give a damn, depending on the office.

  “Anyhow, the outline you got from Lou about sums up what I’ve been told—the big difference being that he used a nightgown to blind his victim instead of a pillowcase. Which helped nail him, as it turned out—not only was he seen going in through the window by a neighbor, but the nightgown slipped off enough so the victim got a look at him. She pulled him out of a lineup.”

  “Lou mentioned a knife.”

  Boisvert made a face. “Yeah—he cut her nipples a little, I guess to get her attention. A real bastard.”

  “What else did he do?”

  “Everything shy of killing her, as far as I can tell. The rape lasted several hours, with intermissions for the knife play and beatings. The woman ended up having her jaw wired.”

  “Did he trash the bedroom also?”

  She looked uncertain. “I suppose—there was mention of a lot of destruction.”

  I changed subjects slightly, realizing I was nearing the limit of her knowledge. “Did all three rape victims live in the same area?”

  “Two in Greenfield, one in North Adams. None of them knew one another, and none of them knew Bob. He’s a stalker.”

  That made me think of Vogel’s one-day employment at Mrs. Wheeler’s. “Was part of his technique getting handyman jobs near where the victims lived?”

  She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. Like I said, we actually don’t have all that much on Bob yet. What I do know mostly comes from my conversations with him. The file only highlights the bare bones on the last assault—the one that landed him in the pokey.”

  “How did he get off on the first two?”

  “Screwups; technicalities. You’d have to check it all out with the Massachusetts people, but from what he told me, the system served him well. For that matter, four years for what he did to his last victim was a slap on the wrist.”

  There was a pause, during which I digested some of what she’d told me. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that we had a “hit”—someone who, from a distance at least, fit our profile to a gnat’s eyelash.

  “It sounds like he talks about the rape a lot.”

  Helen made a dismissive gesture with her hand before grinding out the second cigarette. “Lou should be handling this guy—he’s a sexual offender. It’s only the burglary technicality that makes him mine. But let’s face it, burglary means he entered by force—not that he was out to steal anything—so we don’t spend much time talking about how to jimmy windows or fence TVs. Besides, Bob Vogel reminds me a lot of some of the guys I grew up with, including a couple of my brothers. I don’t like him, and I don’t see him living to a ripe old age—at least not on the outside. But I do know what makes him tick.” She grinned suddenly—so immersed in this world she no longer saw the incongruity. “I guess you could say we get along.”

  “Lucky you,” I muttered, to which she only laughed and reached for another smoke.

  · · ·

  I had copies made of all the information I needed concerning Bob Vogel, including his home address and place of employment, and went straight to my office, despite the fact that I still hadn’t shaved or showered.

  Ron Klesczewski’s expression told me I should have tended to those small details first. “Are you okay?” he blurted as he looked up to find me looming over him at his temporary, paper-strewn desk.

  I gave him the file I’d secured from Helen Boisvert. “Get the records on this guy—his Massachusetts rap sheet is inside. And see if you can locate a police officer who knows about him, either from North
Adams or Greenfield. I’d like to talk to him.”

  He flipped open the file and stared at the name at the top of the first page. “Robert Vogel?”

  “He did a one-day handyman stint for one of Gail’s neighbors. I found him in your files.” I saw J.P. Tyler waving to me from the hallway door. “Okay?” I asked Ron.

  He still looked a little startled, but nodded firmly, regaining his composure.

  “What’s up?” I asked Tyler in the hall, as he led me down to the detective bureau, where he’d converted a cramped janitor’s closet into a makeshift laboratory.

  “Two things: One, I tried to match the pubic hair I found in Gail’s bed to either you or her and came up empty, which means it came from the attacker.”

  It was nice of him to be so diplomatic. In fact, I knew damn well such an argument wouldn’t hold up in court. A third person’s pubic hair found in a de facto conjugal bed did not necessarily involve a rapist. For our purposes, however, it was good enough.

  “All I can get from it, though,” he continued, “is that the guy was Caucasian and dark-haired.”

  We entered the detective squad office and went not to the tiny lab, but to Tyler’s desk. “The second thing I have higher hopes for.”

  He held up a small baggie with a tiny fragment of organic material in it. “Remember this? The vegetable matter I found on the couch near the window? It’s Russian olive—a cross between a screen bush and a small tree. It can grow to twenty-five feet, has small silvery leaves and berries.”

  I knew better than to ask him the relevance of this. J.P. had his own style, and it often involved some minor theatrics.

  “It’s not a rare plant—you see it planted by the side of the interstate sometimes. Developers like it because it’s cheap, hardy, and easy to handle, and it makes them look like nature lovers when they surround their junky architecture with it.”

  He looked at me with a pleased expression. “The point is, there ain’t a single Russian olive on Gail’s property.”

  “How ’bout Mrs. Wheeler’s, two houses down?”