Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series)

by Archer Mayor

  “Not really. It’s a favor for Hillstrom. The guy was her cousin, and there’re a couple of odd details about it. I said I’d look into it.”

  “Sounded like more than that.”

  Joe laughed. “Got Willy’s nose twitching, did I? That’s cool. Drive him crazy.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” she said. “I have to live with it. He thinks you’re pulling a fast one—working under the radar.”

  “He would. No,” Joe reassured her. “In fact, crack of dawn tomorrow, a crew is coming to clean out the property. Backhoes, Cats, Dumpsters, the works. Might take a couple of weeks or more.”

  “Wow,” she said. “What’re you hoping to find?”

  “Nothing,” he replied. “Although you always wonder. I’ll just be there for a while, keeping Hillstrom’s daughter company. She’s videotaping the whole thing for a thesis or something. Turns out Hillstrom’s the homeowner, so she just wants it back to sell.”

  Ever the investigator, Sam referred to his earlier comment: “A couple of odd details?”

  Joe came clean. “There’s something about how he was found that doesn’t quite fit—the position he was in, some of the marks on his body. It’s not enough to punch a case number, and the autopsy gave us nothing except accidental death, but I don’t see the harm in poking at it a bit.”

  She nodded and half turned to go. “Okay. I was just curious. You want company tomorrow? I got a light load on my desk.”

  He admired how she wasn’t letting this go. “Absolutely. I’ll be leaving the office just after eight.”

  * * *

  Sam and Joe arrived at Ben’s the following morning in the midst of a truck convoy, making Rachel’s diminutive, two-door Mini Cooper look like an imperiled eggshell.

  Resembling an amphibious invasion, the flatbed trucks fanned out around the house, ready to unload the heavy equipment Joe had described earlier.

  Joe, Sam, and Rachel met to one side to exchange introductions and avoid being run over by the men in hard hats who were scattering to their respective posts.

  “You got all you need to start shooting?” Joe then asked the young woman.

  Rachel pulled a surprisingly small camera from her bag.

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “They make ’em smaller than that, boss,” Sammie said softly. Having taken an immediate shine to Rachel, she added, “I’d love to get my hands on one of those, especially the way Emma’s coming along.”

  Joe shook his head. “Okay. Rachel, your mom told me the cleanout crew knows you’ll be lurking around.”

  “I already signed the death and injury waiver they faxed me last night,” Rachel said cheerily. “All I need is a hard hat.” She turned to Sam and told her, “I bet I can get you a camera cheap. I got this through the school.”

  For his part, Joe thought that a hard hat might be the one missing touch. Rachel was already dressed in a pair of oversized work boots and an insulated Carhartt jumpsuit with a T-shirt over the top of it, boasting, I SHOOT PEOPLE, and featuring the picture of a camera. That aspect of her made him think of an exuberant kid who’d wandered by accident onto a construction site.

  With the ignition of several diesel engines, all conversation became challenging, so the three of them migrated to the foreman to receive hard hats and instructions on where not to stand. Rachel stepped away to film as the first of the crew began exposing the building’s interior by pulling down a wall while simultaneously driving props under the roofline to maintain the structure’s integrity.

  In short order, they were confronting a second barricade comprised of Ben’s belongings, as shaggy and disheveled as the wall containing it had been bland and smooth.

  “Jeez!” Sam shouted into Joe’s ear. “It’s creepy—like the inside of a body.”

  “It is, in a way,” he replied.

  They moved back as two Bobcats approached to wolf down large mouthfuls before twisting around to deposit them into a waiting truck. Rachel continued darting around, following the action.

  Slowly, attended by men with bags and shovels, the Bobcats crept into the wound they’d created. Joe and Sam approached the ragged edge of the hole to watch the room before them gradually regain definition.

  This wasn’t the same section that Joe had entered earlier, with the entrance tunnel leading to the large expanse of waist-high debris, but another one, more clotted and filled. The stacks reached virtually to the ceiling, and the Bobcats—in order to create more manageable divots—occasionally crashed into the piles to make them collapse like crumbling cliffs of shale, revealing more strata of paper beyond.

  Joe was drawing just this comparison, when, with the abruptness of a magic show’s apparition, a newly exposed cross section revealed the curled-up body of a man encased about three feet up from the floor. He resembled an oversized beetle, snugly fitted into an elaborate casting.

  Joe and Sam simultaneously sprang forward amid the moving machines and men. “Whoa!” Joe shouted. “Stop your engines!”

  But the operators didn’t need telling, nor did Rachel Reiling, who stood stock-still in shock, her camera running.

  In the sudden, complete quiet, the two cops clambered across the broken field to where the body lay exposed in the slanting daylight.

  “That explains the smell,” Sam said, noting the level of decomposition.

  Joe was crouching down, trying to figure out the mechanics of the body’s peculiar positioning, which was suggestive of a burial.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “It also makes this a whole new ball game.” He glanced up at his colleague and added, “Looks like we’re officially on duty.”

  * * *

  “Hold it,” Rachel said. “There. Back it up a couple of frames.”

  Lester Spinney gave his computer key a few jabs.

  In silence, they watched Ben Kendall move in reverse, concentrating on the background just under his left arm.

  “There,” Rachel said again.

  Lester froze the screen.

  “See it?” she asked them.

  Joe, Sam, and Willy pressed in to better see the image.

  Joe tapped his finger on what appeared to be a small opening in the stack of boxes beside Ben. “Doesn’t look like much.”

  “Maybe not, but he had at least a couple of them.”

  “How tall was he?” Willy asked, seemingly at random.

  “Ben? Not very,” Rachel said. Despite her youth and the squad room’s austere setting, Joe couldn’t not notice her maturity and poise in their midst.

  “Five-eight,” Sammie said, having recently consulted the autopsy report.

  “Why?” Lester asked without turning around.

  “Small guy—small hole,” Willy replied. “Reminds me of the tunnel rats they had in Nam—crawling through the VC underground systems to see what they could find, like punji stakes, land mines, and grenades on the fly.”

  “Ben Kendall was a photographer,” Joe reminded him.

  “Everybody knew about the tunnels,” Willy shot back. “He would’ve, too.” He tapped Rachel on the shoulder. “Were his little rabbit holes booby-trapped?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “He told me to never-ever go into one. I figured it was because they were dangerous.”

  “That’s no lie,” Willy muttered, stepping back, his point made.

  “This new dead guy was small, too,” Sammie said.

  Joe looked at her. “We have anything on him yet?”

  She answered, “The crime lab’ll be running his prints as soon they’re delivered from the ME’s office. Something’s bound to crop up.”

  “Yeah,” Willy threw in, “unless Hillstrom finds nothing, the prints don’t hit, or whatever files there are have been eaten up by some stupid computer.”

  “No, no,” Spinney said, reaching for his smartphone. “I told them to text me as soon as they got something. I bet it’s in already.”

  Joe smiled to himself, seeing both men’s outlooks in a nutshell—Spinney: upb
eat, positive, supportive, a happy family man; and Willy: downcast, pessimistic, sarcastic, and the suspicious member of a family he seemed to orbit more than inhabit.

  “Yeah,” Spinney said, having scrolled to the proper screen. “Here it is, fresh off the presses: Tomasz Bajek. At least that’s what his driver’s license says. The ME’s office extracted it from his wallet, which was covered with yuck and shoved into his underpants, for some reason. The lab ran the name through NCIC and got nothing, but the license says he lived in Philadelphia.”

  “That it?” Willy asked.

  “For the moment, yeah, but I’m sure we’ll get more. If nothing else, I bet the Philly PD has a file on him. Stands to reason, given what we think he was up to. There’s a lot of data that hasn’t made it to the national data banks, especially if it’s local, older stuff.”

  Joe kept quiet for the moment, given the presence of their young outsider, but Ben Kendall and this Bajek having both originated from the same city seemed an unlikely coincidence.

  He returned to the earlier topic. “Rachel, before we let you go, tell us more about these tunnels. You must’ve asked him what they were for.”

  As it had been throughout, her response was quick and enthusiastic. “I did, but I never got a straight answer. Also, it’s not like there were a ton of them. I think I saw two or three. I always thought at least one might lead to his version of a den—just from things he used to say about ‘burrowing in,’ and ‘being as snug as a mouse in his hole.’ Remember what I said about how sometimes he reminded me of an animal that way? I actually thought it was kind of cool, and fantasized that at the end of one of them was a large cave with a TV and a pool table and all the rest. I know it wasn’t true, but that’s how I saw it in my mind’s eye.”

  “God knows what it was really like,” Willy said in a low voice, a man well known for his lack of possessions.

  “Speaking of nooks and crannies,” Joe said. “You mentioned some pictures that were missing from his version of a bedroom. Did you happen to shoot those with your camera, or were they off-limits?”

  Rachel smiled shyly. “They were, kind of. But I shot them anyhow, when he wasn’t looking.” She gave Lester an idea of where to find the footage on his computer. A minute or two later, they were all looking at a trio of snapshots of a smiling young woman, thumbtacked to one of Ben’s walls.

  “Pretty,” Sammie murmured.

  “And he never identified her?” Joe asked again.

  Rachel shook her head. “Nope. Like I said, just a friend. That was it.”

  They asked her a few more questions about Ben’s living habits, getting little more in return, before thanking her for the video and her help, and escorting her to the door of their second-floor office.

  “Was that tunnel booby-trapped?” Lester asked once the door had closed.

  “I think so,” Sam answered. “After they got the body out, Joe and I gave what was left of the tunnel a pretty good look. You could see how the stack spanning that part of the passageway had been built off balance, with a massive hunk of metal positioned right over it.”

  “The top of a welding table,” Joe filled in. “Course, that kind of heavy equipment was all over the place. But Sam’s right about it looking built to collapse. It seemed like the tunnel was narrower at that point, too, so the user would have to shove his way through to keep going, thereby triggering the cave-in.”

  “Why?” Willy asked succinctly. “Was there something worth protecting down the line?”

  “I wondered the same thing,” Joe admitted. “But we’ll have to keep at it. There was no more excavation after that. We sealed the scene and sent the crew packing. From what we could tell, there wasn’t anything to see beyond where Bajek’s body was found.”

  “It was like the trap was the whole point,” Sam added.

  “Curiosity killing the cat,” Willy said.

  “Maybe so,” Joe agreed. “If Ben was aware of the rumors that he was hiding secret loot, he might’ve built it solely for that purpose.”

  They’d each returned to their respective desks by this time, except Spinney, whose computer they’d been using to watch Rachel’s footage.

  It was he, therefore, still manning his keyboard, who said, “Wow. That’s a double whammy.” He looked up at Joe. “Boss, you may not love computers, but when they work, they’re hard to beat. I was just checking e-mails and found a message from the Philadelphia PD—a Detective Elizabeth McLarney. She contacted the sheriff’s department with an inquiry a couple of days ago, which they then put onto the intel Listserv. But she’s not asking about a missing person named Bajek—she’s asking if anybody up here has ever heard of Benjamin Kendall.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Willy reacted.

  “Apparently it’s in context with a case they got down there,” Lester finished. “Here’s the contact info.” He recited McLarney’s phone number, which Joe took down on a pad.

  He looked up at his squad members. “Any reason not to jump on this now?”

  No one bothered answering, as he was already dialing.

  The voice over the speaker phone was brusque, urban, and fast-spoken. “Detective McLarney.”

  “Detective, this is Special Agent Joe Gunther of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation.”

  “You gonna talk to me about Benjamin Kendall?” she asked. “What the hell kind of name is Dummerston?”

  Everyone in the room laughed.

  “Detective,” Joe told her, “I was about to tell you that you’re on a speaker up here. I’m with members of my squad.”

  “Hey, guys,” she said, unconcerned. “So, who’s Kendall?”

  “Why’re you askin’?” Willy asked from across the room.

  “You’re no Vermonter,” she shot back. “Even I know that.”

  “He’s ex-NYPD,” Joe explained. “A long time ago.”

  “Apparently not long enough,” Sam threw in.

  “Apparently not,” McLarney agreed. “Look, you’re calling me ’cause I got the ball rolling. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. Not the other way around.”

  Joe could see that Willy was about to argue the point, so he spoke quickly, “Ben Kendall was a local hoarder, originally from your fair city, but up here for decades. We found him dead in his house a few days ago, of undetermined causes, and he wasn’t fresh. In the process of cleaning out the hoard, we found another body, also decayed.”

  “Jesus. Don’t you people have noses up there?”

  Willy could no longer keep silent. “No—we have houses, with things like trees and grass between them. Ya oughta try it.”

  “He lived in the boonies,” Joe filled in. “But there’s another wrinkle to it: We just found out that the second body also has ties to Philadelphia. We got a name of Tomasz Bajek.” He spelled it out for her. “That’s all we have, though, and apparently the national data bank didn’t cough up any criminal history, which strikes us as unlikely. So, any help you could give us from local sources down there would be appreciated. You willing to share now?”

  “We found his ex-wife, Jennifer Sisto, tortured to death,” she answered bluntly.

  The air in the squad room instantly electrified. Joe felt his face redden. Beverly had told him that Ben had married before going to Vietnam, and divorced upon being discharged from the hospital. He’d had it in his notes to chase that angle down, to see what the ex-wife might have to offer, but he hadn’t done so. Now, not only had Bajek’s origins compounded the oversight, but Rachel’s missing photographs of the pretty young woman on Ben’s wall also suggested a sickening, coldly logical connection to what they’d just been told.

  “Why was she tortured?” he asked, covering his embarrassment.

  “We have no clue,” McLarney reported. “Right now, our theory is that the bad guys didn’t get what they were after, ’cause they ransacked her place from one end to the other. We figure they came up empty. And no,” she added without pause, “there was no record of a safe deposit box, or any al
ternate hiding spot. We’re still checking her background, coworkers, neighbors, and so on, but right now, it’s not looking good. Would you be willing to send me what you got on Kendall?”

  “Sure,” Joe readily agreed. “Would you do the same with Sisto and whatever you can find on Bajek?”

  “You got it.”

  “When was Sisto worked over?” Willy asked, having reached the same conclusion as Joe.

  McLarney gave them the approximate date, prompting Willy to say, “That sounds like it was after our guys got killed.” He glanced at Joe, but without criticism, and added in a quiet voice, “And after those pictures disappeared from Kendall’s house.”

  “We’ll include whatever the medical examiner found out about Bajek,” Joe said, keeping on task. “Given the hometown coincidence, it may be useful.”

  “Hey,” McLarney said, “you never know.”

  “Okay,” Joe concluded, his finger poised above the speaker button. “Any full face shots of Sisto would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your help, Detective.”

  “No problem, Hon,” she said. “Talk to you later.”

  The line went dead and Joe looked up at his colleagues. “What did she call me?”

  Willy shook his head. “It’s a Philly thing.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I’m sorry. I know all this field and stream crap is supposed to make me feel good, but I think it’s … I don’t know … unnatural.”

  Frank Niles took his eyes off the road long enough to cast his partner a look. “You sure that’s the word you’re looking for?”

  Neil Watson pointed vaguely at the passing Vermont countryside, admittedly not at its best—stark branches stripped of colorful leaves, grass killed by night frosts, all ready for a face-saving blanket of snow that had yet to arrive. “Cute. Come on. Look at it. It’s a butt-ugly waste of space. Even worse than the last time we were up here, poking through that sick bastard’s House of Shit. They should do something with this real estate.”

  “You’ll like Burlington,” Frank ventured. “It’s got thousands of people. Traffic jams, pedestrians getting in the way, exhaust fumes. Maybe even manhole covers, just like New York.”