The Company She Kept

by Archer Mayor

  “Spooky,” Lester commented from the back. “It’s like some spaceship beamed up everybody but us.”

  “I doubt it beamed up the people we’d like to see gone,” Willy said sourly, grabbing his withered left arm and shifting it so he could sit more comfortably. They were all dressed for the outdoors, in addition to carrying their standard tactical gear. “Be typical if only the good guys got zapped.”

  The other three smiled at the comment, typical of the speaker. Willy’s arm—a reminder of a career-threatening encounter with a bullet on a case many years earlier—was a testament to both the one-liner and Willy’s overall Eeyore outlook.

  Any humor vanished, however, as the car rounded the next wide curve, and a cluster of vehicles came into view, most of them sparkling with various combinations of blue and white and red strobe lights against the craggy backdrop of a dark rock wall.

  Lester hunched forward, craning to see up, which his great height and the car’s low roof made all but impossible. “My God. That’s awful.”

  No one argued with him, including Willy. The sight of a single human body, hanging high and small and lonely halfway to the cliff’s top, struck them all with its melancholy.

  There was no need to pull off the road—trucks and cruisers were parked haphazardly, as if their drivers had subconsciously enjoyed not having to follow the rules.

  “We’re in the wrong place,” Willy said as they got out, still staring at the mesmerizing vision overhead.

  A state police sergeant proved him correct as he approached, saying, “They’re waiting for you up top.” He gestured with his thumb, continuing, “The next exit’s a few miles north, but we cut a snowmobile path just past the cliff that connects to the road above. You could go that way if you don’t mind one of my guys driving your car around the long way. We got sled operators standing by.”

  “Sounds good,” Joe told him. “What about the people who called this in?”

  “They’re in their car.” The sergeant pointed to the scenic pull-off and an SUV hitched to a trailer bearing two snowmobiles. “We got a video-recorded statement, but you’re free to talk to ’em yourself, if you want.”

  Joe watched the man’s bland, impassive face, looking for any signs that this was a dig. “Uniforms” versus “Suits” was a well-known rivalry within law enforcement, although less so in Vermont, given the small numbers involved. But VSP versus VBI was an additional factor, since the creation of the latter had seriously depleted the ranks of the former’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation—and had eroded its influence.

  The sergeant, however, appeared to be either totally lacking in such prejudice, or a skilled poker player.

  In any case, Joe didn’t care. “I’m good,” he replied. “They tell you anything interesting?”

  The man smiled and visibly relaxed. “Not really. They had the sense to keep their distance, but except for the obvious, they didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything, and don’t know anything. Our BCI guys called for the crime scene truck.” He glanced upward. “They just arrived upstairs, so everything’s looking pretty secure.”

  Joe shifted his gaze once more to the reason they were here. “This is going to sound a little screwy, but are we sure she’s dead?”

  The sergeant chuckled. “Not screwy to me. First thing I asked when I got here. She’s dead, all right.” He indicated an athletic young trooper in the distance, talking with a couple of his colleagues. “The tall one there was first on scene. He called it in, checked her out with his binoculars—so far so good—and then the crazy bastard climbed the netting and checked for a pulse.”

  Joe stared at him. “He climbed up?”

  “Like a goddamned monkey. Wished I’d been here to see it. It’s got to be forty feet. The female tourist took pictures. You should see ’em. I gave our boy a big thumbs-up, and then told him that if he ever did a thing like that again, I’d have him on desk duty for a month.”

  Joe shook his head, thinking that he would have pulled the same stunt a couple of decades ago. “I heard something about a purse,” he asked.

  “BCI took it. It was over there, looking no different than if you’d just put it down. The clasp was still closed, which is a miracle if it was dropped from that height.”

  Joe nodded without comment, and turned to face his team. “Okay. Let’s go sledding.”

  * * *

  They found five snowmobiles waiting by the side of the road, as the cliff tapered off to become a shallow, snow-packed gully that aimed back toward the hilltop. They divided up among four volunteer drivers and hitched rides to a two-lane dirt road above. Contrasting with the view they had been enjoying—and despite being higher up—here the road was screened by trees on both sides, with only glimpses between the evergreens of the Connecticut River valley.

  They were met by a VSP van that took them to a second cluster of cars, including a large truck from the forensic laboratory. As usual at such scenes—which were blessedly few in this rural state—Joe was impressed by the number of people gathered. Besides the state police and the crime lab civilians, there were representatives from Fish and Wildlife, the local sheriff’s office, EMS, a couple of local municipal cops, and even what appeared to be a town constable—most of them muttering and watching the very few people who were actually processing the scene.

  He couldn’t blame them. A cop in Vermont could go through most of a career without witnessing a homicide scene. A banner year in Vermont might produce twenty murders—fewer than he imagined New York City racked up in a month.

  From inside the yellow tape enclosing a generous semicircle, a plainclothes detective they knew from past encounters caught sight of them and invited them over. “Oh, boy, here come the big guns. Can we all go home now?” he cracked.

  Joe identified himself to an officer with a clipboard before ducking under the cordon. “Rick,” he said. “Long time. How’ve you been keeping?”

  “Can’t complain. I’m happy to be the lowly BCI guy on this one. This is gonna be a nightmare before it’s done.”

  It was a custom-designed moment for Willy to say something insulting, but Joe knew his man. Kunkle was ignoring the chatter, his eyes darting around the scene as he submitted his ID in turn, instinctively cataloging every detail around him. A trained military sniper and a PTSD-plagued paranoid, he was someone who focused fast and hard.

  Joe looked around as Sam and Lester took their turns at the checkpoint. The ice-hard dirt road was only twenty yards from the edge of the cliff, beyond the thin line of trees and the remnants of a dilapidated chain-link fence. Embedded in the otherwise pristine crust of snow, between the tarmac and the first tree trunk, were a set of tire tracks and some footprints. Joe saw a tied-off double loop of taut white rope around that first trunk, leading straight toward the cliff.

  “You find any witnesses to anything?” Joe asked his BCI counterpart.

  Rick frowned. “Not yet. I got guys pounding on doors, but it’s pretty isolated up here. The road is rarely traveled, given both the interstate and the paved highway they’re using for the detour.”

  Joe pressed his lips together before saying, “Makes you think. Whoever did this had to have been familiar with the area—the backwoods road, the broken fence, the proximity to the cliff … Even the trees being handy so the rope could be tied off.”

  He watched as the lab techs laid out a narrow sidewalk next to the tire tracks, giving them access while preserving the evidence. “We were having a conversation on the way up here about whether this could be a suicide.”

  “With no car?” Rick asked.

  “It could’ve been stolen afterward,” Sam contributed, crouched down with her small backpack and unloading her camera equipment.

  Rick didn’t laugh. “Great minds and all that,” he said. “We thought the same thing, especially after we sent a unit to her house in Brattleboro and found her car missing. Problem is”—here he pointed at the tracks in the snow—“those belong to a pickup or an SUV. Raffner’
s registered to a Prius.”

  “Of course she is,” Willy muttered, and moved away, shadowing the techs.

  Rick and Joe ignored him. “You put out a BOL for the car?” Joe asked.

  “Yup. Nothing yet.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Lester said, trailing behind Willy and now Sam, as they started coordinating with the crime lab team.

  * * *

  Because of the aging day’s ebbing light, the protocols of how best to deconstruct a scene like this had to be altered, and provisions made to secure the area overnight. Fortunately, the weather was forecast to hold steady, making this an easy decision.

  Less easy was choosing how to remove the body from its perch.

  It couldn’t be a simple matter of reeling her in by the rope from which she was dangling. Any tastelessness of doing so aside, the practical consideration remained of how the stressors of such a maneuver might play out. As Willy indelicately put it, “You don’t want her head coming off.”

  As a result, after everything obvious had been thoroughly documented and the evidence gathered, a high-angle extraction crew was summoned and dropped over the cliff and the remains placed inside first a body bag, and then a lightweight wire litter to be pulled to the top.

  Nevertheless, for Joe, who’d known Susan for decades, the shock of seeing her dead after the bag had been partially unzipped—the rope still around her neck—hit harder than he’d expected.

  Raffner had been Gail’s friend, not his. He’d been open to some kind of relationship, given her importance in Gail’s life, but he’d always felt that Susan didn’t like him much. She’d respected him—both Gail and his own inner radar had told him as much—but he’d sensed that she’d viewed him as the loyal opposition.

  That being said, he’d seen her laugh and cry and had shared meals and drinks with her for years—if always in the company of others. She’d been bright and smart and tough and good at getting things done—as well as devoted and dedicated to Gail. To see the source of such vitality so pale, stiff, and silent drove home what he knew Gail must be experiencing.

  Her best friend—certainly her most steadfast one—had been reduced to a broken vessel, its vibrant contents emptied.

  “You want to take a better look at her?” one of the climbers asked him, undoing the straps that held her pale corpse to the litter.

  Shaking off his musings, Joe came alongside the device, asking, “How stiff is she?”

  “Not rock solid. It’s more than the usual rigor, ’cause of the cold, but she’s not like some of ’em—straight out of the freezer.”

  Grateful to hear that, Joe slipped on a pair of latex gloves and crouched in the snow, a small crowd looking on. They’d all dealt with bodies that had truly frozen stiff. Not only couldn’t you make them conform to anything, like a doorway or the inside of a hearse, but they took days to thaw prior to autopsy.

  “Let’s make sure,” he announced generally, “that when she gets transported to Burlington, the hearse is heated to where the driver can barely stand it. We’ve got to do what we can to get her warm enough that they can open her up.”

  As Joe began helping with the straps and the bag’s zipper, they all noticed how her underlying sweater, blouse, and bra had been sliced down the middle, exposing her bare chest.

  “Damn,” someone said.

  Crudely cut into the flesh was the single word, “Dyke.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Joe escorted Susan’s body to the medical examiner’s office in Burlington by following the funeral home’s featureless minivan for a couple of hours along I-89. This was Vermont’s only other interstate, which cut a diagonal from White River Junction to the state’s “Queen City,” through the middle of the famed Green Mountains. It was arguably as pretty a road as I-91, and certainly one he rarely wearied of traveling. This was good news, given the number of times he had to do so, largely because Burlington was the state’s largest metropolis by far, and thus where most people met to conduct business.

  Weariness, however, was hardly a concern on this trip. Not only was Joe constantly on the new “hands-free” phone setup they’d mounted into his car, to conform to Vermont’s new cell phone usage statute, but the vehicle ahead kept reminding him of the emotional cost of Susan Raffner’s death, and its pending impact on the community at large. Joe had learned the hard way how this socially sensitive state could react when one of their own—a celebrity to boot—was cut down in her prime.

  As if in confirmation, the cell phone came alive in between two of his own outgoing calls.

  “Gunther.”

  “It’s me,” said Gail, sounding stronger and more resolute than before, which he knew from experience could be good or bad.

  “Hey,” he said, considering what to say and how to say it. “I’m escorting Susan to the medical examiner’s office right now.”

  “What have you learned?”

  “We’re definitely treating it as a homicide, but we’re a long way from reaching any conclusions yet.”

  “You sound like a press release,” she said, confirming his fear that she’d balance her grief with an aggressive, take-charge attitude.

  He decided, therefore, to get to the point. “You have to swear on a stack of Bibles not to let this out, no matter what the pressure.”

  “Joe,” she began.

  “It could be very important to solving this, Gail. As governor, we’ll tell you what you need to know, but you more than most have seen how this works.”

  Her voice hardened. “What are you dancing around?”

  He sighed to himself before answering, “I don’t want anybody else telling you this: Someone, presumably the killer, cut a message on Susan’s chest.”

  “What? What’re you saying?”

  “It’s the word ‘dyke,’ Gail. I’m sorry.”

  She exploded on the phone. “Goddamn it. Oh, fuck.”

  He listened to her crying and pounding something hard repetitively on her desk, before he said, “I will do everything I can to find out what happened. And I will drive my people to do likewise. We will not rest.”

  He imagined her struggling to compose herself, especially given how superficial his own words had sounded to him—despite their sincerity. Joe had no idea of the shared history these two intimately connected women might have built between them, or of the true nature of Gail’s pain right now.

  “What are you going to do?” she finally asked in a subdued voice.

  “The autopsy should give us some basic information—cause of death, maybe something about the sequence of events,” he said matter-of-factly. “The crime lab is processing everything at the scene, and then we’ll analyze whatever trace can be found on the body. We’ve also got people looking for her car, which seems to have gone missing. And Lester and Willy are going to her house right now to see what they can find there. It’s basic, solid stuff, Gail, and it’ll be done right. Additionally, I’ll research any possible hate crime angles. It could be there’ll be some buzz among the groups we track that’ll be helpful. Do you know if Susan received any communications targeting lesbians or homosexuality?”

  “Is that you diplomatically asking if Susan was queer?”

  Joe kept his tone impassive, although he was startled that he hadn’t actually asked the question with that in mind. “No. But was she?”

  “Yes,” came the answer, and the phone went dead.

  “Thanks so much,” he said softly to himself, feeling instantly guilty about his sense of relief that he and Gail were no longer romantically involved.

  * * *

  “I haven’t asked,” Lester said conversationally, “but how’s fatherhood treating you, now that you’ve got a few miles under you?”

  Willy took his eyes off the passing countryside to stare at him. “You looking to hand off your own kids, or just being nosy? I’m surprised you’re not a grandfather by now, the way you woodchucks breed up here.”

  Lester Spinney, as befit his easygoing personality
, merely laughed. “I’m a woodchuck? How long you lived up here, speaking of which? You should almost qualify.”

  “Too long.”

  “You miss New York?”

  “Like a canker sore.”

  “Emma sleeping well and enjoying day care and learning who’s got the brains between her parents?”

  That got a smile from her father.

  Lester went back to negotiating the traffic lined up for exit two into Brattleboro. Willy was a hard case to crack. A transplanted New York cop, he’d been shot back when he and Joe and Sammie had worked together for the Bratt PD. The injury had almost cost him his job, along with the use of the arm. But that was one of the unique things about Vermont—there were few enough people making things happen that creative solutions often became the norm. In this case, that meant that despite Willy’s injury and his almost toxic demeanor, Joe Gunther had worn down some significant opposition to keep him employed. He’d pushed Kunkle’s integrity and ability—and made some loaded references to the Americans with Disabilities Act—but he’d also taken full responsibility for him, which had eventually sealed the deal. The creation later on of the VBI had become the perfect opportunity to not only collect the best and brightest among the state’s investigators—including Lester himself—but to build a protective niche for Willy Kunkle, as well.

  And Les was happy for that, because Willy, for all his irritable ways, struck him as a hot, bright, eccentric source of insight whose absence from their ranks would have made the world a duller place—and resulted in a lower solve rate. The latter point wasn’t a given, but Spinney’s affection for his curmudgeon of a partner was willing to allow for the possibility. After all, Willy Kunkle was fun to watch.

  Out of the blue, Willy asked, “How is your boy, anyhow? Flunked out of the police academy yet?”

  “Nope,” Lester answered cheerfully, “and my daughter’s not pregnant, either, to your earlier point. Nor is my wife feeding a drug habit out of the hospital’s supply cabinet. In fact, Dave’ll be graduating in a couple of weeks, and then it’s figuring out where to go next.”