The Company She Kept

by Archer Mayor

  Joe glanced at her. “Can you tell when they were administered?”

  She touched his forearm with a gloved hand. “Exactly what caught my eye. They definitely predate death. They’ve been given time to get established. Not much time, mind you, but some.”

  “Maybe a struggle beforehand?” he suggested.

  “They’d be consistent with that.” She indicated more bruises around the body’s upper arms. “Just as these would be with someone seizing her tightly, either holding or pushing her.” She looked up at Todd. “Could you turn her over for a quick look?”

  With an ease befitting his weight lifter’s physique, the diener complied, revealing a horizontal bruise across Susan’s lower back.

  “Thank you, Todd.”

  Smiling in response to Beverly’s trademark courtesy, Todd returned the body to its original supine position.

  “Therefore possibly grabbed and pushed against something hard and horizontal,” Joe said.

  “Possibly,” was her cautious reply.

  They continued trading observations and information for a couple of hours, as Beverly examined what else Susan had to offer. Several times during the autopsy, she stepped away from the table to run warm water over her partially numbed fingertips.

  There were essentially three distinct stages to a full-fledged postmortem examination, barring the final toxicology report: what the clothed body had to tell, what the naked version followed with, and finally, what the internal organs might reveal. To an old-fashioned person like Joe, only the middle stage stimulated a sense of inhibition, stemming back, no doubt, to a traditional upbringing involving modesty and discretion. For him to watch a woman he’d known for so long being slowly disrobed and then meticulously probed, scraped, and fingerprinted—every inch of her recorded by Todd’s camera—made him feel like a voyeur, and brought home as nothing else had so far that Susan’s vitality, like it or not, was never again going to be on display.

  The third and last stage was by contrast a comfort zone for him. The autopsy seemed purely scientific, exposing a history that even the host body often hadn’t known, such as a slightly damaged heart muscle. With Beverly as his guide, Joe learned about Susan’s past as a smoker, her having once had an abortion, her sporting a sensual tattoo that only her most intimate companions had appreciated. He discovered that she might have benefitted from more exercise, less alcohol, and that she’d had a small but persistent argument with hemorrhoids. Most important, and late in the procedure, he also learned—once her face had been elastically peeled down and tucked under her chin, the top of her skull removed, and her brain exposed—that she’d suffered a stunning blow to the back of her head sometime prior to death and that she’d finally been done in as a result of a subsequent blow to her left temple, which had fractured the bone and caused, in Beverly’s language, a “catastrophic” hemorrhage.

  “You seen enough of this kind of wound to take a guess about what caused it?” Joe asked, fascinated by the amount of damage left behind.

  He should have known better, of course. He and Beverly had been meeting over dead bodies for more years than either of them could recall. Never in that time had she ever speculated about any mechanism that wasn’t blatantly obvious. She reported end results, supplying clarity and insight based purely on the evidence.

  Nevertheless, she caught his eye upon hearing the question and suggested, “I doubt she was hit by a bird flying at high speed, if that helps.”

  He bowed slightly. “Point taken, Doctor.”

  Later that night, however, as they lay together in her home south of Burlington, alongside the dark immensity of Lake Champlain, she did allow herself more latitude.

  “Seriously?” Joe asked. “A bird?”

  “It just popped into my head. Maybe because you found her dangling halfway down a cliff. I can give you this much: It was something cylindrical at point of contact, perhaps an inch in diameter, and delivered at high velocity. Of course, that could cover anything from a chair leg to the butt of a pool cue to even the heel of a woman’s shoe. Do you have any idea at all of what happened?”

  He snaked his arm around her bare shoulder as she tucked in closer, loving how comfortable they were together. “Not yet,” he said. “But we’ve barely begun.”

  * * *

  Senior Trooper Tommy Redman radioed dispatch that he’d be out of the car on portable, before killing his engine and opening the door to the cold night air, at once reluctant to leave the cruiser’s warmth and happy to be seeing his old friend Jack Muskett, ex-cop, current constable, always a good source of area gossip, and—last but most important right now to Redman—the unlikely brewer of the best cup of coffee in the county.

  Muskett lived off a dirt road, in a trailer grown roots, with a retrofitted peaked roof, dilapidated attached porch, and cinder blocks skirting its base—hopefully but inadequately designed to keep the cold wind from sneaking in under the thin floor. It was as representative a residence for the rural northeast as were the surrounding maples and the sweet sap that dripped from them once a year.

  Redman found Muskett burrowed into his beaten La-Z-Boy, one hand around a mug, the other clutching the remote, staring at a program featuring alligators, swamp boats, and men who looked like him.

  “Hey,” the trooper said, passing through the living room on his way to the kitchen.

  “Hey, yourself,” was the response.

  Redman pulled a stained clean mug off the drying rack by the sink and poured himself some coffee from a percolator that had no reason to be functioning, before returning to the other room and carefully settling into an adjoining armchair, simultaneously balancing his mug and shifting his duty belt to allow him to sit comfortably. Between the Taser, radio, an extendable baton, his ammo pouches, two cuff cases, his gun, his OC spray can, cell phone, flashlight, and pager—this took some doing.

  Muskett caught the body language. “Cuffs, a stick, and a gun,” he said. “It’s all we had. Don’t know how you move around with all that crap.”

  “Why do you think I’m putting my feet up?”

  Muskett raised an eyebrow. “For Christ sake. You just got out of a car. Cops don’t walk anymore.”

  Tommy had heard it before. He actually agreed with much of it. Times had changed, and not always for the better. The onboard computers, the GPS units that told the shift sergeant where you were at all times, the audio-video equipment … It all was starting to make RoboCop look like a documentary instead of a sci-fi movie. Plus, most cops were a conservative bunch, and bitching about the sorry state of the world was an ongoing source of perverse comfort.

  Tommy announced his reason for dropping by, as he did every week, keeping his eyes mindlessly glued to the two men on TV, who were poking into the water with oars, hoping for some angry reptilian reaction. “So what’s new?”

  It was their eight-year-old ritual, where Jack filled Tommy in on all the local skulduggery. In addition to currently being constable, Jack owned a one-truck towing company, drove a school bus every morning and afternoon, served on the three-man selectboard, and was a member of the fire department. He also inaugurated every day at the local filling station/coffee shop, opening the place up at five-thirty by being first in line. Amid all of these occupations, habits, and professions, Jack Muskett became privy to more information than might be jammed into a weekly soap opera. More times than he could recall, Tommy Redman’s ongoing string of criminal investigations had been helped from just regularly tuning in, and sometimes asking a well-chosen question. Redman had four or five such dependable sources—men and women, both—scattered across the county.

  They were about twenty minutes into their news update, as Jack referred to it, when he casually mentioned, “I had a complaint not twenty-four hours ago about activity in the middle of the night at Dana’s junkyard. Pissed me off something royal, getting up outta bed for absolutely nuthin.”

  “You didn’t find anything at all?”

  “That is what nuthin means, Tom
my. I drove up and down the rows, flashing my light around. No bodies, no party animals, no horny teenagers. Like I said, nuthin.”

  Dana’s was the largest auto junkyard in a thirty-mile radius, recently defunct and increasingly a target of environmentalists and transplanted city dwellers who found the place unsightly. For pragmatists of Tommy’s acquaintance, it remained a source of recycled auto parts, helping to keep a remarkable fleet of barely legal backwoods beaters on the road.

  They wrapped things up shortly thereafter, Tommy knowing that his dispatcher would soon be wanting an update. But as he eased out of Jack’s rutted and slippery dooryard, trying not to slide into any of the abandoned hulks lining the way, he set his course on Dana’s, two miles away, responding to both instinct and curiosity. Jack, as Tommy well knew, might have been the best of gossip blotters, but he wasn’t the most energetic of investigators. He hadn’t seen anything suspicious at the junkyard—which also might have meant that he simply hadn’t run it over in his car.

  The place wasn’t locked. It wasn’t even fenced in, which was another complaint from the growing chorus against it. In the old tradition, places like this junkyard had simply evolved over time, born of falling crop prices, available farm acreage, and the instinct among hardscrabble people to make ends meet practically. What began as simply a way station for wrecked cars heading elsewhere had grown into a vast and loosely organized semipermanent resting place for hundreds of disintegrating vehicles, all of them roughly stacked in rows, with broad snowpacked paths between them. New additions to the rotting collection were both rare and probably against the law, given the legislature’s ever-streaming current of regulations, so the towering piles on each side of Redman’s cruiser hadn’t changed much in recent years. But it was precisely the place’s neglected reputation that had triggered Tommy’s instinct to take a look. A party place or a lovers’ lane it might have become, but its isolation and vastness were also magnets for things darker—and thus worth checking out.

  The problem was that literal darkness was also what Tommy had to deal with. He had alley lights on the strobe unit atop his car roof, and a searchlight that he could manipulate as he crawled forward, but peering amid the inky gaps and jagged angles of one teetering stack of metal after another taxed one’s concentration, and about fifteen minutes into this spontaneous and fruitless impulse, he began to rethink the wisdom of his action.

  Until he saw the oddity.

  That was often the case, after all. It wasn’t so much with clarity that so many discoveries were made, but rather the small mental nudge that made one think that—just maybe—this one anomaly deserved further scrutiny.

  As it did here. Just before his brain completely dulled to the slow, monotonous procession of piled, rusty, black and brown heaps, Tommy caught sight of the barest accent of something colorful. Not the fading paint job decorating a dented fender or door, but a small, distinct spot of bright green, reflecting in his searchlight like a beacon’s flash.

  He stopped the cruiser and backed up, looking for confirmation, and then emerged into the night with his flashlight in hand.

  Lurking in a niche between two stacks that had slumped over onto each other like drunks on a subway car, was a Prius with a green license plate. It had been pulled into the gap as far as possible, and then not quite covered by a weatherworn tarp. The plate was just visible through a hole in the fabric, and only from one angle.

  Under normal circumstances, a finding like this was followed by a request to dispatch to check the state’s DMV data bank for the owner of record.

  That wasn’t necessary here. Tommy Redman simply returned to his front seat and consulted a scrap of paper that he’d taped to his dash earlier, listing the registration of Susan Raffner’s missing car.

  It was a match.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Joe opened his front door cautiously and peered past his guest to see if anyone was standing in the driveway. Willy Kunkle stared at him, looking peeved.

  “Really? No secret knock? There’s nobody stalking where we actually work, boss. We don’t have to sneak around like the KKK.”

  Joe stepped back to let him in. “You telling me the office parking lot had no camera trucks?” he asked. “And that our phone wasn’t ringing nonstop?”

  Willy didn’t answer.

  “Right,” Joe said under his breath, and closed the door.

  Lester and Sam were already there.

  Joe waited for his last arrival to settle onto the edge of a sofa before he began. “This’ll be super quick, and from now on we’ll run the press gauntlet. I just wanted to compare notes among ourselves before more people join in and it gets harder to speak plainly and clearly.”

  “Things’ll pipe down soon enough,” Willy argued. “They always do.”

  “Normally, I’d agree,” said Joe. “But I think we’re in for something new this time. That’s why I wanted to meet off the grid, if just this once.”

  “How’s this different?” Sam asked. “I mean, aside from the body being a senator. It’s not like it was the governor or something.”

  Joe rose and leaned against the counter that separated his small living room from his even smaller kitchen. Gilbert seized the opportunity to leap up next to him and butt Joe’s shoulder with his head, before seating himself elegantly atop his master’s paperwork.

  “I may be wrong,” Joe allowed. “But humor me for a couple of days until reality kicks in. Then we’ll see. My instinct is that when it comes to gay rights and civil liberties and the rest of it, we Vermonters are living in a bubble.”

  “LGBTQ,” Sam told him. “That’s what they prefer—not individually, but as a group, like in a press release.”

  Joe stopped dead. “I realize that. I just can never get the order straight in my head.”

  “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning,” Sam recited. “LGBTQ. It’s got a kind of cadence to it.”

  Willy snorted. “Spare me. Questioning? Why not H for Having a Bad Day?”

  “You are such a caveman,” she told him.

  “We all set on this?” Joe asked, trying not to sound testy.

  “Sorry,” Sam said, looking down at the floor. As if sensing a soul in need, Gilbert abandoned Joe, leaped to the floor, made a semicircle around Willy, and jumped into Sammie’s lap. She wrapped him in her arms.

  Joe’s irritation faded. “Sam,” he said, “we’ll make sure you’re the one who speaks to the media when the time comes, okay? I’d just get the initials screwed up.”

  He cleared his throat to get back on track. “I’m just finding out how all this works, but I’ve heard through the grapevine that Susan Raffner was as involved with the BGL…”

  “LGBT … Q.”

  “Thank you …

  “That she was as keen for the cause as were the sixties radicals with their protests and sit-ins. The Internet is on fire with one group or another arguing its case, and Susan, no surprise, was very vocal, but not,” he emphasized, “to the extent you might think. She had so many other fish to fry that this one apparently qualified for a lower ranking among her enthusiasms.”

  “But she was a lesbian?” Lester asked. “That’s solid?”

  “Read the label on her chest, son,” Willy said.

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Lester countered.

  “It did this time,” Willy continued. “It’s just that no one gives a shit about it around here. That’s what Joe meant by our living in a bubble.” He pointed out the window. “Lester, you’re a sweet, ignorant homie. Outside this white-bread, milquetoast state, people hate each other for no reason at all. Trust me on that. I fit right in out there in the real world.”

  Joe held up his hands. “Okay, okay. For what’s it’s worth, I spoke to the governor on the phone yesterday—she confirmed Raffner was gay. Let’s kick around what we may be dealing with. I want to see what cards we can put faceup.”

  “Walks, talks, and looks like a duck,” Willy predictably spoke first. “I
t’s a hate crime by some fundamentalist right-wing wacko. Throw it to the feds and let them handle the publicity.”

  “I didn’t know she was a lesbian,” Sammie said. “And I doubt anyone else here did, either. So why target someone in a big way that nobody knew was a target in the first place? No fed I know is gonna take this without compelling evidence.”

  “Joe said she was outspoken on the Internet,” Lester reminded her. “This maybe has nothing to do with Vermont or her being a senator or close to the governor or anything else. Could’ve been someone from out-of-state who killed her.”

  “If that’s true,” Willy said stubbornly, “then it’s the equivalent of a terrorist act, which means two things: Somebody’s got to take credit for it or miss out on the headlines; and it again becomes a federal case, like I keep saying, which means we can get back to chasing psycho woodchucks and leave this crap to the big boys.”

  “You really don’t want to get this guy?” Sam asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Not if he’s some Arkansas Bible thumper. I’m saying that if Lester’s right, this belongs to the people with the deepest pockets and the most resources. I’m being practical, for once. Give me credit.”

  “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Joe cautioned them. “Let’s work from the crime scene out, as usual, and see what’s real. Is there any evidence that she didn’t die in our fair state, regardless of where her killer came from?”

  After a telling pause, Willy started over. “Single vehicle, probably a pickup, quick in-and-out, just long enough to string up the body and leave. That and Raffner’s clothes imply a killing somewhere else, but nothing that says out-of-state. Plus, she lived here and was found here. Logic says she was killed here, too.”

  “What about the purse found at the bottom of the cliff?” Lester asked.