The Company She Kept

by Archer Mayor

  “What did you make of it?” Sam wanted to know.

  “I just assumed she’d been upset by something—probably the reason she’d come back home in the middle of the night—and that she was angry enough to ignore me and slam the door. I was going to ask her if everything was all right, the next time I saw her, because I was concerned.”

  She sighed deeply and slumped in her seat. When she spoke again, Sam could hear the emotion in her voice. “Poor girl,” she said quietly. “I had no idea I would never see her again. What a terrible world it’s become.”

  Amen, Sammie thought.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Joe was signing in at the reception desk of the forensic lab when the side door to the lobby opened and David Hawke stuck his head out. “We ought to get you an office here,” he said cheerfully. “Cut down on the commute.”

  Joe hung his visitor’s badge around his neck and crossed to shake hands. Hawke escorted him into the building’s inner sanctum, still speaking. “How goes the battle? Seems almost lucky to me that the governor made her announcement when she did. That must’ve taken some heat off you, no?”

  “I suppose,” Joe answered vaguely. But in fact, he’d been saddened that the sexual preferences of a head of state had proven more interesting to the media than someone’s killing—even a prominent someone. On a personal note, however, Joe had been happy to see that Gail’s revelation had done her some good, as well. Her precampaign numbers were on the upswing, and she seemed more determined and more comfortable than ever in her public appearances—a self-confidence he’d noticed as well when he’d talked to her about putting pressure on HSI.

  “You said on the phone that you wanted to see everything we had,” David said. “As I mentioned, it’s not a huge amount, and we already passed along the interesting stuff. What do you think you’re looking for?”

  “Hard to say, David. You know how it is, sometimes. You’ve got to return to the scene and stand there for a while, look at it with fresh eyes, I guess.”

  “Meaning you’re stumped.”

  “We’re not flush with ideas,” Joe answered cautiously, at once coy and yet trusting that none of this would go beyond the two of them. His reluctance was mostly instinctual—no cop of experience reveals much, even to a colleague of Hawke’s standing—but it had a touch of the superstitious, as well. Joe’s instincts told him he was close to a solution, but he had yet to locate the keystone that would lock it all into place.

  Hawke escorted him to a secure room, where an array of objects, photographs, computer printouts, and fingerprint cards had been laid out across a long table for display and analysis.

  “There are naturally more avenues to pursue,” David said as he closed the door. Joe cast an eye over the collection. “There always are, assuming there’s cause and money enough to justify it. Like that time you drove down to Brookhaven National Laboratory to get that blood examined. Wild guess is that you don’t have anything like that up your sleeve this time, though.”

  “No,” Joe answered him. “You’re right. On the other hand, I don’t think I’m facing quite the brick wall I was then. Whoever did this acted spontaneously. It wasn’t planned. At least that’s the theory. So, if we’re right, that means he had to have made mistakes, or made compromises, while he was working under the gun and against the clock.”

  He was traveling the length of the table, scrutinizing Hawke’s findings as he spoke. He came to a row of fingerprint cards. “I take it these were all from the passenger seat position?”

  “Mostly. Your colleagues have been collecting comparison prints right and left, which has been a huge help. But passenger seats are historically tough. Prints overlie one another, get smudged, or they’re just too random to discover within the general population. I mean—I know it doesn’t apply in this case—but think of a carpooling situation, or a mom using her vehicle as a virtual school bus. There can be hundreds of prints left behind. Raffner was single, had no kids, and the car was relatively new, but still…”

  Joe came to a neat arrangement of pennies, quarters, sales slips, paper clips, a Black Jack gum wrapper, a movie ticket stub, two pencils—one broken—even a pair of shoes, and several wadded-up, dirty tissues, among other random jetsam.

  He pointed to the entire section. “Under the seats, I’m assuming?” he asked.

  “Right. She was actually neater than most, or had recently cleaned her car. Lucky, considering what I heard about her two residences. Word is she was a real pack rat.”

  “That she was,” Joe replied distractedly, still moving down the line. He came to the clothing he’d seen Beverly’s diener remove at the autopsy. “I’m guessing you got nothing from these?”

  David had been walking along behind him, looking over his shoulder. “Nothing tangible. The cuts in the clothing appear consistent with the type of instrument used on her chest, but that’s not saying much. Beverly sent us microscopic swabs from the inner aspects of the incised letters, thinking we might pick up some transfer from the blade, but there again—shy of the kind of equipment the super labs have—we found nothing.”

  After another fifteen minutes, Joe finally straightened and shook David’s hand in thanks.

  “This do you any good?” Hawke asked him, opening the door to the hallway.

  “Not obviously,” Joe conceded. “But it was helpful to see it all. After a while, with the e-mails and faxes and phone calls and teleconferences, you sort of lose touch with the reality of the thing. It’s nice to return to square one every once in a while. Thanks for that, David.”

  “Sure thing, Joe. Happy hunting.”

  * * *

  Montpelier being two exits away from the lab—and on the way back to Brattleboro—Joe stopped by Gail’s office in the Pavilion, which was attached to the rear of the Vermont History Museum. A mundane brick structure, it housed a variety of governmental agencies and was overseen by a single guard in the lobby. However, even with the paranoid times and how most other states protected their upper management personnel, the Pavilion was just a fraction more secure than the wide-open, neighboring capitol building. Ironically, given his job and sense of privacy, Joe rather liked the pragmatism of Vermont’s minimal safeguards. If it wasn’t broke, there was no special need to fix it.

  Upstairs, in the waiting room outside the governor’s combined office and apartment suite, Joe found John Carter, Gail’s head of security, sitting on the visitor’s couch, working his smartphone.

  Joe sat beside him and shook his hand. “John, how’ve you been? Things crazy enough for you?”

  John pocketed his phone and shook his head. “We’ve been earning our pay. I can tell you that. How’s the investigation going?”

  “We’re making inroads,” Joe said. “You just hanging around, waiting for more media to storm the door?”

  Carter chuckled. “Not at the moment. Things have quieted down a bit. The one-minute-one-mile attention span of most of those people is helping us out there. I’m just waiting for the governor. She’s due to head out soon.”

  Joe got back up. “I better drop in now, then,” he said. “Don’t want to make her late—or miss her altogether.”

  Carter stayed put, but held up a hand. “I’ve been meaning to call you about Nate Fellows.”

  Joe paused. “Oh?”

  “It’s no big deal, but I know your unit’s been looking under every rock. Did you know that he’d written threats to the governor, as well?”

  “I knew her name was on a hate list he’d made. What was the nature of the threats?”

  “Nothing specific. It was more crank than hate. You read the same sort of crap in letters to the editor. But he went on about how she was a disgrace and a traitor to Vermont and should stay in the kitchen and all the rest. You get the idea. We checked it out at the time, but found nothing to move on. He never crossed the line. You know: letter of the law and all that. Freedom of speech.”

  “When was this?”

  Carter shrugged. “Mo
nths ago. I just wanted to make sure you knew he hadn’t just targeted Raffner. It seemed like a general kind of thing.” He quickly glanced at his watch. “You better get going. She’s already running late.”

  “Thanks, John. I appreciate it. Good seeing you,” Joe said, thinking that their Mystery Man’s selection of Nate Fellows as a patsy might not have been as random as they’d thought. Within the right circles, it seemed that Fellows had been a known entity.

  * * *

  Alice Drim looked up from the copy machine in the office’s front room and greeted Joe with a bright smile. “You here to see the governor?” she asked.

  “I am, but I hear she’s already running late.”

  “Another event to raise money. Things’ve heated up, what with one thing and the other. We won’t all be looking for jobs next year, but she’s got her work cut out for her.”

  Joe knew that Alice was also the campaign’s volunteer fund-raising coordinator. “How’s the money holding up? If that’s not too indiscreet?”

  She laughed. “For you? I don’t think so. There was like a big theatrical pause when we were holding our breath, but the governor played it like a pro and the coffers opened back up. So we’re looking good. A big break in your case wouldn’t hurt.”

  He returned the smile as he passed into the office’s inner sanctum. “I hear you, Alice. We’re working on it.”

  He met Gail and her entourage of Rob Perkins, Kayla Robinson, Joan Renaud, and a couple of others coming down the short hallway. Gail’s face brightened at the sight of him and she gave him a warm embrace. “God, it’s good to see you. Did you need something? I’m afraid I’m running out the door.”

  “I know. I heard,” he told her, walking alongside. “I was just in the neighborhood, as they say—at the lab seeing David Hawke—and I thought I’d say hi.”

  “Damn. Let me call you later. Things’ve become pretty nuts, mostly due to my rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick. But the campaign’s building steam, too, as a result. This place has been crawling with people all day.”

  “It’s helped you regain your focus, from what I’ve been seeing,” Joe said.

  She stopped at the front door to the suite and took his arm, looking into his eyes as she’d once used to. “You know that’s true, don’t you, Joe? Especially now.”

  Very briefly, he saw her eyes dampen with the thought. He quickly kissed her cheek and murmured, “You’re doing well. Knock ’em dead.”

  He stepped aside in the front office, where John Carter and a couple of others were waiting, including a woman who stared at Gail as at a store mannequin, quickly and professionally swapping out her earrings and altering the lay of her collar. She also muttered something to her, which caused Gail to forage through her pockets at speed and empty them of accumulated trash into the receptacle by the door—to smooth out the lines of her long coat. With a false smile and a nod of the head, the handler faded back and let the cortege file out. They moved fast, murmuring urgently—like water released from a sluice gate—most of them with their smartphones out, which were glowing for attention. Joe stayed inside the doorframe, watching them head for the elevator. With their departure, and the absence of Alice as well as the receptionist, who’d vanished into the office’s nether regions, Joe suddenly found himself alone and surrounded by silence, as if in the aftermath of a tornado.

  His foot bumped against the half-full trash can Gail had used, which had been jostled slightly from its place near the wall. He stared at its contents a moment as he pushed it back, his memory abruptly jarred, and his heart falling. He crouched to take a closer look.

  Checking over his shoulder to make sure he was still alone, he retrieved an envelope from his inner pocket and used it to carefully lift a gum wrapper from the trash. It was labeled Black Jack, written on a black oval against a pale blue background. It was a perfect match for a similar wrapper he’d just seen laid out on David Hawke’s lab table.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “What did Hawke say?” Sam asked.

  Joe shifted the cell phone to his other ear. He was parked outside the forensic lab, to which he’d returned in a fog of mixed emotions after finding the Black Jack wrapper Gail had dropped into the trash can.

  “They match. Same fingerprint on each wrapper, but nothing’s on file, so we have nothing to go on.”

  “But it’s the governor’s office,” Sam protested. “How many people can that mean?”

  Joe’s eyes were sightlessly fixed on the snow directly before his bumper. He was reflecting on the possibility of a near lifelong friendship gone lethally sour, and on one woman turning on her lover with a viciousness Joe would never have imagined.

  “It’s like a beehive,” he replied, doggedly forcing himself to heed the literal truth, in place of his worst fears. He hadn’t actually seen the contents of Gail’s pockets hitting the trash—he’d merely retrieved what he’d found on top of the pile. He wasn’t an eyewitness. “The trash can was by the front door. The wrapper doesn’t necessarily belong to a staffer. We can’t jump too fast here—not now.”

  “But we could ask around,” Sam protested. “Black Jack? That’s what you called it? Who the hell’s ever heard of that? It’s gotta be super rare.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Joe countered, struggling not to sound testy. “If we show an undue interest, then we’ve revealed our hand. Assume it is someone in Gail’s office. Right now, he—or she—is probably feeling safe. We need to take a careful, under-the-radar look at each of them—backgrounds, lifestyles, whereabouts on the night of the murder, fingerprints, the whole ball of wax—and see if we can find something that ties one of them into this. Speaking of which, what did you get out of Regina Rockefeller?”

  “She was better than I thought she’d be,” Sam said, immediately falling into line with Joe’s marching orders, which only fueled his guilt about keeping his suspicions from her—his most loyal and trusting of colleagues. “Turns out the chatty crazy lady imitation is partly camouflage, which is maybe a little crazy in itself. But she still didn’t have much to offer. She heard what she thought was Susan coming and going that night, but when she called out just as the supposed Susan was leaving the house, there was no answer and the person slammed the door, which was something Raffner apparently never, ever did. Regina wrote it off to Raffner being pissed off for some reason, and said that Raffner came and went all the time in the middle of the night when the legislature was running. It was only later that she wondered if it might’ve been somebody else. Oh. And before you ask, there was no extra key that Regina knew anything about.”

  There was a pause—Joe lost in his thoughts, Sam reviewing what she’d just said. “About the background checks,” she then followed. “Does that include the governor? I mean, that’s a little offbeat, isn’t it?”

  The nature of the question allowed him to display some remnants of responsibility. “Of course it does. We can’t play favorites. And I shouldn’t be anywhere near it. I probably shouldn’t even be briefed on it. You handle the details of this and don’t tell me of your progress.”

  She hesitated before replying, “Got it. You okay? You sound a little off.”

  “I’ve had better days,” he answered, his memory fruitlessly stretching back over the years to any outbursts of anger that he’d witnessed in Gail, searching in vain for demonstrations of real violence.

  * * *

  “You ready to throw away more of the taxpayer’s hard-earned cash?” Willy asked. “We ought to head out and do some street work—check out the salvage yard again, maybe, and establish if someone on our lists knew about it.”

  Lester was hunched over his desk, studying line after line of what looked like a bill. He didn’t stop as he spoke, “I thought of something that might be more useful. Raffner got a piece of mail this morning that got me thinking.”

  Willy was intrigued. “What d’ya got?”

  Lester kept reading. “Well, if it’s nothing, we’ll both get called on the carpet for w
asting time, so beware the company you keep, but it occurred to me that there may have been one aspect of Raffner’s Prius that no one’s looked into.”

  “Do tell.” Willy leaned over and saw that Lester was looking at automotive gas receipts.

  “The Prius had a relatively full tank,” he explained. “Made me think about her buying gas. Most of us are creatures of habit, especially when it comes to our cars. We go to the same mechanic, use our favorite gas stations, and most of us stick to a regular commuter route, at least to and from work.”

  “Tell me what I don’t know, Grasshopper.”

  Lester continued, unfazed. “Well, up until the trip she took with her mystery passenger, from Brandon in Hartford to Buddy in Rutland, Raffner was boringly predictable, back and forth between Montpelier and Bratt. But according to her most recent credit card bill, and the mileage accrued by this routine, I calculated that she was due for a refill, which she had to have gotten near the end of her last trip.”

  “Maybe around Rutland?” Willy proposed. “Buncha all-night gas stations there, ’cause it woulda been late. How full is relatively full?”

  Lester looked up at him. “That’s another habitual thing, right? At least among people who can afford it—filling up the tank when you need gas. I asked for the lab to give me an estimate on the amount of spent fuel, and you’re right—it’s looking like she burned off enough to get from Rutland to where the car was found in that salvage yard.”

  Willy straightened and returned to his desk to grab his gloves. “I think I know where you’re heading, but why do we give a rat’s ass where she filled up last?”

  Lester grinned at him. “We don’t. But if we find the station”—here he tapped the receipts before him—“like I just did—maybe—if we’re lucky…”