by Archer Mayor
“Hey!” she yelled, looking around desperately. Hanging from a hook over the kitchenette’s counter was a frying pan that she now wrestled free.
Nick Gargiulo, seeing her grab the skillet, wasted no time. He grabbed the broken table lamp, smacked Jayla across the head with it, and scrambled to his feet to deal with Rachel.
She didn’t wait for him. As he jumped onto the bed to vault toward her, she ducked low and lashed out with the pan, striking him hard on the left knee. He uttered a scream and fell forward; she let him tumble over the arch of her back and then pivoted around to hit him again on the shoulder.
He’d had enough. Throwing the chair at Rachel to pitch her off balance, he found Jayla’s phone by chance under his hand on the floor, took it, and ran, limping, toward the entryway. He tore open the door and vanished, his feet thundering on the steps as he went.
Rachel fought off the chair and got to her feet, yelling at the top of her voice, already hearing concerned voices from the downstairs neighbors.
“Charlotte!” she shouted to her friend, still lying beyond the bed. “Are you okay?”
The frying pan in hand, she saw her own phone on the breakfast table. Keeping her eyes on the gaping front door, she dialed 911 with her free hand.
“Charlotte,” she repeated loudly, working her way through the destruction to where Jayla lay, at once watching the door and trying to listen to the operator.
She rapidly explained what had happened and announced her name and address before tossing the phone onto the bed, trusting 911 to do the rest.
She reached Jayla’s outstretched legs between the open bed and the wall, and crawled up alongside her, repeating her name again and again, never getting a response.
There was no blood, as she’d feared. The lamp—a heavy metal remnant of a piece of farm equipment, once considered quaintly ornamental—rested like the ponderous hulk it was beside Jayla’s head.
Rachel carefully slid her hand under her friend’s neck and cradled it. “Charlotte,” she said softly. “Say something. Can you hear me?”
But there was no response. Nor would there be.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I keep telling myself I shouldn’t do it,” Don Heustis said, maneuvering his electric wheelchair to where he could fit his key into the storage locker’s padlock. “My wife says I need my head examined. These four units’re a decent size—worth some money. I own this whole storage business, as well as a bunch of apartments, but still—she’s right. I could rent these out if I made ’em available.”
“Why don’t you?” Lester asked, mostly to be friendly, but also mildly curious. Heustis had been the late Kyle Kennedy’s landlord, and was the owner of several businesses around Wilmington, including the storage park—his entrepreneurial energy at odds with his appearance.
Heustis paused to cast Spinney a glance. “You know? The folks I rent to tend to be down-and-out. People call me a slumlord, and I know my places aren’t the Ritz. A lot of other scumbags make a ton ripping off the poor and cutting corners. But I used to be down-and-out. Me and my wife, both. We haven’t forgotten. Do I make money? Sure, but not like people think.” He waved his hand at the row of locked cabinets facing them. “And I do things like this—keep people’s property for years after they’re gone—just in case someone might care enough to want them back. It’s like a community service I don’t advertise. But it helps sometimes, like with you, right now.”
Lester couldn’t argue the point. Once he’d been reminded of Kyle’s belongings by Molly Blaze, he’d contacted Sturdy Foster to ask after them, and was told that, while they’d been processed, virtually nothing had been kept as evidence. Only a hunch and pure curiosity had encouraged Les to then locate Don Heustis, so he was grateful for the older man’s benevolent packrat instincts.
“I really appreciate it,” he told his guide. “Has anyone else asked to see any of this?”
“Not since I inherited it,” Don said, getting the lock open. “They better hurry up, though. I have my limits. I keep this junk for maybe three years, more or less. Just the small stuff, of course. I sell the furniture, or reuse it or trash it, depending. But whatever’ll fit into these four units, I’ll keep.” He patted a nearby partition. “This one’s due to become available again, so I’m glad you came.”
His chair whirred backwards a couple of feet and he nodded once definitively. “Don’t bother calling me when you’re done.” He laughed. “You, I think I can trust. Just lock everything up.”
“What if I want to keep something?”
“Send me an email describing it. I’ll print it out and put it in the bin to represent the original. That way, everything’s complete—in theory, at least.” He tilted his head. “Till I throw it out later.”
“Right,” Les acknowledged. “Well, thanks again.”
“You bet,” Heustis said, and trundled away down the aisle, toward the warehouse’s distant open door.
The phone went off in Lester’s pocket. It was Sam.
“Hey,” he answered.
“Hey, yourself. What’re you doing? I didn’t see you at the office this morning.”
“I’m in Wilmington, about to paw through Kyle Kennedy’s old belongings, from his apartment. Just wondering if there’s anything in them that might tell me what he was up to, the night he got killed. I figured I’d drive straight here, instead of bothering with Brattleboro traffic. Anything going on?”
“Yeah,” she told him. “I’m heading up to Burlington, on a homicide.”
Lester was surprised. “Doesn’t the BPD usually handle their own? I thought that was a matter of pride for them—the whole twenty-four/seven, full-service thing. We almost never get invited to play in Burlington.”
Her voice remained grim. “We weren’t this time, either. Beverly Hillstrom weighed in, and I guess they didn’t want to piss her off. I think the governor and the commissioner were lurking in the background, too. Hillstrom’s daughter’s roommate was bludgeoned to death last night—an unidentified intruder.”
“Holy shit,” Lester burst out. “Is she okay? Rachel, right? She worked with us.”
“Same one, and she’s fine. She actually beat the bastard off, but it was too late for the roomie. Anyhow, Beverly called me and I called McReady at the PD up there. You know how it goes. I informed Joe, to keep him in the loop. Course, Hillstrom had already called him.”
“McReady good with it?” Les asked, knowing the politics she was referring to all too well. In a state this small, everyone in fact did know everyone else.
“He didn’t have much of a choice,” she said. “But he’s a good guy—and a realist. He said he totally understood, had no problems with my tagging along. But he also made it clear he wasn’t handing anything over.”
“That okay with the bigwigs?”
“They’re all on their best behavior—so far. It’s early yet.”
“The boss gonna come home?”
“He can’t,” Sam said. “His mom’s not out of the woods and his brother still can’t relieve him. It wouldn’t make any difference. Rachel’s fine, like I said, and her mom can definitely handle a crisis.”
Lester laughed. “No kidding. Okay. Well, happy trails, then. What’s Willy up to?”
He could visualize her rolling her eyes. “Very funny. He’s south of the border somewhere. Have a good time in Wilmington.”
The phone went dead.
* * *
Lester opened the cabinet’s battered metal door and peered inside. Every time he was called upon to paw through someone’s possessions—like now, or during a search warrant, or even glancing at the personal detritus attending a car crash, strewn across the road—he was confronted with the same pathetic reminder of how little of true value most humans leave behind. The keepsakes and mementos, the once-cherished scraps that stimulated a memory, so often resembled flotsam from a sunken vessel—objects without resonance, open to misinterpretation, criticism, and/or mockery.
With this in
mind, he paused before the relics of the life of Kyle Kennedy, almost forgotten in this dim, anonymous repository, looking like trash left by the curb and labeled FREE.
These were the tailings Lester hoped to mine, and maybe use to explain Kyle’s death.
Lester assembled a couple of cardboard boxes and a piece of plywood into an uneven table, across which he began spreading the contents of the storage locker. He made four piles—clothes, CDs, papers, and everything else, including keys, some cheap pens, a telephone answering machine, a couple of pocketknives, a comb, and a watch. Then he took inventory.
He started with the paperwork—bills, notices, Post-its, a parking ticket, bank records, pay stubs, a checkbook, and other predictable odds and ends. Sorting through them, methodically taking notes as he went, he built a timeline and a portrait of an average Vermont blue-collar citizen, neither surprising nor particularly revealing. Kyle Kennedy drank, smoked, cavorted, worked, loved, and lived like most of the people Lester had known since birth. By the time he moved the last shred of paper from one edge of the table to the other, Lester felt he’d merely glimpsed a variation of his own reflection in the mirror. He’d made different life choices than Kyle, and thus chosen a different road, but fundamentally, there were more similarities than differences between them.
He moved to the next pile—the clothing—and made fast work of that, going through pockets, checking labels and general appearances for anything outstanding, again without success. After that, he hunted down an electrical outlet, plugged in the answering machine, and played what few messages there were—from his employer, an unidentified female asking if he wanted to have dinner, and a final one, presumably from a friend, that caught his full attention.
“Hey. It’s Chad. When the fuck’re we gonna throw some lead again? You ever find the sixty-five? Come on, man. I’m boooooored.”
Lester played the recording twice. The time stamp on the machine had been lost when it was unplugged, but Chad’s call was second to the last in line. It had to have been fairly close to the time of Kyle’s death.
Lester briefly abandoned his labors to walk out into the welcome sunshine to his car, unlock the back door, and open the old case file that he’d brought for easy reference.
He flipped to the section containing the crime scene photos and went to the ones showing Kyle’s bloodstained body, sprawled in the driver’s seat of his pickup. Nestled in his lap was the revolver he’d used to shoot Ryan Paine. It was a .357 Taurus Model 65.
* * *
Beverly shifted her daughter’s head slightly against her chest, causing Rachel to look up and ask, “You okay?”
Beverly stroked her hair and kissed her forehead. They were stretched out together on Beverly’s large bed at home, facing the windows overlooking Lake Champlain, the blush of the rising sun just starting to paint the peaks of the Adirondacks, far to the west.
“No, I’m not,” Beverly told her. “You just witnessed a friend’s murder. I’m not the least bit okay.”
They’d been up all night, ever since the attack, first at the scene, then the hospital, so Rachel could be checked out, and finally the police department, where she detailed what had happened. It was there that Beverly had made her request that the VBI—and specifically Sammie Martens—be invited. That went over like the proverbial fart in church, not that Beverly had cared.
Lastly, and speaking well of each of them, both Dan Reiling and Joe had made immediate contact—Dan by coming to the ER to see his daughter, and Joe, regretfully by phone only from the Midwest, asking to speak to the girl so he could offer his sympathy directly.
Beverly had taken comfort in all this—the mechanisms of the very system she represented working quickly and well. It helped her keep at bay the true horror of what Rachel had been through. Of the usual list of things no parent wants their child to experience, this one was so exotic as to rarely be mentioned.
“I really liked her, Mom,” Rachel said quietly.
Beverly tightened her hug slightly. “I know, sweetheart.”
“She was a nice person.”
“I realize that you told everything to the police, but do you think Charlotte knew the man who attacked you? Now that a little time’s passed by?”
Rachel shook her head. “There’s like a disconnect. If you do have a normal mom and dad and you went to school like everybody else somewhere in an Albany suburb, you don’t just step off a bus without even a toothbrush. When we first met, I knew there was something off. She covered it first by saying she’d run away from Buffalo and a bad home situation, but I didn’t care when she later said that wasn’t true. She did it ’cause she was being careful, like we do sometimes when we’re not sure of a situation.”
She twisted around again to look her mother in the eyes. “It didn’t matter. It never mattered—she was so … alive. I mean, I got it when you asked me about her at lunch. I knew you were worried I’d taken in someone I knew nothing about. But I felt in my bones it was okay. That was just the way she was.” She sagged again in Beverly’s arms, staring back out at the dawning day. “Or that was how I saw her.”
“Perhaps the man had nothing to do with her,” Beverly suggested. “Is there anything to say that they were definitely connected?”
“Maybe not,” Rachel replied. “It could’ve been random, I suppose.” But her heart wasn’t in it.
Nor was Beverly’s. Being of an analytical nature, and never having met the mysterious Charlotte Collins, she’d been far more concerned than her daughter by the girl’s sudden and unexplained appearance. There was little doubt in Beverly’s mind that Rachel’s new roommate and the attack were related. It was one of the primary reasons she’d pulled rank and manipulated the VBI, and specifically Sammie, with whom she now felt she had a real connection, into being invited by the Burlington PD.
But Beverly’s insistence wasn’t purely sentimental. Her inner alarm system was ringing loudly—whoever was behind Charlotte’s murder was most likely also involved in causing her to get on a bus to Burlington. The question therefore had broadened, as Beverly saw it, beyond who had killed Charlotte Collins to why.
This young woman’s murder was not a freestanding event. It was the second act in a drama that predated her encounter with Rachel. Of that, Beverly was convinced.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
To Sammie, the common denominator around the conference room was that everybody looked exhausted, from Captain Mike McReady and his entire detective squad to the attending forensic types and the uniformed brass, including Mike’s boss, the police chief. All told, there might have been twenty people either sitting at the table or lining the walls.
The Burlington Police Department was housed in an enormous, remodeled, pre–World War II car dealership. It was sprawling, soared overhead, and generally had an open-ceiling design to most of its offices, allowing for better air circulation and—for a few cynics—the feeling that its occupants were rats in a maze. Therefore, depending on your outlook, the exceptional presence of a ceiling in this special soundproofed room was either a relief or a claustrophobic disappointment.
For Sam, who was already feeling the effects of everyone’s body heat before the briefing had even begun, the rats had it good.
Psychologically, her isolation was all the greater since—for now, at least—she was a guest. The VBI generally took on cases only upon invitation. That had been understood since its creation. Thus, McReady’s opening the door only halfway: VBI could sit in, but no more.
Sam, however, did have two more personal incentives for being here: First, Hillstrom had requested her by name—without Joe acting as intermediary; second, this was to be the first of two meetings in Burlington. The second was slated for later at the VBI office down the street, to involve only the squad. She’d used this high-profile, lethal home invasion to call for a special meeting—including Joe via video—to simultaneously assert her leadership and guarantee that everyone was on the same page.
There was, in addition,
an unspoken third reason for her being here: She was laying the ground for what she was convinced would be the VBI’s eventual inheriting of this case—or at least for its taking the leading role. Notwithstanding the commissioner’s and the governor’s influence—and Rachel’s mother’s high profile, politically—Sam felt that there was much more going on here than just a thief who got surprised sneaking around an apartment.
McReady ran the briefing. Experienced, professional, and levelheaded, Mike had ended up where he was through merit and years on the job. Most knowledgeable people assumed that the same factors would make him the next chief of the department.
He began with a computerized slide show, displayed on a wall-mounted screen. Using a progression of neighborhood establishing shots and crime scene photos, maps, and sketches, he outlined Jayla’s and Rachel’s evening—the outing for ice cream and a movie, the routine retiring to the apartment and separate bedrooms, the unexpected and unforewarned nature of the attack.
He then split the screen and itemized what they knew so far about each victim, beginning with Rachel, in part because of the small role they suspected she’d played in this drama. With Jayla, however, he slowed down and spoke to greater effect.
“Charlotte Collins,” he began, showing various images of her dead body. “Which—surprise, surprise—is an alias, as is her alternate first name, Jayla, which we found on a couple of documents in her purse. Real name, according to her license, is Charlotte Anne Robinson. I should mention that Rachel Reiling was unaware of this. She had no clue Robinson was using a pseudonym. She did say that she wasn’t too surprised, since she’d wondered about the victim’s backstory from the get-go. We expect to find out more about Robinson soon. She told Reiling she was from Albany, attended SUNY, had parents who lived in Guilderland, just outside town, and that they both worked for the Albany school system. We’ve sent inquiries to both PDs out there. It shouldn’t be long before one or both kick something back.”