Trace

by Archer Mayor

  Willy astonished the entire room by saying, “Actually, yeah, I would. You volunteering?”

  Joe didn’t hide his surprise. “Sure. You got it.”

  He then gazed at Lester. “And how’re you doing with both feet in a political quagmire? You wish your forensics friend had never called you about those fingerprints?”

  Lester didn’t need to go into as much background, since he’d been filing his case notes regularly, like Sam. Nevertheless, he hadn’t updated his narrative since speaking with Dylan Collier.

  “It is getting murkier, I’ll give you that,” he said. “Turns out Dee Rollins—Ryan Paine’s grieving widow—has no middle gear when it comes to men. So far, I’ve found out she was sleeping with Paine; Kyle Kennedy; Paine’s best friend, Dylan Collier—who gave me all this—and is now with a fourth one, who works for Wilmington PD. The first three were all at the same time, and the last one might’ve been, too, for all I know now.

  “I’m already sure we’re no longer dealing with just a trooper pulling some dude over and exchanging gunshots. The problem’s become figuring out the choreography. Did Kennedy lure Paine by driving up and down that stretch like a maniac, waiting to be stopped? That’s what Collier says Dee Rollins told him. Or did Paine lie in wait and ambush Kennedy because he was sleeping with his wife, and then get surprised ’cause Kennedy was packing heat? And in either case, what’s the story behind the phony fingerprints on Kennedy’s gun, which mysteriously went missing just prior to the shooting anyhow?

  “I even took a flier and suggested to Collier that maybe Paine, distraught over his wife’s cheating and knowing he was about to be fired, committed suicide somehow, at once killing his rival and coming out like a dead hero. Collier went ballistic, of course, since it sounded like I was trying to deprive Dee of her survivor benefits, but he didn’t argue that Paine was bummed out about his career nose-diving.”

  Willy was chuckling and shaking his head. “Jesus, and I thought I had it bad with counterfeit mil-spec drone batteries. You should write for the movies. That’s some crazy shit.”

  Lester laughed in agreement. “You think I don’t know it? This thing’s driving me nuts, mostly because I know when I put it on paper, the Titanic’s gonna look like a fender bender. Collier reminded me how many cops showed up for Paine’s memorial. It’s gonna be just swell telling ’em all that our hero’s something else.”

  “But you know where you’re headed with it?” Joe asked.

  Spinney nodded. “I obviously got to have a sit-down with Dee. But staring at the ceiling last night in bed, I’ve also thought of another angle I want to look at first—just for what-the-hell.”

  Joe didn’t press him. “Okay. Sounds good.” He stood up. “Let’s all get to it.”

  Lester stopped him, however, by reaching under his desk. “Almost, boss. Since you’re heading home right now to find out who’s been eating your porridge while you been away, I figured you might like company.”

  He pulled out Joe’s cat carrier and placed it on his desk, to where Gilbert could see through the door and spy his roommate. He let out a meow and stuck a paw through the bars, to everyone’s laughter.

  Joe crossed over, opened the door, and took the cat into his arms, where the two of them touched noses.

  “You gotta be kidding,” Willy commented. “Really?”

  Joe raised an eyebrow at him. “Hey, you can’t be the only one to have a small creature love you.”

  * * *

  The angle that Lester hadn’t detailed at the meeting came to him during one of his routine rituals. In the dark, in bed, with Sue’s rhythmic breathing for company—on the nights she wasn’t at work—he liked to review the past day’s events. Or, as this time, a case’s inner workings. With no one to disturb him or ask distracting questions, he would let his mind wander among the details, as if window-shopping along a narrow, twisting, highly commercial street.

  It was in that context, in the moonlit bedroom, that he recalled Sturdy Foster’s offhand comment about the lack of gunshot residue either on Kyle Kennedy’s hand or clothing.

  At the time, he’d thought of how revolvers are more prone to leave such a deposit—the nature of a revolver’s cylinder is such that there’s a gap between where the cartridge resides and the opening to the barrel through which the fired bullet passes. It is that “cylinder gap”—not present in a semiautomatic gun—that typically allows a microscopic side-spray of burned gunpowder to escape.

  In the commonly accepted scenario of the Kennedy–Paine confrontation, investigators like Sturdy had pictured Kyle Kennedy shooting one bullet into Ryan Paine through his open left window—meaning, since he was a righty, that he would most likely have held the revolver across the front of his chest.

  This was not an absolute. Lester realized that. Kennedy might’ve twisted his body around or held his hand out the window. There were several explanations possible for why no cylinder gap powder stain had been found running lengthwise down the front of his T-shirt—or, for that matter, any blowback found on his shooting hand.

  But Lester wasn’t happy with some vaguely acceptable hypothesis. Even with all the political brouhaha at the time, the pressure to move fast, and feeling the loss of a colleague, his instinct would have been to take a very close look at Kennedy’s car. The gunshot residue may have reasonably ended up somewhere other than Kennedy’s chest, after all.

  But that was the definition of Monday-morning quarterbacking. Nevertheless, before dropping off to sleep, Les had told himself to at least try to locate that car—even three years later.

  It was not an absurd notion, not in Vermont. Old cars didn’t vanish with the alacrity they did in major urban areas to the south. There, sheer numbers promoted efficiency—there were too many out-of-commission vehicles, too little space to absorb them, and too much money to be made recycling old metal.

  In the rural north woods, however, the exact opposite was true. Locals even referred to an abandoned car—usually still sitting in a front yard—as a Vermont planter. Cars and trucks were driven for much longer than they were elsewhere, and when finally retired, they often ended up in an ex-pasture. Roaming along Vermont’s back roads, one frequently came across a cluster of such retirees, sitting weed-choked by the dozen, side by side or stacked, often behind a sagging barn, awaiting a poorly defined future.

  It tended to be a leisurely holding pattern, with vehicles resting sometimes for years between active service and demise in a smelter’s cauldron—if ever.

  The next morning, Lester got on the phone and, step by step, traced the route that Kyle Kennedy’s bloodstained car had taken from its release as evidence by the crime lab. An hour later, he had the address of a substantially sized auto graveyard not far from the lab’s location in Waterbury, near the center of the state.

  When he arrived there two hours later, it turned out to be fairly typical of its kind—less a car and truck repository and more an old-fashioned junkyard, including everything from vehicles to large appliances to, in this case, a small herd of goats and some chickens.

  A short gray-haired woman exited the farmhouse beside the dirt driveway when he pulled up.

  “You the one who called?” she yelled at him before he’d fully rolled to a stop.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said out the window.

  She marched over and stood by the door as he unfolded himself from behind the wheel.

  “Goodness,” she said, checking him out. “You’re a tall one.”

  “So I’ve been told,” he replied, not commenting on the fact that she had to be under five feet, easily.

  “Well,” she told him, “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you’ll probably be wanting to get right back into that car, ’cause the one you talked about is a good half mile down the way.” She gestured toward the back of the house, where the driveway continued parallel to the piled junk he’d noticed coming in, over a small knoll, and around an outcropping of trees.

  “Fine with me,” he s
aid, holding out a photograph. “It still look like this?”

  She glanced at Kyle Kennedy’s worn, dented, partially rusty sedan, documented at the lab on the day it had been brought in on a flatbed.

  “Yup,” she confirmed. “It’s a whole lot dustier, but that’s her. I wouldn’t be likely to forget that one.”

  He slid back into his seat. “I bet. I’ll check it out, then.”

  “Not without these, you won’t.” She dangled a set of keys before him, smiling.

  He took them. “You’re right. It’s been locked all this time?”

  She laughed. “Yup, despite the hundreds of people I get every day, asking to take a bloodstained beater out for a spin.”

  He joined her. “Okay. Dumb question. Thank you.”

  She stepped back to let him leave. “They say there’re no dumb questions.” The look on her face told him what she thought of that.

  She was right about the dust, but once he’d found the car, parked perpendicular to the road, Lester was impressed by how unchanged it looked—as if someone had abandoned it at a drive-in theater long ago. He even glanced over his shoulder as he swung out of his car a second time, to check for a weather-beaten outdoor screen. What he saw instead were a few more of the wandering goats.

  Nodding to them politely, he opened his back door and pulled out an evidence-gathering kit he’d brought along, which he deposited next to Kennedy’s front passenger side door.

  It was a sylvan scene, next to the field, complete with the goats, chirping birds, and a scattering of cumulus clouds against a bright blue sky—quite a contrast with what he encountered upon unlocking the door and swinging it wide against protesting rusty hinges.

  Lester waited a moment for the faint breeze to whisk away the stale and rancid odor that hit him like a fog. Immediately before him, a few sharply angled drops of blood spatter led across the passenger seat’s fabric like the tail of a meteor toward an age-blackened lump of gore, concentrated where Kennedy had sat, bleeding out from his heart wound.

  Lester stood studying all this for a while, interpreting what he saw, section by section, some no larger than a playing card. He’d analyzed the crime photos earlier—the ones featuring Kennedy’s body still in place—and now mentally superimposed the two sets of images.

  They checked out. Everything confirmed what investigators had found—a man, dead of a gunshot to the chest delivered from an angle consistent with the open driver’s window, had died in that seat. What projected blood there was had been deposited logically, thinning and spreading outward as it had traveled toward the vehicle’s right side. The droplets that he could decipher—mostly the ones still adhering to hard surfaces—all pointed toward the point of origin.

  It was textbook, and spoke without question of Ryan Paine’s discharging his weapon at Kennedy, and catching him with devastating, close-range force.

  Lester let his gaze return to where it had begun, on the passenger side. As befit the pacing of the initial investigation, the car’s interior did not reflect a crime lab’s full-fledged efforts. This had not been a whodunit; no suspect was going to be facing charges in court later, where evidence would be presented. As a result, no swatches had been cut out for preservation, and no chemical stains left behind where tests had been conducted to support the sequence of events.

  This had been a slam dunk. Sad, perhaps; “tragic,” in the vernacular of the media. But easy. No muss, no fuss.

  For Lester—now—that was good news. Although it had been three years, the car had gone straight from the lab to here and sat, pristine, locked up, and undisturbed. The family hadn’t wanted it, for obvious reasons, and similarly, no one had expressed a desire to buy it. For his purposes—even though the technical chain of custody had long been broken—the car was an intact crime scene.

  He looked directly before him. The fabric covering the right seat’s vertical back section—as is commonly the case in cars—had suffered little wear or tear over time. Most Americans drive alone, and when they do have company, those companions usually drop their food and soda—or leave their paw prints—on the seat. Not against the back.

  Lester leaned in so that his eyes were inches from the pale gray cloth, like a naturalist reading a butterfly’s pattern. What he found is what had caught his imagination in the middle of the night and made his mind race at the possibilities.

  He straightened, satisfied, and unsnapped the evidence case at his feet, extracting a cardboard box from a side compartment. From this in turn, he removed a small sheet covered with a slightly sticky substance, and an equally compact, flexible vial with a small quantity of fluid within it.

  He methodically dabbed the sheet against the back of the car seat, working from top to bottom, dropped it into a plastic bag with a zipperlike seal—alongside the small vial—and crushed the vial to expose the sheet to the fumes of the vial’s contents. Holding the bag up to his eye a couple of minutes later, he smiled as the sheet became speckled with a small galaxy of distinct blue dots.

  “Son of a gun,” he murmured happily.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Where’re we going?” Willy asked, having just followed his boss’s instruction to bypass the exit leading to Burlington, in order to stay on I-91, heading due north.

  Despite Willy’s general contempt for his fellow human beings, he liked Joe Gunther and enjoyed his company, and not only for the latitude that the older man routinely afforded him. There was a steadiness to Joe, a reliability that transcended their occasional disagreements, which had created a trust that Willy otherwise reserved solely for Sam.

  Not that he would ever express any of that, of course.

  “Little detour,” Joe said. “If it’s okay with you.”

  “Hey,” Willy replied. “It’s your dime.”

  Joe left it at that as they passed Hartford and Hanover and continued toward Thetford, some twelve miles on.

  “You’re kidding,” Willy commented, suddenly recognizing the significance of following Joe’s directions.

  “Nope,” Joe said. “I wanted to drop by anyhow, and it occurred to me you two had never met.”

  Willy let out a cautious grunt. “Okay.”

  The Gunther farm, where Joe had been born and raised, was almost within sight of the exit. It wasn’t large, even by Vermont standards—tracts of it had been sold off over the years to set up a fund for Joe’s mother and lessen the burden on Leo. Nevertheless, the house still had a couple of fields in proximity, and its appearance hadn’t changed since Joe and Leo minimally helped their father as kids.

  Given the spontaneous nature of this impulse, Joe was pleased to see the family car—usually at work with Leo—parked outside the attached barn containing several less-than-perfect “classics” from the ’60s, as Leo put it, in which he was known to cruise the neighborhood, generally with one of his fair-weather girlfriends.

  Indeed, as they rolled to a stop, Leo appeared at the front door of the house, his arms spread wide and a broad smile on his face—his pleasure enhanced when he saw that Willy, whom he’d met only once before, was at the wheel.

  He marched over to Kunkle and gave him a bone-crushing hug, which Joe could see Willy just barely resisted responding to with gunfire. Touchy-feely he was not—something Leo routinely ignored with everyone.

  “Willy,” he now said with genuine pleasure. “A sight for sore eyes. How long’s it been?”

  “Not long,” Kunkle replied in a monotone.

  “Well, it feels like it.” Leo threw an arm across his shoulder. “How’s the bouncing baby girl? She’s got to be roaring around like the Energizer Bunny nowadays.”

  “She’s fine,” Willy said, as uncomfortable as if he’d been dressed in a tutu at a funeral.

  They all three began walking toward the house, with Leo still talking. “And Sam? Still happy balancing motherhood, crooks, and trying to figure you out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good luck on the last one, right?” Leo gave him a final squ
eeze before releasing him in order to throw open the door. Willy gratefully entered the house in a near rush, leaving the two brothers behind to exchange conspiratorial smiles.

  “You’re a bad person,” Joe whispered as he followed suit.

  “You just say that ’cause Mom likes me more,” Leo said.

  “I heard that,” came a woman’s voice from beyond the mudroom. “You boys cut that out. We have a guest.”

  On cue, Joe motioned to Willy, who was more uneasy by the second, to pass through the far door.

  They entered a living room, the true core of the house, where the boys’ mother had long ago established her command center—a semicircular gathering of tables surrounding her wheelchair and loaded with books, newspapers, magazines, and remotes for radio, television, and various lights around the room, in case she wanted to take a nap. To Joe, the setup had always seemed like a Disney fantasy of an old lady who ran the world from her quaint, rural farmhouse.

  Willy stood stock-still before her, at a loss, like a boy facing the principal.

  Joe’s mother stuck out her hand. “Mr. Kunkle, I presume? I hope you’ll forgive my son’s bad manners. Both of them, for that matter.”

  Willy quickly obliged by shaking hands. “Mrs. Gunther. Nice to meet you.”

  “By the looks of things, I doubt I was on your list of things to do today.”

  Willy half smiled. “No, ma’am.”

  She pointed to a seat by her chair. “Make yourself comfortable for a while. I’ll let you go in under fifteen minutes, I promise. It shouldn’t be too painful.”

  Willy obliged her as she fixed her sons with a glance. “And you two can retire to the kitchen, make us some tea, and talk about me in my absence. Sound good?”

  Joe nodded. “Outstanding. Will do.”

  “Glad to hear you’re doing better,” Willy said after the other two had noisily retreated.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It was the oddest thing I’ve ever experienced, but it apparently left no ill effects, or so they tell me.”