Presumption of Guilt (3 page)

Things were done professionally and effectively in this nation's second least populated state, but their tempo was scaled to the locale's reality. As people were too fond of saying, there was “real time,” and “Vermont time.”

By the next day, however, everyone necessary was in place, and the wheels put into motion to free Nelson Smith's discovery from its tomb.

Also, Joe and Sammie had been joined by the two previously absent members of the local VBI squad—Lester Spinney and Willy Kunkle—both of whom had been out running other cases when this one came in.

Spinney—absurdly tall and gangly—was a native-born transplant from the Vermont State Police, drawn to the VBI because of its small size and major crimes focus. Kunkle was equally striking, but for radically different reasons. Hailing from New York and NYPD-trained, he stood out because of his demeanor. Sammie's romantic partner and the father of their young daughter, Emma, he was saddled with PTSD, a history of alcohol abuse, and a crippled left arm, which he kept—for the most part—pinned to his side by shoving his hand into his trouser pocket. Kunkle was irascible, opinionated, brusque, and intolerant; he was also one of the best cops Joe Gunther had ever worked with, which played well for Willy, who owed his continued employment to Joe's steadily running interference against everyone from the governor on down—all of whom Willy had alienated at one time or another.

“Can't we rule it a suicide?” Willy asked now, looking down at the calcified finger with the ring, still trapped in place.

Predictably, Lester laughed, Sam rolled her eyes, and Joe answered evenly, “Probably not, but I like the creative thinking.”

Given that the next stage here would involve crime scene techs, the consultant anthropologist, and the precisely applied use of more jackhammers, chisels, and finally hand brushes and spatulas, Joe opted to lead his team out of the inner security fence, across the main entry road, to an administrative building housing the company's media relations department. There they'd been told to expect documents and photographs detailing the construction of the same warehouse that was currently being dismantled.

These were delivered by an efficient, pleasant, and professional young woman who met them at the door, escorted them down a hallway, and set them up in a conference room whose table was neatly stacked with file folders and a laptop computer.

She waved a hand at the array as if making introductions. “I put out the computer because I thought you might want to see the old photographs on-screen. You can blow them up that way to see any details, and arrange them into separate folders as you go. Oh,” she added as an afterthought, pointing to a machine in the corner. “You can also print them out, if you want, or put them on a thumb drive if you have one. You know how to do that?”

Joe spoke for them all. “I think we'll figure it out. If not, we'll send up a flare.”

*   *   *

It took a while to find their footing. The plant had taken years to construct, and the archives covered the progression from farmland to when the switch was thrown in 1972. Every aspect had been documented, from weld and pour inspections to a thousand general site photographs. Nevertheless, they reached their goal eventually: photos and documents detailing the pouring of their warehouse slab. In the end, they not only knew which firm had done the work, but the names of the mixer's driver and the chute operator, as well. Disappointingly, none of the pictures portrayed the actual work in progress.

“They could've taken a shot of the body being dumped, for Chrissake,” Willy grumbled. “The one interesting thing that happened, and they missed it.”

“Probably because of this,” Lester said, holding up a single sheet of paper. “It's an ‘unusual event' report,” he explained. “A fire in the parking lot at the same time the slab was going in. There's a reference to how all work was momentarily halted by the distraction.”

“You think the pouring crew was pulled away so the body could be dumped?” Sam wondered.

“By who?” Willy asked. “A third party or one of the pouring crew? Either one of them could've rigged the car fire to distract the other.”

Joe indicated another report. “This is the investigation behind the vehicle fire. Not much to it. Just says, ‘engine fire,' without explanation.”

“It identify the owner?” Lester asked.

“Yeah.” Joe paused to read, “William Neathawk. High iron guy, maybe. I remember when all this was happening. They used a bunch of Native Americans to put up the steel framing. That was common back in the day.”

“I heard about that,” Willy added. “Totally fearless, to hear the stories.”

“Well, whatever Neathawk was, or still is,” Sam said, “we'll have to rule him out.”

“Good luck with that,” Willy said under his breath.

“Good luck with any of them,” Joe agreed. “Most folks working here were nomads, moving from job to job. It's going to be a challenge, not just finding them, but even some of the companies that employed them. Vermont Yankee itself was sold in 2000 or so. Rounding up employee lists is going to be fun. We'll have to see if they even bothered keeping tabs during construction. My guess is that lots of people just wandered off. Assuming our skeleton was even missed, he was probably lumped in among them.”

He noticed Willy switching from one screen image of the slab pouring to another and back again—repeatedly—comparing the two. “You got something?”

“Something moving.” Willy allowed them to see. “That lump there—the tarp. You can see what looks like some leftover rebar sticking out the end of it.” He tapped his finger on the screen for emphasis. “When I flip from one to the other, it flattens slightly—like something was moved from underneath.”

“And the flap changes position,” Sam added. “Like it's been shifted.”

“It's right beside where the body was found,” Lester pointed out. “Against the skirting.”

Joe shrugged. “There wasn't time during the car-fire distraction to do much more than flip the body onto the crisscrossed rebar and cover it with concrete.”

Willy sounded peeved. “It means more than that. This whole thing had to've been done in two steps. Whoever did it moved the body under the tarp the night before. Nice catch.”

Joe straightened and took them in. “So we go back in time and check what records they have for then.”

“Did they have night watchmen?” Sammie asked.

“Guess we're about to find out.”

*   *   *

Back at the site, signs of progress were unmistakable. A shallow, semicircular dry moat, reaching down to the rebar, had appeared around the body, and the debris from within it painstakingly removed and sifted for anything such as a weapon, a bullet or casing, credit cards from a long-rotted-away wallet, or any other piece of evidence. So far, nothing had surfaced. As Joe had suspected, it seemed as if the body had been quickly tipped into the foundation site—as it might have been over the gunwale of a rowboat.

“You get lucky searching the records?” Jim Matthews wanted to know.

“Sort of,” Joe conceded. “The body may've been moved in two stages—onto the site the night before, hidden, and then here, presumably forever. Problem is, we just searched the watchman logs of the night before the pour, and nothing was noted.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning absolutely nothing,” Willy said from beside them.

Joe answered the question. “Security was a Band-Aid, mostly to prevent theft or sabotage. You had a guy with a time clock, wandering around like a bicyclist in the Pentagon. Took him all night to make two turns—pretty much hopeless.”

Of course, Willy had to add, “Or he was in on it, and moved the body himself. Rent-a-cops weren't held to the high standards they are now.”

Joe sighed inwardly as he sensed Matthews stiffen moments before walking away.

“Nice,” Joe said in an undertone. “Very diplomatic.”

“I thought so,” Willy responded.

Joe followed Matthews to where he was pretending to be checking a subordinate's clipboard entries.

“Any media response so far?”

The man's reaction was professional, any response to Willy's comment kept private. “Better than we'd hoped.” He pointed toward the entrance gate. “One truck and a couple of cars out there, but nothing like the old days. Probably helped that the press release stressed this happened before the plant even went live. Things'll heat up, for sure, but so far, so good.”

*   *   *

Slowly, the crime scene techs broadened the moat until, at last, they were on their hands and knees, their Tyvek suits filthy, chipping away at the emerging corpse like oversized vultures trying to share a meal.

The process was all the more exacting because of the anthropologist's discovery that the wet concrete had been fine-grained and liquid enough to form an excellent mold of the body's contours. This suggested that, although the remains were now skeletal, the mold's reverse impression might be detailed enough to help in identifying the body. As a result, the more relevant chunks holding the victim fast were as delicately cataloged and packaged as the bones themselves, for latex casting later.

Even Kunkle was impressed by the careful unveiling's end results. “Jesus. I'm half waiting for him to sit up.”

Joe crouched near the exposed cranium, studying it as if seeking a whispered explanation. “I think you're safe,” he said.

 

CHAPTER THREE

Beverly Hillstrom was impressed, as well. “I've never seen a case quite like it.”

For Joe, that was quite an admission, coming from not just the state's chief medical examiner, but one with vast experience. A confession of surprise from Beverly—given her erudition—was a rarity few had witnessed.

Joe, however, was among them. Over two decades, he'd earned her respect through his own dependable work ethic, and had recently graduated from colleague to romantic partner. That time—and now this new proximity—had allowed him insights into Beverly that generally escaped others—a development that had made him the happiest he'd been in a very long time.

At the moment, they—and Beverly's diener, Todd—were standing over what had been nicknamed
CONCRETE MAN
—pending a more permanent identity. He lay faceup, not on one of the morgue's two examination tables, but off to one side, on something more like a draped conference table. This was because Concrete Man was in pieces, each of which Hillstrom and Todd had spent an hour meticulously arranging in anatomical order, following their subject's return from the radiologist, who was busy studying the results elsewhere in the building.

The tidy array of bones reminded Joe of Wile E. Coyote, of Road Runner fame, after yet another encounter with a steamroller.

They were standing in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, or the OCME, located in the basement of the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington. It was the only place in Vermont where the state's roughly five hundred forensic autopsies were conducted every year.

“When you said you were sending me a case that had been entombed for forty years,” she continued, “I imagined a much more damaged skeleton.” She spread her gloved hands out, as if introducing a work of art. “But this is remarkable. I may have let popular prejudice override my scientific expectations.”

“How so?” he asked, surprised.

“This means of disposal is a cliché of early-twentieth-century fiction,” she said. “Usually in the context of the famous ‘overshoes' of Prohibition fame. I'd always assumed that the stories played on a mere handful of actual cases. But concrete encapsulations are not uncommon currency—to the point where they were addressed in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences
a while ago. I've never seen it in Vermont, however. Also, for some reason, I thought that the acid in the concrete would be much more destructive of the skeletal calcium. I forgot that concrete has a high level of calcium, inhibiting the very leaching of bony matter I was anticipating.”

Joe was amused. He always enjoyed it when she got nerdy on him, ramping up her already fancy prose style. “This was a special mix,” he offered. “I don't know about the chemistry, but the quality and consistency of concrete was above and beyond the norm.”

“I thought it was a warehouse floor.”

“Yes and no. Every aspect of construction was so closely supervised that we were told they applied the same standards across the board, whether it was the reactor building or a slab off to one side. Plus, given the amount of material called for over the whole four-year project, they set up their own manufacturing on-site, where it could be pumped or trucked around at their convenience. Anyhow, that's why this guy's final resting place wasn't your run-of-the-mill garage floor.”

She nodded. “Well, our good fortune. And I gather that they salvaged molds from around his face and one hand. That might prove helpful if they decide to make latex impressions later on, to help in identifying him.”

Joe agreed. “Fingers crossed. There's probably not much out there for comparison, like dental records and X-rays. All this happened pre–computer filing.”

She shrugged, still taking inventory. “It's a trade-off. They're making such inroads with DNA and the like, we may be able to get more out of this poor fellow than you think. Anyhow, let's see what he can tell us.”

As she bent over her work, he asked, “So it is a male? The anthropologist at the scene said so, too.”

“Oh, yes,” she confirmed. “I'd say a six-foot male Caucasoid of approximately thirty years of age, based on the skull and pelvic synthesis.”

“You don't have his name?” He laughed.

She looked up and smiled back. “That's where you earn your keep, I'm afraid. But, knowing you, I'm sure you will.” She touched a small blue stain high on the pelvic girdle and announced, “He was wearing blue jeans. Did you find rivets at the scene?”