Red Herring (22 page)

There would be no need for a warrant here.

Sky stuck his big feet out before him and clasped his hands across his stomach. “So,” he said, “what piece of detective work brings you here?”

“That obvious?” she asked.

He gave her a gentle smile. “Samantha, when you come here to cry, you look like a lost puppy; when you come here to help me work and get distracted, you dress like I do; when you come here to see Margaret and whatever kid may be hanging around, you bring gifts. Now, you look like a cop. If you were a man, you’d be wearing a tie.”

She was laughing. “I wish I were a better undercoater, Sky, ’cause then we could switch jobs, although if we did, my bosses would get a great detective, and you’d lose all your customers.”

He wagged a finger at her. “Don’t sell yourself short. You’re better than you think, and trust me”—he waved his hand around—“this doesn’t take a genius. Plus, I’d be a terrible cop. I like people too much.”

She nodded her agreement. “You’re probably right there. It helps to be a little hard-nosed.”

He was studying her as she spoke, and now asked, “You sure you’re okay? I saw the paper this morning, about the three murders. You’re right in the middle of that, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“Thought so,” he continued. “I told Margaret the same thing. ‘Poor Sammie,’ I said, ‘knee-deep in evil again, I bet.’ ”

“Well,” Sam conceded, “you were right.”

“Is that what brings you here?”

“It is,” she admitted. “We’re collecting lists of people who either
benefit from certain services, like this one, or who have certain specific occupations. Afterward, we’ll compare all the lists to see what names overlap.”

His eyebrows rose. “And you want people who get their cars oiled? That’s a lot of folks, if you’re getting to all my competitors, too.”

“We’re trying to,” she said. “That’s where the math kicks in. When we get enough lists, the names appearing across the board are likely to be few and far between.”

He shook his head in wonderment. “That’s amazing, how you do that.” He suddenly grasped both chair arms in his large hands and pushed himself to a standing position. “Well,” he said, “let’s not dilly-dally. I got a list on the computer. We were about to print it out for our company Christmas card.”

He led the way back across the barn floor to a small cluttered office in the far corner. A school desk was the largest thing in it, the shelves were sagging with trade magazines and catalogs dating back years, there were pictures of family and friends—including one featuring Sam and Willy, who was frowning, of course. Sky carefully settled behind the computer, cleared its keyboard of unopened mail, and turned it on.

“What other lists are you looking at?” he asked. “If that doesn’t break any rules to ask.”

“No, no,” she said. “It’ll sound a little weird, but it’s welders and hospital employees and funeral-home workers and ammo reloaders and woodworkers, among others. Kind of a hodgepodge. That’s just some of them.”

He was nodding as he scrutinized the screen, waiting for the computer to fully awaken.

“Like a hunter who has a home shop with a table saw and a welding rig, and who volunteers nights as a hospital aide.”

Again, she laughed at his clear-sightedness. “Exactly. You are
good
, Sky. That’s amazing.”

He shook his head and started typing. “Nah. I’m just describing damn near everybody I know. Hell, I’m most of those myself, except for the medical stuff. I don’t like blood, so I volunteer as a firefighter. You know that.”

“I do,” she allowed.

He foraged around amid the displaced mail until he found a pair of reading glasses that he daintily perched on his nose. “There. That’s better.”

He glanced up at her quickly. “What about a psychological profile? You have anything there?”

She shook her head. “He’s killed three people, as you know from the paper. But, to be honest, people killing people isn’t that abnormal. I’m not sure a profile would tell us much.”

He frowned, as much at the screen as at her comment. “I’ve heard that,” he said, “but I don’t really want to believe it.”

He suddenly pushed himself away from the desk and shoved the glasses up into his hair to better study her. “You’re looking for someone who does all these things, or comes into contact with them, but you’re also looking for someone who’s not right in the head.” He held up his finger. “Maybe anybody can kill once, ’specially in the right circumstances, but three times?”

She wasn’t sure what to say, and merely muttered, “I guess.”

Sky lurched forward and started stabbing the keyboard again. “Tell you what: You don’t tell anyone what it means, and I’ll put some asterisks by the people I think might be crazy enough to be who you’re after.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off with a raised hand. “I know, I know. You’ve got other undercoaters you’re talking
to and a dozen lists to read and then you’ll find out that your villain didn’t even own a car. None of that matters. I just want to do this, okay? I know it’s probably libelous or some damn thing, so all I’m saying here is that the names I’ll check are a little weird. It’s just my two cents worth, okay?”

The printer began chattering, somewhere behind a stack of bills, and in five minutes Sam found herself back outside in the driveway, seated behind the wheel, and scrutinizing Sky’s customers.

Nothing leaped out. She recognized a few names because of past DUIs or other old cases she’d handled while on the PD. Scanning the addresses didn’t do much for her, either.

What stuck in her mind, though, wasn’t the actual list. It was the fact that Sky had thought of marking certain names in the first place.

In general, interactions with forensic labs are done electronically or by mail. So many boxes of weapons, buccal swabs of DNA, cast impressions of tire treads, photographs, reports, and other paperwork are put in the mail that the U.S. Postal Service is considered a reliable and acceptable link in any chain of custody. Indeed, the efficiency of this mundane but reliable system was often preferred over hand deliveries.

Joe, however, tended toward old school. He felt that handing over an item face-to-face, or at least following up in like fashion after the article had arrived, was not only good manners, but proof of the object’s importance in the overall scheme of the sender.

Of course, he understood being hectored by matters of routine. But there were exceptions, and he believed this was one of them.

The Brookhaven findings—along with the gains he was hoping might come from them—were of a unique nature to Joe. Born of a process he’d never guessed existed, they were aimed at catching a criminal he wanted to stop more than he had any other in a very long time.

Whoever this man was, standing invisible behind the dead bodies of three innocent people, taunting the police with his ominous blood drops, he was certainly not the average crook, bent on conventional malice. This one ran deeper, more cruel and calculating, and in search of a goal they could only hope he’d reached, assuming that meant no further killings. Joe didn’t want to even consider the fallout of finding another victim. That was one more reason for driving to the crime lab in person—to escape his desk phone and the pile of news-hyped messages from people demanding to know what social plague had gripped bucolic Vermont.

The state’s forensic lab was for the moment on the top floor of one of a cluster of ancient, inefficient, dour red brick buildings now blandly called the State Office Building Complex, but known in 1891—the time of its creation—as the Vermont State Hospital for the Insane. At its peak housing some fourteen hundred patients, the actual hospital portion of the campus now barely functioned, and was annually threatened with extinction. But it was far from isolated; all around its shrunken core, inhabiting the many nooks and crannies it had once called its own, was a gathering of state agencies cut loose from nearby Montpelier. As bureaucracy had grown, the world becoming more complicated, demanding, and politically compromised, the state’s leaders had latched on to the erstwhile insane asylum’s fall from popularity and gradually filled its emptying buildings with entities as diverse as Natural Resources, Corrections, Children and Families, Environmental Conservation, and—more relevant to Joe—the Department of Public Safety. It was this latter building that housed not just the state police headquarters and the crime lab, but also the central office of Joe’s own Vermont Bureau of Investigation—even if that did only amount to just enough room for Bill Allard and a secretary.

Joe prowled the forever-packed parking lot for a hole, lucking out at last at the far end, and walked toward the old, hulking edifice, noticing how much the snow had yielded to the warmer temperatures of a normal October. At least the lab would eventually be free of its confines, he reflected—almost ten million dollars had been secured at long last to build David Hawke and his team new quarters, allowing what was a highly regarded, nationally certified operation an environment more befitting its true quality.

Once inside and past the buzzer-controlled entryway, Joe eschewed the small elevator, climbed the two flights to the top floor, forever impressed by the austere architecture, and then wandered down a short hallway to Bill’s miniature domain. He hadn’t called ahead—not to Bill—but he also wasn’t averse to Allard joining the conversation he was anticipating with Hawke.

As so often happened when he dropped by, he found Bill scrutinizing his computer screen as if it were covered with hieroglyphics.

“Hey,” he said from the door.

Allard didn’t even glance in his direction. Only his eyebrows rose in greeting.

“I’m reading about you right now.”

Joe stepped into the small office. “The
Reformer
? Yeah—that was a shoe dropping I didn’t expect. That the bad guy would blow our cover.”

Bill shook his head. “The
Reformer
was nothing. This is the
Boston Globe
. They’re loving that we’ve turned into Newark.”

Joe sat down. “Newark? They say that?”

“Not in so many words, but Newark is mentioned as the epitome of armpits, and Vermont’s in the same paragraph. Subtle, it is not.”

The phone rang. Allard picked it up, listened briefly, and told his secretary, “Like all the others—I’m currently out of the office.”

He hung up and looked at Joe for the first time. “Since eight
A.M.
,” he said. “Nonstop. The press, the politicians, the brass from downstairs. The governor called; I could hear him sweating on the phone. ‘Remember,’ he says, ‘I created you with my pen.’ Can you believe that?”

Joe smiled. “Sure I can. Why’s he give a damn?”

Allard broke away from the screen and sat back, locking his hands behind his head. “You really don’t know?”

“What? It’s not like
he’s
whacking these people.”

“In an election year,” Bill explained, “they give a damn about everything, and you know what? They’re right. Your old girlfriend chooses to make hay out of this, Reynolds will end up with egg on his face, guaranteed.”

Joe scowled, trying to follow the logic.

“It’s the same as when New York gets hit with a snowstorm,” Bill went on. “The people yell at the snowplow people; they yell at their bosses; the bosses yell back and get the union riled up. The union screams about how the mayor shortchanged their hours, benefits, and operating budget. The mayor says his hands are tied because of shenanigans in Albany; and the next thing he knows, the New York State governor loses the election because of something he couldn’t have controlled in the first place.”

He pointed at Joe. “Our governor is wondering if you’re not a snowstorm.”

“Me?” Joe asked.

“You’re the one being quoted.” He pointed at the screen. “And that’s all it takes.”

Joe absorbed that for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Did he actually say anything I care about?”

“No, but his attitude was more panicky than I thought it would be. He’s starting to really sweat this one.”

“And an incumbent, no less,” Joe mused.

“Well,” Bill admitted, “I won’t be voting for her, but your old . . .”

“Gail,” Joe interrupted. “I’m getting tired of the girlfriend handle.”

Allard chuckled. “Right. Fair enough. Gail. Anyhow, she’s gaining yards. The rape victim angle is probably key, not to sound heartless, but even without it, I think she stood a good chance. Reynolds’s been there a long time, and people have gotten to attach him to most of their problems—like the guys downstairs and the creation of VBI.”

Joe laughed at the irony of that. “You telling me cops’ll be voting for Gail because Reynolds created us?”

Bill shook his head like a sage confronting a dense student. “Come, Grasshopper, did I not tell you about snowstorms?”

Joe checked his watch and rose to his feet. “Jesus. I’ll leave it to you to ponder that crap. I’m actually here to see David. You want to join us? I want to kick around what he’s learned from the Brookhaven stuff.”

The phone rang again as Bill stood also. “And leave all this?”

He preceded Joe out the door, ignoring the phone.

The crime lab was down the hall, behind locked doors, but David Hawke’s even smaller office was just a few yards away from Bill’s, toward the stairwell, and with a single window overlooking an airshaft. Joe could only imagine how much Hawke was fantasizing about his proposed new digs, purportedly less than a full construction year away.

If you believed what you heard.

Hawke gave them his standard affable smile as they crossed his threshold, and rose to shake hands. “Two of you? Should I be nervous?”

“Hardly,” Allard reassured him. “I’m just running away from my phone.”

Hawke gestured toward the door and ushered them both back out. “Then let me aid and abet. I think it’ll be better if we talk in the lab. I can do a little show-and-tell, and we can all escape the phones.”

He led the way to the lab’s reinforced door and entered both his password on the lock and their names on the visitors’ sheet, speaking as he did so. “I was really pleased with what they did down there, Joe. I’m guessing you’re pretty happy, too, given all the new avenues this opened up, but on a scientific level—and even just an interagency one—this whole deal seemed to me like a home run.”