The Company She Kept (6 page)

Joe opened his front door cautiously and peered past his guest to see if anyone was standing in the driveway. Willy Kunkle stared at him, looking peeved.

“Really? No secret knock? There's nobody stalking where we actually work, boss. We don't have to sneak around like the KKK.”

Joe stepped back to let him in. “You telling me the office parking lot had no camera trucks?” he asked. “And that our phone wasn't ringing nonstop?”

Willy didn't answer.

“Right,” Joe said under his breath, and closed the door.

Lester and Sam were already there.

Joe waited for his last arrival to settle onto the edge of a sofa before he began. “This'll be super quick, and from now on we'll run the press gauntlet. I just wanted to compare notes among ourselves before more people join in and it gets harder to speak plainly and clearly.”

“Things'll pipe down soon enough,” Willy argued. “They always do.”

“Normally, I'd agree,” said Joe. “But I think we're in for something new this time. That's why I wanted to meet off the grid, if just this once.”

“How's this different?” Sam asked. “I mean, aside from the body being a senator. It's not like it was the governor or something.”

Joe rose and leaned against the counter that separated his small living room from his even smaller kitchen. Gilbert seized the opportunity to leap up next to him and butt Joe's shoulder with his head, before seating himself elegantly atop his master's paperwork.

“I may be wrong,” Joe allowed. “But humor me for a couple of days until reality kicks in. Then we'll see. My instinct is that when it comes to gay rights and civil liberties and the rest of it, we Vermonters are living in a bubble.”

“LGBTQ,” Sam told him. “That's what they prefer—not individually, but as a group, like in a press release.”

Joe stopped dead. “I realize that. I just can never get the order straight in my head.”

“Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning,” Sam recited. “LGBTQ. It's got a kind of cadence to it.”

Willy snorted. “Spare me. Questioning? Why not H for Having a Bad Day?”

“You are such a caveman,” she told him.

“We all set on this?” Joe asked, trying not to sound testy.

“Sorry,” Sam said, looking down at the floor. As if sensing a soul in need, Gilbert abandoned Joe, leaped to the floor, made a semicircle around Willy, and jumped into Sammie's lap. She wrapped him in her arms.

Joe's irritation faded. “Sam,” he said, “we'll make sure you're the one who speaks to the media when the time comes, okay? I'd just get the initials screwed up.”

He cleared his throat to get back on track. “I'm just finding out how all this works, but I've heard through the grapevine that Susan Raffner was as involved with the BGL…”

“LGBT … Q.”

“Thank you …

“That she was as keen for the cause as were the sixties radicals with their protests and sit-ins. The Internet is on fire with one group or another arguing its case, and Susan, no surprise, was very vocal, but
not,
” he emphasized, “to the extent you might think. She had so many other fish to fry that this one apparently qualified for a lower ranking among her enthusiasms.”

“But she
was
a lesbian?” Lester asked. “That's solid?”

“Read the label on her chest, son,” Willy said.

“
That
doesn't mean anything,” Lester countered.

“It did this time,” Willy continued. “It's just that no one gives a shit about it around here. That's what Joe meant by our living in a bubble.” He pointed out the window. “Lester, you're a sweet, ignorant homie. Outside this white-bread, milquetoast state, people
hate
each other for no reason at all. Trust me on that. I fit right in out there in the real world.”

Joe held up his hands. “Okay, okay. For what's it's worth, I spoke to the governor on the phone yesterday—she confirmed Raffner was gay. Let's kick around what we may be dealing with. I want to see what cards we can put faceup.”

“Walks, talks, and looks like a duck,” Willy predictably spoke first. “It's a hate crime by some fundamentalist right-wing wacko. Throw it to the feds and let them handle the publicity.”

“I didn't know she was a lesbian,” Sammie said. “And I doubt anyone else here did, either. So why target someone in a big way that nobody knew was a target in the first place? No fed I know is gonna take this without compelling evidence.”

“Joe said she was outspoken on the Internet,” Lester reminded her. “This maybe has nothing to do with Vermont or her being a senator or close to the governor or anything else. Could've been someone from out-of-state who killed her.”

“If that's true,” Willy said stubbornly, “then it's the equivalent of a terrorist act, which means two things: Somebody's got to take credit for it or miss out on the headlines; and it again becomes a federal case, like I keep saying, which means we can get back to chasing psycho woodchucks and leave this crap to the big boys.”

“You really don't want to get this guy?” Sam asked, genuinely surprised.

“Not if he's some Arkansas Bible thumper. I'm saying that if Lester's right, this belongs to the people with the deepest pockets and the most resources. I'm being practical, for once. Give me credit.”

“We're getting ahead of ourselves,” Joe cautioned them. “Let's work from the crime scene out, as usual, and see what's real. Is there any evidence that she didn't die in our fair state, regardless of where her killer came from?”

After a telling pause, Willy started over. “Single vehicle, probably a pickup, quick in-and-out, just long enough to string up the body and leave. That and Raffner's clothes imply a killing somewhere else, but nothing that says out-of-state. Plus, she lived here and was found here. Logic says she was killed here, too.”

“What about the purse found at the bottom of the cliff?” Lester asked.

“Probably tossed there to attract attention,” Willy replied. “Which is what it did, making them look up.”

“The ME hasn't issued the autopsy results yet,” Joe told them, “but cause of death seems to have been the second of two blows to the head. The rope was just for show—postmortem—as was the wording on her chest.”

“She raped?” Willy asked bluntly.

“It doesn't appear so,” Joe said. “She was manhandled some.”

“Her house showed nothing unusual,” Lester offered. “No signs of struggle, blood, or forced entry. The dog sitter she used said she dropped off the pooch like usual. Dog lived at the sitter's during the legislative session 'cause of Raffner's crazy schedule, so she hadn't seen Susan in a couple of weeks.”

“She was a slob, though,” Willy added. “And had a little weed by the bed, no surprise.”

“What about her car?” Joe asked. “Anyone get a copy of the report on that yet?”

“It was the state police who located it,” Sam reported, “so it went straight to the crime lab. They also processed the junkyard where it was found, but so far, I haven't heard they found anything—sounds pretty much like the house.”

“The legislature's still going strong,” Joe continued. “So, she would've been in Montpelier, most likely, which explains the dog. A lot of the senators from far away either have apartments or condos locally, to cut down on the commuting, or they've got roommate setups with other politicos. Do we know about her?”

“She rented the top floor from an old lady who lives below,” Willy said, causing everyone to look at him. “With the unlikely name of Regina Rockefeller.”

“How do you know that?” Sam asked.

“I am the poh-leece,” he replied. “And we got our guys from the headquarters unit going to check it out. I called the woman who's in charge of herding senators up there—some title with ‘clerk' in it—and she gave me Raffner's particulars.”

“Nice work,” Joe said. “Along those lines, have we started on a timeline for her? Last seen? Last contacted via electronic device? Last appointment met and missed?”

“I'm on that,” Sam said. “I'm coordinating it with the crime lab folks. I figured we might as well use them as a conduit for now, since they're the catchall for everything else being collected from all quarters. So far, there's a cell phone, two home computers, a laptop, and a tablet. With any luck, we'll get an idea about her last movements from one of them.”

Joe resisted reacting to anyone having or needing so many screen-equipped nuisances.

As if reading his mind, Sam added, “Along with those gizmos, she had dozens of filing cabinets filled with probably thousands of documents, any one of which might have something to do with how she ended up. She had hundreds of friends, allies, fellow protesters, and who knows what else that should be interviewed.”

“And colleagues she worked with in the State House,” Joe threw in. “They don't have personal secretaries or staffers under the dome. They share a clerical and legal pool of people. They should be questioned, too.”

Sam addressed that, being the squad's primary traffic manager. “Parker and Perry are on it already, that being in their backyard. We're gonna have to expand this conversation to include more bodies, if you want some of these answers. It's already gotten way beyond just us. The paper files alone are going to take an amazing amount of time to process, unless there's a break to help us out.”

Parker Murray and Perry Craver were two ex–state police VBI investigators assigned to the central Waterbury unit, out of the headquarters building. There were five VBI squads, or units, across the state, located geographically for convenience. Murray and Craver didn't lead their squad, nor were they the only ones comprising it; it was the alliteration of their first names that always lumped them together, and gave the unit its identity within the VBI. It also didn't hurt that they usually teamed up on a case.

Joe spoke to Willy. “You mentioned fundamentalist right-wingers. Were you just being opinionated, or do you actually have a lead?”

Sammie let out a brief laugh. Willy cast her an amused look and asked generally, “What do you think?”

Joe ignored the humor. “So, who do we know who hates lesbians enough to kill one?”

For once there was dead silence in the room, followed by Lester saying plaintively, “It's
Vermont,
boss. It's like a nonissue.”

“That's what I was saying at the top,” Joe reminded them. “We need to get our heads out of that cloud. If this killing was about Susan's sexual orientation, it wouldn't be the first instance of something happening in Vermont attracting a flatlander nutcase. We need to broaden our horizons.”

Sammie had opened her laptop and was typing at high speed—another skill Joe didn't have.

“Southern Poverty Law Center,” she said. “They collect so much information on these groups, they have their own intelligence unit. The fusion center in Williston put me onto them.”

“Speaking of the fusion center,” Lester suggested, “they'd be good to consult, too. If they don't get an immediate hit in-state, they can spread the word.”

Joe nodded. It was a good idea. There were seventy-eight centers across the United States, many with staff experts on specific topics, who cross-communicated regularly.

“I'm sending an e-mail to someone I know up there right now,” Sam said, her eyes locked on the screen.

Willy, who did his best to present as a troglodyte, was almost as comfortable with computers as Sam—although Lester had them both beat. Nevertheless, he routinely talked down his prowess, as he did indirectly now. “None of that typing's gonna nail the crazy bastard who did this.”

“You know that for a fact?” Joe asked.

Willy tapped the side of his nose. “I smell it. We're not talking Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City federal building. This is somebody who was pissed off—up close and personal.”

“Maybe it's local politics after all?”

Willy canted his head to one side, considering his boss's question. “Maybe. Could also be sex-related.”

“Fair enough,” Joe agreed. “Another reason that we ask about any complaints, fights, disagreements—be they political or personal—when we start asking time, place, and last-seen questions.”

“You're gonna have to talk to your old girlfriend, boss.”

An awkward stillness caught the room. Sammie eyed Willy reproachfully. “Jesus. You are smooth.”

Willy's eyes widened innocently. “I'm just sayin'.”

Joe broke the tension. “He's right. I was probably the first person Gail called after she heard. She, Susan, and I go back. I doubt the governor had a closer friend, including me—even before we broke up. If Susan was having problems, Gail most likely would've heard about it.”

“Speaking of which,” Lester said, “what if this
is
connected to politics? Would that mean the governor's under threat, too?”

“What if it's connected to sex?” Willy offered, looking directly at Joe. “After you two went your separate ways, could Gail've found comfort in Susan's bed?”

Sammie, always the loyalist, slapped her computer closed. “You can be such an asshole.”

“It's a fair question,” Joe said calmly, adding with a tension-dissolving half smile, “if indelicately put. The answer is: I don't know. I'll ask.”

“Better you than me,” Willy admitted.

“You'd never get in the room with her,” Lester said. “She
hates
you.”

There was scattered laughter as everyone considered the long list of such people.

“You are an acquired taste,” Joe told him.

Gilbert had returned to the countertop to be with Joe, who now reached out to scratch him behind the ears, changing subjects as he did so. “Okay. Unless somebody has something more to add, I think that wraps it up. Allard has given us a total green light—we can go anywhere, use anyone from the other VBI units, and we have access to discretionary funds to make it happen. That also means that if we screw anything up, it'll be our butts on the barn door, so we need to be careful, courteous, and thorough. We will be dealing with other agencies, entitled political types, hypersensitive true believers, and a growing number of reporters. Sam and I will work out assignments.