The Skeleton's Knee (11 page)

I considered that Coyner, or whoever had stolen the chart, might also have burned something in the stove, maybe even the chart itself, minus the frame and glass. But the first scenario made more sense, especially with Fuller’s stained right hand.

It meant that Fuller had taken the precaution of burning the paper, either because he didn’t want someone to find it while he was recuperating in the hospital or because he suspected he wasn’t going to survive. Initially, after all, he had told Breen and his partner to let him die in peace.

If he hadn’t thought he was going to return, burning something self-incriminating wouldn’t make much sense. Unless the document—whatever it was—incriminated someone else.

After all, why live in a house for twenty years, eliminating everything that might reveal your past, and yet keep a self-incriminating document for posterity? Whatever it was he’d burned had to have pointed the finger at someone else, someone who posed a threat to him personally and yet whose secret he’d wanted to die with him if necessary.

Had that been the same person who had stolen the chart?

I began studying Tyler’s photographs one by one, focusing on every detail, hunting for anything odd. What burned in my mind now was the most banal of revelations: The person who had stolen the chart had to have known it was there to begin with. Did he, therefore, also know about the incriminating document? And if he did, then why wasn’t the place torn apart in a desperate search?

I pulled open the file containing my own photographs, the ones including both the chart and the unfocused shadow of someone lurking outside the window. I placed my shots of the building’s interior next to Tyler’s and compared them, looking for any discrepancies. The chart had vanished in the time between the taking of both sets of photographs; maybe something else had disappeared, too—something that had told the thief his secret was secure and that he had no need to conduct a frantic search.

Tyler had also taken a shot of the bookcase, straight-on, as I had. I laid them side by side and looked from one to the other, back and forth, my eyes aching with the concentration. What finally froze me wasn’t a single item but rather the absence of one; there was a small gap on the bottom shelf, near the stove, in Tyler’s picture. I squinted at my own picture, where the same gap was filled with the spine of a paperback book, the title of which had been circled with a broad band, like a felt-tip pen.

I sat back, curiously satisfied. The photos were in color, but the mark around the book’s title merely appeared brown. I was convinced, however, that had the picture been taken earlier, just after Fuller’s departure on the ambulance, the circle would have been as red as the blood from his pricked fingertip.

I stared at the now-missing book, smiling at its intended pun and admiring the mind of the man who had brought it to my attention, and to that of the chart thief. It was a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
.

HARRIET POKED HER HEAD
around the door to say that the second metal detector was waiting for us at the rental place and that everyone except Ron was either here or would meet us at Fuller’s place.

I neatened up my paperwork and crossed over to J.P.’s desk in the middle of the squad room. “I got something extra I’d like you to do when we get to Fuller’s.”

“Shoot.”

“I want you to go over the contents of that stove with a fine-tooth comb. If my hunch is right, you should find at least some trace of newly burned paper mixed in with the wood ash, near the front of the stove door. I think Fuller destroyed a document or a letter just before he was taken to the hospital.”

Tyler quietly nodded and crossed over to the closet where he kept his forensics bag of tricks.

The trip back up to Coyner’s remote property was made largely in silence. I had Dennis and Tyler with me; Sammie and Willy Kunkle were in separate cars.

At first, I wrote the quiet drive off to the contrasting personalities of my passengers. Dennis DeFlorio was as much a slob as Tyler was neat and precise, and they were not given to idle chats under the best of circumstances. But the farther we drove, the more I began to share their lack of enthusiasm for the search. Looking for the gun would be a long and tiresome procedure, and probably a fruitless one at that. Moreover, if by some miracle we did locate it, what would it prove? It would no longer have any prints on it, and any serial numbers would doubtless lead nowhere; a man of Fuller’s intelligence and caution would hardly have left behind a gun so easily traceable. The net result, if this all proved accurate, would be another brick wall, and although our efforts had only just begun, I was already feeling a sense of futility. We’d made some progress on the case, but nothing had brought us any closer to the solution of a more than twenty-year-old homicide.

By the time we arrived at Coyner’s house, Kunkle was already there with the rented metal detector, predictably giving voice to all our doubts. “Hey, Joe, we really going to hunt around for this guy’s gun?”

“Yeah. Anyone seen Coyner?”

Sammie, sitting in the passenger seat of her car with her legs stretched out toward the breathtaking view of the valleys below, answered, “I knocked—no answer.”

I checked my watch. “Okay, let’s get moving; we’ve got about five hours of light left.”

Tyler held up a canvas bag he’d brought along, adding without humor, “And flashlights for everybody.”

The general mood did not improve much during the afternoon, even with Tyler’s discovery, after painstaking work with tweezers and a magnifying glass, of the blackened remains of a letter in the wood stove. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell us more, since his conclusions were based on a few minute scraps of shiny ash.

It was, however, the sole highlight of the afternoon. The rest of our time was spent crisscrossing Fuller’s horticultural masterpiece in two teams, one detector apiece, stopping every few feet to investigate whatever set the machines off. Sometimes the reason was an old nail, a lost tool, the remains of a container; other times nothing was found, and when the area was rechecked after some digging, the detector stayed mute. J.P. hypothesized about the effects of iron in the soil; Kunkle was both less charitable and more crude.

At sunset I feared that morale had dipped so low I would have to call it quits. Instead, I had Tyler radio for the department’s emergency services van, equipped with portable halogen lamps, by whose light we continued along our narrow, predetermined search grids. I kept hopefully silent while the others punctuated their work with increasing complaints about the cold, the equipment, and their fate in general.

Since there were five of us, the odd member of the group sat out a quarter hour while the other four worked on. At around 7:45, the sun long since set, I was sitting on Fuller’s front stoop, watching the others shuffling through their paces near the edge of the woods, their shadows sharp-edged by the harsh lights, when for the hundredth time I heard the persistent complaint of one of the detectors. I saw Sammie’s diminutive form stop, while Dennis’s bulk dropped to all fours and began to scratch the earth’s surface with a hand spade he’d borrowed from the toolshed. He sat back on his haunches a few minutes later, a small pile of dirt by his side, and Sammie played the detector across the surface of the shallow hole once more. The chirping reached my ears again.

I got up and walked toward them, hearing Dennis swearing as he bent to his task again, scooping out larger clods, assisting the spade with his other hand now. Once more, Sammie swept over the hole with the detector’s broad, flat, horizontal disk. It sounded a third time.

“Goddamn it,” Dennis growled and reached into the hole.

“What’d you think?” I asked Sammie.

She shrugged noncommittally, but her eyes were tightly focused on Dennis’s work. “Beats me. First time it’s been this deep.”

Tyler and Kunkle crossed over to us, having marked their spot with their own machine. Without asking, Willy fell in next to Dennis, his one powerful hand making his own spade work like a miniature steam shovel.

After they’d gone down about two feet, I interrupted them, aware of Dennis’s heavy breathing and the gleam of sweat on the back of his neck. “Try it again.”

The detector repeated itself, its irritating alarm now egging us on. I switched places with DeFlorio. Kunkle stayed where he was, muttering, “This better be something, or I’m out of here. This is bullshit.”

“At least it’s easy digging,” I commented, half to myself.

“Yeah—I noticed that,” Willy said in a voice that made me pause to look up at him.

He grinned back at me. “Kind of makes you wonder.”

It was true, I thought. Vermont soil is notoriously “bony”—as rock-strewn as a boulder field—and all afternoon, in response to the detectors’ urging, we’d been proving that generality correct. But here, the consistently soft, almost wet earth moved under our spades as in a well-tilled garden—except that we were far below the level of Fuller’s lovingly tended soil.

At three and a half feet, Dennis and J.P. were hanging on to us for dear life, trying to keep us from falling into the narrow hole. Each scoop of the spade now had to be followed by a grunting heave back up to the surface so the dirt wouldn’t slide back to the bottom, but neither Willy nor I would be relieved. Driven by the detector’s persistence, we were now convinced we were close to discovery, although Willy, true to form, disguised his own excitement by muttering, “Probably a fucking Model T under here.”

We all knew it as soon as my spade made contact, sending up a single sharp clang that froze us all in position.

“Shine a light in here,” I ordered.

Four bright halos cascaded into the hole where I was hanging almost upside down. I stuck the spade into the soft earthen wall around me and used my bare hand to brush the dirt away.

“What the hell is that?” In their craning to see, I felt someone’s grip loosen on my legs, then felt myself slide down the hole until my nose was almost flat on the bottom.

“Goddamn it.”

When I scooped the earth away, I discovered a bright, shiny stainless-steel globe, about the size of an orange. I carefully worked my fingers to either side of it, trying to gain some definition. It was attached to two darker, grittier objects that extended from it at a forty-five degree angle, like shafts from the apex of some oversized drafting compass. Indeed, now that I could see it better, I knew the metal ball was actually a hinge, beautifully designed, immaculately crafted, and surgically precise.

“Pull me back up.”

They dragged me over the edge and went back to staring at our small, twinkling treasure, ignoring me as I tried scraping some of the mud from my stomach and face.

“It’s some sort of machine,” Dennis said tentatively.

“In a way,” I answered. “It’s an artificial stainless-steel knee joint, and it’s attached to a skeleton.”

“
HELLO, LIEUTENANT
.”

I turned away from the jumble of people setting up staging and equipment by the roped-off grave site and saw Beverly Hillstrom coming toward me. I had called her right after discovering the skeleton, to ask her advice on how to deal with it. It was now 10:00
A.M.
the following morning.

I smiled at her with genuine pleasure and shook her slim, elegant hand. “Doctor. It’s wonderful to see you; I thought one of your regional MEs would be attending. I didn’t know you were coming.”

“I wasn’t going to initially, but then I couldn’t resist it. Besides, once I’d recommended a forensic archaeologist, I thought the least I could do was to introduce him personally.”

She turned and gestured to a short, wiry man whose face was as bushy with black hair as his head was gleamingly bald. His eyes looked enormous behind thick, dark-framed glasses, and he squinted at me slightly as we exchanged formalities, as if considering what a slice of me would look like under a microscope.

Hillstrom beamed between us, the immaculate hostess. “Dr. Boris Leach—Lieutenant Joe Gunther.”

Leach’s eyes shifted away from me after a cursory glance, focusing instead on the activities by the hole. His hand was cold and limp in mine, and I dropped it as soon as I could.

“Lieutenant, I take it no one has aggravated the hole any further?” He stepped around me and ducked under the yellow Mylar “Police Line” we’d used to surround the site.

Hillstrom patted my arm quickly and smiled, encouraging me to ignore Leach’s arrogant tone of voice. I realized then she wasn’t here purely out of professional curiosity. When I’d called her about the skeleton, she’d warned me that Leach was no Miss Manners; she’d obviously decided upon reflection to run interference between us.

I lifted the barrier for her and we followed in Leach’s wake. “It’s just the way we left it last night, except for what your assistant dropped off a while ago.”

He stood at the edge of the hole, now illuminated by the bright, cool sunlight. The metal knee joint shone like a white spark, nestled in its pit. He looked around suddenly, “Where’s the backhoe? I told Henry specifically to request a backhoe. I can’t be expected to remove four feet of dirt by myself. It’s idiotic… Pointless.”

I held up my hand to interrupt him. “It’s coming, Doctor; it should be here in a few minutes. What about everything else?”

That sidetracked him for a while. He left us to examine the pile of equipment his twitchy, birdlike assistant Henry had brought in a pickup truck some forty-five minutes earlier.

Watching him, I muttered to Hillstrom, “Too many years digging in the Gobi Desert?”

She smiled like an indulgent mother. “Take the bad with the good, Lieutenant. This man is very good.”

Leach returned from his inventory and fixed me with his fierce owl-wide eyes. “Who’s the forensics man on your team?”

“J. P. Tyler.” I shouted over to J.P., who was doing his own surreptitious examination of Leach’s assembled hardware.

Rather than waiting for Tyler to join us, Leach marched off and made his own introductions. Both men took hammers and large spikes and set off toward opposite trees near the grave site. Once there, they drove the spikes into the trunks, fastened them to the ends of two reeled measuring tapes, and unrolled the tapes toward the hole, establishing both a double set of fixed surveying points and an accurate triangulation system. From now on, all maps of the site would feature the two trees, and all items on that map would be measured from them. Indeed, even as I was admiring the simple efficiency of the plan, I saw Leach thrust a drawing pad, a pencil, and a ruler into Tyler’s hands.