The Skeleton's Knee (14 page)

It wasn’t easy. The farther we buried ourselves in this wilderness, the more the tension became punctuated by sounds far off, the flickering of half-seen flashlights, and the incessant urgent mutterings of our portable radios. As the four sides of this roughly coordinated search grid converged, the danger increased that one of us might mistake the other for a target and convert this well-intentioned effort into tragedy.

This very point was driven home when Katz, slightly to my right, stepped on a rabbit, which immediately bolted into the bush, causing him to shout out in alarm and Hartley—just barely visible on the flank—to swing toward us, gun raised.

“It’s okay,” I shouted, freezing in midstep, half-dropped into a crouch.

“Who’s there?” came a voice from off to the side, reinforced by the nervously flitting beam of a powerful flashlight.

“Joe Gunther and three others. You the other flank?” Instinctively, I and the other two officers also waved our lights about. I could feel the relief flooding the air among us, thick in Katz’s voice as he muttered, “Thank God.”

We found Billy Manierre in a small clearing near the Frog Pond five minutes later. A large, white-haired, avuncular man, representing, along with Brandt and myself, the old guard of the department, he was always dressed in uniform—a recruiting poster testament to how high a patrolman could go.

He was holding a map in one hand and a flashlight in the other, grilling one of his team leaders on their coverage of the scene. Greenhill Parkway, a seldom-used, isolated residential street, had not been blocked off.

The young officer wilting under Manierre’s questioning tried his best to explain, but his stammered excuses could never address the root of the problem, as both Billy and I well knew. We were a “full service” department, which meant we offered everything a big city department did. But while every branch of a major metropolitan police force was fully funded and staffed, ours were sometimes represented by a single individual, often one with several other hats to wear. As tonight’s efforts had amply demonstrated, our lofty aims, combined with our lack of personnel and experience, sometimes fell a little short of the mark.

Greenhill Parkway was a dead-end street paralleling the interstate and leading off Route 9. It didn’t even border the area we’d just searched, but, rather, pointed like a finger into its heart. Billy was by now convinced that leaving it open had allowed the shooter to jump calmly into his car and join the backed-up traffic on Route 9 while we were noisily setting up our dragnet.

I returned to the interstate, to find Beverly Hillstrom in the company of Ron Klesczewski, a tow-truck crew, and a fire engine company that was hosing down the punctured hearse. Farther off, several state troopers were beginning to direct the newly released traffic.

“No luck, I take it?” Ron asked.

I shook my head. “How’s the driver?”

“Serious but stable,” Hillstrom answered. “He was hit twice in the leg. Why was someone trying to kill us?”

“I don’t think he was necessarily trying to kill anyone. I think he was after our friend here.” I peered through the remains of the hearse’s back window at the black plastic body bag on the stretcher. “You had a chance to check him out yet?”

Ron, no doubt still smarting from his day-long ordeal at the State’s Attorney’s office, muttered, “You’d think he was dead enough already.”

Hillstrom opened the back of the wounded station wagon and climbed in. “He’s dead enough, Sergeant, but he may have things to tell us yet. Lieutenant, if you had any worries earlier about my bringing in a specialist to examine these bones, you can relax. It will be done.”

She carefully checked the body bag for bullet holes. “There’s one near the head, and another lower down. If there’s any damage, it shouldn’t be difficult differentiating it from any older trauma. For all that gunfire, I’d say the sniper wasn’t a very good shot.”

“He was aiming for the gas tank,” I replied.

She nodded soberly, realizing that by mere proximity, had the hearse exploded, her car would have been burned to a crisp. “Well, if you’ll help me get this fellow into my backseat, I’d like to get to work on this as soon as possible.”

I looked at her and smiled, wondering if she’d been as rattled as I, and knowing I’d never find out. “You mind if I arrange a state police escort?”

She smiled back a little tiredly. “No. I think I’d like that.”

IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK
before various members of the squad began filtering back into the office, slightly stunned at being catapulted from a low-profile, twenty-year-old brainteaser of a murder case to a headline-grabbing machine-gun attack by a maniac on a national interstate highway.

We had conducted the post-ambush follow-up by the numbers, including using Red, our narcotics tracking dog, to see if the shooter had left a scent from the place where Billy Manierre and his ragtag crew had found a handful of spent cartridge shells. There’d actually been a moment of hope when the dog had taken off in a beeline—but the scent had dried up at the top of Greenhill Parkway, confirming Billy’s pessimistic prediction that the shooter had not overlooked the same obvious escape route we had.

Brandt had made an appearance, something he rarely did, to invoke his famous GOYA and KOD maxim, which stood for “Get Off Your Asses and Knock on Doors.” It was good advice, if indelicately phrased, and had already been put in motion. But nothing had come of it. No one in the entire neighborhood had seen or heard a thing, with the exception of a few who’d confused the actual gunfire for a truck malfunctioning on the interstate.

There was a feeling hovering over all of us, as palpable as smog, that we’d just been given a proper mugging.

Nevertheless, I figured I’d better start with the only physical evidence we had so far, and so I went to visit Tyler in his tiny corner laboratory—a converted broom closet. He was standing at one of two narrow counters, looking up something in a thick reference book.

“Any luck?” I asked, leaning against the doorjamb.

He jotted down a quick note, then emptied a manila envelope onto the counter. Some fifteen brass shells rolled and spun out into a semicircle before him. “.223 caliber, consistent with ammunition they were putting into M-16s over twenty years ago.”

He reached out and picked one up at random. “No prints on any of them, and they’re all stamped ‘LC 67,’ which I just found out stands for the Lake City Arsenal, Independence, Missouri, 1967—the year they were manufactured. Lake City had a contract with the military to churn these out during the Vietnam War.”

He stopped, took off his reading glasses, and looked at me.

“Anything else?” I asked him.

“That’s it.”

I now understood why he hadn’t come running into my office earlier. “And you don’t have anything new from yesterday?”

He shook his head. “Not enough time yet.”

I thanked him and crossed the squad room to seek out Sammie Martens, whom I could hear pounding away on her typewriter. She was sitting in one of the cubicles we’d formed by erecting several interconnecting soundproof panels.

“How ’bout you? Any encouraging news?”

She sat back in her chair and made a face at me. “If you mean about tonight, forget it.” But then she smiled. “I do have something on Fred Coyner, though.”

She consulted a sheet of notes next to the typewriter. “Frederick Mills Coyner was born here in Brattleboro on August 4, 1917, the only child of a couple who died within three years of each other when Fred was a teenager. He inherited the house off Hescock Road, along with about five thousand dollars and some two hundred acres surrounding the house.

“He dropped out of high school after his mother died and from then on pretty much made his living off the land. On various forms over the years, he’s listed his occupation as logger, sugarman, farmer, and contract mechanic. He never made much money, but apparently he stayed solvent and kept his nose clean with both the local police and the IRS.

“He married Hannah Wilcox in 1940, when he was twenty- three. They had two children over the next few years, both of which died as infants.”

“Anything suspicious in the kids’ deaths?”

“None that I could see. The death records indicate birth defects in both children. The Coyners lived on Hescock Road with no fanfare and no troubles until January 1967, when Fred sold off his first piece of land.”

The mention of 1967, right after my conversation with J.P., added a sudden extra weight to her biography.

“Why did he sell the land?” I asked.

“It took me a while to nail that down. Fred’s wife died of cancer in 1970, but I found out she’d been diagnosed about four years earlier, just before he began selling off property.”

“So he was paying for her medical treatments,” I muttered.

“As far as I can tell, yes. Of the two hundred original acres, he unloaded all but ten, and finally took out a mortgage on the house. In late 1969, we busted him for being drunk and disorderly, but he was driven to his residence instead of spending the night in the tank when we found out he had an invalid wife at home with no one to take care of her. By the time Hannah died in 1970, Coyner’s delinquent tax bill totaled almost twenty thousand dollars and papers had been filed to sell his property as a result.”

I remembered my own wife’s battle with cancer just a few years later. We, too, had been childless, and despite my own job security, finances had played no small part in adding to the stress. It had been a lonely, desperate time. Alcohol had helped me through a couple of the toughest stretches, until I’d given it up for good, fearful of its appeal.

“Later that same year,” Sammie continued, “out of the blue and almost fresh from the funeral, Fred settled all his bills. A note at the tax assessor’s says the payment was made in cash. And from that time on, he’s listed his profession as produce farmer, although the only part of his land that’s agricultural is located around Fuller’s place.”

She put her crib notes back down but she wasn’t finished. “I asked Ron if he’d discovered anything about Coyner’s banking habits, but all he’s been able to get so far is that the bank is First Vermont and that the guy is living comfortably.”

Willy Kunkle appeared from around the panel separating Sammie’s desk from his. “There’s your rat, if you ask me.”

I turned to him. “What’d you find out?”

“That there’s no way Coyner could make a comfortable living from what he was dealing in produce. He could only grow stuff for three or four months out of the year at most, and he didn’t bust his ass even then. According to your fruity friend Sunshine Jackson, Coyner was more of a recreational grower. I asked Jackson if maybe the old guy was growing dope. He just wiggled his eyebrows at me. Weird son of a bitch.”

“How long has Coyner been doing business with him?”

“Years, apparently, but they aren’t buddy-buddy. Sunshine said I reminded him of Coyner, and I don’t think he was making a run up my leg. Thought Coyner was a crook of some kind, ’cause he usually paid in hundred-dollar bills.”

“Jackson only sells seeds and fertilizer and whatever, right? Where did Coyner unload the produce?”

“Farmer’s Market, Food Co-op, various fairs around the area. Pretty low-key. I talked to other people who do the same thing. None of them knows Coyner real well, no more than to say hello and get nothing in return.”

“Did you talk to any neighbors?” I asked.

“Yeah. Seems pretty clear that Coyner only likes his own company. I got more gossip about the time his wife was sick, though. According to the Sunset Lake Road crowd—the year-round people, that is, which come to about twelve—the time we nailed Fred for D & D wasn’t the only time he flew off the handle. He’d get lit on a regular basis toward the end—1970, I guess—and tear around the neighborhood raising hell.”

“Nobody complained?”

“They knew what was up, and he didn’t do any harm—scared the dogs, shot up a few road signs. Most of the time, someone would either steer him back home or he’d head that way himself eventually. There was one time when he went down to Hippie Hollow and started blowing out the bus windows with a shotgun. A few people got pissed then.”

“Hippie Hollow?” Sammie asked.

“About halfway between Coyner’s place and Route 9,” I answered. “There’s a road heading west. Twenty years ago, there was a sort of commune up there—they all lived out of five or six old yellow school buses.” I paused and thought back a moment. “You know, our own State’s Attorney defended them in a couple of cases before he switched hats. I’ll have to give him a call and ask him about that.”

I turned back to Willy. “No one pressed charges after the incident with the shotgun?”

“Nope. Once his situation was explained to them, they decided to let it slide. And after his wife died, he went back to being the invisible man of the neighborhood.”

“By the way,” Kunkle added, “I told Dennis to hold up on faxing Fuller’s photograph to everyone. I figured if we had the Boston PD’s forensic guys take twenty years off Fuller’s face by running the picture through their imaging computer, we could fax before-and-after pictures and maybe improve our chances.”

I moved to the center of the room to address them all, since Ron Klesczewski had just entered the office and I could now hold an impromptu staff meeting. “Apparently, we’ve stirred up somebody who’s hell-bent on erasing the past, and since the skeleton may give us an explanation, I’ll be heading up to Burlington tomorrow to see what Hillstrom has found out.

“In the meantime, we should circulate the recent and early portraits of Fuller as soon as we get them back. Maybe someone will remember him and give us a fresh lead. Also, since we know the shooter used an M-16, we need to find out what we can about the local availability of Vietnam-vintage weapons. Check with bartenders, club owners, gun shop and sports store operators, and your snitches to find out if there’s been any unusual activity concerning M-16s or .223 ammo, either preceding or following tonight’s pyrotechnics.

“Finally, although there’s no sign I hit this guy when I fired at him, let’s check the hospitals, both here and in Keene, Greenfield, and Townshend, as well as the local doctors’ offices and pharmacies for anyone buying either painkillers or trauma dressing. Ron, you coordinate with everyone.”