Tucker Peak (33 page)

We hadn’t found much then. We had reason to think we’d find a bit more this time.

Snuffy Dawson stood next to me as we watched four officers in white Tyvek suits wrestling a heavy chest away from the far wall of an almost empty room, while a fifth stood by, taking photographs of each step of the process. Snuffy was now the happy recipient of much recent media attention, having held several press conferences in order to explain the sheriff’s department’s hat trick in solving a homicide and a major embezzlement case and in busting up a local drug ring. I noted with satisfaction that he repaid our courtesy of keeping out of the limelight by mentioning our help. It was a political gesture on the part of an old pro, and I was hoping it would be useful in VBI’s future interactions with other departments. That was probably wishful thinking, of course. Other cops would just think Snuffy had brought us in because he was losing his grip.

But it was another small step in our march toward legitimacy. “Have you heard what they’re going to do with Tucker Peak?” I asked him as we waited.

“Their board of directors hired a bankruptcy lawyer, if that tells you anything. There’ll be the usual claims that the world is ending, and then they’ll find a buyer at ten cents on the dollar and they’ll start it all over again. The rich’ll stay that way and the poor’ll find other jobs.”

“We found out McNally’s heart condition was bogus, by the way,” I said. “He printed the prescription label on his computer and filled the bottle with generic saccharin.”

Snuffy snorted softly with disbelief. “Why did he add to the confusion? Burning the pumphouse, blowing the water main, sabotaging the generators? All it did was draw attention.”

“But not to him. It just gave strength to the rumors about how messed up the mountain was—rumors they did everything they could to spread. Gorenstein’s the better talker of the two. He said the plan was to degrade the resort’s reputation, even push it into bankruptcy if possible. That way, the fake heart problem could believably flare up and let McNally leave gracefully, and the finances would be in such a mess that their little shoplifting might go unnoticed. That’s the main reason McNally kept playing ball with the TPL. He needed them as cover. It was a long shot, but he and Gorenstein were hoping to get away with it free and clear—if they had, they could’ve stayed in the U.S., two mediocre businessmen who’d just been targeted by poor timing, bad luck, and in Gorenstein’s case, a slightly soiled name. The burning of the pumphouse wasn’t part of it, of course. McNally had to destroy it so no one would find out the pumps didn’t exist. If Linda Bettina hadn’t been so efficient McNally could’ve skipped adding arson to his list of offenses.”

“What’s Kathy Bartlett going to do with Norman Toussaint?” Snuffy asked after a moment’s reflection.

“Nothing too awful, I guess,” I told him. “There were mitigating circumstances. He’ll probably be on probation forever and owe a small fortune, but I doubt he’ll do jail time. He finally rolled over on McNally, which helped. But the best news for him is that it may have all paid off—the treatments he was paying for seem to be working. I heard this morning that his kid’s turned the corner and might be headed for a full recovery. To be honest, though, I don’t think Toussaint’ll be that lucky. He sold his soul in this deal, and that’s going to haunt him the rest of his life. Too bad McNally doesn’t have the same kind of conscience.”

 The chest now shoved aside, the team of four began tearing up heavy floorboards, all of which had already been sawed through to form a perfect four-foot-by-six-foot rectangle.

“Your two wounded deputies okay?” I asked.

“Yeah. Now they have bragging rights and their wives are ready to kill them both. Tough life. Lucky Tony Bugs was such a lousy shot. I bet he wishes you were a better one.”

One of the men dropped into the hole with some rope and disappeared from view.

“I didn’t shoot to wound,” I admitted, although I was happy I had.

A few minutes later, the man in the hole reappeared and handed several rope ends up to his colleagues. He rejoined them up top and they all four pulled as a unit, lifting a human-size, sausage-shaped bundle wrapped in multiple layers of tarp and plastic, much like a poor man’s mummy.

“Well, there you have it,” Snuffy said quietly, “as advertised. At least Tony Bugs gave us that much.”

I looked at the packaged remains of Marty Gagnon, the small-time hood who’d thought himself capable of moving up from simple burglary to blackmailing a mobster whose identity he’d discovered by pure fluke.

“God,” I sighed. “What a species we are.”

Snuffy Dawson smiled. “You gotta love it.”

If you enjoyed
Tucker Peak
, look for
The Sniper’s Wife
, thirteenth in the Joe Gunther series.

WILLIE KUNKLE DIPPED HIS LARGE RIGHT HAND
into the sink and scooped a splash of warm water onto his face, washing away the last of the shaving soap. He straightened, used the edge of a towel hanging to the right of the mirror to mop his cheeks and chin with the same hand, and studied his reflection in the harsh fluorescent light.

He wasn’t looking for flaws in his shaving. And, God knows, there was no narcissism taking place. Willy was the first to acknowledge his was a purely functional appearance. He had what was necessary: a nose, two eyes, a mouth, none of it particularly remarkable. As far as it went, it was just a face.

And yet he studied it every morning in the same way, carefully, warily, especially watching the eyes for any deepening of the intensity which even he found disturbing. Had he seen them on somebody else, they were eyes that would have given him pause—eyes which troubled him all the more that they were his. They were what made of the whole truly something to remember, and although he didn’t know it, they were the one feature almost everyone remembered about his face.

His scrutiny drifted lower, again as usual, to his neck, to his collar bones, and finally to his left shoulder and the useless arm below it. He’d been symmetrical once—at the very least that. Now he was someone who carried an arm as an eccentric might perpetually lug around a heavy, stuffed animal.

Except that his burden wasn’t that interesting. It was just an arm, withered, pale, splotchy with poor circulation—something straight out of Dachau but pinned to his otherwise healthy body—put there by a rifle bullet in a police shootout years ago. In fact, the scar marked the dividing line between the alive and the dead of his body the way a ragged and permanent tear identifies where a sleeve has been torn from a shirt.

It did draw attention away from the eyes, though. People overlooked them altogether when describing him as “the cop with one arm.” Which was an advantage, as far as Willy was concerned. He appreciated that a lesser but adequately flamboyant deformity covered for a far more telling one. It suited his personality. And his need. As he’d watched those eyes every morning “those windows into the workings of his head” he’d actually become grateful for the arm. It was his own built-in red herring.

He reached up and turned off the light. Time to go to work.

· · ·

The visit to Bellevue only aggravated the roiling anxieties Willy was trying so hard to tamp down. Even with a recent and extensive remodeling, the huge hospital and the familiar journey to the morgue reached up like a stifling fog to constrict his throat. As a rookie New York cop so many years before, he’d made this trip a half dozen times, collecting paperwork or dropping things off to help in some busy detective’s investigation. He’d enjoyed being part of something outside a patrolman’s routine, and had found the morgue’s forensic aspects interesting and stimulating: all those racked bodies offering entire biographies to those clever and motivated enough to decipher them. These visits had helped him to believe that although police work at the bottom of the ladder left something to be desired, the promises it held justified sticking it out for the long run.

Of course, that was before he’d drowned all such thinking in the bottom of a bottle.

The white coated attendant greeted him at the reception area with little more than a grunt and he followed him down a long, windowless, antiseptically white hallway, through a pair of double doors. There they entered a huge enhancement of Willy Kunkle’s memory of the place: a tall room, shimmering with fluorescence, and equipped with two opposing walls of floor-to-ceiling, square, shiny steel doors. The sight of it made him stop in his tracks, struck by the image of a warehouse full of high-end dormitory refrigerators, stacked and ready for shipment, gleaming and new.

The attendant glanced over his shoulder. “You are all right?” he asked in broken English.

Willy sensed the man’s concern was more self-interested than any display of sensitivity. He didn’t want to deal with a hysterical next-of-kin and miss more than he already had of the television program he’d been enjoying out front.

“Yeah.” Kunkle joined him almost halfway down the towering row of cold cubicles.

The attendant consulted the clipboard in his hand one last time and pulled open the drawer directly before him with one powerful, practiced gesture. Like a ghost appearing through a solid barrier, the white-draped, shape of a supine woman suddenly materialized between them, hovering as if suspended in mid-air.

The attendant flipped back the sheet from the body’s face. “This is her?” Willy watched the other man’s face for a moment, looking for anything beside boredom. He thought he might be Indian, but in truth, he had no idea. He’d recently heard that 40 percent of New York’s population was foreign born, now as in 1910.

The man scowled at him, suspicious of Willy’s expression. “You see?” Willy dropped his eyes to the woman floating by his waist, looking down at her as if she were asleep on the berth of a spaceship, and they were about to share a voyage to eternity.

He studied her features, feeling as cold as she seemed, his heart as still as hers. A numbness filled him from his feet to his head, as if he were a vessel into which ice water had been poured.

Romantics would have the dead appear as marble or snow sculptures. In fact, the reality was far less remote and pleasant. Whatever blemishes the deceased once had were enhanced by death’s yellow cast, and the tiny amount of shapeliness the musculature had maintained even in sleep was lacking, allowing the cheeks to pull back the smallest bit, and the entire face to strain against the boniness of the skull beneath. This was truly a corpse, and little else.

He reached out slowly, but stopped short of touching her, struck by the vitality of his large, powerful right hand next to her drained, thin, mottled face, the same face he’d reduced to tears a dozen times over. She looked tired, as if the sleep she was engaged in now was of no use to her whatsoever. For some reason, that made him saddest of all. Surely, she’d wished for some peace and quiet when she’d opted for this state. It almost broke his heart to think she hadn’t been successful.

The attendant sighed. “It is Mary Kunkle?”

He’d butchered the last name. Willy glanced down the length of her shrouded body and noticed a toe tag ludicrously sticking out from under the far end of the sheet. It made her seem as if she were for sale.

He moved down to read the tag. It had her name and an address in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, just south of the Williamsburg Bridge.

That small detail triggered the dormant analytical part of his brain and made him lift the sheet off her left arm. The detective on the phone had said she’d died of an overdose, and there, as stark evidence, was not only the single fresh wound of a needle mark in the pale, skinny crook of her arm, but ancient signs of similar abuse clustered about it like memories refusing to disappear.

“Yes, that’s her,” he finally answered, stepping back, allowing the attendant to flip the sheet back over Mary’s face with all the detached flair of a custodian covering a sofa.

Over the years, Archer Mayor has been photographer, teacher, historian, scholarly editor, feature writer, travel writer, lab technician, political advance man, medical illustrator, newspaper writer, history researcher, publications consultant, constable, and EMT/firefighter. He is also half Argentine, speaks two languages, and has lived in several countries on two continents.

All of which makes makes him restless, curious, unemployable, or all three. Whatever he is, it’s clearly not cured, since he’s currently a novelist, a death investigator for Vermont’s medical examiner, and a police officer.

Mayor has been producing the Joe Gunther novels since 1988, some of which have made the
TEN BEST
or
MOST NOTABLE
lists of the Los Angeles and the New York Times. Mayor has also received the New England Booksellers Association book award for fiction.

Find him online at
www.ArcherMayor.com

Open Season
Borderlines
Scent of Evil
The Skeleton’s Knee
Fruits of the Poisonous Tree
The Dark Root
The Ragman’s Memory
Bellows Falls
The Disposable Man
Occam’s Razor
The Marble Mask
Tucker Peak
The Sniper’s Wife
Gatekeeper
The Surrogate Thief
St. Albans Fire
The Second Mouse
Chat
The Catch
The Price of Malice
Red Herring
Tag Man
Paradise City