"I may be," he explained, "but I've got to start with the clothing."
"Ah. A mystery in the unfolding. I like a little intrigue."
She eventually took him to a wing off the autopsy room, beyond the coolers where, he knew from past experience, the two men he'd shipped her were still stored, and placed a couple of oversize plastic tubs on a nearby examination table.
"Brattleboro John Doe Number One, as we're calling him-or at least his personal effects," she announced, standing back.
Joe stepped up to the table and opened the tubs. Unlike when he'd first seen them, the clothes were now dry, though still soiled by some of the debris they'd picked up in the water.
By instinct, he started with the upper torso coverings, reconstructing the layering from skin contact to outermost garment, and then began poring over the fabric's surface, inch by inch.
Hillstrom finally yielded to curiosity. "What are you looking for?"
Gunther laughed. "Maybe nothing, but it was too interesting to pass up. We're pretty sure we found out where this guy spent his last night. He checked into a cheap motel with a small overnight bag, no car, paid in cash, and used a phony name-Norman Rockwell, in case you're tempted to change your John Doe."
Hillstrom wrinkled her nose. "Not the way this is going, I'm not. Rockwell deserves better."
"If it helps," Joe suggested, "my team's calling him Wet Bald Rocky, versus Dry Hairy Fred." He resumed his scrutiny. "Anyhow, we're playing with the idea that he met someone at the motel, which person then immediately rendered him harmless before transporting him to the stream."
Hillstrom was already nodding in comprehension, following where he was leading. "And it's the rendering him harmless that you're looking for? What did you find in that motel room?"
He paused to look over his shoulder at her. "You're good. It was a single identifying tag belonging to a Taser cartridge."
"A Taser!" she exclaimed. "But they work with wired barbs. I would have found skin defects on the body."
"Only if the barbs reached the skin," Joe explained. "They don't have to in order to work." He straightened, holding up the decedent's leather belt, adding, "They just need to close the circuit. By digging into something like this."
She came in close to see what he'd found. In the center of the belt's surface was a small hole with a minuscule jagged edge to it, as where a tiny barb might have left a tear upon being extracted.
"Oh, my Lord," she murmured. "It is possible, isn't it?"
He laid the belt back down. "It does connect. It would help if we found evidence of a second impact site."
She'd already grabbed hold of his upper arm. "Come here. Let's take a look at him, now that we know what we're after."
She led him to the storage cooler, which had two horizontal doors stacked one atop the other, and opened the upper one. A wash of cold air spilled out as she seized the edge of the drawer inside and pulled out a tray laden with the plastic-wrapped body of the man they'd found in the water days ago.
Quickly donning latex gloves, she expertly exposed the naked corpse, its torso pragmatically sewn back shut with a series of widely spaced stitches, and with Joe's help, she rolled it onto its side to reveal its back.
"That was the back of the belt, right?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said softly, already craning to study the blanched, fleshy surface before him. He touched the mottled body near its lumbar area. "Around here. If the shooter knew what he was doing, the second barb should have hit somewhere at or just below the shoulder blades."
"Here," she said, tapping the cold skin with her fingertip. "It's not an actual defect… more like a pimple."
She crossed the room to fetch a strong magnifying glass and applied it to the spot she'd found.
"That's it," she announced after a few seconds of study. "During an uneducated survey, it's nothing much to note. But with scrutiny, it's clearly not a pimple-more like a tiny burn."
Joe spread his fingers just above the body's back, measuring the distance between the lumbar spine and the small red dot. "About a foot and a half," he announced. "Which means the shooter was standing pretty close when he fired."
He returned to the pile of clothes to find some piece of clothing that might reveal a barb having been roughly torn lose. He found it in a tightly knit polar fleece vest-a mere couple of strands hanging loose from the fabric.
"Bingo," he said, bringing the vest back over to Hillstrom and holding it next to the cadaver.
"Lines up perfectly," she agreed.
She stepped back to consider him thoughtfully. "But what does that tell you, exactly?"
"Not much that's provable," he admitted. "It does suggest how to incapacitate a man in a motel room and then drown him fifteen miles away."
Joe drove from Burlington to Chelsea next, hoping to catch Rob Barrows in his office. He left the interstate at exit 4 and journeyed east through Randolph Center and East Randolph to take the Chelsea Mountain Road up and over Osgood Hill. This was also a roundabout way to reach Thetford and New Hampshire beyond, and more reminiscent of the challenges the state offered its travelers a mere half century earlier, before most of them were seduced by the ease and comfort of I-89. These now less used roads were, by contrast, old Vermont to Joe's mind, set among a countryside as prickly as a porcupine's back with trees, and so encumbered with streams, ravines, and claustrophobic, pressed-together hills as to make progress before the advent of paved roads a quasi-heroic effort. Still, for all that, atop Osgood Hill, cresting a rise and emerging from the woods, he was abruptly rewarded with a sweeping view-long, curving fields, the sparkle of otherwise hidden water, and the solid massiveness of distant ancient mountains-and was won over yet again by his state's uncanny ability to both challenge and nurture those willing to carve out a living in its midst, while shaping them into something hardy, independent, self-sufficient, and sometimes a little cranky in the process.
Joe found Rob Barrows at the sheriff's headquarters in Chelsea, at the top of the northernmost of the village's two greens-an eccentricity particular to the town. The sheriff's office was tucked behind the United Church of Christ, in a nineteenth-century red-brick building neighboring Court, School, and Church Streets-a trio of names simultaneously bland, comforting, and a little peremptory, as if the founders of the village had better things to do-and more land to grab-in the late 1700s than to linger here and apply their imaginations.
"Hey," Barrows said as Joe entered the officers' room, a small, cluttered space that served a variety of roles. "I thought you were going to give me a call, not actually make the trip."
"Nice day for it," Joe answered neutrally, choosing a chair beside Rob's desk. He did not go into how staring at his brother's inert form in the hospital for a half hour at a time was more than he could stand, even in his mother's company. "What did you get out of that?" He pointed at the equally blank-faced, remarkably filthy computer that they'd removed from Steve's Garage.
Barrows had been at his own console when Joe entered, and he now waved at his screen in explanation. "Just been following up on that," he said. "I got the software to get around the password. Hit pure gold. For one thing, he's cooking the books-the legit stuff is what we saw at the shop; the kickbacks and bill padding and bogus work claims are all behind the password. When everyone gets out of the hospital, I'd seriously recommend you get another mechanic."
Joe opened his mouth to respond, and to ask about Leo's car, but Rob was clearly building up steam and continued instead with "I also found out that somebody at Steve's has been filling his time with more than cars. I made a copy of his hard drive and transferred it to my computer so I wouldn't be tampering with evidence, but take a look at this."