I hadn’t expected to see much activity at this time of night. I knew Ron would be there-his personality dictated he’d probably move a cot in before long-and I knew at least one officer from each patrol shift was assigned to be there. What I found was four times that number of people, all of them immersed in work, shrouded by the sounds of typewriters, telephones, muttered conversations, and the vague odor of overcooked coffee.
Sammie Martens was the first one to see me standing in the doorway. Listening on the phone, she waved me over to where she’d staked out a claim at one end of a long folding conference table.
She jotted down a few notes, thanked whoever it was at the other end, and hung up, explaining, “Still canvassing Gail’s neighborhood.”
She rose and led me to one of the bulletin boards, which had been covered horizontally by a six-hour timetable, divided into columns fifteen minutes apart. The legend, Time of Assault, occupied the center-most column. Reading from her freshly obtained notes, Sammie filled out an index card with “car sound-southbound-un-witnessed,” and stuck it with a pin under the 4:00-4:15 label.
She stood back and explained the team’s progress so far. “We’re filling it up little by little. Some of them, like Dennis’s old guy going to the john, are pretty specific; others, like the one I just got, aren’t worth too much.”
I pointed to the only entry in the 3:30-3:45 column, a card stating, “Burgess returns home.” After freeing herself and pulling the pillowcase off her head, Gail had locked the time at 3:37. “What about that one?”
“Timothy Burgess-lives over a mile down the street. One of the patrolmen working with Dennis found him. Rock-solid alibi, seen leaving one place and arriving home. We checked him for priors just to be sure. Nothing.”
I scanned the entire board, noticing that even I made an appearance. “Anything interesting at all, even if it doesn’t fit the timetable?”
Sammie shrugged. “Maybe.”
She marched back to her table and pawed through a pile of notes, extracting a single sheet. “Harry Murchison, works for Krystal Kleer Windows and Doors. He was half the crew that installed two of Gail’s windows last year.”
She handed me the sheet-a printout from the Vermont Department of Corrections. “One count of sexual assault and battery, for which he served time, and an arrest for sexual molestation, which never made it to court. We haven’t contacted him yet, nor have we run him by Gail to see if he rings a bell.”
She hesitated a moment and then added, “Are you planning to see her soon?”
I handed the sheet back. “I don’t know. Probably. You been able to check out what Murchison was doing last night?”
“I asked around his neighborhood a bit-low profile. He has a girlfriend with a noisy kid, they like loud music, and they put down a fair amount of beer on the weekend, so they’re not too inconspicuous. But the closest I could get to pinning down his whereabouts was whether his truck spent the night at home.”
She paused, apparently for effect. “It didn’t, at least not the whole night. When the woman I spoke to went to bed at midnight, the truck was still gone. When she got up early this morning, it was there, and she says she thought she heard it coming back ‘sometime in the middle of the night,’ to quote her.”
My mind was running through the various ways we could get closer to Mr. Murchison without tipping our hand. “He on parole or probation?”
Sammie shook her head. “I thought of the same thing. No, he’s not, so we can’t use a parole officer to help us out. Except for maybe getting chummy with his girlfriend, I don’t see how we can get close.”
“Maybe one of our snitches will. Where’s Willy?”
She rolled her eyes and smiled. “Out there somewhere, poking around in other people’s laundry. This is his kind of case. I’ll try to find him and tell him to work on that.”
I glanced back at the bulletin board with the timetable. “You said Murchison has a truck?”
“Yeah-a dark-blue pickup with a cap. Could’ve been the one the old guy saw.”
“God bless old bladders,” I muttered.
Sammie hadn’t heard me. “Willy checked out Ryan, by the way. As far as we can tell, he had dinner with friends, wrapped things up a little before eleven, and went home to bed, the last part being speculative. He lives alone, the neighbors don’t have a clear view of his house or driveway, and they hate his guts anyway, so they aren’t too interested. Besides that, Willy found out he has a couple of bicycles and that he likes to ride at night, probably to look through people’s windows. He could’ve snuck out on one of them after pretending to hit the sack. Nobody would’ve heard him, and he doesn’t live that far from Gail’s place.”
I nodded, half to myself, my eyes on Ron Klesczewski, who’d left his computer terminal to refill a cup of coffee at the urn near the door. I didn’t tell Sammie about my recent chat with Jason Ryan, or the fact that for some reason I’d believed him when he’d told me of his innocence.
“I suppose you heard Gail’s name is being published in tomorrow’s paper?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Sammie’s response was bitter.
“It was her choice-you might want to spread that around before everyone starts dumping on the Reformer prematurely. Besides, it might be helpful-we won’t have to tiptoe around quite as much, and maybe we can start pulling people in and pressuring them a bit. Thanks for all your work, Sammie. You ought to think about getting some shut-eye.”
“You too,” she said quietly as I walked over to see Ron.
“We’ve been working on the intelligence files Todd dropped off,” Ron said as I approached, “and we may have a couple of hits.”
He pulled a folder from one of his neatly arranged file boxes and read me two of the names I’d heard earlier at the intelligence meeting. “Barry Gilchrist and Lonny Sorvin. Both of them are in town, both have MOs that at least partially fit the bill, and as far as we can tell, both have daily schedules that would’ve allowed them to do the assault. I contacted their parole officers and we’re arranging for interviews tomorrow morning.”
I glanced at the files, familiar with their contents. Neither one of them had struck me as prime during the meeting, but I wasn’t going to fault Ron’s enthusiasm. My instincts weren’t infallible, and the textbook approach had put a lot of guilty people behind bars.
He reached into another box and handed me a sheet of paper. “That came from Gail-somebody dropped it by early this afternoon. It’s a list of men she thinks could have done it. Ryan’s on it.”
I felt a slight tingle at the nape of my neck as I took the sheet. “How far have you gotten on this?”
He picked up on the urgency in my voice, which triggered his dormant insecurity. “I gave it top priority-over the intelligence files even. I figured if she gave us those, she must’ve had good reason. Problem is, there’re some twenty names, and we want to do them right-not move too fast. So far, we’ve dug into about half of them.”
I pointed at the list. “I take it the ones that’re crossed off were misses?”
He looked over my shoulder. “Yeah-Dan Seaverns is out of town. I talked to him in Salt Lake City, just to make sure. Johnston Hill’s mother died two days ago, and he’s been dealing with that with witnesses. Philip Duncan was at a late dinner party, lasted till two-thirty. Mark Sumner was there, too-I think it was some realtor blast-they work in the same office. Anyhow, that checks out, too. Richard Clark was home in bed, according to his daughter-”
“His daughter?”
“Yeah. Dennis did that one. Little unorthodox, I guess, but he intercepted the daughter at school this afternoon, got into a big conversation, and found it out.”