“A few days, maybe-it depends,” I answered vaguely. I was distracted by the sudden thought that Tom Kelly had more up his sleeve than just a mysterious strategy. It was possible that he had certain knowledge of his client’s innocence and needed only Vogel on the stand to prove it.
“Have you been able to get a reading on Vogel? Any rumors from cell mates or prison guards or anyone else?”
“Nope. Ever since he blew it with the oil-slick story, he’s been stone silent.” Tony’s voice became guarded. “What’re you after, Joe? Did you find something in those files I gave you?”
I sidestepped. “I’m just trying to figure Kelly’s strategy.”
Almost reluctantly, I thought, Tony admitted, “From what I’ve heard, Vogel is feeling no pain. I guess defiant is the word.”
“Like he expects to stick it to us in court?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be biting my nails.”
“Right,” I muttered.
Brandt tried once more. “I get this feeling you’re holding out on me.”
I gave in just a hair. “I don’t know, Tony-I’ve got a lot invested in all this. I’m worried I may have been sloppy.”
His voice was solicitous, but he sounded vaguely relieved. “You didn’t land this guy all by yourself, you know. We all did, and we got him on the evidence-better than a lot of other times. You just need to get back to work.”
“I guess so,” I agreed, but I knew we had different meanings in mind.
I returned to Brattleboro four days later, in the middle of the night, just as soon as I’d been able to get out of bed, use the bathroom, and put on my clothes, all without assistance. I knew there was going to be hell to pay from the hospital, whom I hadn’t informed of my departure, but getting back to work had by now become a visceral need. I had to confront theory with reality-doubts with concrete answers-and thus stand with everyone else in their conviction that we’d put the right man behind bars.
One major obstacle to all this, however-aside from the fact that the trial had begun the day before, and that nobody now wanted to hear from a last-minute Cassandra-was that legally I couldn’t return to work. Until the hospital officially released me, my doctors issued a clean bill of health, and the town’s insurer gave me the nod, I couldn’t be seen inside the Municipal Building in a professional capacity.
I was pondering how to get around this red tape, having slowly and painfully climbed the stairs to my third-floor apartment, when I fished my keys from my pocket and inadvertently inserted the wrong one into the lock.
I stood there for a moment, staring at the lock. I’d lived here for decades, always using the same key every day, and yet, after only a five-week absence, I’d goofed. It wasn’t me I was thinking about, however. In a totally different context, it was Bob Vogel.
I returned the keys to my pocket and slowly returned downstairs, the question of where to start my private quest suddenly answered.
It had been well over a month since Willy Kunkle and I had tailed Vogel along the back roads between Jamaica and West Brattleboro, but while the route we’d taken had been new to me then, it seemed intensely familiar as soon as I pulled off Route 30 forty minutes later and began retracing our trip.
This time I wasn’t following a distant pair of taillights with my own lights out, hoping to avoid notice and the ditch both; instead, I put myself in Vogel’s position-a recent arrival to the region, traveling on roads familiar only for where they led, watching not for any memorable landmarks, but rather for the roving sheriff ’s car that would mean the end of my license and the probable revocation of my probation.
It had come to me, when I’d inserted the wrong key in my lock, that perhaps Vogel had done much the same thing with his proffered alibi-identifying not the place where he’d broken down and lost a noticeable amount of oil, but where he’d assumed the breakdown had occurred.
According to the statement he’d given Willy Kunkle after I’d gone into a coma, his car had quit “maybe four miles out” between Wardsboro and Newfane, just beyond where a narrow road or driveway took off into the trees on the right. We’d already determined that his car’s odometer was on the blink, but Willy, who’d done the on-site investigation, had also discovered that there was only one place along that approximate stretch of road that fit the description.
I drove almost as fast as we had the other night, assuming that was the pace Vogel usually set for himself, and I made a pointed effort not to study the right side of the road with undue scrutiny. Nevertheless, the gap, when it came, was pretty evident, all by itself along an uninterrupted stretch of forest.
I stopped, delicately extricated myself from behind the driver’s wheel, grimacing at the pain in my still-sensitive gut, and walked along the side of the road. Even allowing for the passage of time, there was no sign of an oil slick, despite extensive sweeps with my flashlight. I’d told Brandt that five weeks of inaction had probably led to an overblown imagination, but I hadn’t actually believed that myself. I’d been dreading that, at first scratch, some overlooked truth would rear up and bite us all. Now that it hadn’t, I was paradoxically disappointed. I got back in the car and resumed my way home.
It was then that my suspicions were given a second wind. A half mile farther on, I came across a second road to the right. Puzzled that Willy had reported no such thing, I pulled over and stopped again.
The answer became obvious as soon as I played my flashlight across the opening in the trees. There was no road, but merely a sizeable equipment yard for logging skidders and trucks, thinly screened from passing vehicles by a spindly row of saplings.
The catch was, as soon as I killed my flashlight, all that remained in the peripheral glow from my head-lamps was the narrow dark gap and the presumption that it marked the opening of a side road. Willy, investigating during daylight hours, would have made no such mistake; for him, the yard had been as obvious as a parking lot.
In contrast to how I’d felt in the face of good news a few moments ago, I now felt a rush of excitement at this disturbing discovery. I quickly returned to where my car was parked and began scrutinizing the ground in front of it, concentrating-as per Vogel’s testimony-just beyond the “road” to the right. Sure enough, even some five admittedly dry weeks later, the soil was dark and greasy with motor oil.
I continued searching, trying not to fall into the same trap that had apparently enmeshed Willy. Unlike him, I didn’t want to stop at finding what I was after, but instead wanted to eliminate any possibility I might be wrong. Unfortunately, I was soon brought up short. Not surprisingly for an area opposite an equipment yard, I found several more oily patches, and with them the realization that all I’d done was to make the whole issue more muddled. Vogel might well have broken down just as he’d said, albeit confusing one site for another; but given the contaminated ground around me, there was no way I could prove it.
I stood in the cold night, reflecting on my growing ambivalence and the potentially dangerous game I was playing. If word got out that I was privately rattling the state’s ironclad case-which I’d largely built myself-the restless army of Dunn observers would ignite like gasoline.
I snapped out of my trance suddenly and peered into the surrounding frozen gloom, my senses alarmed by something out of place. It had been a metallic sound, and perhaps a glimmer of light, both so subtle they could have been imagined. A car door perhaps? I shot a beam of light up and down the silent dirt road but found nothing.
Fueled now more by instinct than by common sense, I got into my car, turned it around, and headed back to Jamaica-to Vogel’s former place of employment.
I parked in the dimly lit lot of New England Wood Products, pulled the file so labeled from the box Brandt had delivered to me, which I had stashed in my locked trunk, and headed for the supervisor’s office.