He answered tersely, his tone of voice betraying his surprise at being found out so quickly.
“Meet me at the bottom of Main and Canal,” I told him. “The Food Co-op parking lot.”
Predictably, I got there first, although I didn’t doubt he was waiting around a nearby corner, convincing himself that such a taunt would successfully salvage some juvenile pride-it was the kind of head game he held too dear. I merely left the engine running, thankful for a good heater, and watched the early evening crowd slowly converge on the Co-op.
He arrived eventually, his left elbow incongruously resting on the driver’s side windowsill-a casual look except for the obvious fact that he must have been freezing half to death.
He rolled to a stop so that our windows were opposite one another, forcing me to expose myself to the cold as he’d chosen to.
“What’s up?” he asked, his voice flat, adding with feigned nonchalance, “I had something I had to do before headin’ back to the barn.”
“I don’t think you want to be feeding me an attitude right now.”
He pursed his lips and kept silent.
“Maybe you can use your screwing around to some benefit,” I told him. “Before the night’s over we’ll have interviewed the Rescue crew, our own dispatch, the backup team you called, and all the neighbors on that street. We’ll have a pretty good idea what really happened when you first showed up. So now’s your chance-you want to change your story before it’s too late and you’ve made it part of the record? You told me you called Rescue and backup, and then ‘we’ went in. Who did you mean by ‘we’?”
He knew there was only one way out. “I went in alone,” he confessed angrily. “I didn’t wait for the others. I thought the woman might need help in there. I didn’t want to waste time.”
“What about the Rescue crew? Why weren’t they warned it was a homicide-to stay at a distance?”
His voice climbed a note, just shy of a whine. “They showed up too fast. I was still checking the house out. I had to make sure it was safe.”
“So they just walked in, totally unaware?”
After a pause, he admitted, “Yeah-just as I was checking out the kid’s room. That’s why I missed him. It didn’t even look like a nursery-I thought it was all storage.”
I sympathized with him there, at least. “You know what might have happened if someone had been waiting inside-to you and the Rescue folks both?”
A flash of irritation crossed his face. “I know, I know. It won’t happen again.”
I resisted the urge to reach out and twist his ear like a child’s. “That’s between you and your supervisor. I want to know exactly what you saw when you entered that building.”
“What’re you after?” he asked suspiciously.
“What you’re going to be putting into your report, Dave. The truth. What you saw, smelled, heard-everything that happened.”
He scowled, which came easily to him. “I didn’t hear or smell anything. Everyone was dead. And I didn’t touch anything.”
“How ’bout the lighting? Did you or the Rescue people turn on any lights to see better?”
“No.”
“Not even the baby’s room? Why have a bright overhead light on in a room with a sleeping baby?”
All suspicion drained from his face and he shook his head. “No. That is weird. That room should’ve been dark. The whole place was lit up like a Christmas tree.”
I put my car into gear, confirmed in my guess that the killer-or killers-had searched the place from one end to the other. “Okay, Dave. I’m glad you didn’t get yourself killed-or anyone else.”
The surliness returned. “Thanks,” he said, and hit the gas, squealing out of the parking lot ahead of me in some parody of male dominance.
I found a message to call Bobby Miller when I returned to the office. He was on the same shift as Raymo and so presumably out in his cruiser somewhere. I told dispatch to let him know I was back.
The phone rang five minutes later.
“Lieutenant? Something came up this afternoon I thought you should know about. Right after I went on duty, I got a call from Winthrop Johnston. You know him? He said you were old friends.”
“We are. He’s a PI. Ex-state trooper.”
“Right-that’s what he told me. He wanted to know about the break-in at Jim Reynolds’s place.”
I stood without moving for several seconds, digesting this. Jim Reynolds was becoming a radar blip that wouldn’t fade. “What did you tell him?”
“Nothing. I said I’d have to clear it with you. He was real nice about it. Said he understood and that he’d wait for you to call him. He made it sound like it was just a boring piece of paper shuffling he was doing, but it struck me as a funny coincidence.”
“Me, too. He didn’t say what he was after?”
“Nope.”
I thanked him, hung up, and dialed Johnston’s number from a list I had taped to my desk-not of snitches, whose names I kept more securely tucked away, but of bankers, business leaders, artists, teachers, and one private investigator-all keen observers, all well traveled, and all willing to act as sounding boards if they thought the questions I had made sense.
Winthrop Johnston, universally known as Win, had been born in Hardwick, in northern Vermont, attended the University of Vermont, and had worked with the state police for thirteen years before deciding to go independent. He’d been a PI for over a decade, working out of Putney, just north of Brattleboro, and had established a reputation as a straight arrow, walking the tightrope between actual broken laws and legal improprieties with a sure-footedness often lacking in his colleagues.
He answered on the third ring.
“Win, It’s Joe Gunther. Bobby Miller tells me you have some questions about Jim Reynolds.”
“No,” he answered carefully. “Not Reynolds. Just about the break-in at his office.”
“Can I ask why you want to know?” The question wasn’t as futile as it always appears on television. On TV, everything a private cop does is mantled by client confidentiality. In reality, PIs know they have to work closely with police and also know that making an issue over trivialities is both irritating and undermining.
Johnston didn’t disappoint. “He hired me to find out who did it.”
“Is he missing anything?”
“Not that I know of. What was your take on it?”
I had nothing to lose by being honest with him in turn, since I had nothing to begin with, anyway. “Can’t figure it out. He denied anything was missing, and we couldn’t tell if anything might’ve been added.”
Johnston sounded mildly surprised, which he may or may not have been in fact. “Like what?”
“Cute, Win. Rumor has it the man wouldn’t mind being governor. Was anything added?”
Win chuckled, then said, “Okay, he is worried, but I don’t think it’s because anything happened. My guess is he hired me because he wants it to stop there. If I get lucky, I’m basically supposed to say, ‘We know who you are and we know what you did,’ and hope that ends it.”
I took him at his word, at least for the moment. “Then I wish I could help you. Since there was nothing gone and no suspect in sight, we’ve pretty much dropped it. Bobby did notice a car heading off down the side street, but all he saw were taillights. His guess was he scared off whoever had broken in, and I think he’s probably right.”
“Okay, Joe,” Win conceded after a moment. “I appreciate the help.”
I sat staring at the phone for a long time after he’d hung up, remembering Stan Katz’s call to me earlier, along with something Bobby Miller had told me which I hadn’t passed on to Win Johnston-that the filing cabinet which appeared to have been rifled contained old, dog-eared files.
I finally shook my head and returned to the matter at hand. Jim Reynolds would have to stand in line.
I didn’t lie to Alice Simms, but when I did finally call her, I figured she had about thirty minutes to write her story and still make the deadline. That didn’t allow for a long question/answer session-a detail she assumed I’d planned from the start.