“The plaster mold?”
“Yup-tire track, opposite where the knife was. It was fresh, showed a little skidding, and it was off the edge of the road, in the dirt, as if the driver swerved over to throw something out.”
He looked up at my lack of response. “All right, all right-possibly. I know it may have nothing to do with it-might’ve even been the ambulance or one of us. Still, it looked interesting, and it would be sweet if it fit a pattern down the line.”
I granted him that. “True enough. How ’bout in the house?”
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Ron’s handling that. I collected some hairs, fibers, and more prints than I know what to do with. I don’t think I’ll even run them unless I need to.”
“And what you thought might be the impression of the killer’s knee in her blood?”
He looked less pleased with that. “Denim blue jeans. The direction of the weave only tells me what it’s not-Levis, for instance-but that’s about it so far.”
I rounded one of the cubicle corners. Ron was at his desk, doing a tidier, more condensed job than J.P., poring over small stacks of letters, papers, and files.
He looked up as I appeared. “How was Montpeculiar?” The standard nickname for our capital, especially when the Legislature was in session.
“Crawling with people. Only got a denial from Reynolds about his car, though. He says it’s his wife’s, anyway. I’m going to talk with her later. What’ve you got?”
He sat back in his chair. “A gold mine-I think. Maybe not for this case, but a real who’s who of area dealers, users, hookers, johns, you name it. She kept a journal of sorts.” He reached out and tapped a fat ledger book with his fingertip. “She seemed to think she was a budding writer or something. This thing’s full of rambling notes, lists of names, pages that look like diary entries or flights of fancy. It’s hard to tell, it’s so jumbled up. Also, the handwriting’s so bad in places you can barely tell if it’s English, and it reads like she was on drugs. Other places, it’s like an accountant’s notes-listing johns and prices. I recognized a few names, but I’m not so sure some of this isn’t make-believe. Hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. Got blackmail material, if she was into that.”
“Find anything that points to her killer?”
“Not in so many words. But if she ever did put the squeeze on anyone, they might want her dead. Besides the criminal activity, there’re some pretty prominent guys here-married men Stan Katz would love to write about. To me, though, what’s interesting is what’s not here-several pages have been ripped out.”
“That what you think happened?”
“It fits-guy confronts her, kills her, turns on the lights and tears the place apart looking for this, rips out the incriminating pages, and splits. If he did a good job, though, finding him’ll be tough. We’d have to talk to everyone she knew, show them what names we can extract from the journal, and hope somebody can think of who’s missing. Could take a while, ruffle a whole lot of feathers, and end up nowhere.”
“Frankie Harris come up at all?”
Ron flipped open the file and pawed through several pages. “Yeah. The guy at the poker game. Sammie told me about that connection. There is an entry here someplace…” He extracted a single sheet covered with dense, cramped handwriting. “This is it. A whole section on him. It’s a little kinky-goes into some detail. But she liked him. Sort of a father figure from what I could tell, if you’re into screwing your father.”
I leaned forward and glanced at it. I could see why he was having trouble deciphering it. Sentences appeared as if cut from confetti, some long, convoluted, and grotesquely poetical, others with all the flair of an affidavit. But I saw what he meant-what wasn’t pornographic seemed dewy with sentiment. No sense of threat from Frankie Harris. In my mind’s eye, I could envision Brenda Croteau late at night, a bottle by her side and a joint between her lips, writing feverishly, at some times conjuring up a reality far different from her own, at others listing names and actions like a speed cop recording license plates.
I had no doubt her killer had once been among them, if only as a passing reference. But Ron was right-he had his work cut out for him.
I returned the sheet of paper. “Once you’ve figured out all the players, compare them with what Willy, Sam, and I got from Brenda’s playmates. Maybe we’ll get lucky somehow. Otherwise, it looks like we’re going to be talking to half of Brattleboro before we’re done.”
Ron sighed and stared at the pile before him. “You don’t think we’ll get a break here?”
I knew how he felt. “A lot depends on J.P. and that knife. You know where Willy is? I got a job for him.”
Jim and Laura Reynolds lived in a modern home on New England Drive, a dead-end street paralleling a very busy Western Avenue-just beyond where the interstate slices West Brattleboro off from Brattleboro. A few decades ago, New England Drive was conjured up by someone wanting to sell off several parcels of increasingly valuable, highly taxed woodland. It was an attractive street, within earshot of the heavy traffic but shielded by the thick pine trees that had once covered the whole area. I wondered how long it might be before whoever owned the intervening acreage decided to duplicate history and deprive these newcomers of their illusional privacy.
The Reynoldses had obviously considered that and had placed their house at the dead end of the road, strategically blocked in by both their own trees and some very careful landscaping. As soon as I entered the curved driveway, I felt removed from the rest of the neighborhood and almost embraced by the forest, as if in tasteful hibernation.
Willy saw it differently.
“Jesus,” he said sourly. “It’s like being in an upscale cemetery.”
I rolled down my window as a police officer appeared from the underbrush, dressed in heavily insulated camouflage.
“Anything?” I asked him.
“Nothing unusual,” he said. “The Crown Vic hasn’t moved once since we been posted here, and the family’s comings and goings have looked totally normal.”
I nodded. If Reynolds had told his wife or secretary to do any criminal housecleaning after I told him we were interested in him, they’d either ignored him or had been very subtle about it. That’s one thing we were hoping to find out tonight.
“Okay-thanks. You can call it quits now. We’ve got a warrant to dig through it.”
It was just getting dark by the time we parked in front of an enormous garage-gloomy enough so that the motion-detection lights on the house flickered feebly to life.
The front door opened as we emerged from my car, and a slim woman in expensive clothes poked her head out. “Lieutenant Gunther?”
I waved to her, impressed by how well she and her husband communicated. “Mrs. Reynolds?”
“Yes, yes. Jim told me you’d probably be dropping by. Do come in. It’s freezing out here.”
We climbed the steps and passed through into a mudroom as large and well-appointed as a living room. I introduced Willy, who looked around suspiciously, ignoring her proffered hand.
“Let me have your coats,” she said awkwardly, taking mine by the collar as I shrugged myself free. Standing close to her, I smelled something like bottled fresh air. It made me feel slightly unwashed. Willy kept his coat on.
She ushered us through another door and into a library/den that made the mudroom proportionally small. “Would you like some coffee or tea to take the chill off?”
As admired as I knew these manners should be, I was already tiring of them, and decided to leave the chill where it was. I ignored the chair she indicated and turned down her offer. “No, thanks. I guess the senator told you why we’d be coming?”
She smiled pleasantly, looking slightly vague. “He said my car was seen somewhere it wasn’t-a case of mistaken identity or something.”
Willy let out a small snort, no doubt imagining how that conversation really went. “You could say that,” I said. “Three men were seen dumping a body out of it in the middle of the night onto the railroad tracks.”