“You got it,” I said. But mundane as it sounded, the request hit me as somehow wrong. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
The next morning, I met with Sammie, Ron, and Willy. Several weeks had gone by since Philip Resnick had been pulped by the train, and we were no closer to finding his killers than we had been that first night.
On the bright side, the car, the three men, Resnick’s identity, and his connection to the abandoned truck hadn’t made it into the papers yet, which were still referring to the victim as an unidentified vagrant.
Which they wouldn’t be doing for much longer.
“We still think Reynolds is involved?” Willy asked with characteristic bluntness.
I looked at Ron for an answer.
“If he is, he’s being very cagey,” Ron answered.
“Cagey?” Sam butted in. “You really think he framed himself with a bogus copy of his own car just to throw off suspicion? It’s unreal.”
“I agree,” Ron resumed. “But it still may be possible. Speaking of which, a Crown Vic matching Renaud’s second description was reported stolen in Keene, just before Resnick was killed. Also, I looked over Brenda’s journal again, seeing if I could find a pattern to those missing pages, but the whole thing’s just too chaotic to begin with.”
I sat back and rubbed my eyes. “Damn, this is frustrating. An office break-in where nothing’s missing, a car at the crime scene that turns out not to have been there, a few missing pages in a dead woman’s journal that might’ve mentioned anybody. I mean, I can write off the phone calls to Katz as political high jinks, but some of this stuff has got to have something to it. Reynolds just keeps coming up.”
“Or we’re being led to think that way,” Sammie said quietly.
Willy crushed his plastic coffee cup and threw it into the trash. “We missed out when his office was broken into. If one of us had been there, we might have gotten a look at those files.”
I turned to Ron again. “You been able to go over his old court records yet?”
He gave me a tired look. “I looked, but there’re hundreds of ’em. He’s a hardworking man. So I stuck to checking for index references to Resnick or Timson or hazardous materials or trucking-and got nowhere. The only other option is to open the files and go over them page by page.”
There was a gloomy break in the conversation. “How ’bout Katahdin?” I finally asked.
“I tried it.” He didn’t need to explain further.
I sat up slowly, a sudden thought stirring. “Where’s Reynolds licensed to practice?”
Ron pawed through some notes. “Vermont, New Hampshire-” He suddenly stopped. “And Maine.”
All three of them looked up at me.
“Get hold of the Portland court clerk,” I told Ron. “See if Reynolds hasn’t been over there defending Katahdin Trucking. And Sammie, I want you to get back in touch with the New Jersey people Ron called earlier about Resnick, and find out everything you can about him-not his criminal record, but his family, colleagues, drinking buddies, personal habits. Anything you can. I want a family tree of associates we can compare to anyone we might have on file.”
Deputy Medical Examiner Bernie Short sounded tired on the phone.
“What can I do for you, Joe?”
“Get some sleep, would be a wild guess.”
“Yeah, well, forget that.”
“How much longer till Beverly gets back?”
“Too long. Late summer.”
“I’ll cut to the chase, then,” I said. “Your office did a Lisa Wooten a few years ago, from down here.” I gave him the exact date and reference number. “All I can find in my files is ‘drug overdose,’ but we’re working a case right now where someone’s claiming the stuff that did her in was deliberately poisoned. Can you give me the details?”
His voice remained flat. “Hold on.”
He was back on the line in surprisingly short order. “Nope. Heroin cut with confectioner’s sugar. Usually what happens is they try to kick the habit for a while, lower their tolerance for the stuff, and then shoot up with the dose they were used to but can no longer handle. Boom, they’re dead.”
“So, definitely no poison?”
“You want a copy of this?” he asked instead.
“The SA’s office might,” I told him. “I’ll let them know. By the way, you couldn’t tell if the dose that killed her was bigger than her norm, could you, assuming she hadn’t tried to kick the habit?”
His answer was short but eloquent: “Nope.”
I hung up and redialed. “I did your bidding on Lisa Wooten,” I told Gail when she picked up. “I’m afraid you’re not going to like it.”
“Tell me.”
“She was a straight overdose. Bernie Short said the only adulterant was sugar. Whoever told Owen Tharp that Brenda poisoned Lisa’s dope was lying.”
“Shit.” The line went dead.
I hung up slowly. I didn’t blame her-I even held myself partly responsible. She’d just committed a cardinal error-uncovering a fact beneficial to the defense-and I hadn’t been sharp enough to see it coming. Reggie McNeil would probably have dug it up eventually, but the fact that this little exculpatory tidbit had been a gift from the prosecution was a card he was sure to play up. If Owen had been deliberately lied to in order to get him motivated to kill Brenda, it could be made to weigh heavily in any jury’s considerations.
Jack Derby was not going to be pleased.
My contemplation of Gail’s fate was cut short by a shadow falling across my desk. “Daydreaming, Joe?”
Al Hammond-tall, distinguished, gray-haired, and the Windham County Sheriff since God was a teenager-stood on my threshold smiling.
I offered him a chair. “Haven’t seen you in a while. What’ve you been up to?”
“Watching television,” he said pleasantly, his eyes very steady.
“Meaning you saw me on the news?”
“Saw you and had the transcript faxed down to me. You really backing this idea?” His tone was stiffly noncommittal.
I decided to play the same game. “What did your reading tell you?”
“It didn’t tell me you were against it.”
“I’m not-not until it’s something other than a vague proposal on its way through a bunch of committees. I’m not necessarily for it, either.”
“You think the concept of a single police force is a good thing?” This time, his voice gave him away, if only slightly, not that I needed a road sign. Sheriffs were political by statute, and this one seemed to have been born that way.
“I think almost seventy different agencies are too many. But you’re safe. Why do you care?”
“Because being in the constitution and surviving as a reality are two different things, as you damn well know. We could be reduced to a crosswalk officer per county and still be in the constitution.”
I baited him a little. “So it’s about turf?”
Those cool, gray eyes narrowed slightly. “It’s about function. Nothing exists for long if nobody needs it. Sheriffs predate every other police agency in this state. For good reason.”
“Welfare fraud investigators are four pay grades below a Vermont state police sergeant,” I countered. “When Welfare was told to tighten their belts, they handed investigations over to the VSP. But what was good for their budget turned out bad for the state’s. In a few counties, VSP is scheduling fraud investigations during overtime hours, and allowing anyone eligible to conduct them. I know a captain who is legitimately taking advantage of that, and for a lot more money than Welfare was paying in the first place. Does that make sense to you?”
“A single agency would have the same problems. Plus, you’re talking about the state police-hardly the paragon of efficiency.”
I tried again, hoping to avoid the standard inaccurate target-shooting at the VSP. “Amos Melcourt killed those two kids up north because a part-time deputy sheriff was put where he shouldn’t have been, supposedly because money was too tight to allow for anything better. That wouldn’t be true in a more centralized system with a state-mandated budget.”