Hammond opened his mouth to respond, but I interrupted. “Al, I’m not picking any fights here. All I’m saying is that just because something worked during the Revolutionary War doesn’t mean it should stay the same into the twenty-first century. These seventy-odd departments have about one thousand full-time cops working for them. It’s not much, but it means different uniforms, cars, equipment, weapons, training… you name it. They say that if every department in Chittenden County alone shared a single dispatch center, they could all save some two million dollars. Think of the money we could have-without raising a single additional penny in taxes-if we could all share our resources like that. We’re already beginning to use the same computer data, we’ve been fighting for years to get automated fingerprinting, the FBI has launched a centralized DNA bank, and other states are creating legislation allowing their cops to participate. We’re on this train whether we like it or not. I’m just saying we ought to acknowledge the fact and figure out how to make it work for us, whether it’s one big department or six regional ones or whatever. We ought to kick it around a bit.”
Hammond wasn’t interested. He rose to his feet and looked down at me for a moment, finally saying, “It sounds great, Joe. And if you and I and a few others were the people who were doing it, I might even go along. But we’re not. It’s the likes of Jim Reynolds and Mark Mullen and our jackass Governor Howell that’re going to be cobbling this together, and they’re going to be working under VSP direction. You mark my words: If this thing goes through-and I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it-it’ll have the stamp of the Green-and-Gold all over it.”
He stalked out the door, his back ramrod straight, like the state trooper he had been more than twenty years earlier.
15
I picked up the phone on the first ring out of instinct but was still half asleep when I placed it against my ear.
“Joe? Lieutenant? Hello?”
I opened my eyes. It was still the middle of the night. “What?”
“It’s Ron. Sorry I woke you up. I just got a call about that stolen Crown Vic from Keene.”
My brain was beginning to function, if not my tongue. “Right.”
“They found it in the woods near Marlboro, covered with branches and snow. The three guys must’ve driven it there right after they killed Resnick and let Mother Nature take care of the rest.”
I looked at the digital clock by the bed. “It’s two in the morning, Ron. You telling me somebody just found it?”
“Two cross-country skiers were enjoying a moonlight run, found the car, called the state police, who called me. I’m on call tonight. It might be the break we been after.”
I couldn’t fault him the wishful thinking. “Okay. Put a man on it till daylight, but call J.P. now and let him know. Ask him if he thinks it might not be a good idea to have the state’s mobile crime lab give us an assist, just in the interest of time. But be diplomatic, okay? He can be a little thin-skinned about those guys.” I almost hung up, and then caught myself. “Also, get hold of someone with a flatbed truck to transport the car to a closed facility for examination-and a brand-new tarp to wrap it in. J.P.’ll know how to handle it. Tell him I’m real keen on this.”
“Will do.”
I felt obliged to add, “And thanks for calling.”
The big car sat in the borrowed town garage like a stolen artifact of inestimable value, surrounded by men and women garbed entirely in white Tyvek costumes and crouching in the middle of a huge pale paper apron extending to the garage’s rough-hewn walls. J.P. and the mobile lab crew had been at it for several hours by the time I arrived. The paper around the car was littered with labeled evidence bags and Polaroid pictures.
J.P. came to meet me as soon as I crossed the threshold. I pointed at the car. “You find anything yet?”
“Yeah. There’s no doubt it was the same one at the railroad tracks. The gravel in the tread matches, the bogus license plate reads like Reynolds’s, although an obvious fake in good light, and we found blood high on the back seat where they must’ve propped the victim up during the ride.”
“So, two in the back and one driving?”
“Probably. Can’t tell for sure. The car’s a few years old and the real owner’s no neatnik, so it’s going to be hard to differentiate what trace evidence belongs to the killer and what doesn’t.” He gestured to the envelopes I’d noticed earlier. “We found a ton of it, in any case, and a shitload of latents. We’re going to have to reference-print everyone who’s ever been in this car in order to rule out what we’ve got. Even if it’s possible, I doubt it’ll be worth the time or expense.”
He then led me to a bench near the back of the bay, to where more evidence bags were piled. He selected one and held it up for me to see. Swathed in its slightly cloudy embrace was an oversized dirty ball peen hammer.
“This is what we think did him in-before the train, of course. Pretty good amount of blood on its business end. Found it in the trunk.”
I peered at it closely. “Funny tool to keep in a car.”
“It wasn’t kept in the car,” J.P. confirmed. “I called the owner in Keene. All he had was the usual junk.”
He replaced the hammer on the counter and picked up a Polaroid lying beside it. “Here’s the kicker, though-if we’re lucky.”
I recognized it as an extreme close-up shot of the hammer handle’s butt end. Stamped in the oil-darkened metal was a short string of numbers.
“Remember that program we ran a few years ago?” J.P. asked. “Where we were trying to get people to mark their valuables and register them with us? I think that’s what this is. Makes sense, too. One of these goes for a hundred bucks or so-weighs a ton, all metal construction, primo goods.”
I waved the photograph at him. “Can I keep this?”
He let out one of his rare, thin smiles. “I thought you would.”
I put it in my pocket. “Nice work-keep your fingers crossed.”
Franklin’s Machine Shop had been a Brattleboro institution for as long as I could remember. Owned by at least the third generation of Franklins, it had always been on Flat Street-in a small, unassuming one-story warehouse, with windows so greasy they were essentially opaque-and had always restricted its advertising to a single, hubcap-sized metal sign hanging over the wooden sliding front door.
I had been a periodic customer of Franklin’s over the decades, especially when I’d needed something either custom-made, or that had stopped being sold elsewhere twenty years earlier. If you needed an old flywheel, for instance, or a replacement drive pulley for an ancient snowblower, Franklin’s was the place to shop.
Not that it was a hardware store, of course. There were no display cases or clerks or pristine overhead lighting. In fact, there was barely any lighting at all. Even at the height of a summer’s day, the interior of Franklin’s remained cavelike, tenebrous, and cool. Looming like metal skeletons, huge piles of odds and ends formed corridors, or were stacked behind and on top of long, scarred, debris-covered wooden worktables. Here and there, stamping machines, drill presses, metal cutters, and who knew what else also stood around like fossilized wallflowers at a soundless party, each accompanied by a single extinguished gooseneck lamp. There was just enough cleared space around these tools for an operator to stand, but generally there was no operator to be seen. If Franklin’s had ever had a heyday, it lay as far back in memory as the heavy leather belts that still crisscrossed its ceiling. Nowadays, either Franklin worked alone or he was accompanied by some relative killing time between jobs.
I hadn’t known Franklin’s real first name until I’d looked it up in our computer just fifteen minutes earlier. Inevitably, he’d always been referred to as Ben, like his father and grandfather before him. I now knew he was the third in a line of men named Arvid.