And that wasn’t our only aggravation, although it topped the list. As spring gave in to summer, the Reynolds Bill saga reached the level of comic opera, affecting every cop within the state along the way.
Mark Mullen’s strategy of disassembling the bill and remaking it in his own image reached a climax in late May, when his special committee finally reported to a restless and bored Legislature that-aided by many witnesses, much thought, and the application of old-fashioned pragmatism-it had taken Reynolds’s radical notion of replacing those sixty-eight agencies with a single cost-saving unit and had “amended” it by slapping on a sixty-ninth.
To be called the Vermont Bureau of Investigation-a dismissive nod to Reynolds that while his plan had been gutted, he’d come up with a great name-this new creation was to do what the Vermont State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations had been doing for years for those communities lacking full-service departments. A loosely structured, minimally bureaucratic entity, VBI was to handle all so-called major crimes, including, among others, murder, rape, kidnapping, armed robbery, and arson with death resulting. Operated by the Department of Public Safety’s now legislatively mandated and funded Criminal Justice Services, and reporting directly to the Attorney General-who could at his discretion dole out prosecutions to the state’s twelve state’s attorneys-VBI was to have full reign throughout the state, directed by statute to assume responsibility of all major crime investigations, regardless of which other agency was handling them to begin with. Thus, from the state police down to the lowliest constable, everyone was to give the big cases to VBI. Agencies could keep their detective squads-the lesser-ranked crimes, of which there were plenty, would still need local addressing-the state police would maintain its BCI, and all uniformed forces would pretty much keep their traditional roles, with a renewed emphasis on community policing. Commissioner Stanton would not become a cabinet secretary.
In short, it was the ideal political solution, designed to look good on paper, sound good on the stump, and drive the people it affected the most totally insane. Not a single cop I knew liked it.
Not that Reynolds gave in without a murmur. Although the House okayed Mullen’s compromise bill-largely because they were eager to get home to their jobs or start running for reelection-it still had to go to a conference committee, where Reynolds got to make his final pitch.
As his cherished bill had begun to unravel, he’d taken advantage of Mullen’s transparent maneuvers to wrap himself in a martyr’s cloak, decrying for weeks on end the death of common sense. So when the time came for three senators to meet with three representatives to hammer out the final bill, he offered himself for service. The Senate’s president-also the lieutenant governor and another contender for Governor Howell’s office-was the man whose job it was to make those three appointments. But while he couldn’t in all decorum deny a slot to the chair of the Judiciary Committee-and the author of the original bill-he could and did saddle him with two Senate colleagues who sided with Mark Mullen’s view of reality.
So, at five-against-one before the conference committee even met, the outcome was preordained. Reynolds was reduced to making one last speech to his colleagues in the Senate, mourning the loss of a potentially high-quality, well-trained, efficiently run organization to a disparate clutter of unevenly trained and experienced officers reporting to a crowd of over five dozen bosses. It was clear, brief, and delivered with great heart, and when he was finished, there was a genuine tang in the air of an opportunity missed despite all his listeners’ knowing it really hadn’t stood a chance from the start.
The new bill soon passed. VBI became law, the various bureaucrats in charge of it disappeared to turn it into reality, and all of us in law enforcement waited until January, when things were slated to come on line and our fates to be decided.
The press kicked it around for weeks, first siding with Reynolds, then trying to predict the future, and eventually-tentatively-conceding that maybe Mullen hadn’t been so self-serving after all. Echoing the speaker’s own mantra that Reynolds had been hunting flies with an untested, high-cost artillery piece, editorials began agreeing that Mullen’s proposal had cut to the root cause of the problem-the consolidation of resources and information for the purpose of solving major crimes. With time, the vision of a steely-eyed corps of bright, tough, statewide Untouchables began to take hold of the public’s consciousness, overriding all concerns about how such a unit could be gracefully blended into a profession famous for its inbred sense of turf.
In the end, along with everybody else in the department, I yielded to the resigned fatalism common to all military-style organizations. I remembered with irony that Jim Reynolds himself had told me early on that in the long run, the cops would do as they were told.
Acceptance of all this was made easier by improvements at home. With Gail coming to terms about her future, she seemed to slip free of the rape’s last tentacles. She was happier, felt freer to wander and quicker to laugh, and suddenly found time in the day to relax and have fun. Not wanting to miss any of this, I left work whenever I could, and Gail and I took advantage of the early warm weather to go for walks, drives, and hikes, and started-in leisurely fashion-looking for some bachelor digs for me. The whole experience-with a few minor stumbles along the way-brought both of us back emotionally to where we’d been years before.
It also made watching Sammie Martens that much harder.
She hadn’t had any choice but to break up with Andy Padgett. As she saw it, he’d violated a moral code she used as her primary guide. But her commitment to what he’d represented had been deep, and his betrayal had hit her hard. After returning from an accumulation of sick days and vacation time, she’d gone back to work like an automaton-regularly, predictably, and utterly without spirit. Willy, protectively out of earshot, if with no more sensitivity, complained it was like working with the living dead.
I began hoping either for a break in the Walter Freund case or another to replace it, just so I could give her something to sink her teeth into.
About halfway through the summer, I got my wish.
I was standing in my office, tidying up before day’s end. The windows were open, the warm air was steady and clear, and I was looking forward to renting a Sunfish and sailing with Gail on a nearby lake.
Until J.P. walked in, a broad smile on his face.
“What’re you so happy about?” I asked him.
“This.” He held up the semiautomatic we’d recovered from Billy Conyer the night he’d died. “I’ve been going over every scrap of evidence we have-checking fingerprints we hadn’t bothered with, running records of everybody we talked to, staring at witness statements till I was blue in the face. I knew there had to be something we hadn’t thought of.”
I pointed at the gun, all too familiar with what he’d been going through. “And?”
“Ballistics,” he said simply. “Ron figured it out. We checked the serial number at the time and got nowhere, so we figured the gun was a dead end. But we never did a ballistics check to see if any bullets from it were on file at the crime lab. They have hundreds of them up there, all dated and cross-referenced-a bunch without guns to fit. Turns out they had one for this.”
I slowly sat down, thoughts of summertime leisure quickly replaced by that familiar adrenaline. “Go on.”
“Three years ago, a gas station was held up off Interstate 89 south of Montpelier. A twenty-year-old named Richie West stuck a gun in the attendant’s face and told him to empty the till. Either the attendant didn’t move fast enough or he did something stupid he wouldn’t admit later, but a couple of shots were fired and he got whacked on the head before West took off into the night-just as an off-duty cop was pulling in for gas. The cop didn’t know what had happened till too late to give chase, but he remembered the getaway car, and the state cops had Richie in cuffs within forty-five minutes.”