“Why?”
I shrugged. “The number-one question. I still think it’s the Harris case.”
Frank sighed.
“It’s the common thread. Of course, maybe it’s the moon or the alignment of the planets, or maybe the entire jury took LSD time capsules and simultaneously flipped out three years later.”
“I’d take that over reopening Harris.”
“I don’t think we’ve got a choice. Even you have to admit a similarity in all these cases, and the likelihood that they were all orchestrated by the same man. Besides that, none of these set-ups was built to last-they were to get our attention, not to sidetrack us. Whatever it is Ski Mask wants, he obviously thinks it involves Harris.”
Frank grunted. “And Phillips’s death guarantees we can’t just ignore him.” He got up. “So I guess we won’t.” He paused at the opened door. “You can look into Harris, with my incredibly valuable backing, but still try keeping it under your hat, okay?”
7
Early on September 15, 1983, the police were called by the manager of the Huntington Arms on Putney Road. One of his tenants, Kimberly Harris, had made arrangements with a local cab company to be picked up and driven to the Keene airport, but she wasn’t answering the repeated knocks on her door. From what the manager could see through the living room window, the apartment appeared ransacked. He said he didn’t want to use his pass key until the police were with him.
Two patrol cars were dispatched to the scene, driven by Sergeant George Capullo and Patrolman John Woll respectively, each of whom was near the end of his shift. They entered the apartment with the manager and found the nude and strangled body of Kimberly Harris tied to her bed. Calls were put out to Support Services, the State’s Attorney and the regional medical examiner. Detectives Willy Kunkle and J.P. Tyler arrived ten minutes later; Kunkle took charge of the investigation while Tyler went about gathering physical evidence.
A preliminary review of the site led officers to believe that a struggle had taken place, ending in Kimberly Harris being tied to her bed. The rope attaching her right hand to the bedpost had worked loose, and her fingernails were jagged and bloody, indicating she had scratched her assailant. A broken, blood-smeared lamp was found on the floor near that same hand, rousing suspicions that it may have been used for self-defense. Wet, viscous deposits in and around her mouth and pubic area led Tyler to assume she had been sexually assaulted.
The regional medical examiner, Alfred Gould, recommended that the state medical examiner take personal charge of the forensic investigation, and James Dunn, the State’s Attorney, agreed. Dr. Beverly Hillstrom was therefore contacted and arrived on the scene from Burlington three hours later.
Meanwhile, based on the manager’s statement that the leather belt found around the victim’s neck belonged to the janitor, Kunkle quickly secured a warrant allowing a search of the janitor’s quarters. During the search, th Ved e police found a woman’s undergarments, a small quantity of heroin with the appropriate paraphernalia, and the janitor, a black man named William Davis. Davis was sitting on the edge of his bed under the influence of the drug, nursing both a bad head wound and several deep scratches on his left cheek. He was booked on a charge of felony-murder.
Several days later, Dr. Hillstrom reported her findings. They were compared with additional tests conducted by the state crime lab. According to both reports, the blood under Harris’s nails matched Bill Davis’s; his fingerprints were in various parts of her apartment and on the belt used to strangle her; the blood-smeared dent found on the lamp matched the cut on his head; the rope used to tie her down was cut from a coil found stored with the rest of his tools; and the semen found on her body was compatible with his blood type.
One additional detail surfaced but was deemed largely irrelevant: Kimberly Harris was five-and-a-half months pregnant at the time of her death. Davis’s blood chemistry ruled him out as the father.
Davis’s statement to the police, obtained after he’d been apprised of his rights, was a rambling, barely coherent denial of the accusations made against him. He claimed he’d been hit on the head from behind sometime the night before and had woken up in his bedroom shortly before the police had arrived. He also claimed he’d been injected with heroin while he was unconscious. He denied ever having an interest in Harris. When asked if he had a lawyer, he burst out laughing. The public defender was called in to take his case.
From that point on, the legal dance began, and the police all but vanished from the scene. Davis was arraigned, his counsel pleaded for release, the judge set a stiff bail, and Davis ended up as a target for the white pranksters in the Woodstock State Correctional Facility, all in short order.
All that was according to the official written report, tailored for public consumption and rendered in such obtuse pseudo-legalese that I had trouble translating it. There were three remaining sources of information I could use to dig into the case: the court records, located upstairs in the derelict, sauna-like bathroom; the police case file, a bound logbook stuffed with additional odds and ends scribbled on napkins, paper placemats, and what have you; and the officers’ notebooks, those small black jobs we all carry around to make personal notes and which don’t belong to anyone but ourselves. The notebooks are usually the most telling, of course, assuming the owner has kept them and can still decipher his own handwriting, but they are sacrosanct-some of what’s in them could get a cop into serious trouble. Had the head guy on the job been Murphy, I might have gotten some access to his notebook. Considering that man was actually my dear friend Kunkle, I wasn’t going to waste time worrying about my chances.
The case file was the logical first step, but it too demanded some deciphering. Many of the items thrown into it were comprehensible only to the throwers, and since Frank wanted me to act invisible, I was in a bad position to ask for favors.
So, for the moment, the court records were the only road I could travel. I closed the written report before me, returned it discreetly to the filing cabinet in the main office, and lumbered my way back upstairs to the Clerk of Court.
The girl behind the counter was her usual summery self. “Two days in a row? I thought you didn’t like the stair [ike" les.”
“I’m working on a medical disability. I need your indulgence again.”
As before, she glanced at the door behind her and lowered her voice. “Shoot.”
“Are you the only person from this office who goes upstairs?”
She nodded. “You’ve obviously never seen my boss.”
I had. It was a rhetorical question. “What would you do if you found someone going through those files without your clearance?”
She pursed her lips. “Other people have junk up there.”
“This would be your junk-like, say, in a bathroom.”
“If he was someone I knew,” she smiled, “and he wasn’t removing anything or making a mess out of the filing, I think I’d just say ‘Hi’ and maybe offer him a fan.”
I smiled back. “Thank you.”
The first thing I did was search the upper floor for a light with a stronger bulb than the one hanging from the middle of the bathroom ceiling. The best I could manage was seventy-five watts. I then stripped to the waist, shifted the boxes into a rough beginning-middle-end order, and settled as comfortably as I could on the toilet seat. I opened the first file from the first carton and began to read.
Gail lived on Meadowbrook Road, north of West Brattleboro, actually not far from Orchard Heights. But where the latter had appeared as if by the wave of a Realtor’s wand, Gail’s neighborhood had followed an unrushed evolution from countryside to farms, and from farms to large family homes. Lately, the occasional one-and-a-half story modern ranch-style was starting to appear, but with discretion-even lending a certain democracy to the street.