I pictured Buddy in my mind, a tall, skinny, shy loner with a fondness for books and isolation. He was about the same age as Jardine and the Wolls, just under thirty. I glanced at Brandt.
He got up. “I think Ron has a copy of the school yearbook in his desk. I’ll go get it.”
McDermott and I watched him go.
“How did his parents’ breakup hit him?” I asked.
“Pretty hard. I guess. He was kind of a strange kid anyway, moody and withdrawn. Very attached to his mother; the two of them had a special bond. She could make him come out of his shell like no one else. Then he could be really sweet. He’s still like that, kind of hot and cold, although I barely see him anymore. He doesn’t start work till after I’ve left, most of the time.”
“Does he hold you responsible for his parents divorcing?”
McDermott tilted his head. “I don’t see how he couldn’t. They probably would have broken up sooner or later anyhow, but I was right in the middle of it.”
“And Buddy knew about you.”
“Oh, yes, I was around, trying to give Mary support.”
“How’s he react to you now?”
“Buddy? We don’t have much to say to each other. It was a long time ago. We mostly just say hi to each other in the hallway once in a while.”
He paused and shook his head as Brandt came out of the building and headed back in our direction, the yearbook in his hand. “It’s odd when you think about it; if things had turned out differently, I might have been his stepfather.”
Brandt stood before us, holding the book open so we could both see its contents. Under the picture of a younger, more sullen-looking Buddy was the caption, “Wendell Schultz, Jr.”
“What do you think?” Brandt asked.
“I think the tables just turned.”
36
We met in a twenty-by-twenty-foot meeting room at the Quality Inn on the Putney Road, just across from the enormous C amp;S warehouse. I had booked the room in person and had spread the word to everyone to gather there, just twenty minutes before, using the lobby telephone. I was hoping this spur-of-the moment planning would assure me of absolute secrecy. J.P. had swept the rest of the police department by now and had found two other bugs, but I still wasn’t convinced his battered AM radio had caught them all, nor had he made that claim.
I stood up at the head of the long, broad table. Going down either side, with plenty of empty space between each of them, were Brandt, James Dunn, J.P., Sammie, Dennis, Ron with his leg parked on the chair next to him, and now, Willy Kunkle. Willy, predictably, had chosen to sit at the other end, so that we faced each other like estranged parents at an awkward family gathering.
“I appreciate you all coming here on such short notice. I think our security breach is known to you all by now, but in addition, there have been some recent developments I think we should all be aware of without resorting to telephones or memos. Although we think we’ve located the bugs that were in the department, we don’t know if any of our other means of communication have been compromised.”
I stepped away from the table and began to walk back and forth across the front of the room. “First off, I’d like to reintroduce Willy Kunkle. You all know him from the old days. His expertise when he was employed by us was in narcotics, and his knowledge of the local players in that game is still very up-to-date. The docs have told us that Pierre Lavoie sustained a bruise right over his heart, where the vest stopped Jackson’s bullet, so we’ve been advised to put him on sick leave till that clears up. As a result, we’ve now hired Willy as a temporary special officer, just until we see this thing through.”
I paused and looked especially at James Dunn. “What we’ve been examining during the last twelve hours is the possible breakthrough we’ve been hoping for from the start of this case. We have evidence that the man who killed Jardine, Milly Crawford, Toby Huntington, and John Woll is Wendell ‘Buddy’ Schultz, the Municipal Center janitor.”
There was a shifting of bodies around the table. Only Dunn had still been in ignorance of this fact by now, but saying Buddy’s name in the open came like a breath of fresh air. Not only had about half of us gone sleepless for the last twenty-four hours again, but we’d been reduced to either working in virtual silence when in the office, or escaping to parked cars and restaurant booths around town in order to have secure conversations. The strain, and the increasingly fragile tempers, had begun to show toward the end.
“We came up with Buddy’s name in the early hours of this morning. The trick, however, was to pin the evidence to him, item by item, to see if it stuck. We began with his fingerprints. J.P.?”
Tyler scratched his temple, taking a few seconds to organize his thoughts. “We had a set of prints we lifted off the bottles of curare…” He stopped suddenly and gave me a questioning glance.
I nodded. “The curare is common knowledge; no need to explain.”
J.P. resumed. “I tried the FBI and the State Police, as well as our own files, but no bells went off. After Joe pegged Buddy, though, that gave me something to go for. Trouble was, how to get Buddy’s prints legally without letting him know?”
“Raid the janitor’s closet,” Dennis muttered.
J.P. smiled. “I thought of that, but he’s not the only person to handle that stuff. Anyway, the Lieutenant remembered that when Buddy stole him a table fan to keep the heat down, he wiped it off before putting it on Joe’s desk. I checked it out, got a perfect set, and made a match with the prints from the curare bottles.”
“You ruled out Lieutenant Gunther’s prints, of course?” asked Dunn, who by now was taking notes.
“Yes, sir.”
I picked it up from there. “That connected Buddy to the curare, but it didn’t necessarily make him the man who used it on Jardine. So we began digging deeper into the similarity between the deaths of John Woll and Toby Huntington. J.P.?”
“What caught our attention was that they, like Milly, had both been shot, and that, as the autopsies revealed, Toby had died first by a day or so. The bullets Hillstrom recovered weren’t in great shape-one of them was in fragments-but the crime lab still managed to make a comparison and came up with the fact that all three of them, including the only good one recovered from Milly, had been fired from the same gun, the gun we found in John’s hand.”
“That,” I broke in, “wasn’t necessarily a mistake on the killer’s part, by the way. Buddy knew that John was still a prime suspect in Charlie’s murder, and a lesser one in Milly’s; the gun would have been concrete evidence linking John to their deaths. The scenario would have been that John shot both Milly and Toby and then used the gun on himself.”
Dennis snorted derisively.
“The mistake he did make was discovered by the crime lab: All three bullets had passed through the same silencer, an item we didn’t find attached to the gun in Woll’s hand.”
Dunn held up his pen. “Hold it. Explain that about the silencer.”
“Most silencers aren’t in perfect alignment with the barrel, so they’ll mark each bullet slightly on the way out, which means that you can match a bullet to a silencer just like you can match it to an individual barrel. The first tip-off to the lab boys was that, while the gunpowder marks on John’s T-shirt were proximity burns, they were inconsistent with an open barrel.”
As Dunn continued taking copious notes, I broadened the scope somewhat. “Right now, pinning the tail on Buddy is still theoretical; we don’t have enough to get a warrant for him or to search his place, even with the fingerprints. He could, for example, claim he’d been at the vet’s a year ago and had handled those bottles out of curiosity. So we’ve taken a background approach, rechecking all the evidence we’ve accumulated so far, with Buddy’s name plugged into the equation as the bad guy. The results have been encouraging. Ron, you spent most of the day reinterviewing some of your more competent, and discreet, high-school sources. What was the bottom line on Buddy?”