“Been pretty quiet.”
“When was the last time you visited the quarry?”
“A few weeks ago.”
“Is there another way to get there, other than right by your driveway?”
“The road goes on through. It’s rough-nobody else lives on it-but you can do it if you’re in the right kind of rig.”
I scratched my cheek, glanced out the dim window, and pushed away from the counter. “Okay, Mr. Whitehurst. If you don’t mind, we’ll go take a look.”
He nodded silently and watched me until we’d both almost reached the foot of the stairs, before addressing what was really on his mind. “This going to be a big deal? Lots of people and what-all?”
I shrugged. “Not if you don’t want it to be. It’s your property. We have to have access, especially if it turns out to be something bad, but you can stop anyone else from coming on your land, same as always. Promise me you won’t use the dogs, though, okay?”
He pushed his lips out slightly but said nothing.
“For our part,” I added, “we’ll keep the location out of the papers. That work for you?”
“All right.”
I emerged as from a dank grotto and tilted my head back to face the sunlight, the warm smell of the nearby woods clearing the dampness from my nostrils.
“Think he might be involved?” Sheila asked after shutting the door.
“I doubt it. Just happened to be in the wrong place. You ought to check him out when we get back to the office, just to be sure. Could be Mr. Whitehurst is a retired ax-murderer.”
We waded through the dogs toward the others and eventually backed both cars down the driveway to the road. Ron gingerly followed Sheila for ten minutes more, until we found another patrol car parked to one side. We both pulled over behind it, tilting precariously on the edge of a ditch. Tyler-short, thin, and still pissed off-struggled to lug his equipment cases out of the uphill door onto the road. “Jesus, Ron. It’s not like we’ll be holding up traffic.”
Ron smiled and lent him a hand, recognizing as I had that the bite was out of his bitching, and that it wouldn’t be long before the J.P. we were used to had returned. Whatever it was that had gotten us all out here, any field work was better than the office drudgery we’d saved him from.
In fact, Tyler’s road to recovery barely took him five paces.
He set down his cases like a weary airport traveler and stood a moment in the middle of the road, getting his bearings. Suddenly he crouched and touched the dirt at his feet. “This is the quickest way to the site?” he asked Sheila.
She nodded.
“So it’s the logical place to park if you’re going to dump a body,” he said, almost too softly to hear.
It was more than a simple statement of fact; there was also a hint of reproach in his voice. Three cars were now parked where a previous one might have paused in the commission of a crime, obliterating all hopes of identifying either tire tracks or trace evidence.
Tyler straightened, apparently unconcerned. “Doesn’t matter. That, though,” he added, pointing at the woods, “is something else. Did anyone think to restrict people to a single corridor in and out?”
Sheila smiled and pointed to a rock by the side of the road. “I put that there when I first got here. The rest of the way’s marked with surveyor tape.”
We lined up at the rock and gazed into the trees. Bright pink scraps of plastic ribbon, tied to branches twenty feet apart, stretched uphill into obscurity.
“I chose this spot because I saw fresh tracks over there,” Sheila added, pointing just beyond the parked cars. “Well,” she then corrected, “maybe not tracks exactly, but some crushed plants and scratch marks in the dirt.”
Tyler’s eyes gleamed. “Nice work.” He wandered over to appraise her discovery.
Ron Klesczewski turned toward our car. “I’ll call for one of the Fish Cops to see what they can pick up.”
The Fish Cops was the nickname for the wardens at Fish and Wildlife. The term was one of affection, since we all knew the best of them could track a squirrel over bedrock. At least that’s what they had us believing.
“Sheila,” J.P. called out. “Where did you say the body was?”
She pointed into the woods. “ ’Bout a quarter mile that way.”
He returned to us, his brow furrowed. “Whoever it was wasn’t taking any chances. Looks like he took a route where he could leave as few tracks as possible.”
Each of us hauling one of Tyler’s cases, we set out on Sheila’s blazed trail, leaving Ron behind to radio in. Five feet into the woods, it became obvious that protecting the integrity of a potential crime scene wasn’t the only reason to have marked a pathway. The surrounding trees became almost instantly indistinguishable from one another, looking as dense and untouched as remote Canadian hinterland. Without those plastic pink flashes of color, we would have been hard-pressed to know what direction to take, or how to find our way back to the road.
One hundred and fifty years earlier, Vermont had consisted almost entirely of farmland and pasture, wrested from a prehistoric virgin forest that had given the lumber industry a lucrative start. Now, some eighty percent of the state looked like our present dense surroundings and gave visiting tourists the erroneous impression that they were traveling the same paths used by the Abnaki Indians. Only the odd stone foundation or field wall gave a clue to the truth.
Several hundred yards up our gentle ascent, the trees thinned out, the earth beneath us yielding to moss and lichen-covered rock, and we found ourselves following the spine of a long, rocky crest, like ants traveling the length of a sleeping dinosaur. Here the surveyor’s tape was pinned in place by small stones.
“Clever,” Tyler said. “A spur of this same surface is what I noticed near the road, where those scratchings were. Guy obviously knew the terrain.”
“Unless,” Sheila cautioned, almost hopefully, “we’re talking about a hiker who just tripped and broke his neck.”
J.P. didn’t bother looking back. “Wearing a business suit?”
No one answered him.
There was no view from the ridge. The forest surrounding the outcropping we were traveling was too tall to allow for one. But it was brighter, and a small breeze brushed our faces, easing the claustrophobia of moments earlier.
The figure of a man suddenly rose as from the earth itself, standing up near the edge of the clearing. He waved at us. “Hey, Lieutenant. Over here.”
Patrolman Ward Washburn came our way, speaking as he approached. “The quarry’s right there. It was kind of hard to rope off.”
He led us to the edge of a sudden drop-off-a small quarry cut into the stone like a bite into a wheel of cheese. A yellow streamer of tape marked “Police-Do Not Cross” lay awkwardly on the stone, until it reached the woods at the foot of the quarry and began looping more authoritatively from tree to tree. Between the base of the small cliff we were standing on and those woods, nestled in the palm of the crescent-shaped quarry, was a pool of dark, shallow, stagnant water. Face down in its middle floated a small, thin man, spread-eagled, his arms extended as though desperately signaling a bus to stop.
The odd thing about him, though, wasn’t his attire, which looked like a throwback to the fifties. It was more the lack of it. His feet were bare.
J.P. Tyler smiled slightly, at last wholly in his element. “Well, it ain’t no deer.”
Chapter 2
Alfred Gould, the assistant medical examiner for Brattleboro, sat back on his heels by the water’s edge. The corpse, stiff with rigor mortis, lay face up in the embrace of a wide open body bag, like a wet, unpliable parody of a Christ figure. His face was a blotchy purple, his hands and feet puckered and made slightly translucent by prolonged immersion. And yet his distinctly Slavic features-those of a man at least in his sixties-were recognizable, if no longer terribly appealing. He hadn’t been in the water long enough to suffer real damage, nor had any aquatic animals chosen to make a meal of his face.