The irony was that, initially, I’d been one of those critics. A career veteran of the Brattleboro PD and the lieutenant in charge of its detective squad, I’d watched with disgust as an interesting trial balloon had been deflated by confusion and lack of support. When the time had come to fill VBI’s ranks, I hadn’t even applied.
Now I was its field-force commander-the number-two man. A leap of faith I hadn’t quite finished rationalizing.
Sammie seemed to be puzzling along similar lines, as well she might, being another newly anointed VBI special agent who’d been cooling her heels at home ever since. “What’re we supposed to do here? Take over the case? None of this is turning out the way I thought it would.”
I shook my head sympathetically. “Until I’m told otherwise, I’m looking at us more like the forensic lab, or the arson guys, or the bomb-disposal squad. We deliver manpower, expertise, contacts, and our own prosecutor to whoever asks for us, and we leave them with the collar, the kudos, and the headlines if we’re successful.”
“The Lone Ranger,” she muttered, “making the town sheriff look good.”
“Kind of,” I agreed. “If we do it right, we’ll get all the tough cases, act pretty much autonomously, and let whatever department head requested us handle the reporters, politicians, and the cranks. It’s a cop’s dream come true.”
Hearing it out loud made it sound pretty good.
“If you weren’t sure what this was,” I asked her, perhaps hoping she wouldn’t ask me the same question, “why did you sign up?”
Sammie flushed slightly. I knew she’d applied to VBI early on without telling me, while still on my squad in Brattleboro. She was smart, tough, persistent, and normally loyal, which I knew was embarrassing her now. But she’d always been hard-driving and ambitious, and I’d never expected her to stay with us forever-all of which was moot anyway, since I was once again her boss.
She began hesitantly. “I thought I could maybe learn a few things.” She groped for something more meaningful in the face of an obviously different reality. Finally, she gave up. “It looked like an interesting opportunity.”
I took her off the hook. “Me, too. Does what I just described help?”
She reflected a moment and then smiled. “It sounds great. You think it’s realistic?”
I laughed. “Beats the hell out of me. How we perform right now’ll probably tell us.”
The ME’s office in Burlington is tucked into a corner of Vermont’s largest medical center, a happy beneficiary of the state’s efforts to lock horns with competing hospitals in bordering New York and New Hampshire. Once located above a dentist off-campus, Dr. Beverly Hillstrom’s office was now extraordinarily well appointed and the source of considerable pride. Which was entirely fitting-over many years, and despite Vermont’s small size and tight budgets, she had created one of the most efficient and highly respected medical examiner systems in the Northeast. These modern facilities were a long-overdue reflection of that.
She greeted us as soon as we were announced and escorted us down a gleaming hallway to the autopsy room at the far end, making well-mannered small talk along the way. Tall, slim, and Nordic in appearance, Hillstrom was of indefinable age and unmistakable bearing. Having worked closely together for years, we still referred to one another by title, and not once had she shared a single detail of her personal life. Yet the depth of our friendship was without doubt. She’d proven it many times, extending me courtesies she rarely granted others.
Titles, however, were causing her a problem right now.
“Lieutenant-in point of fact, that’s no longer accurate, is it?” she asked as we neared the wide, blank door of her autopsy room.
“Not technically. I don’t mind if you want to stick with it.”
She shook her head. “No, no. That wouldn’t do. How should I address you?”
I was still ambivalent about that. “It sounds a little silly, but we tore a page from the FBI book-officially I’m a Special Agent in Charge, or a SAC. Not that I’m in charge of anything yet. Why don’t we just make it ‘Mister,’ with the understanding that I’d really prefer ‘Joe.’”
She swung back the door and ushered us over the threshold, frowning slightly. “No. Mister is fine.”
The room before us was broad, deep, bright, and neatly arranged, with a skylight overhead and two operating areas extending from the wall like twin boat slips. Laid out on one of the metal tables was a body so unusual in appearance it looked more like a lab experiment than an autopsy candidate.
Standing next to it were two men, Hillstrom’s longtime lab assistant Henry, and Ed Turner, a state trooper assigned to this office as its law enforcement liaison.
Turner raised his eyebrows as we entered and greeted us with a reserve I knew we’d better get used to. He was, after all-and until or unless these prejudices were sorted out-a member of a “rival” agency. “Well, look at this-the feds that aren’t. What’re you doing here?”
I laughed and shook his hand, sensing Sammie tense beside me. “Just helping out the Stowe PD. How’ve you been keeping?”
Hillstrom, sensitive to matters of turf, quickly took over. “We have an approximately mid-forties male, in good physical condition aside from a few missing parts, who appears to have suffered a single fatal puncture wound to the heart, although we’ll have to wait for toxicology to rule out anything additional. The body itself has thawed out,” she explained further, “although some of the organs are still a little hard. We’re trying to speed things up by flushing them with warm water, but I don’t want to move too quickly.”
Sammie had been studying the open body with professional interest, staring down at its unusually dark red interior. Hillstrom’s finding, however, made her look more carefully at the chest. “He was stabbed?” she asked.
Her confusion was understandable. The ME’s patient was anything but traditional-his skin was red fading to a leathery brown, instead of the usual sickly yellow, his eyes were strangely sunken and dry, and his nose, ears, and fingers were dark, as if dipped in soot. He also was missing one arm and both feet, the amputations so clean, they looked cut through by a razor. But there was no sign of any violence aside from some bloodless scratches on the side of his face.
“You’re reacting to how he looks,” Hillstrom responded. “That’s what stumped the Stowe police and the local assistant medical examiner, I’m embarrassed to say. It’s also what led them to think that he might have been just a hiker who got lost and died of natural or environmental causes, perhaps scraping his face in the process.”
She pulled on a pair of gloves, moved closer to the man’s chest, and parted a few strands of his chest hair, revealing a tiny hole in the skin the size of a ruptured pimple. “There’s the point of entry.”
Sammie leaned so far over that her nose was inches from the wound. “What was it? It almost looks like a small-caliber bullet wound.”
“He was run through,” Ed Turner answered, “like with a shish kebab skewer.”
I could see from Hillstrom’s expression that she disagreed with the allusion, but she merely changed the subject. “Another interesting detail can be found with the victim’s extremities, including the ears.” She lifted his one remaining hand. “Notice the shriveling of the fingertips-their weather-beaten quality?”
“Almost looks like a mummy,” Sammie softly observed.
Hillstrom smiled broadly. “Very good, Agent Martens. That’s exactly right.”
“Implying he’s been around for a while,” I suggested.
“Longer than you think, I bet,” Turner added, his earlier reserve now gone.
“Look at his duds.” He crossed over to a pile of clothes on a nearby table and spread the top garment out for examination-a curiously constructed wool herringbone jacket with a belt across the back. It was worn, tattered, and faded.