Cricket was obviously a creature of habit, starting with back doors and garbage cans, then expanding to the backs of garages, frozen compost containers, hibernating gazebos, and other relics of summer. It wasn’t until we were at the bottom of somebody’s sloping lawn, with a sweeping view of a dazzling, flat, white expanse of frozen water that he’d apparently headed in a beeline toward the property I was most interested in.
I picked up the pace then, ignoring my near frozen feet and Willy’s increasing complaints behind me, and ran clumsily by ice-bound boat docks and dead gardens until I was standing on the shoreline of Tom and Ben Chambers’s property. There, the smooth furrow of a curious dog on his fast morning rounds was replaced by a wide, trampled, dirt-strewn half circle, attached like a soiled snow angel to the side of a fallen tree trunk. Here, Cricket had found his sought-after reward, stuffed under the log and wrapped in the remains of a now eviscerated dark brown trash bag.
“You got your portable?” I asked Willy, whose voice had been stilled by our discovery. “Get J.P. here-now. And I want a search warrant for brown plastic, thirty-gallon garbage bags, surgical instruments, any animal parts, hair, or remnants, and any surfaces stained by or utensils used for the handling of said parts, hair, or remnants. Probable cause is the possible use of said animal in Satanist rituals, the unburied disposal of a potential health hazard within one hundred feet of a water source, the killing of a fur-bearing animal out of season, and anything else you or the SA can think of that a judge’ll sign-tell them to be creative.”
“You want the bags included?” Willy asked incredulously.
“J.P. showed me a Journal of Forensic Sciences article about how garbage bags from the same box can be microscopically linked to one another, even if they weren’t in sequential order in the box-something to do with how they’re made at the factory. Anyhow, I’m hoping that even if NeverTom cleaned up the rest of his mess, he won’t have thought about the bags.”
I turned and looked up the long, curving lawn to the enormous home perched at its top. “Find me a way to get into that house, Willy.”
Ron Klesczewski located me in my office pretending to shuffle paperwork while I waited for Willy to produce the search warrant. “I got it,” he said, closing the door behind him. “At least I think so-what Tom Chambers has on Ned Fallows.”
I let him grab a chair. “I started thinking,” he resumed, “maybe it wasn’t related to the zoning board, so I broadened my research, looking in every town record I could find for Fallows’s name. Remember several years ago, that fire in the Cotton Mill Hill warehouse? Gutted part of the building? Most of the damage was on the first floor, to an upholstery business, but upstairs, in the back, there was a big storage room-all stereo equipment and electronics-easily damaged by smoke and heat. Everything was declared a total loss. The arson report was inconclusive, but the investigator made a note about how the smoke got into that upper storeroom-a door was left open that should’ve been shut, and a window was conveniently broken to draw the fire in the right direction. But the fire showed no suspicious origin, the upholsterers were way underinsured, and so nobody pursued it.
“Here’s the trick, though. The electronics represented the entire stock of a small, pricey, unsuccessful stereo store on Main owned by Ned Fallows. His banker just told me Fallows was having problems meeting his mortgage payments. The equipment was mostly out of date-basically unsellable in a trendy market-and there was a lot of it. But since the insurance was for replacement instead of current value, Fallows got top dollar to buy brand-new, cutting-edge stock. After which, and after spiffing up the store, he sold the whole business within a couple of months of the fire, making him either real lucky, or someone who pulled a fast one and got away with it.”
Ron moved to the edge of his chair with enthusiasm. “Digging a little deeper, the lucky-guy picture begins falling apart. Fallows didn’t run the store-he had a series of managers instead, the latest one being someone named Ricky Steves. Steves had been on the job for about four months before the fire, and had come to Brattleboro from North Carolina, where he has a criminal record for arson.
“My banker contact told me that after the sale of the store, Fallows paid off all his debts, retired the mortgages on the business and his house, and went back to being a Realtor and a teacher-as well as a member of the ZBA. The kicker is that according to town tax records, only a few months after the store was sold, Steves got a high-paying job for BTC Investments as a ‘consultant,’ although the low-level BTC workers I talked to never saw or heard of the man. BTC, of course, stands for ‘Benjamin and Thomas Chambers.’”
“Son of a bitch,” I murmured.
“Right. After collecting a paycheck for about a year, Steves left town without a trace. I couldn’t find him in any computer we’re hooked to.”
Ron sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. “So, what can we prove? Nothing. But I bet Tom Chambers is holding some sort of documentation laying out how Ricky was hired by Fallows to torch the business for the insurance. That’s the leverage NeverTom must’ve used to get Fallows to cheerlead the project through the ZBA. The irony is, rumors at the time said Fallows would back the project anyway, given his past voting record. Makes you wonder if Chambers twisted Fallows’s arm just for spite-to show he could knock him off his pedestal. That must be a bitch for Fallows-knowing that voting his conscience had made him look like he’d been corrupted.
“Of course,” Ron added, “there’s no way in hell we’re going to get all this confirmed, not unless Tom Chambers finds religion and bares his soul. But at least we’ve got enough for a little leverage.”
I didn’t argue the point, but I dearly hoped we had more than that. Not only was I concerned about Ned’s wandering around loose, his intentions vaguely ominous, but Mary Wallis’s disappearance continued to nag at me like a chronic ache. Despite the consensus that she had either fled or been killed, I couldn’t suppress the feeling that she was still alive-but that like Shawna before her, her time on this earth might be running out.
By mid-morning, Willy Kunkle and I were at Tom and Ben Chambers’s door, armed with a warrant and accompanied by a search team.
NeverTom was not happy to see us. “What the hell do you want?”
Willy handed him the paperwork and gestured to the others to file in. “For you to get out of the way.”
I could see Chambers considering whether to block the door with his body. Instead, to my relief, he moved aside, waving the warrant at me. “God damn you. I want to know what’s going on.”
I stepped inside and closed the door. “I won’t expect you to like this,” I began, “but we have reason to believe a raccoon was killed and dissected in this house, parts of its body removed, and the rest wrapped in a garbage bag and illegally disposed of on your property. Since the raccoon showed signs of being rabid, we felt the need to check this out. I suggest you read the warrant for the details.”
Tom Chambers’s face, never placid at the best of times, grew red to the point where I became mildly concerned for his health.
“You bastards. It’s not enough you libel me in the newspaper, and skulk around town asking questions and smearing my reputation. Now you come up with some weird little scam to invade my home. You and your chief and that arrogant crippled asshole in there had better start looking for new jobs, buddy.” He stabbed my chest with his finger. “Because I’m going to have every one of you fired.”