This very point was driven home when Katz, slightly to my right, stepped on a rabbit, which immediately bolted into the bush, causing him to shout out in alarm and Hartley-just barely visible on the flank-to swing toward us, gun raised.
“It’s okay,” I shouted, freezing in midstep, half-dropped into a crouch.
“Who’s there?” came a voice from off to the side, reinforced by the nervously flitting beam of a powerful flashlight.
“Joe Gunther and three others. You the other flank?” Instinctively, I and the other two officers also waved our lights about. I could feel the relief flooding the air among us, thick in Katz’s voice as he muttered, “Thank God.”
We found Billy Manierre in a small clearing near the Frog Pond five minutes later. A large, white-haired, avuncular man, representing, along with Brandt and myself, the old guard of the department, he was always dressed in uniform-a recruiting poster testament to how high a patrolman could go.
He was holding a map in one hand and a flashlight in the other, grilling one of his team leaders on their coverage of the scene. Greenhill Parkway, a seldom-used, isolated residential street, had not been blocked off.
The young officer wilting under Manierre’s questioning tried his best to explain, but his stammered excuses could never address the root of the problem, as both Billy and I well knew. We were a “full service” department, which meant we offered everything a big city department did. But while every branch of a major metropolitan police force was fully funded and staffed, ours were sometimes represented by a single individual, often one with several other hats to wear. As tonight’s efforts had amply demonstrated, our lofty aims, combined with our lack of personnel and experience, sometimes fell a little short of the mark.
Greenhill Parkway was a dead-end street paralleling the interstate and leading off Route 9. It didn’t even border the area we’d just searched, but, rather, pointed like a finger into its heart. Billy was by now convinced that leaving it open had allowed the shooter to jump calmly into his car and join the backed-up traffic on Route 9 while we were noisily setting up our dragnet.
I returned to the interstate, to find Beverly Hillstrom in the company of Ron Klesczewski, a tow-truck crew, and a fire engine company that was hosing down the punctured hearse. Farther off, several state troopers were beginning to direct the newly released traffic.
“No luck, I take it?” Ron asked.
I shook my head. “How’s the driver?”
“Serious but stable,” Hillstrom answered. “He was hit twice in the leg. Why was someone trying to kill us?”
“I don’t think he was necessarily trying to kill anyone. I think he was after our friend here.” I peered through the remains of the hearse’s back window at the black plastic body bag on the stretcher. “You had a chance to check him out yet?”
Ron, no doubt still smarting from his day-long ordeal at the State’s Attorney’s office, muttered, “You’d think he was dead enough already.”
Hillstrom opened the back of the wounded station wagon and climbed in. “He’s dead enough, Sergeant, but he may have things to tell us yet. Lieutenant, if you had any worries earlier about my bringing in a specialist to examine these bones, you can relax. It will be done.”
She carefully checked the body bag for bullet holes. “There’s one near the head, and another lower down. If there’s any damage, it shouldn’t be difficult differentiating it from any older trauma. For all that gunfire, I’d say the sniper wasn’t a very good shot.”
“He was aiming for the gas tank,” I replied.
She nodded soberly, realizing that by mere proximity, had the hearse exploded, her car would have been burned to a crisp. “Well, if you’ll help me get this fellow into my backseat, I’d like to get to work on this as soon as possible.”
I looked at her and smiled, wondering if she’d been as rattled as I, and knowing I’d never find out. “You mind if I arrange a state police escort?”
She smiled back a little tiredly. “No. I think I’d like that.”
12
It was ten o’clock before various members of the squad began filtering back into the office, slightly stunned at being catapulted from a low-profile, twenty-year-old brainteaser of a murder case to a headline-grabbing machine-gun attack by a maniac on a national interstate highway.
We had conducted the post-ambush follow-up by the numbers, including using Red, our narcotics tracking dog, to see if the shooter had left a scent from the place where Billy Manierre and his ragtag crew had found a handful of spent cartridge shells. There’d actually been a moment of hope when the dog had taken off in a beeline-but the scent had dried up at the top of Greenhill Parkway, confirming Billy’s pessimistic prediction that the shooter had not overlooked the same obvious escape route we had.
Brandt had made an appearance, something he rarely did, to invoke his famous GOYA and KOD maxim, which stood for “Get Off Your Asses and Knock on Doors.” It was good advice, if indelicately phrased, and had already been put in motion. But nothing had come of it. No one in the entire neighborhood had seen or heard a thing, with the exception of a few who’d confused the actual gunfire for a truck malfunctioning on the interstate.
There was a feeling hovering over all of us, as palpable as smog, that we’d just been given a proper mugging.
Nevertheless, I figured I’d better start with the only physical evidence we had so far, and so I went to visit Tyler in his tiny corner laboratory-a converted broom closet. He was standing at one of two narrow counters, looking up something in a thick reference book.
“Any luck?” I asked, leaning against the doorjamb.
He jotted down a quick note, then emptied a manila envelope onto the counter. Some fifteen brass shells rolled and spun out into a semicircle before him. “.223 caliber, consistent with ammunition they were putting into M-16s over twenty years ago.”
He reached out and picked one up at random. “No prints on any of them, and they’re all stamped ‘LC 67,’ which I just found out stands for the Lake City Arsenal, Independence, Missouri, 1967-the year they were manufactured. Lake City had a contract with the military to churn these out during the Vietnam War.”
He stopped, took off his reading glasses, and looked at me.
“Anything else?” I asked him.
“That’s it.”
I now understood why he hadn’t come running into my office earlier. “And you don’t have anything new from yesterday?”
He shook his head. “Not enough time yet.”
I thanked him and crossed the squad room to seek out Sammie Martens, whom I could hear pounding away on her typewriter. She was sitting in one of the cubicles we’d formed by erecting several interconnecting soundproof panels.
“How ’bout you? Any encouraging news?”
She sat back in her chair and made a face at me. “If you mean about tonight, forget it.” But then she smiled. “I do have something on Fred Coyner, though.”
She consulted a sheet of notes next to the typewriter. “Frederick Mills Coyner was born here in Brattleboro on August 4, 1917, the only child of a couple who died within three years of each other when Fred was a teenager. He inherited the house off Hescock Road, along with about five thousand dollars and some two hundred acres surrounding the house.
“He dropped out of high school after his mother died and from then on pretty much made his living off the land. On various forms over the years, he’s listed his occupation as logger, sugarman, farmer, and contract mechanic. He never made much money, but apparently he stayed solvent and kept his nose clean with both the local police and the IRS.