“You saw this man?”
He shook his head. “Don’t I wish. He found me last night, outside in the dark on Flat Street. Came up behind me, shoved me against the wall, stuck a knife in my ear, and asked me about Marty.”
“And you told him where he was?”
Don Matthews smiled. “I told him squat. I gave him a phony address.”
“Pretty risky.”
The smile broadened with the implied flattery. Matthews might not have told the truth to the man with the knife, but his ego demanded he share his secret with some appreciative audience. For those scant few minutes, he and I were bonded.
“Like I said. It’s a pride thing. But it did make me twitchy.”
“You call Marty to warn him?”
“I left a message.”
The next question was a given. “How do I do the same thing?”
“Talk to Jorja Duval. She lives in Bratt, on Baker.”
Baker Street is just a block beyond one of Brattleboro’s busier, four-way intersections. The other three streets either lead downtown or to shortcuts to the south side. But the extension feeding into Baker falls off a slight embankment and is part of a closed loop bordering a large, empty field near the Whetstone Brook-out of sight and largely out of mind.
The buildings along it run from decrepit to slightly better, in varying stages. The address Don Matthews had given me was a two-story apartment building, once a home, now cut into four small, dark sections, each one neglected, stagnant, but cheap. The windows were all covered with familiar brittle and tattered plastic wrap, once put up to help stop the freezing air from whistling through the gaps but left to age through all four seasons, year after year, until its only remaining effectiveness was to proclaim the hopelessness of those inadequately sheltered behind it.
Willy and I had decided on a quiet approach, parking up the street and coming around the corner on foot. The weather was good-clear, sharp, and cold enough to make your nose hairs tingle-and I didn’t mind the chance, however oddly presented, to be outside and away from the stifling indoor heat most people found comforting during the winter.
We walked down the middle of the street. There was no traffic, and the sidewalks had been left to reemerge in the spring, as usual in most of the town’s less stringently tidy neighborhoods.
“Anything we should know about Jorja Duval?” I asked Willy as the house loomed nearer.
“Nothing you couldn’t guess,” he said. “On welfare, on drugs, small history of dealing, tricking, and petty theft. Featured in a few domestics, according to Bratt PD, always as the punching bag. I knew her father back in the old days. Always figured he was banging her, although no charges were ever brought. He’s at St. Albans now on a manslaughter charge. Jorja had a brother, too, but he OD’d about five years ago.”
“How old is she?”
Willy hesitated. “Twenty-five? Maybe younger.”
We drew abreast of the house, took it in quickly with a practiced eye, and then struggled our way up a pathway that had been cleared in the Walter Skottick fashion-not at all.
The peeling front door sported four rusty mailboxes by its side, none of them labeled. There were also no doorbells. I raised an inquiring eye at Willy.
He pointed to the window above us and to the right. “That one,” he said softly, and twisted the doorknob.
The door swung back to reveal a gloomy, bare-floored hallway with a set of stairs heading up. The odorous fog that crept out to envelop us was rancid and flavored with mildew and a smell of humanity reminiscent of an overripe diaper pail. Neither one of us reacted, since as working environments went, this was pretty standard fare.
We both paused for a moment, watching and listening, taking nothing for granted, knowing full well that inhabitants of such places were capable of anything.
Hearing nothing, we headed upstairs. There was an extra stillness to the cold air I didn’t like, though, and I could sense Willy felt the same way. He unbuttoned his coat and removed his gun from its holster.
Walking on the balls of our feet to partially muffle our shoes and the squeaking of old floorboards, we moved to either side of Jorja Duval’s apartment door and paused once again, listening to nothing but our own breathing.
I finally reached out and rapped on the door, looking up and down the hallway as I did so for any movement from the other two apartments on the landing. “Jorja Duval? This is the police. Open up.”
The response was immediate, otherworldly, and psychologically chilling. From inside, we heard a single, high-pitched animal howl, followed by a series of thuds, crashes, and the sound of claws scrabbling across bare wood at high speed. It was as if my knock had unleashed some demonic pinball that was now smacking off every wall and obstacle inside the apartment.
“What the hell?” I muttered and grasped the doorknob, twisting it slowly.
The door opened and a tabby cat flew out and froze for a split second at the sight of us, its hair on end, before shooting off like a rocket down the stairs. But not before I’d seen that all four of its paws were crusty with dried blood.
“Jesus,” Willy burst out.
Still recovering from the surprise, I chanced a fast glance around the corner, my own gun out as well. Pulling my head back, I described what I’d seen to Willy. “Short hall, two closed doors opposite each other. Big room beyond. All I could see there were two legs sticking into the middle of a big blood stain, and red paw prints all over the place.”
“We call for backup?” he asked. I paused, thinking of the eerie stillness I’d noticed earlier. “No time. Ready on three?”
I held up three fingers, one at a time, and the two of us entered the small hallway as one, covering both the distant room and the two closed doors.
The precautions proved unnecessary. The place was empty except for the dead woman in the middle of the floor, lying face up, spreadeagled, with her throat cut wide. The room was dingy, dark, barely furnished, splotched with blood, and seemed far less comfortable than the average coffin.
“This Jorja Duval?” I asked Willy.
He holstered his weapon. “Was.”
I opened the back of the Brattleboro Police Department’s converted ambulance and hauled myself inside. Used for everything from carrying their special reaction team to serving as a mobile command vehicle, it was now parked outside Jorja Duval’s apartment house primarily to give us all a warm place to confer. The landlord had still not been located, so no one had found a way to turn up the heat in the building, which was now crawling with state crime lab technicians in any case, clad in puffy white overalls and booties, like scientists escaped from a movie lot.
Inside the van were Ron Klesczewski, Sammie Martens, a couple of Brattleboro cops taking advantage of the portable coffee urn, and a woman I’d never met but knew to be the head of the forensics team. We’d all been here for five hours by now, following the standard protocol for the discovery of a homicide, and were processing the apartment, interviewing the other residents, and canvassing the neighborhood.
I found a spot on the bench running the length of the van’s side and slipped off my coat, greeting the others as I did so. I’d just returned from the office, where I’d been making more inquiries into Marty Gagnon and his known contacts.
The lab tech was a tall, striking woman named Robin Leonard, who introduced herself with a firm handshake and a no-nonsense manner.
“Okay,” I asked them all, after that introduction was over, “where do we stand?”
Sammie had been in charge during my absence, and while not prone to sitting back in most cases, she knew better than to speak first right now. In exchange for its elite status, or because of it, VBI had drummed into its ranks an instinct for diplomacy, Willy notwithstanding. We didn’t need the FBI’s reputation for stepping on toes. Sammie kept her peace, looking directly at Ron instead.