It was a familiar scenario. When the three of us had worked together in the old days, both the pecking order and the interaction had been similar. I’d been the lieutenant, Sammie the eager up-and-comer, and Ron the thoughtful introvert, hard-working but self-conscious, always doubtful of his true worth. Now, by simple attrition, he was head of that same detective squad, and I knew he’d been struggling with the trappings of the job. I’d always believed he had the makings of what he’d finally become. I’d even made him my second-in-command in preparation once, prematurely, as it turned out. But he was also his own worst obstacle and could be frustrating to watch in action.
Not now, though. The pressure, while real, was still predictable this time, so after a moment’s hesitation, and the stimulus supplied by Sammie’s telling look, Ron cleared his throat.
“Right now, from our perspective, things aren’t looking too good,” he admitted. “We still have to chase down a few residents who aren’t in right now, who might’ve seen something at the time, and we need to find out if anything like the mailman or any service trucks were in the area when we think the victim was killed, but so far, we have nothing-no unusual activities or sounds, no interruptions to the neighborhood’s normal patterns. And no one has anything to say about Jorja Duval, Marty Gagnon, or anyone else who might’ve been in that apartment.”
“Meaning they never even saw them?” I asked.
“The woman across the landing and the guy who lives downstairs admit they knew Duval. Saw her coming and going. But they never talked to her, and they deny she ever had guests or caused any disturbances. To hear them, she might have been a ghost.”
“Meaning they’re lying,” Sammie softly echoed my thoughts.
“Maybe,” Ron agreed, “but we can’t prove it. Not yet.”
“What was the time of death?” I asked.
Robin Leonard spoke up. “I asked the assistant medical examiner that when he was packing her up for transport. After the usual disclaimers, he guessed sometime last night.”
“And the neighbors were in?”
Ron nodded. “Supposedly.”
One of the cops spoke up unexpectedly, no doubt hoping to impress Leonard. “You’ll probably find some dandruff or something that’ll nail the guy. I read somewhere you folks can even pick out individual cat hairs. Maybe the tabby’ll help you out.”
Leonard glanced at the man for a moment, forcing him to look away. When she responded, however, it was as if his comment had been purely professional. “I’m not that hopeful. I was told she’d only been living there a few weeks, and that the apartment has seen a half dozen occupants in the last year. My guess is we’ll end up collecting as many samples as we’d find in the average bus station, half of which we’ll never connect to anyone.”
“So, you don’t have anything hot right now?” I asked. “Like the proverbial bloody footprint?”
She smiled and pointed to the cop, in part, I guessed, to ease him off the hook. “Just the tabby cat’s, and we have a few thousand of those.”
I turned to Sammie. “Robin’s people let you poke around, too, right? You find any documents or clothing or personal items that might have belonged to anyone other than Duval?”
“Hard to say,” she answered. “The clothes she was killed in were men’s, as were half the rags in her closet. Looks like she wore whatever she could get her hands on. There’s nothing obvious belonging to somebody else, and the only documents I’ve found so far are pretty routine: mostly welfare or parole related, along with some junk mail.”
“Did I notice a phone up there? Seems like a luxury for someone living at rock bottom.”
Sammie tried to hide her embarrassment at not having made the same observation, a reaction that was typical of the high standards she set for herself. “Yeah. I’ll get a warrant for the records.”
“What about Marty’s car?” I asked Ron. “Anyone ever see it around here?”
He shook his head. “Not that we know so far.”
“You check if he got any tickets recently? According to Skottick, he’s been driving it for a month or so. Probably won’t help us even if he did get one, but you never know.”
“Will do,” Ron answered neutrally, possibly thinking I was grasping at straws.
“I assigned a couple of people to search the car like you asked, by the way,” Robin Leonard said. “Haven’t heard anything back yet. I wanted to wait for the full crew to be finished here before we tackle his apartment.”
I checked a list I’d taken from my pocket. “Thanks. You put a guard there, Ron?”
“’Round the clock. I also made sure all our guys have been briefed to keep a lookout for Gagnon. What did you get out of the computer?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “I went downstairs to check your in-house files, too. I was hoping if I ran checks on both Duval and Gagnon, I might get some overlaps, some common ground to cover. But nothing came up. I just got more people to look for. I’m afraid we’re all going to be knocking on a lot of doors.”
In the slight pause following that, Sammie asked, “You think Marty killed her?”
“I have no reason to think he didn’t. It’s more likely that the guy who punched out Skottick killed her trying to find Marty, but who can tell? Whoever did it, Marty seems to be the key. And,” I added, “if nothing else, at least we know what he looks like.”
Sammie let out a sigh. “Assuming he isn’t dead, too.”
The next several days were spent coordinating dozens of separate activities, all dedicated to locating Marty Gagnon. His apartment and car were disassembled, everyone we could find who knew him or Jorja Duval was interviewed, as were-again-Walter Skottick and Don Matthews. We even called William Manning in New York for more details and gave his background extra scrutiny. Neighbors were questioned, regular delivery people stopped and quizzed, and every scrap of paper found in our searches was analyzed for any lead at all. The medical examiner in Burlington was asked to conduct an especially thorough autopsy, which request stimulated both a frosty reaction and the simple result that Jorja Duval had died of a single cut to the neck-no defense wounds, and only slight bruising to the upper arms.
We had cooperation in all this from the Brattleboro cops, the local state police barracks, and for outlying addresses, various deputy sheriffs. We also issued a BOL, or Be On the Lookout bulletin, nationally for Marty Gagnon.
None of it led to anything beyond finding a few more people who, like Don Matthews, had been approached by a man they didn’t see and asked about Marty’s whereabouts. But Gagnon himself remained invisible, as did the man who’d assaulted Skottick, threatened Marty’s friends, and possibly murdered Duval, and we didn’t get a single hit on any of the notices we’d sent out over the wire.
At least, we didn’t until Sammie Martens walked into the office one afternoon brandishing a single piece of paper and a smile on her face.
“What’s that?” I asked, hanging up the phone.
She laid it down before me. “Maybe nothing. I got a court order for Jorja’s phone, like you suggested. I think you’ll get a kick out of what we found.”
She placed a fingertip opposite the only long-distance number on the document. “That call was made two days before the Manning place was ripped off-to a pay phone in the employee locker room at Tucker Peak.”
Chapter 6
Bill Allard sat back in his chair and pensively cupped his cheek in his hand. “God, Joe, it seems awfully thin. Don’t you have anything more linking Marty Gagnon to Tucker Peak than a single call made from his girlfriend’s phone?”
“There’s a speeding ticket he got on the access road,” I told him, hoping to stoke his enthusiasm slowly, using the little I had to its best advantage.
The two of us were in Allard’s office on the top floor of the Department of Public Safety building (also the headquarters of the Vermont State Police) in Waterbury, a conveniently short drive away from the state capitol building, the legislature, and those who controlled the purse strings.