It was clear, however, that he’d been here within the month. Thirty minutes into our archaeological dig, Sammie found a newspaper dated two weeks earlier.
She pointed at a phone near the rumpled bed. “You think he conducted business from here?”
“We can only hope. Get the number and we’ll run it by the phone company.”
“If he did,” she suggested. “Maybe we’ll find some records or files or something.”
We both instinctively paused to study the room from a different perspective. The sergeant, having sent the other officer away, looked from Sammie to me and back again. I could tell he’d stayed behind in large part to keep her within sight. “What’s up?”
Sammie tilted her head, her eyes going from wall to wall, as if reading a map. “We’ve been here long enough to have found a desk or a filing cabinet or a briefcase. If he did do business here, given his past criminal history, he probably figured this place would get tossed sooner or later.”
“Meaning he hid it,” he concluded for her.
“If we’re lucky.”
She began walking the floor perimeter, where the kick-board met the wall, moving clothing, trash, and debris as she went. I took her cue and studied the framing over each door. I got lucky first, noticing how a board over the bathroom entrance was slightly soiled at both ends, as if from repeated handling.
I reached overhead and tugged at it gently. “He’s a tall guy,” I reasoned out loud. “Be more natural for him to work high than to get on his knees.”
The board came straight out along two long wooden dowels fitting a pair of holes in the header behind. The narrow gap between the top of the header and where the sheetrock ended served as a perfect clandestine shelf.
I reached into the gap and withdrew a thin, curled-up accordion folder made of lightweight cardboard. This I handed to Sammie, to mollify her obvious disappointment at not having made the discovery.
She placed the folder on the kitchenette counter and slipped the rubber band from around it with a snap.
“What’ve you got?” the sergeant asked, his expression overly keen, as he stood close enough to her to be almost touching.
She poured the contents out, ignoring him, too used to law enforcement’s gender imbalance to take much notice of its occasional juvenile excesses. “Looks like some notes, letters, a list of names and schedules.” She opened a small envelope. “And-damn, this is handy-photographs of houses looking suspiciously like Tucker Peak.” She held one up by its corners. “Including the William Manning residence.”
I forced the sergeant to step back so I could examine the list. “All the burglaries are here, plus a few.”
She glanced over from studying the photographs. “They had more planned?”
I read more carefully. “They were either going to knock off more than they did, or they’ve already hit a few no one told us about. Look at the dates in the schedule.”
Sam compared them to the electronic dates stamped on the front of each photograph. “Richie quizzed his girlfriends about their calendars while they were rolling in the hay and then gave Marty the heads up. Wonder who took these pictures?”
I was now staring at the wall before me, thinking back.
“What’s up?”
“Something Richie said about the break-ins before he creamed me-‘You don’t even have the number right’-this must be what he meant.”
She riffled her thumb through the notes in her hand. “I guess we better figure out who we’re missing.”
I pointed to the small pile of letters. “And check out his pen pals.”
For the next three days, the four of us did a collective autopsy on Richie Lane’s private archives, interviewing the owners of those houses listed but not known to have been robbed, and chasing down the names of those people, mostly women, who’d written him.
It was not easy going. Most of the condo owners were only occasional residents and some only owned their property in order to rent it for a fortune through the resort’s booking service, leaving us to interview baffled renters who had no idea what we were talking about. We did meet an owner who had noticed a few items missing-and a broken window-but who still hadn’t thought that he’d been robbed. Our visit turned on a light bulb over his head and caused Willy to restate that most people are morons.
We also met two residents who admitted that around the time we knew their homes had been targeted, they’d had sudden changes of schedule, which we assumed was why Gagnon and Lane had passed on the opportunity. On a tangential sociological point, I also discovered that not every house had been scrutinized through Richie’s bedroom antics alone. In many of the houses we studied, there was either no woman inhabitant, or she was too old or incapacitated to frequent the Tuckaway or take ski lessons, or hadn’t been at the resort at the right times, meaning Richie had probably gained his knowledge from a male. With each and every mark, however, the common denominators of either regular attendance at the nightclub or slope-side lessons from Richie reinforced our hypothesis that he’d been Marty’s spotter.
Tracing the writers of Richie’s letters also turned out to be tricky. Several of them were married, prompting the same discretion I’d used with Mrs. Manning. Others were located far away, usually back in their urban homes near or in New York, Boston, Hartford, and elsewhere, which forced us to conduct the interviews by phone. Others were simply impossible to locate. Richie hadn’t kept all the envelopes, and some of them didn’t have return addresses anyway. Usually, by cross-referencing the signatory with our list of homeowners, we could figure it out, but in one case specifically we hit a dead end. Unfortunately, she also looked very promising.
She’d signed her name Shayla and made mention of Steepway, a road which-according to the 911 database we consulted-was located in Newfane, about twelve miles northwest of Brattleboro. There were others, too, Steepway being about as unique a designation as River Road, but this one was the most proximate to Tucker Peak, in next-door Windham County, and seemed as good a place to start as any.
Also, the tone of Shayla’s letter implied that she and Richie, whom she called Bobby-his real name-were friends of long-standing acquaintance. Unlike most of the other correspondents, who ran the gamut from the pleading to the pornographic, she maintained a familiar, joking tone, almost like that of an intimate sister.
After checking all available databases and finding nothing on Shayla, I picked up the phone and called the Windham County sheriff and asked if his department could shed any light. He was no help there but recommended I speak with the town constable, Eric Blaushild.
Constables are a curious Vermont institution, dating back to before the state joined the Union. The root of local law enforcement, and once listed along with the sheriffs as the primary police agents in the state’s Constitution, they had not weathered the march of time well. Dropped from the Constitution during a rewrite in the seventies, they’d assumed a second-class status in a world increasingly interested in better police training, uniform standards for all departments, and more legally defensible policies and procedures.
Constables-at best part-time certified by the state in a one-week training course, and often elected by a public who had no idea what or who they were-frequently were seen as dinosaurs, useless appendages, or even dangerous, gung-ho, gun-wielding wannabes who hadn’t made the grade into “legitimate” police work. There was some truth to all this, of course, and examples could be trotted out on demand. But by and large, the town constable remained, while a bastard child of the legal establishment, a good tool for local ordinance enforcement, especially involving dogs and occasionally quarrelsome residents. They could also be good sources of neighborhood information.