CHAPTER ONE
Joe Gunther crested the hill overlooking a small cluster of flashing, multihued vehicles below. They made him think of a swarm of fireflies, settled untidily by the side of the road, but in fact were a group of cruisers and unmarked cars much like his own. They appeared randomly scattered, as if abruptly stopped by a startling event.
They had in fact been summoned here, in the looming twilight of a fading Vermont winter day, as they often were by mishap or catastrophe, to sort through another mess left in humanity’s wake. Their common dismissal of parking protocols was due mostly to this road having been closed to traffic. But, beneath it, Joe recognized a fondness for flouting convention, perhaps because police officers were so often called upon to enforce it. Cops could be rebels that way: trained to the rule of law, obedient to procedure, policy, and authority, they are also drawn by the occupation’s spontaneity, adrenaline, and the rewards it offers creative thinkers.
Anyone can mentally retire while still on the job and merely put in the hours. Police officers are no different. But older investigators tend to rise to a higher calling. They are the profession’s theorists, and when placed among the right peers, the best of them can be almost termed artists.
Joe was such a man, a veteran of decades of police work, and he was about to join a group of colleagues honed by experience to the same edge. He was the field force commander of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, and they were all about to lay open the inner workings of an untimely death.
* * *
It was late winter—cold, harboring decaying, crunchy snow, and punctuated by surrounding bare-armed trees, their dark branches upthrust in surrender or supplication. It was getting warmer—slightly—the days longer, the lakes melting from their edges, and snowfall more frequently turning to rain. Winter was dying, for which Joe was grateful. He liked New England’s seasons, had known them all his life, and cherished living where, for six months at least, nature could be lethal. But it was the variety that gave the place life, and everyone he knew was ready for the coming spring, especially now that the annual maple sugarers were done collecting their product.
Everyone apart from the person responsible for their spontaneous gathering, who presumably no longer cared.
Joe rolled to a stop by the side of the road, the only vehicle not using its strobes.
A man, narrow, intense, unsmiling, approached with watchful eyes. His lame left arm was pinned to his side by its hand being tucked into his Tyvek suit’s pocket. This was Willy Kunkle, one of Joe’s small special unit, whose injury had been incurred years earlier in a shoot-out, but whose natural talent—and Joe’s influence—had kept him employed.
“Hey, boss,” he said in greeting, his accent betraying a hint of his New York City roots. He opened Joe’s door and stood back to let the older man out.
Joe looked at him inquiringly as he straightened and stamped his feet.
Willy answered the unstated question. “It’s a clusterfuck. We’re gonna earn our pay with this one.”
Joe nodded, looking around. “Who else is here?”
“Who isn’t?” Kunkle counted off. “We got state police, sheriff’s deputies, our crew, the ME’s office is responding, EMS just left, and the local fire department is working the detour. We’re only missing the town constable. Even the wrecker showed up early to rubberneck.” He gestured toward a shallow ravine running between the woods and the hard-packed dirt road. “But that wasn’t what you meant, I know. Sam’s down there. Lester’s wrapping up a case at the office. Should be here soon.”
Sam was Samantha Martens, another squad member and the mother of Willy’s child, Emma. Lester Spinney was the last of the VBI’s southeast regional team—one of the agency’s smallest despite its caseload, which was not something this tight-knit group wanted to change. They’d become family over time and preferred no outside meddling.
As he pulled on the type of white coveralls everyone else was already wearing, Joe indicated the roof of the abandoned car he could see from this angle. “Looks fancier than your average used pickup.”
“By about a hundred grand,” Willy agreed. “Mercedes four-door. Crap car, in my opinion. All flash for a lotta cash. You could do as well with a GM. Course, that’s just me. It’s registered in New Hampshire and was reported stolen five days ago.”
Joe was beginning to grasp his colleague’s point about complications. “Therefore not belonging to the dead man I was told was inside?” he asked doubtfully.
“You wish. Let’s just say the word inside is a matter of interpretation. He’s in the trunk, which they made way too small, natch.”
“Stolen five days ago?” Joe asked. “No one traced its GPS? They should’ve found it within hours.”
Willy hitched one shoulder. “Beats me. Supposedly, they tried but got no signal. Who knows?”
* * *
Felony crime scene reconstructions tend to be oddly leisurely paced affairs. Perimeter and access avenues are established and roped off, vehicles come and go on assorted tasks, tents are set up, specialist teams delicately work around one another like dancers of a minuet, and quiet conversations occur in small clusters, with hands cupped around paper cardboard cups of hot coffee. In some instances, as here, the natural daylight gradually yields to a spindly forest of powerful LED lamps, a growling thrumming of generators adding to the already running car engines.
Thousands of images are taken throughout, by patrol officers, investigators, medical examiners, and a special crew manning a FARO 3D digital camera designed to preserve the whole scene as a form of hologram—this to be available long after the surrounding reality has been dispatched to the morgue, the wrecker’s yard, or fed into VBI computers for analysis, consolidation, and distribution.
At some point, state crime lab investigators arrive in a large truck and collect, bag, and inventory anything from cars to computers to footprints and finger smudges. Collectively named the CSST, or Crime Scene Search Team, they catalog and store bag after bag until, finally—many hours later—the ant-like activity slows and dissipates, the cruisers, vans, tow trucks, and SUVs thin out, and at last, the reopened road and surrounding bare trees get to witness once more the gentle creaking of cold branches in the quiet breeze, and the rare passage of a car whose driver has no idea of the theatrics preceding his appearance.
Copyright © 2022 by Archer Mayor
