Open Season (14 page)

These first two breathless paragraphs were followed by a more or less accurate account of each crime. The names of Reitz and Phillips were spread all over, as was the now-miserable John Woll, but Wodiska was missing and the Stiller-and-Rodriguez episode was alluded to only vaguely, culled no doubt from secondary sources. It seemed my efforts to tiptoe around Harris had worked so far—the jury connection was not mentioned.

I tossed the paper back onto Murphy’s desk. “I can’t believe he dragged in dog theft. That’s tacky.”

Frank’s eyes narrowed, but whatever he had to say was interrupted by Chief Brandt walking in. Not that Brandt said anything at first. He merely parked himself on a two-drawer filing cabinet and pulled out his pipe. We kept quiet.

Tony Brandt was a dead ringer for an Ivy League dean. He was thin, bespectacled, and tweedy, with a long nose, soft gray eyes, and thinning hair. He wore elbow patches on his jackets, maintained a shine on the seat of his slightly wrinkled wool slacks, and had a fondness for conservatively colored argyle socks.

That, lucky for us, was where the similarity stopped. For this, despite his looks, was no high-thinking theoretician. He was a lifelong cop, trained in the streets of Keene, New Hampshire, and Boston and a member of our force for the past eighteen years. He’d been chief for eight. Married and with three kids, he could still be found wandering the streets late at night, picking up tips, keeping in touch with informants, compulsively being a cop.

Despite this, he was not one of the boys, and his austerity was the single biggest reason he held the position he did among his men. In the constant struggle between labor and management, no different on a police force than in a car factory, he’d maintained his balance between gaining their respect and winning their support. Whenever he slapped you down, you knew you were to blame.

He finished loading his pipe, lit it and said in a pleasant voice, “So, what the hell is going on?”

Murphy’s face reddened. This was not what he wanted to hear a few months shy of retirement. “We did what we could to keep a lid on all this.”

Brandt shook his head. “Most of what’s in there,” he pointed at the newspaper, “is either public-record stuff or the byproduct of bull sessions. Stan has a lot of friends around here. What I want to know is what’s not in the article—and what hasn’t been in the daily reports. I also want to know how it ties in with this.” He pulled a piece of computer printout from his pocket and handed it to Murphy.

Murphy looked at it and scowled. “That was supposed to go to me.”

“I thought so. That’s why I called this little meeting.”

“Could you guys bring me in on this?” I asked.

Murphy waved the printout. “This is the FBI report on your bug. They say, to quote them, ‘it’s highly sophisticated but slightly out-of-date military ordnance.’ Judging from the speed of their response, I’d say they’d love to know where we got it. It sounds like it’s hot.”

Brandt blew out a large cloud of smoke. “Frank and I attended the same FBI course a few years back. It seems we made the same friend in Philip Danvers, who heads one of their research branches. I guess we both figured he’d be a handy man to know. Anyway, obviously he confused the goose with the gander and sent me the results of Frank’s request. So, what’s up? Between the local paper and the FBI, I smell a rat, and I sure as hell know you two are sitting on it.”

Frank sighed. “Joe’s tied the ski mask attacks to the Kimberly Harris murder. All the cases Stan mentioned involve ex-jury members.”

Brandt’s eyebrows rose. I took over. “At first, I thought it might be a vengeance thing, maybe coordinated by Bill Davis or done by a buddy of his without his knowledge. Or maybe someone going after one juror and tying in the others to screw us up. Or even an insurance scam or a huge coincidence. On the face of it, the vengeance angle’s the best of the bunch, except that besides Phillips, none of the jurors has been seriously nailed; even the attack on Stiller was mostly theatrical, as if to bring attention. So that made me think of something else, which is that Ski Mask wants us to reopen the Harris investigation and find out that Davis didn’t kill her. Whatever it is, Frank and I figured we better keep the cork on any Harris angle until we could prove something.”

Murphy rubbed his eyes with his palms, but Brandt just sat there, as impassive as before. “So maybe Davis didn’t kill her?”

“He might have, but there’s room for doubt. We may have jumped a little fast.”

“Run it down.”

“I don’t have much right now, except for a gut feeling that procedure was a bit rushed on this one.”

“What’s that mean?” Murphy demanded.

“I interviewed the Huntington Arms manager this morning. I found out he’s a peeper whose biggest kick so far was Kimberly Harris. Apparently, she performed the daily duties common to us all with unusual flair.”

“Did we ever question him?” Brandt asked Murphy.

Frank pulled a poker face. I knew this was chewing at him, and I didn’t enjoy seeing it. “I don’t remember. Maybe Kunkle did and ruled him out on the spot. It would be in the case file.”

That was a lateral pass to me, which I deigned to accept. “It might be, but again, for discretion’s sake, we decided not to open the file just yet.” Brandt nodded. “I might add, though, that the confession I got from the manager sounded brand-new to me. It was not something he’d already told another cop.”

The chief relit his pipe. “What else?”

“I also visited Dr. Hillstrom yesterday afternoon in Burlington.” I noticed Frank’s surprised look. “She’s tickled pink someone is digging into this again. She also feels things were pushed a little too hard and were a little too easy.”

“She was part of it.” Frank said.

“She admits that, and she’s not saying Davis is innocent. She just feels that when circumstances stood against him, they were taken at face value instead of being analyzed more carefully. His blood type, for example, is incredibly common, and yet that’s what the prosecution used to connect him to the semen. Her point is that if we really chased down that comparison, the semen and the blood type might no longer match.”

“Why didn’t we do that?” Again, the question was to Murphy.

“We never do, you know that. You were there, front and center. We follow standard guidelines. The ME does her routine, the State’s Attorney does his, and we do ours. That’s what happened. If there was a screwup, it’s the system’s fault, not ours. I mean, hell, what do we know about homicide anyhow? We all felt great about nailing Davis, and there was nobody kicking sand in our faces then. This is all Monday-morning quarterbacking.”

There was silence in the room. Things had become personal, and we all knew it. We also knew Frank was right. I hadn’t been involved in the investigation, but I had been a cheerleader all the way. At the time, the case had seemed miraculously clean and straight, and we had all shared in a lot of self-congratulatory backslapping.

Brandt cleared his throat. “So what have you done? Is Hillstrom doing the tests?”

“She can’t. She doesn’t know how. She did recommend a guy outside New Haven who does this stuff all the time.”

“All right. Aside from the blood tests and the manager, what else have you got?”

“An interesting comment Hillstrom made about the location of the semen. It seems it was found in Harris’s mouth and pubic hair, but not in the vagina, indicating that it could have been placed on the body artificially.”

“Or that Davis jacked off on her. We’re not talking about two people making love, you know,” Frank muttered.

Brandt nodded. “I agree that one’s thin. Besides, even if it was placed, Davis could have done the placing. Anything else?”

“Yes. She thinks the scratching and the lamp together make for evidence overkill—she doubts Harris could have done both. Also, she said that while she never got a chance to examine Davis physically herself, she did call Memorial to talk to the emergency staff that treated him. Apparently that’s a routine part of her own investigation. The impression she got was that the blow he received was a humdinger—definitely enough to knock him out. If that’s true, it runs in the face of the theory that Harris clubbed him with the lamp just before he strangled her.”

“But presumably that’s an educated guess—different heads having different tolerances for abuse, right?”

I conceded the point.

Brandt rubbed the side of his nose with his finger and thought a bit. “Is that it?”

“We have a very motivated man in a ski mask.”

“Jesus,” Murphy exploded, too loud in a too-small room. “You say that son of a bitch is turning this department upside down just because he wants the case reopened. Where the fuck did you get that, Joe? I mean, who is this guy? What’s his angle? This whole thing might have nothing to do with Kimberly Harris, did you ever think of that? We have every plainclothes we’ve got digging on this, plus a few uniforms; there’s all sorts of stuff they might come up with. Why are you obsessed with some cockamamie rigmarole that’ll only end up making us look like a bunch of grade-A morons?”

“Because I’m getting some help from the outside. Last night, somebody tried to kill me, and Ski Mask pulled my fat from the fire.”

It was a little over-dramatic, but it made a nice point. It also stopped Murphy in his tracks. His whole demeanor changed. “What the hell happened? Why didn’t you report it?”

“Nothing to report. Somebody turned on the gas in my apartment after I went to bed, and Ski Mask dragged me out just in time. I spent the rest of the night sleeping it off on the landing—almost froze my butt off. But that was it. I have no better description of Ski Mask than what we’ve already got and I have no idea who tried to bump me off. Ski Mask might know, because he said they would keep at it, and that they would probably rig it to look like an accident.”

Brandt shook his head. “I doubt that. They have to assume you’ve reported the attempt. If you died accidentally now, we’d be suspicious anyhow, so they no longer have any real reason to be discreet.”

“That’s a big comfort. He also said the key to this thing was Harris; that they were trying to cover it up and that Ski Mask and we had flushed them out enough that they were getting desperate.”

Murphy slapped his hand on the table like a gavel. “Hold on here. You don’t actually swallow that, do you? Ski Mask saves boy wonder here from the bad guys in the nick of time so he can continue the investigation? Give me a break. How was Ski Mask in the right place at the right time? And if he was, why didn’t he tail the people who gassed your place and get his own answers? None of that makes sense. I think he gassed you and then saved your hide. That way, he looks good and we get more interested.”

Brandt gave up fiddling with his pipe and put it in his pocket. “That does make sense, Joe.”

I swallowed a surge of anger. They were right, and I’d been made a fool of again. “Maybe. The only thing I have against it is that I came pretty close to croaking. It was too fine a line for Ski Mask to rely on.”

Murphy let out a groan, as I might have in his place. “I think you’re being snookered. He doesn’t need you alive. If you had died last night, that really would have gotten us going and he could have played on that. Either way, it was a no-lose play for him.” He shook the page of computer printout Brandt had received in the mail. “And even though he talked about Harris and you found this fancy bug, it doesn’t mean he was positive we’d even thought about the Harris case. For all we know, his only source of information is the newspaper and the whole purpose of his theatrics was to get the name Harris front and center in our minds.”

That was a depressingly good point. I knew Ski Mask had used us to start the ball rolling, but I had flattered myself into thinking he needed me personally, and that I might have some control over him as a result. But Frank was right; as far as Ski Mask was concerned, any cop would do.

The revelation made me doubt everything I’d come up with so far. Maybe he was a disgruntled former juror, or the Huntington Arms manager, or someone hired by Mrs. Reitz’s daughter, or even a crony of Davis’s. The whole thing was as clear as mud, and I was beginning to feel I was drowning in it. I sure as hell wasn’t going to mention the private eye from Burlington now.

Curiously, it was Brandt who came to the rescue. “Of all our options, one does seem to stand out. If you took those blood samples or whatever down to the guy Hillstrom recommended and had them analyzed, that would at least give us something concrete to work with.” He looked directly at me. “Has anything else surfaced at this point? Anything about the Phillips shooting or the other stuff?”

“Nothing. Dead ends all around.”

“Frank?”

Murphy angrily shifted his weight in his chair. “This whole damn thing only started a couple of days ago. We’ve barely scratched the surface.”

“But we have interviewed everyone involved that we know of, right?”

“So far.”

“And we have eliminated the obvious? Insurance, revenge, robbery, jealousy, whatever.”

“It may be there. We just don’t see it yet.”

Brandt looked at the floor for a few seconds. “I agree with Frank about letting Harris out of the bag too soon. We would look like morons if you came back from testing Hillstrom’s samples with positive proof that we have the right man behind bars. Find out what you can as quickly as possible—and I’m talking a couple of days at most here—and then we’ll see where to go next.”

He slid off the filing cabinet and walked over to the door. “By the way, Frank, don’t feel like a sitting duck here. Technically, I headed the Harris investigation. I was given all the facts and had all the options. If there has been a screw-up, nobody’s going after you. I can promise you that.”

Murphy nodded and watched him go. He waited a few seconds until we both heard the hallway door close, and then he let out a snort. “He can’t promise anything if they fire him first.”

I stood up. “I wouldn’t worry, Frank.”

He gave me a deadpan look. “It’s not your problem, is it?”

I LEFT FRANK BROODING
and called up Dr. Hillstrom from my office. She said she would have all samples and slides on their way within the next few hours via state police courier. She also said she would call Bob Kees and tell him to expect me some time tomorrow. I mentioned that the chief had given me only a couple of days and she burst out laughing. The best she could do, she said, was to pass that along and hope Kees had an abundance of Christmas spirit left over.