I quickly retrieved my gun at the far end of the landing. When I reappeared on the stairs, however, Matthews was no longer alone. Standing over him, smiling, was Willy Kunkle, a pair of handcuffs in his hand.
“He still alive?” I asked him.
Willy chuckled and leaned over to apply the cuffs. “Not happily, but yeah. Are you?”
DON MATTHEWS EYED ME WARILY FROM HIS HOSPITAL BED.
“You gonna read me my rights?”
“I hate to tell you this, Don, after all you’ve been through, but we weren’t there to arrest you. We just wanted to ask you a few questions.”
He gingerly touched the bandage encircling his head, looking like a CliffsNotes version of Walter Skottick. “You’re shitting me. I should sue you guys.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You can try, after I bust you for unlawful flight, assault on a police officer, destruction of private property, and knowingly selling stolen property. The fat little weasel you were doing business with when we dropped by is talking his head off. With your record, that’ll all weigh more than you want to carry, believe me.”
He seemed to agree after a moment’s thought, because his next question was, “What did you want to ask me?”
“We’re looking for Marty Gagnon. You seen him?”
Matthews laughed in surprise and then winced with pain. “That’s what this was all about? Jesus. No, not in weeks.”
I looked at him for a long moment, as if contemplating his fate. “You know, Don, maybe I’ll drop the hammer on you, anyhow. The more I remember our little foot race, the more pissed off I get.”
His mouth fell open. “Oh, come on. I guess I came out worse than you did. Look at me, for Christ’s sake—you totaled me.”
“I can add to the damage. I’m the good guys, remember? What’s the problem anyway? Just give me an address and I’m out of your hair.”
He stared at me sullenly.
“Or,” I added, “I can start digging into your life history even deeper to find out why you’re holding back. You up to something with Marty you don’t want me to know about?”
Matthews made a disgusted face. “It’s a pride thing.”
I hid my amusement at this curiously honest admission. “At any price?”
“No,” he conceded, as if finally concluding a social obligation he hadn’t believed in from the start. When he resumed, his voice was more confiding. “Okay, this is straight. It’s all I know. Marty was feeling some heat—not you, somebody else—I don’t know who. But he figured he’d lay low for a while.”
“You know he’d just pulled a job?”
“At Tucker Peak? Yeah. He was going to show me some stuff, but we never got around to it. He didn’t call like he was supposed to.”
“Was the heat turned on after that job? It was only a couple of days ago.”
“I guess,” he conceded. “Whoever this was came down hard. Started rousting all Marty’s friends like he’d had a lot of practice.”
“You, too?” I asked, surprised.
“That’s why I ran when you came to my place. I was a little gun shy after the last visit.”
“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.
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.”