The Company She Kept (2 page)

“She was murdered.”

“Susan
Raffner
?” he asked, sitting up, noticing at the same time that another call was coming in.

He ignored it for the time being. “Tell me what happened.”

“I don't know. I just got a phone call. They found her dead near the interstate. I don't understand what that means, but they definitely said she'd been killed. They told me they called because she was my friend.”

“Of course,” he said soothingly, not adding that it was also because of Susan's being a state senator. The two women had begun in politics together, decades ago, when Susan had backed Gail for a place on the Brattleboro selectboard. She had been Gail's political adviser and trusted sidekick ever since.

“Did you get the name of the cop on the case?” he asked out of habit.

“I didn't talk to him,” she said, sounding surprised. “They called the governor's office, not me directly. Rob told me.” There was a sudden catch in her voice, and when she resumed, she was choked with emotion. “What does it matter, Joe? Who cares?”

“You're right, you're right,” he said, ignoring her flash of irritation. Rob Perkins was her chief of staff. “I'll get that later.”

“You'll do this, Joe?” she pleaded. “You'll find out who did it?”

“I'll do my best,” he promised.

“I already gave orders that VBI was to have the case, no questions asked, but I want you leading them. If you get any shit from anybody, you call me, okay?”

“Of course, Governor,” he assured her. “I'll get on it now. I'll keep you informed. Promise.”

His use of her title seemed to steady her, transcending their past intimacy to introduce a stabilizing formality.

Following a moment's hesitation, she said, “Thank you, Joe. I'll wait to hear from you.”

“I am sorry, Gail,” he told her.

He heard her sob as she hung up. He checked his phone to find out who'd called. It was Bill Allard, head of the VBI—the Vermont Bureau of Investigation—of which Joe had been the field force commander since its inception.

“You calling about the governor?” he asked as soon as Allard picked up.

“I'm calling about Senator Raffner,” Bill replied, sounding nonplussed.

“I was on the phone with the governor. She called to say she'd asked us to look into this.”

“Asked is hardly the word,” Bill corrected him, not a fan of Gail. “But it does look like our kind of case.”

“With me as lead?” Joe asked.

“Ah,” Allard reacted. “She told you that, too, huh? Yeah. That's what she wants.”

“I understand if you have to conflict me out,” Joe told him. “Having the governor's old boyfriend running the investigation into her closest ally's death might get sticky.”

“Not for me, it doesn't,” Bill countered. “Raffner was a sitting state senator. I want my best team on it. We can't sacrifice quality to play politics—we don't have the manpower. Handpick whoever you want. We'll shift personnel around to cover, if need be.”

The phone indicated a third incoming call. Joe said, “Roger that. Just thought I'd float the question. I'll call you back when I got something.”

He hit a button on the phone. “Gunther.”

“It's Sam,” said his second-in-command, the weekend's on-call officer. “You hear yet? Hell of a way to start a sunny Sunday.”

Her natural intensity reverberated over the line. She had a perpetual level of commitment—whether to him, the job, her baby daughter, or the acerbic Willy Kunkle—that radiated like a heat source.

“I just hung up on the governor and Allard,” he told her. “Nobody's told me much beyond that Susan Raffner was found murdered.”

“That's how it's looking,” Sam said. “Unless she took herself out in the weirdest suicide I ever heard.”

“
What?
”

“She was found hanging from one of those steel-mesh retaining nets they dropped across the cliffs lining the interstate. A couple of tourists called it in. It almost sounds like when a farmer hangs a dead fox from his fence, to warn other foxes. Totally crazy.”

“But it's not a suicide?” he asked pointedly.

“VSP is guarding the scene,” she reported, using the familiar initials of the Vermont State Police. “They're keeping everything as clean as possible for us, but it looks like a homicide, unless you know something I don't. For one thing, they're saying there's no car parked nearby. It could be a suicide combined with a car theft. Stranger things have happened.”

Joe shook his head at the phone. “Okay. It's not like Raffner and I hung out. I barely saw her over the years. But suicidal? I never got that—she was way too full of piss and vinegar, protesting every cause under the sun. You did hear we've been assigned to head this up?”

“Yup,” she said, sounding happy. “I'm at the office right now, packing stuff up. Who do you want to come along?”

“The way the cages are being rattled,” Joe said, “everybody, so we start on the same page.”

He could almost hear her grinning. “Cool. I already got Willy calling the babysitter, and Lester said we could pick him up at the gas station off exit seven.”

Which was one of the many reasons Joe had made her his Number Two. “I'm headin' out,” he said gratefully. “See you in a few.”

*   *   *

Joe had once imagined that if you took a sheet of paper, crumpled it up into a ball, and then flattened it out—creased lengthwise, like a small, rectangular tent—you would have the rough approximation of a 3-D map of Vermont. The mountains run down its middle, the right and left edges are calmed and flattened by water—the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain, respectively—and the rest of the state's surface is as bumpy, irregular, and furrowed as the Ice Age relic that it is.

He loved every square foot of it. As he sat in the passenger seat of the unmarked car, with Sam at the wheel and Willy and Lester in the back, he watched the Connecticut River come into and out of view in the valley below them. The interstate this far north was never heavily traveled—certainly not by urban standards—and had been declared by various magazines as one of the country's most scenic byways.

And yet, he mused … There was always a flip side, as his long career attested: For all its sylvan beauty and apparent tranquility, despite its sparse population and square miles of emptiness, Vermont was also poorly financed, nonindustrialized, and far off the beaten path for everyone except tourists, and—more recently—drug dealers. None of that made it a crime magnet, but this very trip north was proof enough to Joe of humanity's chronic inability to live as peacefully as these calming environs suggested.

The VSP had sealed off an entire section of the road between two exits, rerouting the scant traffic to a parallel two-lane highway. Sam maneuvered their vehicle between the cones manned by a young trooper who waved them through, and continued for four miles along a pavement now as empty of traffic as an abandoned movie set.

“Spooky,” Lester commented from the back. “It's like some spaceship beamed up everybody but us.”

“I doubt it beamed up the people we'd like to see gone,” Willy said sourly, grabbing his withered left arm and shifting it so he could sit more comfortably. They were all dressed for the outdoors, in addition to carrying their standard tactical gear. “Be typical if only the good guys got zapped.”

The other three smiled at the comment, typical of the speaker. Willy's arm—a reminder of a career-threatening encounter with a bullet on a case many years earlier—was a testament to both the one-liner and Willy's overall Eeyore outlook.

Any humor vanished, however, as the car rounded the next wide curve, and a cluster of vehicles came into view, most of them sparkling with various combinations of blue and white and red strobe lights against the craggy backdrop of a dark rock wall.

Lester hunched forward, craning to see up, which his great height and the car's low roof made all but impossible. “My God. That's awful.”

No one argued with him, including Willy. The sight of a single human body, hanging high and small and lonely halfway to the cliff's top, struck them all with its melancholy.

There was no need to pull off the road—trucks and cruisers were parked haphazardly, as if their drivers had subconsciously enjoyed not having to follow the rules.

“We're in the wrong place,” Willy said as they got out, still staring at the mesmerizing vision overhead.

A state police sergeant proved him correct as he approached, saying, “They're waiting for you up top.” He gestured with his thumb, continuing, “The next exit's a few miles north, but we cut a snowmobile path just past the cliff that connects to the road above. You could go that way if you don't mind one of my guys driving your car around the long way. We got sled operators standing by.”

“Sounds good,” Joe told him. “What about the people who called this in?”

“They're in their car.” The sergeant pointed to the scenic pull-off and an SUV hitched to a trailer bearing two snowmobiles. “We got a video-recorded statement, but you're free to talk to 'em yourself, if you want.”

Joe watched the man's bland, impassive face, looking for any signs that this was a dig. “Uniforms” versus “Suits” was a well-known rivalry within law enforcement, although less so in Vermont, given the small numbers involved. But VSP versus VBI was an additional factor, since the creation of the latter had seriously depleted the ranks of the former's Bureau of Criminal Investigation—and had eroded its influence.

The sergeant, however, appeared to be either totally lacking in such prejudice, or a skilled poker player.

In any case, Joe didn't care. “I'm good,” he replied. “They tell you anything interesting?”

The man smiled and visibly relaxed. “Not really. They had the sense to keep their distance, but except for the obvious, they didn't see anything, didn't hear anything, and don't know anything. Our BCI guys called for the crime scene truck.” He glanced upward. “They just arrived upstairs, so everything's looking pretty secure.”

Joe shifted his gaze once more to the reason they were here. “This is going to sound a little screwy, but are we sure she's dead?”

The sergeant chuckled. “Not screwy to me. First thing I asked when I got here. She's dead, all right.” He indicated an athletic young trooper in the distance, talking with a couple of his colleagues. “The tall one there was first on scene. He called it in, checked her out with his binoculars—so far so good—and then the crazy bastard climbed the netting and checked for a pulse.”

Joe stared at him. “He climbed up?”

“Like a goddamned monkey. Wished I'd been here to see it. It's got to be forty feet. The female tourist took pictures. You should see 'em. I gave our boy a big thumbs-up, and then told him that if he ever did a thing like that again, I'd have him on desk duty for a month.”

Joe shook his head, thinking that he would have pulled the same stunt a couple of decades ago. “I heard something about a purse,” he asked.

“BCI took it. It was over there, looking no different than if you'd just put it down. The clasp was still closed, which is a miracle if it was dropped from that height.”

Joe nodded without comment, and turned to face his team. “Okay. Let's go sledding.”

*   *   *

They found five snowmobiles waiting by the side of the road, as the cliff tapered off to become a shallow, snow-packed gully that aimed back toward the hilltop. They divided up among four volunteer drivers and hitched rides to a two-lane dirt road above. Contrasting with the view they had been enjoying—and despite being higher up—here the road was screened by trees on both sides, with only glimpses between the evergreens of the Connecticut River valley.

They were met by a VSP van that took them to a second cluster of cars, including a large truck from the forensic laboratory. As usual at such scenes—which were blessedly few in this rural state—Joe was impressed by the number of people gathered. Besides the state police and the crime lab civilians, there were representatives from Fish and Wildlife, the local sheriff's office, EMS, a couple of local municipal cops, and even what appeared to be a town constable—most of them muttering and watching the very few people who were actually processing the scene.

He couldn't blame them. A cop in Vermont could go through most of a career without witnessing a homicide scene. A banner year in Vermont might produce twenty murders—fewer than he imagined New York City racked up in a month.

From inside the yellow tape enclosing a generous semicircle, a plainclothes detective they knew from past encounters caught sight of them and invited them over. “Oh, boy, here come the big guns. Can we all go home now?” he cracked.

Joe identified himself to an officer with a clipboard before ducking under the cordon. “Rick,” he said. “Long time. How've you been keeping?”

“Can't complain. I'm happy to be the lowly BCI guy on this one. This is gonna be a nightmare before it's done.”

It was a custom-designed moment for Willy to say something insulting, but Joe knew his man. Kunkle was ignoring the chatter, his eyes darting around the scene as he submitted his ID in turn, instinctively cataloging every detail around him. A trained military sniper and a PTSD-plagued paranoid, he was someone who focused fast and hard.

Joe looked around as Sam and Lester took their turns at the checkpoint. The ice-hard dirt road was only twenty yards from the edge of the cliff, beyond the thin line of trees and the remnants of a dilapidated chain-link fence. Embedded in the otherwise pristine crust of snow, between the tarmac and the first tree trunk, were a set of tire tracks and some footprints. Joe saw a tied-off double loop of taut white rope around that first trunk, leading straight toward the cliff.