Sammie fell silent, temporarily beaten down.
I gave her a little support. “That’s scenario A. But it doesn’t take anything else into account—Milo’s death and the irregularities surrounding the convention center project. In a town this size, we’d be idiots to assume that two deaths, a disappearance, and the possibility of a corrupt real estate deal are all coincidences. It would be safer to think they
might
be related, and work from there.”
Everyone looked at Willy for a reaction, but he kept his peace, scowling. He’d often enough said that anyone who relied on coincidence was a jerk.
I tried to dissipate the tension. “So let’s find out if there are any connections. Right now, both the Shawna and Milo death investigations are in a holding pattern, pending developments. The Wallis case is wide open and currently gets top priority, although for the moment, with our own Patrol and all surrounding law enforcement agencies chipping in, we’re doing pretty much all we can. The convention center project’s looking a little more promising. Ron and Justin Willette came up with a few names we need to look at more closely. Sammie will hand out assignments. We’re looking for lifestyle changes or signs of sudden wealth, during the year and a half the project was getting permits. I want to see if we can get enough on these people so a judge will cut us subpoenas for their bank records. But remember to be subtle about it—for our sake. We don’t want a lot of thin-skinned bureaucrats screaming to the media and giving whoever’s responsible enough time to destroy evidence.”
“Is NeverTom on Ron and Willette’s list?” Willy asked contentiously.
“No. But if he is involved, he’s probably the one pulling the strings,” Sammie answered. “First, we need to look at people like Eddy Knox, the zoning administrator, and Ned Fallows and Rob Garfield of the ZBA, and Lou Adelman. They may be the small fry, but if they’re crooked and we can get to them, we can use them to lead us to the top guys.”
“Don’t think we won’t look into the Chamberses, Willy,” I added. “But we need to take the time to do this right, by the numbers. If we’re right about all these cases being interconnected, then we’ll be doing a lot more than digging up dirt on a few bigwigs. We might be saving Mary Wallis’s life.”
· · ·
Shortly afterward, in my office, I dialed the state police in St. Johnsbury and asked for Lieutenant Mel Hamilton, the barracks commander. Several years ago, I’d worked with the Essex County SA’s office and had coordinated with Hamilton on a case. We’d become pretty friendly and had kept in touch over the years.
“Hi, Joe. What’s up?” he asked.
“You don’t follow the news?”
He laughed. “Well, I figured it’d been twenty-four hours already—time to add an extraterrestrial sighting to your list, or maybe a tidal wave. Is there any truth to that Satanism stuff?”
“Maybe—it’s probably a smoke screen. Unfortunately, smoke is all I’ve got right now.”
“Which is why you’re calling.”
“I need a favor. Could you have someone pick up a man named Ned Fallows? Lives in a log cabin two miles east of Lunenburg, on the dirt road crossing Turner Brook. I want to talk to him, and he has no phone. Something’s come up down here I want him to explain.”
“This a bad boy?”
“He’s a seventy-year-old retired town planning commissioner who got his hands dirty. I was up there last night, but he wouldn’t fess up. I’m hoping I just found the right piece of persuasion.”
“Okay. I’ll put it on the radio.”
“Thanks. Better tell ’em to go slow and polite—he’s got a Rottweiler. Quiet but big.”
“Great.”
I’d barely hung up when Harriet buzzed me on the intercom. “Line one, Joe—Conrad Blessing at Guillaume’s Funeral Home.”
Surprised, I picked the phone back up. “Conrad. How can I help you?”
Blessing’s voice was hesitant, seemingly embarrassed. “I hate to bother you. But I think I found something you ought to see.”
“Something to do with Milo?”
“Oh, no. I’m afraid it’s someone else. We had a customer delivered from the Skyview Nursing Home—an elderly woman who died last night. She has a death certificate listing natural causes, but… I suppose this is crazy. I shouldn’t have called.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be right over.”
I grabbed my coat and headed for the hallway, calling out to Tyler, “J.P., sounds like I’ll need you on this one. I’ll be at Guillaume’s,” I told Harriet. “I’m expecting a call from upstate—the VSP. If it comes in, get the number and call me at Guillaume’s. Tell them not to leave, okay?”
She smiled and waved me out.
· · ·
Conrad Blessing opened the front door to the funeral home as we reached the top porch step. “I hope this is worth your while. It’s just that… Well, I think there’s something strange, and considering how things turned out with Mr. Douglas… ”
“Why don’t you show us what you’ve got?” I suggested. Relieved, he led us down the familiar back hallway and through a wide, locked door into a brightly lit room with a gleaming metal table in its center. The body of a dead woman lay there, dressed in a flowered nightgown.
“This is Mrs. Adele Sawyer, eighty-three years old. Apparently, she had a bad heart—you can see that from the swollen ankles—and I guess the Skyview’s attending physician, Dr. Riley, figured nature had taken its course.”
We approached the table, and J.P., already having donned a pair of latex gloves, began to gently examine the dead woman’s head, face, and neck. “I think I see what caught your eye,” he said a minute later.
Blessing moved to the body’s other side and pointed at Mrs. Sawyer’s generously proportioned neck. “It seems bruised, doesn’t it? I thought at first it might be dirt. Some of the older people have a hard time washing themselves, assuming they can move at all, but it’s not, is it?”
Tyler moved to the woman’s mouth and peeled back both her upper and lower lips, revealing the pale gums underneath. “No, it’s not,” he said. “See this piece of tissue stretching between the gum and the inside of the lip, right at the mouth’s midline? It’s called the frenulum. It’s easily bruised when pressure is placed against the lips.”
He paused, looking more carefully, prompting Blessing to ask, “What does that mean?”
Tyler straightened and removed his gloves with a snap. “I’m no pathologist, but from what I see, this woman’s mouth was covered with one hand, to stifle any noise, while she was strangled to death with the other.”
· · ·
The Skyview Nursing Home had no view to speak of, the local joke being that the name was literally true, no more and no less. It was located in West Brattleboro, on a street off of Route 9, the town’s main thoroughfare, in a large, scooped-out natural depression at the foot of a steeply rising hill. On its other three sides were low-cost, single housing units, mostly painted gray, collectively labeled Skyview Village.
Among homes for the elderly, the Skyview occupied a genteel middle ground—it was neither a clinically supervised resort for the independent rich, nor a medical repository for the abandoned near dead. Several of its patients had Alzheimer’s or a different chronic disorder, while others had simply grown unable to live on their own. Virtually all of them were supported by some form of government assistance. They came to the Skyview to dwindle away in the care of a pleasant, competent staff, which in turn was supported by an outside group of physicians who dropped by for periodic visits. Death here was an accepted part of life and until now a matter of evolutionary routine.
Which made our arrival the cause of some excitement.
I had called from the funeral home to have a patrolman guard Mrs. Sawyer’s room and possessions, pending a judge’s signature on the bottom of a search warrant. By the time I got to the Skyview with Sammie, Ron, and J.P., the lobby and hallways were filled with curious staffers and residents.
On the second floor, a gray-haired woman wearing a white uniform and a very worried expression waited with our patrolman. “Are you in charge?” she asked me as we approached, each of us carrying some of J.P.’s cumbersome equipment.
“Yes—Lieutenant Joe Gunther. Brattleboro PD.” I stuck out my hand as the others filed by me into the room.
She gave my fingers a distracted shake. “Janet Kohler—I’m the head nurse here. What is going on? You really think Mrs. Sawyer was murdered?”
Impressed once again by Brattleboro’s amazingly efficient grapevine, I gave her a cautionary shrug. “Right now, we haven’t the slightest idea. Were you on duty when she died?”
“No—Sue Pasco covers nights, but I have her report.”
“Good. I’d like to see that. I’d also appreciate it if you could call her and ask her to come here as soon as possible. I want to talk to her personally.”
Janet Kohler hesitated a moment. “What does this mean… If she was murdered?”
I gave her a supportive smile. “Let’s take it a step at a time. By the way, I gather Dr. Riley is the attending physician. Has he been associated with the home for long?”
“A few years—seven or eight, I guess. I don’t remember right off.”
“You two get along?”
She looked surprised and then guarded. “Of course.”
I smiled and patted her forearm. “Sorry—that was a dumb thing to ask. I just wanted to know what kind of a guy he was.”
Her face relaxed. “Well, you know doctors. But he’s nice enough, and he’s always done good work here. We never had any complaints.”
“Okay. I’m going to join my crew, so if you could get Ms. Pasco’s report and make that call to her, I’d appreciate it. It might also be a good idea to keep any rumors to a dull roar for the time being. No point getting everyone all excited.”
She nodded and left. I paused for a moment, watching the patients and a few staffers still standing in the corridor, murmuring among themselves. For a split second, I visualized the same hallway dark and deserted, in the middle of the night, occupied only by someone with murderous intent. It was a sad and sinister image to superimpose on a place already so saturated by decline and death. But despite what I’d told Nurse Kohler about the murder needing to be confirmed, I had no doubts about what had happened. The big question was how to put a face on the “someone” responsible.
And that wasn’t our only problem. For a department used to handling one or two homicides a year, this one was going to stretch our resources to the limit. That alone was worth a prayer that we would reach the bottom of it fast and neatly.
Tyler already had the others at work on different aspects of the room—Ron checking the floor, furniture, and curtains, and Sammie the contents of the drawers and the one closet. J.P. himself was bent over the night table, dusting it for fingerprints.
“Anything yet?” I asked him.
He didn’t say what I wanted to hear. “Nothing obvious. They stripped the bed. That was too bad. But nothing else seems to have been messed with. Surprising, in a way. Normally, the next of kin clean out a place like this pretty fast.”
It was an interesting point, and something else to ask Janet Kohler when she returned. In the meantime, I was more hindrance than help here, so I left the room and went next door—to the room sharing the wall against which Mrs. Sawyer had kept her bed.
The door was open, so I knocked on the frame and stuck my head in. A bird-like woman, thin, small, and with an odd, quick way of moving her head, looked up from the book she was reading in an armchair.
“Yes?” she asked, smiling, marking her place with a gnarled finger.
“Hi—not interested in what’s going on next door?”
“Oh, I already know about that—Adele was murdered in her bed last night.”
I walked farther into the room, looking around. It was bright and cheerful, something I’d noticed Adele Sawyer’s was not, and the walls were decorated with a dozen small, energetic oil paintings of rural scenes. The slight but pervading odor of disinfectant-over-human-waste that lingered throughout the rest of the building seemed thwarted by the room’s atmosphere. “You know that for a fact?”
“That’s what they’re saying.”
“Did you hear anything last night—through the wall?”
“No. I sleep like a log.”
I introduced myself and we shook hands. Her name was Esther Pallini, and her hand felt like a small bundle of brittle sticks wrapped in smooth, warm cloth. Her eyes glittered with friendly enthusiasm. “What you do must be very exciting.”
I sat on the edge of her bed. “Not really. Paperwork and phone calls, mostly.” I tilted my head toward the shared wall. “Were you and Adele friendly?”
She shook her head vigorously. “She was a complainer—I don’t like that.”
“How was her health? Did she get around easily?”
“For a woman her size, she was lucky she could move at all. She was an encyclopedia of every pain known to God, but I think her heart may have been the real problem—she had those fat ankles heart patients get.” With forgivable vanity, she tapped her own trim, tiny feet briefly on the floor.
“Did other people like her?”
Her eyes widened and she smiled broadly. “Do I think one of them could have killed her? What a wonderful idea. I suppose so. Most people think we just sit around in a place like this and turn into vegetables. But there’s lots of intrigue that goes on.” She suddenly lowered her voice and leaned toward me. “And sex. People are jumping into bed with each other all the time. Causes jealousies sometimes.”
I raised my eyebrows and matched her conspiratorial tone. “Did Adele fool around?”
Esther Pallini looked utterly startled and burst out laughing. “What a picture. I couldn’t even imagine it—oh, think of the poor man. No, no. Adele just liked to talk about it. She usually got her facts mixed up, of course, getting everyone riled.”
“Upset a few people?”
Only then did my spirited informant become pensive. “A few. But to the point of murder? I don’t really care that she’s dead—we’re used to that here. But I can’t imagine one person killing another.” She gestured to a radio situated on the windowsill. “You hear about it all the time… I don’t know if it could happen here—I mean… That one of us could actually do it.”
I laid my hand on hers. “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. We don’t know what happened yet.”