“My banker contact told me that after the sale of the store, Fallows paid off all his debts, retired the mortgages on the business and his house, and went back to being a Realtor and a teacher—as well as a member of the ZBA. The kicker is that according to town tax records, only a few months after the store was sold, Steves got a high-paying job for BTC Investments as a ‘consultant,’ although the low-level BTC workers I talked to never saw or heard of the man. BTC, of course, stands for ‘Benjamin and Thomas Chambers.’”
“Son of a bitch,” I murmured.
“Right. After collecting a paycheck for about a year, Steves left town without a trace. I couldn’t find him in any computer we’re hooked to.”
Ron sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. “So, what can we prove? Nothing. But I bet Tom Chambers is holding some sort of documentation laying out how Ricky was hired by Fallows to torch the business for the insurance. That’s the leverage NeverTom must’ve used to get Fallows to cheerlead the project through the ZBA. The irony is, rumors at the time said Fallows would back the project anyway, given his past voting record. Makes you wonder if Chambers twisted Fallows’s arm just for spite—to show he could knock him off his pedestal. That must be a bitch for Fallows—knowing that voting his conscience had made him look like he’d been corrupted.
“Of course,” Ron added, “there’s no way in hell we’re going to get all this confirmed, not unless Tom Chambers finds religion and bares his soul. But at least we’ve got enough for a little leverage.”
I didn’t argue the point, but I dearly hoped we had more than that. Not only was I concerned about Ned’s wandering around loose, his intentions vaguely ominous, but Mary Wallis’s disappearance continued to nag at me like a chronic ache. Despite the consensus that she had either fled or been killed, I couldn’t suppress the feeling that she was still alive—but that like Shawna before her, her time on this earth might be running out.
· · ·
By mid-morning, Willy Kunkle and I were at Tom and Ben Chambers’s door, armed with a warrant and accompanied by a search team.
NeverTom was not happy to see us. “What the hell do you want?”
Willy handed him the paperwork and gestured to the others to file in. “For you to get out of the way.”
I could see Chambers considering whether to block the door with his body. Instead, to my relief, he moved aside, waving the warrant at me. “God damn you. I want to know what’s going on.”
I stepped inside and closed the door. “I won’t expect you to like this,” I began, “but we have reason to believe a raccoon was killed and dissected in this house, parts of its body removed, and the rest wrapped in a garbage bag and illegally disposed of on your property. Since the raccoon showed signs of being rabid, we felt the need to check this out. I suggest you read the warrant for the details.”
Tom Chambers’s face, never placid at the best of times, grew red to the point where I became mildly concerned for his health.
“You bastards. It’s not enough you libel me in the newspaper, and skulk around town asking questions and smearing my reputation. Now you come up with some weird little scam to invade my home. You and your chief and that arrogant crippled asshole in there had better start looking for new jobs, buddy.” He stabbed my chest with his finger. “Because I’m going to have every one of you fired.”
I snatched up his finger in my fist, watching his eyes widen slightly in alarm. “Mr. Chambers, you are entitled to do anything you want, under the law. Threatening me and denigrating my officers is not included in that. If you want to call your lawyer, go ahead. I don’t give a damn. But if you so much as think about getting in our way while we’re working here, I’ll bust you so fast you won’t know what hit you. Is that understood?”
He retrieved his hand and held it against his chest, as if giving it comfort. “You’re history,” he snarled and retreated to another room.
I took a deep breath and turned to see Kunkle looking at me from a doorway, a grin on his face.
· · ·
Surprisingly to me, J.P. and his team found several items beyond the half-empty box of dark brown garbage bags I’d been hoping for. A small bonanza was located in the basement, where under a strong fluorescent light, and alongside a washer and an old-fashioned sink, a wooden worktable, scarred and worn, displayed a large oval pale spot in its center.
J.P. pointed at it. “Bleach—fresh, too. And there were animal hair shafts on the floor and stuck to this sheetrock knife.” He opened an evidence envelope to show me. “Found it hanging on the pegboard over there with the other tools. Trash has been picked up several times since this was done, so we didn’t find anything there, and the sink doing double duty for the washing machine means the trap’s been cleaned of any residue I could get. Still,” and here he held up a small plastic bag, “I did find a couple of additional hairs caught in the drain grate.”
He moved over to the far side of his large evidence-gathering case and picked up a small cardboard box. Inside was an old metal ricer, popular for making mashed potatoes. “Interesting, huh? The only kitchen tool down here. It’s been hit with bleach, too.”
I merely scowled in response.
“Here’s something else,” he said with satisfaction and pulled out an open box of coffee filters. I still didn’t say anything, so he prompted, “Filters and a press… The raccoon had its brain scooped out, remember?”
I finally reacted. “You saying he made cider out of the brain?”
“Seems reasonable. That’s where rabies resides—there and in the saliva. The other part of the coon that was scraped was the inside of its mouth and tongue. It’s not a scientific way to harvest a virus, but there’s no reason it couldn’t work… In fact, I guess we know it did.”
My memory returned to an earlier hypothesis I’d shared with Tony Brandt. “Hiding the injection site somewhere among all the sores, flea bites, and acne.”
Tyler finished the thought. “All he had to do was get Milo comatose on booze. By next morning, he never would’ve known.”
“You find a hypodermic?”
He shook his head sadly. “No—this is all pure conjecture. Except for the hair and the bags, we don’t have anything, and I doubt they’ll be able to match the hair to the specific dead animal. They’ll probably just confirm it came from a coon.”
“You checked everywhere?”
He raised his eyebrows equivocally. “We did a reasonable search—by the book. For all I know, we’re standing on enough evidence to put him away for life.” He tapped his foot on the earthen floor. “But we may never find out.” He hesitated a moment and then added, “We did bump into something upstairs, in the master bathroom, but it wasn’t on the warrant, so I didn’t even touch it—a prescription bottle of phenobarbital, made out to Thomas Chambers.”
· · ·
At the top of the basement stairs, I found Connor O’Brian, NeverTom’s lawyer, waiting for me, fussily dressed as always and equipped with a superior smirk.
He tapped the folded warrant against the palm of his open hand. “I hope you had a good time touring the house, Joe, because a tour is all you’re going to get out of this blatant invasion of privacy. This,” he held up the warrant, “is a joke, as you probably know. If Judge Harrowsmith had been in town, instead of the twinky you hoodwinked, you never would’ve gotten it signed.”
“But I did get it signed, Connor.”
“A temporary inconvenience—worse for you, since I see you actually collected something. Now it’ll all be thrown out, along with the warrant. I thought you were more professional.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to know the difference.”
The smile flattened slightly, to my satisfaction. Connor O’Brian had always soured my stomach. “Joe, there is no weight of law behind the recommendations of how to dispose of dead animals, rabid or not.”
“Take me to your master, Connor,” I said, not bothering to debate.
Walking stiffly, he led the way to the door through which Chambers had vanished two hours earlier. It opened onto a truly magnificent library—wood-paneled, with leaded windows and leather furniture—straight out of
My Fair Lady
. Tom Chambers was standing by a large fireplace, lit, I noticed, by gas jets behind decorative ceramic logs. In a far corner, looking like a child in an oversized chair, Ben Chambers sat watching the three of us, pale, withdrawn, and nervous. I nodded silently in greeting, and he responded in kind.
“Have you finished?” Tom demanded petulantly.
“Yes, thank you. And collected some evidence.” I gave him a handwritten receipt. “I should warn you, Mr. Chambers, that despite what your lawyer may say, you are in trouble.”
He glanced down at the receipt, and to my disappointment a look of genuine amazement crossed his face. “What the hell? A ricer? What in Christ’s name is a ricer? And coffee filters? What do you people think you’re doing?”
I glanced at his brother, who was looking with baffled alarm at Tom. I began to feel slightly queasy, as if some vast and expensive structure of my own design had just begun to crack at the foundation.
Tom Chambers was advancing toward me, his face back to its familiar shade of purple. “Get out of my house. Now. I’ll see you in court, Gunther, and it won’t be over some fucking ricer. It’ll be to sue you for every penny you fucking own. This is the last time you’ll ever play the Gestapo in this town.”
O’Brian slid between us, placing his hand on Chambers’s chest, murmuring calmative phrases I couldn’t hear over his client’s bellowing. I left, closing the door behind me.
J.P. and Willy were waiting for me outside the house, stamping their feet against the cold.
“I guess Mr. Big took offense,” Willy said with standard grace.
“Yeah,” I agreed, heading for the car. But I was no longer sure Tom Chambers’s outrage was so misplaced.
“BRING THE TIME LINE INTO MY OFFICE,”
I told Sammie as I passed her desk.
She did as requested, surprised at my tone of voice.
She sat down opposite me and opened a file folder on her lap. “This is as much as I have so far.”
“What’ve you got on Tom Chambers?”
“Specifically? Nothing. There are three dates we know for sure—when the PCB was dumped in Keene, when Mary Wallis disappeared, and when Adele Sawyer was murdered. Tom Chambers was in Montpelier on the first, at home on the second, and at an all-night poker game on the third.”
“Who’s vouching for him being at home? His brother?”
“Yeah.”
“So that one’s up in the air.”
Sammie continued. “We’re pretty sure Hennessy did the PCB. Neither his mistress nor his wife can give him an alibi, and the meeting he claimed he was at in Albany never took place. Also, just for the hell of it, we had Keene PD check their records for that night. Hennessy was given a ticket for burning a red light at two in the morning. He was driving a Carroll Construction pickup with an oil drum in the back. He was also so hyper they gave him a breath test. He passed.”
I thought a moment, my apprehension growing. “Did J.P. hear back on the raccoon carcass?”
“Ten minutes ago—there was too much damage to the brain to do a test, so we can’t categorically say it was rabid. Not only that, but he checked the ricer and the wood samples he removed from the worktable. He couldn’t find a trace of anything except bleach.”
“And the phenobarbital?”
Her expression lightened. “There we might have something. The prescription was filled by an out-of-town pharmacist, which is why we missed it the first time around. J.P. got a warrant based on what we found in Shawna’s hair and took a look at the pharmacy’s records. Tom Chambers has a standard prescription there—has had for the past five years, for difficulty sleeping and nerves, and there was a spike in the purchase pattern at about the right time, as if he’d had to replace a bottle. ’Course, that’s pretty circumstantial—he could say he dropped them down the drain by mistake.”
I tossed the pencil I’d been holding across my desk. “Shit. Without Hennessy, Wallis, or Fallows, we don’t have a goddamn thing, do we?”
“We will,” she said softly.
“What about Ben Chambers?” I asked suddenly.
She shrugged. “Nothing—and nothing to use as leverage, either. He’s a loner who keeps to himself. BTC is a privately held company, so its records are closed without a warrant. We have been asking around, but where NeverTom goes everywhere and sees everybody, Ben either stays at home or visits the office. He doesn’t date any women, go out to restaurants, travel anywhere, belong to any clubs. At business meetings, he either phones in or shows up late and leaves early so no one can chitchat. He’s not a recluse, but he comes close.”
I had moved my chair while she was talking and was now staring out the window at the cobalt-blue sky.
“We’ve got a problem, don’t we?” she said quietly.
I shifted my gaze to her. “Yeah. We focused on NeverTom fast and early. He’s a loud-mouthed creep, he obviously deals dirty, and we had people like Fallows and Eddy Knox to help prejudice us. But I’m worried we missed the boat… Still, how can you dig up as much as we have and still wind up with nothing? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Unless you’re digging in the wrong direction.”
“You mean Ben Chambers?” I asked. “Where’re the connections? Aside from buying the convention project, he never comes up.”
“Maybe Ben’s using Tom as a front.”
“So why can’t we nail Tom then? It should work out that if we can get one, we get the other. My God—with three dead bodies and a possible fourth, and a fifteen-million-dollar con game going on right under our noses, you’d think we could come up with some solid evidence. What the hell’re we missing?”
· · ·
Ted McDonald filled his tiny studio. A truly huge man, planted on an all-but-invisible swivel chair, he could reach every knob, switch, and button on his various pieces of equipment without having to do more than bend forward slightly. Ted was WBRT’s news director, not a DJ who read the news, so the two of us were on our own until the top of the hour, when the rock-’n’-roll diet was regularly interrupted for a five-minute informational update.