Bellows Falls (23 page)

“They got the tent up just before the rain,” Gail said quietly. “Even before they started digging for real.”

“I didn’t want to take any chances,” Tyler added.

The group parted as we ducked under the tent flaps, revealing a carefully exposed, shallow rectangular trench. Mercifully, it was empty, its contents zipped into a black body bag resting alongside.

I crouched between the hole and the body, feeling the water squish out of my shoes. I had to speak loudly over the thrumming on the canvas above us. “What’s the rundown?”

“Outside of the grave itself,” Tyler answered, “we didn’t find anything. We crawled around, used metal detectors, ran the whole routine. In daylight you can’t see any buildings except the motel from here—at least none with any windows facing this direction. Sammie had Kunkle and Ron and a bunch of patrol officers canvass the area, like we did when we found the blood, but nothing’s come up yet. They’re still at it—that’s why they’re not here now—but it doesn’t look good for witnesses.”

I nodded my head toward the black bag. “And him?”

“We just zipped him in before you got here. The assistant ME was about to take him up to Burlington.”

I glanced up, surprised, and saw Alfred Gould standing in the group. “Sorry, Al. Didn’t see you there.” I looked around at everyone. “Sorry to all of you, in fact—should’ve said hi. You know Jonathon Michael from the AG’s office?”

The men were mostly our patrol officers. One worked with Al. Another I took to be the dog handler. They all nodded their greetings without comment.

“Any preliminary findings?” I asked Al Gould.

He squatted by the body’s other side and pulled the zipper down a couple of feet, revealing a badly decomposed, musty-smelling remnant of a human being, its wildly mussed, dirty hair contrasting starkly with the neat skeletal grin just below it. Any remaining skin was dark and gelatinous, sloughed off entirely in places.

“It’s better than it looks,” he said, pointing at the skull. “The clothing retarded decomposition, so under his T-shirt the skin’s pretty much intact. He’s also wearing a pair of jockey briefs, but nothing else, so the notion that he was in bed looks good. The two bullet wounds seem to be through and through—one just under the ribs, the other in the neck. From the trajectory angles and what J.P. told me of the scene, I’d say the abdominal wound came first, exiting just below the left scapula. That would be consistent with someone lying supine on a bed, his feet toward the killer, and with the killer also being low down, as if sitting on the dresser opposite. The second wound caused most of the bleeding, of course. I’d guess it pretty much tore away the carotid.”

He straightened and redid the zipper. “Hillstrom’ll give you all the details, probably by late tomorrow, and there’ll be more to go on then, but those’re the basics.”

Beverly Hillstrom was the state’s medical examiner, famous for her detailed analyses. “Thanks, Al.” I looked up at Tyler. “And you’re sure it’s Morgan?”

J.P. shook his head. “Not scientifically. We contacted his dentist, so X-rays’ll be sent up north, too. But we found his name stenciled in the back of his Retreat-issue T-shirt. Nothing we’ve found yet says it’s not him.”

Tyler hesitated, and then said, “We do have another problem, though, and none of us is real sure what to make of it.”

He gestured to me to follow him. I rose, circumvented the open grave, and walked some twenty feet to the other end of the tent, where a large sheet of cardboard lay covering the ground.

“The dog picked up on this, too,” Tyler said, and slid the cardboard over to one side. At first, I couldn’t tell what he was showing me, other than a slight depression in the earth. Then I noticed a smaller, dirtier, more disintegrated version of the skeletal leer I’d just left.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Al guesses it’s a kid, but that’s about it. Those few teeth and some bone fragments are all we found. The grave’s a lot shallower, so we’re thinking animals made a meal out of it, pulling most of the skeleton apart like they usually do. It’s obviously been here a long time.”

He looked up at the tent fabric above us, which was shimmering from the pounding outside. “Once this mess clears up, we can take this whole field apart, section by section. There might be more like this one. That’s why I asked the dog handler if he could stay over. Sammie said it was okay.”

“You talk to Willy about this one?” I asked.

“No. We found it by accident. We were putting up the tent and working on the other grave, when the dog alerted to the second one. We had to shift things a bit to protect them both, but that’s all we had time to do. Willy had already left to help with the canvass.”

“He told me Jasper had made an example out of a runner who ripped him off. The kid disappeared, the point was made, and things went smoothly from then on. We never heard a thing about it.”

Tyler was staring at me incredulously. “What about the parents?”

“I asked the same thing. Apparently you and I are living in a dream world. They figured he’d run off—never thought twice about it. That’s why I asked about Willy. If he can locate them, and the crime lab can extract some DNA from what’s here, maybe we can put a headstone over this little guy. Is Al going to take care of him, too?”

“In a day or so. This hasn’t been properly excavated yet, and I figured Morgan had priority.”

“You did right,” I said to his unasked question. “Take your time, do it by the numbers. It’s not going to make any difference if we let him sleep a little longer.”

· · ·

The water poured across our skylight as if a hose were poised just out of sight above it. The noise on the roof, though much more muted, reminded me of the excavation we’d left a few hours earlier. Gail and I were in bed, the lights out, entangled in one another’s arms. We were still slightly damp from having made love with an almost desperate passion, driven by a need to avoid the images we’d so recently witnessed.

The reprieve had been purely temporary, however, and I knew her thoughts, like mine, were back in the tent filled with too much light and sadness.

“Can I ask you something?” she said after a while.

“Sure.”

“What’s it like for you, seeing that?”

I paused a long time before answering. “I can’t remember the first combat death I saw in Asia, or the first dead body I saw as a cop. They’ve all sort of blurred together. But I’ve wondered sometimes if with each exposure, I haven’t come away with a small piece of that person’s soul. It makes me think that one of these days I’ll hit overload. Probably not, though. People get used to worse things than I’ve ever seen.”

“So you don’t feel tears, or anger, or even depressed?”

I was uneasy with the question, although not for myself. I was worried I hadn’t paid attention to her under the tent, that some momentous spiritual shift had occurred inside her that my carelessness had allowed to run rampant. When Gail had returned to law school and later become a deputy state’s attorney, I’d been pleased and flattered by the process, even though it had been taxing on us both. I’d felt her moving toward me philosophically and emotionally and had responded in kind, making of our buying a home together a symbolic act. Now, in this one question, I feared the threat of a tremor and wondered if it all hadn’t happened too fast, with too many assumptions taken arrogantly in stride.

But I kept this to myself and merely answered as honestly as I could. “No. Sadness sometimes, probably born of frustration. Mostly, I just feel I’m on the outside looking in.”

The rain filled the silence that followed, oddly reinforcing our sense of security in this house—the shelter we’d built over our shared life.

“This might be a little corny,” I added. “But you’re a big factor in making a lot of it easier to take.”

She let out a deep sigh.

“How ’bout you?” I finally asked, the simplicity of the words belying the concern tucked beneath them.

She turned her face toward mine. “I was worried it wasn’t right to feel that way—that I was missing something. Or turning cold.”

I laughed, greatly relieved. “I don’t think you’ll ever have to worry about that.”

We kissed, and she resettled herself and gradually went to sleep. But the conversation stayed with me long into the night. I’d spent a lifetime pursuing, controlling, or arresting people who frequently either got killed or killed themselves. But the further back I reached to see their faces, the more I realized my comment about what a stabilizer Gail’s love had become for me went deeper than I’d thought. One of the biggest differences between those bodies and me, in a spiritual sense, was that they were alone, and I was not. It was a revelation a good many other cops could claim, too, of course, but as I’d been finding out recently, not all of them.

In the end, that thought gave me comfort, and—as I too fell off to sleep—a reawakening hopefulness.

FROM THE SIDEWALK, BURLINGTON’S FLYNN
Theatre on Main Street is at best unprepossessing. One and a half stories high, it is by all appearances solid and well built, with a white stone facade demurely but elegantly carved with its name, but in that it is no different from an old bank building or a pretentious post office. The striking thing about it is the marquee crowning its bank of front doors like a jester’s gaudy hat. Multi-hued, ornate, and speckled with hundreds of flashing colored bulbs, at night it draws in theatergoers like moths to a flame.

It was not at night that we gathered under that marquee, however, but shortly before ten o’clock the next morning, the time specified by Lenny Markham for his meeting with Duncan Fasca. We’d never considered making this a one-on-one affair, of course, but with the discovery of Jasper’s body, and of what we were presuming was one of his runners, our wariness of Lenny’s role had ratcheted up several notches. No longer were we content with merely stacking the meeting in our favor numerically. Now we were going to stake out the whole building, curious to learn what Lenny might do following our talk.

Unfortunately, our team had not grown much in size, the Burlington PD not being in a position to supply us reinforcements for a case they didn’t own. Our adjusted plan of attack, therefore, was for Fasca and me to meet with Lenny, while Audrey McGowen, Jonathon, and a single plainclothes officer Audrey had begged from Patrol kept watch on the various exits around the building. We all had portable radios, turned off until needed so Lenny wouldn’t be spooked by an inadvertent transmission.

Following some last-minute detailing, therefore, Duncan Fasca and I separated from the others and entered the lobby. Like the exterior, it was tastefully low-key—terrazzo floor tiles, antique marble half walls, niched display cases, alternating with mirrors and gentle lighting. The farther we walked, the more that lighting lit the way, allowing for an elegant transition from the glare off the sidewalk. The first sign that the theater’s muted facade was in fact a charade surfaced as we passed from the lobby to the foyer. It soared overhead well in excess of two stories, dwarfing us physically and injecting an element of wonder. The back of the building was not only taller than its entrance but, being sited on the slope of a hill, extended downward as well.

The effect of this architectural slyness reached completion upon entering the performance hall itself. Even warned of something grand by the foyer’s sneak preview, I was totally unprepared for the enormity of what we encountered. Huge, dark, cavernous, and as resonant as a tomb, the hall seemed more grotto than man-made structure. The orchestra seats swept down and away toward the enormous distant stage, taking full advantage of the site’s natural incline, while the walls, ornate in lavish Art Deco, hurtled skyward to meet in an elaborate, graceful curved ceiling some forty feet above our heads. It had been like entering a modest house, discovering an impressive living room, and then proceeding into a cathedral at the rear. I was so taken with the effect that despite our reason for being here, I tilted back my head, let out a quiet laugh, and said, “Jesus. This is wonderful.”

Fasca glanced at the ceiling, muttered, “Yeah, I guess,” and pointed to a staircase along the side wall. “Let’s head up and see if we can find him.”

We didn’t look far. As we reached the mezzanine, we were stopped by a teenager lounging by the guardrail, watching some eighty musicians tuning their instruments.

“You want to see Lenny?” the boy asked, visibly uncomfortable with the setting, obviously not an employee.

“Yeah,” Fasca answered.

“Follow me.”

He took us past an “employees only” sign up another set of stairs, to a landing with a steel ladder leading to a small, square opening some eight feet off the ground. “He’s up there—on the grid. Make sure you don’t got nothin’ in your pockets that’ll fall out—pens, pads, stuff like that.”

The boy stood there, waiting for us to go on without him. Fasca hesitated, struck as I’d been by the meaning behind his instructions, remembering what Audrey had said about it being no place for those with vertigo.

“Where will he be?” Fasca finally asked.

“Over the stage. I gotta go.” The boy bolted downstairs and vanished.

“This setup bother you?” I asked Fasca, “knowing Lenny?”

He shrugged and grabbed the first rung of the ladder. “He’s used rug rats before.”

Beyond the square hole at the top of the ladder, there was a tiny landing, a flight of three steps, and a broad wooden catwalk running from one side of the theater to the other, high above the mezzanine, and parallel to the stage. Not that any of this was clearly visible. The lighting allowed for only occasional glimmers, casting the vaguest of shadows.

I pulled a penlight from my pocket, having ignored the boy’s warning, and turned it on.

We were enmeshed in a spider’s web of enormous steel girders, crisscrossing the air space between the roof overhead and the ceiling I’d admired from below. Shooting off from our catwalk were two others, each at a ninety-degree angle, leading to the grid over the stage. Killing my penlight for a moment, I could see the barest outline of a man, far in the distance, moving around a large, dark piece of equipment.