Fruits of the Poisonous Tree (12 page)

I almost asked why she hadn’t told me anything about it before I realized what a predictably masculine response that was.

She apparently sensed the question anyway. “Later, I felt kind of foolish. It’s hardly the first time something like that’s happened. Every woman knows most men’ll try to catch a glimpse either up her skirt or down her blouse. It’s an obnoxious fact of life.”

I felt distinctly uncomfortable, recalling how often I had done just that. “Did you ever see him again?”

“No. It was a quick job—only two windows. They were done the same day they began. But I never wanted to use Krystal Kleer again… ” She stared off into the distance briefly. “And now I feel I may have gotten this man into a lot of trouble.”

“Not unless he did it. Let me go back a bit. When you served them in the living room, it was in front of that row of older windows behind the couch, right?”

She nodded.

“Did you see either of them showing an interest in those windows—examining them in any way?”

“No. They were just sitting there. Their backs were to them.”

She leaned forward and rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands.

I stroked the back of her head. “You okay?”

“It’s just this headache—I’ve had it all day.”

“You had any aspirin?”

“A couple, a long time ago.”

I was rubbing her back again, acutely aware of how thin and frail it felt. “When was the last time you ate anything?”

I felt her sigh—it was eloquent enough.

I got off the bed and circled around in front of her, squatting down to look into her face. “Look, I know lying in bed hasn’t been a big success, but why don’t you try it one more time while I get hold of some more aspirin and maybe a sandwich or some soup at least. You need something inside you or you’ll get sick, on top of everything else.”

She didn’t resist as I pulled her gently out of her seat and guided her to the edge of the bed. I propped up the pillows and set her down against them, covering her legs with a blanket I found draped over the footboard.

She held onto my forearms as I finished tucking her in, her eyes brimming with tears again. “Joe—what if he had AIDS?”

I felt my heart skip a beat. “One thing at a time. We’ll run blood tests and rule it out, but you can’t worry about it right now. Just work on what you can get your hands on.” I kissed her cheek and straightened up. “Let me get you something to eat.”

I found Susan downstairs and we quickly put together a small plate, along with some orange juice and two aspirin, but when I returned to the upstairs bedroom, Gail had finally fallen asleep.

I watched her for a few minutes, seeing how shallow her breathing was; every once in a while, her fingers would twitch, or her brow suddenly furrow. I could only imagine what nightmares were clashing inside her, and hoped with all my heart that they would soon be put to rest.

I COULDN'T GO HOME
that night. For entirely different reasons, my place was no more appealing to me than Gail’s was now to her.

I returned to the department around midnight. I’d now been up for some twenty hours. The command post was ghostly in its emptiness, like a battlefield stripped of warriors—all except for a single policewoman from the graveyard shift, who presumably had been instructed on how to continue the sifting process that Ron had been overseeing all day. She was young and relatively new on the force, not an uncommon occurrence in a town the size of Brattleboro, whose police department was often used as a stepping stone to other, more lucrative jobs in law enforcement elsewhere. Particularly in the patrol section we had quite a few people who were inexperienced, underpaid, overworked, and yet were expected to have at least a passing knowledge of every aspect of a police officer’s duties.

But spreading our resources thin was the only way we could afford to maintain a “full-service” operation, and it usually, if sometimes just barely, fit the bill—as long as no major cases came along to throw us all into turmoil.

Which is what was worrying me now. Unless something broke soon, the personnel allotted to finding Gail’s attacker would begin dwindling in direct proportion to the growing pile of other cases.

I grabbed a chair and pulled it over to the bulletin board with the timetable that Sammie had shown me a few hours ago. Additions had been made since then. Actual names written under older labels, like “voices heard walking by” and “jogger headed south,” indicated that real people had been linked to events, and—because Ron had written them in black ink and not red—that they’d also been eliminated from the suspects list. The pickup with the cap, going by at 4:15, was still unidentified, however, and its status had been upgraded by an accompanying red question mark. Harry Murchison, window installer, was going to merit an interview soon.

I wearily got back to my feet and crossed over to Ron’s long file-covered table. The young patrolwoman looked up as I approached. “Hi, Lieutenant—how’re you doin’?”

“Hi, Patty—hanging in there. Found anything interesting?”

She made a small face. “I’m just cross-indexing witnesses with things they saw, to see if anything shows up hinky. I’m working on UPS trucks and garbage pickups and what-have-you. I guess they’re lookin’ for someone casing the place out, but so far I don’t see it.”

I went around the table and sat next to her, my interest pricked.

“I didn’t know we’d rounded up that kind of information yet.”

She paused in riffling through a folder, happy to be interrupted. “Oh, yeah. Billy turned half the afternoon shift over to this—we’ve had people all over town. Everyone’s really psyched, you know, because… Well, you know,” she finished lamely, knowing of my ties to Gail and suddenly embarrassed by her own enthusiasm.

“I appreciate it,” I said for her benefit and patted a pile of folders she’d put to one side. “These the ones you’re finished with?”

“Yeah.”

I pulled them over in front of me and opened the top file. Patty glanced at me, obviously disappointed at being left with no other option besides getting back to work.

Folder by folder, down through the pile, I began to reconstruct activities I’d known nothing about—all credits to Ron’s efficiency. Fanning out from the immediate canvass of Gail’s neighbors, the investigation had reached far afield to reconstruct a whole month’s prior activity on her street. There were interviews of rural-route postal carriers, utility-company employees sent out to remove a broken branch from the wires, a Federal Express driver from Keene, New Hampshire, who’d delivered a package two weeks ago. Residents had been queried about any parties they’d held recently, guests or visitors they might have had, or any unusual occurrences that might have caught their attention—from strangers lurking to dogs barking at odd hours. Wherever possible, names had been taken down to be checked against the computer networks available to us.

While I’d never panned for gold, it struck me as being a similar process—patiently washing through thin covering layers, watching for the tiniest glint.

I struck such a glint at 2:35 in the morning, long after Patty had abandoned me to find some company by the coffee machine across the hall.

I’d been going over files covering events over two weeks old, and I was by now pretty thoroughly immersed in the neighborhood’s residents and their habits. Like an overeager new arrival on the block, I’d made the effort to remember everyone’s name, whose pets and children belonged to whom, what their hobbies and interests were, and even which ones I tended to like or dislike, for whatever reason. Their voices, as reflected in the canvass transcripts and notes, took on individuality, and over the hours I grew familiar with the neighborhood’s daily cadence.

It stuck out, therefore, when cranky old Mrs. Wheeler hired a one-time yard man to give her lawn a final mowing before the frost settled in.

He hadn’t done anything to bring attention to himself, hadn’t gone up and down the street drumming up additional business, hadn’t sat in his car at lunch and watched people’s comings and goings. He’d merely appeared one day in a beaten-up, ancient station wagon, unloaded some hand tools and an old mower from the back, done the job, and left, never to be seen again.

And that’s what caught my eye. In a neighborhood with a regular, predictable rhythm, his appearance—as mundane and uneventful as it had been—was nevertheless unusual.

The interview with Mrs. Wheeler, neatly indexed in another of Ron’s folder boxes, revealed two other things: that Mrs. Wheeler’s regular yard man had suffered a garage fire a few weeks back, destroying much of his equipment and forcing all his customers to fend for themselves until the insurance came through; and that the temporary, one-time replacement had been named Bob Vogel. The tantalizing possibility that the fire, Vogel’s appearance, and Gail’s rape were interrelated was inescapable, if as yet totally unfounded. Unfortunately, the name of the regular yard man, seemingly incidental at the time of the interview, had not been recorded.

I crossed the room to where Ron had set up a computer terminal and unleashed the machine onto Bob Vogel’s scent. I began with a quick name search of our own criminal files, although I was pretty sure that if Vogel had been a client of ours, I would have remembered him. I was therefore not too surprised to come up empty-handed. I switched to Meadowbrook Road—Gail’s street—and launched a query for complaints originating from there that might have featured either Bob Vogel or his vehicle within the last month. Again, I found nothing, and again, I wasn’t too surprised. I moved next to the Vermont Criminal Information Center’s databank for an overview of all the state’s criminal offenders. This time, the absence of Vogel’s name was a little more troublesome—it meant either I was barking up the wrong tree, pursuing an alias, or that Bob Vogel had appeared from out of state.

I paused to rub my eyes. Despite the adrenaline that had accompanied my little discovery, I was beginning to fade and knew I’d have to call it quits soon. I straightened my back, stretched, and called up the FBI’s National Criminal Information Center to gain access to the Interstate Identification Index—the Triple I—a listing, by state and/or municipality, of most people with felony records.

Realizing this was my last swing at getting any quick results—and that lots of legwork lay ahead if it failed—it was with a small sigh of relief that I finally saw, “Vogel, Robert” appear on the screen. I called up his file and sat back, admiring how close we’d come to missing him, even while doing all the right things.

Robert Vogel was on probation in Vermont on a Massachusetts burglary charge, which explained why Lou Biddle hadn’t thought to bring his file to our intelligence meeting, and why I hadn’t found him in my search of Vermont law breakers—a non-Vermonter, his name had never come up.

My real satisfaction, however, lay in what the computer showed Vogel to be. It turned out that although he was still paying society for burglary, he’d already paid his legal dues for rape by serving a full four-year term in a Massachusetts penitentiary; he’d also been previously charged with two additional rapes, neither resulting in conviction.

I stared at the screen for several minutes, its fluorescent green letters hypnotic in their intensity, before I suddenly realized that despite my excitement I was on the brink of falling asleep. Soon, I thought, soon, as I switched off the computer and slowly walked over to the fax machine. I typed up a brief note for Lou Biddle to call me as soon as he got to his office, punched up his number, and sent it off over the wires.

At that I straightened, stretched, and gave in to exhaustion, satisfied that the day had at least ended with a shred more hope than it had begun.

· · ·

Four hours later I rued the enthusiasm that had prompted the sending of that fax. Lou Biddle’s voice on the other end of my phone not only gave me no joy, it was even, for the first few moments after I picked up, a complete mystery to my sleep-clotted brain.

“Joe, what the hell’s the matter? You sound sick.”

I cleared my throat and struggled to open my eyes against the light from my bedroom window. “Sorry—long night. Do you have a Robert Vogel in your files, on probation here for a Massachusetts burglary?”

“Not in my files, but maybe one of the others has him. Helen, probably. I’m sex offenders only.”

“Could you find out? Now?”

There was a moment’s surprised hesitation. “Sure. Hang on.”

I spent the five minutes he left me hanging getting tiredly out of bed. Just before he returned, I wondered how Gail had fared through the night—and what use I was going to be to her if I kept up this pace. I realized now that, despite the promising end results, last night’s marathon had been more than a little self-indulgent, triggered by some subtly pervasive urge to vaguely mimic Gail’s ordeal with one of my own making. It had been exactly the type of display I’d been struggling to avoid.

Nevertheless, Lou sounded duly impressed when he got back on the line. “I got him. How the hell did you dig this guy up?”

“He mowed the lawn of one of Gail’s neighbors a couple of weeks ago. You free for the next hour?”

“Next half hour, yeah.”

“I’m on my way.”

The local probation and parole branch of Vermont’s Department of Corrections was located a mere stone’s throw from where Mary Wallis had hammered Jason Ryan with her shoe—down among a cluster of buildings bunched together on the flats between the water’s edge and the high bank on which the Putney Road was perched. Fifteen minutes after hanging up on Lou Biddle, I pulled into his parking lot.

I found him in his office, comfortably settled in an ancient tiltback office chair, a cup of coffee cradled in his hands and his feet propped up on his desk.

He pointed to a coffee machine by the door. “Help yourself. You look like you need it.”

I gratefully followed his suggestion. “Did you get a chance to read that file?”

He leaned forward and pulled it off his desk. “Yup. You may have a hot one here. Three rape charges, the last one with a sentence. He served the rape in full and is doing the burglary on probation.”