Fruits of the Poisonous Tree (23 page)

“We had any other nibbles?”

Ron shook his head.

I rubbed my forehead. I was so tired by now, I could barely function, much less jump at the notion of traveling forty-five minutes to the far end of the county because some power-company field man was playing hooky. “When did Harriman Station first try to contact their guy?”

“Three hours ago.”

“Long-time employee?”

Ron had asked all the right questions before me. “Seventeen years—rock solid.”

Despite his eagerness, or perhaps because of it, I merely felt more drained as I said, “Okay. I was going to wait for J.P. and the others to bring back what they need for an arrest warrant and then see the process through, but I might as well keep out of their hair and do something more constructive. I’ll pick one of them up on the way out of town and check out your Glory Hole.”

I got to my feet slowly, ignoring Ron’s look of disappointment at being left with his paperwork. “Then I’m going home for some sleep.”

· · ·

I didn’t go into great detail with Sammie Martens when I picked her up outside Bob Vogel’s trailer park, and—after giving me a quick glance—she didn’t ask for any. She merely listened to my directions, accepted that we were being stimulated in large part by a hunch of Ron’s, and took over the wheel as I slouched down into the opposite corner and closed my throbbing eyes.

I didn’t need to admire the passing countryside. Like many people living in southern Vermont, I was intimately familiar with the Harriman Reservoir and its surroundings. Hanging like a seven-mile-long twisted streamer from Route 9’s rigid curtain rod, the reservoir nestles in a bunched-up cluster of steep, stocky, tree-choked hills vaguely reminiscent of the Appalachians—a setting unlike any other in the state. Coming south off of 9 onto Route 100, roughly paralleling Harriman’s jagged shore, it is easy to think that Vermont has been mysteriously left behind, perhaps because the driver is not actually crossing the Green Mountains, but moving among them as they mingle to become the Hoosac Range leading down into Massachusetts. It is, for locals at least, a recreational area of choice, and a place I and many of my friends visited often.

Even the so-called Glory Hole was familiar ground. A hundred-and-sixty-foot-wide concrete, curved funnel that looked like a gigantic suction hole in some child’s nightmare, it sat, as if floating, some thirty feet from the dam that had formed the reservoir back in the 1920s and which, back then, had been one of the largest earthen dams in the world—two hundred feet tall, eight hundred feet long, and thirteen hundred feet wide at the base. During extremely wet years, when the Glory Hole’s role as spillway was called upon to protect the dam from any eroding overflow, people from miles around would gather at a convenient cliff high above the hole and look straight down, transfixed, as millions of gallons of water slid over the lip of the funnel and vanished as into the bowels of some gargantuan toilet. It was a frightening, mesmerizing, deafening sight that no first visitor ever forgot, and which pulled people back time and again, whenever the waters swelled beyond their prescribed boundaries.

Now, however, was not such a time, for weather or tourists. The summer had been relatively dry, the weather was becoming cooler with each passing day, and it was too early for either leaf-peepers or deer hunters. The place, I noticed, opening my eyes as Sammie pulled off Route 100 onto the long, paved dead-end access road leading to the dam, was deserted.

“You see any power-company trucks?”

She shook her head. “Haven’t seen much of anybody. You really think this is where Vogel headed?”

“I don’t know… ” I hesitated. “To be honest, I think the main reason I’m out here is just to take a break. No reason he couldn’t have, though.” The gap in the rocks and trees to our right indicated the approach of the scenic cliff top, high above the spillway. “Pull over when you get near the fence.”

She stopped by the side of the road and pointed to the dam, which angled off below us to the far shore. A road capped its crest, and a small yellow pickup truck, looking like an abandoned toy from this distance, was parked with its driver’s door open. “There’s one of your mysteries solved.”

We got out of the car and approached the chain-link fence blocking the top of the cliff. Far below, the bone-dry Glory Hole, no less hypnotic for the absence of rushing water, came into view. It was fringed by a circular wooden pier, below which taintor gates hung to further control the water level if necessary, and from which two narrow wooden catwalks extended like clock hands—one toward the quiet, still, massive dam, and the other to the top of a concrete tower, crowned by a small shed, which stood alongside the Glory Hole, slightly farther out in the water, and which presumably functioned as a vertical service tunnel.

Our attention, however, was drawn to none of this, for near the center of the spillway’s funnel, just shy of where the downward curve began its dizzying plunge toward the black hole in the middle, the small, motionless shape of a man lay spread-eagled. One of his hands extended high above his head and was wrapped around an iron ring, set into the concrete for service crews to hook their ropes. And below him, trailing like a kite tail and vanishing into the void at his feet, was a thin, bright ribbon of blood.

"JESUS CHRIST," SAMMIE MURMURED
ducking down, her eyes already scanning the area around us. “You think he’s still alive?”

Squatting next to her, I craned my neck to look at him again.

“He’s got a firm grip on that ring, not that that necessarily means anything.”

I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted. “You down there. Can you hear me?”

For a moment nothing happened. Then, almost imperceptibly, one leg moved about eight inches.

“Jesus,” Sammie repeated. “If he lets go, he’s had it.”

I scuttled back to the squad car, not knowing what we had—if the man had fallen by accident, if he’d been pushed or shot, and, if so, whether his attacker was still nearby, perhaps sighting on the two of us right now.

I unhooked the mike from the car’s radio. “M-80 from O-3.”

Dispatch answered immediately, “Go ahead, O-3.”

“I’m at our intended destination with one civilian down, possible hostage situation, unknown and un-located perpetrator. Get me all the help you can, including an ambulance and a high-angle rescue team, but stop them at the entrance to the access road until I give further word.”

The reply was crisp and unemotional. “10-4. M-80 out.”

Sammie joined me crouching by the open door. “So now what? That guy doesn’t look like he has too much left in him.”

I pulled two armored vests from the back seat, handed one to her, and slipped into the other without attaching the Velcro tabs. The exhaustion that had been dragging me down for untold hours, clogging my brain and affecting my concentration, had vanished completely, replaced by an almost frightening hyper-vigilance. “This road hits a hairpin curve about two hundred feet farther downhill and then doubles back to a parking lot on the dry side of the dam. We should have pretty good cover and a safe approach to the Glory Hole from there—assuming no one’s waiting for us.”

“Right,” was all she said, before slipping on the vest, circling the car, and getting back behind the wheel.

The sylvan peacefulness of moments ago had been abruptly wrenched into something almost perversely opposite. Without a single hostile sign or sound, our surroundings now were threatening and dangerous—the trees potential sniper nests, the rocks and bushes obstructions to a clear, safe view all around. We rolled the car slowly down the hill and around the corner, our eyes straining against the dark green of the bordering trees for anything suspicious, dimly aware of the massive bulk of the dam growing to our right as we circled around below its potentially protective shoulder.

As soon as we got to the small parking lot at the end of the road, some thirty feet below the dam’s crest, we raided the car trunk, and lugging a shotgun, a radio, a coil of rope, a pair of binoculars, and some extra ammunition, we made our way though the bordering trees up the steep slope to the top. To our left, extending eight hundred feet to the hills across from us, and several thousand feet down to a seemingly tiny streambed far below, was the vast, open, grassy sweep of the dam’s restraining slope. Normally a sight of inspiring beauty and industrial ingenuity, it was now just a potential killing field of gigantic proportions—a place to avoid at all costs until the threat, if any, could be located.

Just shy of the narrow utility road where the abandoned pickup stood, we ran out of tree cover.

Sammie—small, athletic, almost wiry—was barely breathing hard after the strenuous climb. She crouched by the last tree trunk and looked around at the quiet countryside. “How d’you want to play it?”

I wiped the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve. “The road’s got a low cement wall on the water side. If we tuck up close to that, it ought to protect us pretty well from everywhere except the cliff we came from.”

She looked over her shoulder. “What about from the trees?”

“The angle from the top of the dam ought to cover them—just keep low once you get there.”

She pursed her lips, took a deep breath, muttered, “Right,” and took off across the last twenty feet at a dead run, her feet digging into the slope like a sprinter’s. I watched all around as best I could, knowing there was little I could do with a shotgun in any case, and was infinitely relieved when I saw her reach the top and roll out of sight across the road.

I waited a few seconds, hearing only birds and the gentle breeze among the leaves overhead. Then I too set out, feeling slow and clumsy, slipping in spots where Sammie had run like a teenager. When I got to the roadway and rolled across it as she had done, clutching the shotgun parallel to my chest, my relief came more from just being able to rest than from any newfound sense of protection. I lay flat on my back, staring at the cloud-dappled sky, gasping for air. Sammie crouched beside me, peering over the top of the low cement wall.

“What d’you see?” I asked, trying to speak as normally as possible.

“Nothing.”

I struggled to a sitting position, first checking the few spots nearby from where someone could draw a bead on us, and poked my head over the wall. The contrast with the scene now to my back—a miles-long view down a narrow, stream-cut valley, seen from the very top of what amounted to a manmade mountain—contrasted violently with what I saw before me. Just five yards below me, the water of the reservoir stretched out so near to where we were hiding that it felt almost like standing up in a boat.

I shifted my gaze to the Glory Hole, where, between the circular dock and the concrete edge, I could just see the top of the man still hanging on for his life. The catwalk leading from the shore to the dock above the spillway was about twenty feet away, but there was a locked gate cutting off access. My eyes went to a small object lying at the intersection, where the second catwalk connected the Glory Hole to the maintenance access tower with the shed on it.

“Hand me the binoculars,” I asked.

Sammie took the shotgun from me as I focused the field glasses on the object.

“It’s a tool box,” I muttered, “lying between the wounded man and the shed on the access tower.”

“So if he was shot and fell backwards over the railing, the bullet must’ve come from the shed.”

“Right.” I handed the binoculars back to Sammie and cupped my hands around my mouth again. “You in the Glory Hole. This is the police. If you can hear me, try to raise your free hand.”

Sammie had the glasses trained on him. “He moved his fingers.”

“Okay,” I shouted, “we saw that. I need to ask you some questions. Move your fingers for yes; stay still for no. You got that?”

“Yes,” Sammie interpreted.

“Have you been shot?”

“Yes.”

“Is the shooter still around?”

Sammie paused, about to say no. “Hold it, he moved his hand. Better take that as an ‘I guess so.’”

“You think he is, but you’re not sure?” I shouted.

“Yes,” Sammie said softly, “no doubt about it.”

“Was he in the shed?”

“Yes.”

“Was he alone?”

“He’s hesitating again… There it is.”

“You only think he was alone?”

“Right.”

“Have you been there a long time?”

“Yes.”

“Can you hang on much longer? Are you secure there?”

“Not a twitch, Joe.”

“Can you move at all?”

“Still nothing.”

“Shit,” I muttered, “by the time everyone gets here, he’ll be down the toilet—literally.” I cupped my hands again. “Can you hang on for another ten minutes?”

“Yes, but he didn’t put much into it.”

“All right. We’re on our way, but we’ve got to be careful, okay?”

“He gave us a thumbs-up.” Sammie looked at me. “The manual says no life is worth your own.”

“We don’t even know the guy’s still in the shed,” I countered.

Sammie eyes grew wide. “Where the hell else would he be?”

“He might’ve had a boat, and that shed leads to something down below. That’s what the tower’s for.”

“You know that for a fact?”

I didn’t answer her. The radio between us squawked instead, “O-3 from M-80.”

I picked it up. “Go ahead.”

“You have two Wilmington units at the entrance of your access road, two sheriff ’s deputies five minutes out, a Dover unit and a VSP unit, both about ten minutes out. What’s your status?”

“Still the same. We’re about to reconnoiter. You better get the state police tactical support unit rolling just in case. And tell the Wilmington units to approach cautiously and to stage at the parking lot below the dam. We’re on the crest road.”

“10-4. M-80 out.”

Sammie gave me a smile. “I get the feeling the manual is about to be thrown out.”

I went back to looking over the wall at the spillway. “Just edited a little, but we are going to wait for the Wilmington people.”

“Then what?”

“Then I run out onto the catwalk, shoot off the lock, drop down onto the edge of the Glory Hole with the rope and pull that poor bastard to safety, all while you and the others riddle that shed with covering fire—if need be.”