Occam's Razor (6 page)

I quickly reread the report in my hand. “You also mention telltale bruising in the left scapular area. What’s that about?”

His enthusiasm picked up immediately. “That was pretty neat. I’m looking forward to showing it to Dr. Hillstrom when she gets back. When I rolled him over, I noticed a very mild discoloration just below the left shoulder blade. Usually, you just note something like that—get it in the record. But I wanted to try something Dr. Hillstrom had mentioned. Bruising is bleeding under the skin, of course, but if the blow’s perimortem—around the time of death—the blood doesn’t have time to spread out and make that characteristic blue-black appearance. So I cut around what little bruising I could see and peeled the outer layer of skin back. There I found a near-perfect footprint. I took a picture of it—it’ll be in the full report.”

“Nice work, Bernie,” I said with genuine warmth. “I hope Dr. Hillstrom gives you a gold star. By the way, were you able to pinpoint cause of death? I have witnesses who make it sound like he might’ve been dead before the train hit him.”

The hesitation on the other end told me I’d pushed him too hard, which I regretted, given what he’d just delivered.

“Those are actually two questions in one,” he answered gamely, though his disappointment was obvious. “And I’m afraid you won’t be able to do much by either one of them.
Cause
of death might have been anything from a baseball bat to the train, to a shotgun blast to the head—impossible to tell…Well,” he suddenly paused, “probably not a shotgun—at least not one firing pellets. I checked the surviving skull fragments and found no sign of them. Might’ve been a deer slug, of course…Anyhow, he didn’t die from whatever agent caused the chloracne.
Time
of death is a little iffy, too. My guess is that he was alive either when or moments before the train hit him—the pulpified tissue was markedly hemorrhagic, and according to your field notes, there was a lot of blood on the ground where the body was recovered.”

I filled the sudden silence that followed this long-winded equivocation with, “But you’re not going to commit a hundred percent to saying he died when the train hit him?”

He sounded embarrassed. “I think he did, but Dr. Hillstrom would probably insist on my sticking to the old adage, ‘He died between when he was last seen alive and when he was first found dead.’ I’m sorry if that’s not terribly helpful.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “I’ll let the lawyers worry about that if it ever gets to court. You’ve been a big help.”

He sounded relieved. “Okay. Well, call any time.”

“I do have one last question. In the prelim, you mention the standard ‘well-nourished male, normal in overall appearance.’ Would that fit the average street person?”

“Not one who’d been following that lifestyle for a while, but you got to start sometime. I just assumed he was a beginner and that the usual signs hadn’t surfaced yet.”

“So I wasn’t out of line thinking that his clean underwear was at odds with his beaten-up clothes.”

Short didn’t answer for a couple of beats. “That’s a discrepancy I didn’t think about. His socks looked regular, too—I mean compared to some I’ve seen.”

I smiled at the phone, childishly pleased at having a gut reaction borne out. “Good talking to you, Bernie, and thanks again.”

I hung up and shouted into the squad room, “Is Ron in yet?”

Klesczewski appeared, still wearing his coat. “Morning. You bellowed?”

I glanced at the new phone on my desk. We’d been equipped some time ago with a new communications system, including voice mail, intercom, and a half dozen other features I hadn’t bothered to learn. Typically, J.P. and Ron had mastered it overnight, Willy and I had barely acknowledged its arrival, and Sammie was somewhere in between.

I gave him an apologetic look. “Sorry. Old habit. I just talked to the ME. Our John Doe was exposed to some nasty chemical shortly before he died. It didn’t kill him, but it did screw him up—running sores and all.” I handed him Bernie’s preliminary report. “Dr. Short called it a dioxin. You hear about that abandoned truck at Bickford’s?”

His eyes widened. “Were those dioxins, too?”

“Could be. Contact Pat Mason at ANR and tell him we may have found a connection to his case. Also, if their lab wants to compare what he found in the truck bed to the clothes the ME sent to the state forensics lab, they might find something—unless, like we think, his clothes were switched before he was killed.”

Klesczewski nodded. “Will do.”

“Short also said he lifted a footprint from the dead man’s skin. He was pretty enthusiastic about it. If it’s as good as he says, maybe we could use it as evidence later. Did Tyler tell you about the partial license plate Renaud claimed he saw?”

“Yeah. I was just about to call DMV about it.” He hesitated and then added, “Willy also told me about the governor’s plan to overhaul law enforcement.”

I looked at him more closely, surprised by the change of subject. “I think it was vaguer than that. Wasn’t he talking about floating the idea at a few public hearings first, using Reynolds as a bird dog?”

“I suppose. Still, it’s a pretty radical idea, isn’t it?”

In several ways, Ron Klesczewski was the youngest member of the squad, although Sammie was his junior by a couple of years. Tough in a fight, and as good as anyone I knew with a computer, a phone link, and a data bank, he remained almost endearingly innocent. It was not an affectation, but he was aware of how he projected and had been known to use it for mileage with strangers. During interrogations, I’d seen suspects become almost eager to talk to him, figuring he needed all the help he could get.

This time, however, he was genuinely curious. “I’m not so sure it is,” I told him. “Our type of law enforcement grew up in stages, on a strictly need basis. When we were all a bunch of farmers, the odd sheriff or constable was enough to do the trick, as were the small PDs later on, but now that we’re seeing some of what they get every day in New York and Boston, that piecemeal kind of approach can cause problems, just like it did up north.”

I was alluding to what Willy had called a “cluster fuck” earlier, which, as usual with him, was both overly blunt and entirely accurate. A man named Amos Melcourt, under investigation by one small municipal department for sexual abuse and suspected of a string of burglaries by the state police, had been visited by a part-time deputy sheriff on a third, minor violation. Inside Melcourt’s house, the deputy had seen three TV sets stacked up in the living room but hadn’t thought they might be hot and therefore hadn’t blown the whistle. A week later, Melcourt kidnapped and molested three children, killing two of them before being shot by police.

It had happened less than a month ago, and the finger-pointing had been escalating ever since. In point of fact, it was an outrage. The sexual abuse investigation should have been shared among all agencies, the state police’s suspicions—and the list of stolen property—should have been more aggressively circulated, and that poor miserable part-time deputy should have been better trained, or at least not been made to interview someone whose malevolence he couldn’t gauge.

Adding to the bureaucratic embarrassments was the revelation later that Amos Melcourt had kept a room in his house filled with pedophilic pornography, among which were photos of the three kids he later kidnapped, along with maps and a timetable of their daily routine. It had been made painfully and irrefutably clear by the press that had the deputy recognized the TVs as stolen property, a search warrant could have been issued, the secret room discovered, and the clear intent to do harm to minors established. Melcourt would now have been behind bars, instead of six feet underground, along with his two small victims.

To people like Willy, it was all water over the dam. As he regularly put it when confronted with such horror stories, “Shit happens.” To me, it was a clear indication that wake-up calls like the one being issued by Governor Howell and Reynolds were both appropriate and timely.

“It’s not that I think the whole system should be thrown out,” I explained to Ron. “For one thing, you couldn’t get rid of the sheriffs without amending the state constitution. But we do need to improve the way we keep each other informed.”

“We have computer-linked data bases, like VLETS and VIBRS and the others,” Ron countered.

“As long as the funding’s there,” I conceded. “But those computers didn’t work with Melcourt. Not everyone in law enforcement’s as handy as you are with those things. And a lot of the older or more conservative cops still see their turf as private property. Remember what that one sergeant said when he was asked why his department had kept their investigation of Melcourt to themselves?”

Ron nodded. “They didn’t want to lose it to the state police.”

“Which is exactly what should have happened. But the state police can get pretty superior, too, sometimes, going on about the traditions of the glorious Green-and-Gold. That can get under people’s skin.”

“They probably are the best in the state,” Ron muttered, a little unhappily.

“I don’t argue with that,” I agreed. “And they’ve been bending over backwards recently to share their assets and data, but that hasn’t always been true. Years back, one of their people told the Senate Government Operations Committee on the record that all sheriffs should be abolished and that all local cops were woodchucks. Ancient history now, and just one jackass’s opinion, but that kind of crack doesn’t easily fade away. And when you’re the biggest guy in the schoolyard, it’s usually smart to be the most generous—unfortunately, that’s a hard lesson to learn.”

We were both silent for a moment, Ron absorbing what I’d just said, and I embarrassed for running my mouth. I hadn’t realized until then how the Melcourt mess had gotten under my skin. Subconsciously, I adopted Willy’s attitude of simply being thankful it hadn’t been us caught in the limelight. But Ron’s curiosity had forced me to admit that some kind of overhaul was in fact past due.

I glanced out the window at the cold, gray sky, forgetful of Ron still standing awkwardly in the doorway—suddenly aware that another bulwark I counted on for stability was threatening to shift.

That Gail’s gradual evolution would cost me her company was no more assured than that the governor and his pet senator would put an end to my job, but the possibilities were there, palpably close, and they filled me with something akin to fear.

INVESTIGATIONS, EVEN OF HEADLINE GRABBERS
like a man being hit by a train, proceed at a curiously slow pace. Trained as we are by television and the movies, we expect things to move at breakneck speed and for things like lab reports and forensic analyses to appear on demand.

They don’t.

There are certain things that happen quickly, of course. The scene is thoroughly picked over, all witnesses located and interviewed, all evidence processed and forwarded appropriately. But then—frustratingly—you sometimes have to stop and wait, with all your instincts receptive, like a hunter in the forest outwaiting the game he knows to be standing stock-still nearby.

Such a pause occurred during the two days following our discovery of the bum on the tracks. Matching the chemicals from the abandoned truck to the tox scan being done on his blood was going to take time, as were the variety of tests J.P. had ordered on the odds and ends he’d found at the scene. That we were prepared for. Running “PCH” through the computers at Motor Vehicles and not getting a hit was much more frustrating.

As was searching for anything more about the three men who had dumped the body.

I put Willy in charge of beating the bushes on that one, not only because it was his particular expertise but also because Sammie, for the first time ever, called in sick.

I called her at home as soon as I heard, since along with everyone else I assumed only death could keep her off the job. She did sound terrible on the phone, and told me she’d be out for a couple of days only, but I thought she was a little cagey about the nature of her illness, and I was irritated by her reluctance to see a doctor. Since things were less than frantic at work, however—for the moment—I decided not to pursue it. Considering all she’d given this department, I had little cause for complaint, and God knows she had sick days due. But I was suspicious about what was really going on, especially since Kunkle, after I asked him what he knew about it, gave me an angrier-than-usual brush-off. Issues of privacy notwithstanding, I wasn’t going to give this too much more time before asking for an explanation.

Fortunately, my attention was soon diverted. On the third day, both Tyler and Klesczewski, from different directions, kicked the investigation back into motion.

Tyler appeared at my office first, triumphantly holding a fingerprint card in his hand, which he brandished before me like an award. It was the standard form with ten available slots, one for each fingertip, with only one of the slots filled with the familiar loops and swirls of a print. “I found it,” he proclaimed. “One fresh fingertip. Not a hundred yards from where the body was.”

“Some animal grab it like you thought?”

“Hard to tell. And it’s not guaranteed. Dumb as it sounds, we don’t know for sure if it is John Doe’s, and we definitely don’t know if John Doe ever had his prints taken, or if the one print will be enough to bring a file out of the computer, but it’s better than nothing. I sent the finger itself up to Waterbury for a DNA comparison with the body, so that can be settled at least, and I was about to see what the AFIS computer could do with that.” He gestured at the card he’d placed on my desk.

I returned it to him. “Nice work. You actually been looking for that all this time?”

He smiled, a little embarrassed. “I just couldn’t shake the idea there had to be leftovers somewhere. The people who put him there counted on train wheels being like meat grinders. But they’re also sharp-edged and narrow and kick up a lot of wind as they pass. I was hoping maybe all that energy moved one of the hands slightly. I couldn’t believe nothing was left behind except mush.”

“You did well. Let’s hope it pans out.”