Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series) (3 page)

“You were here when he was removed?” Joe asked.

Owen was looking around, playing his light across the landscape. There was an overhead bulb burning, here and there, but to little effect. “Yup. Took pictures, too. Believe it or not, it seemed tidy compared to this. Everybody was in a rush to get him out.”

Joe was trying to reconstruct the scene as they’d found it. “You never suspected foul play?”

Baern sensed where this was headed. “Honestly? No. I know what you’re thinking: that we just wanted to get the hell out of here. I’ve asked myself that a dozen times already, especially since you walked into my office. I swear to God, between how we found Ben and what I found out later about Jason Newville, I can’t see anything here beyond a really sad accident.”

“So, how’s that work?” Joe asked him. “Ben was walking by the doorway and everything from one room suddenly caved in on him?”

Baern fidgeted with his tie. “That’s the way it looked at the time. Things have been moved—”

“Not
that
much,” Joe pointed out. “There’s no place
to
walk by. You either approach the pile head-on, from this direction, or you slide down it the way Jason did, from the other.”

Owen became a little defensive. “There are other rooms where it’s not a pile that spills into the next room, but a stacked wall. I was thinking the same was true here, and that maybe he was standing in front of it, maybe looking for something down low, when he destabilized the whole thing and it crushed him. I mean, it looks like the side of a hill now, but it might not’ve been that way originally.”

Joe was nodding. “Okay. I could see that. Do you remember—was he mostly pinned by tools and hardware, or magazines and boxes?” He gestured toward the rest of the room. “Like what was thrown off to get to him afterwards?”

“Softer stuff,” Owen said. “Why?”

“I haven’t seen the autopsy photographs yet, and I know he was partially decomposed, but from what you told me, he was kind of beaten up—scratches and bruises and whatever.”

His younger colleague pondered that a moment before conceding, “Which is a little unlikely from a pile of paper.”

Joe faced him encouragingly. “Not impossible, but ‘unlikely’ is a good word.”

CHAPTER THREE

Joe was sitting in a booth at the back of an out-of-the-way restaurant in Burlington when a woman slid onto his bench, pressed herself up against him, and delivered a kiss. He responded by infiltrating her unbuttoned coat with his hand and caressing her flat stomach and the underside of one breast.

Beverly Hillstrom broke away only long enough to murmur, “Special Agent Gunther. What do you think you’re doing?”

“Taking advantage of a consenting adult, I hope,” he said, kissing her.

She slid back out to remove the coat, hung it on the booth’s outer post, and took the bench across from him. Her arrival made the air around them smell of the cool, fresh outdoors.

“This okay?” he asked, indicating the seating.

“Wonderful,” she said, as she reached out to take his hand, “And it’s not that I don’t want to be seen with you.”

“No, no,” he almost interrupted. “I totally understand. It makes life easier for the both of us, to be honest.”

She laughed then. “You should know, your ex-girlfriend being the current governor of Vermont. That has to have been awkward on occasion.”

He allowed for a rueful smile. “It had its moments when it was news, but no more. Thank God we weren’t an item when she got elected. Not that dating the state’s chief medical examiner is a step down.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Perish the thought.” She gave his fingers an extra squeeze as she said, “I love that you drove all the way up here to see me. You are something else—one of the most thoughtful people I know.”

“It’s my pleasure,” he assured her. “I’m just sorry about the circumstances.”

“It was a little disconcerting to see my own cousin on the table,” she allowed. “Did you get to meet with the VSP investigator? His name didn’t ring a bell with me.”

“He’s new,” Joe told her. “Owen Baern. Solid guy. He’ll get the hang of it faster than most.”

“And you found nothing suspicious about Ben’s death?”

Joe tilted his head slightly. “I’m not saying that.”

Their waitress arrived and took their drink orders. Joe waited until she’d left to answer Beverly’s question. “It’s a given that every investigation has a few questions you can’t answer. The trick is to ask if you can live with them. Right now, I can’t say that. I’ll need some more facts before I’m happy with a finding of ‘Accidental.’”

Beverly took a sip of her drink before saying, “Fire away.”

He tapped his finger on the menu. “First things first. Otherwise, she’ll just keep interrupting.”

They therefore dealt with their orders before Joe asked, “Tell me about Ben. You said he moved to Vermont because of you. What’s the story there?”

“We were all brought up in Philadelphia,” Beverly began. “I come from quite the clan—what you might call Brahmins of the Main Line, not that the phrase means anything around here. The Main Line is a string of suburban towns running west of the city, alongside the primary tracks of the old Pennsylvania Railroad: places named Lower Merion, Villanova, Gladwyne, Bryn Mawr—where I attended college—and several others.”

“I was down there on a case,” Joe said. “Some pretty fancy houses—not that you can see them too well.”

“I should say not,” she agreed. “Several of those towns are among the priciest in the country, as they were in the late 1800s. People pay to be invisible from the road—unless, of course, they’re showing off.”

“That explains the Ferrari dealership I saw,” he suggested. “New Money versus Old?”

“As always,” she said. “Anyhow—full disclosure—your latest girlfriend is a hopeless blue blood.”

“I’m shocked.”

Her voice became nostalgic. “I know. That’s actually one of the reasons I became a physician—because I was told I didn’t have to. All such stuffy idealism aside, however, being a kid down there in those days was pretty magical, as un-PC as it sounds. We had a wonderful, pampered, catered-to childhood, which even then—in my defense—I knew not to take for granted. My parents had figured out that much—they made sure we appreciated how advantaged we were.”

“This included Ben?”

“Yes, although from a different angle, and in less than ideal circumstances in the long run. Ben’s mother and mine were sisters. They were inseparable as children—my grandmother used to say they were like twins. But my aunt married for love at too young an age, and it didn’t turn out well for her. Ben was the result, and in the early days, when things were still happy—he was just part of the gang. But later, his father started drinking, made a string of bad investments, and alienated everyone. They moved away, refused to keep in touch, turned down offers of help. By the time Ben was a teenager, his mother had died and he was living with a drunk. I always thought that was one reason he turned to photography—to put a camera between himself and the world.”

“That must’ve been hard to watch,” Joe said supportively.

Beverly leaned toward him. “It should have been, and I have beaten myself up for most of my adult life because it wasn’t. Shameful as it sounds, Ben’s departure from our special kingdom barely caused a ripple. My mother took it hard. It changed her to have lost her sister. But we kids paid little attention. We were busy having fun and growing up like royalty and going to all the right schools and parties and what have you. It left me with a feeling of lapsed responsibility that I will take to my grave.”

Joe took one of her hands in his, stunned by how her own self-doubt was so at odds with his respect and admiration for her. “Whoa. Beverly. Slow down. How were you supposed to know what was going on between the adults? Much less take on the burden of what happened? This kind of crap happens in every family, from the Cabots down to the street sweeper.”

She was already shaking her head. “I realize that, Joe. You know me. I’ve put it all under a microscope—the scientist in the lab coat. You think I am unaware that half the cops in Vermont refer to me as the Ice Queen? That’s my armor, and what happened to Ben plays a big role in it. I let him down when he needed me, even if he didn’t know to ask for help, and I will never let that happen again. I will be just shy of fanatical in speaking up for the people who appear on my autopsy table—not to mention friends and family.”

They paused as their waitress returned and served them their meals.

“It wasn’t just that Ben fell off the radar when his parents left Philadelphia,” she resumed as they began eating. “I probably could have remained clueless and guilt-free if he’d just grown up to be another banker or insurance salesman or even a passport photographer, for God’s sake. It’s what did happen to him that fused with the family’s earlier sins, and made me feel that I should have paid closer attention.”

“What happened?” Joe asked.

“In a word, Vietnam,” she said.

“He served in Nam?” Joe blurted out.

“Yes. It didn’t sound too threatening at first. He shipped out as a Signal Corps photographer. He’d married and tried to find work, but without much luck. The army was recruiting, making all sorts of promises, including that you could pick your job and not be sent to Vietnam—both of which were usually so much hot air. But he actually landed one out of two. We were worried for him, of course, but amazed that they’d recognized his skill with a camera and put it to good use. So, despite his being sent to a war zone, we were hopeful that he’d be kept away from any direct line of fire.”

“I take it that didn’t turn out well.”

“No. You remember those days—nightly reports of body counts and defoliation and hearts-and-minds rhetoric and soldiers putting Zippos to thatch-roofed shacks.”

“They called them hooches,” Joe said quietly, his own memory reaching back all too easily.

“Yes,” she recalled. “Well, it was also a PR battle against the protesters the world over, and Ben was caught up in the middle of it. He was photographing appalling things and then being ordered to cull through them so that they looked like the U.S. was winning the war. The letters he wrote home that his wife shared with us became darker and darker. He wrote that he began carrying two cameras—the army’s and his own—so that he could document what mattered to him. The irony is that those pictures mostly showed scenes and people that look unaffected by the war, as if he was using the second camera to distance himself from the horror.” She sighed and fiddled with the salad that, so far, she’d barely touched.

“Did he suffer from PTSD?” Joe asked.

She looked up from her reveries. “Oh, much worse than that. I mean, yes, he did, but the bullet he stopped with his head did the real damage.”

Joe stared at her, his mouth open.

She scowled at her own dramatics. “I’m sorry. That was a little much. Guilt is so hard to keep in perspective.”

“Isn’t that a contradiction right there?”

She laughed, if only briefly. “Granted.”

“So he was sent home,” Joe brought her back on track.

“He was. In a coma. He’d sustained critical damage to the frontal lobe, and stayed in the hospital for almost a year, after which he did all he could do to essentially disappear, including ending his marriage.”

“That when the hoarding began?”

“Not immediately, but soon thereafter. Personality changes are not uncommon in traumatic brain injury.”

Joe took a bite of his burger. Not as distracted as she was, he was hungry. “What happened to his pictures?” he asked.

She placed her cheek in her hand, making him think that she might start to cry. A seasoned listener, he was struck by how affected he was by her distress, and was thereby reminded—yet again—of much she’d come to mean to him.

“I should have known that you’d go to the heart of it,” she said. “That’s why I called you about this.”

“The photographs?”

“Indirectly.”

He didn’t show his utter lack of comprehension. “So, tell me,” he urged instead.

“He kept quite a few,” she began. “At least, the ones he was allowed to—the ones he took for himself.”

Joe waited, continuing to eat.

“Of course, he was unconscious when he came back. The army just collected his possessions, including what he was wearing when he was shot—which again sounds peculiar, given these days of blood-borne pathogens—and shoved them into a trunk and shipped them home. And those films sat, probably for years, knowing Ben, until he began getting back into photography.”

“Where was he living by then?” Joe asked.

“Here,” she said. “In Vermont. I’d moved up to take the medical examiner’s job—fresh from a fellowship in forensic pathology at the City of Philadelphia ME’s office. I’d been here a little while, and had met and married Daniel, when Ben told me that he also wanted to ‘live in the sticks,’ as he put it. I helped him find the Dummerston property. Technically, I guess you could say I bought it for him, since I was the mortgage holder. But he paid me rent, the first of every month.”

“Huh,” Joe said. “I had no idea.”

She smiled sadly. “I know what you’re thinking. It didn’t look like it does now. It was nice—a true picture postcard. By then, Ben’s father had died, he’d inherited a modest amount, the military was paying him disability, and I helped out with the bigger bills, if I thought he’d accept it.”

“Did he? Beyond the house?”

“Hardly ever. We’d gotten back in touch after he left the hospital. It wasn’t as it had been when we were kids, but there remained a genuine closeness. In fact, until he met Rachel, I was the only family member he’d speak with. And I think he was grateful for my finding him a corner of the earth in which to hide—not that he ever admitted it.”

“That makes sense,” Joe said. “How did Rachel get involved?”

“She was struggling to find a suitable subject for a video documentary, and I told her that Ben might be both appropriate and approachable. I knew he was a hoarder, and that the topic is popular right now. I was hoping he might help her along. Of course, I had an ulterior motive: I’d always wanted to draw him out a bit more—he was outwardly gregarious, but remained inwardly guarded—and I also wanted him to meet at least one of my daughters and perhaps form a friendship.”