Red Herring (2 page)

Except for its last moments. Those had, by all appearances, been a waking nightmare.

Up to now, Joe had employed a favorite time-tested technique at death scenes—while acknowledging the body, he didn’t start by focusing on it, choosing instead to work from the fringes inward. But he’d done that by this point. He’d wandered through the small, neat house, asked many of the preliminary questions, and gathered an overall sense of Doreen’s daily rhythm.

Now he gazed at her, supine on the couch, her mouth agape, the blood shining on her forehead, her clouded eyes fixed on the ceiling as if she’d died wishing herself someplace else.

Joe didn’t fault her there. The most compelling aspect of this entire scene, and which had transfixed every other investigator here, he feared, was the story suggested by her position. Her legs were apart, her nightgown pulled up to her waist and torn at the bodice, and her black underwear dangling from one foot.

By all appearances, Doreen Ferenc had been raped and murdered.

“Are you the one they told me to see?”

Joe glanced over to the door leading to the kitchen. A bearded man in his mid-thirties with longish hair was leaning over the threshold,
hesitant to enter. Like everyone else, he was dressed all in protective white, but his self-consciousness about it was transparent.

Joe rose from his seat. This was no cop. “I don’t know. Joe Gunther. VBI.”

VBI stood for Vermont Bureau of Investigation, the state’s major case squad. Joe was in fact its field force commander—a title that in more populated states would have guaranteed him a spot behind a desk. But not in Vermont.

Joe crossed the room, careful to stay on the floor’s butcher paper travel lane—a crime-scene detail designed to curtail contamination.

He stuck out his gloved hand. “And you?”

The younger man flushed. “Oh, damn. I’m sorry. Jack Judge. I like John, to be honest, but everybody calls me Jack. Holdover from when I was a kid. I’m the new assistant medical examiner. Sorry I’m late. The snowstorm caught me by surprise.”

Gunther smiled, amused by his self-deprecation. It was a nice break from the usual Type A behavior at such a setting.

“Welcome, John. You want to see the main attraction?”

Judge smiled back. “I guess that’s why I’m here.”

Joe led the way. The rule was that no one touched a body before the ME. This wasn’t always observed, but it had been this time, Joe being in charge. Back in the day, AMEs, as they were now called, used to be volunteer local doctors, but as the world had become more litigious, violent, and complicated—even in this rural corner—they’d been replaced by trained investigators. Though not full-timers, they were often nurses or paramedics, used to responding to chaos in the middle of the night, working alongside cops, interpreting medication labels, and filing prompt paperwork.

“You just start?” Joe asked.

“Yes and no,” Judge answered him. “I was a medic in the service.”

Gunther looked at him more closely. “See any action?”

Judge nodded. “Iraq.”

Joe, ex-army himself, nodded and circled the couch to introduce the AME to the reason he’d been called. “Tough,” was all he said, before stating, “Doreen Ferenc; DOB 5/24/56, making her fifty-four.”

Jack Judge squatted down, his forearms on his knees, and studied the body’s face.

Joe kept speaking, knowing the drill. “Some of this is sketchy—it’s still early—but we think she lived alone, led an orderly life centering mostly around her mother, who’s in a nursing home. She had a regular doctor, whom she saw yearly, but had no medical problems and was only on an acid reflux med. I don’t remember the name. One of the other guys has that.”

Joe pointed at the small bowl of melted ice cream. “She supposedly had a little vanilla laced with brandy every night in front of the tube, so this looks like it happened last night.”

Judge cast a glance at the darkened TV.

“We turned it off,” Joe filled in, adding for no reason except to slightly humanize the victim, “It was on the Nature Channel. She had an ironclad routine, going to the nursing home every morning and afternoon to spend time with Mom, so when she didn’t show up today, someone over there began calling. A neighbor finally saw this through the window and called 911.”

“Who saw her alive last?” Judge asked.

“You’re kidding, right?” came a voice from the doorway. “What the hell do you think we’re all doing here?”

They looked up to see a scowling man with a withered left arm, the hand of which had been shoved into a pocket of his Tyvek suit to keep it from swinging around. This fellow, the arm notwithstanding, had cop stamped all over him.

Gunther said with a frown, “Willy Kunkle—John Judge, from the ME’s office. Willy works for me, although nobody knows why.”

Judge nodded, but Kunkle smirked. “They call you Jack, right? Jack Judge. Cute. Sounds like a cartoon.”

Joe didn’t say anything, recognizing the futility of educating Willy, but Judge, to his credit, simply answered, “Jack or John—doesn’t matter. I heard of you, too.”

Kunkle laughed. “I bet. You do her yet?”

“We were about to,” Joe said.

Willy drew near, but had the courtesy to stay quiet. Joe didn’t doubt that he’d give Judge more grief later. Hazing suited him, showcasing the least flattering of his many, often conflicting personality traits.

Jack Judge went back to studying Dory, finally rising enough to hover over her like a parent delivering a good-night kiss.

He spoke softly. “Nothing jumps out at first glance. I see no signs of strangulation, or bruising around the face or shoulders.” He reached out and deftly checked under the remnants of the torn nightgown before pressing against her sternum and along her collarbones and ribs, one by one, lifting each exposed breast gently to do so. Joe had seen several such exams, and even conducted a couple, but admired the man’s sensitive touch, as if the patient were still alive.

“She’s cold and in full rigor,” Judge continued. “I’ll check lividity in a bit, but I suspect that’s fixed, too. That would fit your idea that this happened last night, right here.”

He pulled a penlight from his outer pocket and moved to the scalp, where he parted her hair and began scanning the skin beneath. After a while, he straightened, frowning. “Can’t find the source of that blood right off, but there’s not much of it.” He quickly shined the light into each nostril and raised her stiffened lips off her teeth,
also peering into the mouth. “It’s not castoff from there, so it may have come from whoever did this.”

“You can call the guy an asshole, John,” Willy chided him, emphasizing the name. “Nobody’ll mind.”

Judge had shifted to her hands, which he handled like porcelain, bending his body rather than manipulating them, so as to preserve their positioning, not to mention any trace evidence that might still be clinging there. Watching him, Joe suspected he’d done well as a medic, both highly competent and impervious to the likes of Willy.

“Nothing obvious here, either,” the AME muttered. “Her nails are long enough to have done at least some damage, if she’d used them, but I don’t see anything.”

He took a step to the left, directly above her midriff. Again, from his pocket, he extracted something Joe couldn’t at first identify, which turned out to be a small, powerful magnifying lens. Using both light and lens, Judge bent even closer to the body’s exposed pubic hair.

Willy took a half pace backward. “You are shitting me.”

Despite the circumstances, Joe smiled to himself. As unlikely as it seemed, cops were often squeamish around the dead, even tough guys like Kunkle. Joe wondered if Judge wasn’t subtly wreaking a little vengeance with this show of interest; Doreen would be going upstate for an autopsy soon, encased and sealed in a body bag. That’s where prints would be lifted, fingernails scraped, hair combed through, tissue samples collected. Not that Joe minded Judge’s thoroughness here and now—it gave them all a better snapshot—but he sensed with satisfaction a little psychological warfare taking place.

Judge continued his close visual examination from her groin to her knees, paying close attention to the inner thighs, but looked disappointed when he finally straightened.

“Nothing,” he stated. “No deposits, no stains, no signs of violence.”

Willy scoffed. “Right. The expert. No offense, but I’ll wait for the doc’s vote on that.”

“You’ve done this before,” Joe suggested, both to clarify and, he hoped, to set Willy right.

Jack Judge nodded. “I was asked to investigate a few rape/homicides in Iraq.”

Willy, also a combat vet, although carrying more baggage than most, looked away, pretending to be taking in the plate of melted ice cream, admonished but not willing to show it. “So, what do you think happened?” he asked as a peace offering.

Judge shrugged. “Maybe less than it seems? Why, I don’t know.” He looked at Joe. “You ready for me to roll her over?”

“Gently,” Joe agreed. “Yeah.”

She wasn’t a large woman, and her stiffened state made it easy for Judge to simply lift an arm and a leg to pivot her onto her right side, just enough for the other two to bend down and examine the body’s underside.

“Whoa,” Willy exclaimed.

The cushions beneath were soaked with blood, which also covered the entirety of Ferenc’s back.

Judge’s position put him at a disadvantage. “Can you see what caused it?”

“Negative,” Willy commented, reaching out toward a hole in the nightgown, at about mid-lumbar level.

“Hold it,” Joe said, touching Judge on the shoulder to get him to set her back into position. “We’ll let the ME give us that. I don’t want to disturb any more than we have. Knife, gun, or ice pick, we know something was used, and we know for sure we have a murder. Let’s
just bag her hands carefully, wrap her up safe and sound, and do what we do best.”

For once, Willy didn’t argue, straightening up. He turned to Judge and asked with a tired, collegial half smile, “All right if we call the perp an asshole now?”

“Fine by me,” Judge told him.

Joe sat in his unmarked car in the driveway of Doreen Ferenc’s home, the engine running and the heater on, writing notes to himself on a legal pad. The vehicles were all on the Back Westminster Road, between Saxtons River and Bellows Falls. The road paralleled Interstate 91—sometimes almost touching it—but otherwise remained hazy in most people’s memories, leaving it to be used mostly by locals avoiding the geographical constraints of the faster road’s widely spaced exits.

The passenger door suddenly opened, introducing a chilling wash of cold air and a tall, skinny man with angular features and a gentle, expressive face.

“Hey, boss,” said Lester Spinney. “Looks like we got a live one this time, huh? So to speak.”

Joe was used to this form of humor. Les had come to Joe’s Brattleboro-based squad from years with the state police, where he’d finally found the bureaucracy and office politics too stifling—especially given the abrupt option of joining the VBI, which was then new, actively recruiting, and offering to match all benefits and pensions of qualified applicants.

“You could put it that way,” Joe agreed. “You been inside yet?”

“Yeah. Willy gave me the nickel tour. He’s calling it a rape/murder as if he was getting an argument.”

“He is. The AME’s claiming he doesn’t see any obvious signs of rape.”

Spinney removed his watch cap and peeled off his gloves, adjusting to the heat. “Condom?” he suggested simply.

Joe stared out the windshield. It had snowed overnight, a freak storm from nowhere, and then stopped almost as abruptly. By now, late morning, the sky was bright blue, ice-cold, and the frozen world below it so white, it pained the eye. The glare washed out the colors adorning a long row of cruisers, vans, and trucks and made them look like the discarded Christmas toys of some giant child. The problem was, Christmas wasn’t for two months yet, and no one Joe knew was prepared for ten inches of snow on the ground.

He wasn’t among the complainers, though, for mixed in with the snow-covered tree branches overhead were broad swatches of bright fall foliage, forming entire bouquets of orange, red, yellow, and mottled green leaves—a beautiful and rare New England postcard.

“Could be a condom, could be rough sex gone too far, could be a rape, or could be all three.”

“Could’ve been staged, too.”

Joe took his eyes off the scenery and blinked at him a couple of times. “Or could’ve been staged,” he agreed.

“They find a weapon?” Spinney asked.

“Nope.”

“So it’s not a suicide or accident.”

Joe smiled. “I doubt it.”

It was a funny process, this preliminary stage. Everything was open to question, and everyone open to suggestion, to the level of the
absurd. Except maybe Kunkle. Although Joe knew that Kunkle was asking himself questions; he just didn’t like sharing them with others.

“The ME’ll probably tell us more,” Lester continued. “What’re our marching orders till then?”

Joe glanced at his notes. “We better tell her mother first. Story so far is that Dory spent hours every day with her at the nursing home. Maybe they were the sisterly type, trading secrets. If so, assuming Mom survives the shock and talks with us, maybe she’ll tell us about a boyfriend.”

“Wouldn’t that be handy,” Spinney said.

“We’ve been told Dory worked her entire career as the executive secretary for McNaughton Trucking, first for the old man, then for his son, Chuck.”

Lester whistled softly. “Nice.”

McNaughton Trucking was the region’s primary hauler, servicing most of the larger businesses in the tri-state corner of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts. It was headquartered in West Chesterfield, across the river from Brattleboro, in tax-friendly New Hampshire, and was worth millions by anyone’s guess. Guessing, however, was about where reality stopped, since McNaughton was a family-owned, private business, and closed to public scrutiny.

Lester turned in his seat to look anew at the modest house. “Sounds like she could’ve done better than this.”

Joe tapped on the pad propped against his steering wheel. “Item three,” he read. “Check finances.”