and most villages is that it has seven massive medieval towers looming over the town and more tourists per cobblestone than the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Waterbury, Vermont. It’s a sort of Disneyland for the Chianti- and-pecorino-cheese crowd. And, of course, it has that torture museum: a three-story collection of antiquarian torture devices, most of which involve wrought iron, ropes, or very sharp points. Its ostensible message, if it has one, is that humans once had little regard for human life and were capable of inflicting truly appalling pain on one another in the name of religion or country or mere self-righteousness. There are the basics, such as the rack and the iron maiden and a functioning guillotine (which was, ironically, supposed to end torture by killing the victim instantly). There is a dungeon. And there are displays of devices that only a real psychopath could have come up with, a disproportionate number of which seemed to involve impaling people. Everything is explained in five languages, and the diagrams can only be called grisly. I had seen my share of disturbing images in the magazines in my grandparents’ attic growing up, and I had visited some pretty despicable crime scenes-but still I grew a little nauseous inside the museum. And yet I also wasn’t oblivious to the reality that I was, in some ways, the twenty- first-century version of those guys who thought, six hundred years ago, that a bone-crunching manacle or a good old-fashioned pair of rib-cage-ripping tongs had their place in the judicial system. I know that my anger at certain kinds of criminals-the stepfathers who molest and murder their stepdaughters, the husbands who batter and murder their wives-is pretty near boundless. But I view myself as civilized. Moreover, an awful lot of the time- perhaps most of the time-the self-proclaimed arms of justice in the Middle Ages were torturing the innocent, not punishing the guilty. It wasn’t about a specific crime, it was about a specific belief.
Nevertheless, I wondered that day in the museum and I speculate sometimes even now what I will do if I ever have before me a capital offense. In Vermont that would demand something like a kidnapping across state lines with a death resulting. Or using the Internet as part of the abduction. At the moment I work for the county, so I won’t face this dilemma unless my career takes me to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Burlington. But someday I might wind up there. And when I thought about the blood and the bodies I had seen in the Haywards’ living room and the kid who was transformed overnight into an orphan, I would find myself angry and appalled and a little unnerved at the pain and the violence that we still inflict on one another daily.
IN ADDITION TO a variety of reporters wanting an indictment, there was my boss, Jim Haas. When I was throwing papers into my attache and preparing to leave for the day, he knocked gently on my door. It was open, but Jim was feigning deference-which meant, as it did always, that he wanted something. And while I might have assumed it would have something to do with the death of the Haywards, I did have other cases, and so I honestly didn’t know which of the dead victims or breathing criminals-the sex offenders, the embezzlers, the drug dealers- was about to postpone my picking up Marcus and Lionel at their after-school programs. Paul had a soccer game at a high school twenty-five miles distant, and so I was getting the boys that afternoon. Jim looked tired and aggravated, and he had loosened his necktie. He paused in the frame after tapping the door’s hollow metal with his knuckles.
I was already on my feet, and so I murmured a greeting but didn’t stop scanning the papers I was retrieving and the folders I was collecting from different corners of my desk.
“Got a minute?” he asked.
“Barely.”
“I want to talk about the Haywards.”
I grunted something that could have been interpreted as a willingness to listen.
“Are we any closer?” he asked.
“Than when we talked on Monday? Nope.”
“But you still believe it’s the pastor.”
“Yes, but only because I don’t have anyone better.”
“What can I do to help? What would it take to get an indictment?”
“Against Stephen Drew?”
“That’s right.”
I thought about this for a brief moment. “Well, evidence would be good,” I said finally.
“You have none… ”
“None that says he murdered either George or Alice. I have plenty that says he was having an affair with Alice. I have a motive for killing George. But nothing to link him either to the murder of his lover or, more likely, the murder of his lover’s husband. Any special reason for the sudden urgency? It’s not like we’re in an election year.”
“Very funny.”
I smiled, but I honestly hadn’t meant it as a joke.
“Really, it’s not sudden,” he went on. “But I just got off the phone with Sondra Norton, and she says that people are scared. Some are beyond scared. They’re mad. No one likes an unsolved murder-or, in this case, two unsolved murders. It makes folks edgy, especially now that Stephen Drew lives in the neighborhood.”
Sondra ran the shelter for battered women and their children. She was also one of our representatives in the Vermont House. And Stephen Drew, for reasons of his own, had now left the parsonage in Haverill and was living like a three-dimensional wanted poster in an apartment in downtown Bennington.
“We all know there isn’t a killer on the loose who’s preying on people he doesn’t know,” I said. “Whoever killed the Haywards knew them and had a clear motive. Sondra must know that, too. She’s grandstanding. After all, it is an election year for her.”
“Sondra doesn’t grandstand. You know that.”
“She does great work. She’s a great person. But I don’t think she has to worry about the safety of her constituents. Whoever killed the Haywards isn’t about to strike somewhere in downtown Bennington.”
“You’re not worried about the reverend?”
“I think he had a concrete motive.”
“You snap once, it’s much easier to snap a second time.”
“I really don’t believe anyone needs to add extra locks to their doors.”
“That’s not the point. I’ve also heard from both county senators. I’ve heard from our mayor. And I seem to be hearing from the media far more often than I would like.”
“Is that the point, Jim? Is that what this is about? People are frustrated? You’re frustrated? You’re spending more time than you want to holding people’s hands on the telephone?” Immediately I knew I had sounded more exasperated than I should have. He stood a little more erect, and his eyes narrowed.
“Alice Hayward was a battered wife who was murdered. Strangled. Someone wrapped his hands around her throat and crushed her larynx, broke the bones in her neck, compressed the carotid arteries, and caused her to asphyxiate. And that someone was almost certainly her husband.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sometime this week or next, when we can clear everyone’s calendars, I’d like us to sit down with the folks at Criminal Investigation and see exactly what we have and what avenues we haven’t pursued.”
“I have a gut feeling you’d like me to be there.”
“Go with your gut,” he said, and then he turned on his heel and left.
PERHAPS A DOZEN times in my life, I’ve run into people while we’re investigating them. Bennington County is like that: It’s a deceptively small corner of Vermont. I’ve run into suspects and perps out on bail while squeezing chickens at the supermarket, while getting gas at the convenience store (with Marcus in his car seat in the back), and at the annual colonial fair over Father’s Day weekend in June (with, thank you very much, my whole family present). Of those dozen or so encounters, all but once the individual knew exactly who I was. And of those times when it was clear that the suspect and I knew precisely where we stood with each other, only twice have I felt the hairs rise up along the back of my neck. One time was when I was having new brake pads put on my car and the wagon tuned up for winter. One of the mechanics, I realized, was an angry young guy charged with aggravated assault and felony unlawful mischief: He had walked into a downtown bar with a steel pipe in his hands and beaten the crap out of some poor dude who’d smiled at his girlfriend. He ended up breaking the guy’s arm. Then, on his way out, he smashed the bar’s plate-glass window for good measure. With his grandparents’ help, he had managed
