kiss. Small comfort.
Murphy was typing when I showed up at his door. It was not something he did with any skill or grace and was guaranteed to make a bad mood worse. “Sit down.”
I sat. He picked up the phone, dialed an interoffice number, said, “he’s here,” and threw a newspaper across the room into my lap. “Have a read.”
The front page headline had the wholesome flavor of a big city tabloid: MASKED MAN ON RAMPAGE. Maybe some of the old rural values were indeed going by the wayside. POLICE BAFFLED BY SERIES OF ATTACKS. The byline, no surprise, was Stanley Katz.
The Reformer has uncovered a link between several recent but seemingly unconnected crimes in Brattleboro, beginning with the shotgun killing of Mr. James Phillips by Mrs. Thelma Reitz, both of Brattleboro, reported in this paper two days ago. Over the last 48 hours, several crimes have been committed involving the same unidentified man wearing a ski mask. According to the Reformer ’s anonymous sources, one case each of animal theft, obscene telephoning, assault on a police officer, car theft, and sexual assault have been connected to the same masked man who arranged the fatal meeting between Phillips and Reitz at Reitz’s home. At this point, the police are at a loss to explain the motives of the mysterious man.
These first two breathless paragraphs were followed by a more or less accurate account of each crime. The names of Reitz and Phillips were spread all over, as was the now-miserable John Woll, but Wodiska was missing and the Stiller-and-Rodriguez episode was alluded to only vaguely, culled no doubt from secondary sources. It seemed my efforts to tiptoe around Harris had worked so far-the jury connection was not mentioned.
I tossed the paper back onto Murphy’s desk. “I can’t believe he dragged in dog theft. That’s tacky.”
Frank’s eyes narrowed, but whatever he had to say was interrupted by Chief Brandt walking in. Not that Brandt said anything at first. He merely parked himself on a two-drawer filing cabinet and pulled out his pipe. We kept quiet.
Tony Brandt was a dead ringer for an Ivy League dean. He was thin, bespectacled, and tweedy, with a long nose, soft gray eyes, and thinning hair. He wore elbow patches on his jackets, maintained a shine on the seat of his slightly wrinkled wool slacks, and had a fondness for conservatively colored argyle socks.
That, lucky for us, was where the similarity stopped. For this, despite his looks, was no high-thinking theoretician. He was a lifelong cop, trained in the streets of Keene, New Hampshire, and Boston and a member of our force for the past eighteen years. He’d been chief for eight. Married and with three kids, he could still be found wandering the streets late at night, picking up tips, keeping in touch with informants, compulsively being a cop.
Despite this, he was not one of the boys, and his austerity was the single biggest reason he held the position he did among his men. In the constant struggle between labor and management, no different on a police force than in a car factory, he’d maintained his balance between gaining their respect and winning their support. Whenever he slapped you down, you knew you were to blame.
He finished loading his pipe, lit it and said in a pleasant voice, “So, what the hell is going on?”
Murphy’s face reddened. This was not what he wanted to hear a few months shy of retirement. “We did what we could to keep a lid on all this.”
Brandt shook his head. “Most of what’s in there,” he pointed at the newspaper, “is either public-record stuff or the byproduct of bull sessions. Stan has a lot of friends around here. What I want to know is what’s not in the article-and what hasn’t been in the daily reports. I also want to know how it ties in with this.” He pulled a piece of computer printout from his pocket and handed it to Murphy.
Murphy looked at it and scowled. “That was supposed to go to me.”
“I thought so. That’s why I called this little meeting.”
“Could you guys bring me in on this?” I asked.
Murphy waved the printout. “This is the FBI report on your bug. They say, to quote them, ‘it’s highly sophisticated but slightly out-of-date military ordnance.’ Judging from the speed of their response, I’d say they’d love to know where we got it. It sounds like it’s hot.”
Brandt blew out a large cloud of smoke. “Frank and I attended the same FBI course a few years back. It seems we made the same friend in Philip Danvers, who heads one of their research branches. I guess we both figured he’d be a handy man to know. Anyway, obviously he confused the goose with the gander and sent me the results of Frank’s request. So, what’s up? Between the local paper and the FBI, I smell a rat, and I sure as hell know you two are sitting on it.”
Frank sighed. “Joe’s tied the ski mask attacks to the Kimberly Harris murder. All the cases Stan mentioned involve ex-jury members.”
Brandt’s eyebrows rose. I took over. “At first, I thought it might be a vengeance thing, maybe coordinated by Bill Davis or done by a buddy of his without his knowledge. Or maybe someone going after one juror and tying in the others to screw us up. Or even an insurance scam or a huge coincidence. On the face of it, the vengeance angle’s the best of the bunch, except that besides Phillips, none of the jurors has been seriously nailed; even the attack on Stiller was mostly theatrical, as if to bring attention. So that made me think of something else, which is that Ski Mask wants us to reopen the Harris investigation and find out that Davis didn’t kill her. Whatever it is, Frank and I figured we better keep the cork on any Harris angle until we could prove something.”
Murphy rubbed his eyes with his palms, but Brandt just sat there, as impassive as before. “So maybe Davis didn’t kill her?”
“He might have, but there’s room for doubt. We may have jumped a little fast.”
“Run it down.”
“I don’t have much right now, except for a gut feeling that procedure was a bit rushed on this one.”
“What’s that mean?” Murphy demanded.
“I interviewed the Huntington Arms manager this morning. I found out he’s a peeper whose biggest kick so far was Kimberly Harris. Apparently, she performed the daily duties common to us all with unusual flair.”
“Did we ever question him?” Brandt asked Murphy.
Frank pulled a poker face. I knew this was chewing at him, and I didn’t enjoy seeing it. “I don’t remember. Maybe Kunkle did and ruled him out on the spot. It would be in the case file.”
That was a lateral pass to me, which I deigned to accept. “It might be, but again, for discretion’s sake, we decided not to open the file just yet.” Brandt nodded. “I might add, though, that the confession I got from the manager sounded brand-new to me. It was not something he’d already told another cop.”
The chief relit his pipe. “What else?”
“I also visited Dr. Hillstrom yesterday afternoon in Burlington.” I noticed Frank’s surprised look. “She’s tickled pink someone is digging into this again. She also feels things were pushed a little too hard and were a little too easy.”
“She was part of it.” Frank said.
“She admits that, and she’s not saying Davis is innocent. She just feels that when circumstances stood against him, they were taken at face value instead of being analyzed more carefully. His blood type, for example, is incredibly common, and yet that’s what the prosecution used to connect him to the semen. Her point is that if we really chased down that comparison, the semen and the blood type might no longer match.”
“Why didn’t we do that?” Again, the question was to Murphy.
“We never do, you know that. You were there, front and center. We follow standard guidelines. The ME does her routine, the State’s Attorney does his, and we do ours. That’s what happened. If there was a screwup, it’s the system’s fault, not ours. I mean, hell, what do we know about homicide anyhow? We all felt great about nailing Davis, and there was nobody kicking sand in our faces then. This is all Monday-morning quarterbacking.”
There was silence in the room. Things had become personal, and we all knew it. We also knew Frank was right. I hadn’t been involved in the investigation, but I had been a cheerleader all the way. At the time, the case had seemed miraculously clean and straight, and we had all shared in a lot of self-congratulatory backslapping.
Brandt cleared his throat. “So what have you done? Is Hillstrom doing the tests?”
“She can’t. She doesn’t know how. She did recommend a guy outside New Haven who does this stuff all the time.”
“All right. Aside from the blood tests and the manager, what else have you got?”
“An interesting comment Hillstrom made about the location of the semen. It seems it was found in Harris’s
