Occam's Razor (22 page)

“Probably. Can’t tell for sure. The car’s a few years old and the real owner’s no neatnik, so it’s going to be hard to differentiate what trace evidence belongs to the killer and what doesn’t.” He gestured to the envelopes I’d noticed earlier. “We found a ton of it, in any case, and a shitload of latents. We’re going to have to reference-print everyone who’s ever been in this car in order to rule out what we’ve got. Even if it’s possible, I doubt it’ll be worth the time or expense.”

He then led me to a bench near the back of the bay, to where more evidence bags were piled. He selected one and held it up for me to see. Swathed in its slightly cloudy embrace was an oversized dirty ball peen hammer.

“This is what we think did him in—before the train, of course. Pretty good amount of blood on its business end. Found it in the trunk.”

I peered at it closely. “Funny tool to keep in a car.”

“It wasn’t kept in the car,” J.P. confirmed. “I called the owner in Keene. All he had was the usual junk.”

He replaced the hammer on the counter and picked up a Polaroid lying beside it. “Here’s the kicker, though—if we’re lucky.”

I recognized it as an extreme close-up shot of the hammer handle’s butt end. Stamped in the oil-darkened metal was a short string of numbers.

“Remember that program we ran a few years ago?” J.P. asked. “Where we were trying to get people to mark their valuables and register them with us? I think that’s what this is. Makes sense, too. One of these goes for a hundred bucks or so—weighs a ton, all metal construction, primo goods.”

I waved the photograph at him. “Can I keep this?”

He let out one of his rare, thin smiles. “I thought you would.”

I put it in my pocket. “Nice work—keep your fingers crossed.”

· · ·

Franklin’s Machine Shop had been a Brattleboro institution for as long as I could remember. Owned by at least the third generation of Franklins, it had always been on Flat Street—in a small, unassuming one-story warehouse, with windows so greasy they were essentially opaque—and had always restricted its advertising to a single, hubcap-sized metal sign hanging over the wooden sliding front door.

I had been a periodic customer of Franklin’s over the decades, especially when I’d needed something either custom-made, or that had stopped being sold elsewhere twenty years earlier. If you needed an old flywheel, for instance, or a replacement drive pulley for an ancient snowblower, Franklin’s was the place to shop.

Not that it was a hardware store, of course. There were no display cases or clerks or pristine overhead lighting. In fact, there was barely any lighting at all. Even at the height of a summer’s day, the interior of Franklin’s remained cavelike, tenebrous, and cool. Looming like metal skeletons, huge piles of odds and ends formed corridors, or were stacked behind and on top of long, scarred, debris-covered wooden worktables. Here and there, stamping machines, drill presses, metal cutters, and who knew what else also stood around like fossilized wallflowers at a soundless party, each accompanied by a single extinguished gooseneck lamp. There was just enough cleared space around these tools for an operator to stand, but generally there was no operator to be seen. If Franklin’s had ever had a heyday, it lay as far back in memory as the heavy leather belts that still crisscrossed its ceiling. Nowadays, either Franklin worked alone or he was accompanied by some relative killing time between jobs.

I hadn’t known Franklin’s real first name until I’d looked it up in our computer just fifteen minutes earlier. Inevitably, he’d always been referred to as Ben, like his father and grandfather before him. I now knew he was the third in a line of men named Arvid.

As serious as the reason for my visit was, that tidbit wasn’t something I was about to ignore.

“Hey, Arvid,” I shouted as I entered the shop, noticing only the faintest touch of warmth from a centralized, rumbling upright furnace that looked like a locomotive begging for food.

There was a metallic crash from somewhere in the gloom, and a cigarette-ruined voice shouted back, “If you’re not from the IRS, you’re some kind of wise-ass.”

“I’m not from the IRS.”

A shadow detached itself from the darkness, looking as oil-stained and solid as the machinery surrounding it, and an old, slightly stooped man with enormous blackened hands and a filthy baseball cap appeared before me. His face showed neither pleasure nor recognition.

“Should’ve known it was you. You got nothin’ better to do than hassle me?”

We didn’t shake hands. It wasn’t something really old friends did. “Nope. Been keeping busy?”

“Enough. What d’ya got? Another cheap piece of junk crap out on you?”

“Not this time. I think we might’ve found something belonging to you.” I handed him the picture of the ball peen hammer.

He hesitated taking it, carefully wiping his hand on the front of an insulated vest that looked as though it had been washed in oil. Despite the lack of light, he didn’t squint to make out the image. He merely glanced at it and returned it to me. “No shit. Never thought that stupid program of yours would work.”

“So it is yours?”

He studied me impassively for a moment. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

“You didn’t report it missing.”

He turned to a nearby workbench and picked up an oddly configured cylindrical object, possibly part of an old drive shaft, and cradled it in his palm, feeling its cool smoothness with his fingertips. Ben Franklin was rarely without something metal in his hands. It seemed to calm him as the feel of rich earth might a farmer.

“You know how much stuff I got in this place?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I don’t neither. For all I know, that thing’s been under a pile the whole time. Never knew it’d grown feet.”

“You know how long it’s been missing?”

“Two months,” he said without hesitation.

I let those two words hang in the air a moment. Two faint plumes of near-freezing air escaped from his nostrils as he waited me out.

“You thought enough of this hammer,” I finally said, “that you marked it and registered it with our department. Now you say you didn’t report it missing because it could’ve been lost in this mess, even though you know it disappeared exactly two months ago.”

He didn’t respond.

“We think it was used to kill a man.”

His lips compressed, his hands grew still, and he seemed suddenly transfixed by something hovering in the middle distance just over my left shoulder.

“Tell me who took it, Ben.”

“You sure you’re not yankin’ my chain?”

This time, I kept silent.

He sighed, returned the cylinder to the bench top, and stood before me with his big hands by his sides, empty and useless. “My nephew—along with a bunch of other stuff. Billy Conyer. You guys know him.”

We did that, but not only because he was a regular customer. He’d also been mentioned by Janice Litchfield as a friend of Brenda Croteau’s.

· · ·

The rooming house where Billy Conyer lived on Elliot Street was one of the worst examples Brattleboro had to offer. A warren of tiny, dark, evil-smelling cubbyholes, it was as famous for its transient inhabitants as for the illegal activities they practiced there. The lighting was haphazard, the plumbing erratic, the heating quirky, the walls looked like Swiss cheese, and the stench was a combination of rotting food, unwashed bodies, and backed-up toilets. It was a place EMTs, firefighters, cops, and building inspectors all got to visit regularly. One hot summer night a few years back, when the local ambulance had gone racing by the nearby firehouse to respond to yet another call at that address, the on-duty firefighters had lined up in front of their open bay doors and saluted the rescue crew by waving fistfuls of rubber gloves at them.

It was that kind of place.

And now it was our turn.

We’d taken our time, made sure the crime lab could match the blood on the hammer to Phil Resnick’s DNA, and had discreetly studied Conyer’s habits for several days running, using one of the windows at the firehouse as an observation point.

The night we chose to move was possibly the coldest of the year so far, and dark as the inside of a closet. It was tailor-made for keeping people indoors, their eyes accustomed to the lights within.

There were six of us, including Sammie and me, all dressed in black, sporting thick armored vests and short twelve-gauge shotguns. Willy, dressed as a bum and equipped with a radio, had been stationed on the inside, slumped in a smelly, inert pile in a corner of the hallway leading to Conyer’s apartment. We’d watched Conyer enter the building just before midnight, heard Willy report him opening his apartment door, and seen his light come on behind his tattered shade—and go off an hour later.

We’d then waited another thirty minutes, to let him fall asleep.

“Any sign of him?” I radioed Willy, who was equipped with an earphone.

“No,” came the quiet reply. “I listened at the door five minutes ago. Not a peep.”

“Okay. We’re in motion.”

I gave the prearranged signal, and we all moved from various positions inside and around the building, quietly convening at opposite ends of the hallway Willy was monitoring. At our arrival, he faded back to stand guard outside, along with a couple of other unobtrusively placed uniformed officers.

The heat inside the building was terrific, making us all sweat under our heavy protective gear. As we took our places to either side of Conyer’s door, I became aware of how our faces were dripping wet in the harsh overhead light.

I nodded to the man near the switch at the staircase. He killed the overhead lights. For a long couple of minutes, there was no sound, no movement while we waited for our eyesight to adjust to the semidarkness, alleviated only by two bright red exit signs, miraculously still functioning. Then I murmured into my throat mike, “Let’s go.”

The two men holding the short battering ram between them swung it back once and smashed through Conyer’s lock with a single splintering crash. Then they dropped the ram and fell off to either side, pulling out their sidearms, while Sammie and Ward Washburn burst through the door screaming at the top of their lungs.

It was textbook perfect, except that as Sammie shouted, “It’s empty,” a door halfway down the hall banged open, and Billy Conyer appeared, half naked and with a gun, his face gaunt and his eyes wide, his body glowing red in the light from the exit signs.

Pierre Lavoie had been standing by the light switch at the end of the hall, where he could also guard the top of the stairs. Now he was not only blocking Conyer’s escape route, but he was standing where any bullets that missed Conyer might hit him.

I don’t know who yelled, “Don’t move.” All of us, from the sound of it. But it still didn’t work. Billy Conyer fired twice at me, then swiveled on his bare heel and crouched low to shoot at Pierre.

But Pierre had instantly assessed his own predicament. Instead of trying to return fire—and possibly hitting us—he simply launched himself down the staircase, vanishing as if the earth had swallowed him whole.

Conyer quickly straightened, apparently astonished by what had happened, and presented us with his glistening back.
“Don’t move,”
I yelled again.
“Police.”
He either wasn’t thinking or had seen too many movies. In one of those moments every police officer dreads, will never forget, and will always hold in doubt, Conyer disobeyed and turned. But whether he planned to shoot again or was actually going to surrender and had simply not dropped his gun, none of us would ever know. Faced with a pointed weapon, we all fired in unison, feeling more than hearing the explosions, and watched as his body was thrown to the floor like a rag doll, spattering the walls nearby with blood.

· · ·

I had no idea of the time when I crept into our bedroom. My head hurt, my brain was in a fog, and my body felt numb. Conyer had been shipped up to Burlington for autopsy, a preliminary post-shoot investigation had been conducted by the state police, the state’s attorney’s office had been notified, and Jack Derby himself had showed up to be briefed. So far, everyone was calling it righteous, which did little for the soul.

Gail stirred as I tried to remove my clothes quietly in the dark.

“Joe?”

“Yeah. It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”

“What’ve you been doing?”

“A little late-night workout with the boys.”

She reached out, turned on the light by her side of the bed, and squinted across the room at me. “What’s that mean?”

I was sitting on the edge of a chair with one shoe in my hand. I didn’t want to have this conversation. Enough had been said tonight already. I needed to think quietly, if not sleep, and put the image of Conyer collapsing in on himself into that mental cupboard where I kept all its brethren.

“There was a shooting and a long post-shoot. Everyone’s fine, though, except the bad guy.”

The squint faded as her eyes adjusted to the light. “You don’t look so fine. And what’s with the ‘little late-night workout’? You hate that John Wayne crap.”

I stared at her for a long moment, struggling to sort out my reactions. Her initial show of concern was so at odds with this last comment, I wasn’t sure where to start.

“Sorry,” I said lamely.

“Who was killed?” she then asked.

I sat back, dropped the shoe, and rubbed my eyes, feeling the echoes of question after question lapping against my head like waves on a fragile sand dune. Of all the people I’d spoken to tonight, she was the most important to me, but it took all my reserves to merely say, “Billy Conyer.”

Her brow furrowed. “Sounds vaguely familiar.”

“Friend of Brenda Croteau.”

She sat up angrily. “What? I don’t understand. You’re not working the Croteau case. What’s going on?”

I got up slowly and crossed the room to sit on the bed beside her, resolved to go through it one last time. “We got a lead on who killed Resnick. Turned out to be Conyer. We raided his place tonight—thought it was a one-room apartment. He’d chopped a hole into the apartment next door, and the one beyond that, and that’s where he was sleeping. I don’t know if it was for security or just because he thought it’d be fun. But when we broke through his door, all we found was an empty room. He came bursting into the hallway two doors down, gun blazing, and we had to take him down. I have no idea how or whether he’s connected to your case. When his name first came up, I should have let you know. It slipped my mind. He never played more than a bit role in the Croteau research—I think Janice Litchfield mentioned him once in passing. Sorry if I messed you up.”