Red Herring (13 page)

He nodded sympathetically. “I lost my wife to cancer decades ago,” he admitted. “I never wanted to marry again.”

“Then you know the feeling.”

“There may be another angle to this we haven’t discussed,” he said after a moment. “Could it be that someone wanted to hurt you by doing this?”

She straightened and pulled her hand away, if only to wipe her cheeks. She looked startled by the suggestion. “Me? Why?”

“I don’t know,” he answered.

She frowned. “This has become such a terrible world.”

“Did you think of something?” he asked hopefully.

She closed her eyes briefly, seemingly exhausted. “I can’t think of anything else.”

She lay back and rested her head against the pillow. Joe rose and squeezed her shoulder. “I’m so terribly sorry, Elise. Thanks for speaking with me.”

She merely nodded and gave him a tired smile.

He saw himself out.

Bill Allard was Joe’s boss, making him and the commissioner of public safety the only two people between Joe and the governor. The VBI was a quirky entity, having resulted from a typically political cocktail of hysteria, heedless speed, and a pinch of spite. One motivator behind Gail’s advisor’s thinking the governor’s trooper/chauffeur might want to dish dirt on the boss was that many in the state police had interpreted VBI’s birth as a direct slap in the face.

That very sensitivity was one of Allard’s concerns when he entered Joe’s office in Brattleboro the next day.

“The Colonel’s curious about the Mary Fish case,” Bill announced after he’d settled into Joe’s guest chair, a fresh cup of coffee in hand.

“Ain’t we all,” Joe quipped. “What’s Neal want to know?”

Neal Kirkland was the colonel in charge of the state police, an old school warrior not well disposed to his troopers taking a backseat to anybody.

“The way he heard it, we might’ve hip-checked his boy off the stage.”

“Dave Nelson?” Joe asked, genuinely surprised. “He seemed pretty grateful at the time, and I think we’re on solid ground claiming it’s a homicide.”

Bill hastened to finish the sip he’d begun. “No, no. Not Nelson. It’s
whoever he reported to, or maybe whoever that guy reported to. You know the routine. By the time it reached Kirkland, we’d ripped them off, kicked sand on Nelson’s shoes, and called him a sissy.”

Joe sighed. “I went through channels. If they wanted to stop us, they had the opportunity. You came all the way down here to tell me this?”

Allard grimaced. “My sister’s getting a divorce. She lives in Green-field, so I thought I’d drop by and hear her out. You and I both know how this works, Joe—the supervisor gives his stamp of approval to you, and then bitches to his boss that he didn’t have a choice and took a bullet to keep the peace. It’s bullshit, but Neal talked to me, which means I had to talk to you, and that’s that.”

He took another swallow before adding, as Joe suspected he would, “Except for now, we have what’s looking like a serial killer. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Joe admitted reluctantly. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to use that phrase, though.”

“Don’t you have three murders, all by the same perp?”

Joe sat back and scratched his temple, feeling his own frustration rising. “Maybe. What we’ve got is two homicides and one death that stinks to high heaven. You’ve read everything I sent you so far, right?”

“Yeah,” Allard conceded. “All the way to last night’s update. You mentioned bringing in a consultant for the high-end forensic stuff. Dave Hawke can’t handle that?”

Ah, Joe thought, the crux of the visit. “Nope—too expensive and too technical. Plus, if this Eric Marine he mentioned takes the bait, most of the expense will probably go away, absorbed by the pursuit of some greater scientific good.”

Bill stared at him balefully.

“Okay,” Joe admitted, “we’ve got pretty much squat right now. A
few drops of blood, some evidence that may or may not have a little DNA on it, and a growing bunch of interviews leading nowhere fast.

We need a break, Bill, and it would be nice to get it before somebody else ends up dead and the newsboys connect the dots.”

“Ah,” Allard said, as if struck by an old lingering memory.

“They been pounding on your door, too?” Joe asked.

“Too? Who’s been after you?”

“Just Katz,” Joe conceded. “The Burlington TV crew was at the Doreen scene, and they’ve made a few calls that Lester and Sam handled. But Stanley’s the only one to have gotten through to me. It’s all been about the one case, so far, but it won’t be long before something leaks out, which would make it really nice to have something to say.”

“And what about that one pure, straightforward murder?” Allard asked. “I mean the old-fashioned stuff—interviews, surveillance, document checks, alibis, and the rest? Anything at all?”

“That’s what I meant by the interviews going nowhere fast,” Joe told him. “We like Chuck McNaughton for something dirty, in part because we think he’s a creep, but he’s got a solid alibi. Lester’s theory is that he could’ve hired a hit, which is possible, but we don’t have a motive. He and Doreen don’t appear to have had a thing going; it doesn’t look like she was blackmailing him or about to squeal to the cops; for that matter, we’ve got nothing saying he was cooking the books or doing anything she could’ve squealed about. His biggest transgression so far would be interesting only to his wife’s divorce lawyer, assuming she had one.

“Plus,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “if he did hire a hit man to whack Doreen, then it’s looking like he used him to kill Mary Fish and Bob Clarke, too. Why do that? To throw us off? Seems a stretch.”

“And Doreen’s mother’s death right after is still looking like a straight suicide?”

“Yeah, although I will admit it brings up a small detail I can’t get out of my head.”

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t put it in any report to you,” Joe admitted. “But I was struck by how two of these cases seemed to hark back to the dead person’s past history—Doreen’s rape by her father and Bob’s grandfather dying drunk at the wheel of a car.”

“ ’Specially since Doreen wasn’t raped this time, and nor was Bob drunk,” Bill filled in.

“But that’s my point. I think Margaret Agostini may have killed herself not just because her daughter was murdered, but because she’d been told that Dory had been raped, too. But it’s just a hunch—there’s nothing to go with it.”

Allard rose, placed his partially empty mug on the counter alongside the coffeemaker, and headed to where he’d hung his coat by the door.

“I’m sorry, Joe. I should know better than to meddle. You’ve clearly got this as surrounded as possible right now. I’ll get out of your hair so my sister can give me a snoot full of real drama.”

“Not a problem,” Joe assured him. “I’ll let you know what we find out.”

Bill settled his coat on his shoulders and gave him a wistful smile. “I should’ve taken retirement when they offered it, right?”

But Joe shook his head. “Not from where I’m sitting.”

Willy pulled the car close enough to the snowbank to allow him to get out and keep the car out of any traffic. “Goddamned road crews. In New York at least they know how to keep the streets clear.”

Sam stared at him. “In
New York
? What the hell’re you doing running New York up the flagpole? You’re the one who keeps saying what a dump that place is, including the snow removal. You
hate
New York. Plus, it’s warming up; half the snow’s gone already.”

Willy scowled at her. “Whatever.” He waved his hand at the remaining mounds of the stuff. “Ya gotta admit. This shit sucks.”

Sammie merely shook her head. Willy hadn’t lived in New York in over twenty years, where he’d briefly been a cop. Moving to Vermont had amounted to a partial salvation, in fact, even though it hadn’t softened his attitude any.

They were parked in the minute village of Westminster West, really a small cluster of buildings lining the curve of a road between Putney and Saxtons River. Known for its artists and left-leaning politics—regardless of whether either one truly represented the majority—West West, as it was colloquially known, was nevertheless as quaint as rural New England had to offer. It boasted the no-muss, no-fuss, archetypal gathering of church, library, and clapboarded Greek Revival homes that so caught the eye of those busloads of summer tourists. It also helped deflect the reality that trailer parks had as much to say about genuine New England as any place like this.

“That the address?” Willy asked, pointing to a small house tethered to the road via a narrow, crooked path through the snow, as wide as a hand shovel’s blade, and now slathered with a layer of soft, slippery mud. The lights behind the ground floor’s windows cast a series of pleasant yellow rectangles upon the white patchy blanket covering the yard.

“Michele Starr,” Sammie confirmed. A shadow passed before one of the windows. “Looks like somebody’s home.”

They got out quietly, easing their doors shut out of long habit, and looked around the neighborhood. The village was tucked in for the
night, the street empty and still, the smell of chimney smoke on the breeze, and the sense of the night air having enclosed the community like a star-packed celestial lid.

“Goddamned cold,” Willy barely murmured, unimpressed, using his one good hand to gather his collar more tightly around his throat.

They traveled the shoveled lane in single file, arbitrarily choosing the sucking mud over any mysteries beneath the recently rain-drenched snow to either side. A no-win set of options that Willy growled about the entire distance, his grumbling unnaturally loud in the surrounding silence. At the door, they listened carefully for a few moments, again out of habit, but heard little beyond what sounded like a muted radio program.

Willy pressed the doorbell.

A moment later a small, slim, older woman stood before them, a tentative smile on her face. “Yes?”

Sam looked over the woman’s shoulder, enjoying the fresh smell of recent cooking that hit her face. An old, slow-moving cat crossed the hallway in the distance without a glance in their direction.

“Are you Michele Starr?” Willy asked.

“Yes, that’s me.”

They both displayed their credentials. “I’m William Kunkle and this is Samantha Martens, of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation,” he intoned. “We’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”

“My goodness,” she said, without opening the door any wider. “What about?”

Sam recognized the gentle paranoia of someone whose age put her in the 1960s as an adult in her twenties. “It’s okay, Ms. Starr. We’re not after you for anything. We think you once knew Doreen Ferenc, and we wanted to know a little more about that.”

Michele Starr remained looking receptive, although the mention
of Doreen’s name clearly made an impact, but the door remained where it was, despite the cold rushing in, and her next questions were hardly inviting.

“Why? And how did you find me?”

Willy had reached his limit—rarely a huge leap. “Lady,” he said, “you’re not in trouble and we’re freezing our asses off. Doreen’s been murdered and we need help. We found you ’cause that’s what we do. It’s that simple. You gonna let us in or not?”

The expression changed to shock, as if Willy had channeled Michele’s mother in reminding her to tend to her manners. The door swung back at last and their small host ushered them in.

“I am so sorry. We’re told so often to be careful nowadays, and this horrible thing about Doreen . . .”

They both filed in and stood slightly hunched in the hallway, letting the heat work its way inside their clothing.

“It’s okay,” Sam said. “Totally understandable.”

After that, the social niceties fell into place by rote. Coats were hung up, hot drinks were offered and the radio turned off, the cat was introduced to little effect, and they all ended up seated around a woodstove with glass doors, enjoying the source of the home’s warmth.

“Feeling better?” Starr asked Willy pointedly as he took a sip from his cup of coffee.

“Lots,” Sam answered quickly, not trusting him to be civil yet. “Thanks so much for understanding. It’s sometimes a quirky job and we catch people by surprise without meaning to. I am sorry.”

The woman was working hard to maintain appearances. “It’s nice to have unexpected company now and then, especially when it turns out I don’t have to worry.”

“Don’t have any skeletons in the closet?” Willy asked.

“The price of a boring life,” she told him.

Sam was looking around the living room, noticing an unusual number of framed black-and-white photographs, not unlike what they’d seen at Doreen’s house.

“You read about Doreen in the papers?” she asked.

Michele nodded mournfully, her voice indicating a crack in her politesse. “Yes. Poor girl. I actually knew her once, a long time ago.”

“At Ethan Allen Academy?”

Her eyebrows rose. “You
have
been checking up on me. Yes, during one of the summer sessions they used to host. I taught photography at the school and it was a good way for me to bridge the summer break. I don’t have any family, didn’t have a summer home, and I needed the money. It worked for everyone. Dory was one of my students.”

“Did you also know Mary Fish?” Willy asked.

There, Starr’s response was spontaneous and happier. She smiled broadly and her eyes softened. “Oh, yes. Mary was like the Queen of the Nile there—all things to all people. One of the nicest, most loving women I’ve ever known.”

“And a boy named Chuck McNaughton?” Sammie added. “He was a student there.”

There the older woman frowned. “Of mine?”

“We know he attended the school.”

She shook her head. “The art department was sort of cut off from the general population. English teachers got to meet everyone, but art was an elective. I didn’t know a lot of the kids who attended all four years.”

Willy pursed his lips. Lester’s discovery earlier in the day that Dory and Chuck had both been at Mary Fish’s school for a brief moment had seemed like just the break they were craving.

“Funny you should mention English,” Sam now said. “Because McNaughton was at the school taking remedial English, the same summer that you and Doreen were there.”