Red Herring (18 page)

“I read somewhere,” he told her, “that George Bernard Shaw once said that being attacked by critics was like being nibbled to death by
ducks. I know what he meant, assuming he ever said it.”

“I read the paper this morning,” she conceded.

He stared at the glass-doored stove before him. He could see a pair of logs burning with mesmerizing intensity. Stanley Katz at the
Brattleboro Reformer
had finally discovered his bloodthirsty roots and issued an editorial demanding an explanation for the “cloak of secrecy” that the VBI had dropped over its recent investigation, which clearly invoked “the darkly disturbing images of secret police organizations so reviled in third world autocracies.”

“I know he has to sell papers,” Joe conceded. “I just wish he didn’t have to be such a jackass about it. I can’t wait for when he’s told we actually have three murders.”

“You two go back, don’t you?” she asked, still making industrious sounds from the kitchen.

“No, you’re right. Nothing new there.”

“So, what else?”

He rubbed his eyes. What else, indeed? “I still haven’t heard from Lester on Long Island. The lab guys there are taking their time, which I hope’ll mean good news. Willy couldn’t stand just doing his job, of course, so he rounded up one of our primary suspects on a grand theft charge, which now means the guy’s lawyered up and unapproachable for anything else. I got a call from someone in New York or someplace, claiming to be from Fox News, wanting to know if I’m the cop who used to sleep with the woman now running for governor.”

Lyn rounded the corner carrying a tray with mugs, cookies, and the artificial sweeteners and fake creamers that Joe so loved.

“Are you kidding me?” she asked.

“The race is down to the wire. Not much time left, and it’s no sure thing for either side. People are looking for ammo.” He thought back to the last conversation he’d had with Gail, about her own camp’s
efforts in that area.

Lyn set the tray on the low table between his chair and her own. He sat forward to doctor his drink the way he liked.

“How do you feel about all that?”

He looked up, struck by her muted tone. “What?”

“Gail. Her race. If she wins, she’ll end up being your boss, won’t she?”

He smiled at the repetition of that theme. “No more than any other governor. Bill’s my real boss, then the public safety commissioner. You could even argue the entire legislature comes next, since they could kill VBI with a single vote.”

That clearly hadn’t addressed her concern. She was still studying the contents of her cup, not making eye contact. “A lot has come out in the press.”

He took a stab at filling in the blank. “About the rape? It’s a big deal in some people’s minds.”

Now she looked up. “Not yours?”

He tilted his head, considering his answer, not sure where this was going. “It changed her life, Lyn. I’m sure it changed us both.”

“And broke you up?”

“As a couple?” He hesitated. “Probably. The rape made her more anxious. What I did for a living finally got to her. People rationalize memories, especially as time goes by. Maybe she’d tell you something else was to blame, but that’s what I remember.”

He stopped playing with his cocoa and reached out to touch her forearm. “Why the questions?”

She broke eye contact, now staring into the fire, as he’d been doing earlier. She sighed. “Just feeling insecure, I guess. Things are going well between us. It makes me nervous.”

He could understand that. Life had not been easy for her, despite
her present success. One bright light was her daughter, a journalist in Boston, but even she was a product of a divorced couple, and no one knew what had happened to Lyn’s ex.

With a track record like that, happiness had to be considered warily.

“Gail and I have moved on, Lyn,” he told her. “It’s a rare friendship now, but it’ll never go back to what it was. Even back then none of our friends could figure out how we lasted as long as we did.”

“But you did.”

Forgetting the cocoa, Joe slid off his chair and crouched by her side, holding her hands. “So will we.”

She leaned forward and placed her face against his neck. He could feel the dampness of her tears.

“God, I hope so,” she muttered into his collar.

“Come on in,” Eric Marine gestured to Joe and Les, ushering them into a conference room down the hall from Eric’s office. “We’ve set up a miniature classroom in here.”

Joe allowed Lester to enter first, noticing how tired he seemed. The younger man had conceded upon Joe’s return to the BNL campus that babysitting a pile of evidence had not only been more boring than he’d imagined, but had involved incredibly weird hours. Apparently, both Marine and Shepard had fit in this project whenever the opportunities arose, including a couple of times in the middle of the night. Joe was both pleased and impressed by their enthusiasm.

The room was essentially two offices stuck together, but it had several chairs around a table and a pull-down screen against one wall. A projector hooked to a laptop sat in the middle of the table.

“Have a seat, gentlemen,” Wayne Shepard greeted them, looking up from the computer screen. “I think you’ll be happy with what we’ve dug up.”

Joe smiled his appreciation. “We’re up for some good news. Les
also told me how you burned the midnight oil on this. We really appreciate that.”

Shepard shrugged. “No big deal. We do that a lot. Sometimes, access to a light beam is catch-as-catch-can.”

“Besides,” Marine said with a laugh, settling into one of the seats, “it’s fun to surprise the younger guys once in a while. They think we’re such hopeless old coots.”

Shepard crossed to the windows and dropped the blinds before sitting down at the keyboard.

“Okay,” he began. “Knowing that neither one of you speaks our form of scientific triple Chinese, Eric and I discussed how to explain all this without sounding condescending.”

“Thanks for that,” Lester said softly.

Shepard punched a key on the computer to introduce the first slide. “So, here we go. We started with a good assortment of test items. As listed here, you gave us three blood deposits and either swabs from or pieces of a pair of women’s underwear, a nightgown, a suicide note, an electric cord, an empty bottle of Scotch, a pair of men’s pants, and a section of truck bumper. All from three different crime scenes.”

The others in the room remained quiet, watching the screen.

Shepard continued. “The first thing Eric and I decided to do was to break our findings into two separate reports, one for you, which is what you’re about to see, and another for David Hawke, which will be couched in terms he will appreciate with his background and knowledge.”

Joe smiled. “Very delicately put. Thank you.”

Eric laughed. “Well, it wasn’t just for you. We know you have others in your chain-of-command who will want to know what happened here.”

Joe could instantly think of several. “True enough.”

“Finally,” Eric added, “you should know that we’ve been in touch with David throughout our research. In some cases, while he’s obviously capable of extracting DNA and is much better at handling evidence than we are, we have a lot more data available to us. Without getting complicated, that just means that we’ve been exchanging e-mails about DNA patterns and whatnot that have been very helpful to both parties.”

Shepard somewhat impatiently moved to another slide. “First, the bad news: There were a couple of things that simply gave us nothing of note.” He punched through two slides as he spoke. “The young man’s clothing—Bobby Clarke’s. There was mention in the paperwork that perhaps the killer had placed the body behind the wheel of the truck, thereby depositing some trace evidence on Bobby’s pants and coat. I had no luck at all there, I think because whoever attacked him wore gloves. It’s getting cold up north, no?”

Joe nodded mournfully, remembering David making the same observation days earlier. “Yes—especially at night.”

Shepard appeared unfazed. “The second dead end, so to speak, was Mary Fish’s purported suicide note. You already know that it matched neither her personal printer nor the one in her office; all we could tell was that it came from someone else’s.”

“That having been said,” Eric amended, “we did capture its fingerprint, scientifically speaking. If you ever do come across the printer you think produced this document, we should be able to match the two.”

Shepard’s face lit up at the suggestion. “Yes, of course,” he said. “And that’s true for much of what we’re laying out for you. A good deal of this amounts to snapshots taken of members of a crowd—it will be up to you to connect the picture to the right human being.”

“Understood.” Joe nodded.

“What about the Scotch bottle found on the floor of Bobby’s
truck?” Lester asked. “Isn’t that a dud? Our guys at the crime lab said it had been wiped clean.”

Eric beamed. “Yes, but with what?”

Shepard interrupted. “That’ll come later.” He pointed at the laptop. “I don’t want to get out of order.”

Eric Marine couldn’t stop himself. “He used a dirty rag,” he whispered loudly and in a rush, at the same time waving on his colleague and urging, “Okay, okay. Carry on.”

Shepard moved to the next image. “Let’s keep with the victims and address the drops of blood later. Chronologically, that means Doreen Ferenc to begin with.” The slide showed the fragment of Doreen’s nightgown surrounding the knife gash.

“Having just said what I did about staying in order, I’m going to make an exception with her underwear and address it later in a different context. As for the nightgown, though, I think Eric told you of the likelihood of particles on the knife blade ending up on the edges of the fabric’s entrance hole.”

Another image showed a huge magnification, although of what, Joe had no idea.

“And indeed,” Shepard continued, “that was the case. I found gunpowder, engine oil, wood dust—primarily oak—and traces of HC
₂
H, in a formulation suggesting oxyacetylene use, since acetylene as a gas would disappear all on its own.”

“Gunpowder?” Lester echoed, just as Joe muttered, “Acetylene?”

“Let me,” Eric dove in, although his colleague had made no effort to speak first. “This part is really for your ears only, since, as scientists, we should restrict ourselves to fact. But I love Vermont, and visit it every chance I get, and I think I’ve gotten a small feel for the place in the process.”

He rested his elbows on the table, emphasizing his keenness.
“What Wayne just mentioned strikes me as perfectly reasonable. Joe, do you carry a knife?”

“Sure.”

Eric shifted his attention momentarily. “Lester?”

Les pulled out a pocketknife and displayed it.

“My point precisely,” Eric resumed. “And both of you presumably use your knives for all sorts of purposes—cleaning your fingernails, opening mail, gutting fish, for all I know. Right?”

Both men nodded, getting the idea.

“Well—and this is pure theory, as I said—here I think you have the knife of a man who maybe loads his own ammunition, is familiar with or works on cars and wood processing equipment, and is within proximity to or handles an acetylene torch, all of which could easily involve the use of a knife blade in time of need. A real Vermonter, in other words.”

Lester was scratching his head. “That’s good to hear.”

“When you load ammunition,” Eric persisted, “you sometimes separate individual flakes of gunpowder to achieve an exact measurement, no?”

Les’s expression cleared. “So you use a knife blade. I got it.”

Joe had removed a pad from his breast pocket and was jotting notes to himself.

“There’s a little more,” Shepard told them. “Again, it’s mostly supposition, and unlike Eric, I don’t know Vermont at all. But acetylene is actually more rarely used than people think. Oxyacetylene welding was very popular back when, but arc-based welding has almost totally replaced it.”

“Still used for metal cutting, though,” Joe finished for him.

Shepard smiled. “Correct. I was thinking that very point might help you home in on a target more accurately.”

“Point taken,” Joe thanked him, adding to his notes. “Although we probably have more people clinging to the old ways than you do down here.”

Shepard nodded. “True.” He turned to his computer and advanced the slide show another image.

“This,” he described unnecessarily, “is the electric cord used to hang Mary Fish. It is also—to echo Eric’s thunder—a nice supporting piece of evidence to the theory he just laid out.”

Again, a picture followed, taken on a micro scale too extreme to recognize.

“Here’s where things get interesting to me,” he said. “It turns out that the cord was beyond simply being new; it was virtually unused, meaning that its surface was factory-pristine.”

“I read in a report that Mary’s companion said the old one had worn out,” Joe explained. “They might’ve bought its replacement but never used it.”

“Well, that was good for us,” Shepard said. “Not that we couldn’t have worked with an older sample. It just would’ve upped the challenge.”

“So you got a print?” Les asked incredulously.

“Not exactly,” Shepard explained. “We extracted a little DNA from a microscopic smear—Eric was telling you that we contacted Dr. Hawke and exchanged some data—but we also lifted some minute environmental evidence left behind by the skin oils—evidence that supports what Eric was saying. All this is where the synchrotron and DNA analysis work hand in glove, with the first securing a sweatprint’s physical deposits, and the latter zeroing in on its genetic code material.”

Another close-up picture. “Engine oil matching that left by the knife,” he said. “And again the acetylene signature—both substances
that are prone to resisting a quick scrub, unlike gunpowder or sawdust.”

Shepard sat back. “I have to warn you about something, by the way. Remember how you were told that while the synchrotron process leaves a sample untouched, and that the same couldn’t be said for DNA analysis? Well, there was too little of this touch-DNA to save a leftover sample. I was told that all of this was for investigative purposes only, though.”