The Company She Kept (3 page)

“You find any witnesses to anything?” Joe asked his BCI counterpart.

Rick frowned. “Not yet. I got guys pounding on doors, but it's pretty isolated up here. The road is rarely traveled, given both the interstate and the paved highway they're using for the detour.”

Joe pressed his lips together before saying, “Makes you think. Whoever did this had to have been familiar with the area—the backwoods road, the broken fence, the proximity to the cliff … Even the trees being handy so the rope could be tied off.”

He watched as the lab techs laid out a narrow sidewalk next to the tire tracks, giving them access while preserving the evidence. “We were having a conversation on the way up here about whether this could be a suicide.”

“With no car?” Rick asked.

“It could've been stolen afterward,” Sam contributed, crouched down with her small backpack and unloading her camera equipment.

Rick didn't laugh. “Great minds and all that,” he said. “We thought the same thing, especially after we sent a unit to her house in Brattleboro and found her car missing. Problem is”—here he pointed at the tracks in the snow—“those belong to a pickup or an SUV. Raffner's registered to a Prius.”

“Of course she is,” Willy muttered, and moved away, shadowing the techs.

Rick and Joe ignored him. “You put out a BOL for the car?” Joe asked.

“Yup. Nothing yet.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Lester said, trailing behind Willy and now Sam, as they started coordinating with the crime lab team.

*   *   *

Because of the aging day's ebbing light, the protocols of how best to deconstruct a scene like this had to be altered, and provisions made to secure the area overnight. Fortunately, the weather was forecast to hold steady, making this an easy decision.

Less easy was choosing how to remove the body from its perch.

It couldn't be a simple matter of reeling her in by the rope from which she was dangling. Any tastelessness of doing so aside, the practical consideration remained of how the stressors of such a maneuver might play out. As Willy indelicately put it, “You don't want her head coming off.”

As a result, after everything obvious had been thoroughly documented and the evidence gathered, a high-angle extraction crew was summoned and dropped over the cliff and the remains placed inside first a body bag, and then a lightweight wire litter to be pulled to the top.

Nevertheless, for Joe, who'd known Susan for decades, the shock of seeing her dead after the bag had been partially unzipped—the rope still around her neck—hit harder than he'd expected.

Raffner had been Gail's friend, not his. He'd been open to some kind of relationship, given her importance in Gail's life, but he'd always felt that Susan didn't like him much. She'd respected him—both Gail and his own inner radar had told him as much—but he'd sensed that she'd viewed him as the loyal opposition.

That being said, he'd seen her laugh and cry and had shared meals and drinks with her for years—if always in the company of others. She'd been bright and smart and tough and good at getting things done—as well as devoted and dedicated to Gail. To see the source of such vitality so pale, stiff, and silent drove home what he knew Gail must be experiencing.

Her best friend—certainly her most steadfast one—had been reduced to a broken vessel, its vibrant contents emptied.

“You want to take a better look at her?” one of the climbers asked him, undoing the straps that held her pale corpse to the litter.

Shaking off his musings, Joe came alongside the device, asking, “How stiff is she?”

“Not rock solid. It's more than the usual rigor, 'cause of the cold, but she's not like some of 'em—straight out of the freezer.”

Grateful to hear that, Joe slipped on a pair of latex gloves and crouched in the snow, a small crowd looking on. They'd all dealt with bodies that had truly frozen stiff. Not only couldn't you make them conform to anything, like a doorway or the inside of a hearse, but they took days to thaw prior to autopsy.

“Let's make sure,” he announced generally, “that when she gets transported to Burlington, the hearse is heated to where the driver can barely stand it. We've got to do what we can to get her warm enough that they can open her up.”

As Joe began helping with the straps and the bag's zipper, they all noticed how her underlying sweater, blouse, and bra had been sliced down the middle, exposing her bare chest.

“Damn,” someone said.

Crudely cut into the flesh was the single word, “Dyke.”

 

CHAPTER THREE

Joe escorted Susan's body to the medical examiner's office in Burlington by following the funeral home's featureless minivan for a couple of hours along I-89. This was Vermont's only other interstate, which cut a diagonal from White River Junction to the state's “Queen City,” through the middle of the famed Green Mountains. It was arguably as pretty a road as I-91, and certainly one he rarely wearied of traveling. This was good news, given the number of times he had to do so, largely because Burlington was the state's largest metropolis by far, and thus where most people met to conduct business.

Weariness, however, was hardly a concern on this trip. Not only was Joe constantly on the new “hands-free” phone setup they'd mounted into his car, to conform to Vermont's new cell phone usage statute, but the vehicle ahead kept reminding him of the emotional cost of Susan Raffner's death, and its pending impact on the community at large. Joe had learned the hard way how this socially sensitive state could react when one of their own—a celebrity to boot—was cut down in her prime.

As if in confirmation, the cell phone came alive in between two of his own outgoing calls.

“Gunther.”

“It's me,” said Gail, sounding stronger and more resolute than before, which he knew from experience could be good or bad.

“Hey,” he said, considering what to say and how to say it. “I'm escorting Susan to the medical examiner's office right now.”

“What have you learned?”

“We're definitely treating it as a homicide, but we're a long way from reaching any conclusions yet.”

“You sound like a press release,” she said, confirming his fear that she'd balance her grief with an aggressive, take-charge attitude.

He decided, therefore, to get to the point. “You have to swear on a stack of Bibles not to let this out, no matter what the pressure.”

“Joe,” she began.

“It could be very important to solving this, Gail. As governor, we'll tell you what you need to know, but you more than most have seen how this works.”

Her voice hardened. “What are you dancing around?”

He sighed to himself before answering, “I don't want anybody else telling you this: Someone, presumably the killer, cut a message on Susan's chest.”

“
What?
What're you saying?”

“It's the word ‘dyke,' Gail. I'm sorry.”

She exploded on the phone. “
God
damn
it. Oh, fuck
.”

He listened to her crying and pounding something hard repetitively on her desk, before he said, “I will do everything I can to find out what happened. And I will drive my people to do likewise. We will not rest.”

He imagined her struggling to compose herself, especially given how superficial his own words had sounded to him—despite their sincerity. Joe had no idea of the shared history these two intimately connected women might have built between them, or of the true nature of Gail's pain right now.

“What are you going to do?” she finally asked in a subdued voice.

“The autopsy should give us some basic information—cause of death, maybe something about the sequence of events,” he said matter-of-factly. “The crime lab is processing everything at the scene, and then we'll analyze whatever trace can be found on the body. We've also got people looking for her car, which seems to have gone missing. And Lester and Willy are going to her house right now to see what they can find there. It's basic, solid stuff, Gail, and it'll be done right. Additionally, I'll research any possible hate crime angles. It could be there'll be some buzz among the groups we track that'll be helpful. Do you know if Susan received any communications targeting lesbians or homosexuality?”

“Is that you diplomatically asking if Susan was queer?”

Joe kept his tone impassive, although he was startled that he hadn't actually asked the question with that in mind. “No. But was she?”

“Yes,” came the answer, and the phone went dead.

“Thanks so much,” he said softly to himself, feeling instantly guilty about his sense of relief that he and Gail were no longer romantically involved.

*   *   *

“I haven't asked,” Lester said conversationally, “but how's fatherhood treating you, now that you've got a few miles under you?”

Willy took his eyes off the passing countryside to stare at him. “You looking to hand off your own kids, or just being nosy? I'm surprised you're not a grandfather by now, the way you woodchucks breed up here.”

Lester Spinney, as befit his easygoing personality, merely laughed. “
I'm
a woodchuck? How long you lived up here, speaking of which? You should almost qualify.”

“Too long.”

“You miss New York?”

“Like a canker sore.”

“Emma sleeping well and enjoying day care and learning who's got the brains between her parents?”

That got a smile from her father.

Lester went back to negotiating the traffic lined up for exit two into Brattleboro. Willy was a hard case to crack. A transplanted New York cop, he'd been shot back when he and Joe and Sammie had worked together for the Bratt PD. The injury had almost cost him his job, along with the use of the arm. But that was one of the unique things about Vermont—there were few enough people making things happen that creative solutions often became the norm. In this case, that meant that despite Willy's injury and his almost toxic demeanor, Joe Gunther had worn down some significant opposition to keep him employed. He'd pushed Kunkle's integrity and ability—and made some loaded references to the Americans with Disabilities Act—but he'd also taken full responsibility for him, which had eventually sealed the deal. The creation later on of the VBI had become the perfect opportunity to not only collect the best and brightest among the state's investigators—including Lester himself—but to build a protective niche for Willy Kunkle, as well.

And Les was happy for that, because Willy, for all his irritable ways, struck him as a hot, bright, eccentric source of insight whose absence from their ranks would have made the world a duller place—and resulted in a lower solve rate. The latter point wasn't a given, but Spinney's affection for his curmudgeon of a partner was willing to allow for the possibility. After all, Willy Kunkle was fun to watch.

Out of the blue, Willy asked, “How is your boy, anyhow? Flunked out of the police academy yet?”

“Nope,” Lester answered cheerfully, “and my daughter's not pregnant, either, to your earlier point. Nor is my wife feeding a drug habit out of the hospital's supply cabinet. In fact, Dave'll be graduating in a couple of weeks, and then it's figuring out where to go next.”

“He's a deputy sheriff now, isn't he?”

“Yup, but probably not for much longer. Time'll tell. He's done well, but it's not his first choice of places to work.”

Willy didn't respond, back to staring out the window. He didn't actually care about what happened to David Spinney, or the rest of Lester's irritatingly wholesome family. It was his own daughter, barely learning to sit up, who had stimulated the question. Willy was an older parent who'd once sworn never to have children, and he'd been thrown by how much she filled his thoughts daily. It worried him. His past strength had been in cutting people out of his life, in part because he had such a low tolerance for most of them, but in part, too, because he wasn't convinced that he deserved their company. He saw himself as deeply flawed—even a bad man, if not for his persistent effort to avoid crossing the line. But the line remained. As a recovering alcoholic, he knew it in palpable terms; as a self-doubting father, mate, and colleague, he feared its proximity as he might have feared a trip wire attached to a land mine.

“Chestnut Hill?” Spinney asked, slowing down on Western Avenue as he approached the top of the hill heading into downtown Brattleboro.

“Take a left on Cedar and a right on Acorn Lane,” Willy advised. “It's easier to see where you're going.”

That was a matter of opinion, Lester thought as he followed directions. Susan Raffner lived in one of the town's more unusual neighborhoods, clustered around an ancient and no longer functional reservoir—access to which was challenging at the height of summer, and flat-out scary when banked by snow and covered with ice, as now. The challenges were compounded by the area being, as the name implied, on a hill, and fed only by a twisting series of narrow, steep, urban versions of poorly paved “goat paths.” The sheer quirkiness of the locale seemed designed for an apparent character such as Raffner.

Lester crawled to the top—a loop road circling the reservoir and servicing a small number of homes—and was struck by how the romantic-sounding name contrasted with Chestnut Hill's mixed-bag reality. The reservoir was in fact a half-empty, crumbling, concrete-lined, weed-tangled frozen pond, primarily reliant on rainwater for its contents, and surrounded by a rusty chain-link fence. It was, put bluntly, ugly, if maybe not to the people living around it. And the surrounding architecture, as it often did in Brattleboro, added to the muddle by running the gamut from graceful and historical to forgettably recent and plain.