Archer Mayor - The Dark Root

“Going in for dowsing?” I asked as I circled my desk and scanned the messages that had been left there.

J.P. twirled the piece between his fingers like a baton. “It came off the burned car. Just got it back from Waterbury.”

I smiled at him and waited as he carefully placed it before me. Waterbury, Vermont, was the home of the state police crime lab, where all the local police agencies sent their evidence for detailed forensic scrutiny. Most departments our size and larger had specialists like Tyler who had some scientific training, but none of us had the money for the schooling and equipment that would have made them real experts.

“It’s a strip of aluminum molding from the A-post on the driver’s side. See that hole?”

I looked at where he was pointing. The hole looked like it had been made with a heavy-duty paper punch, but with a small, dark smear on one side. “That stain is a copper-zinc mix left behind by a bullet. The hole would fit a nine-millimeter, a thirty-eight, or a three-fifty-seven.”

A small chill tickled my neck. There could be several explanations of why Benny’s car had a bullet hole in it, but the obvious one was what Sally had already prophesied-which meant that both Tony’s dour mood and the media’s enthusiasm would soon be further stimulated. “This the only one you found?” I asked.

His eyebrows rose at my seeming lack of gratitude. “There might’ve been holes in the windows, but the heat and the crash took care of them.”

“I’m not complaining,” I said soothingly, pawing through the papers on my desk. I finally located the file I was after and flipped it open. “The one witness who reported hearing gunshots was walking his dog about a mile shy of where Travers went over the edge… Here it is: ‘Three shots-sounded like firecrackers.’ As usual.”

I handed the file to him. “If the bullet’s a nine millimeter, chances are it came from an automatic, which means there might be shell casings somewhere along that stretch of road.”

He took the file, smiled happily, and headed out the door. “I’ll rally the troops.”

“Keep this as quiet as you can, okay?” I called after him.

He’d left the aluminum strip in my care while he made his phone calls. I picked it up and looked at it more closely. It was stained and scarred by the heat, but unlike its owner, it must have broken free of the actual wreck.

Except that Ben Travers hadn’t actually been the owner. I reflected on that for a moment, realizing that the car might be more informative on Travers’s last day than his associates had been.

I picked up the phone and dialed Willy Kunkle’s extension, taking advantage of Tony’s advice to bring on more people.

“Yeah?” His voice, predictably, sounded both bored and surly.

“You want some action?”

“Probably not.”

“Good. Don’t move.” I left my office for the squad room outside, dropping the metal strip off at Tyler’s desk, and walked around the sound-absorbent panels that separated four work areas in the room’s center. On the far side, I found one of the most effective-and least appealing-of my subordinates. Willy Kunkle was an unrepentantly sour, recalcitrant, difficult human being with whom nobody liked to work, but whom everybody respected for the results he brought in. He was a cop from the old school, who missed the rubber hoses and hot lamps, hated Miranda and all lawyers, and longed for a more liberal department policy on stun guns and nightsticks.

Just as Sol Stennis specialized in Brattleboro’s troublesome kids, Willy had monopolized the town’s hardcore underworld. He was intimately connected to the activities, it seemed, of every deadbeat druggie, child molester, wife beater, and thief in town. Asked to enter that arena and extract information, he was almost invariably successful where none of us could scratch the surface. Rumors had it his track record was directly related to some flagrantly illegal interrogation techniques, but no one I knew had ever actually witnessed him crossing that line, and no single complaint had ever surfaced from the social swamp he frequented.

Of course, he may not have needed such methods. God knows, we found him unpleasant enough to give him what he wanted just to get rid of him.

Which had nothing to do with the arm.

Disabled by a sniper’s bullet years ago, Willy Kunkle’s left arm hung shriveled and useless by his side, its hand usually stuffed into his pants pocket so it wouldn’t flop around. He used it often to grim advantage, pulling it out on appropriate occasions like a veiled threat of the horrors he could deliver if provoked, or playing it for sympathy with women he was targeting. His was truly a twisted talent to behold, although my being his sole admirer was probably the only reason he was still employed as a cop.

“So what wonderful opportunity you dumpin’ on me now?” he asked as I approached.

“It’s right up your alley. Find out what happened to the car Benny was driving after it was stolen. J.P. says it had just been repainted, and Benny didn’t do paint jobs. That suit your fancy?”

Kunkle gave a disgruntled half shrug. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Harriet Fritter, the squad secretary, poked her head around the corner. “There you are. Call on line two-Beverly Hillstrom.”

Vermont’s medical examiner and I had become old friends ever since we’d discovered a shared propensity for taking no situation at face value-a prejudice we’d often either separately or together stuck our necks out to satisfy. While we’d never met socially, and still referred to one another by our respective titles-largely because of her oddly formal style-we’d formed a trusting relationship I doubted she had with many others.

As a result, Beverly Hillstrom was often the first and most elucidating sage I consulted in a homicide investigation, as well as the one I could count on to keep digging until she’d found every nugget a corpse had to offer.

I therefore settled down with some anticipation to hear her cool, almost aloof assessment of the charred corpse I had sent her, hoping that I would at last learn a little more of how Benny Travers had met his fate.

“I must say, Lieutenant, you certainly redeemed yourself for not having sent me anything for quite a while. Thank you for the dental records, by the way. They were a definite necessity.”

“So it’s one-hundred percent that the body is Ben Travers?”

Even here, I noticed with a smile, her scientifically suspicious nature stirred uncomfortably. “My X-rays of the teeth match the records.”

I allowed her that, without comment. “And what did he die of, officially?”

There was a moment’s hesitation, during which I subconsciously braced myself. Hillstrom was usually not one to equivocate on such matters. “Given the state of the body, I’m going to have to hedge my response a bit.”

“You mean given the crash and the fire?” I asked hopefully.

This time the answer was familiarly quick in coming-and forever put to rest any chance that Benny might have just fallen asleep at the wheel. “No-given the beating, the bullet, the crash, and the fire, in that order.”

“The beating?” I repeated inanely, having already been subliminally warned about the bullet by Tyler’s discovery.

She laughed softly, obviously pleased. “Let me start backwards. With a body this badly charred, the natural assumption is that the fire was the lethal agent. That’s what I first wanted to determine, therefore, and indeed it proved easy to do. Mr. Travers’s air passages showed little soot or searing; his carboxyhemoglobin concentrations were only slightly elevated; he showed none of the subendocardial left-ventricular hemorrhaging that is common to death by fire; and while his skull was blown apart by intracranial steam pressure, most of the fractures were unaccompanied by cerebral contusions or signs of hemorrhaging, as would have been present with immediately lethal blunt violence to the head.”