Archer Mayor - The Disposable Man

“I don’t either,” I admitted, “but I’ll try to find out.”

She sounded surprised. “You know Frazier? I’d never met him. He seemed pleasant enough-a bit formal.”

“Yeah. He heads the Burlington office. ‘Formal’ isn’t a description I would’ve used, to be honest. He never struck me that way.”

“I think it was Philpot. I got the impression Frazier was there purely as decoration-to get my door officially open. Maybe he was just feeling uncomfortable.”

I mulled that over for a moment. “Did you tell them we thought the body was Russian?”

“I wasn’t overly friendly.”

That was answer enough. I’d seen her in that mode. “Let me dig around a little. You want to hear the results?”

I could almost hear her smile over the phone. “Well… ”

“You got it,” I interpreted, laughing, and hung up.

My hand still on the receiver, I pondered what Hillstrom had told me, resisting the impulse to call Walter Frazier directly and ask him what the hell was going on. The unannounced presence of the FBI was curious enough, but nobody I knew named Philpot was assigned to either their Burlington or Rutland offices, and he, combined with the already mysterious John Doe, made me want to do some homework before confronting Frazier.

I picked up the phone and dialed an internal number. “What’s the latest news?” I asked Sammie once she’d answered.

“Nothing yet.”

“How ’bout the dailies. Anything there?”

The dailies were our own internal log-the official diary of everything the department did around the clock, whether it resulted in further action or not.

There was a pause as Sammie checked my request. “Nothing stands out,” she reported a moment later. “There was an inquiry from the sheriff’s office-it doesn’t say what they were after. Want me to chase it down?”

“Yeah. I’d like everything checked for the next few days. The FBI’s been sniffing around our pal with the Russian toes. I’d love to find out why.”

Sammie knew better than to suggest simply calling them up. Despite serious advances in interagency cooperation, skulduggery and exclusion remained time-honored practices. It often paid well to do a little spadework before holding that first conversation.

“I’ll call you back,” she said instead.

It took her under ten minutes, and she delivered the news in person, appearing at my door with a satisfied expression. “I guess I know why you’re still the boss.”

“Oh?”

“That inquiry from the sheriff was about an abandoned rental car near Stratton Mountain, left parked at the filling station just north of the access road. They’re asking if anyone’s reported it missing. So far, no one has.”

She let the significance of her last sentence sink in before raising her eyebrows. “Wanna go for a ride?”

I waited until J.P. Tyler pulled his head out of the rental car’s trunk before breaking what I thought had been an extraordinarily gracious silence. Locked into a stuffy, windowless garage to ensure the integrity of a potential crime scene, Sammie and I had watched him powder, scratch, vacuum, and snip at almost every surface the car had to offer, receiving very little information for our patience.

As Sammie took another surreptitious glance at her oversized watch, however, I thought a break in the pattern was due.

“So, J.P., what’re we looking at? Good news?”

He was holding a plastic spray bottle in one hand, and a flashlight rigged with a dark red filter in the other. His expression read of slightly veiled irritation. He was not a man who enjoyed an audience.

“It’s got promise.”

He crossed over to a long workbench against the wall and exchanged what he was carrying for some nail scissors and a small evidence envelope. Sammie sighed but kept her peace.

I did not. J.P. had milked this as much as I was going to let him. Besides, I could tell from his barely perceptible smile that he felt he’d already won the game. He could afford to be magnanimous.

“So spit it out.”

He placed the scissors on the car’s bumper. “It’s no home run, but it’s better than what we had. I lifted several fingerprints from the interior, most of which look like they match our John Doe. That would make him the probable renter of the car, in my book. There are others, here and there-kind of in odd places, actually, which make me think they came from someone on the rental company’s cleaning crew. But that’s about it. The rest are smudges, which might’ve come from anyone. The nice thing is that what I got is very clear. Rentals are much better than regular cars that way-almost like clean blackboards, as far as fingerprints are concerned. Once we locate the franchise he got this from, we’ll check their time and personnel files, find out who cleaned it, and see if we can rule out the other prints.”

He then shrugged. “Unfortunately, that’s about it for the interior. I’ll run the dirt I found on the gas pedal by the crime lab, along with what I vacuumed from the seats, but I don’t expect much. And there was basically nothing else-no candy wrappers, no personal items, not even a road map. And,” he held up a finger, “no luggage. It’s almost like he drove the car a hundred feet and then abandoned it.”

“Or someone made it look that way,” Sammie added.

“Or he did himself,” I said, the visitors from the FBI still fresh in my mind.

They both looked at me.

I explained. “Nothing else about him seems normal. The suit, the belt knife, the tattoos, even the way he was killed. They’re all pretty weird. Why not the possibility that he cleaned out his own rental car before dumping it? The one thing we haven’t even bothered with so far is figuring out what someone like this was even doing here.”

Sammie chewed on that for a moment, and then asked J.P., “Was the steering wheel wiped clean?”

He shook his head dismissively. “No, but it didn’t need to be. Steering wheels are lousy for prints. Everything ends up smudged.”

He turned toward the trunk again. “Anyhow, none of that’s the really interesting part. I found bloodstains on the carpeting back here.”

I stood next to him and stared into the dark recesses of the immaculately empty trunk. “A lot?”

“Enough for analysis. I’ll send some clippings to the lab and have them cross-check the DNA with John Doe’s.”

I shook my head. “No. What I meant was the ME said his carotid had been cut, that he’d lost enough blood to affect lividity. If all that blood’s not here, it’s got to be somewhere else.”

J.P. nodded. “So we either have a seriously stained site somewhere, or a blanket or tarp that’s soaked in the stuff.”

We all stared at the car in silence. Finally-hopefully-I muttered, “Well, that’s something,” although none of us were entirely sure what that was.

That night, the bedroom was dark and empty. Gail was in her office at the end of the hall, nestled in an oversized armchair and surrounded by the stacks of paperwork that seemed to follow her like doting pets. Not that I was any better. I’d been doing some late-night homework myself.

I leaned over and kissed her forehead, jostling her reading glasses with my chin.

“Hey, kiddo,” she said. “Did you get hold of Walter?”

I’d told her of Walter Frazier’s visit to Hillstrom’s lab. I found a narrow clearing in the middle of a small couch opposite her and settled down. “Yeah. I thought I’d wait till after hours. I figured if the FBI was being coy, maybe he’d share a few secrets off the record. We’ve worked pretty well together before-he doesn’t play the Bureau’s usual game of excluding local law enforcement.”