Archer Mayor - The Disposable Man

Ron Klesczewski drove with both hands on the wheel, his eyes intent on the twisting dirt road ahead.

“Do we know for sure this isn’t a dog or a dead deer or something?” Tyler asked from the backseat.

I twisted around to face him. “Not according to Sheila. She checked it out. It’s definitely a man.”

J.P. Tyler scowled silently into his lap. “A suicide, I bet,” he said glumly. The forensics expert of my four-member squad, he was along for good reason, but he’d been having a bad day and was obviously convincing himself the rest of it had just vanished down the tubes. I was counting on his natural curiosity to resurface once we reached our destination.

A sudden lurch made me turn back toward the road.

Ron smiled apologetically. “Sorry. Don’t guess this sees much traffic.”

He nervously drove us through a huge muddy hole, accelerating to make sure we didn’t get stranded in the middle. Trees to both sides of us canopied overhead, allowing only an ineffectual dappling of late summer sun. I checked their crowns in vain for the first faint blushings of the coming fall foliage, always first to appear in the high, colder hills surrounding downtown. We were off of Ames Hill Road, west of Brattleboro, an area as seemingly remote as Vermont’s deepest backwoods, and yet only fifteen minutes from the office. Half our department’s beat looked like this, yet we were perhaps the fifth largest community in the state.

“There it is, up ahead,” Ron commented, easing us around a copse of trees and up a final, narrow driveway to an opening haphazardly cluttered with beaten trucks, rusting cars, one police cruiser, and half a dozen barking dogs. Directly before us was a small, open-sided barn, filled with a battered assortment of woodworking equipment and an ancient generator. To our left, connected to the generator by a heavy electrical cable, an outhouse-sized cabin, with one closed door and no windows, sat perched on the edge of a large concrete slab covered with a plywood deck.

“What the hell is this?” Tyler muttered, fingering the door handle and suspiciously eyeing the circling dogs.

“Doesn’t look like anybody’s here,” Ron echoed, craning his neck.

I watched the dogs for a moment, reading their body language. I’d spent enough time in Vermont’s most isolated region-the Northeast Kingdom-to know the careful protocol of a newcomer. Despite our now being some two hundred miles south of there, almost touching the Massachusetts and New Hampshire borders, I recognized the need to follow the old rules.

I opened the door slightly, sticking a foot out first for the dogs to sniff, before slowly emerging from the car, my empty hands visibly open and slack by my sides. Cool, wet noses filled my palms in flurried, competitive greeting.

“Hey there,” I murmured, slowly crouching, running my fingers lightly through shifting tufts of hair. “How’s it going?”

The dogs were light, dark, tall, short, rangy, and compact. All were scruffy, their hair thick and matted. Their eyes stayed watchful throughout this ceremony, their haunches muscled up in preparation for instant fight or flight.

They skittered away as the door to the distant shed opened, revealing a tall, slim woman in a police uniform. She paused at the top of a stepladder connecting the ground to the concrete slab and waved at us.

“They’re okay,” she called out. “The owner wants to meet you before I show you what we got.”

“All of us?” I asked.

“Just you, Lieutenant.” She laughed suddenly. “Maybe you guys can play catch with your new friends.”

“Not goddamn likely,” Tyler said under his breath, having tentatively joined me by the side of the car.

I crossed the rutted parking area, circling a pickup truck perched on cinder blocks, and approached what now looked more like a tool shed balanced on the edge of a missile silo hatch. It was all situated slightly higher than where we’d parked, so that as I drew abreast, I discovered a row of three narrow basement-style windows lining the edge of where the slab emerged from the earth.

Sheila Kelly tilted her head toward the broad, flat expanse as I climbed the four-step ladder to join her. “It’s a work in progress,” she explained. “They put in the cellar a few years back and capped it. Someday they’re going to tear this thing off,” she patted the shed wall, “and replace it with a log cabin. Least that’s what the owner says. His name’s Billy Whitehurst-he found the body. He’s a little twitchy about letting too many people on his property, though. That’s why the introduction.”

I nodded. “That’s fine. Is it far from here?”

“Not too. Maybe half a mile up the road you came in on, and then into the woods a bit.”

I now saw the shed’s sole purpose was to protect a set of stairs leading into the basement. Below us dim lighting revealed the bottom few steps and the poured cement floor beyond. I gestured to Sheila to lead the way.

The atmosphere that rose to meet us was clammy, cool, and aromatic-enriched by decaying food, unwashed bodies, and stale, unmoving air-both curiously sweet and rancid. Daylight barely seeped through the three cloudy windows I’d noticed earlier and was anemically assisted only by a single bulb hanging over a distant kitchen sink. A man stood there, with the water rushing, laboring over something I couldn’t make out. His back was turned toward us.

Lining the damp walls were counters, stacks of boxes, two bunk beds-one cradling a small, wide-eyed child-and a clothes dryer being emptied by a silent, furtive woman in a tie-dyed skirt. In one corner was an ominous-looking bank of interlinked car batteries connected to a fuse box, which, I assumed, ran to the generator in the barn outside. The other three corners were demurely walled off with bedsheets nailed to the ceiling joists.

I imagined a family living here for several years and tried not to think of the psychological toll.

“Mr. Whitehurst?” Sheila said as we crossed the cool, sweating floor. “This is Lieutenant Joe Gunther, our chief of detectives-the police officer I told you about.”

The man at the sink turned away from what I now recognized as the heart of a carburetor and looked at me from under a shaggy pair of gray eyebrows. I didn’t offer to shake hands, nor did he, both of us following the same code of conduct I’d recognized was in play from the start.

“You want some coffee?” he asked.

“I’m okay, thanks.” I leaned my hip against the counter, waiting him out.

He wiped his hands ineffectually on a red rag he extracted from his back pocket and poured himself a cup from a nearby coffee machine. His fingers left dark smudges on the dingy white plastic.

“Hell of a thing, something like that.”

“How did you find it?”

“Checking the woodlot with one of my boys. There’s a soapstone deposit a little ways from here, with a small quarry. Every time we’re near it, the kids fool around with it-chip some off, or mark it up. It’s soft and easy to work. Supposedly, they make talcum out of it. Years back, somebody had plans-that’s how the quarry got started-but they crapped out. One of these days, maybe I’ll do something with it. They use slabs of it for woodstoves and heating stones. You can cut it with a chain saw it’s so soft.”

I nodded, my silence as eloquent as any verbal prompting.

He took a deep swallow of coffee. “Anyhow, the boy found it first. Called me over. I saw right off what it was. Sent another of my kids to call it in on a neighbor’s phone.”

I glanced at Sheila.

“I took a look, just to confirm it, but that’s all,” she said. “There’s another unit there now, sealing it off.”