Archer Mayor - Occam's razor

So much for any metaphorical flock of birds uniting in perfect harmony.

The phone rang as if in response to my worsening mood.

“Joe. How’re you doin’?”

Stanley Katz was the editor of the Brattleboro Reformer, the daily newspaper. Both he and it had gone through some serious ups and downs over the years, the fallout being that the Reformer occasionally read like a real newspaper’s second cousin.

Which wasn’t entirely the paper’s fault. The police department had many of the same problems, and not just because money was tight.

Brattleboro itself was partly responsible, being neither big enough to support a muscular PD and a thriving paper, nor small enough to do without them.

Also, the Reformer had been bought and sold a number of times over the previous decade, finally to its own employees, which is how Katz, an erstwhile police beat reporter, had ended up at the helm. Self-ownership had proved to be good in principle, injecting pride into those who wanted to live here anyway, but for the younger, more restless, upwardly mobile junior workers, there were just too many other better-paying jobs elsewhere.

Just as with us.

“I’m fine, Stanley. What’s up?” I asked him, wary as always. We had disagreed often enough in the past to make a friendship unlikely, although we’d been known to cooperate, sometimes to the brink of what was legal.

“Just wondering about any movement on the dead bum case.”

I doubted it was that simple-he didn’t seem interested in his own question. “What did the chief tell you?”

He avoided answering. “Nothing’s happened for days. People are getting curious.”

“We’re waiting for lab reports. Nobody we’ve found saw anything useful.”

“I heard you’ve got an abandoned truck near Bickford’s, too.”

I hesitated. I could tell this was what he was after, which made me wonder what he already knew. It also meant we both hoped the other had something interesting to offer.

I began vaguely. “Yup-gave it to ANR. Pat Mason’s handling it. Call him.”

I knew he already had and the response he’d received.

Katz tried again. “Too bad about Norm Blood. It’s a guarantee he’ll lose that farm.”

“Probably.”

“Lot of family in the area. Makes for a good local story. Sad one, though. You hear of any other local names connected to it?”

Here it comes, I thought. “Nope. We handed it over pretty fast. Haz mat’s not our thing.”

“How ’bout Jim Reynolds?” His words came out in a small rush, as if he’d suddenly tired of his own game.

I was startled and didn’t immediately respond. I remembered Tyler’s mentioning Reynolds’s office being broken into. Given his prominence as a state senator and a local attorney, I now realized I should have followed that up.

I decided to play it straight. “Can’t help you, Stan. Reynolds never came up. Why?”

I could feel him wavering, wondering how much to admit. “I got a call. Guy said there might be a connection.”

“To the truck or Norm Blood?” I asked.

Now I sensed embarrassment. Apparently, Katz had been hoping for a totally different kind of conversation from this.

“Neither, really, just to haz mat in general. I figured it was the truck, ’cause that’s the only case I know about right now. You been working on anything else concerning illegal dumping?”

“Nope. That’s it. What did your informant say, exactly?”

He sounded almost relieved to stop playing cat-and-mouse. “He didn’t identify himself. He requested me by name, and asked if I’d heard Jim Reynolds was up to his waist in illegal dumping. I said no, and he told me I better hop to it or the Rutland Herald was going to eat my lunch-again.”

The Herald was arguably the best paper in Vermont, and the fact that it regularly scooped the Reformer on Brattleboro stories was one reason it had earned that reputation. Katz himself had once defected to them briefly, just before the Reformer’s last owner had sold out to the employees, who in turn had wooed Stanley back.

“What did Pat Mason say?” I asked.

“A generalized ‘no comment.’”

I paused again, my brain teeming with questions Katz couldn’t answer. “Well, Stanley, I don’t know what to tell you. We haven’t heard a peep about Reynolds.”

His disappointment turned to bitterness. “But you’ll put me first on the phone list when you do, right?”

I considered trying to smooth his feathers. He had, after all, made me a gift of sorts. But I changed my mind. “All in good time, Stanley.”

After the phone died in my ear, I dialed Tyler on the intercom.

“Who filed the report on that break-in at Reynolds’s office?”

“Bobby Miller. I just saw him in the Officers’ Room.”

“Thanks.”

I left my cubicle, crossed the building’s central corridor, and entered the department’s other half through an unmarked side door that led directly into the communal area we’d dubbed the Officers’ Room. There were several desks scattered about, each one crowned with a beige computer. In one corner was the patrol captain’s lair, glassed in like my own, in another was a fridge and a counter with a coffee machine, a microwave, and an assortment of cups, plates, and other kitchen debris. Bobby Miller, coming on duty, was loading up on caffeine.

I tapped him on the shoulder.

His face lit up when he recognized me, which wasn’t guaranteed with all the uniforms, our department being pretty typical when it came to rivalry with the plainclothes cops. “Hi, Lieutenant. How’re you doin’?”

“Fine. I wondered if I could pick your brain about a call a few weeks ago.”

“Sure.” He finished pouring cream into his coffee and took it and a doughnut over to a small conference table nearby. “This okay?”

I took a doughnut myself and sat opposite him. “You were in on the office break-in at Jim Reynolds’s, right?”

He nodded, his mouth full.

“How did that go?”

He swallowed, took a sip of coffee, and then shrugged. “Nothing much to it. I saw the back door was slightly open when I drove through the parking lot, so I called for backup. Pierre Lavoie showed up about three minutes later, and we both checked it out. The office sits by itself on a patch of lawn, with the sidewalk out front and the parking lot in back, so it didn’t take much to go around the outside and see what was what.

“By that time, Sheila had joined us, so we all three went inside. As far as we could tell, things looked pretty intact. There was one filing cabinet in an inner office that had a couple of drawers open, but that was it.”

“No stolen computers or radios or anything else?”

Finishing a second sip, he shook his head. “Nope. It all looked normal. We called Reynolds at home right after, so he could confirm if anything was missing. He got there about fifteen minutes later.”

“Did you see anyone near the building before you noticed the door, like a lookout or maybe the burglar pretending to be a pedestrian walking away?”

Miller looked unhappy with himself. “I thought about that later. I was coming from the west, which means I drove past the front of the building, up its far side, and then into the parking lot. If whoever was inside saw me right off, he would’ve had time to head out the back. I did notice a car driving down the street next to the lot, away from the main drag, but it was only after I was writing the whole thing up that I wondered where it had come from. Given the direction it was heading, I should’ve seen it just before I pulled in, either in my lane or approaching from opposite. So it must’ve been already parked on that street, waiting. I didn’t think about it at the time, though, so I have no idea what kind of car it was. I just saw the taillights out of the corner of my eye.”