Archer Mayor - Occam's razor

I thought it likely he was right, but I didn’t want to make him feel any worse by rubbing it in.

I moved on instead. “What was Reynolds like on the phone? Were you the one who talked to him?”

“Yeah. He wasn’t happy. Kept asking if anything was missing. I told him that’s why we were calling him. But he was different once he got there. After he gave the place a quick once-over, he acted like it was no big deal.”

“You mention the open filing cabinet?”

“Specifically. I figured a lawyer would be more antsy about that than a missing fax machine or whatever. You want my personal opinion, he was more upset than he wanted us to know. When I first showed him the open drawers, it was like he was glued to the spot, he was so surprised. That’s why his change of mood was so weird-like it was forced.”

I thought for a minute about what he’d told me, allowing him time to take another bite of doughnut. After he’d finished, I asked, “Bobby, do you have any idea what was in those drawers?”

He hesitated before answering. “Not really. There wasn’t much point in our poking around in them. I did take a glance, though. I think they were case files-old ones. I remember noticing that the tabs on the manila folders were bent and a little dirty, like they’d seen a lot of use. But I suppose that could be true for ongoing cases, too, considering how long it takes to get through the system…I guess I don’t really know. Sorry.”

I stood up. “Don’t be. That’s all I needed.”

To his questioning look, I added, “His name’s come up in something else. Seemed like twice in a couple of weeks was quite a coincidence.”

Bobby Miller was apparently satisfied with that, since he went back to his doughnut without comment.

I, however, was more curious than ever. I doubted the Reynolds break-in was any standard smash-and-grab. The contents of that filing cabinet had to have been the motive. The question therefore became: Did the thief have time to do what he’d set out to do, or had he been interrupted prematurely? Was Reynolds’s change of mood a feint, or did he see at a glance that he had nothing to fear?

Jim Reynolds had worked in this town for over fifteen years, exclusively as a criminal defense attorney. He and Gail’s boss had faced off in a number of high-profile cases, and even when he’d lost-which was rare-he’d squeezed out every legal option available to him, earning him the non-flattering nickname in our office of “Robo-lawyer.”

He had also become one of the town’s high-profile citizens, joining the right groups, associating with the right heavy hitters, so that when he’d finally run for state senate, after brief stints on the school and select boards, both the announcement and subsequent victory had been all but preordained.

What had been surprising was how little we’d heard from him since, given the attention-grabbing foreplay. Admittedly, politicians in Vermont operate a little differently from those elsewhere. We run a true citizen-legislature, which generally only goes from January to April or May. Most of our legislators have outside jobs, since the best they can hope for as politicians, including extras, isn’t much more than $13,000 a year. Only the governor, the lieutenant governor, and the speaker of the House get paid year-round.

So it’s true that neither the Jim Reynoldses nor their House counterparts have the opportunities or the budgets to make the headlines their full-time colleagues do in other states. Correspondingly, because of this double existence, it is also a fact that relatively few attorneys run for state office, since it cuts so seriously into their schedules and incomes.

I’d therefore thought that having achieved what he’d wanted politically, Jim Reynolds had suddenly found himself running a part-time practice while being a part-time legislator-dividing by half any chance to be truly effective. Gail gave him more credit. She felt he was just biding his time, waiting for the right issue.

It looked like she’d been right.

He was nearing the end of his second two-year term. Legislative sessions straddle a biennium, and this January had marked the start of the second half, called the “adjournment session.” Reynolds was the chair of the powerful Judiciary Committee, but he’d failed to win the pro-tem position, which in practice is the Senate’s top dog-the lieutenant governor’s title of “president” notwithstanding-and I’d argued with Gail earlier that his enthusiasm might be running out.

Until Amos Melcourt had killed those two kids, of course. Now it looked like Reynolds had found himself a life raft and, with it, the backing of the governor and his head of Public Safety, Dave Stanton. Since Willy Kunkle had sourly revealed all this in the office several days ago, one of the promised public hearings on revamping statewide law enforcement had taken place in Rutland-to rave reviews. People had turned out in droves, almost every police agency had been used to mop the floor, and Reynolds was beginning to look like the spear-point of change.

All of which reminded me of Watergate and made me wonder if a simple botched break-in might be more than it appeared.

I didn’t get the chance to mull over the break-in of Jim Reynolds’s office any longer than it took me to leave Bobby Miller to his doughnut, cross to my side of the building, and come face-to-face with Harriet Fritter, the squad’s administrative assistant and a doting grandmother several times over. “There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“I was in the Officers’ Room-ten minutes tops.”

“There’s been a killing on White Birch Avenue. A woman stabbed with a knife.” Her face suddenly hardened. “And a baby, too.”

I squeezed her shoulder in sympathy and continued to my office to fetch my coat. “Everyone there now?”

“The first units, just barely. It came in as a missing persons first.”

I returned down the hallway, struggling into my parka. “Okay. You know the drill. Round up who we need. They have a suspect yet?”

“Not that I heard.”

White Birch Avenue is located in the southeast quadrant of town, a flat plateau dominated by a contrasting mixture of three cemeteries, the high school, the town garage, a sedate middle-class neighborhood, and some of the poorest housing we’ve got. Depending on where you are in this area, you have no inkling of the existence of its other parts, such is the division from one section to the next.

White Birch is barely a hundred yards long. Connected to South Main and dead-ending at the gates of Saint Michael’s Cemetery, it is narrow and shady to the point of being overgrown, tucked away out of sight and out of the public’s general consciousness. The homes along its length run from fairly run-down to flat-out decrepit. It is not at the bottom of Brattleboro’s food chain, but it is not far removed.

I reached it in under four minutes.

The scene was much more active than the railroad tracks had been in the middle of the night. There, the assumption had been that a bum had committed suicide. Here, there were no doubts what had happened, and as Harriet had demonstrated, a child’s involvement had cranked up emotions to the utmost. South Main Street was jammed with ambulances, squad cars, and private vehicles with either red or blue flashing lights, even though the first of these couldn’t have been summoned more than ten minutes earlier, and most weren’t necessary now. The late afternoon light hovered between day and night, making the colorful, pulsating display all the more festive in a world of uniform gray.

I parked at a distance and walked to White Birch, which already had yellow tape barring it from the growing crowd. I was happy things had been so quickly contained.