Archer Mayor - Scent of Evil

Sammie glanced up at the ceiling as if it were dripping microphones. “Kind of gives you the creeps, doesn’t it?”

Fred McDermott was obviously delighted to get out of the small interrogation room. He paused on the edge of the parking lot at the back of the Municipal Building and filled his lungs with air as if we were camping by the side of a mountain lake.

It was still dark, but just barely. The first half-light of dawn was beginning to slip between dark objects and their backgrounds, bringing them into relief. I led the way to a grassy slope under some trees and sat down. McDermott joined me, awkwardly placing his hands on his chubby knees. He didn’t ask why I’d brought him out here.

“Fred, you said you got a call telling you to meet me at the high school, is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right.” His head bobbed several times too many, a reflection of just how baffled he still was after the night’s activities.

“Did the voice sound familiar at all? Did he identify himself?”

“No, I didn’t know who it was. He just said he was calling from the police department with a message from you.”

“Did he specify the time and location?”

“Oh, yes; the middle-school entrance on the south side at midnight.”

“And you were to go inside the building?”

“That’s right; go inside and wait.”

“You didn’t ask why? It was kind of an odd request, wasn’t it?”

“Well, I was curious, but I didn’t really get a chance. He just made sure I had it right, and then he hung up. Oh, and he said it was confidential and to keep it to myself.”

“What time did he call?” I asked.

“It was late, around ten-thirty.”

I paused at that. If he was being truthful, that was right after Pierre’s bogus call to me setting up the meet. Apparently, our elaborate hoax had been a failure from the start. Our eavesdropper must have been standing around, knowing what we were up to, just waiting for the location so he could put his game plan into motion.

“Fred,” I resumed, “do you have any particular bone to pick with Luman Jackson, professionally or otherwise?”

He shook his head. “I barely know the man.”

“But you came to him complaining that we were putting pressure on you.”

He looked surprised. “Oh, no. He came to me. He said he’d heard about it someplace and wanted to know if it was true. I told him we’d talked, that it had startled me a bit, but it hadn’t particularly bothered me. I’d just figured you were doing your job.”

“He didn’t identify his source of information?”

McDermott paused, and his face furrowed in concentration, but I knew what he’d say before he said it.

“No, I’m sure he didn’t say.”

I shifted focus abruptly, trying to catch him off balance. “What’re you doing with almost fifty thousand dollars in the bank, listed under a phony name?”

He looked at me blankly for a moment, then blinked and stared harder, as if my nose had suddenly sprouted flowers. “What?”

I plowed on, despite his blatant incredulity. “We found a listening device in the ceiling of my office, hooked to a transmitter under your filing cabinet. Combining that with your always showing up at the wrong place at the wrong time with these killings, we got a search warrant and dug into your bank records. It wasn’t hidden too well.”

He shook his head, his mouth partly open. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Joe. I’ve never had fifty thousand in the bank. I’ve never had that kind of money anywhere.”

“Regular deposits, nice fat ones, made out to Fred Ellison, who happens to have your home address and your first and middle names.”

He spread his hands out to each side in symbolic surrender. He was so taken aback by the suggestion, he wasn’t even irritated at our invading his privacy. “I swear to God, I don’t know anything about it. I know I keep saying that, like when I showed up at that murder scene just as it was going off, but I’m innocent. I don’t know why, but somebody must have it in for me, ’cause I haven’t done a thing, honest.”

His eyes were wide and soft, devoid of the calculation and malice I’d seen in Jackson’s just a half hour before. I stared off over the parking lot, now lit by an anemic pale-gray sky, plugging what had occurred over the last few hours into what we already knew. McDermott stayed quiet and still beside me.

I finally looked at him again. “Have you ever had anything to do with the Brattleboro Union High School?”

He half shrugged. “Sure, I have to inspect it every once in a while, just like I do all the other schools.”

“How about in some other capacity? Did you attend school there?”

“No. I lived in Rutland as a kid.”

“Ever have any problems in your role as inspector?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. Everybody slips up now and then. When I found something out of line at the school, I just told the assistant principal and it was taken care of.”

“A few years ago, they had to tear a lot of asbestos out. Did you catch any flak for that?”

“No. People were unhappy; said they’d lived through it fine and didn’t see that their kids were doing any worse, but that was just normal complaining. I mean, hell, it hit my taxes, too. I wished like crazy I could have told them it was no problem.”

I thought about it some more. “How about any of the people there? Ever get into a tangle with one of the teachers or maintenance staff?”

He just kept shaking his head.

I saw Brandt appear at the back door of the building and look around. I waved to him and turned to McDermott. “Hang on a sec, would you? Be right back.”

Brandt nodded toward McDermott as I approached. “Getting anywhere?”

“Not yet. I just started fishing for a high-school angle.”

“You really think that’s where it all ties together?”

I looked back at the round building inspector, perched on the slope like a soft boulder. “I don’t know… A hunch. I keep thinking all this began a long time ago, like when Jardine and Rose and John Woll first met up.”

“In high school,” Brandt finished.

“Yeah, the same place Jackson taught.”

“And the same place you chose for your wishful-thinking bushwhacking tonight. You do that on purpose?”

I tilted my head to one side. “I don’t know. Maybe subconsciously. It was the only other place besides the Municipal Building in which a few of the players had a common link.”

Brandt shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ve known three of them were connected through high school from the start of this thing. You’ve had people checking into that for days with nothing to show for it.”

“Maybe the fact that we knew it early on made it unremarkable; we knew John and Rose had to have met somewhere, so Jardine having been their classmate was the only coincidence. And in a town this size, it wasn’t much of one. Then came Milly. There was no school connection there, but it introduced the whole drug angle, which introduced us to Cappelli and Atwater and the others. We lost sight of the original connection.”

“Which Luman Jackson has just revived.”

“Yeah; there’s something else, though. Look at who we’re dealing with. It’s not some guy discovering his partner was skimming the profits, or his wife was fooling around. We’re after someone with some serious anger here. Jardine was executed with amazing forethought. His killer thought for a long time, years probably, about the best way to do it. He researched it like a guy building an atom bomb, fantasizing about how he’d like to do it, then finding a way to make the fantasy real. He found out about curare, God knows how, and then discovered how he could get his hands on some. He stole just enough, months in advance. See what I’m saying? This guy was burning like a long, slow fuse.”