Archer Mayor - Scent of Evil

“This bastard ought to have it; it’s what Doug recommended to Buddy.” He flipped to the back, ran his finger down the list of entries, and muttered, “Bingo.”

Without a word, unconsciously slipping into old cooperative habits born of prior years of working together, Tyler dropped a cotton glove onto the book, which Kunkle pulled onto his hand with his teeth. He then turned to the appropriate page near the front of the book, flattened the page by tugging gently at its corners, and quickly scanned its contents.

“That it?” Tyler asked.

“Yup.”

Tyler withdrew a foot-long cylindrical object from the evidence case he’d brought with him. “You realize this is a shot in the dark. Any prints have to be less than two weeks old for this gizmo to work.”

“Christ’s sake, J.P., just do it. You can run for cover later.”

In official terminology, what J.P. was preparing for use was called a “disposable iodine fuming gun.” Fat and short at one end, long and thin at the other, it looked like a straightened-out bubble pipe. Tyler took the fat end between his fingers and rolled it back and forth, crushing the iodine crystals within and releasing a small amount of gas. He then bent over the page Kunkle was holding open and blew through the slim end of the pipe, using his breath to wash the gas over the surface of the paper. Slowly, as he swept the operating end back and forth, two clear ochre-colored prints began to appear. He concentrated on them, no longer moving about, until they were sharply revealed. He then put down the fuming gun, quickly pulled a fingerprint card from his pocket, and held it next to the two already fading prints he’d uncovered.

There was a noticeable stillness in the small group around him. “It’s a match.”

“You’re absolutely sure?” Brandt asked.

Willy slapped Tyler on the back once, an uncharacteristically jovial gesture for him. “’Course, he’s sure; son of a bitch never says anything unless he’s sure.”

We all looked at the page while the prints quickly faded from view. Later, up in Waterbury at the State Police Crime Lab, they would be made to appear permanently through a different process. But for now, this was all we needed. Tyler prepared a cardboard container for the book from materials he’d brought with him.

“All right,” I said. “We’ve got a murder victim with curare in him, a report of missing curare, bottles with Buddy’s prints that were near those stolen bottles, and now we’ve got his prints on an article dealing with curare. Enough for a warrant?”

Brandt nodded. “Certainly enough to try for one.”

Tyler was still troubled. “If the curare was stolen months ago, Buddy must have consulted the PDR back then. Why was I able to find fresh prints?”

Kunkle wasn’t worried, predictably. “Who cares? Maybe he came back to refresh his memory on how to inject the stuff. Point is, when the state lab guys do a real job on that page, I bet they’ll find a bunch of prints dating way back.”

“Including a few extras from other people,” Tyler muttered.

Kunkle shrugged. “I doubt it. It’s a recent edition, and I bet there aren’t too many people brushing up on South American poisons around here.”

Brandt chuckled. “In Brattleboro, who knows?”

Buddy Schultz lived on Prospect Street, the single inhabitant of the only run-down, weather-beaten, one-and-a-half-story clapboard building on the street, perched on the edge of a sixty-foot, heavily wooded, almost precipitous incline that overlooked Clark Street and, beyond it, Canal Street. Buddy’s home loomed almost directly over the erstwhile grave of Charlie Jardine.

By the time we reached the building’s sagging front stoop, it had been surrounded by officers, and Tyler and DeFlorio were near certain the place was empty. Under normal circumstances, that would have come as no surprise; it was late at night, when Buddy normally was supposed to be carrying out his janitorial duties at the Municipal Building. We hadn’t been able to locate him tonight, however. But standing here, waiting for the door’s lock to be forced, I had the creepy feeling that he wasn’t far off, and was probably watching us now.

Dennis, J.P., Sammie, and several members of the Special Reaction Team entered first, guns drawn, fanning out inside like a release of lethal, armored locusts.

I stayed outside, listening to the sound of boots pounding throughout the building, enjoying the first hint of coming coolness in the night air. The forecast for tomorrow was for temperatures in the seventies, with an eighty-percent chance of rain. The weather, like the investigation, looked about ready to break.

“Scene’s secure.”

I entered a central hallway, with a small living room to one side, a spare bedroom to the other, the kitchen straight ahead. Even with the lights on, it had a dingy, dark, forgotten feel to it. The wallpaper bellied out from the walls, the wooden floors had been ground into a uniform gray, the light fixtures were bare bulbs. It wasn’t a dirty place but definitely forlorn.

“Joe?” Tyler stuck his head out of a doorway farther down the hall.

I joined him at the entrance of a bedroom/office combination, really just a room with a bed at one end and a desk at the other. But it was obviously the heart of the house and, aside from the bathroom and kitchen, probably the most used room of all; unlike the rest of the place, it looked, if not cheerful, at least comfortable. There was an ancient, overstuffed armchair, a well placed black-and-white TV, stacks of well-thumbed paperback books and periodicals reflecting an eclectic and surprisingly intellectual range. I reminded myself that the inhabitant here had once been a grade-A student with hopes of college and presumably a great deal beyond. It was a sobering reminder of how potentially poisonous the mixture of brains and a damaged psyche could be.

I stepped back into the hallway and whistled loudly. “Yo, people. Your attention for a second.”

Heads appeared from various openings.

“Just a few reminders: One, we have a warrant for curare only; two, if you find it, let out a shout so J.P. can deal with it; and three, if you find anything else that catches your eye, let us know. If it’s juicy enough, we can try to expand the warrant to include it, but do not look in places where a bottle of curare obviously wouldn’t be.”

There was a general murmuring of assent and most of the heads disappeared.

“I think I got something here,” I heard Sammie announce from behind me.

I re-entered the bedroom and crossed over to where she had removed the drawers of the desk; she was flashing a light inside the cavity.

“Looks like one of those soft-sided briefcases.”

I stuck my head in next to hers and saw what she was describing, wedged high up against the back of the desk, just shy of where the drawer back would end up when the drawer itself was closed. “Looks like it could hold a bottle or two. J.P.?”

Tyler came over, took a photograph of the desk, then a close-up of the case in its hiding place, and finally gingerly removed it, wearing his cotton gloves. He unzipped the top and poured the contents out onto the floor. Fanned out before us were a sheaf of documents, notes, and letters, and rolling a short distance away before coming to a stop in the middle of the room was a long black metal cylinder. A silencer.

None of us moved for a moment. I quickly scanned the top sheet and another that poked out farther than the others. The first was a bank account showing Fred McDermott’s address but using the same false name we’d found his slush fund hidden under. The second was a plaintive note from Luman Jackson, agreeing to “the terms you set forth” but demanding, typically, that “this must have an end or I will damn the consequences.”