Fall Guy

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always with these tall tales, I am indebted to many others for at least trying to keep me on the straight and narrow when it comes to procedures, protocols, and processes. Those below did their best, I am sure. The results of my heeding their guidance, however, are all my responsibility.

Tom Andrews

Margot Mayor

Greg Davis

Castle Freeman

Tracy Shriver

Sean Eaton

Eric James

VSP Bomb Squad

Sarah Clark

Steven Brown

John Martin

Adam Belville

Ray Walker

Todd Faulkner

Jeremy Evans

Matt Sweitzer

NHSP

Jesse Bristol

CHAPTER ONE

Joe Gunther crested the hill overlooking a small cluster of flashing, multihued vehicles below. They made him think of a swarm of fireflies, settled untidily by the side of the road, but in fact were a group of cruisers and unmarked cars much like his own. They appeared randomly scattered, as if abruptly stopped by a startling event.

They had in fact been summoned here, in the looming twilight of a fading Vermont winter day, as they often were by mishap or catastrophe, to sort through another mess left in humanity’s wake. Their common dismissal of parking protocols was due mostly to this road having been closed to traffic. But, beneath it, Joe recognized a fondness for flouting convention, perhaps because police officers were so often called upon to enforce it. Cops could be rebels that way: trained to the rule of law, obedient to procedure, policy, and authority, they are also drawn by the occupation’s spontaneity, adrenaline, and the rewards it offers creative thinkers.

Anyone can mentally retire while still on the job and merely put in the hours. Police officers are no different. But older investigators tend to rise to a higher calling. They are the profession’s theorists, and when placed among the right peers, the best of them can be almost termed artists.

Joe was such a man, a veteran of decades of police work, and he was about to join a group of colleagues honed by experience to the same edge. He was the field force commander of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, and they were all about to lay open the inner workings of an untimely death.

It was late winter—cold, harboring decaying, crunchy snow, and punctuated by surrounding bare-armed trees, their dark branches upthrust in surrender or supplication. It was getting warmer—slightly—the days longer, the lakes melting from their edges, and snowfall more frequently turning to rain. Winter was dying, for which Joe was grateful. He liked New England’s seasons, had known them all his life, and cherished living where, for six months at least, nature could be lethal. But it was the variety that gave the place life, and everyone he knew was ready for the coming spring, especially now that the annual maple sugarers were done collecting their product.

Everyone apart from the person responsible for their spontaneous gathering, who presumably no longer cared.

Joe rolled to a stop by the side of the road, the only vehicle not using its strobes.

A man, narrow, intense, unsmiling, approached with watchful eyes. His lame left arm was pinned to his side by its hand being tucked into his Tyvek suit’s pocket. This was Willy Kunkle, one of Joe’s small special unit, whose injury had been incurred years earlier in a shoot-out, but whose natural talent—and Joe’s influence—had kept him employed.

“Hey, boss,” he said in greeting, his accent betraying a hint of his New York City roots. He opened Joe’s door and stood back to let the older man out.

Joe looked at him inquiringly as he straightened and stamped his feet.

Willy answered the unstated question. “It’s a clusterfuck. We’re gonna earn our pay with this one.”

Joe nodded, looking around. “Who else is here?”

“Who isn’t?” Kunkle counted off. “We got state police, sheriff’s deputies, our crew, the ME’s office is responding, EMS just left, and the local fire department is working the detour. We’re only missing the town constable. Even the wrecker showed up early to rubberneck.” He gestured toward a shallow ravine running between the woods and the hard-packed dirt road. “But that wasn’t what you meant, I know. Sam’s down there. Lester’s wrapping up a case at the office. Should be here soon.”

Sam was Samantha Martens, another squad member and the mother of Willy’s child, Emma. Lester Spinney was the last of the VBI’s southeast regional team—one of the agency’s smallest despite its caseload, which was not something this tight-knit group wanted to change. They’d become family over time and preferred no outside meddling.

As he pulled on the type of white coveralls everyone else was already wearing, Joe indicated the roof of the abandoned car he could see from this angle. “Looks fancier than your average used pickup.”

“By about a hundred grand,” Willy agreed. “Mercedes four-door. Crap car, in my opinion. All flash for a lotta cash. You could do as well with a GM. Course, that’s just me. It’s registered in New Hampshire and was reported stolen five days ago.”

Joe was beginning to grasp his colleague’s point about complications. “Therefore not belonging to the dead man I was told was inside?” he asked doubtfully.

“You wish. Let’s just say the word inside is a matter of interpretation. He’s in the trunk, which they made way too small, natch.”

“Stolen five days ago?” Joe asked. “No one traced its GPS? They should’ve found it within hours.”

Willy hitched one shoulder. “Beats me. Supposedly, they tried but got no signal. Who knows?”

Felony crime scene reconstructions tend to be oddly leisurely paced affairs. Perimeter and access avenues are established and roped off, vehicles come and go on assorted tasks, tents are set up, specialist teams delicately work around one another like dancers of a minuet, and quiet conversations occur in small clusters, with hands cupped around paper cardboard cups of hot coffee. In some instances, as here, the natural daylight gradually yields to a spindly forest of powerful LED lamps, a growling thrumming of generators adding to the already running car engines.

Thousands of images are taken throughout, by patrol officers, investigators, medical examiners, and a special crew manning a FARO 3D digital camera designed to preserve the whole scene as a form of hologram—this to be available long after the surrounding reality has been dispatched to the morgue, the wrecker’s yard, or fed into VBI computers for analysis, consolidation, and distribution.

At some point, state crime lab investigators arrive in a large truck and collect, bag, and inventory anything from cars to computers to footprints and finger smudges. Collectively named the CSST, or Crime Scene Search Team, they catalog and store bag after bag until, finally—many hours later—the ant-like activity slows and dissipates, the cruisers, vans, tow trucks, and SUVs thin out, and at last, the reopened road and surrounding bare trees get to witness once more the gentle creaking of cold branches in the quiet breeze, and the rare passage of a car whose driver has no idea of the theatrics preceding his appearance.

Having arrived long before that end point, indeed at the height of the activity, Joe stepped off the road and gingerly worked his way downslope, following one of the staked-out avenues to the rear of the thoroughly stuck four-door sedan. He ended up beside a slightly built but wiry, intense young woman who was aiming her camera at the interior of the car’s trunk.

“Hey,” he greeted her quietly.

“Hey back,” Sammie Martens replied, still shooting.

“We have an ID yet?”

“Course not. Can’t be that easy.” She lowered the camera to study the curled-up body before them, nestled like a sleeping stowaway resting on his side, one hand tucked under his cheek.

“The ME hasn’t moved him yet,” she added. “He might have a wallet.”

“Despite your having already checked.”

She cast him a look. “That would be a breach of protocol, boss. You know I’d never do that.”

Her voice lost its hint of playfulness as she indicated the young man’s blue-jeaned hip. “I’m betting it’s gone. You can see the faded outline of a billfold in his back pocket. He was probably relieved of it before getting shoved in here.”

“To steal his documents and money or to hide his identity?” Joe asked.

“Questions to be answered, for sure.”

“When you weren’t checking for an ID, did you also not notice how he might’ve died?”

Sam tapped the side of her head. “Don’t know what’s going on under his clothes, but he caught something hard with his temple. It looks ugly enough to be fatal.”

“We know who the car belongs to yet?”

“One Lemuel Shaw,” she offered. “If you can believe that. I hope for his sake he has a nickname.”

“Old New England moniker,” Joe said. “Where from?”

“Gilsum, New Hampshire, between Keene and Marlow,” she told him. “On Route 10. If the car’s any sign, I’d say Mr. Shaw eats high on the hog.”

“How do you know this isn’t Mr. Shaw?”

“Wild guess? There’s about a fifty-year age difference, according to Shaw’s DMV photo.”

“Willy doesn’t think much of the car. I overheard somebody say it looked like a teenager’s bedroom.”

Sam led him to one of the rear doors, open to reveal a lightly stained and dirty back seat. “Most of what was in here’s been removed for inventorying, but you can still see how it was all just tossed in. There wasn’t room for our friend, even if that had been an option.”

“So what’s your theory?”

She answered immediately. “I don’t think it was moving day. It all amounted to easy-to-carry tech toys, booze, silverware, and a piece or two of jewelry. And money, just thrown in. A real jumble.”

“A magpie nest,” Joe surmised.

She nodded. “But is our dead man the magpie?”

“And who were the drivers?”

“Drivers?” she asked, before catching herself. “Right. Dumb. The one who drove here and the one who picked him up after.”

Joe made light of it. “He could’ve driven a corpse here and then stuck his thumb out to hitch a ride. Not a stretch, considering some of the people we’ve arrested.”

Sam accepted his kindness. “True, but unlikely.”

“How ’bout foot or tire prints?” Joe asked, moving on.

“Yes on the first, cast and photographed, not that I’m putting much faith in them. Negative on the tire marks. The first responders didn’t totally destroy the scene before they left, but the road still had nothing to tell us. CSST did a complete exterior sweep; they have yet to do the car’s inside, just so you know. They’re waiting till they get better lighting and more heat. And they haven’t grabbed the electronic black box.”

“Speaking of which,” Joe said, “Willy told me nobody got a fix on the GPS after it was reported stolen. What’s that about?”

“I was told they got no joy. Maybe something short-circuited the unit.”

“How many times did they try?”

“Beats me,” she replied. “Nor do I know which agency was asked.”

A waving flashlight beam caught their attention. Willy was above them, signaling from the edge of the road. “Got something interesting up here.”

“Maybe the driver did stick his thumb out and got run over,” Sam commented.

“We could never be so lucky,” Joe replied, joining her in the steep but short climb back up.

On top, Willy indicated the open rear doors of the CSST truck, whose glaring interior was equipped in part like a mobile office, complete with stools and workbenches.

“Jim found something you’ll love,” Willy added, his tone thick with irony.

Jim Collins was the CSST leader, whom they found seated near the front after clambering into the truck. He was situated before a rectangular container with a glass viewing window cut into its top and two holes into which he’d thrust his hands to work on something inside.

“Joe, good to see you. Sorry I can’t greet you formally.” He nodded toward the box holding his hands. They knew what he was doing. Standard search protocol regarding electronics dictated that officers first and foremost protect all phones, tablets, and computers from possible self-destruct signals sent remotely by their owners. They do this by using so-called Faraday pouches, designed to shield devices from outside impulses until they can be delivered to the lab. However—given the unlikely yet fortunate circumstance of a computer lab readily available by the side of the road at night, complete with an even larger, full-fledged Faraday box—an initial quick peek was too hard to resist.

“There were only six phones recovered from the car,” Jim was saying, “so I thought, what the hell, right? This being the only one without encryption, why not take a look? You might be glad I did.”

Joe peered over the top of the man’s Tyvek-hooded head to look into the lighted box. The portals Jim had used for his hands were fitted with gray metallic gloves inside, making the box’s interior as secure in its way as a miniature biohazard vacuum room, and Joe could admire how Collins’s fingers were expertly manipulating the phone’s controls to reveal its contents.

“Kiddie porn,” Jim explained, scrolling through images of pale, hairless, exposed young flesh. “Found it in an email where the sender said that if the recipient likes what he sees, there’s more available, quote-unquote, the usual way.”

Joe straightened, sadly not surprised. “Swell,” he said darkly. “Just what we needed.”

Blessedly, Vermont was no hotbed of child abuse, but it had enough of its share to make these images depressingly familiar.

Willy was standing within earshot. “It might be. Jim says the phone’s also from New Hampshire. All this—the car, the body, the contents—is looking more and more like a dump job, although there’s no saying the guy in the trunk wasn’t killed over here.”

Joe turned toward him. “Keep going.”

Willy indicated the Faraday box. “That email could legally give us cross-border access to New Hampshire. Underage porn is a federal rap, and those photos are date-stamped recently enough to maybe make them an ongoing crime, not to mention the peer-to-peer implications of the text, which point to trafficking. We could use all that to mother-may-I the AG’s office and get the ICAC task force activated. Keep us involved, regardless of jurisdiction.”

Collins spoke without looking up. “If you do cross the river, Fred Houston’s your man—he’s ICAC out of Cheshire County and a federal task force officer, to boot. Incredible resource. Nice guy, too.”

Joe listened without responding, processing Willy’s suggestion. ICAC stood for Internet Crimes Against Children, the umbrella organization representing dozens of task forces across thousands of police agencies nationwide, all aimed at interdicting and prosecuting the offenses advertised in its name.