As I entered the car, I glanced back at Mike and saw him raise his eyebrows with irrepressible anticipation. He had wanted a real case; and apparently we were about to get one.
As I settled into my seat, Pete handed me a small pillow that he had brought along, with characteristic decency. “Here,” he said uneasily. “For your—hip, or whatever.”
“Very good of you, Deputy,” I said gratefully, attempting to bolster the left side of my lower back and pelvis into as comfortable a position as possible. “And may we also know where we’re going?”
“West Briarwood,” he answered. “But that really is it. Just hang on till we get there.” And with that we headed back down the hollow, Pete once more turning his spinning roof lights on and leaving his siren alone, while driving faster than was his custom. In addition, I noticed that he had turned his radio off: a highly unusual move for any officer, and one plainly intended to prevent our overhearing open-channel chatter about our destination and the case that was awaiting us.
{ii.}
The town of West Briarwood was far more typical of communities in Burgoyne County than was the small, seemingly featureless village of Surrender: grouped around the intersection of Route 7 and yet another randomly numbered county road (for there has never been any system other than whim involved in the ordering of New York county byways) were a Stewart’s convenience store; a mini-mall that featured a liquor vendor; a run-down grocery store; and several other shops, each of which was constantly having either a grand opening or a closing sale. Residentially, there were about two dozen run-down but quaint late-nineteenth-century houses (most of them long ago gutted and refashioned into apartments), along with more recent ranch houses that did nothing but provide a reminder that time had brought few enlightened developments to the county. Our business that day, however, lay beyond the town proper: again taking to one of the ubiquitous hollows of the county, this one hopefully named Daybreak Lane (despite the fact that the foothill it was cut into faced west), we rode up about five hundred feet in elevation and two miles in distance, past farmhouses in need of repair and surrounded by old cars and trucks, as well as lawn and farm equipment, nearly all of it for sale.
Finally, we closed in on a seemingly ancient mobile home that stood amid a group of secondary-growth trees at some remove from the lane. It was plainly abandoned, although how long it had stood so was impossible to say. Much of its siding was missing, revealing loose insulation, and several windows had been replaced with thick plastic that had once been relatively clear, but was now dismally murky. A large, plainly visible and badly encrusted sewage hose had served for a septic system, running away from the house and into an obliging field; and small amounts of a brown liquid, driven, in all likelihood, by a rusted, running toilet drawing on the trailer’s defective well, still trickled steadily into a patch of discolored grass. Yet all these signs of decay and ignorance would, sadly, have almost certainly been as much in evidence when the trailer had been inhabited as they were now. Realizing this, I glanced back at Mike, and could see that his unadulterated anticipation had grown mitigated by apprehension: if ever a place promised not only a crime but a history of singularly grim details, we had reached it.
Additional unpleasantness, of a more mundane but still troublesome variety, was indicated by a collection of vehicles that had already gathered around this standing testament to desperation: the personal squad car of Sheriff Steve Spinetti was closest to the trailer door, and behind it was parked a battered black Chevy Impala that I recognized as belonging to Dr. Ernest Weaver, medical examiner for not only Burgoyne but several other counties, as well. Finally, jammed in behind Weaver’s car, there was a van drawn from the fleet of the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center in Albany, the central crime lab that served all counties that did not have their own forensics facility (such being most) or that were not near one of the FIC’s field stations. The FIC had fared as badly, during the era of forensic scandals, as had most labs in the nation, and neither Mike nor I was pleased to see it represented. Nor, to his credit, was Pete: the deputy’s lead foot on the highway had apparently embodied his effort to get us to the scene quickly enough to avoid territorial and philosophical disputes. But such encounters now seemed inevitable. The van had likely brought to the scene one or more of a group of lab techs, almost all of whom were known to both Mike and myself; and, judging from the bored, slightly angry look of the state trooper who had evidently been ordered under duress to ferry the tech and his equipment, he, she, or they must already have been on the scene for a fair amount of time.
Pete pulled in alongside the van, on what had once been the trailer’s lawn, and as he released Mike from the back seat of his car, I used my cane to get out and upright, catching the eye of the state trooper just long enough to see him turn away in various forms of disgust, not the least of which was likely the realization that he would not be getting back to Albany any time soon. As for Dr. Weaver and the tech, they were evidently inside, while Steve Spinetti was approaching us, waving one large arm and hand as he smiled in enjoyment.
“You must’ve drove pretty fast, Pete,” he said with a chuckle, his long nose reaching down toward his upper lip as he did. His merriment was characteristically needling: he had obviously known that the ME and the FIC tech were coming even before Pete had left to fetch us. The sheriff was hoping less to make our mission irrelevant than to be sure that it would be carried out in competition with the other crime scene investigators, thereby subjecting all points of view to immediate challenge: such was the man’s custom, and it was not without its merits. “Not fast enough, though,” Steve went on. “Weaver and the state tech got here in a big damned hurry, especially for them. Almost like somebody gives a shit…” The slow, thoughtful way that Steve said these last words seemed to indicate something out of the ordinary; but then he stuck his right hand out and shook my partner’s and my own, apparently as upbeat as ever. “Dr. Jones—Mr. Li. You’ll be glad to hear that Weaver says we’ve already got it covered. Straightforward, he says: got to get some details, but according to him it’s just another teenage murder, though this time it’s pretty nasty.”
“ ‘This time’?” I echoed; but before I could pursue it, Pete spoke up, sounding surprised:
“That right, Chief? Well, can’t be much objection, then, to these guys looking around a bit, if it’s all sewn up already.”
Spinetti cast Pete a knowing look, followed by an even wider smile. “Well, hell, Pete, I don’t want to discourage initiative, do I? And you fellas did make the trip. Sure, I’d be grateful if our distinguished guests could stick around.” His undeniably perspicacious grey eyes plainly showed that he was pleased he would be able to fully hedge his bets. “Just let those two boys make their preliminary assessment official, and we’ll see what the ringers from Surrender can do for us.”
Steve Spinetti was one of the few high-ranking members of law enforcement in Burgoyne County, to say nothing of the entire Empire State, with whom I had managed to maintain even a guardedly collegial relationship, following Mike’s and my own not quite voluntary exile from New York City. He ruled his domain in the style of one of the better class of small bureaucratic tyrants: not with an utterly closed mind, but with one that would use any means at hand to close a case as quickly as possible. He thus avoided extra time spent looking for details that would only complicate his paperwork and threaten his own authority as well as his ability to grab primary credit for a solution. This is not to belittle the man at all: Steve was a tough yet compassionate first responder (unlike many, who never got past the tough side), and his honesty about his motives concerning paperwork and proper acknowledgment simply made him more straightforward and far easier to work with than most men or women who had reached similar levels of authority.
And yet he had a very cagey side, too; and I was about to get a pointed demonstration of it. “Say, uh, Doc,” he said; and his voice had suddenly gone down in volume, although he never lost his smile. ??
?While we’re waiting, I’d like to mention a couple of things, but I don’t want anybody here—and that includes you, Pete—to give that trooper sitting in the van any reason to think we’re doing anything but shooting the shit and having a good time. Okay?”
Mike and I had been in dozens of such politically tricky situations before, and we both immediately smiled and affected a chuckle or two for the trooper’s benefit as I replied, “Of course, Steve—just so long as our little talk is going to include an explanation of what you meant by ‘just another teenage murder.’ ”
“Oh, it will, it will,” Steve said, his own phony grin getting wider. “And one day I’m going to learn to watch every fricking word that comes out of my mouth around you, Doc. But here’s the thing: Weaver and the tech, they’re real sure about their call on this. And I don’t know, maybe they’re right. But me and Pete were the first ones here, and we’ve checked out the girl’s background, and the whole thing just feels wrong, to both of us.”
I eyed the deputy. “That right, Pete?”
“That’s right,” Pete said, turning his head away from the van. “I mean, besides the way she died, or maybe because of it—I don’t know, I just don’t like it.”
“Okay,” I replied. “So what makes Weaver so sure?”
“We’ll get to all that, after you see the body,” Spinetti said, looking at the trailer and himself appearing to become, if only for an instant, somewhat melancholy; but remembering the trooper, who was indeed keeping a careful eye on our little conference, he forced out a laugh. “Damndest thing,” he said through it. “What these meth heads will get up to. Or when. Or why…”
“ ‘Meth heads’?” Mike echoed.
“Yeauh,” Steve droned, in his upstate drawl. “The parents were, anyway. Dead girl’s name is Shelby Capamagio—they all used to live here, but the folks disappeared about two years ago. Took their younger girl, left the older one with some relatives further up the road. At least we think they’re relatives, they don’t communicate real well. Or can’t. Won’t, maybe.”
“Hunh,” Mike noised, maintaining his smile, but troubled, now. “So—another throwaway kid?”
My partner wasn’t just being flippant: the death of Shelby Capamagio had apparently taken place, like many others of its kind, against the backdrop of a nation in which increasing numbers of parents, faced with financial catastrophe of one kind or another, were simply disappearing from the lives of one or more of their offspring and making themselves impossible to trace, by taking on new identities or going off the grid. In the process, they were creating an entirely new variety of young people who did not fit into the state’s official classifications for either “orphaned,” “abandoned,” or “homeless,” but rather had formed a new category of their own, one that New York, among other states, had labeled with brutal concision: “throwaway children.”
“Yeauh,” Steve said again. “Looks like it could be. Not quite sure yet, though…” It was something of a nervous tic, the sheriff’s insistence on running through every option in a speculative statement; and I had to concede, it was indicative of an investigative mind that, if somewhat undeveloped, was still instinctively keen. “I been up to talk to the people she first stayed with, didn’t get much—but from what I did, lemme tell you, it ain’t a nice story. She was trouble, I guess—and when whoever those people are had had enough of it, they moved her out of their house to their equipment shed. Fed her meals, when they could catch her, gave her a space heater in the winter. I guess I don’t have to tell you she only got worse. Took it for about six months, then disappeared. They figured her for a meth head just like her folks, and thought she went to find them.”
“Any idea where they went?” I asked.
“Rumor was,” the sheriff replied, tiring of the story in a discouraged way (for it had become a dishearteningly familiar one, in recent years), “they took off to the desert somewheres. Vegas, Phoenix, outside L.A., maybe—”
“Ah,” Mike sighed. “The Crystal Triangle. Where meth is king, and hope goes to die…” The depressing reality of Mike’s statement momentarily overcame even his ability to laugh at almost anything; but he tried hard to recoup, asking with a smile, “And that’s where she got into the drugs?”
“So everybody seems to think,” Spinetti answered. “But—”
“Sorry, Steve,” I said, trying to keep my expression upbeat, “but who’s ‘everybody’?”
The sheriff laughed once more. “Just be patient, Doc, I won’t hold out on you. Anyway, the girl had no involvement with drugs here, that we know of, though we’re checking further—but Weaver, the tech, and their bosses seem to buy that she picked up the habit somewhere.” Steve glanced at the trailer again, evidently thankful that the ME and the FIC tech hadn’t appeared yet. “Which is part of what I wanted to talk to you two about.” And then, rather suddenly, he slapped my shoulder and laughed loud. “You guys’ve been a lot of help to us, on other jobs, and don’t think I don’t appreciate that. But trust me when I say—this is a-whole-nother animal, this case. There is shit going on in this one that—well, that I’m not even sure I really understand. Not yet, anyway. So…” He laughed again, straightened my jacket and my tie convivially, then added, “I’m gonna bring up a subject I never have before, and neither has Pete. But—well, we both know all about why you got shit-canned from your last jobs.” Mike was on the verge of launching into a reflexive objection and defense, but Steve held up a hand. “I ain’t saying that either of us believes any of the bullshit that was passed around by your bosses or the papers down there. What I am saying is this—” And suddenly Steve’s smile vanished, and he looked me square in the eye. “When you go in there, and you’re thinking up your theories and grabbing all your little bits of evidence that nobody else sees—don’t…fuck…up. Because when you come back out, I need to know if Weaver’s genuinely full of shit, and not just because we all think he’s a fuckin’ asshole. Right?” Steve did not wait for a reply before saying, “Okay! Now, I’m gonna go find out what’s holding those two bastards up. So you three stay here, try to keep looking like abso-fucking-lutely nothing is going on, and I’ll be back…”
Spinetti vanished through the half-hanging door of the mobile home, leaving Pete to look a little sheepish. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you more on the way over, guys,” the deputy said. “I was actually kinda hoping that Weaver wasn’t even going to be here, yet. But you know how Steve likes to do things.”
I studied his troubled features. “We do, indeed, Pete. But something more’s on your mind, isn’t it?”
He hesitated for a moment. “Well—don’t quote me, right? But I was on the scene before even Steve was, and I was the first to go talk to those people up the road. And, well—the whole time I been a deputy, I don’t think I’ve ever come across any case that was so wrong, in so many ways. Starting with how many of the higher-ups seem to have how much interest in the damned business.”
“Indeed?” I said, my faith in Pete’s instincts as solid as ever. “Well, then, Deputy, I’m glad you came to get us. And don’t worry about Weaver being here. I can handle him.”
“Yeah,” Mike said, with a laugh that was very genuine, this time. “We’ve all seen how you can handle Weaver.” He pulled out a cigarette and elbowed the deputy. “But don’t sweat how your boss does business, Pete—we do, just as you say, know how he likes to manage things. And he’s not wrong. It’s actually smart, in a lot of ways. You set people against each other, sometimes, you’re going to find out things they wouldn’t usually tell you.”
“I appreciate that,” Pete said, in quiet relief. “And whatever the sheriff may say, he does, too. Because neither of us wants to get this one wrong…”
There it was again: the unelaborated implication that, whatever the death we had come to witness in fact was, it was only the latest in a series. “ ‘This one’?” I echoed, trying not to hit the point too hard. “Pete? Would you like to explain what your boss was very careful not to?
”
“Don’t worry,” Pete said. “He’ll get around to it. But he wants to get your opinions without any, whatever you call it, without any prejudicial statements from us.”
And, even given Mike’s and my own ability to maintain impartiality, it wouldn’t have been hard, I had to concede, for Pete and Steve to have created such prejudicial feelings about the opinions of the two men who, in a few seconds, emerged from the trailer with Steve. Dr. Ernest Weaver was an obese character with a round, fleshy face and a small mustache that appeared ever ready to fall from his upper lip; while the second figure was small, balding, sheathed in a sterile blue jumpsuit, and trying his hardest not to look overwhelmed. Despite his unassuming manner, however, this shuffling little FIC tech was in fact the representative, at this particular crime scene, of nearly everything that had gone wrong with criminal investigation over the last hundred, and especially the last thirty, years, as well as the embodiment of why forensics had never truly earned the rank of “science.” Like his colleagues, the tech bore the responsibility of being the first and therefore the most important expert interpreter of physical clues at such sites, and he was viewed by the uninitiated—especially when he appeared in the full field getup that he was wearing now—as the semi-mystical master of an unimpeachable evidentiary machine, an apparatus beyond the power of most mortals to understand and any to question. In truth, however, such characters were scarcely the keepers of secrets so great that they could speedily unlock the mysteries of unnatural death; that was a fiction of fiction, one created by novels, movies, and especially television. In fact, CSIs (as they dearly loved to be called) were the fragile human cogs in the engine of detection, the components that nearly always weakened and gave way, or could be made to give way, under the pressures of laziness, incompetence, ambition, and corruption.
And who was the particular mortal that bore the burden of all this potent folklore concerning what men could do regarding crime, on this particular July day in the humid Taconic foothills? By name, he was one Curtis Kolmback, and he had just come, to judge from his face, from a scene of death somehow more disturbing than those with which he was used to being presented, at least of late. Fortunately, he was also a man that both Mike and I knew well enough to cope with fairly easily: like many such techs, Kolmback had come over from another discipline (in his case, again as in many, from anthropology), and gotten his technical certification from the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute—the online equivalent of a school that one might, in an earlier time, have found on a matchbook cover, and an organization that had been hit particularly hard by scandal in recent years. Unlike most of his colleagues, however, and to his personal credit, Curtis was usually in the market for a helping hand, and as he glanced over to see us near Pete’s cruiser, a look of relief flooded his features.