Chat - Archer Mayor [55]
Quickly donning latex gloves, she expertly exposed the naked corpse, its torso pragmatically sewn back shut with a series of widely spaced stitches, and with Joe’s help, she rolled it onto its side to reveal its back.
“That was the back of the belt, right?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said softly, already craning to study the blanched, fleshy surface before him. He touched the mottled body near its lumbar area. “Around here. If the shooter knew what he was doing, the second barb should have hit somewhere at or just below the shoulder blades.”
“Here,” she said, tapping the cold skin with her fingertip. “It’s not an actual defect . . . more like a pimple.”
She crossed the room to fetch a strong magnifying glass and applied it to the spot she’d found.
“That’s it,” she announced after a few seconds of study. “During an uneducated survey, it’s nothing much to note. But with scrutiny, it’s clearly not a pimple—more like a tiny burn.”
Joe spread his fingers just above the body’s back, measuring the distance between the lumbar spine and the small red dot. “About a foot and a half,” he announced. “Which means the shooter was standing pretty close when he fired.”
He returned to the pile of clothes to find some piece of clothing that might reveal a barb having been roughly torn lose. He found it in a tightly knit polar fleece vest—a mere couple of strands hanging loose from the fabric.
“Bingo,” he said, bringing the vest back over to Hillstrom and holding it next to the cadaver.
“Lines up perfectly,” she agreed.
She stepped back to consider him thoughtfully. “But what does that tell you, exactly?”
“Not much that’s provable,” he admitted. “It does suggest how to incapacitate a man in a motel room and then drown him fifteen miles away.”
Joe drove from Burlington to Chelsea next, hoping to catch Rob Barrows in his office. He left the interstate at exit 4 and journeyed east through Randolph Center and East Randolph to take the Chelsea Mountain Road up and over Osgood Hill. This was also a roundabout way to reach Thetford and New Hampshire beyond, and more reminiscent of the challenges the state offered its travelers a mere half century earlier, before most of them were seduced by the ease and comfort of I-89. These now less used roads were, by contrast, old Vermont to Joe’s mind, set among a countryside as prickly as a porcupine’s back with trees, and so encumbered with streams, ravines, and claustrophobic, pressed-together hills as to make progress before the advent of paved roads a quasi-heroic effort. Still, for all that, atop Osgood Hill, cresting a rise and emerging from the woods, he was abruptly rewarded with a sweeping view—long, curving fields, the sparkle of otherwise hidden water, and the solid massiveness of distant ancient mountains—and was won over yet again by his state’s uncanny ability to both challenge and nurture those willing to carve out a living in its midst, while shaping them into something hardy, independent, self-sufficient, and sometimes a little cranky in the process.
Joe found Rob Barrows at the sheriff’s headquarters in Chelsea, at the top of the northernmost of the village’s two greens—an eccentricity particular to the town. The sheriff’s office was tucked behind the United Church of Christ, in a nineteenth-century red-brick building neighboring Court, School, and Church Streets—a trio of names simultaneously bland, comforting, and a little peremptory, as if the founders of the village had better things to do—and more land to grab—in the late 1700s than to linger here and apply their imaginations.
“Hey,” Barrows said as Joe entered the officers’ room, a small, cluttered space that served a variety of roles. “I thought you were going to give me a call, not actually make the trip.”
“Nice day for it,” Joe answered neutrally, choosing a chair beside Rob’s desk. He did