Mention Vermont and the mind fills with images of bucolic farms and snow-covered mountains. Crime novelist Archer Mayor, who also works as a death investigator for Vermont’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and as a detective for the Windham County (Vermont) Sheriff’s Office,… [More Info & Read Excerpt]]]> By Leslie Gilbert Elman, Special to CNN, Sat July 7, 2012. 

Mention Vermont and the mind fills with images of bucolic farms and snow-covered mountains. Crime novelist Archer Mayor, who also works as a death investigator for Vermont’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and as a detective for the Windham County (Vermont) Sheriff’s Office, sees those things and others. His police detective protagonist Joe Gunther is more than likely to gaze out at the Connecticut River near Brattleboro and find a body floating on the surface, as was the case in Mayor’s 2007 novel “Chat.”

Brattleboro, Joe Gunther’s home turf, embraces its position as Vermont’s fictional crime center and the entire state of Vermont embraces Archer Mayor. At 12 Vermont Welcome Centers, including Guilford on I-91 near Brattleboro and Williston North and South on I-89 between Montpelier and Burlington, a new lending library program lets visitors pick up a print or audio edition of an Archer Mayor novel to enjoy while they travel and to return when they’re done. Lodging packages with an Archer Mayor/mystery fiction theme are available in Brattleboro, Burlington, North Bennington and Waterbury. The Brattleboro Literary Festival takes place in October.

The past year has not been kind to Brattleboro. A fire severely damaged the historic Brooks House hotel and much of the town’s Main Street, and rains from Hurricane Irene flooded the downtown area. But Vermont’s natural beauty remains unblemished.

Joe Gunther and his team at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation are alerted to a string of unrelated burglaries across Vermont. Someone, in addition to… [More Info & Read Excerpt]]]> Now a New York Times bestselling series, “Even in beautiful Vermont, Archer Mayor finds shadows . . .  and his detective, Joe Gunther, finds a way to beat them back.” —NPR     

Joe Gunther and his team at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation are alerted to a string of unrelated burglaries across Vermont. Someone, in addition to flatscreens, computers, and stereos, has also been stealing antiques and jewelry.

Meanwhile, in Boston, an elderly woman surprises some thieves in her Beacon Hill home and is viciously murdered. The Boston police find that not only is the loot similar to what’s being stolen in Vermont, but it may have the same destination. Word is out that someone powerful is purchasing these particular kinds of items in the “Paradise City” of Northampton, Mass. 

Gunther, the Boston Police, and the vengeful niece of the murdered old lady convene on Northampton, eager to get to the bottom of the mystery and find the “responsible parties”—although each is motivated to mete out some very different penalties.

Pre-order on Amazon

Originally entitled The Stalking Horse (a title that was used on another book published just a month before this was set to appear,) Open Season concerns a mysterious man in a ski mask, who forces the police to reopen an old murder case by compromising all the members of the old jury.… [More Info & Read Excerpt]]]>

The Plot

Originally entitled The Stalking Horse (a title that was used on another book published just a month before this was set to appear,) Open Season concerns a mysterious man in a ski mask, who forces the police to reopen an old murder case by compromising all the members of the old jury. Joe, soon realizing that his department is being used as a stalking horse to flush out the real murderer, must discover who that person is, before the man in the ski mast gets to him first.

An excerpt from Open Season

Joe drives to New York State to confirm the identity of a man who’s been stalking the Brattleboro area in a murderous rampage, and who up to this moment has been known only as Ski Mask, as befits his disguise.

Voorheesville, which I reached by heading due west on Route 9 through Bennington and Troy, was the epitome of the bedroom community. I’m sure it had a town center, or at least a cluster of tasteful buildings passing for one, but from what I could see, it consisted of mile after mile of undulating, well-kept interweaving blacktop, hemmed in by tamed trees and half-seen, tidy houses. Some of these were pretty grand-English Tudor near-misses and combination Federalist/Southern plantations with swimming pools out front-but for the most part they were white, wooden, neat, and reclusive. They clung to the centers of their two-acre lots, surrounded by enough shrubs and trees to shield them from all but a glimpse of their neighbor’s roof.

I stopped at a filling station among an odd and incongruous collection of fake-Georgian commercial buildings and got directions to the address Brandt had given me. It was located in what must have been the low-rent district. The trees were not as tall, the lawns not as large, the shrubs not as fat and the houses, with a couple of garish exceptions, were downright self-effacing. Along a spur marked Dead End, cluttered with split-levels on half-acre lots, I found a mailbox marked Stark.

I pulled into the driveway and parked in front of a one-car garage. Above the door, its six-foot wingspan painted in peeling gold, was a wooden bald eagle. To the right of the garage, parallel to the driveway, was a one-and-a-half story white clapboard house as lacking in distinctive features as the one-dimensional boxes in children’s drawings. I walked up the shoveled path to the front door and knocked.

The door swung back two feet, revealing a short, thin, white-haired woman who instantly struck me as the cleanest, neatest person I’d ever met. There was not a wrinkle or a fold out of place. Her dimly flowered housedress and cardigan sweater looked as if they were on a hanger; her brown lace shoes were spotless and scuff-free; her face and hands pale pink and practically shimmering; every hair was rigidly in place.

“Yes?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

“Mrs. Stark?”

 “That’s right.”

I pulled out my badge, something I rarely did at home. “My name is Lieutenant Gunther. I work for the police department in Brattleboro, Vermont. I called you a few hours ago?”

She nodded, just barely.

“I have no jurisdiction down here, so you’re under no obligation to talk with me, but I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about your daughter, Pamela.”

Her eyes, which had been focused somewhere over my shoulder, dropped to my shoes. In that one gesture, I sensed some vital part of her anatomy giving away. She said, just audibly, “Of course,” and turning from the door, vanished into the gloom of the hallway beyond.

I hesitated-the door was still barely open-before I followed her inside. From what I could see of it as my eyes adjusted to the dark, the hall was empty. I walked its ten-foot length and looked to both sides. To the left was another hallway leading presumably to some bedrooms; to the right was a totally green living room. Mrs. Stark was sitting on the edge of a straight-backed chair, her immaculate hands in her smooth lap, looking at the green shag carpeting. She seemed so lost in her thoughts, I wasn’t sure she remembered I was there.

The room was dark, the only light a green seepage through thick drapes drawn across a large patio window. Hanging on the walls, along with the occasional half-visible picture, were several military swords-some cavalry, some oriental-four glass-faced display frames filled with medals and insignia, and two oil paintings, both depicting modern battle scenes, one featuring World War II-vintage tanks, the other Vietnam-era helicopters. Above the dark green mantle at the far end of the room was another eagle, surrounded by gold stars. The rest of the room looked more normal-no army cots or pup tents-but I did notice that most of the room’s furnishings were equipped with sanitary fail-safe devices: antimacassars on the backs of armchairs, a doily under every lamp, glass cups under the table legs, small rugs on the carpeting in front of every chair. The entire room was as neat and antiseptic and green as a freshly filled fish tank. The only sound I could hear was a clock ticking somewhere.

I walked over to the sofa and sat gingerly, conscious of squashing its pillows’ perfect plumpness. “Mrs. Stark, when did you last see your daughter?”

She looked up at me slowly. “Three-four years ago.”

“And where was that?”

“Here. She was living at home. She and the Colonel had a fight, only this time she left-forever.”

“The Colonel?”

“My husband.”

 “And where is he?”

 “Gone. I don’t know.” She went back to staring at the floor.

 I looked around the room again. Of all the scenes I’d played in my head prior to coming here, this was not one of them.

 “Did he go shopping or something?”

 “No. He left.”

 “When?”

 “A couple of months ago.”

 I wanted to return to her daughter, but something tugged at me to keep this line going. “Why did he leave?”

 “To find her.”

 “Did he?”

 I don’t know. He found something.” One hand rose slowly and barely touched her forehead with its fingertips before resettling next to its peer. It was like the kiss from a solicitous bird. “She is dead, isn’t she?”

 “Yes, I am afraid so.”

 She let out the softest of sighs.

 “And now he’s dead too.”

 “Your husband?”

 She nodded again.

 “Not that I know of.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the photograph of the late Kimberly Harris. “Mrs. Stark, I hate to do this, but I have to ask. Is this a picture of your daughter?”

 I crossed the room and laid the picture in her lap, face up. She didn’t touch it, didn’t react, but she did look.

 “Yes,” she said simply, her voice unchanged. It was an utterance from someone drained of any emotional reserves. She was like a well of tears long run dry.

 “If your daughter left home several years ago, why did your husband wait so long to go after her?”

 Another sigh escaped her, a sound so gentle in this quiet green room I could almost see it. “They say fathers and daughters are supposed to have a special bond, don’t they?”

 “I’ve heard that.”

 “Colonel Stark and Pam had that once, when she was a little girl. They seemed able to talk to each other without saying a word. It troubled me, because of what he did for a living. I was afraid that one day something would happen to him, that he would be gone forever, and she would be destroyed.”

 “What did he do for a living?”

 She looked surprised. “He was a soldier.”

 It was my turn to nod.

 She didn’t say anything for a moment. I was afraid my interruption might have broken her concentration, but she went on. “Perhaps that’s what should have happened. She would have loved him if he’d died. Instead, they grew older, and began to fight.”

 “About what?”

 “Nothing. Everything. Private things. She was no longer a little girl. And she grew up to be a young woman. I think that surprised him. He wanted everything to be the same. Of course, it wasn’t.” The hand fluttered up again and settled down. “It’s a little confusing. I don’t know. Maybe he loved her too much-not like a real father and daughter.”

 A sour taste came to my mouth. I remembered Susan Lucey saying something that had struck the same chord. “What do you mean, exactly?”

 She shook her head slightly and shrugged.

 “The Colonel was more than just a soldier, wasn’t he?”

 “Oh, yes. Very special; very secret. He would just go off.”

 I thought of the bug I’d found in my apartment. Very special. “So they had one last big fight and she left?”

 “That’s right.”

 “Then what happened?”

 “Nothing.”

“I mean, how did your husband react after her departure?”

“He didn’t.”

“What did he do?”

“He left on assignment for two years.”

 “And when he came back?”

 “He was different.”

 “How so?”

 “He talked about her all the time. He thought she’d be here when he returned. He couldn’t believe it-that she had really left. He thought I was lying when I told him I hadn’t heard from her since that day.”

 “The day of the fight?”

 “Yes”

 “What was the fight about?”

 She looked at a spot on the wall about a foot above my head. “They fought a lot.”

 I took a shot in the dark. “About her behavior… like with men, maybe?”

 “Yes.” There was a pause. “Boys her age… the Colonel was a jealous man.”

 The odd taste returned to my mouth. “So what happened after he discovered she’d been gone all that time and wasn’t coming back?”

 “He was convinced she was dead-that that’s the reason she hadn’t come back to him. Some man must have killed her.” She emphasized the word “man”. “He started looking for her, calling police departments, checking the newspapers in the library, going on trips. Finally, he left for good.”

 “About two months ago.”

 “That’s right.”

 “Do you know where he was headed?”

 “No.”

 “Did he mention Boston or Brattleboro or Vermont?”

 “He didn’t mention anything.”

 “The day he left, did you know he was going for good, or did you just think he was off on another of his little outings?

 “I felt he was going on duty.”

 “How’s that?”

 “When he’d get his orders to go somewhere I couldn’t be told about, he’d call that ‘going on duty’. I always knew when that was about to happen because he changed. That’s what it was like.”

 “And he’s never gotten in touch?”

 “No. But I didn’t expect him to. He didn’t do that.”

 “You mean send letters or call home?”

 “That’s right.”

 “How about when Pam was little?”

 “He did then. He’d call her sometimes, but only when she was little.”

 “You mentioned he’d go places you weren’t supposed to know about. Was he in Intelligence?”

 “Yes. Maybe.”

 “You don’t know?”

 “Not really.”

 “Is he still on active duty?”

 “I don’t know.”

 “Do you know who to call in the government about something like this? A superior officer or something? What was his branch of service, by the way? The US Army?”

 “We started in the Army, but I’m not sure any more; it stopped being normal a long time ago. I don’t know who to call.”

 “Has anyone called you about him?”

 “No.”

 I closed my eyes for a second. This was one weird couple. “I don’t mean to pry, Mrs. Stark, but I think your husband is in big trouble and I need to know everything I can about him. I get the feeling he was a little unusual – that is, he may have had unusual habits. Is there anything you can tell me about him that might help me to find him?”

 She frowned and leaned forward in her chair, picking something invisible off the rug and putting it in her cardigan pocket. Then she rose and walked over to the glowing green curtain. I expected her to throw it open and let in the sunlight, but she just stood there, her nose almost touching the fabric. Her hands reached out to either side and her fingers played gently on the folds of the curtain, making it ripple like murky sea water.

 Her words, when they came, were slow and carefully chosen. “Our marriage was not a conventional one, Lieutenant. We shared very little. I did as I was told and he supported me. I it hadn’t been for Pamela we might still be together. Having a daughter was very complicated-I don’t know why. Maybe we all got too close.” She shook her head and repeated. “I don’t know.”

 I decided not to press it. “Did your husband have an office or a den I could look at?”

She didn’t move. “Yes. It’s upstairs to the right.”

 I got up and left the room. I’d noticed the staircase when I’d come in. The office was a small room tucked under the eaves, half its ceiling sliced away by the slant of the roof. But it was white and brightly lit by two unshaded windows-a positive relief from the funereal gloom downstairs.

 Again the walls were like those of a military museum, covered with odds and ends: bayonets, several old rifles, more medals, a couple of helmets, photographs of men in uniform, either in the field or all spruced up as if for graduation. I looked for a face common to all the pictures, figuring that would be Stark, but I couldn’t do it. The hats or helmets and uniforms-not to mention the obvious passage of years-made them all look pretty much alike. I did notice, though, that the uniforms weren’t just American. One shot showed what was definitely a French group and at least two others had an anonymous Latin American look to them. Our boy apparently got around.

 The room was dominated by a large antique desk. I sat behind it and went through its drawers. Its contents were conspicuously neutral. A filing cabinet against one wall was empty except for one .45-caliber Colt semiautomatic pistol. I copied its serial number and left it there. I looked around a little longer with no results and returned to the living room. Mrs. Stark was sitting again in her chair, just as before.

 “Was your husband carrying a lot when he left the last time?”

 “No. Just his duffel bag, as usual.”

 “What about the contents of his filing cabinet?”

 “He came for those later.”

 “When?”

 “I don’t know. He must have waited until I was out of the house. He did that sometimes.”

 “You mean sneak into his own house?”

 “Yes.”

 I passed on that one. “Would you have a photograph of him and your daughter?”

 “Yes.” She got up and pulled a framed picture out of a drawer under the coffee table. It showed the three of them in front of this house, in the summer. They all wore shorts and T-shirts, but each looked pulled in from a different part of the world. Mrs. Stark, old and demure in Bermudas and a sedate polo shirt; the Colonel, hard-eyed, crewcut, tall and lithe, dressed in Marine-style gym clothes; and Pam, her face cold and remote, turned away from the camera, wearing very brief running shorts and a shirt that revealed her bare midriff. None of them touched one another, none of them smiled, and only Stark stared straight into the lens with the pale blue eyes that had so frightened Susan Lucey-and which I had seen for the first time when Ski Mask pulled me out onto the landing of my apartment.

 “What was Pamela like, as a daughter?”

 “Angry, like her father.”

 “She ever get into trouble?”

 “Trouble?”

 “Yeah, like at school. You know, the usual things nowadays-drugs, sex, stuff like that.”

 She looked straight at me for a long moment. It was the first time she’d made direct eye contact. “That was very controversial.”

 I waited for more, but that was it. This woman’s laundry was not for public airing-especially this laundry, I thought. I held up the photograph. “Can I borrow this? I’ll send it back as soon as I have copies made.”

 “Yes. It doesn’t matter.”

 I pulled a business card out of my wallet and handed it to her. “I’ll get out of your hair. Thanks for your help. Do call me if he gets in touch, will you?”

 She took the card without looking at it.

 I walked toward the entrance hall with the picture in my hand. She stayed where she was. I hesitated at the door. “Mrs. Stark, is there anything you would like to know about your daughter’s death? You can ask me if you’d like-it’s all right.”

 She stood there in the middle of the room, arms slack by her sides, again looking into some nebulous middle distance, as abandoned and lonely as the only living bird in a desolated forest. “No.”

I let myself out.

A hand is found sticking out of the dirt at a construction site, and Joe Gunther’s detective squad begin to research into who the man belonging to it was, how he was killed, who might have done it, and why. But before they know it, several more people are dead, including one… [More Info & Read Excerpt]]]>

The Plot

A hand is found sticking out of the dirt at a construction site, and Joe Gunther’s detective squad begin to research into who the man belonging to it was, how he was killed, who might have done it, and why. But before they know it, several more people are dead, including one of the town’s biggest drug dealers, and others are implicated in a variety of illegal activities, from members of the ruling elite to one of the police department’s very own. Hampered by the worst heat wave in a decade, hobbled by the press and intrusive hometown politics, Gunther figures out that the person behind the crimes is being fueled by revenge for wrongs done long ago.

An excerpt from Scent of Evil

To set the stage: Joe, Det. Ron Klecszewski, and most of the department’s uniformed day shift are in pursuit of Mark Capelli, a truck driver who works for an enormous wholesale grocery supplier in Brattleboro. They have been running after him through the huge warehouse, playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game, and have finally arrived at a long line of truck delivery bays, filled with people handling pallets of produce.

We heard a distant shout and a gunshot from one of the most distant of those bays.

“Oh, shit,” Ron muttered, and began to sprint down the length of the loading dock, cutting right and left around stacks of produce like a football player going for a touchdown.

I paused for a moment. A forklift operator clutched his arm as Mark Capelli bolted through a crack in one of the bay doors toward a truck backing up to the dock. I ran out another door, set on heading him off outside.

Unfortunately, I was still several hundred feet away and had a long line of trucks to get around. I was about fifty feet from where I thought Capelli had left the warehouse when I heard a loud crash and the roar of a diesel engine in distress.

The noise had been caused by a Freightliner cab-over being driven away from its box without the support legs being dropped. I rounded my last obstacle in time to see the box lying with its nose on the tarmac like some religious penitent. The cab, shuddering and belching black smoke as Capelli slammed it through its gears to gain speed, was already peeling away. He was headed west, against the prescribed traffic flow, bound for the far corner of the building and the entrance gates leading out to Ferry Road.

A trucker, his mouth half stuffed with a sandwich, was gesticulating near the front of the box. “He stole my cab, for Christ’s sake, that’s my fucking truck.”

I saw Ron standing at the edge of the adjacent loading door. “Where’s your car?” I shouted at him.

“Follow me.” He bent down and swung me up onto the dock before leading me through the entrails of the building on a roughly diagonal track toward the building’s dressed-up front door to the west. As we both burst out onto the parking lot, Capelli’s fire-breathing behemoth screamed around the far corner, heading for the closed front gate.

“Guess we’d better let ‘em know what’s happening,” I said, as we piled into Ron’s car, just as the truck blew through the gate with a shriek of complaining metal. Leaving parallel crescents of black burned rubber on the pavement, Capelli slewed onto Ferry Road, heading for the Putney Road traffic light. In a squeal of spinning tires, Ron backed out of his parking space and gave chase, while I began giving orders over the radio.

We had two major problems: We didn’t have enough time to get roadblocks properly organized, and we didn’t know which way Capelli would take. If he turned right at the light, he could head up Route 5 to grab the interstate at Putney, or try to vanish along the byways crisscrossing the hills around Dummerston, the neighboring township. If he turned left, which I suspected he would, his choices were downtown Brattleboro, a couple of miles straight ahead, and either Route 9 East into New Hampshire, or I-91’s Exit Three, both located at the crossroads less than a mile down the road. I told Dispatch to contact the Vermont State Police and the Windham County Sheriff’s Department for anything north of our position, the New Hampshire cops for anything east, and ordered all available units to converge on Exit Three.

Another disadvantage was that most of our patrol units were either behind us or still back at the warehouse, which left precious little to put between the truck and the open road. As Capelli skidded through the light and drove south, I modified my instructions over the mike.

“This is Oh-three. I want all available units to move onto I-91, north and southbound. Rolling roadblocks.” I hung up the radio. “Ron, you’d better let at least one of the patrol units by. We aren’t exactly legal here.”

He slowed slightly and waved one of our tailgaters on, but only one; he wasn’t about to concede the chase, despite the rule that high-speed chases and roadblocks were only to be performed by recognizable squad cars.

“Why put everybody on the interstate?” he asked. The crossroads were coming up with amazing speed. I noticed both my feet were pressed flat against the floor.

“Gut call. It’s a wide-open road. That’s what I’d do.”

As if I’d willed it, the Freightliner slid into the crowded intersection, sideswiped several cars, and peeled off toward I-91. Another police unit screaming up from Putney Road almost added to the wreckage, barely missing us and a man who’d leapt from his vehicle to check for damage. I looked over my shoulder as Ron swept around the corner. That put three squad cars behind us and one in front. I wondered what was left to stop Capelli. I also wondered how much hell I was going to catch for putting this demolition derby into action.

As soon as I saw the truck commit to the first on-ramp, I grabbed the radio again. “All units from Oh-three. The truck’s heading north on the interstate. All units respond accordingly.”

But I shook my head as soon as I’d delivered the message.

Klesczewski saw me. “What?” he half shouted over the noise of the engine and the sirens.

“Why would he head north?’

“Why not?”

It was a legitimate counter-question. Neither choice was rational, neither was the whole premise, for that matter. How Capelli hoped to escape, driving a Freightliner with a bunch of cops on his tail, was beyond me. But if he was stupid enough to think he could, he was stupid enough to think that heading south toward Massachusetts and beyond held more options than tearing up the pavement for a hundred miles toward Canada.

I grabbed the mike again. “ All units from Oh-three. Who’s on the interstate now?”

“Oh-three from One-five. I’m just north of Exit Two right now.”

“Set up a roadblock southbound just below the West River Bridge.”

“I thought he was heading north.’ The voice was high-pitched with incredulity.

“He is. I think he’ll turn around.”

“Oh-three from One-two. I’m coming onto Exit Two from West Bratt. Want me to join One-five?”

“Ten-four.”

Klescewski’s face was tight with concentration as he tried to keep out of the ditch rounding the corner of the on-ramp. “You better be right, or we’re going to look like a bunch of assholes.”

I grinned at this rare profanity; in fact, I knew that soon, especially in the eyes of several of our town leaders, we would earn the label regardless of today’s results.

Capelli’s truck was swerving slightly from side to side, making it impossible for the patrol car behind him to pass. As he drew abreast of the interstate at the top of the ramp, he added to the obstacle course by clipping a Subaru station wagon and causing it to twirl into a series of multiple pirouettes, which made all of us slam on our brakes to avoid joining in. Thus shielded, Capelli cut into a controlled slide and sliced across the emergency U-turn lane a bare hundred feet away from the ramp. He was going for the southbound route.

The unit immediately behind him missed the U-turn completely, since it had veered to the wrong side of the dizzying Subaru and was hurtling north in the far breakdown lane. Klesczewski was luckier, as were the two units behind us.

“One-two and One-five from Oh-three. He’s headed your way.”

The thousand foot long West River Bridge, one hundred feet above the water and now just a mile ahead of us, was undergoing repairs. The entire southbound span was closed, and traffic had been rerouted to one half the northbound span, which was split down the middle by a row of heavy concrete dividers. The speed limit, for good reason, was forty. We were going ninety-five.

The approach to the bridge is a slightly descending slope. Units Twelve and Fifteen, their blue lights twinkling fiercely, were clearly visible on either side of the single southern lane at the far end of the bridge. Real roadblocks, unlike those in the movies, should always allow an exit. They are supposed to show the bad guys that escape is fruitless, not to provide them with photogenic opportunities to create mayhem. At midpoint on the bridge, in the gap that separated the two spans, men in helmets and fluorescent vests were working acetylene torches from a long wooden platform, suspended by cables from the railing above. The flames from their torches looked like minuscule chips of sunlight.

“Ease up a little, Ron, the switch over is bumpy.”

Klesczewski slowed down. Capelli did not. His truck hit the thin, ripply asphalt overlay linking the southbound lane to its half of the northbound bridge, bounced once, and began to twist sideways, spewing several small rooster tails of burning rubber.

“Holy Christ, he’s going over.” Klesczewski slammed on the brakes hard, making the seat belt cut against my chest.

The truck hit the bridge sideways, with its rear wheels in the lane, its middle straddling the guard rail, and its cab hanging over the gap between the two spans. I could see the looks of horror on the faces of the workmen on the platform as the Freightliner screamed toward them, riding the guardrail like some bizarre huge toy truck run amuck. Now, added to the black smoke from the burning tires and the diesel exhaust, there was a shower of flaming sparks cascading from where the railing cut the truck undercarriage as it slid.

Slowly, as if tantalizing us, the cab began to peel forward off the chassis, exposing the engine beneath and throwing the whole disastrous mess off balance. For a moment, the truck’s wheels left the pavement, and then, with the last of its momentum, it flipped on the guardrail like an acrobat somersaulting on a tightrope. The cab flew high in the air, its driver catapulting through the window like a champagne cork. The chassis settled back on the road, a smoking, twisted, wreck, while Capelli and the cab landed with an explosion on the wooden platform below the bridge. We watched transfixed as the cab, surrounded by debris, spun silently through the hundred feet down into the shallow river. The platform, hanging on by a single cable, swung in a wide arc, and below it, dangling by a leg, which was tangled in the remains of the other cable, was Mark Capelli. The workers, hooked to their safety harnesses, were glued to the metal undercarriage of the bridge like insects to flypaper.

There was a deathly quiet as Ron and I left the car and stepped out onto the bridge. All traffic had frozen in place, all the topside workers were as still as statues at the railing; the one sound I could hear distinctly for that brief moment was the gurgling of the water far below as it swirled around its newfound obstacle.

I began to run.

A hermit dies in the hospital of a bullet he received twenty years earlier. At his mountaintop home, a skeleton with a bullet hole and a metal knee is found buried in the yard. On the way to the medical examiner’s office, the hearse comes under machine gun fire. A long-hidden crime… [More Info & Read Excerpt]]]>

The Plot

A hermit dies in the hospital of a bullet he received twenty years earlier. At his mountaintop home, a skeleton with a bullet hole and a metal knee is found buried in the yard. On the way to the medical examiner’s office, the hearse comes under machine gun fire. A long-hidden crime is obviously very much on someone’s mind-someone who would love to destroy what little evidence remains. The serial number on the metal knee takes Joe Gunther to Chicago, where he is snubbed by the big city cops, and confronted with some ancient and bloody history. When he returns to Vermont with newly discovered evidence, he’s no longer alone. He’s picked up a shadowy presence as eager as himself to unmask the person who buried the skeleton with the knee.

An excerpt from The Skeleton’s Knee

To set the stage: Abraham Fuller has died in the hospital of a bullet wound received twenty years ago. Baffled by what is automatically an ancient homicide case, Joe and his colleagues go the near-hermit’s secluded home on property owned by a man named Conyers, to search for clues. There they find a grave with a skeleton equipped with a shiny metal knee.

“Hello, Lieutenant.”

I turned away from the jumble of people setting up staging and equipment by the roped-off grave site and saw Beverly Hillstrom coming toward me. I had called her right after discovering the skeleton, to ask her advice on how to deal with it. It was now ten a.m. the following morning.

I smiled at her with genuine pleasure and shook her slim, elegant hand. “Doctor. It’s wonderful to see you; I thought one of your regional MEs would be attending. I didn’t know you were coming.”

“I wasn’t going to initially, but then I couldn’t resist it. Besides, once I’d recommended a forensic archeologist, I thought the least I could do was to introduce him personally.”

She turned and gestured to a short, wiry man whose face was as bushy with black hair as his head was gleaming bald. His eyes looked enormous behind thick, dark-framed glasses, and he squinted at me slightly as we exchanged formalities, as if considering what a slice of me would look like under a microscope.

Hillstrom beamed between us, the immaculate hostess. “Dr. Boris Leach-Lieutenant Joe Gunther.” Leach’s eyes shifted away from me after a cursory glance, focusing instead on the activities by the hole. His hand was cold and limp in mine and I dropped it as soon as I could.

“Lieutenant, I take it no one has aggravated the hole any further?” He stepped around me and ducked under the yellow mylar “Police Line” we’d used to surround the site.

Hillstrom patted my arm quickly and smiled, encouraging me to ignore Leach’s arrogant tone of voice. I realized then she wasn’t here purely out of professional curiosity. When I’d called her about the skeleton, she’d warned me that Leach was no Miss Manners; she’d obviously decided upon reflection to run interference between us.

I lifted the barrier for her and we followed in Leach’s wake. “It’s just the way we left it last night, except for what your assistant dropped off a while ago.”

He stood at the edge of the hole, now illuminated by the bright, cool sunlight. The metal knee joint shone like a white spark, nestled in its pit. He looked around suddenly, “Where’s the back hoe? I told Henry to specifically request a back hoe. I can’t be expected to remove four feet of dirt by myself. It’s idiotic… Pointless.”

I held up my hand to interrupt him. “It’s coming, Doctor; it should be here in a few minutes. What about everything else?” That sidetracked him for a while. He left us to examine the pile of equipment his twitchy, birdlike “assistant” Henry had brought in a pickup truck some forty-five minutes earlier.

Watching him, I muttered to Hillstrom, “Too many years digging in the Gobi Desert?”

She smiled like an indulgent mother. “Take the bad with the good, Lieutenant. This man is very good.”

Leach returned from his inventory and fixed me with his fierce, owl-wide eyes. “Who’s the forensics man on your team?”

“J.P. Tyler.” I shouted over to J.P., who was doing his own surreptitious examination of Leach’s assembled hardware.

Rather than waiting for Tyler to join us, Leach marched off and made his own introductions. Both men took hammers and large spikes and set off toward opposite trees near the grave site. Once there, they drove the spikes into the trunks, fastened them to the ends of two reeled measuring tapes, and unrolled the tapes toward the hole, establishing both a double set of fixed surveying points, and an accurate triangulation system. From now on, all maps of the site would feature the two trees, and all items on that map would be measured from them. Indeed, even as I was admiring the simple efficiency of the plan, I saw Leach thrust a drawing pad, a pencil, and a ruler into Tyler’s hands.

At that point, Leach shouted over to Hillstrom. “You can play photographer now, if you want to earn your keep.”

Hillstrom merely chuckled and pulled a camera from the bag hanging off her shoulder. Even considering our friendship, it never would have occurred to me to address her in such a tone.

From that point on, Dr. Leach was like a caricature general in the field, shouting orders to his troops, and doing most of the work himself.

After a quick sketch of the scene as it was, the surface debris of leaves and stray stones was cleared away to reveal the true topography of the land. Shovels were handed out, and slowly, inch by inch, the top layer of soil was removed over about a ten foot by five foot area, revealing at first a uniform mantle of dark, moist, nutrient-rich dirt.

I wandered near Hillstrom at one point in this drawn-out process and asked how deep we were going to go. She shook her head in shocked amusement. “Not to worry. That’s why he was asking for the back hoe. Soil like this is divided into two parts: the upper layer can be about eight inches deep, like it is here, and it tends to be dark and rich. Below it is the lighter colored, generally sandier layer, which usually goes down until you hit ledge or water or whatever. The premise is that if you dig a grave, you’ll punch through the top and burrow into the lower layer, but when you later fill in the hole, the dirt you throw in will be a mixture of both dark and light. So, years later, if you skim the dark top soil off of a larger surrounding area, chances are you’ll discover one spot in the lighter, deeper soil which looks slightly different, because it’s been disturbed. That’s how you know exactly where your grave is.”

“But we know where the grave is,” I persisted, unembarrassed to display my archeological ignorance.

“Yes, but we don’t know its orientation or size. People rarely dig nice big, deep, rectangular holes for their murder victims. They do what they can in a hurry, crunch their victims up as tight as possible, and stuff them in. Boris and I have found them head first, balled up, and cut into pieces. It’s amazing.”

Her explanation was right on the mark. At about one foot down, a barely perceptible darker patch, about three-and-a-half feet round, distinguished itself from its pale surroundings. The hole we’d dug the night before was right at the edge of it.

The back hoe had long since arrived, accompanied but not operated by the high strung Henry, whom Leach put to work laying out wooden stakes and a grid. Once a cut line was established, the machine began digging a wide, deep trench right next to the grave site.

Leach stood next to me as we watched the back hoe at work. “You ever been to a dig before?” he asked suddenly without looking at me.

“No.”

“Well, it’s a pain in the ass to dig straight down. The position’s uncomfortable, the visibility stinks, and the dirt keeps falling back into the hole. Plus, if the body’s still ripe, the stench comes straight up at you. Much easier to put a trench alongside the site, and work at it in comfort, directly in front of you. Then it’s more like emptying a chest of drawers, from the top one down.”

I was about to thank him for this unexpected tidbit when he left as abruptly as he’d come, signaled to the back hoe operator to stop, and jumped over the trench like some bespectacled billy goat, falling to his knees at the point where the light dirt and the mixed dirt met. He used a long knife to cut a cake-sized wedge between them and then signaled to me to join him.

I knelt down by his side and he pointed at the cleavage the wedge had left behind. “Shovel marks left by whoever dug the hole. You can see from the scalloped cut that it was a spade-shaped shovel, about twelve inches wide at the base and slightly curved.”

He looked up suddenly. “Beverly, where the hell are you? You want to take possession of this mess fast, you’ve got to help me out.” Hillstrom, standing nearby, shook her head silently and joined us, focusing her camera on the evidence as Leach laid out a ruler for comparison. In the meantime, I called over to Dennis to check the tool shed for a shovel fitting Leach’s description. As I did so, I noticed State’s Attorney James Dunn quietly joining the crowd at the police barrier, as irresistibly drawn to this death scene as he was to all the ones I’d ever attended during his tenure. I’d realized by now that we’d be here most of the day; it astounded me that Dunn’s specialized curiosity would allow him to abandon the office for so long on such short notice. Hard to keep a man from his personal interests. I gave him a small wave and went back to being a spectator. The trench now complete, Leach set to work in earnest, scraping the side of the dirt wall before him until the faintest change in color indicated he was right at the wall of the narrow, vertical, cylindrical grave. Then, as he’d told me he would, he set to work removing the dirt from the top down. By the time he’d reached the artificial knee, Dennis had returned with a shovel, and we took a brief pause to document that we had indeed found a match for the scars in the dirt. This was no small matter to me privately, for while everyone else was narrowly focused on the task at hand, I was still wondering if the body in the hole had anything at all to do with Abraham Fuller. The shovel was a comforting bridge over that gap. It didn’t prove culpability; it didn’t even point at Fuller, since it was perfectly possible that the shovel was Coyner’s, and that he’d buried Old-Kneecap before Fuller had appeared on the scene. Nevertheless, it was a link, until something better came along.

The artificial knee, it turned out, was the highest point of the body, since both upper and lower leg bones angled downward from where we’d found it. Indeed, as Leach progressively laid bare the skeleton, we could all see that it rested upside down on the nape of its neck, its torso curved and twisted skywards, and its heels tucked in so as not to stick out of the ground.

With that much clear, but with most of the body still encased in dirt, Leach summoned Tyler, Henry, Hillstrom, and me to his side.

“Okay, this is what we’ve got so far. You-” he pointed at Tyler, “Take measurements and make a sketch while I point all this out. Henry, help him out.”

Hillstrom had already begun taking photographs, so he left her alone and focused on me, standing before the half visible skeleton as he might have before a blackboard. “We’re looking at an adult, probably fully grown, whether male or female I don’t know. It’s about six feet in length, which would statistically indicate a male, but that can be misleading-there are a lot of tall women around.

“He or she was dressed at the time of death, in what looks to be a nylon shirt and a pair of blue jeans, but he wasn’t wearing any shoes. If he was wearing a sweater, all traces of it have long since vanished, but I’m pretty sure he was not wearing a coat of any kind. The only buttons here are consistent with the shirt alone.”

I bent forward and put my eyes a few inches away from where the skeleton was held by the dirt like a bug on flypaper. All I could see was skeleton. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

My body language gave me away. With a sigh of impatience, he began pointing out the telltale signs. “Blue jeans, see? The zipper and the copper stress point tabs they use to secure the pocket corners have all left telltale green stains on the bone. The nylon shirt-” he pointed at a small shred of rotted material. “It’s the only material that might survive this long; cotton and wool vanish very quickly. And here, see the plastic buttons? Also, look at the feet; no lace grommets, no leather or rubber sole, no boot nails, no nothing. Therefore: no shoes.”

I was beginning to see what he saw. I pointed to a mass of tiny, confetti-sized fragments that seemed to surround the entire outline of the body. “And that?” “Plastic. He was wrapped in it-or she was; I’m just saying ‘he’ for convenience. Don’t forget that.” He pulled a small trowel from his back pocket and scratched away at his exhibit. “Look, see those round plastic circles, like lifesavers? Those are the reinforced holes running along the top of a shower curtain. You’ll notice they’re all bunched together, as if they were gathered in a knot. And just below them, see that? Rope strands, indicating that the curtain had been tied off above the head, to make it a container for the body.”

He shifted to the feet. “Same thing here, see? No little circles, of course, since this is the bottom of the curtain, but you can see where there are more plastic fragments from where the curtain has been bunched together, and again, here are the rope strands.”

“So he was wrapped in the curtain, which was tied off at both ends with rope, and dragged to the hole.”

“From inside the house,” Leach finished.

“Because of the lack of shoes?”

“Possibly, although it was apparently warm weather-no jacket, remember-so he might have been running around barefoot. But the shower curtain also implies an interior death. If he dies outside, why tear down the curtain from inside? Why not just dig the hole and dump him in? If he dies inside, possibly pouring out a lot of blood, then you’d be more inclined to wrap him in something both handy and waterproof, like a shower curtain.” A slow smile spread across my face, which he seemed to take as an affront, adding, “Of course, all that’s utterly meaningless with a body this old-just a little magic show to entertain the unwashed masses.” He turned to Henry and Tyler. “You finished yet? I’d like to get this over with before next summer. Set up the rocker screens over there and filter the dirt I’ve already removed.”

The next stage of Leach’s “magic show” took on the more traditional appearance of a documentary on digging up dinosaurs. The back hoe was retired, the shovels stacked, and even the hand trowels put away. Now Hillstrom’s cranky little expert was down to dental tools and toothbrushes. The fact that he was toiling over an upside-down corpse with a metal knee instead of bits and pieces of a brontosaurus gradually lost its impact. As the hours went by, most of us lost sight of the overall horror of what had led us here. Like Leach, we became locked onto one minute patch of bone and dirt after another, cataloguing with him the retrieval of each button, belt buckle, scrap of cloth, and wristwatch that gradually was pried from the hard-packed damp earth.

Also, the skeleton itself lost its ghoulish powers as it was slowly dismantled and laid in an open body bag spread out on a stretcher, the soil supporting it having been removed and sifted through the fine-mesh rocker screens that Henry and J.P. steadily shook back and forth. James Dunn, despite his own peculiar enthusiasm, began looking distracted, glancing at his watch more and more frequently, and no doubt ruing his decision not to have sent an assistant in his place.

The care and time finally paid off, however, when Leach quietly gestured to Hillstrom to take a photograph of the area just below the skeleton’s inverted ribcage. Looking over her shoulder as she focused for the shot, I saw the recognizable remains of a small caliber bullet resting in the dirt, where presumably it had settled after the flesh holding it in place had rotted away.

That was all James Dunn needed. With a satisfied grunt, he rose from the rock he’d claimed as his chair for the past several hours, and headed back to his office, the proud owner of another felony. My own emotions were more complicated, since we were the ones who’d have to name the skeleton, as well as the person who’d placed him in his pit. Though not disproved by this latest discovery, any chances that Abraham Fuller had acquired his lethal wound through an accidental shooting had become microscopic.

Beverly Hillstrom stood beside me, watching as Leach carefully removed the ribcage and placed it on the stretcher, leaving only the skull in place. Her voice was very soft. “I feel like apologizing.”

“For what?”

“Ever since I called you about Mr. Fuller, your job seems to be getting increasingly difficult.”

I let out a little sigh. “Looks that way now. Maybe once you get this guy on your examining table in Burlington, things’ll improve.”

She shook her head. “I don’t see how. I might be able to trace the bullet’s trajectory, get a little more precise about his sex, age, and race, but there’s a limit, and that’s about it.”

“What about the knee?”

“Yes-I was thinking about that. A complete data search might yield something, especially if we can locate a serial number. If this fellow’s been in here too long, though, chances are the prosthesis originated in Europe, and that’ll open up a whole new set of problems… and expenses.”

I remained glum and silent.

“There is one thing, though… “ she added tentatively, revealing that terrier-like inability to let go that I so valued in her.

“What?”

“I have a friend-a forensic anthropologist-who might be interested in taking a look. She’s very good, and bones are her specialty.”

“So what’s the catch?”

“Money. If I bring her in, my office has to pay.”

“And you’re as broke as everybody else.”

She didn’t answer at first, but a slow smile crossed her face as she abstractly watched Leach remove the last of the skeleton from its grave, destined for the nearby hearse that would carry it to Burlington. Finally, she turned to me. “Look, let me get back to my office and make a couple of phone calls. There might be a way around this. Will you be available tomorrow?”

“Absolutely,” I answered without hesitation.

She gave my forearm a squeeze and began walking toward the slope leading out of the trench. “We’ll get this fellow to talk one way or the other.”

Joe Gunther’s girlfriend, Gail Zigman, is raped, causing consternation and great pain not just to the two of them, but a media frenzy due to her political prominence, his involvement in the case, and her refusal to hide behind a shroud of anonymity. Instead, while Joe and his colleagues narrow in on… [More Info & Read Excerpt]]]>

The Plot

Joe Gunther’s girlfriend, Gail Zigman, is raped, causing consternation and great pain not just to the two of them, but a media frenzy due to her political prominence, his involvement in the case, and her refusal to hide behind a shroud of anonymity. Instead, while Joe and his colleagues narrow in on the identity of her attacker, Gail is leading candlelight parades down Main Street, bringing attention to the true character of rape. But is the man the police nail for the crime the right one? Risking his friendship with Gail, the respect of his peers, and finally his own life, Joe doggedly keeps digging, hoping to find out if the man they have in jail is rightfully there, or if the evidence against him was fruits of the poisonous tree.

An excerpt from Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

To set the stage: In pursuit of a man believed to have raped Gail Zigman – Bob Vogel – Joe has been stabbed in the stomach, and now lies near death in the hospital.

What I remember comes to me in private mental snapshots-some slightly fuzzy or badly framed, some of people, others of ceilings, ambulance roofs, or views of the sky. All of them are in random order. The one constant theme, like music accompanying a slide show, is the pain. It is the pain, I’ve come to think, that stimulated my taking the snapshots in the first place. Whenever it hit badly enough, I came into focus, more or less, just as a dozing concertgoer might be jarred awake by an occasional off-key note, before nodding off once more.

There are many clear, full face, but troubled portraits of friends-Tony, Ron, Sammie, Gail, Billy… even my younger brother Leo, a butcher from Thetford and the gentle custodian of the remnants of my family. All there, I knew, to lend me comfort, to see how I’m doing, but all looking as if they’ve lost their best friend. There is one of Willy, of course, that’s a little different. He’s farther away, standing straight and viewing from a distance. When I wasn’t taking photos but just leafing through them until the next spasm woke me up – I came to think he was looking at me as he might a dead dog in the street. But then he’s a special case; and he did show up.

Toward the end, more lucid, although still keeping to myself in dark unconsciousness, I knew that’s what was going on-that they were visiting me-fitting themselves awkwardly in between the IV poles, the electronic monitors, the EKG machine, and a bunch of other equipment that kept a steady watch on me. But having no memory of their visits apart from these disjointed images-and judging solely from their expressions-I knew I wasn’t doing too well.

I eventually found that out for myself when the familiar painful stimulus led to a moving picture instead of a still. I watched in grimacing fascination as a young nurse, her eyes watchful, manipulated something below my line of sight. It was dark all around us, the only light coming from a freestanding gooseneck lamp she had beside her, and the familiar green, red, and amber glow from the various instruments plugged in all around me.

“Ow.”

She stopped, and turned to look at me, her face darkening in the shadow, which in turn highlighted the whiteness of her teeth as she smiled. “Good morning.”

I moved my head slightly to take in the surrounding gloom. “Morning?”

“Figure of speech. It’s two A.M. How are you feeling?” Her voice was soft and clear.

“Not too good. What are you doing down there?” To me, my voice sounded like it was coming from inside an echo chamber and my throat hurt like hell. I didn’t know if I was whispering or shouting.

“Changing your dressing. Sorry if it hurts a bit.”

I caught my breath at an extra jolt, remembering how painlessly the knife had slipped in. “He did a hell of a job, I guess.”

She smiled again, her eyes back on what she was doing. “That he did. He said lots of other people would’ve died from less. You’re a tough guy, Mr. Gunther.”

She hadn’t known whom I’d meant, and I was too tired to explain it to her. Also, there was something uplifting in the way she spoke, after all those grim-faced snapshots, and I didn’t want to ruin the mood. I passed out instead, launched on a new career of collecting movie loops-small segments of action, usually of nurses like her, sometimes of doctors-always brought on by the pain. Some of these loops had dialog, occasionally as coherent and reasonable as that first one, but they tended to be a little repetitive. The time of day and concern for how I was feeling were two popular subjects. And there were other times when the movie and the soundtrack were completely out of whack, when lips moved without sound and words floated by out of context. I got more of those grim looks at those times, and eventually, like a precocious toddler, I learned to keep my mouth shut when the audience frowned.

A breakthrough came when I woke not from pain, but from a gentle pressure on my forehead-something warm and smooth-a caress-and I opened my eyes to see Gail looking down at me.

“Smile,” I asked her.

She smiled-genuinely-the pleasure reaching the small crinkles near her eyes. “Hi. You’re looking better.”

I waited for the pain, for the lights to fade and the movie to end as usual-some of them had been that short-but nothing happened. I took advantage of it to study her more closely, in the flesh, instead of in the recesses of my mind. She didn’t look better. Her eyes were bloodshot, her hair tangled and unwashed, and her cheeks gaunt and shadowed with exhaustion.

“You look terrible.”

The smile spread to a chuckle. “Thanks a lot-you’re to blame for most of it.”

I felt a familiar tug on my ability to focus-my brain longing to return to its black hole of peaceful contemplation. My sight darkened and blurred. But I didn’t want to go this time. I shifted my weight slightly, and the hot poker did the rest-my eyes cleared and my mind resurfaced.

That obviously wasn’t all it did, however. Gail suddenly leaned forward, her expression intent. “Are you okay?”

I unclenched my teeth. “Yeah-sorry.” I raised an arm to touch her, to set her at ease, and saw a thin, almost bony hand come into view-pale, slightly wrinkled, and scarred by several old IV sites along the forearm. Instead of squeezing her shoulder, I flexed my hand several times, as if at a loss to explain its function.

She interpreted the gesture. “You’ve been here a long time, Joe. Weeks. You came close to dying a few times.”

Her tightly controlled voice suddenly meshed with her ravaged appearance and I felt terrible about my earlier flip comment. I put the stranger’s hand to use and gripped her arm. “Gail, I thought about you-about being with you-just after he stabbed me.”

She smiled again. “Swell.”

I held onto her harder. “No. It was strange. It was peaceful, and didn’t hurt. I was just lying there in the water, thinking of how nice it would be to be with you. You were the one thing I could think of that helped.”

The words sounded awkward to me, unfamiliar and slightly juvenile. I was angered at my own lack of eloquence, knowing without being told of the hours she must have spent by my bed, putting aside her own pain so she could accompany me through mine.

“I guess it worked,” was what she said, but the smile lingered in her eyes.

I wanted to ask her how she was doing, if her own suffering at the hand of our mutual nemesis had eased any since we’d last visited. I wanted to find out what had happened to Bob Vogel, and what her reaction was to that. But it was all beyond me. My vision closed in again, I saw my hand fall away from her arm, and this time I couldn’t bring myself to move. Just as I shut down, I saw Gail lean forward to kiss me.

The next visitor I knew about was Leo, my brother, who woke me up as any truly professional butcher might-by getting a firm grip on the meat of my upper arm.

He smiled as I opened my eyes. “Jesus, Joey, you’re scrawnier’n hell.”

I focused on his tired face-broader and darker than Gail’s. “You don’t look so hot yourself,” I croaked, clearing my throat.

He slipped his arm behind my neck and tilted my head up to receive some cool water from a cup with a bent straw hanging out of it-his years of tending our invalid mother showing in his gentle dexterity. “I knew you’d want some of this-all that crap they had stuffed down your throat. I couldn’t believe it.”

I finished sipping and he laid me back, suddenly peeling back my upper lip and looking at my teeth. “Boy, we ought to do something about that, too. I brought a toothbrush, okay?”

I stared in wordless amazement at the brush he whipped out of his shirt pocket, his tired eyes gleaming with the bright glow of success. “That’s another thing I knew they wouldn’t think of. Has Gail tried to kiss you yet?”

“I don’t… I think so. I’ve been kind of groggy.”

He burst out laughing and produced a crumpled tube from another pocket, from which he slathered a thick dollop onto the brush. “God, no wonder she hasn’t said much-must still be catching her breath.”

I blinked a couple of times, trying to banish the tendrils of a deep sleep from my brain. “Leo, what’s been going on? Where am I?”

He raised his eyebrows and dipped the brush into the cup. “You don’t know? Open your mouth.”

I raised a hand to hold him off. “Don’t. I can do it.”

He handed it over cheerfully. “I doubt it.”

I took the brush and tried to use it, my fingers trembling with the effort. After only a couple of strokes, my entire arm felt heavy, and I missed my teeth completely, delivering a swatch of foam across my chin.

Leo shook his head, satisfied by his foresight. “Give me that. You’re making a mess.” He took it away and set to work, neatly and gently. “You’re in Lebanon, New Hampshire-the Hitchcock Hospital-and you’ve been under for three weeks, Joey-gram negative septicemia-that’s what they said you had. Fancy for blood poisoning. What the knife started, your own guts spilling into the rest of you almost finished. You had the docs scrambling a couple of times. Bad fevers, seizures, times you were delirious-you gave ‘em a run for their money. They tell me you lost forty pounds just lying here. By the way, who’s paying for all this?”

I gurgled something, and he shrugged, “Oh, right. Sorry. Here —” he brandished the all-purpose cup. “Spit.”

I spat.

“The reason I ask, you got first class all the way-police escort for the ambulance from the dam; helicopter ride up from Brattleboro; the best surgical team they had to offer here… You know how long they worked on you?”

I knew better than to try to answer. When Leo was on a roll, there was no point trying to stop him.

“Eight hours. Gail and I were sitting outside the whole time. They tried getting us to go home, but forget that. Anyway, it was the same bunch working on you the whole night. I thought docs were a little overpaid, you know? But when I saw the head guy-when he came out to tell us you’d pulled through the operation-he looked like he’d earned his keep. That son-of-a-gun looked beat. You know what I mean?”

He punched me gently on the shoulder and then immediately leaned over me, his eyes inches from mine. “Damn, you okay? Got a little carried away. That didn’t hurt, did it?”

“It’s okay, Leo.”

He was already massaging the shoulder with his big paw, doing far more damage than he had with the punch. He suddenly stopped again and took my face in his hands, as he might a small child’s. His face was serious and troubled, in abrupt contrast to the beaming expression he’d been showering on me so far. “You’re doing okay now, aren’t you? Feeling better?”

I tried to nod between his hands, and muttered through puckered lips, “Fine-a little tired.”

“I know you’ve been banged up before-even out like a light for a couple of days-but this time… I don’t know… You really had me scared. You actually died a couple of times, you know that?”

I tried shaking my head politely, with less success.

He glanced up at the machines clustered around me. “Hadn’t been for all this stuff-and all the people here-you would’ve been history.” He paused, his eyes gleaming brightly. “You scared the shit out of me.”

He gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, said, “Don’t do it again,” and disappeared as magically as he’d appeared.