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several months in his chair recently, as temporary chief, and I knew what his role was like—not being able to investigate anything personally, being chained to the desk, and yet being accountable in the public’s eye for everything that came out of the department.
    I let a minute float by before answering. “My gut tells me we’re going to have problems with this one. There might be all sorts of reasons for wanting to bury a man you just killed, but I don’t know why anyone would pick that spot.”
    Brandt’s right eyebrow rose. “Seems perfect to me.”
    “‘Seems perfect.’ That’s the trouble with it. This is one of the most rural states in the whole country. Even Brattleboro has as much countryside as concrete. If I’d discreetly murdered someone in my basement, and had waited several hours to put him in my car at night so I could dump him, I sure as hell wouldn’t head for Canal Street. I’d go out of town, find some forgotten ravine where I could work in peace, and bury my man for keeps.”
    “Maybe you don’t have a car.”
    I pondered that one. “Which makes me local to the scene, having to carry the body from my basement to Canal Street on my shoulder.”
    Without a word being spoken, we both rejected that one.
    “So why was it put there?” he finally asked.
    “So someone would find it.”

3
    THE CARPENTER HAD FINISHED FOR THE DAY by the time I left Brandt’s office. I noticed the offending saw, lying tilted and silent on a sawhorse, its nerve-jangling screech as neutered as the unplugged electric cord curled up on the floor beneath it. I went down a short, interior hallway to the men’s room to treat my headache with some cool water on the face.
    It wasn’t just the police department that was being revamped, but the entire Municipal Building. A half-year earlier, the ribbon had been cut on the new District Court Building across the street, and all the judges, clerks, secretaries, and sheriff’s men who had once shared our quarters had taken their paraphernalia and abandoned us like a departing storm. In the sudden void, we survivors—the police department, the town manager, the planning director, the finance director, the town attorney, the listers, the town clerk, and all the others—had crept warily out of the nooks and crannies into which we’d been stuffed for decades and had begun to explore a vast new domain.
    Unfortunately—in the short run—with freedom had come remodeling, and department by department the building was being torn apart. I knew it was for the eventual good, but at the moment I couldn’t imagine a grimmer place to work, a point that was driven home by the notice on the sink in the men’s room: “Disconnected for renovation—please go upstairs.”
    I sighed, mopped my forehead with my warm, soggy handkerchief, and crossed the main corridor to the unmarked door of the detectives’ bureau, located opposite the department’s administrative and patrol offices. At least now, though still looking like a battlefield and feeling like a banana republic, the building was quiet.
    I found Ron Klesczewski with Harriet Fritter, the detective-unit clerk and, for me, a gift from a bureaucratically sensitive god. They were standing over Ron’s desk, shuffling through the results of the canvass. Here, all construction had been completed. An erstwhile maze of cubbyhole offices had yielded to two large rooms, the first of which was circled by four smaller ones—a lockup evidence room, an interrogation room with a small viewing closet, a lab, and an office for me. This first large room—the squad room—also held a cluster of four desks in its middle, cloistered from one another by head-high sound-absorbent panels. The second large room beyond served as a meeting/training area, with a VCR, a TV, some equipment lockers, and a conference table. All of it was pretty basic, but compared to what we’d had—once the air-conditioning was in place—it would be heaven on