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so-called niece?”
    There, Nelson was prepared. “That was the point—he wasn’t asked. He just volunteered, like he was feeling guilty.”
    “He have any regular habits?”
    The other man finally had to admit defeat. “I didn’t ask. It sounded like he was a night owl.” He pointed at one of the names on the page. “That one said that he came and went at all hours of the day and night.”
    Joe wiped his forehead again with his sleeve. “I better head out. The lab guys’ll probably be wrapping things up. You got relief coming soon?”
    Nelson checked his watch. “Another hour or so.”
    Joe patted him on the shoulder. “I appreciate your help, Gary. I’ll make sure Klesczewski and your supervisor get told.”
    Nelson smiled. “Thanks.”
    Nelson waited until Joe was about halfway down the hall, heading for the top of the stairwell, before he asked, “Mr. Gunther, do we know who did it?”
    Joe stopped and looked back at him. “Not right now.” He then added, more hopefully, “Not yet.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    U nbeknownst to Joe Gunther, Lester Spinney nosed his car down Brattleboro’s Main Street a few minutes before his boss left Castine’s apartment building, headed for the same destination.
    Spinney was a startlingly tall and lanky man, doomed to be nicknamed Stork by almost any group he joined. He was the odd man in Joe Gunther’s four-member squad—married and with children, and the only one to have come from the state police instead of the local cops. In that last way, paradoxically, he represented the VBI’s overall norm, since most Bureau cops had begun as troopers. It wasn’t high-level math. With some three hundred people in uniform—in a state numbering only a thousand full-time cops, total—it stood to reason that the state police would be the biggest talent pool available. The irony was, of course, that when the governor signed the VBI into existence, he’d slapped the face of the VSP in the process. Their own Bureau of Criminal Investigation had once been assigned Vermont’s major crimes, and now were restricted to pursuing whatever was deemed too time-costly for road troopers. A bitter pill only partiallyoffset by making applications to the new VBI exclusive to the best investigators in the state—a clear advantage to old BCI members.
    It had been an arcane political childbirth, made murkier by strong opinions and hurt feelings. The likes of Lester Spinney, however, had only benefited. Once struggling inside a tradition-bound—he would have said hidebound—organization with a promotion bottleneck, Les was now free to run his own cases with a minimum of interference, under the guidance of an almost legendary mentor—all for the same pay, benefits, and retirement as before.
    This was not a man unhappy with how life could sometimes turn out. And the fact that he had to commute from Springfield to Brattleboro to do so, and work with the likes of Willy Kunkle, didn’t faze him at all. He and everyone else knew Kunkle was on board solely because of Gunther’s influence. In truth, that was exactly the point: Willy may have been a public-relations disaster. But he was an inspired cop, instinctive and canny and utterly committed. Given Lester’s own quirky sense of humor, and how he’d often felt bound and gagged as a trooper, he was delighted to work with an outfit that would have Willy Kunkle as a member.
    He reached the bottom of Main Street, and the double-sided chute of tall, weathered, traditional, red brick buildings, and veered slightly right through the complex intersection—Brattleboro’s own “malfunction junction”—to engage onto Canal Street, on his way to Manor Court.
    Springfield, his home forty miles north, looked a little like this, as did so many others. There was always a source of flowing water somewhere, for the energy and transport of yore; always the imposing, gargantuan architecture, speaking of nineteenth-century industrial might; and usually a fountain,