Tucker Peak Read Online Free Page A

just good craftsmanship.
    · · ·
    It was with similar anticipation that I returned to the office on Monday morning to see what the computers had coughed up concerning William Manning’s missing items. For me, an investigation, no matter how apparently trivial, shared many of the elements of a woodworking project. They both demanded thoughtfulness, patience, and attention to detail, and both promised to disappoint if handled carelessly. But neither one was entirely successful if only followed by the numbers. Strong elements of intuition and creativity always featured in the end result.
    It was also true, however, that encouraging momentum was sometimes slow to build. When I checked for reports from our queries of two days ago, I found nothing.
    Or, as Willy put it more succinctly, “We got shit. No hits on the fingerprints, the MO, the sheriff’s neighborhood canvass, nothing from the caretaker, who I interviewed yesterday, and no news on any of our rich boy’s toys. I still think he did it himself for the insurance.”
    Sammie Martens was standing by a small counter that held a coffeemaker and a few cups. Small, slight, and as tough as sinew, Sammie was ex-military like Willy and me, but—perhaps because she was barely in her thirties—she still maintained the spit and polish both of us had long since dropped. She was also intense, ambitious, and extremely loyal, a combination that occasionally got uncomfortably tangled up in itself and dropped her into dark moods of self-doubt and frustration. She and Willy were the only erstwhile Brattleboro police officers to accompany me in the shift to VBI, a move that had effectively robbed the town’s detective bureau of three-fifths of its manpower. We’d been working as a team for over ten years, as a result, and had become more like family members than mere colleagues.
    “You know most of that stuff won’t be coming in for days,” she told him. “You’re just pissed off because you don’t like the guy and you think the case is beneath you, but you still can’t resist being interested in it.”
    Willy looked at her balefully. “Oh, right. Like I’m staying up late at night sweating this out.”
    “You drove me all the way back to Tucker Peak to talk to the caretaker on a Sunday,” she said, smiling and taking her first sip of coffee. “The sheriff’d already done that.”
    Willy scowled.
    “Did you learn anything new?” I asked, surprised and curious.
    But feeling cornered by now, he didn’t take it well. “Right—you, too. Don’t be bashful. Pile it on. You saying we shouldn’t double-check the other guy’s work?”
    Sammie was walking slowly across to her desk so she wouldn’t spill her drink. “Willy, give us a break. It’s too early for opera.”
    He didn’t respond, but I noticed him hiding a smile as he pretended to dig around in a lower drawer. Willy and Sammie, after years of bickering while working for me downstairs, had recently and suddenly become a romantic item, just prior to joining VBI. It was very low-key. I was one of the few who even knew of it, and it had seemed at the time as likely as a bullfrog courting a bird. But it appeared to be working. Sammie’s nearly obsessive, jagged, driven style had been softened, and the angry fire that raged perpetually inside Willy was running just a few degrees cooler.
    The office door opened with a bang, and a tall, skinny man with a tousled shock of blond hair entered, saying something pleasantly suggestive over his shoulder to Judy, our secretary, who sat alone in the small waiting area between our office and the hallway.
    Lester Spinney was the final member of the “Southeast” team, VBI being divided into four cardinal divisions around the state, with the fifth residing at the Department of Public Safety headquarters in centralized Waterbury. Lester and I had known each other since we’d worked together on a homicide in the state’s isolated Northeast Kingdom region a decade earlier.