Scent of Evil by Archer Mayor Read Free Book Online

the realities at hand began to settle back around me.
    Some of those realities, I knew, might end up involving Gail and me, assuming my dour instincts about this case proved accurate. As selectman and chief of detectives, respectively, we could, in times of crises, occupy opposite corners, with her peers clamoring for information and mine playing close to the chest. And we were not, as I often wished, that detached from our jobs. Experience had shown us that our basic philosophical differences—hers leaning far left, mine stuck in the middle—could put a serious strain on our intimacy when the pressure was on.
    I crossed the room to where Tyler had set up a makeshift laboratory in what had once been a good-sized janitor’s closet. I knew the room was occupied because all the boxes that normally lived in it were neatly piled outside.
    “Who is it?” Tyler answered my knock. I could hear the strain in his normally placid voice.
    “Joe.”
    “Come on in.”
    I opened the door cautiously and was immediately assaulted by a cloying wave of moist, sweat-anointed heat. The overworked suction fan in the ceiling screeched in an effort to make the air breathable. A second motor, attached to a large vacuum cleaner hooked to the drain of a special “dry sink,” was also howling, trying to keep the dust out of the air, with marginal results. The noise made me wince in pain. J.P. Tyler and two other men were jammed inside a space in which one person could comfortably operate. They were standing at the two-wall counter, sifting dirt through fine-gauge wire meshes into the dry sink. On the floor, several more dirt-filled, labeled garbage bags awaited processing.
    Tyler’s face was dripping with perspiration and covered with a fine layer of dust.
    “Jesus, you guys look like miners.” I stood in the open doorway, not being able or willing to actually enter the small room.
    Tyler’s two equally grimy companions gave me acknowledging looks. Tyler, however, seemed totally oblivious. He wiped one cheek with the back of his rubber-gloved hand, thereby turning dust into a muddy smear, and gave me a broad smile—the lab man in his element. He looked around, as if suddenly discovering where he was. “Yeah. Tight quarters.”
    “It’s boiling in here, and noisy.”
    “Oh, I guess it is.” He glanced over at the other two. “Why don’t we take a small break?”
    The other two filed past me, no doubt wondering where in their job descriptions they’d missed having to play in dirt in a hundred-degree, hundred-decibel closed box.
    Tyler tore a paper towel from a wall dispenser and wiped his face. “Well, we’re getting a few things.”
    “Like what?”
    “A Camel cigarette butt so far, and some dirt that seems like it came from somewhere else.”
    “All that dirt came from somewhere else.”
    He smiled ruefully, utterly unoffended—a reaction I could usually count on. Tyler was so lost in his own view of the world that irony, along with most other subtle forms of communication, affected him the way a mouse fart does a high wind. This made him both an excellent technical man and a lousy judge of human character. I hoped, definitely for our sake, and perhaps even for his, that he would never be promoted or hired away from the small niche in police work he so perfectly inhabited.
    “You’re probably right,” he admitted. “But I thought I might keep a few samples to compare with whatever Hillstrom or the crime lab in Waterbury might come up with. You know, from the shoes and fingernails and whatever.”
    I nodded, remembering how clean I thought the dead man’s fingernails had been at the funeral home. I wasn’t too optimistic. “Did the photos come back yet?”
    Harriet Fritter had overheard us. “Yes, they did. I put them in J.P.’s top drawer. There was another envelope with ten copies of the head shot. I gave those to Billy to be distributed to the patrol.”
    Harriet was a robust, widowed mother of five, grandmother of