Three Can Keep a Secret by Archer Mayor Read Free Book Online

example, while the Vermont Bureau of Investigation was designed to operate with five interlinked squads — one in each of the four corners, and a headquarters unit at the Department of Public Safety in Waterbury — for a while, that neatly diagrammed command structure had been abruptly rendered more free-flowing.
    As the residents of the state hospital had discovered overnight, that entire campus, housing some fifteen hundred state workers — including the VBI administration — had abruptly become an abandoned, soggy ghost town. Fortunately, the DPS building had suffered the least, and was likely to be reoccupied soon, but that lay in the future. In the meantime, the VBI office there was empty, and they'd all just received news —
    very quietly delivered — that one of the hospital's patients had gone missing.
    As Joe found out upon returning from his field trip.
    "Did he just wander off into the rain?" he asked Lester after hearing of it, sitting at his desk and struggling to replace his rubber boots with a pair of shoes.
    "She," Lester corrected. "And yeah, in a sense. Found a way into the tunnels and basically evaporated. Search and rescue did their thing, but no luck so far."
    "So far?" Joe looked up. "That mean they've kicked it to us, or are they still looking?"
    Lester gave him a crooked smile. "Little of each, I guess. I don't think we're in the world of hard-and-fast right now."
    Joe tied his second shoe and straightened. "Great. So, now we've got two missing persons cases."
    Willy was sitting at his corner desk, his feet, as usual, propped up on its surface. "Better'n a couple of dumb floaters," he said.
    "You got another?" Lester asked, not having been updated on Joe and Willy's nighttime escapade.
    Willy shrugged with his right shoulder. "Coffin filled with rocks. Might mean somebody faked his own death; might mean something more complicated."
    Sammie laughed as she filled her coffee cup at the side counter they used as a kitchenette. "You'd love that, wouldn't you?"
    "Totally," he agreed, unconsciously touching the Band-Aid over his eye, happy to have survived his impromptu swim in the river, and her accompanying wrath.
    "Well, brace yourselves," Joe told them all. "We may get more MIAs as people sort out who's where and who's not, but for us, and for the time being, there's no doubt that a live, roaming mental patient takes priority over a coffin filled with rocks." He looked at Spinney. "Give us what you got."
    Lester consulted his notes. "Carolyn Barber. One of the few longtimers. Right now, with all the computers down, the building evacuated, and the staff scattered, it's a little tough getting particulars, but I was told she'd been there for decades, which is super rare, and that she was a peaceful soul, kept to herself, never caused trouble. That was one of the things that surprised them when she went missing. They get some over-the-top funny farm candidates there, and they watch those like hawks, but not Barber. The guy I spoke with said she was like a shadow, just drifting around. Kinda poetic."
    "Great," Willy snorted. "We'll lure her out playing sitar music on a loudspeaker."
    "If she was so laid back," Sammie asked, "then why wasn't she put into a halfway house or something? I thought that's what they did nowadays."
    "They do," Les agreed. "But she was a special case. My source didn't know why. Maybe it was money or connections. He said he didn't think she had any family — hadn't had a visitor as far back as he could remember."
    "How old?" Joe asked.
    "Seventies," Lester continued. "They nicknamed her the Governor. I guess she was delusional or something. Claimed she'd actually been governor once."
    "Huh," Joe let out, tapping his forehead. "She was."
    "The Governor?" Lester asked him. "Really? I asked this guy. He said they checked, just so they wouldn't get a nasty surprise someday. There was no record of Carolyn Barber being head of state."
    "It wasn't official," Joe explained. "I don't