Free Red Herring by Archer Mayor Page A

“You’ll get to dance on my grave—I’ll give you that—but I’ll still have the bigger smile on my face. Give me what you’ve got on this Ferenc lady. Raped, too, was she?”
    Katz and Gunther went back years. In more ways than one, it seemed a very long time.
    “You clearly received the press release,” Joe answered him.
    “Worthless piece of crap. Tell me about the rape.”
    “Nothing to tell yet.”
    “Tell me about the rapist.”
    Joe knew better than to react.
    “You got anything at all?”
    “We’re working on it right now,” Joe told him.
    “Ooh. There’s a headline: ‘Cops Working on Homicide.’ Better than the opposite, I suppose. Come on, Joe. You’re busting my balls here.”
    “I haven’t even started, Stanley. And you of all people know I’ll call when we get something we can make public.”
    “God, you’re a prince.”
    The phone went dead and Joe slowly hung it up. Stanley Katz’s casualness notwithstanding, this had been a warning shot, if not precisely from the
Brattleboro Reformer
, then from the industry it represented.
    It wouldn’t take long for the press in general to crank up its interest, especially as things got more complicated.
    Bob Clarke looked balefully out the window as he slipped his much patched winter parka over his Taco Bell uniform.
    “Great,” he muttered, watching the snow drifting from the night sky into the parking lot lights, and there coming to life like excited fireflies.
    “It’s not supposed to be bad,” a female voice said behind him. “They said a dusting, maybe.”
    He turned to see his coworker also getting ready for the cold, pulling a knit cap over her blond hair and tucking in the loose strands.
    “Easy for you to say,” he told her. “You got snow tires.”
    “You don’t?” she asked.
    He grimaced, glanced one last time out the window, and began heading for the front door. “I don’t even have tread.”
    Bob braced himself and pushed open the glass door, exchanging the fast food–scented warmth for the shock of winter chill. He hated the cold. Born and bred in Post Mills, he’d still never gotten used to it.
    He pulled his keys out as he approached his Toyota pickup, parked near the Dumpsters, as required by management. It was a rusty, spring-shot, oil-leaking heap, and every time he saw it, it reminded him of his overall fate—stuck in the boonies, living with his grandmother, his father in jail and his mother God-knows-where. He was all of nineteen and felt like an old man. Even the manager of the Taco Bell considered him a loser, and that Bozo could barely tie his own shoes.
    Which didn’t mean he wasn’t right.
    Bob unlocked the truck’s door and hitched himself in behind the wheel, struck by how, even in below zero temperature, the cab smelled of mildew and general decomposition.
    He went through the painful ritual of bringing the engine to life, using the starter as a defibrillator.
    He’d gotten the truck for a hundred bucks and had put that much into keeping it running. If he hadn’t been friends with the mechanic who issued the inspection sticker every year, even that much wouldn’t have done the trick.
    Running at last, he nosed out of the parking lot, his headlights dim, his windshield scratched, and his ineffective heater not even on.
    At least he had his iPod, which he’d stuck into his ears first off, making the lack of a radio the one aggravation he could overlook.
    Traffic in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, where Bob worked in the entrails of a long commercial strip next to the interstate, was down to a trickle. It was midweek, very late, and most people had sense enough to stay indoors when the weather reports were bad.
    At least, most people who had a choice.
    His head bobbing slightly to the music, he aimed north toward home, on the other side of the Connecticut River, above Thetford Hill, Vermont. It would take him about forty minutes, avoiding the freeway, which he wasn’t fast enough for