Free Occam's Razor by Archer Mayor

suddenly found himself running a part-time practice while being a part-time legislator—dividing by half any chance to be truly effective. Gail gave him more credit. She felt he was just biding his time, waiting for the right issue.
    It looked like she’d been right.
    He was nearing the end of his second two-year term. Legislative sessions straddle a biennium, and this January had marked the start of the second half, called the “adjournment session.” Reynolds was the chair of the powerful Judiciary Committee, but he’d failed to win the pro-tem position, which in practice is the Senate’s top dog—the lieutenant governor’s title of “president” notwithstanding—and I’d argued with Gail earlier that his enthusiasm might be running out.
    Until Amos Melcourt had killed those two kids, of course. Now it looked like Reynolds had found himself a life raft and, with it, the backing of the governor and his head of Public Safety, Dave Stanton. Since Willy Kunkle had sourly revealed all this in the office several days ago, one of the promised public hearings on revamping statewide law enforcement had taken place in Rutland—to rave reviews. People had turned out in droves, almost every police agency had been used to mop the floor, and Reynolds was beginning to look like the spear-point of change.
    All of which reminded me of Watergate and made me wonder if a simple botched break-in might be more than it appeared.

6
    I DIDN’T GET THE CHANCE to mull over the break-in of Jim Reynolds’s office any longer than it took me to leave Bobby Miller to his doughnut, cross to my side of the building, and come face-to-face with Harriet Fritter, the squad’s administrative assistant and a doting grandmother several times over. “There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.”
    “I was in the Officers’ Room—ten minutes tops.”
    “There’s been a killing on White Birch Avenue. A woman stabbed with a knife.” Her face suddenly hardened. “And a baby, too.”
    I squeezed her shoulder in sympathy and continued to my office to fetch my coat. “Everyone there now?”
    “The first units, just barely. It came in as a missing persons first.”
    I returned down the hallway, struggling into my parka. “Okay. You know the drill. Round up who we need. They have a suspect yet?”
    “Not that I heard.”
    White Birch Avenue is located in the southeast quadrant of town, a flat plateau dominated by a contrasting mixture of three cemeteries, the high school, the town garage, a sedate middle-class neighborhood, and some of the poorest housing we’ve got. Depending on where you are in this area, you have no inkling of the existence of its other parts, such is the division from one section to the next.
    White Birch is barely a hundred yards long. Connected to South Main and dead-ending at the gates of Saint Michael’s Cemetery, it is narrow and shady to the point of being overgrown, tucked away out of sight and out of the public’s general consciousness. The homes along its length run from fairly run-down to flat-out decrepit. It is not at the bottom of Brattleboro’s food chain, but it is not far removed.
    I reached it in under four minutes.
    The scene was much more active than the railroad tracks had been in the middle of the night. There, the assumption had been that a bum had committed suicide. Here, there were no doubts what had happened, and as Harriet had demonstrated, a child’s involvement had cranked up emotions to the utmost. South Main Street was jammed with ambulances, squad cars, and private vehicles with either red or blue flashing lights, even though the first of these couldn’t have been summoned more than ten minutes earlier, and most weren’t necessary now. The late afternoon light hovered between day and night, making the colorful, pulsating display all the more festive in a world of uniform gray.
    I parked at a distance and walked to White Birch, which already had yellow tape barring it from the