The Sniper's Wife

Chapter 1





Willy Kunkle dipped his large right hand into the sink and scooped a splash of warm water onto his face, washing away the last of the shaving soap. He straightened, used the edge of a towel hanging to the right of the mirror to mop his cheeks and chin with the same hand, and studied his reflection in the harsh fluorescent light.

He wasn’t looking for flaws in his shaving. And, God knows, there was no narcissism taking place. Willy was the first to acknowledge his was a purely functional appearance. He had what was necessary: a nose, two eyes, a mouth, none of it particularly remarkable. As far as it went, it was just a face.

And yet he studied it every morning the same way, carefully, warily, especially watching the eyes for any deepening of the intensity which even he found disturbing. Had he seen them on somebody else, they were eyes that would have given him pause—eyes which troubled him all the more that they were his. They were what made of the whole truly something to remember, and although he didn’t know it, they were the one feature almost every-one remembered about his face.

His scrutiny drifted lower, again as usual, to his neck, to his collarbone, and finally to his left shoulder and the useless arm below it. He’d been symmetrical once—at the very least that. Now he was someone who carried an arm as an eccentric might perpetually lug around a heavy stuffed animal.

Except that his burden wasn’t that interesting. It was just an arm, withered, pale, splotchy with poor circulation—something straight out of Dachau but pinned to his otherwise healthy body—put there by a rifle bullet in a police shootout years ago. In fact, the scar marked the dividing line between the alive and the dead of his body the way a ragged and permanent tear identifies where a sleeve has been torn from a shirt.

It did draw attention away from the eyes, though. People overlooked them altogether when describing him as “the cop with one arm.” Which was an advantage, as far as Willy was concerned. He appreciated that a lesser but adequately flamboyant deformity covered for a far more telling one. It suited his personality. And his need. As he’d watched those eyes every morning—those windows into the workings of his head—he’d actually become grateful for the arm. It was his own built-in red herring.

He reached up and turned off the light. Time to go to work.




Winter had passed by at last, even mud season was nearing an end. A year’s worth of weather in Vermont has been called nine months of winter and three more of damned poor sledding, but a quantity of subtleties is lost there. In fact, to those brought up in its midst, Vermont offers as many temperature and mood swings as any moderately complicated marriage, which is also how many natives view their relationship with the state.

Willy Kunkle was not a native. A “flatlander” by birth, transplanted from New York almost twenty years before, he didn’t much care about the local fondness for climatology. It was either hot or cold to him, dry or wet. And discussing it wasn’t going to change anything. Still, this was a very pleasant morning, and despite himself, he enjoyed the almost uncomfortably cold air drifting in through the open car window on his drive downtown.

Willy lived in Brattleboro, Vermont, a topsy-turvy, nineteenth century, postindustrial town of some twelve thousand residents squeezed into the state’s southeast corner, hard by the Connecticut River and straddling three of Interstate 91’s first exits out of Massachusetts.

This was a significant geographical detail. It made of Brattleboro the first taste of small-town Vermont to all those high-speed travelers coming out of the south, which is why a multimillion-dollar, high-tech welcome center had just been erected below Exit 1, and helped explain the town’s financial survival when other historical mementos, like Springfield, Bellows Falls, and Windsor farther north, complete with similarly picturesque redbrick hearts, had faded to become mere economic ghosts of their former selves.

More specific credit for Brattleboro’s stamina came from another unlikely flatlander source: back during the sixties, a small army of disaffected social dropouts, dizzy with blurry images of sylvan splendor and a thirst for isolation, barely crossed the state line to set up communes, natural food restaurants, and back-to-the-earth farms. Eventually, once the spiritual glow had either faded or aged, these erstwhile hippies amended enough of their more doctrinaire enthusiasms to become an integral part of an interestingly quirky, often contentious social fabric.

To the local police, however, Brattleboro’s proximity to New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and the interstate had been slowly transforming the town from what the chamber of commerce called the gateway to Vermont into its doormat, a magnet for all the ills leaking out of the urban south—a cynical and narrow view, no doubt, but allowable given the source.