There was no answer.

Frustrated, she rose and headed for the door. "I'm going downstairs-see if I can find out what set him off."

She turned into the radio dispatch area on the first floor and rapped on the bulletproof glass separating the dispatchers from the public. A woman half rose in her seat to peer over the console between them. "Hey, Sam." Her voice was made metallic by the two-way intercom. "What's happenin'?"

"I'm looking for Willy. You see him this morning?"

The woman's expression registered surprise, then confusion. "He didn't tell you guys?" She gestured to the side. "Come around to the door."

Sammie moved down the hallway to a locked door that opened almost as soon as she reached it. The dispatcher took her through the patrol officer's room to an empty office normally used by the PD's parking enforcement division, calling through the door of her own office as she did so, "Wayne, cover for me a sec, will you?"

"It was kinda funny," she explained to Sammie. "We got a call from a New York City detective asking if we could send an officer to locate someone named William Kunkle, who supposedly lived in Brattleboro. I started laughing and told him no one went out of their way to dig up Willy if they could avoid it. The guy was dead quiet, so I explained that Willy was a cop who worked upstairs. Which was exactly when Willy walked by the window. So I shouted to him to take the call on the wall phone. I was watching when he answered. He looked really intense for a couple of minutes, and then he hung up and vanished, just like that." She snapped her fingers. "I figured he was booking it upstairs to see you."

Sammie Martens shook her head. "I saw him through the window, running back to his car. What was the name of the New York cop?"

"Hang on." The woman crossed the narrow hallway into the dispatch area and retrieved a pad from her console desk. "Detective Ogden." She handed the pad over. "That's the number."