CHIEF of a CONSCIENCE

IT’S BEEN NEARLY NINE MONTHS. THE FLOWERS AND BEER CANS AND SCROLLED FAREWELLS (“SMOKE A BONG FOR JOEY”) ARE LONG GONE FROM THE ROADSIDE NOW, AS IS THE GHOSTLY WHITE RACING BIKE—WHITE-PAINTED TIRES, WHITE SEAT AND HANDLEBARS, HUNG WITH WHITE WREATHS—THAT STOOD SOMEHOW UPRIGHT, FOR WEEKS AFTER ALL THE REST WAS GONE, IN THE FIELD JUST OFF THE TURN, ON ROUTE 116 IN HINESBURG VERMONT, WHERE THE HONDA CIVIC LEFT THE ROAD. BUT THE HAND-CARVED, BLOCK-PRINTED WOOD SIGN, NAILED TO THE TREE, IS STILL THERE: “AS YOU COME HERE TO GRIEVE THE SAD LOSS OF JOSEPH AND TO PAY YOUR RESPECTS PLEASE REMEMBER THAT A MAN NAMED RICHARD WHO ALSO WAS LOVED BY FAMILY AND FRIENDS WENT OUT FOR A BIKE RIDE ON A BEAUTIFUL SUNDAY MORNING AND NEVER CAME BACK.”

It’s a sunless afternoon in midJanuary, though there has been no snow for days, and the ground is as gray as the sky. As we make our way south on 116 half an hour southeast of Burlington in the black police cruiser, to our right the flatness of the Champlain Valley unrolls itself like a carpet across a succession of fields; to the west, the land rises slowly, through a ridge of low trees, toward the foothills of the Green Mountains.

The police chief, Frank Koss, drives on without looking sideways. (“I pass here,” he says, “probably three or four times a day.”) Half a mile or so past the spot, he turns the SUV left onto a rutted side road, then left again, as the road turns briefly to dirt, up a hill that curves past a derelict barn, then through a thinly settled neighborhood of homes that have seen better days. There are woods on both sides now—scrub pines, a scattering of birches—and every few hundred feet a driveway cuts in from left or right. One of these is the Triple L mobile-home park, a scrum of single- and double-wide trailers packed in around narrow dirt alleyways, where Joey Marshall’s family still lives. “Most of those people there, I have a lot of respect for them,” the chief says. “They go to work, they take care of their homes, they’re good people.”

Another mile farther on, and with the woods now opening up to fields, we pass a large brick church fronted by a white cross; across the road from it, in the middle distance, is the rear of Champlain Valley Union High School, where Joey was a student until two days before he died. Just past here is Annette’s Preschool, where the chief likes to come some mornings, he says, to check in with the crossing guards and “just say hi to the kids.”

He drives on, taking his time, glancing up this side road, turning down that one, both hands always on the wheel. A car passes going the other way; both drivers raise fingers in greeting. “This is the best part of the job,” he says now. “You’re out on the road, you’re seeing people, they’re getting to see their tax dollars at work. After a while, you get to know the faces; you get a sense of who’s who. The day comes there’s a report of a domestic [problem], of some man and woman fighting, it helps that you’ve met them, that you have a sense of the history there.”

The history with Joey Marshall wasn’t so different from that of a lot of 17-yearolds—just a degree or so more extreme. He liked speed. (“Speed [for him] was a way of life,” a high-school friend would tell the police later.) He defied limits. He chafed at authority. He smoked weed. He was young.

Hinesburg police officer Anthony Cambridge, a former high-school social-studies teacher with the gentlest manner you’re likely ever to encounter in a cop, recalls an early run-in with Joey: “I was in my own car, on my way home. He came up behind me and passed me, then passed five other cars in front of me, at what I’d say was 80 miles an hour. It was the most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen done in a car.”

Cambridge went to the Marshall home, where he met with Joey and his grandfather, then brought them back to the station. Joey cried and promised to slow down. Not long after came a phoned-in complaint: He was still at it, driving his grandfather’s black Ford Fiesta way too fast on North Road— the site of the mobile-home park—“in a backward baseball cap, knocking down pylons.” Cambridge brought him into the station a second time, this time with his mother. His grandfather took away the car. “Someday you’re going to thank him,” Cambridge told the boy. Within weeks he was driving another, this time a teal-blue Honda Civic.

There were several more incidents, one involving a defective front license plate, another a noisy exhaust. Then, on the morning of April 26 last year, a Sunday, reportedly following an argument with his parents about his sum- many of them deadly, most of them on the road. Ten years gone from California, and he can still give you chapter and verse of the first fatality he ever worked: October 1982, father and three kids, killed in a Porsche on a Marin County mountain road. Or what he calls his worst: July Fourth weekend, 1997, Boulder Creek in Santa Cruz County, an 18-year-old, DWI, drives broadside into a tree at 1:30 a.m., killing three friends and burning a fourth over half his body. “They left flowers around the tree after that one, too,” he says.

He retired in the summer of 2006 on a California state pension, finishing as a sergeant with the Mount Shasta office at the northern edge of the state. He was 53 years old, married, with 30-odd years of policing behind him.

Some weeks before he left, with his wife, Debbie, he took a road trip east: on I-70 through the middle of the country, with no certain destination in mind, “except that we both liked the idea of living in New England.” The trip took six weeks. By the time they were done driving, Vermont was the clear choice of both: “It’s hard to explain why. We just liked the feel of things there.”

They returned home and began surfing the Web. There was an open- ing in Williston for a full-time beat cop—accidents, patrol duties, handing out tickets—which he began in the fall of ’06, a month after his last duty day in Mount Shasta. The Williston job led, a year later, to a similar post in Hinesburg. There was a promotion, then another. Since the spring of 2012, he’s been serving as chief, on a salary of $68,000 a year. He’s also trained as an EMT, whose duties—up to 200 calls a year, he says—he performs as a volunteer.

To make sense of what Koss did after Joey Marshall died, it helps to under-