Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series) (23 page)

“Hey, babe. How’re ya doin’?”

She burst out laughing. “What the hell?”

“I stole one of their ladders,” he half explained. “Wanna get outta here?”

*   *   *

One street over, Joe killed his lights and drifted to the curb. Far ahead, a man in a fire coat, minus his helmet and ax, stepped out from between two homes, a block away from the action, to be met by the dark car Joe had seen quietly slipping away.

As the car then gathered speed and turned on its headlights, heading in Joe’s direction, he once more flopped onto the passenger seat, resting his cheek against the warm pizza box, and let it pass by.

Then he pulled into the road, executed a quiet U-turn, and followed from a distance.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was long past midnight, and the storm had finally arrived. Vermont’s largest city was looking like an empty Christmas pageant soundstage, where someone had forgotten to switch off the artificial snow machine. Joe topped the hill with his headlights out, hoping to preserve his relative invisibility, and headed into downtown and toward the mesmerizing black hole of Lake Champlain beyond. It was a neat trick, however, driving in the dark, barely keeping the car ahead in view, and relying solely on passing streetlamps to guide him. The heavy snow made every overhead bulb appear like an isolated, smudgy beacon, shrouded as if by fog and barely extending to the roadway.

In the end, Joe’s ambitions proved unrealistic. Despite his best efforts, circumstances overwhelmed him. Just shy of the water’s edge, the tenuous visual link between pursuer and pursued finally snapped, and he lost sight of the taillights that had transfixed him since Colchester. Idling in the middle of the intersection of Main and Battery, without another vehicle in sight, he searched in vain for any movement whatsoever.

His cell, which he’d hung up after leaving the fire scene, vibrated again.

“Gunther,” he answered distractedly, still turning his head to and fro.

“Nice leadership,” came Willy’s flat voice. “Leave one of your own behind in a burning building.”

He ignored the taunt. “She okay?”

“No thanks to you.”

“I got that part.”

“Where the fuck are you?”

“Downtown. I picked up on the two who torched the place and followed them as far as I could.”

“You lost ’em?”

“Finally. Yeah. But I don’t think they made me.”

True to Willy’s character, he dropped the bitterness of his opening comments without further thought, as Joe trusted he would. When he spoke next, his voice was solely that of a co-investigator. “You think they were heading home after a hard night’s work?”

“I hope so. It might give us at least a notion of where to concentrate a search.”

“Cool. We need a break with this stupid case.”

Joe returned to what would be tomorrow’s headlines. “You get anything like a lead from the fire scene?”

“The Focus driver was a predictable dead end. Fire marshals haven’t started yet, but you know they won’t find shit from that bomb. You get the car’s registration?”

“Yup. Might help. Where’s everyone right now?”

“Heading back to the office.”

“Sam doesn’t need someone medical to look at her? Bill Allard will have us for lunch if we don’t cross that
T.
”

Willy laughed. “Right. Sam in the hospital for anything short of a bullet? Good luck. We got her looked at by EMS at the scene. You’ll have to live with that.”

Joe had expected as much. “Okay. See you at the office.”

He brought the rest of the cold pizza to share when he entered the front room, his hair and shoulders covered with snow. The office elsewhere was mostly dark, lending an oddly intimate air to their small group consisting of Tom Wilson, Sam, Willy, and Lester.

Joe crossed straight over to Sammie and kissed her on the cheek. “God, you’re a sight for sore eyes. How’d you get out?”

She smiled at Willy, who was rummaging through the pizza box, not listening. “My hero. He stole a ladder when they weren’t looking and climbed to my window to rescue me.”

Joe laughed. “Really?”

Willy turned with a slice in his hand. “That’s bullshit. She was fine upstairs and they were just following protocol, making sure the fire wouldn’t come back around and cut them off. I just got impatient.”

“You?” Joe exclaimed. “Impatient?”

“Kidding aside,” Tom said, “the fire chief will be reaching out to you tomorrow—well, I guess later today,” checking the wall clock. “He’s pretty pissed.”

“And for once not about me,” Willy added. “You know firemen and cops. Somebody blabbed from our side, so now he knows we had an undercover op going, and he’s all worked up about how we put one of his neighborhoods in danger.”

“What
is
left of the house?” Joe asked.

Willy looked slightly rueful. “Not much, which means the people we borrowed all the video stuff from’ll want to tear you a new one, too.”

Joe ran his fingers through his hair. “I can’t blame them. Not that we saw any of this coming. I’ll dump the whole mess onto Allard.”

Unusually, Willy then offered a bit of moral support. “It wasn’t a total bust. You followed the bad guys pretty far. Main and Battery? That must be close to where they’re holed up. There aren’t too many options down there.”

That was true, but it nevertheless involved at least three major hotels and hundreds of apartments facing the water. Still, they were drawing closer, as Joe revealed by removing an envelope from his pocket and holding it up. “And let’s not forget the receipt that Hank Filson picked up from the floor of the kidnap car. It traces back to a hardware store in the same neighborhood.”

“You talk to them yet?” Willy asked.

“Nope, but I will. When Hank gave it to me, I wasn’t sure of its value, since Mutt and Jeff move around so much. But now I’m thinking maybe they’ve found a home base, at least for while they’re in this neck of the woods.”

“Why did they do it?” Sammie asked, her face and blouse still damp and smeared with soot. “If they were coming for Rachel, they’ve got one hell of a weird way of running a kidnapping.”

“They were flipping us the bird,” Joe told her. “Telling us they were onto our game. What did we get from the driver of the red Focus?”

“What you’d expect,” Lester reported. “I coordinated with the locals when they interviewed him at the scene. He’s just a dirtbag homeboy who was paid to do what he did. He don’t know nuttin’, didn’t see nobody, and has no idea.”

“So he never met his contractor?” Joe asked.

“Nope. It was all by phone, the money was cash, and the delivery by dead drop. Like Tomasz Bajek, once removed—disposable labor.”

“Except that he’s still alive,” Joe mused. “Might as well put him under the hot lights later at the PD, just to see if he remembers anything else.”

“And what do we do in the meantime?” Tom asked. “Canvass the neighborhood around Main and Battery to see if we get lucky?”

“Kind of,” Joe replied. “But let’s start with the hardware store. We’ve been hoping they’d make a mistake.” He held up the envelope again. “Maybe this is it.”

*   *   *

Hardware stores had been a favorite haunt of Joe’s for as far back as he could recall. His father, a quiet, introspective, gentle farmer from the Thetford area, had taken Joe and his younger brother, Leo, to hardware stores when they were kids, as if passing along his appreciation for mechanical things through a form of educational miming. The three of them would wander the aisles, weighing a succession of tools in their hands, the boys watching their father’s expression and learning the values of durability, precision, and craftsmanship by how their teacher winnowed through the offerings to his final choice. An odd, near-silent ritual, cherished by the boys and guaranteed to make them nostalgic every time they entered such a place forever after.

Of course, it couldn’t be a huge building center so common across suburbia. The setting was as key as whatever crowded its shelves. In Burlington, the store that had issued Joe’s receipt fit the bill to perfection. It was older, had creaking wooden floorboards, and smelled of sawdust, varnish, and what Joe could only think of as old iron. It also looked as if the merchandise jammed into every nook and cranny was merely what they’d been able to fit in, implying a gold mine of much more, somewhere just out of sight.

“Can I help you?” a white-haired woman asked as Joe and Sam passed under the small bell that jangled softly above the front door’s upper frame.

Joe glanced about, taking in the tight aisles and loaded bins, shelves and cubbies, noticing with pleasure that some items were even hanging from the pressed tin ceiling and looked about as old as the clerk.

“Yeah, if you’ve got a minute.”

“All the time in the world. People aren’t knocking down my door anymore,” she said, with no tone of complaint.

“Too bad,” Joe said. “I’m from the other side of the state, otherwise I’d be here weekly.”

The woman smiled. “I know the feeling. What can I do for you?”

They both showed their credentials as Joe continued, “We’re from the police, and we’re working a case where one of your receipts cropped up.”

She nodded. “Nothing too bad, I hope.”

Joe took out the receipt and laid it on the scarred wooden counter, facing the clerk. “This one of yours?”

The woman bent at the waist and studied it without picking it up, as if it might be tainted with something catching. “Sure is.”

“We couldn’t figure out what was purchased.”

She left her station at the counter and headed toward one of the aisles as she spoke. “We call them harness cleats, but basically, they’re super-rugged staples you can attach to a barn wall to hold heavy gear.” She stopped at a bin, reached in, and extracted an example. “Pretty beefy. You actually drill all the way through the wall and attach the cleat from the other side with a couple of bolts. I suppose if you had enough of them, you could make something like a metal ladder going up to a loft—like what you see on some of the older utility poles, you know?”

Joe held it for a moment before handing it to Sam. “You can’t sell too many of them, I’d guess.”

The owner headed back to her counter. “Nope.”

“You work here all the time?”

The woman turned and extended a hand in greeting. “I own the place. Sande Snyder—Sande with an
e.
If I didn’t work here, the sign in the door would say, ‘Closed.’”

“But you sold a few of these lately,” Joe stated, more as a fact than a question.

“The receipt says three,” Snyder responded laconically.

Sam laughed. “Right.”

Joe smiled. “You remember who bought them?”

Snyder placed both hands, palm down, on her counter and eased her back slightly by leaning forward. “I do, not that that’ll be of much good to you. I’d have a hard time describing my own husband’s face to you, even if he was still alive. I never can figure out how they do that on TV.”

“Tall, short, fat, skinny? Nothing?” Sam asked.

“Medium on all counts, and mean in the face,” Snyder told her. “Struck me as a city man, born and bred.” She shoved away from the counter and crouched down briefly, adding, “But you don’t have to take my word for it. I got surveillance here, ever since I was broken into a few years back.”

She reappeared with a plastic case containing a CD. “I don’t have, like, a nonstop movie system. Too expensive.” She twisted around and pointed at what resembled an old hurricane lamp, placed at about eye level on a shelf. “It’s hard to see, but it’s sort of a camera with a stutter, rigged to a motion detector. Takes about a picture per second when it’s running, so a single CD can hold a bunch of time. Lucky for you, I just swapped over to a new one. You want to find who you’re after, check toward the end. Like I said, he’s the mean-looking one, the cleats’ll be on the counter in front of him, and he’s wearing one of those Russian-type trooper hats with the ear flaps snapped up over the top. Looks pretty dumb, if you ask me, but I guess they’re warm enough.”

*   *   *

Joe distributed the prints of the hardware store customer to the people around the table—the assembled VBI squads of both Burlington and Brattleboro offices, and Bill Allard, who had driven up from Waterbury to be in on the meeting.

“With many hours of work from several of you here, and help from the FBI and others,” Joe began, “we now know this to be Neil Watson. Date of birth: 7/30/76. He is known as an enforcer for hire, and has multiple arrests for aggravated assault, battery, use of a deadly weapon, and so on, but nothing in the last ten years. At first glance—” Joe paused long enough to hand out a summary of Watson’s past charges. “—you’d be forgiven for thinking that he either died a decade ago or has been locked up in prison. As the surveillance photograph proves, you’d be wrong. It seems that either Mr. Watson got smart, which I personally doubt, or he finally associated himself with someone possessing a better sense of self-preservation.”

“Any idea who that someone is?” Allard asked.

“Not a clue,” Lester chipped in.

“Tommy Bajek wasn’t so well preserved by him,” Willy commented.

“Apparently not,” Joe agreed. “But look at what happened right after Tommy died. Jennifer Sisto was tortured to death, which—when you combine it with the fire bomb attack on the Colchester house—hints at a leader both shrewd and with a seriously violent revenge instinct. That could make the Neil Watsons of the world pretty loyal, I would think.”

“Sure,” Willy picked up. “All the best bosses are secretive psychopaths with a penchant for killing people.”

A suppressed wave of laughter circled the room as Joe bowed slightly and said, “Thank you, William.”

“But you’re saying they’re here in Burlington, aren’t you?” Allard asked. “Even if we don’t know the alpha dog’s name.”

“Correct,” Joe said, placing another picture on the table. “This is the car I followed on the night of the fire. It was found abandoned in a downtown parking garage near where I lost it. Tom contacted the firm that rented it out two days before the fire, and got zip for his effort—the same as with the two cars that were used to tail Tom to Colchester and Sammie last week.”