“You pretty sure going there will take you to Grega?” Allard asked, ever mindful of his tight budget. The VBI had been created by the governor and was funded by the legislature, both of whom liked big headlines and small headaches. Sending the state’s elite investigative unit abroad on a whim—even if for a good cause—was potentially tricky territory.
“I’m not sure of anything,” Joe answered honestly. “I was struck by the fact that Flaco headed north when he felt the heat. If I were Grega and I heard about a violent change in management, I’d either run for the hills if I felt I was next, or run back to the mansion to find out whose ass I should kiss.”
“And you’re choosing the second option, why?” Stanton asked.
Joe lifted one shoulder slightly. “Because it’s the one that makes the most sense at the moment. Grega’s described as upwardly mobile, and we know he’s a killer—therefore not a guy to run.”
Kirkland was shaking his head. “You’re guessing. The old boss is dead; you don’t know who killed him or why; you don’t know who might’ve replaced him; and Wilson’s a dead end, so you don’t know what to do next.”
Joe conceded the point with a smile but then tilted his chin toward the closed door. “All true. But if we’re going to help young Jeff out there with the media, we better feed him something, even if it’s that we’re chasing down a lead. And you have to admit that the Maine connection reaches that level, if nothing else.”
Mike Bradley looked up at the sound of his office door opening and saw a man and a woman standing before him, the man with his left hand awkwardly stuffed into his trousers pocket.
The woman he recognized—Sammie Martens. He’d coordinated with her on a case years ago, when he was still with the Burlington police and she with the Brattleboro PD.
Bradley knew the man with her only by reputation, which was enough to make him think he might now be in for trouble.
He rose with a smile, circled his desk, and stuck his hand out in greeting, his defenses on high alert.
“Hey, there. Mike Bradley. Nice to have you on board. Good drive?”
Sam was all smiles as well, returning the handshake and making pleasantries. Kunkle ignored their host, turned on his heel slightly, and began studying the hangings on Bradley’s walls—a younger man’s version of what Sam had seen in the Boston ICE SAC’s office two days previously.
“You guys do all right up here, close to the money,” Willy cracked, shifting his gaze to the larger outer office, visible through Mike’s interior window. Burlington was but a half-hour drive from the capital, and the VBI office here, the largest in the state, had six agents and a three-room complex on the top floor of a modern downtown building. Bradley was the unit supervisor, one of four who worked directly under Gunther. As such, he knew of the Brattleboro facility, having visited it once while Willy was absent. It had struck him as a claustrophobic dump.
“Yeah,” Mike said, his hackles nevertheless raised. “But you’ve got the boss.”
Willy let out a sharp, derisive laugh. “Yeah. There’s a plus.”
“He keeps
you
employed, Willy,” Sammie cracked to thaw the air slightly.
Mike had heard that the two had become a couple. Involuntarily, he shook his head slightly, startled at the thought. She was attractive, too—if undoubtedly dysfunctional somehow.
He waved a hand at the two guest chairs he had opposite his desk. “Sit, sit. You want any coffee?”
Willy remained standing while Sam took a chair. “How ’bout a grande café espresso with a shot of hot milk?” he said.
“Stuff it,” his companion cautioned him, smiling at Mike before adding, “It’s his colon—full of shit.”
Mike nodded and sat behind his desk, too startled to comment, but assuming the coffee question could sort itself out.
“So,” he segued, determined to keep up appearances,
for her, at least. “What sends you up here? News from the front? Joe’s still in Massachusetts, right?”
“Nope,” Sammie told him. “He is hooked up with ICE, but he’s back in Vermont for a day or two, meeting with the big bosses. You read about what happened down there?”
“The shoot-out on Dot Ave?” Bradley answered, tapping a sheaf of papers before him on the desk. “Just got the report. Sounded like a cluster fuck.”
“Would’ve been fun to be there, though,” Willy said, finally sitting.
Ah, thought Bradley, remembering that Sam had accompanied Gunther. Maybe that was the problem—the guy was feeling left out.
“We’re here,” Sam returned to Mike’s question, “purely as support troops—setting up or manning a command center, or just doing go-fer jobs that your guys are too busy to handle. We are not about looking over your shoulder or doing any second guessing.”
Mike immediately considered sending Kunkle to Siberia for doughnuts. Instead, knowing both of Sam’s closeness to Joe and—thankfully—of her general competence, he answered instead, “No, no. That’s fine. We could use the help, to be honest. The press is all over this and constantly getting in the way.”
“What’ve you got going so far?” Sam asked.
Mike relaxed slightly, feeling himself on more familiar ground. Kunkle and Martens would in fact be useful, even if, as he suspected, they were here with more on their minds than they’d just admitted.
“We do have a command post in place—or the start of one. I have reps from the sheriff’s office and the state
police and the AG’s and even one liaison from the Vergennes PD, just to be totally PC. We have a hot line set up for anyone who may have witnessed Sleuter’s traffic stop; a direct link to the Mounties for what they can find on Marano and Grega; and several guys going through every record we can locate where either name might crop up, on both sides of the border. I’ve also got a man doing the normal follow-up on Sleuter, making sure he was aboveboard.”
“How’s that going?” Kunkle asked lazily.
“Good. Haven’t found anything yet. He was obnoxious and ambitious—he didn’t hide the fact that he saw the sheriff’s job as a springboard, but so far—going over his past cases—he’s clean. Of course, that’s just gotten started, and the man was busy. Anyhow, we won’t have any problem finding you things to do.”
He rose and gestured toward the outer office. “All right. Then let me introduce you around and get you settled in. You’ll probably know half my crew anyhow, so I bet in a day or two, it’ll be like you were here from the start.”
Not that he actually believed a word of it. A small but potent headache was already telling him that much.
Cathy Lawless added a stick of gum to the one in her mouth. Dave Beaubien glanced up from the radio receiver he was fine-tuning in his lap and took note. She was winding herself up, getting into role. Cathy was the most high-strung person he’d ever known—thin as a piano wire and just as tense—and one of the fastest nonstop talkers, too, which, given his own general stillness, made them quite the team.
But a good one. She’d made the comment that they were like Fred and Ginger—she could do everything he did, backward and in heels. Old joke, and he’d never seen her in anything but sneakers or boots, but there was truth to it, too. For all their contrasts—he was actually the one with the softer contours of a Ginger Rogers—they seemed to instinctively know what the other was thinking, or about to do.
And so he knew now that she was steeling herself for the encounter just ahead.
Of course, gum chewing wasn’t her only outlet. She was talking, as well, while staring out the passenger side window at the fishing boats at anchor, barely visible in the ambient light from the homes and businesses
ringing the harbor. They were in a tiny port near Machias, some twenty-five miles shy of the Canadian border. She was preparing to meet one of her regular contacts, named Bob, who knew her only as Suzy, thought she was a doper transplant from Boston with lots of ready cash, and, least fortunately, also had a crush on her, despite her best efforts to redirect him.
“I mean, for Christ’s sake, what doesn’t he get? Not once have I led the son of a bitch on—no flirting, no boob-flashing, no batting my eyes. I make my buy, I get my intel, and I leave. It’s gonna blow him away when we finally decide he’s not worth the trouble and we shut him down. Can you imagine the look on his face? I half bet he’ll give me one of those ‘after all we meant to each other’ lines. You know what I mean?”
Dave knew better than to answer.
“The only saving grace is that he likes to meet outdoors, ’cause I tell you, if these things were held in some trailer in the woods, I wouldn’t do it, not even armed to the teeth and with ten of you as backup. Life’s too short to get what we get paid and be stared at by some creep who can barely keep his dick in his pants.”
She abruptly held up her hand, as if Dave had just given her grief. “I know, I know—totally against department policy. Don’t rub it in. I shouldn’t have opened that door. But what else was I gonna do? If I hadn’t let him search me that first time, he woulda made me as a cop. It was a rock and hard place kinda thing.”
She took her eyes off the scenery to look at him. “Jesus, Dave. You rebuilding that thing? It is gonna work, right?” She tapped the top of her head, where the tiny microphone was hidden in her hair.
Dave nodded, not looking up, and said, “Don’t.”
Cathy sighed and returned to her vigil. “I know this thing’s the cutting edge, but I miss the old-fashioned wires. This feels weird, like wearing nothing at all. Plus, I only have your word that it’ll work. How the hell do we know Bob won’t suddenly change the rules? He could take me into a basement and you’d be screwed, and I’d be up shit creek without a paddle.”
This time, Dave did react. “You wouldn’t go, and it’ll work.”
She turned on him and punched his shoulder. “I know that, Dave. It’s the principle of the thing. It just makes me feel naked.”
Dave flipped the device over in his hand, turned it on, ran a quick diagnostic, and nodded. “You aren’t. It’ll be fine—and we’ll all come running if something screws up,” he told her.
She frowned, the shoe suddenly on the other foot. “Hey, don’t go crazy, all right? Just listen to the conversation. If it sounds okay but then the sound drops off for some reason, don’t go ape on me. I can handle Bob, for God’s sake. He just wears me out, is all. It’s not like I couldn’t take him out with one kick in the balls. You all set?”
Dave opened his door. “Yup.” He quickly radioed the backup team parked a couple of blocks away, announced that he and Cathy were out of the vehicle and going active and that they should begin monitoring her mike.
Cathy stepped out of the van and breathed in the night air, cool and tinged with salt and oil and the faint smell of decay. She actually hailed from the Moosehead
Lake region, far from the Maine coast, and hadn’t even seen salt water until she was in her teens. She’d never gotten used to the coast as a result, always feeling like a tourist. That was one of the reasons she told dealers that she was from Boston—to fill in the part of her that felt out of place.
She gave one last glance at her partner, who was patiently lingering by the rear of the van, waiting for her to move. They’d parked in the shadowy lot of the town church, with a narrow view of the harbor across the road. As she was meeting with Bob, Dave would stalk her from the darkness, listening in on her at all times, recording everything that was said.
“Good to go?” she reiterated.
He nodded.
She stepped free of the darkness and into the feeble glow of an overhead streetlight, and checked both ways before crossing the road. She needn’t have bothered. It was past midnight, and in a lobstering village whose business required people to get up at three
A.M
. to be on the water at dawn, there wasn’t much movement beyond the silent scurrying of a couple of cats.
The opposite side of the road bordered the water’s edge, with a broad, built-up swath of concrete and wooden wharves, docks, storage sheds, and equipment yards. All were cluttered with equipment arcane and familiar, prominent among them the ubiquitous stacks of lobster traps, lately made less photogenic through the widespread replacement of the wood-slatted traps of yore by the more practical, durable, but less appealing wire models.
Cathy walked with a haphazard, slovenly gait, contrary
to her nature, in the hopes of presenting a vague, possibly strung-out demeanor. She and Bob had met initially through the conventions of the business—she the user, and he the slightly larger fish up the food chain, introduced by a dealer who could no longer supply her needs. The name of this game wasn’t busts so much as follow the prey upstream until a big enough specimen popped up.
Bob wasn’t that player. They’d now met three times, each time with Cathy increasing her demand; it was clear he was running shy of resources. He’d been hedging on the dates they could meet, and trying to get her to split her orders over time.
She also didn’t like him, which made his growing unimportance a relief. The first time they’d met—before she could stop him—he’d run his hands over her breasts, supposedly in search of a wire. She’d slapped his hands away and yelled at him—an inauspicious start she’d reluctantly worked to repair. As she’d said to Dave, she wasn’t paid enough to be felt up by losers like him.
She reached a dock stretching out from the end of a weather-beaten building the size of a large garage and swung out onto its time-darkened boards, her sneakers slapping against their surface. As she approached a small shed on the dock’s far end, the water’s black, slightly oily surface around her barely undulated in the lights from the retreating shore. Bob preferred this place for his meets because he said it made him feel safe—he could see in all directions.
She glanced around. In fact, you couldn’t see a goddamn thing, including the lurking Dave Beaubien.
Walking out toward the middle of the blackened bay felt like a one-way excursion down a gangplank.
“If you can hear me, Dave,” she said in a normal tone, still some distance from the shed, “make a noise.”
The single solid thump of a boot stomp sounded far behind her.
“Gotcha,” she answered. “Everything looks normal up ahead.”