George looked confused. “Isn’t that what you said? One hundred each?”
Mroz stuck out his hand for the money. “That’s what I said—I’m running a special all this week.”
“Is it going up?” George asked, taking the envelope in exchange.
“Call me when you’re in need again, George,” Mroz told him. “I’ll tell you then.”
George nodded a couple of times, fresh out of conversation and now distracted by what he was holding.
Mroz shook his head—the sad but sympathetic purveyor of balm for the needy.
“Get out of here, George. Enjoy the rest of your evening.”
There was a momentary silence following George’s departure. By habit, Harold never said much of anything, but Mroz was a talker, and incapable of letting more than a minute go by without saying something.
“Thousand right out of the gate. Could be a good night. I like ’em when they start strong like that. Puts me in a good mood.”
“That’s good to hear,” said a male voice from the direction of the bathroom.
Mroz leaped to his feet, staggering slightly in the process. A man stood in the bathroom doorway, a gun in his leather-gloved hand. He was smiling slightly.
Mroz jerked his head around, looking for his bodyguard. Harold was standing at his post by the window, still watching for visitors. He turned and nodded to the man. “Nobody coming.”
“What the fuck’s going on here?” Mroz demanded of the newcomer. “Who the fuck’re you?”
“I’m Alan Budney,” the man told him. “His new boss.”
Mroz glanced at Harold again, but without much confidence. “Harold?” he asked.
Harold merely shrugged and went back to studying the outdoors.
Mroz nodded, visibly weighing his options. “You want in on the action?”
Budney shook his head. “Nope. I want it all.”
With that, he pulled the trigger, filling the room with a sharp, explosive crack and putting a hole in Matthew Mroz’s chest.
The latter fell back against the wall and bounced awkwardly onto the floor, one hand on the wound, not saying a word. His eyes stayed glued to Budney’s, but without purpose or reproach. If anything, there was a look of wonder on his face before all signs of life slipped away.
Budney wasted no time with Harold. He stuck his arm out, took aim, and squeezed off two quick rounds from across the room.
Harold wasn’t as cooperative as his ex-boss. “You son of a bitch,” he yelled, and launched himself at Budney, as if totally ignorant of the twin stains that had blossomed on his T-shirt.
Budney didn’t hesitate. He fired twice more, hitting Harold once in the head. That dropped the big man like a dead tree, flopping him onto the bed where he stayed without further motion.
“What did you expect, you dumb bastard?” Budney asked no one in particular. He stared at both men for a couple of seconds, as if uncertain about what to do
next. He hadn’t anticipated the adrenaline now pulsing through him like an electric current.
He passed his gloved hand across his mouth, shoved the gun into his waistband, and walked over to the window to see if anyone was coming. When he’d set this up with Harold, promising him the world in money and influence, they’d arranged for a big enough break between scheduled customers for Budney to act freely and without interruption. In the same vein, Budney had rented both the room next door and the one below—under assumed names—just to make sure the gunshots wouldn’t be easily overheard. The pacing of Mroz’s client list, however, had been Harold’s department.
Budney looked nervously out across the parking lot, half expecting a cordon of police cars and SWAT members to be ringing the motel. But there was little going on—a young couple crossing the lot, hand in hand, some traffic driving by in the street beyond. All looked peaceful and serene, in total contrast with the contents of the room.
Budney opened the door slowly, pulled his shirt over the gun butt, stored his gloves in his back pocket, and stepped out to enact the next phase of his plan. He didn’t bother collecting either the cash or the drugs. He preferred thinking that, at this point, that smacked of small potatoes.
Joe Gunther rubbed his eyes, blinked, and briefly turned away from the crime scene lights and the long row of parked, strobe-equipped vehicles. He gazed at the rising sun, barely backlighting the tops of the Green Mountains in the distance, but already tinting the tall grasses of the open, rolling fields nearby with the first strokes of dawn’s blush. It was a time of the day he’d especially cherished as a boy, when he’d arise from his bed to share breakfast with his benignly taciturn father before the latter headed out to tend to the crops and animals.
It was an appropriate remembrance, and not solely because of the sunrise—the area around Vergennes was ancient farm country, some of Vermont’s most productive. Joe had been brought up on the other side of the state, but the effect was similar if a bit more spectacular here, and he was too tired to be picky.
He shut his car door and turned to his reason for being here. A sheriff’s cruiser was positioned by the side of the road, in standard patrol stop presentation, its nose slightly angled toward the center of traffic, as if ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Officers placed
their cars that way partly for protection as they got out to approach whomever they’d stopped.
There was irony in this instance, though, since it looked like the cop had never left his vehicle.
But that was a first impression, and Joe knew better than to rely on it. In his decades as a police officer, even far from the urban mayhem of New York and Boston, Gunther had seen his share of either straight-forward murderous encounters, or others intriguingly cloaked in misdirection or obscurity. He’d learned that each could first appear as the other.
Nevertheless, this did not look like a slam dunk. There was too much about it that smacked of complication.
He sighed gently. He liked complications, or at least working his way through them. A methodical man—some even thought a little plodding—he had a dogged, nonflamboyant, almost Old World style. He was courteous and considerate, hardworking and slow to take credit—the inveterate team player. Which helped explain his present position. Joe Gunther, after leading Brattleboro’s municipal detective squad, seemingly forever, was now the field force commander of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, the state’s relatively new major crimes unit.
But he felt a true weariness with the nature of this call. Murders in Vermont were few, averaging perhaps seven or eight a year—rare enough to make it standing protocol that he be called to the scene regardless of time or location. But the killing of a cop? That was virtually unheard of—a once-in-a-decade event, at least so far.
As a result, Gunther knew that the entire state would
be watching every detail of this one—and that every news outlet would be hoping to dog his heels.
Which still didn’t fully address the heart of his melancholy—Joe Gunther was a combat veteran, a lifelong witness to violence, a man whose entire professional life had been devoted to cleaning up in the wake of human bedlam. He’d seen brutality and the threat of death visit not just his comrades and the general population, but members of his own family. And yet he still couldn’t adopt the commonly held belief that such acting out was as natural to human beings as sex and the need to eat. Killing remained for him a gesture bordering on lunacy.
A square-built, plainclothes detective with a sandy crew cut split away from the group clustered around the cruiser and approached him. “Anyone give you the lowdown on this, Joe?”
Joe shook his hand. Michael Bradley was the squad leader for the VBI Burlington office, some twenty-five miles away, and thus, under Joe, the senior investigator here. “Hi, Mike. Long time. Just that a deputy had been found, an apparent homicide.”
Bradley nodded. “Right—Brian Sleuter. Five years on the job, good record of arrests. Aggressive, ambitious, aiming for the big leagues somewhere—some say anywhere, since he was supposedly frustrated with the sheriff’s department. It’s looking like he might’ve been surprised on a traffic stop.”
Joe was looking past his colleague’s shoulder, taking in what he could see of the crime scene, along with the various uniforms and faces. Gunther had been a presence in Vermont’s small law enforcement community
for long enough to have at least met most of its senior members. Thus, he could already see some of the entanglements he’d soon be delicately sorting through. Mixed together, if not precisely mingling, were the state police, the sheriff’s department, the Vergennes police, the state’s attorney, the medical examiner’s lead investigator, and at least a couple of others from Mike Bradley’s office. And that, he knew, would be just the beginning.
“We know about the traffic stop?” he asked Mike, redirecting his focus.
“From Dispatch only, right now, but Sleuter did have his video running, so that ought to help, assuming he had a tape in.”
Joe eyed him carefully. “We haven’t looked at that yet?”
Bradley smiled. A veteran himself, late of the Burlington police department—the state’s largest—he wasn’t given to being flustered. “It’s a cop killing. We’re taking our time—within reason.”
“Right,” Joe agreed.
Bradley laughed gently as a follow-up. “Meaning we’re about to pop the trunk, if you’re interested.”
They began crossing over to the group around the car. “What did their dispatch have to say?” Joe asked.
Bradley pulled out a notepad for reference. “A black, ’04 Toyota Solara, registered to James Marano, from Massachusetts—Dorchester Avenue address.”
“He was the driver?”
Bradley shrugged. “Sleuter asked for the twenty-seven RO, so presumably the owner and the driver were one and the same. And no,” he added quickly as
Joe opened his mouth, “I don’t know if he had a passenger.”
They reached the group and Joe began exchanging handshakes. It wasn’t many years ago that the VBI hadn’t existed and that the state police would have been running this scene. The initial transition—and the sometimes attending resentments—had been partly overcome by the VBI leadership resolutely avoiding the limelight, entering cases only when invited, and referring to their agency as a support tool only. But that went only so far. Every time Joe entered a case, therefore, he paid homage to the past, respected sensitivities, stressed his helpful role, while yet—with as much subtlety as possible—essentially taking over the investigation.
For the moment, however, most of that didn’t matter. Here—now—he was surrounded by fellow cops, all of them concentrating on the murder of one of their own.
Bradley nodded to a crime lab tech, whose team had cordoned off the cruiser. The woman, looking like a futuristic model at a car show—clad in a white Tyvek suit and isolated from the crowd behind a “Crime Scene” tape barrier—opened the vehicle’s trunk to reveal its contents, familiar to every patrol-trained officer in the crowd. Facing them was the standard collection of first aid kit, traffic cones, an officer’s shift bag, and a shotgun case. More pointedly right now, however, was a small steel cabinet bolted to the trunk’s back wall—the video recorder.
With her gloved hand, and using Brian Sleuter’s key, the tech unlocked the recorder’s security door, revealing a standard VCR control panel. She pushed the Eject
button, extracted the tape, and held it up to the artificial light.
“About halfway unreeled,” she announced, handing it to one of her colleagues on the other side of the barrier.
“You going to check that out here?” Joe asked him.
The man smiled helpfully. “I can. I have a player in the truck. I know how much you guys want to look at it.”
“I’d appreciate it,” Joe encouraged him.
“Follow me,” he said simply.
A small herd fell in behind him as he trudged toward the large crime lab truck parked somewhat precariously along the grassy ditch separating the macadam from the miles of surrounding fields that were slowly emerging from the darkness. Technically, there was a pecking order involved in who participated in a high profile investigation. The county sheriff had officially requested VBI assistance, rubbing in the state police’s awkward second fiddle position. But Joe didn’t want any such political smog in the air—not when he still had no idea whose resources he might need—so he remained silent.
The crime scene tech, however, looked over his shoulder at the sound of so many feet behind him. “It’s a tight fit back there,” he warned.
A state police lieutenant suggested, “How ’bout one rep from each agency?”
Satisfied, Joe let them mutter through that one on their own, sliding up alongside the tech instead and sticking out his hand.
“Never had the pleasure. Joe Gunther. VBI.”
The tech’s eyes widened as he put his gloved hand into Joe’s. “This is an honor. I’ve heard a lot about you. Ed Needles. I just joined the lab about six months ago—from Natick, Mass.”
“Welcome on board. How do you like it?”
“Good bunch. The facility’s a little funky, compared to what I know, but I like the people. No politics; straightforward; well trained. I got no complaints.”
They reached the back of the truck, equipped with a set of wooden steps, reminiscent of a ladder propped against a gypsy’s caravan wagon. It was immediate proof of the lab’s touch of practical funkiness. In single file, the chosen few tromped into the truck’s resonant box and marched toward the front, where the wall above a counter was festooned with a battery of rack-mounted electronic gadgets, including a TV screen and several computer monitors.
Without ceremony, Needles slapped the cassette into a VCR and hit the Rewind button. After a couple of attempts to locate the beginning of Sleuter’s last stop on the tape, the tech hit Play and took a half step back so everyone could see.
The confined space, claustrophobic and rapidly too warm, fell completely silent aside from the tinny voices emanating from the TV. They all watched, transfixed, as the cruiser’s camera revealed—in color and in surprisingly sharp detail—a dark Toyota pulling over to the side of the road. Brian Sleuter’s voice was heard talking to Dispatch, along with her response, as Joe noticed Mike Bradley beside him pulling his pad from his pocket and starting to take notes.