But he was stuck in his own reality. “That’s just what you think you can do. The way I’ve set things up is the only hope we have.”
I stood up, convinced of his determination. “You know we’ll find him anyway. You’re throwing away your only chance of salvation.”
“You have to say that. You don’t have a choice.”
I sighed and looked out at the breathtaking view, pondering how such beauty could be host to such misery. “Okay, Norm, then I guess you better come with us.”
LESTER SPINNEY FOUND ME IN THE BASEMENT
of the Municipal Building, where I was putting the finishing touches on paperwork relegating Norman Toussaint to the police department’s temporary holding tank.
“Conan Gorenstein just resigned as CFO of Tucker Peak, effective immediately. Linda Bettina thought you’d like to know.”
I signed my name to the bottom of the form and leaned back in my chair. “Why?”
“Officially, because he got a better offer elsewhere.”
“And unofficially?”
“Linda has no idea, but she smells a rat big time.”
“I bet Win Johnston knows,” I said. “Any news back from David Hawke on the vacuum bag?”
“Not yet. Should hear within a couple of hours, though. I called this morning and asked.”
I gathered up the paperwork and rose to my feet, fighting what I knew was a juvenile impulse to forego Hawke’s analysis and just move against Busco with what we already had.
The contents of the bag were no longer as important as they’d once been, after all. Now they were merely Kathy’s way of adding a pair of suspenders to the metaphorical belt of her legal case, and only that if Hawke found something incriminating among them. Still, I didn’t want to piss off our own prosecutor, and a double sense of security was no bad thing. “I’m going to give Win a visit. Call me on the cell phone as soon as you hear, okay? I don’t want the U.S. Marshals getting the jump on this. We have first dibs on Tony Bugs, regardless of what they think.”
· · ·
Win Johnston worked out of his home north of Brattleboro. His office was comfortable, roomy, well lit, and equipped with a pair of French doors leading out to a snow-covered deck overlooking a half-acre yard. It looked like the workplace of a semi-retired CPA. In fact, Win ran an agency comprised of several investigators and a small secretarial staff and owned a security service as well.
He greeted me with a cup of coffee and the offer of an easy chair. “What can I do for you, Joe?”
“Tell me about Conan Gorenstein.”
He smiled thinly. “What about him?”
“He’s the guy you’ve been investigating, he’s been ripping off the resort by cooking the books on the condo rentals. Now he’s out on the street purportedly because he got a better offer, which I doubt.”
“And your question is?”
“Is your investigation completed and are those all your findings?”
He laughed. “You got me—that’s not what I expected. I thought you were going to grill me for his identity.”
A long pause stretched between us, during which my unanswered question hung in the air.
“Let me ask you something first,” he countered. “If Gorenstein’s now unemployed, what makes you think I haven’t finished my job?”
“We caught the guy who rigged the ski lift and did some of the other sabotage. He also spilled the beans on what the TPL’s been up to. If Gorenstein’s only guilty of the condo shuffle, that leaves a big item unexplained. The man we have behind bars wasn’t alone, he was being manipulated by someone else. I need to know if between you and us, we’ve done a clean sweep or not, or if a third party’s still out there.”
He pushed out his lower lip thoughtfully. “Huh. Good question.”
“Was that all the dirt you could get on Gorenstein?”
He twisted in his seat and stared out the French doors for a moment. “Look,” he finally said, turning back, “we both know how this works. You asked me that night in the parking lot to keep an eye open for anything that might help you out. I did that and found nothing. Between you and me and nobody else, I was hired for the same reason I usually get hired by an outfit like that, and I found somebody’s hand in the cookie jar. That was all they needed, and they acted on it. It’s not like I have to build a legal case—in fact, that’s exactly what everyone’s trying to avoid.”
“Did they tell you who to look at from the start?”
“Nope. They had no clue. It was just a feeling that they should’ve been grossing more than they were.”
I frowned. “Hold it. How’s that work? If they didn’t know the condos were being rented out, how could they have been expecting extra revenue? From what I understand, Gorenstein was skimming off an operation he was running on the side, not dipping into general company income.”
Win had been nodding in agreement throughout this question. “Right, right. That’s only because a gut instinct isn’t always based on the truth—sometimes it’s just a flare for something that’s vaguely out of whack. I studied the books, Joe—both sets of books, I should say. The condo scam was all I found, and it was netting him thousands of bucks a month. Not much if you’re planning to rip off IBM, but handsome money for your average Vermonter. There was no indication he was involved in any sabotage.”
“Who hired you?” I suddenly asked.
He paused again. “That’s getting close to forbidden territory.”
“Fine, play the stiff upper lip. I’ll tell everyone what an uncooperative pain in the ass you are. So, who hired you?”
“Phil McNally.”
That caught me off guard. “No kidding? When I mentioned you were prowling around, he pretended that was late-breaking news. He even suggested the Board might’ve hired you to check
him
out.”
“You blame him? Actually, I was to report to the Board, not to him or Linda Bettina—so no one could say we were playing footsie.”
“And he gave you a double-oh-seven license?”
“Free rein. McNally’s a pretty straight-up guy. Plus, I think he arranged it like that so he couldn’t be accused of stacking the deck. He hired Gorenstein, after all.”
A small flurry of nagging questions kicked up in my head, none of which I wanted to share with Win right now. “You don’t know where Gorenstein disappeared to, do you? I’m assuming he’s not still clearing out his desk.”
“No, he’s gone, but he’s probably just at home. As usual with these things, nobody’s admitting anything—no fouls, no penalties. If he had the balls, he could probably ask for a reference, and they’d probably give it.”
The phone in my pocket let out a muffled chirp, “Excuse me a sec,” I said and fished it out. “Gunther.”
“It’s me,” Lester said at the other end. “We just got a fax from the crime lab on the vacuum bag. Looks like we’ve got all we need. Kathy Bartlett’s on her way down here to tie the legal bow.”
“Be right there.” I got to my feet and moved to the door, slipping the phone back into my pocket. “I gotta get going.”
Win knew better than to ask why, but he did have one question. “How’d you figure out I was after Gorenstein and that he was scamming the rentals?”
“I met Mameve Knutsen. She told me how she reported the scheduling discrepancies between when people were supposed to be in the condos and when they were actually there. Said the man she talked to at the office was a newcomer with a habit of pulling at his earlobe when he talked. Got to watch those things, Win.”
Johnston self-consciously touched his ear with a fingertip, as if to make sure it was still there. “Yeah. You have a good day, Joe.”
I waved good-bye and pulled the door closed behind me. But outside in the hallway, instead of heading to my car, I paused to retrieve the cell phone and dialed Lester back.
“Do me a favor,” I asked him when he answered. “It’s a little off the topic, but send somebody over to Conan Gorenstein’s house and have him brought down to the office. I want to have a talk with him. And see if you can find out who was supplying the equipment that was supposed to go into that cremated pumphouse. Also, locate the ski lift tower manufacturer and ask about the order they have with Tucker Peak.”
I could tell from the background noises that Spinney was groping around his desk, presumably for a pen. “Right, ski lift towers. Got it. What the hell’s going on?”
“Call it a follow-the-money hunch. I think we have more than Tony Bugs and Marty Gagnon in motion right now. And by the way, do not contact Phil McNally for any of these questions.”
There was a slight pause. “How ’bout Bettina? It would speed things up if I worked through somebody over there. Being discreet’ll take a lot more time.”
I weighed that in my mind for a few seconds and then went on pure instinct. “Fine, but same warning to her about keeping discreet. I want McNally left in the dark.”
“Roger wilco.”
· · ·
“What’ve we got?” asked Kathy Bartlett as she dumped her briefcase on my desk and draped her coat across the back of a nearby chair.
I offered her the crime lab fax Lester Spinney had used to lure me back to the office and summarized the very advantages I’d been thinking of bypassing just hours earlier. “Traces of cocaine—lots of it. All vacuumed up by the cleaning lady into a factory-fresh bag, as attested to in her sworn affidavit. It’s the third leg of the stool you were asking for to get us legally into Andy Goddard’s—aka Tony Bugs’s—condo. It should give us a rock-solid search warrant on its own merits, which in turn might give us something more than a fingerprint to connect him to Jorja Duval’s murder.”
She read both documents carefully, nodded once, and without having sat down, gathered up her things and headed back out the door. “I’ll go round up a judge. What’s your timing?”
“I don’t want to rush things. I have to coordinate with Snuffy and the Marshals on how we pick Tony up.” I checked my watch. “Is four hours from now okay?”
“I’ll be here.”
Spinney passed her on the threshold and nodded appreciatively after she’d left. “Very cool woman. Wouldn’t like her as a mother, though.”
I didn’t ask him to expand on that. “Where’ve you been?”
He waved a computer printout at me. “Using the copier downstairs, wrapping up on your homework. Wild goose chase, as it turned out. I don’t know what you were hoping to find, but both the pump and ski tower manufacturers came up empty.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning they have contracts with Tucker Peak to work out general specs, all aboveboard. Plans are in place to move full-steam ahead.”
“General specs? The towers aren’t in production right now?” I asked him. I began feeling the same satisfaction I got after locating a long-sought-after puzzle piece and fitting it into place. “I was told they’d be installed by helicopter this spring. They have survey crews out there now. And those pumps are supposed to have been finished and awaiting shipment, pending a new pumphouse.”
He looked at me blank-faced. I smiled in return, the conviction of what I was thinking spreading through my body like a warm glow.
“No,” he said slowly. “They both told me they were just in the early stages.”
“No money’s changed hands?”
“Not beyond a down payment.”
“That’s what they think,” I murmured, trying to counter my growing excitement. “Money’s definitely changed hands, and I bet I know who’s holding it. How was Bettina to work with on this?”
“Fine,” he said. “She did ask me why she couldn’t talk to McNally, but she didn’t seem too surprised when I told her you’d fill her in later. What’s going on?”
“I haven’t figured out the details,” I admitted, “and the evidence may prove me wrong, but I think we’ve stumbled over an embezzlement scheme, with the CEO
and
CFO working as a team. Did you get someone to pick up Gorenstein?”
“Yeah. They should be here in an hour or so. I thought he’d just pocketed a few rentals on the sly. What’re you talking about?”
“It looks clearer to me now than it did back then,” I explained, “but the first time I thought something was wrong was when the sabotage at Tucker Peak went beyond the usual environmentalist high-profile pranks—maybe even before that… come to think of it, when I wondered why McNally didn’t have Snuffy just throw the protesters off the property. That never made sense to me, even with McNally’s good-guy reputation.”
I rose from my desk and crossed over to where we hung our coats. “Want to take a field trip? I need to talk to Bettina face-to-face.”
“Fine with me, but what about Gorenstein?” he asked, joining me.
“Leave a note downstairs to have him cool his heels till we get back. I don’t mind him staring at a wall for a little while anyhow. If he gets antsy, tell whoever’s holding him to invent a stall tactic—no car to take him back home or something. Meanwhile, you and I can coordinate with Snuffy and the Marshals via cell phone on busting Tony Bugs.”
On our way through the reception area, we told Judy where we were headed and continued on down to my car, noticing that the second half of yesterday’s snowstorm looked about ready to unload—at long last. Once on the road, I resumed my narrative. “Another thing was Win Johnston. He was hired by McNally—I think as a red herring—obvious enough that if Win hadn’t approached me first, we would’ve heard about him somehow anyway. He was supposed to be a smoke screen, just like McNally’s keeping the TPL around.
“Finally,” I continued, “there was Norman Toussaint, twisting in his own guilt, eager to confess his sins even if he wouldn’t snitch on his son’s sugar daddy. He told us he’d done the chairlift and the water main and that TPL had dyed the storage pond, hung the banner, and the other benign stuff. But he had no explanation for the pumphouse burning and admitted someone else did in the generators.”
“Couldn’t that still have been the TPL people?” Spinney asked. “Betts doesn’t seem to have a clue what they’re up to, and he’s one of the bosses.”
I didn’t argue the point. “That’s possible, except for the kid’s medical bills suddenly being paid and the overall timing. I thought it was an interesting coincidence that the pumphouse burned just before the pumps were supposed to go into it. In fact, McNally stood right in front of me and bitched that he’d have to pay storage fees on them until he could rebuild. That was after Bettina had told me her crew had finished building the shed two months ahead of schedule. Now you found out the pumps haven’t even been fabricated—and certainly haven’t been paid for.”