The Price of Malice (18 page)

It was a place from which they could see and hear anyone approaching for a hundred yards in any direction, without being seen themselves.

She gave him a hug and whispered in his ear, “Jesus. Am I glad that’s over.”

He answered in a similar, barely audible tone. “It went okay?”

“Just like you said it would. He gave me the number of someone supposedly in the know, and again tried to get the new name of the
Maria
.”

“What did you tell him?”

She handed him the recorder, which he put away. “The first thing that came to me—that it was in storage and that if I ever got around to it, I might sell it. I even offered it to him.”

Joe chuckled. “And he didn’t bite?”

“I guess he didn’t want to be that obvious. I did ask him why he was so curious. He said he wanted to keep an eye out for a buyer, just for what the hell. How did you do?”

Joe patted a small camera bag hanging from his shoulder. “I got pictures of him, his car’s registration, and two guys who couldn’t have cared less about the observatory or the bridge, one of whom followed you after you left the bridge, but had to drop you in the fort because of the route you took.”

“And the other one?”

“He left after Brandhorst. My guess is they won’t pay you much attention till you contact the guy with the cell phone. You told Brandhorst you knew they’d searched your room?”

“Oh, yeah, not that he admitted it.”

“That’s okay,” Joe said. “We just wanted him to know you were on your guard. You make a couple of fancy moves after leaving here, like we discussed, and you should lose that tail again, assuming he’s still around. As I said before, I think Brandhorst was just playing it safe showing up with muscle, and maybe hoping to get lucky.”

“Did you make it back to Bangor after lunch?” she asked.

He nodded. “Double-checked your motel room and moved your car to the rental place. You want to have dinner together, maybe in Augusta?” he asked.

“Don’t you have to get back to Vermont?”

“Sure, but it’s on the way, and it’ll give me a chance to make sure you weren’t followed.”

She reached up and kissed him. “Deal.”

He studied her carefully then. “So—are you going to stay put until I can get back out here—no running off on your own? We’re only talking a couple or a few days, max.”

She patted his chest and smiled. “I promise.”

W
illy propped the heel of one shoe against the edge of his desk. “Where the hell is he?” he asked, scowling.

Sam glanced over to Joe’s section of the office, empty and neat. “Told me he had to duck out for a personal day—that something came up.”

Even Lester was caught off guard by that. “Something came up?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Fuck him,” Willy recommended. “Let’s do it without him.”

“Thank you for your support,” Joe said from the doorway as he entered, adding, “and sorry for running late. Small family emergency.”

“Everything all right?” Sam asked, typically solicitous.

“Better not be,” Willy threw in, “ ’cause Bill Allard was looking for you, too. Didn’t sound happy. I had no clue what to tell him, so you better be dealing with a full-blown personal crisis.”

Allard was the director of VBI, Joe’s immediate boss in Waterbury, strategically located near Montpelier, the state capital. Bill Allard tended to let his people run on their own, but he did like to be kept in the loop, just in case he got bushwhacked by a bureaucrat with a need
to know. Joe hadn’t spoken with him since Castine had been found murdered—a definite and unusual oversight. He wasn’t surprised to hear Bill was getting twitchy.

“Probably didn’t help that you told him to drop dead,” Lester suggested from his desk.

Willy smiled. “He’s used to that from me—wouldn’t expect otherwise.”

Joe gave Kunkle a serious look, to which Willy waved his hand. “Just kidding, boss, just kidding. I was on my best behavior.”

“Whatever that is,” Sam muttered.

Joe dumped his bag beside his computer and perched on the windowsill behind his chair. Mercifully, the region-wide heat wave had broken during the night, and the weather was back to a pleasant high seventies—sunny and dry.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s find out where we are.”

“The way things’re looking,” Les volunteered, “we may be the only ones who didn’t want this guy dead.”

“Speak for yourself,” Willy cracked.

Sam stayed on track. “It’s getting complicated fast. Last night, Les grabbed a guy named Ray Needham who used to steal with Castine and split the proceeds. Castine screwed him on their last outing, and Ray claimed he hadn’t seen him since—except that Ron found a store tape that shows them together the day before Wayne died.”

“Did Ray know about the Manor Court apartment?” Joe asked.

“He says he didn’t even know where Wayne lived,” Les said. “ ’Course that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have followed him there, or anywhere else. If Ray lied about when he last saw him, maybe he was also the one knocking on that apartment door.”

Joe opened his mouth to ask a question, but Les then threw in,
“And the last guy he tuned up, he used a baseball bat. Damn near killed him.”

Joe nodded instead and looked over to Sam.

She got the message. “Next on the radar is Karen Putnam. She was having an affair with Wayne while her daughter—Becky Kerr—was maybe being abused by him, at least according to Wayne’s neighbor, Andrea Halnon. That would make me consider killing Wayne, and that was before I met Karen. She’s got a real short fuse.”

“What did she tell you?” Joe asked.

“Nothing constructive. I was actually talking to one of her kids—the only one at home—when she drove up and threw me off the property.”

“You have a plan for her?”

“I’ll talk to her again. I think she’s expecting it. Maybe I started off on the wrong foot, interviewing her son first. For all her faults, she’s a protective mother.”

“You get anywhere with him?”

Sam shook her head. “His name’s Richard Vial. A real sweetheart. Maybe ten or eleven; likes to live under the trailer. Sounds like life overhead gets a little crazy. I’m pretty sure I made an ally out of him, for what it’s worth. But I need to do a lot more work on the whole family—figure out who’s who. Could be Karen wasn’t the only one who hated Wayne.”

“Like Becky,” Lester suggested.

“True,” Sam conceded. “I’ll be checking her out, too.”

“Anything else?” Joe asked them.

“Just that we’ve barely started,” Willy cautioned. “Ray, Karen, and Becky are already in our sights, but like Les found out, it could be anybody, this early into it.”

“Okay,” Joe conceded, “so, maybe we focus on a couple of the
neon signs in this case, for instance the degree of passion in the attack.”

“Or that it specifically happened in the apartment Wayne used to get laid,” Sam suggested, “instead of his place or down a dark alley.”

“Speaking of which,” Lester said, “when I went back to Manor Court to interview a few folks we missed during the first canvass, I found the guy who rented the apartment between Terry Stein and Liz Babbitt. He told me one reason he left was that he felt someone was dropping by when he wasn’t there. There was never anything missing or screwed up; he said it was just a feeling. Gave him the chills.”

Joe thought back to Lyn’s story of having her motel room tossed.

“He never bitched to the landlord?” Willy asked.

Lester laughed. “Yeah. Right. He left instead. Anyhow, it does suggest that Wayne’s use of the place started right after Terry left, and maybe involved people besides Karen Putnam.”

Joe said softly, almost to himself, “We need to really dig into Wayne’s history.”

“We got his body,” Willy volunteered. “What did your pal Hillstrom find out?”

Beverly Hillstrom was the state’s medical examiner, and an old friend of Joe’s, which, as Willy had implied, usually made her an early stop for Joe in such investigations.

“I haven’t seen her yet,” Joe admitted.

There was a stillness in the room as everyone absorbed the anomaly.

“You’re slippin’, boss,” Willy suggested with predictable subtlety.

“We got the prelim,” Sam suggested helpfully. “Basically said what we thought—blunt trauma and a sharp instrument, neither of which were found at the scene.”

“Hillstrom’s always got more,” Willy pressed. “Joe just needs to massage her a little.”

Joe smiled. “Consider it done, for you, if nobody else.”

But he was embarrassed by the oversight, tacking it onto a growing list of lapses that he’d committed since Lyn’s departure. The thought reminded him, too, of his own boss’s interest in having a talk.

“Guess I’ll kill two birds with one stone and see Allard, too,” he told them.

He slid off the windowsill and concluded, “All right. Sounds like we’ve got more than enough to keep us busy. Sam, you’ll coordinate who does what while I’m upstate?”

She waved from her desk.

“Then wish me luck,” he said, grabbing his bag. “I’ll see what I can bring home.”

The break in the heat allowed Joe to cross the state with his windows open, instead of wrapped in air-conditioning, which he instinctively disliked. Vermont has only two interstates—91, which runs up the eastern side, from Brattleboro to Canada; and 89, which intersects with 91 halfway up and cuts diagonally northwest, toward Burlington, on the shores of Lake Champlain.

The trip is a soothing, picturesque, graceful, two-and-a-half-hour offering of some of the best that Vermont has to offer, from serpentine rivers to granite-capped mountains. Fields, farms, covered bridges, low-head dams, railroads paralleling rocky streambeds—all of it rendered in a seamless slide show. Joe was a native Vermonter, the older of two sons of a Thetford Hill farmer. The values, traditions, and life lessons of that heritage always played in concert with the scenery to lift his spirits.

Today was no different. Smelling the cut hay and fresh manure from a nearby farm, as the road headed into the Green Mountains, Joe pondered the balancing act between his professional and personal lives—as different as the contrast he’d been appreciating recently between Vermont and the Maine coast. Or, more relevantly, the tug of war he felt himself battling between addressing Lyn’s plight and tending to the Castine case.

But there were also some overlays, and the more Joe drove, the more he began to recognize them. He had forever appreciated the often lethal quirkiness of human nature—its drive to reach beyond its grasp, to resort to baser instincts, to assume the worst. His entire professional life had been spent in responding to these traits, and there was no reason to believe he was seeing anything new right now. They were just hitting him from two directions at the same time.

As a result of this insight, the longer he drove the less torn he became between either abandoning Lyn to her own devices or periodically leaving his team to fend for themselves. Instead, the two situations began to fuse into the practical concern to simply get both jobs done. There may be scheduling problems, and a few steamed-up people, but he slowly convinced himself that if he kept his own introspection at bay, and applied a little old-fashioned efficiency, he could still serve each taskmaster.

That he might be deluding himself never occurred to him.

In this artificially upbeat mood, he bypassed the Waterbury exit—and Bill Allard’s office—to proceed directly to Burlington and the so-called Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, or OCME. If Allard was miffed at being left in the dark, it wouldn’t hurt to meet him with the latest autopsy findings in hand.

On the list of “largest cities” for each of the fifty states, Burlington has the unique distinction of being the smallest of the bunch. As if
in compensation, however, it has drawn to its outskirts and environs almost a third of Vermont’s entire population. Joe therefore found himself easing away from his inner thoughts to pay closer attention to the thickening traffic.

He took the downtown exit, toward the broad, sweeping hill and the huge lake beyond, but cut right at the top, into the embrace of the sprawling, perpetually under construction maze of the Fletcher Allen medical center. The OCME was located—like an oft overlooked family heirloom—in the nearly inaccessible nether reaches of this complex. Every time he visited, despite his numerous trips here, Joe managed to get lost while strolling the corridors, passages, and hallways that bound Fletcher Allen together.

He was surprised, therefore, when he traveled from the garage through the labyrinth without a misstep, finding himself in short order not only standing before the properly labeled door, but just as it flew open to reveal a tall, slim, white-coated, slightly aristocratic blonde holding a file in her hand—the chief herself, Dr. Beverly Hillstrom.

She burst out laughing at the sight of him. “My God. Joe. Where did you pop out of?”

They embraced warmly, kissing on the cheek, two friends of such long standing that—just once—when each had coincidentally been in emotional turmoil, they’d even been lovers for a night.

“I was curious about Wayne Castine—or at least that’s my excuse,” he said with a smile.

She squeezed his arm. “You are a born romantic, even if I’m the only one who knows it.”

In fact, that was truer for her, who addressed virtually everyone except Joe as “Mister,” “Ms.,” or their official title, to preserve propriety. If anyone had been told of what she and Joe shared, they never
would have believed it, so convincing had Hillstrom been in creating her Ice Queen persona.

“Walk with me,” she urged him. “I’m only going down the hall to deliver this”—she waved the file—“and that’s only because I wanted to stretch my legs. A day full of paperwork. Perfectly awful.”

“How have you been otherwise?” he asked.

“Oh, wonderful,” she admitted. “We’ve been getting out more. Bought a small sailboat that’s become a complete life saver. I sailed as a youngster, and forgot how much I liked it. Life is good. How’s Lyn?”

Beverly was married, with children, all older now and out of the house. She and her husband had briefly gone separate ways—that’s when she and Joe had found mutual solace—so he was happy to hear that the suture was holding.