The Second Mouse (20 page)

Seemingly by honed instinct, Coven knew enough to quit while he was ahead. “Well, like I said, I figured you might be interested, and I wanted to say hi anyhow. I’ll e-mail you what I got and call you later at home.”

“Thanks, Milt,” Joe told him. “I appreciate it. One question, though: What’re you thinking was behind the theft of the garbage bag?”

Coven hesitated, weighing his response. “Well . . . I suppose the natural reaction is a dirty bomb, but that seems pretty unlikely. I mean, this stuff was medical trash—old IV tubing, dressings, junk like that—all slightly tainted. Even if you sprinkled it from a helicopter, it wouldn’t do any harm. On the other hand, if you cancel out the dirty bomb idea, you don’t have much left—somebody stole somebody else’s trash. That’s why I didn’t hit the red button and alert my fellow feds.”

“It could’ve been misplaced,” Lester suggested.

“My point exactly,” Coven agreed. “The hospital says not. But like I said, we just pass this info along, no matter how small it looks.”

Joe saw Willy warming up again and so wrapped it up quickly. “Thanks, Milt. It might be worth a lot. Thanks for thinking of us. Give my best to Sue.”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks. Love to Gail, too.”

Joe hit the Off button, causing Gail’s name to float in the air.

“Guess his intel isn’t all
that
great,” Willy smirked.

Sam glared at him. Her words could barely be heard, she spoke so quietly. “You are such an asshole.”

Joe cleared his throat. “I’ll fatten my own assignment with the garbage bag and the missing dope dealer, just for what-the-hell.”

“Lester and I can give you a little background on that,” Sam admitted. “We spent some time checking him out when the BOL first came out.”

Joe nodded, giving his team one last appraising look. “Okay—looks like we’re heading for parts west.”

Chapter 17

“
W
here is it?” Nancy asked quietly, as if being discreet in a roomful of eavesdroppers.

They were both in Ellis’s apartment again, alone. In bed.

“In my trunk,” he said.

She propped herself up quickly on one elbow, her eyes wide, all discretion gone. “
What?
It’s been days. I thought . . .”

He covered her mouth gently with his fingertips. “I did, too. But I started thinkin’ about somethin’ else.”

She slowly removed his hand. “What?” she asked, her confusion clear. “You were going to hide it in his toolbox.”

He nodded. “And then call the cops.”

“The feds,” she corrected.

“I know, Nance. I know. Let me finish.”

She pressed her lips together, fighting the urge to protest.

Ellis took a small breath before continuing. “The plan was to have Homeland Security take him away like they did with that guy we heard about on TV—lock him up forever and not even give him a trial, like a terrorist.”

“But you gotta plant the stuff, Ellis, like we discussed—put the cheese in the trap.”

His face darkened slightly at her persistence. “Yeah, Nance, I gotta bait the trap. And whose prints are on that bag? And whose DNA? I sweated on that thing.”

“We wiped it off.”

He shook his head. “You seen what they can do on TV. Plus, where did that bag come from?”

She stared at him, wondering what the trick part of the question was.

“From the hospital where my mom is,” he finished. “How hard do you think it’ll be for them to figure that out? I drop a dime to the feds, telling them Mel is a wack job aiming to blow up the Bennington Monument or something, and first thing they’ll do is take that bag apart. They’ll figure out where it’s from, and nail us instead of him. Far as I know, Mel’s never even
been
in that hospital.”

Nancy untangled her legs from his and sat up in the bed, leaning against the wall, her expression hard.

He tried winning her back. “Sweetie, we can still do it, or something like it. We just need to be more careful.”

“Give me a cigarette.”

He rolled over toward the night table and retrieved a half-empty pack. He extracted a cigarette, lit it up, and handed it to her.

“It’s still a good plan,” he reiterated.

She took a deep pull, held the smoke for a few seconds, and then let out a long contrail between her lips. She was staring straight ahead.

“I guess,” she finally said.

“We need to figure out how to make them look only at him and not us.”

She was silent a while longer, her eyes still on the far wall, working on that cigarette.

“I just want it done, Ellis,” she said.

“I know. Me, too.”

Joe glanced down at the buzzing cell phone in its dashboard charger. He didn’t recognize the number on the small display, but it was a Montpelier exchange, which gave him a pretty good idea who was calling him.

Conflicted, he glanced ahead, saw a pull-off at a souvenir stand parking lot, and stopped his car. He was on his way toward Bennington, on Route 9, and had just passed the road’s apex over Vermont’s tree-covered, hilly backbone—complete with a view stretching out for hundreds of square miles. His ambivalence about the upcoming conversation was compounded by a small regret that he’d just missed the best place to have it.

“Hello.”

“Hi, Joe. It’s me.”

Gail Zigman had a low voice, and from the first time he’d heard it, it had always hit him the same way, with a stirring he imagined animals responded to in the wild.

Almost despite himself, he smiled. “Hey, Gail. This is a treat.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

He laughed. “I was just thinking about that. I’m a few hundred yards past the top of that long downslope into Bennington, between Searsburg and Woodford, staring at some tourists buying stuffed animals and pricey syrup. How ’bout you?”

Her voice flattened somewhat. “Oh, in the Executive Building somewhere. I had a little time between meetings. I’d rather be where you are.”

That was perhaps a little richer in meaning than either of them wanted. “Oh, I doubt that,” he said lamely. “Bennington hasn’t changed much.”

She played along. “Big case there?”

“Maybe. We have something percolating we need to figure out, but right now we’re just fumbling around.”

In fact, this was his favorite part of an investigation, when not just he but the whole team had the pull of a strong scent encouraging them. They were largely ignorant, that was true, but motivation was taking care of itself.

“You still having fun up there?” he asked, moving the conversation along, its emptiness palpable. They were being guarded to an extent that they’d never been before. Their past involvement had epitomized intimacy, and had included their jobs, where each of them had found the other to be a natural sounding board. It was the aspect of their relationship that Joe missed the most—and which was now making him feel awkward. In fact, the depth of his ignorance about what she was doing these days was startling.

“Oh,” she said with no great enthusiasm, “I wouldn’t call it fun. Worthwhile, though. Definitely that.” She paused before adding, “There are times, though . . .”

“Right,” he said, not knowing where to go next. Looking out at the parking lot, oddly mirroring this conversation in his head, he envisioned two picnickers in a minefield.

“I miss you, Joe,” she said after a long silence. “I miss us.”

“I know,” he admitted, thinking back to his night with Beverly. He didn’t regret it, not even now. But he missed what would have accompanied it had the woman been Gail. It reminded him how much he was in limbo.

“Well,” she added sadly, interrupting his thoughts, “I guess I only have myself to blame.”

He knew that deserved some response, a one-liner designed to make the jagged edges less painful. But for the life of him, he couldn’t come up with it, not to his own satisfaction.

“I don’t see blame going anywhere,” he said, not liking how that sounded.

But it seemed to work. “You were always very sweet that way,” she said.

He wasn’t sure he had been, or even exactly what that meant.

Mercifully, he heard some feeble electronic sound in the background of her phone, a bell of some sort, that prompted her to say, her voice defeated, “I have to go. Thanks for talking. You sound good.”

“You, too,” he lied. “Knock ’em dead.”

He replaced the phone, checked his rearview mirror, and returned to the road.

Time to get back to something he knew how to do.

“I never liked that look,” Willy said, glaring at her from the passenger seat.

Sam stared at him. “Is that what’s been bugging you all the way over here? My hair?”

“That, the tight jeans. You look like a hooker.”

She laughed at him. “No hooker you ever knew. What I look like is fashionable. These are sixty-dollar jeans. And the blond hair works like a charm to open guys up. You just don’t like how other men appreciate me,” she added in a teasing, lilting voice.

He shifted his gaze to the scene outside. They were parked on a side street in Bennington, not far from Piccolo’s, the bar that their local PD contact, Johnny Massucco, had told them was a likely watering hole for men like Mel Martin.

“They don’t appreciate you,” he said sullenly. “They just want to jump your bones.”

“And you don’t?” she asked.

“Not the same.”

She watched his profile, knowing what was bothering him. Her change in appearance wasn’t new. She’d used it before, once when she’d masqueraded as a ski instructor, and again when she’d pretended to be a drug dealer in Holyoke, Massachusetts. On both occasions, he’d become surly and aloof. Over time, she had come to understand both his insecurity and his deep conservatism, and how they combined sometimes to wind him up tight. It was a pain—he was difficult enough to live with when he was feeling fine—but given her own quirky needs in a mate, she’d actually come to see his moodiness as sweet . . . some of the time.

“Well,” she told him, “you sure won’t have the same problem in that getup.”

He swung back to face her. “What? I look normal.”

She poked him. “Normal for a bum.”

With a flash of anger, he reached for the door handle and yanked it open. “Let’s get going.”

She caught hold of his arm. “Whoa, hang on. I don’t want to lose sight of you.”

“Fat chance of that. You’ll be in the middle of an admiring crowd.”

She didn’t let go. “Willy.”

He caught her change of tone and was quieter in his response. “What?”

“I’ve stuck by you this long, haven’t I?”

Willy wasn’t overequipped with moments of grace, but he did have them, as both Sam and Joe knew. They came fast and vanished faster for the most part, but when timed right, they could linger.

As an example, in a gesture scented with faint but reliable virtue, he quickly ducked his head, kissed her fingers, and said, “Come on, babe, we ain’t got all night.”

They headed off in slightly different directions after leaving the car separately, blending into a section of town at once bruised and polished. Bennington was full of such contrasting overlays, with haves and have-nots virtually sharing the same fences. This area featured low-income housing down one street, a fancy restaurant and a state-of-the-art fire station up two others, and one of the town’s busiest commercial strips one block over.

Piccolo’s appealed to customers of all stripes, being a place where the younger, slightly rough-edged gentility might go for a nightcap after the evening had officially concluded—to where the hard-core drinkers had been hanging out all night. It wasn’t a classic biker bar—those tended to be short-lived in towns like this—but it was definitely working class.

It was also a place where Sam and Willy each could reach a combat-ready comfort level. As with those few soldiers who discovered that the adrenaline of battle afforded a certain simplified clarity, so these two had found that slipping disguised into the twilight between the good guys and the bad freed them to act more spontaneously, without fear that their bosses were one citizen’s complaint away.

Cops, especially those in uniform, were more conscious of maintaining the badge’s reputation than they were of the gun most civilians stared at. It was the claim of misconduct, whether real or imagined, that dogged them most, not the misuse of a weapon they rarely fired. For these two, therefore, there was a paradoxical sense of liberation in their identities being hidden.

So Sam and Willy, several minutes apart and via two different entrances, came into Piccolo’s looking cheerful and glum respectively, supposedly in search of either company or respite, but in fact as keen as dogs on the hunt, ready for anything and on the scent for Mel Martin.

Mel Martin, not surprisingly in a town this size, was a couple of streets from Piccolo’s at that very moment, sitting in the cab of the truck he’d bought from Newell Morgan. He was watching the front of the oddly named Green Mountain Vista Lodge Motel—a fleabag with no vista of anything except the traffic on Route 9.

The Vista, as it was colloquially known, was C-shaped in the traditional manner, surrounding its own parking lot on three sides. All the rooms led onto two stacked walkways, the upper one belted in by a balcony, a row of cars hemming in the lower one like sucklings lined up against one gigantic, sleeping pig.

Mel’s point of interest was the door to number 32, on the second floor, slightly closer to the right-hand staircase. It was indistinguishable from its neighbors—brown, battered, and accompanied by a tiny, occluded window to one side—but Mel stared at it as if seeking enlightenment.

Which, in one sense, he was. He’d witnessed a blade-thin young man, street-named Banger, enter the room twenty minutes earlier, intending to conduct a minor piece of business in the illegal drug trade, and he was awaiting his reappearance.

Mel knew what was happening behind that door. He’d even caught a glimpse of the young couple who had opened up to Banger’s knock. They’d be sitting around feigning coolness, feeling each other out on issues of quantity and price, and either doing a deal and parting company or joining together in a group indulgence where Banger consumed most of his profit on the spot. Whether sex entered into it often depended on a crucial few creating the right mood. Mel remembered times when he’d woken up atop a naked woman with no memory of what might have gone on between them.

The source of his fascination, however, had nothing to do with such reminiscences, or even any yearnings to relive them. Mel was more interested in where he’d picked up Banger’s tail—the same address High Top had given him just before dying.

Which made of this innocuous encounter inside a faceless motel a beacon toward Mel’s major score. Of that, he’d convinced himself.

Banger worked for the mysterious two cousins who had captivated Mel’s imagination the way the lottery drives others to gamble away their life savings. And just as he had snuffed out High Top to get a simple address, so he was now willing to do whatever was necessary to extract the next level of knowledge from this source. His first knowledge of the elusive cousins had created something akin to a quest in him, based less on their reality than on the dream they represented.

In truth, Mel had no idea if Banger’s suppliers made any more money than he did conducting his much ballyhooed raids. The mere rumors that they did were good enough. And, perhaps incongruously, his sacrifice of High Top for so little was not a reflection of any concerns about insolvency. He was far more careless than that—if a single influence could be blamed for his growing thirst for violence, it might just as easily have been boredom.

He had killed before. High Top had been the third. The first had been an inebriated bum in an Albany alleyway one night when he’d been in his early teens. That had been mostly experimental—and a disappointment. He’d come upon the passed-out old man by accident, on his way from having broken into a hardware store only to find the till empty. On a whim, he’d closed off the bum’s mouth and nose, hoping for some paroxysm of death he could then add to his mental scrapbook. All he’d received for his efforts was a cessation of breathing. Presumably, the guy had been so drunk, he was already at death’s door.