Tucker Peak (22 page)

I could almost see him nodding at the phone in comprehension. This was, as I’d hoped it would be, just the kind of problem he and his colleagues liked to tackle most.

“There is something I could try,” he finally said slowly. “There’s a retired guy in Florida who’s been trying to sell people on how to lift prints from human skin. Has something to do with temperature differences between the skin surface and the material you want to transpose the print to. Anyhow, he’s been fiddling with it since the late seventies, and just recently started getting some consistent results.”

“That sounds perfect,” I said, almost cutting him off.

“Yeah, well, ‘sounds’ may be the operative word. This is still considered iffy stuff, and it has a pile of variables that’ll render it null and void: the body’s temperature, exposure, cleanliness, extent of decay, and a bunch of other things. They all have to work together, more or less, as do factors like was the assailant wearing gloves, were his fingers oily enough, was it the right type of oil, did he press too hard or not hard enough, and so on. You get the idea.”

“Unfortunately,” I admitted.

He sounded apologetic for overdoing the caveat. “Hey, don’t get depressed until I give you good reason. I will try this out, right on the bruises we think his hands left on her arms. In fact, I’ve been looking forward to giving this technique a shot.”

“Okay,” I said. “I appreciate it. And I promise not to hold my breath.”

He laughed. “You can if you want to. This won’t take long. I’ll call you tomorrow or the next day and let you know what I’ve found.”

· · ·

Shayla Rossi was being housed in the basement, courtesy of the Brattleboro police, sitting in a narrow cell with the traditional metal toilet and a bunk. There were no other short-term residents at the moment, so instead of moving her to the interrogation room upstairs, I left her behind bars. I merely dragged a folding chair to the other side of her door and made myself comfortable.

“Who the hell
are
you people?” she demanded.

I remembered what the constable had said about her cranky personality. “Vermont Bureau of Investigation. My name’s Joe Gunther.”

“Never heard of it.” She was sitting on the bunk, her back against the wall, her knees drawn up before her. My mind flashed back to what I’d just told David Hawke about our persistent low visibility, a problem I sensed I’d soon be yearning for.

“We work on major felonies, Ms. Rossi—the really bad stuff.”

“That has nothing to do with me. That’s Bobby’s rap.”

I flapped my injured arm slightly, remembering that she’d known Richie Lane by his real name of Bobby Lanier. “Your dog gave me this.”

“I didn’t set him on you.”

“You trained him,” I said.

Shayla Rossi merely pressed her lips into a thin, straight line.

I glanced down at the file I’d brought with me. “I see the gun Bobby fired was yours, too.”

“I didn’t know he was going to use it.”

“You knew he was on the run.”

“So?”

“That’s harboring a fugitive, Ms. Rossi, and aiding and abetting. And say what you want about Vermont being soft on crime, we still take assaulting a police officer pretty seriously. Unless you help me out, you could spend a long time in a cell.” I thought back to her isolated home and what it said about her choices in life, and added, “Except that you’d be living with dozens of other women, some pretty nasty, all piled on top of one another. We have a real overcrowding problem in our jails.”

Her arms slipped around her knees to hug them closer to her. “You’re so full of shit you can’t see straight. I didn’t do a damn thing. My lawyer’ll have me out of here like that.” She tried to snap her fingers, but either her technique or her sweaty hands betrayed her—there was no sound beyond a pathetic plop.

I referred back to the file. “Right—your lawyer. Public defender. Seems like he had a little trouble spelling your name, kept writing down ‘Sheila.’”

I actually had no idea if that were true. There was no mention of it in my paperwork. But it had the desired effect.

“That fucking idiot,” she said, her hot, narrowed eyes watching me as if I might suddenly strike out.

I shook my head sympathetically. “Shayla. I know you don’t think much of us, or the system in general. But you’re between a rock and a hard place here.” I paused before suggesting, “It’s not where you have to be.”

“What do you mean?” she asked slowly.

“Let’s face it, you’re dealing with a bunch of very embarrassed people. Here we were, running all over looking for Bobby, and you had him tucked away, nice and safe, right under our noses, not twenty minutes from this building. That makes us look pretty bad. My bosses, the prosecutors, everybody’s scrambling for cover, you know how it works. And guess who they’re planning to hang most of this on?” I pointed to her.

She opened her mouth to say something, but I leaned forward suddenly and gestured to her to stay quiet. Her mouth snapped shut with surprise.

“Shayla, you know that’s bullshit, right?
I
know it’s bullshit. I also know it doesn’t need to be. I can get you out of this. A little slap on the wrist, a little kowtowing to the judge and the others, and you go back home, free as all-get-out.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “How?”

“You tell me what you know—here and now.” I pulled a tape recorder out of my pocket, turned it on, and placed it through the bars onto the end of her bunk.

She tucked her heels up even closer. “I don’t know anything.”

“I’m not saying you do, not consciously. I just want to hear your perspective: how Bobby contacted you, what he said, how he got you to take him in. You and I know you’re just the innocent bystander here, the one who gave an old friend a place to stay, but until I can tell my bosses exactly what happened, item by item, they’re going to try to pin it on you.”

She looked both confused and disgusted. “This is such a crock.”

“Talk to me.”

She scratched her head. “I don’t know… Bobby and me go back. We were hot once, but then he went one way, I went another. No big deal. We talked now and then… ”

“About what?”

She stopped, surprised. “Normal shit. What he was doin’, what I was doin’.”

“And what was he doing?”

“Working at Mount Snow and Tucker Peak the last two, three years—longest time he ever stuck with anything. It wasn’t much, but he said he liked the people. He was big on that, always liked being around people. Just the opposite of me.”

“He had a scam going at Tucker Peak,” I said. “He ever talk about that?”

She hesitated.

“Shayla,” I tried putting her at ease. “If you didn’t have anything to do with it, you can’t get into trouble.”

“He was pretty proud of it,” she finally said. “Like he was a spy or something—James Bond the rip-off artist.”

“He ever mention Marty Gagnon?”

“Not till he came to hide out at my place. Before then, I just knew he had a partner—that was it.”

“How did he describe the operation?”

“He called himself the inside man. He’d sweet talk the ladies or con the guys, whatever it took to get into their homes. Then he’d take pictures or draw a map, figure out which windows were alarmed, if any, find out when the owners would be away. That’s what he thought was like being a spy, ’cause he had to be real slick about it, not show his hand. It did sound pretty cool.”

She’d stretched one leg out during this, which I hoped was a sign she was becoming more comfortable with me.

“But then it went wrong,” I suggested.

She stared at her foot for a while, apparently thinking back, maybe wondering how things had turned out as they had. “Yeah. He called me up, said they’d killed Marty and were closing in on him. That was the first time I heard of Marty. He also told me he’d hit one of them over the head who claimed he was a cop, ’cept the name of the police department he mentioned didn’t exist. Bobby was really scared.”

“Who did he say was after him?”

“He wasn’t sure. He thought it was the druggies.”

I glanced at the tape recorder to make sure it was still running. “Who were they?”

But her answer was a disappointment. “I don’t know, probably one of the people he ripped off. That’s what scared him—not knowing. And that it all fell apart super fast.”

“Do you think Bobby stole drugs from someone?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t do drugs himself and he didn’t have the connections to move it. Maybe he tried—I’m not saying he didn’t—but if he did, it’s news to me.”

“Let’s talk about Marty a little.”

“I told you, I didn’t—”

I interrupted her. “I know, I know—you’d never heard of him. But you were told he’d been murdered. Did Bobby know that for a fact?”

She stared at me, looking confused. “He’s not dead?”

“He might be. We haven’t found a body.”

She became thoughtful. “Bobby just said he’d been killed, not that he’d seen it happen.”

“How do you think the two had been getting along?”

There, she seemed clearer. “Not so good. He bitched about how Marty wouldn’t move the stuff fast enough, how he had to keep at him all the time.”

“Did it sound like Marty would get angry?” I asked, my interest growing.

“I guess. It wasn’t like they were ever buddy-buddy. Bobby thought he was low-class, not a people person, which was a real put-down from him.”

Which made me wonder what he’d seen in Shayla, aside from her being the perfect person to hide out with.

“Did Bobby ever say Marty had threatened him?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Nah.”

I considered continuing, going over the same ground again in the hopes of learning more—that was certainly standard practice. But chances were good that Sammie had pegged this woman’s usefulness from the start.

Still, the drug angle was new, if not well defined, and offered the slim possibility of a new line of inquiry. It also helped explain, if true, why the costs in human lives had been so high. From a simple case of unsolved burglaries, we were now facing the possibility of something far bigger—and more lethal.

All that was left now was to hope that our interviews, phone calls, background checks, and general data-crunching would yield just enough light to let us see what was going on.

And maybe lead us to Marty Gagnon, a man I was now very much hoping I’d meet alive.

I STEPPED INSIDE THE WARMTH AND DARKNESS OF MY HOUSE
late that night and leaned back against the closed door, feeling all the muscles in my body suddenly begin to relax.

The medicine I’d been given to both control the pain and fight off any infections had fogged my brain and made me groggy. All day, I’d been struggling to maintain concentration, which ironically had probably helped make me more efficient than usual. But now I was wiped out. I worked my way out of my coat, dropped it on the floor, wandered over to the sofa, and collapsed, falling asleep before I could remember to remove my shoes.

The respite didn’t last long. Like an approaching train whistle in a dream I wasn’t sure I was having, the phone’s ringing crept into my head as from far in the distance, only finally waking me up when I couldn’t explain its source.

I opened my eyes and stared up at the dark ceiling, feeling like a huge weight was pinning me in place. My hand groped over my shoulder, fumbling for the side table next to the sofa, until it finally located the incessant phone.

“What?”

“This Joe Gunther?” The woman’s voice sounded doubtful.

“Yeah.”

“Must be a bad connection. This is Linda Bettina at Tucker Peak. We’ve had another incident you probably want to look at.”

“What is it?” I asked, slowly sitting up.

“The new pumphouse we’ve been building just went up in smoke.” She hesitated and added, “You told me to call you if anything else happened.”

“I know, I know. Sorry. I’m a little under the weather. You sure it wasn’t a short or something?”

Her voice regained its usual slightly acerbic edge. “The pumps hadn’t been installed yet.”

“I’ll be right over.”

· · ·

The air was so cold, it felt brittle and was bathed in a full moon turned up to full wattage. As I drove between the dark mountains leading up to Tucker Peak, I kept twisting in my seat to look around, overwhelmed by the deep stillness of the snow-shrouded trees, which were tinted a faint, lunar blue by the shimmering radiance overhead. At times like these, I felt irrelevant in the world’s grand scheme, and totally powerless. I knew that we humans were wholly capable of burning, polluting, stripping, and altering the landscape to a lethal extent. But on special occasions, under just the right lighting, I trusted that the winner in this struggle would be the same force that had preceded us in history and which would, in the long run, treat us as a minor blip in time. The car I was in, the road I was traveling, and the few house lights I could see in the distance seemed as impermanent as snowflakes on a hot stove.

I drove to the equipment yard as Linda had instructed on the phone and was met by the same crooked-toothed, bearded snowmaker named Dick who’d tossed me the crowbar when I was stranded in the chairlift.

He gave me a big smile as I got out of my car. “Boy, you sure had us goin’, pretending you were a carpenter. Good thing you never got one of us pissed off. We mighta pounded you good and never known you were a cop.”

I looked at his eyes, watching for some double meaning there, but he seemed to have merely uttered a bizarre statement of fact.

He did, however, suddenly step back and give me a more careful appraisal. “Where’s your arm?”

I’d put my coat on with the left sleeve empty. “I still got it. It’s in a sling.”

“Cool,” was all he said, before taking my good elbow and steering me toward an idling Yamaha snowmobile. “Linda said to get you up there pronto. Hope you’re dressed warm.”

He got on first and gave the throttle a couple of hormonal revs. I tucked in behind him and had just looped my hand through the thick strap binding the seat when he took off with a jolt that should have sent me ass-over-backward. So much for not pounding on a cop.