Darkness First (33 page)

S
ean Carroll stepped just inside the fence, his gun by his side. ‘Hold it, Emmett,' he called out. ‘Stop right there.'

Ganzer stopped. ‘What? Why? What's going on?'

Carroll studied the bear, its head half shot away. That's when another possibility occurred to him. Harlan Savage had, after all, served two tours in Iraq.

‘Move back into the open, Emmett. About ten feet back. I need to check something out.'

‘What? Why? What's that?' Ganzer said, looking confused rather than worried. That was good.

‘Just do it, Emmett. Everything will be fine.'

Reluctantly, Ganzer moved back.

Carroll withdrew as far away as he could get from Ganzer without leaving the fenced compound. He squatted down. ‘Open the back of the bear, Emmett,' he called out. ‘Tell me what you see.'

Ganzer shrugged. Yanked at the edges of the fake fur.

Carroll turned away, covered his face with his arms and scrunched down further.

But there were no explosions. There was nothing but silence.

Carroll lowered his arms. ‘What's in there?' he called to Ganzer. ‘What's inside?'

Ganzer pulled out some newspapers. Let them fall to the ground. ‘Plastic bottle,' he said. ‘And a bunch of money.'

‘Take the bottle out and look inside.'

‘I'm not wearing gloves.'

‘Don't worry about it. Easy enough to distinguish your prints from Savage's.'

Ganzer opened the bottle and smiled. ‘Pills. Canadian Ox. We got it.'

‘Nothing else?'

‘Just the money. Shouldn't we bag this stuff ?' asked Ganzer. ‘It's evidence.'

Carroll rose and moved toward Ganzer. ‘That won't be necessary, Emmett. Just put everything back inside the bear.'

Once again, Ganzer did as he was told.

U
nder cover of darkness, Maggie moved silently toward the break in the fence.

When she was close enough to hear the words the two men were saying she flipped on her recorder, hoping it was sensitive enough to pick it all up.

‘I
do want to thank you, Emmett,' Sean Carroll said. ‘You've really been a big help.'

Ganzer smiled at the praise.

He stopped smiling when Carroll raised the automatic he was holding and pointed it at Ganzer's face.

‘Now put your hands behind your head,' he said.

‘The fuck you doing?' asked Ganzer.

Now it was Carroll's turn to smile. It was exactly the same question the boys on the boat had asked. Exactly the same deer-in-the-headlights expression on Emmett's face.

‘Hands behind your head, Emmett,' Carroll repeated. ‘Or I'll have to blow it off.' This time Ganzer obeyed.

Sean Carroll reached in and removed Ganzer's weapon from its holster. ‘I'm sorry I'll have to shoot you in the face, Emmett. But what with the body armor you're wearing … well, I'm sure you understand.'

W
hile he was talking, Maggie slipped through the break in the fence.

‘I
t was you?' Ganzer asked, disbelief making his voice quaver. ‘You killed Stoddard? And the Blakemore girl? And your own wife?'

‘I'm afraid so,' said Carroll. ‘But not to worry. I'll be all right. Everyone will think it was Harlan Savage. They'll also think he killed you.' Carroll smiled. ‘I'll tell everyone how bravely you died in the line of duty.'

Emmett Ganzer was now only half listening to what his boss was saying. He was more intent on watching Maggie Savage approach silently from behind Carroll, carrying what looked like a shotgun.

F
rom a hundred meters away, all Michael McCabe could see through the night-vision scope of John Savage's bolt-action Remington 700 rifle, the civilian twin to Harlan's M40, was Emmett Ganzer's broad back. ‘Move, you oversized fuck,' McCabe muttered to himself.

M
aggie waved her hand, silently signaling Emmett Ganzer to move away from Carroll. If he stayed where he was the Mossberg would kill them both. But Ganzer stood as if rooted to the spot. He said nothing. It was his eyes that gave Maggie away.

C
arroll whirled. Fired. Ganzer leaped at Carroll's arm, but too late. Maggie went down, clutching her chest. The Mossberg fell to the ground. Carroll spotted McCabe as he turned back to fire at Ganzer. His second bullet struck Emmett dead center between his small eyes. Maggie, shaken by the impact of the bullet against her body armor, struggled to pull her Glock from her holster. Carroll got there before she could.

T
hrough his night-vision scope McCabe saw Sean Carroll lift Maggie from the ground. Pull her up in front of him, his left arm locked around her neck, holding her body against his, his right hand pressing his automatic against her throat.

There was no way McCabe could fire. Not from here. Not without hitting Maggie. He got up and ran across the open yard to his right, hoping to create a possible line of fire. As McCabe moved, Carroll, as if attached by an invisible axle, turned, keeping Maggie between himself and the Portland cop.

T
wo hundred meters away, Harlan Savage lay flat on the ground, steadying the tripod legs of his M40 on a flat bit of earth. Through the lens of his scope he saw Maggie's black hair brushing against Carroll's face. Their bodies were tight against each other. For the first time in his life Harlan wished his tall, beautiful sister was six inches shorter.

‘D
rop the rifle, McCabe. Or I'll kill your girlfriend here,' Carroll called out. ‘You are McCabe, aren't you?'

‘You'll kill her anyway.'

‘Oh, you never know. I might let her live. For a little while at least.'

As McCabe moved further to the right, Carroll kept turning, keeping Maggie between himself and McCabe. For Harlan to get any kind of shot, Carroll had to turn five more degrees. And, as McCabe kept moving to the right, he did.

The angle was about as good as it would get. If Carroll pivoted any further Harlan's bullet would go through the back of Carroll's head and then likely go through Maggie's as well. But from this angle Harlan had just enough clearance between the two of them.

As Michael McCabe and Sean Carroll stared each other down, a small red dot danced one inch behind Sean Carroll's ear. Harlan gauged the speed of the wind coming in from the sea. Ten to fifteen knots. Adjusted his aim slightly to the right. The little red dot was now dead center on Maggie. Harlan figured the wind should carry the bullet just far enough to the left to kill Carroll and miss his sister. If he was wrong, well, he didn't want to think about that. It was without question the most difficult shot Harlan Savage had ever attempted in his life. But he couldn't see any other way out of it. He had to try. He put slow pressure on the trigger.
Please God, make him stand still
.

Perhaps God heard Harlan's silent prayer. Perhaps He didn't. Either way for the microsecond it took for the bullet to travel the 200 meters, Sean Carroll and Maggie Savage, their bodies pressed tightly together, stood motionless. The wind held.

S
ean Carroll never heard the bullet that entered just behind his right ear and came out the left side of his head taking some of Carroll's brains and a few strands of Maggie's hair along with it.

Neither did Conor Riordan. The man who never was was no more.

9:00
A.M
., Sunday, August 30, 2009

Augusta, Maine

O
n Sunday morning, August 30th, one week and two days after the death of Tiffany Stoddard, a special meeting was called by Assistant Attorney General Burt Lund. It began on time at nine
A.M
. in the private conference room of Lund's boss, Maine Attorney General Bradley Freese.

Lund arrived early. Freese, as was his habit, entered five minutes after everyone else and took the seat left open for him at the head of the table. Lund sat at the other end.

In appearance and manner, the two men couldn't have been more different. Lund was a rotund five foot five and 200 pounds. He usually looked like he'd slept in his suit. His shirt-tails stubbornly refused to obey his half-hearted attempts to keep them tucked in. This morning he'd cut himself while shaving and wore a small, round band-aid on the left side of his double chin.

Freese was tall and patrician, his silver hair was immaculately groomed, and his custom-tailored Dunhill suit perfectly outlined his athletic body. A former all-Ivy League quarterback at Princeton, Freese had preceded Susan Marsh by twenty-five years as a member of the Harvard Law Review and, as Attorney General, had hired her to join his team. In spite of his deep disappointment at having Susan provide Sean Carroll's alibi in his wife's death, she remained a particular favorite. Almost a daughter, he liked to say.

The long oval table between Lund and Freese was full. On one side were Sheriff John Savage, Maggie, McCabe, Assistant Medical Examiner Terri Mirabito, and Dr Joe Pines of the Maine State Laboratory in Augusta. Across from them sat Eastport Police Chief Frank Boucher, Portland Police Chief Tom Shockley, Colonel Ed Matthews, commander of the Maine State Police, Sean Carroll's immediate boss, Lieutenant Tom Mayhew, and Anne Marie Lichter, a child welfare supervisor at Maine's Department of Health and Human Services, who was present to represent the interests and welfare of eleven-year-old Tabitha Stoddard. Judy Lombardi, Brad Freese's executive assistant, sat behind her boss and had been tasked with taking detailed notes.

‘All right,' said Freese. ‘Let's get this show on the road. Now, can anybody please tell me what in hell this monumental screwup was all about.'

‘I think I'm the one to do that,' said Lund. He'd spent the previous two days thoroughly debriefing Maggie and McCabe and then following up by interviewing everybody else who had played any role whatsoever in the events of the preceding week.

‘Where's Susan Marsh?' asked Freese. ‘Shouldn't she be here?'

‘Unfortunately,' said Maggie, ‘nobody knows where Susan is at the moment. We haven't been able to reach her.'

Freese turned back to Lund, ‘Well, then, go ahead, Burt. You'd better get started.'

‘I think the best place to start, sir, is about ten months ago, when Sean Carroll's wife, Detective Elizabeth Carroll, and a number of other officers attached to Maine DEA were invited to Saint John, New Brunswick, to review security procedures at the Ecklund Company in Saint John. As you may know, Ecklund is one of eastern Canada's largest distributors of prescription pharmaceuticals. Upon her return, Detective Carroll wrote a lengthy report detailing what she considered shockingly lax security in the Ecklund facility. With the clarity of hindsight, it's obvious now that she shared her report not only with her colleagues at DEA but also with her husband, Sergeant Sean Carroll.'

Lund spent the next hour detailing everything else that was known. Throughout the presentation Freese kept shaking his head in apparent disbelief and disgust. Lund finished up by playing the recording Maggie had made of Sean Carroll's last conversation with Emmett Ganzer. The small recorder had picked up every word.

Lund asked his boss if he had any questions.

‘Yes. Quite a few actually.' His gaze found Terri Mirabito. ‘Dr Mirabito, your autopsy confirmed that Tiffany Stoddard was in fact pregnant?'

‘Yes sir. She was six weeks along,' said Mirabito.

‘Do we know who the father was?'

‘As of this morning we do. We'd already done an analysis of the fetal DNA and, just an hour ago, DNA samples obtained from Sean Carroll's apartment confirmed that he was the father of her unborn child.'

Freese sighed. ‘How about the remainder of the drugs? Have we located them?'

‘Yes,' said Ed Matthews. ‘We discovered Sean Carroll owned a one-room cabin in the woods about twenty miles west of Skowhegan. We had an ERT team take the place apart. They located the drugs under two false floorboards in the cabin. They also found both Sean Carroll's and Tiff Stoddard's fingerprints all around the cabin, including on the box where the drugs were stored.'

‘How many pills were there?'

Matthews let out a long slow breath. ‘Out of the original 40,000 stolen from Ecklund in January, 22,562 were in the cabin. There were an additional 5,000 plus found outside the cannery at Parnell Point. They were hidden inside the child's teddy bear which Emmett Ganzer had been carrying just before he was killed by Sean Carroll and Carroll in turn was killed by Sheriff Savage's son, Harlan. We have to assume the remainder, approximately 13,000 tablets, have already been sold on the streets since the theft in January. We also found a large amount of cash in the same hiding place in the cabin.'

‘How much?' asked Freese.

‘One million two hundred and sixty thousand dollars.'

‘Presumably the proceeds of the drug sales?'

‘Presumably.'

‘We also have a lot of dead people,' said Freese. ‘Do we have any idea what the final body count will turn out to be?'

‘I think Detective Savage may be the best person to address that.'

Freese turned toward Maggie and waited.

‘As of now,' said Maggie, ‘not counting Sean Carroll, we know of seven dead for sure. One more, Luke Haskell, is missing and I suspect may be dead as well.'

‘Excuse me,' Chief Boucher interrupted, ‘I guess I should have mentioned it earlier. Luke Haskell's body washed up on Campobello Island last Friday. There was no ID on the body, no way to identify him and it took the Canadian police three days to ask us if we knew who he was. We just got word.'

‘Cause of death?' asked Freese.

‘Luke drowned. We can't prove one way or the other whether Carroll was responsible or if he just tumbled overboard in a drunken stupor but given the timing of events and the fact that Luke probably could possibly have identified Carroll, I think we really do know the answer to that question.'

‘What about the child? Tabitha Stoddard?' asked Anne Marie Lichter, the woman from DHHS. ‘Where is she now?'

‘Tabitha is staying at my house in Machias,' Sheriff Savage said. ‘My wife, who is a retired nurse, is looking after her. So is Dr Kaplan.'

‘I assume this is a temporary arrangement?'

Savage thought about the question before answering. ‘I don't know. We'll see.'

‘That work for you?' Freese asked Lichter.

‘I'll need to talk with Tabitha, but yes, for the moment, that's fine.'

‘How about Susan Marsh?' asked Freese. ‘Can somebody explain to me what Susan's involvement in all this was?' It obviously pained him to think of her as somehow involved in a criminal enterprise.

‘All we know at this point,' said Maggie, ‘is that Susan Marsh went to Sean Carroll's apartment the night after we spoke to her. There's at least some possibility that she went there to question Carroll about whether the brandy he served her the night of Liz Carroll's death might or might not have been spiked with drugs designed to make sure she didn't wake up. In any event, while there, we're reasonably certain she either purposely or inadvertently communicated that McCabe and I suspected that Carroll was, in fact, Conor Riordan. We don't know what Carroll's reaction to that information was other than to come to Machias and try to kill me. We can't ask Susan because at the moment she seems to be missing herself.'

‘Well, let's just hope she turns up soon.'

‘I don't have a great deal of confidence in that happening, sir,' said Maggie.

‘Dear God,' was all Bradley Freese could say as the implication of what Maggie said sunk in. ‘What about Emmett Ganzer? What was his role in this?' he asked next.

‘In my view,' said Maggie, ‘Emmett was guilty of nothing more than excess aggression and mindless ambition. He wanted to be promoted a little too much. As the recording demonstrates, he had nothing to do with the deaths or the drugs.'

‘One thing I don't understand, Detective Savage,' said Freese, ‘is why Carroll let you work on the case. It's what led ultimately to his downfall.'

‘I can only guess,' said Maggie, ‘but I think it was because he knew, because of my friendship with Dr Kaplan, I'd investigate the murder on my own anyway. If I was working for him I believe he thought he could control me. That way he'd always know what I knew and be able to keep me from getting too close to the truth.'

‘Well, he was obviously wrong about that,' said Freese.

‘Yes sir,' said Maggie. ‘As he was about so many other things.'