Red Herring (17 page)

They did meet other people, of course, if not many, including some working within the entrails of all the tubing, wiring, and supporting architecture. It made for a tight fit, to be sure, but not quite as impenetrable as Joe had thought from above. And there were scattered mementoes of a quaintly human flavor sprinkled about—laptop-equipped desks decorated with family photos, calendar art, personal trinkets, and political cartoons. They evoked a slightly warped, sci-fi equivalent of prehistoric cave drawings—faint scratchings of Homo sapiens in a technological universe.

The most curious thing for Joe, however, was the paradoxical nature of the whole thing—a vast building dedicated to producing a beam of light, which, in the end, remained nowhere to be seen. Indeed, this famous light was so concentrated, and so rigorously controlled, that in the long run, it wasn’t like a flashlight in the dark at all, but rather a space-age contraption so high tech and valuable that nary a drop of its prized product was allowed to leak into the surrounding space. It may have been a form of man-made sunshine, but it wasn’t to be wasted.

Back outside in the quiet of the lobby, Lester gave voice to one of Joe’s growing concerns, “I guess I can see how you can take a grain of space dust and figure out what it’s made of,” he said. “But how’re you going to study our stuff? We brought a sawed-off part of a truck bumper.”

Wayne laughed at his wonderment. “Not to worry. We get strange materials all the time. We just adapt the stations accordingly. We’ve analyzed plastics to be used in artificial knees, human bones to study arthritis. We even once took a close-up look at the sludge from New York harbor to see what pollutants were in it.”

“We can take a piece of metal or wood,” Eric added, “that’s been hit by a bullet, and find out not only that it
was
a bullet, but potentially
what kind and from what box on its owner’s shelf, assuming we have access to that.”

“If you study an object closely enough,” Shepard added, “you can usually discover its unique qualities—just like matching a print to a finger.”

“The difference,” Marine picked up, “is that a fingerprint is hardwired biology. What we’re talking about is the ability to fingerprint a sample’s environment.” He pointed at Spinney’s head. “Today, you woke up, presumably washed your hair, and set out to come here. All during that trip, your hair was exposed to a series of changing environments, each of which probably deposited samplars, however tiny. All of those, as well as the nature of the hair shaft itself, could conceivably be identified and charted from infrared spectroscopy.”

Joe had already grasped as much. What was nagging him now was more practical.

“How fast can it be done?” he asked.

“Depends,” Shepard admitted. “And of course, we’re dividing to conquer here, with both Eric and me working simultaneously. Still, none of this should take more than a couple of days to process, even if we have to crunch the data for a bit longer afterward. But by then, you’ll be back home catching crooks, right?”

Everyone laughed politely, but certainly the two cops had no idea what they’d be doing in the interim, especially given their baffling surroundings.

They returned to Eric’s office, made a couple of phone calls to gain access to the lab’s high security vault, and then laboriously transferred the samples from the Vermont truck to there, documenting the move carefully. Joe made clear that nothing was to be removed from the vault without either him or Lester being notified, so that samples could be escorted to whatever testing environment was called for.
The two scientists smiled condescendingly a couple of times during this lecture, but Joe could tell that they were mostly posturing. It was clear they understood the need to maintain a chain of evidence, to the point where Joe was left wondering if his reason for being here had less to do with security, and more with curiosity, impatience, and anticipation.

By the time this was wrapped up, and the two cops brought to the dorm room they would share for the next few days, night had arrived and the entire campus had begun glowing from within, with hundreds of windows, skylights, and streetlamps replacing the daylight, giving the lab an appropriately industrial appearance.

“Some place, huh?” Lester commented as they later made their way toward an on-campus restaurant/bar that Eric had recommended before heading off for his own home and family. “It’s like the place everyone in high school said I should go to.”

“You were a science guy?” Joe asked him, enjoying how warm the air was in comparison to Vermont, if not the relative dullness of the naturally flat surroundings.

“Not really. It was my physique. I always looked like a stork. People just assumed I was smart. Probably helped me be better in school than I might’ve been.”

Joe trudged on for a few seconds before reacting. “Let’s hope the same thing works for our evidence—that it winds up better than we think it is.”

The moon was full, bright, and opalescent, its milky shimmer coating the snow-covered countryside like a glowing layer of cream. It reflected off the earth’s white surface enough to light up the somber sides of the otherwise dark wooden buildings scattered alongside the narrow stream creasing the bottom of the gully. Overhead, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

The entire scene was eerily still and as beautiful as a Romantic painting, its canvas stretched out as far as one could see.

“Shit,” Willy growled to himself, swinging out of the car.

He was alone, of course, having not told anyone of his plan, including Sam. Not that she wasn’t capable of a little guerrilla action herself. But that was the problem; Willy could never tell which way she might choose—independent or company line. And lately, especially with his obsession to nail Chuck McNaughton, he suspected she’d blow the whistle on him.

That, Willy could live without. He knew he was right. No matter if Chuck hadn’t killed Doreen Ferenc or Mary Fish with his own hands, the man was definitely dirty. And wasn’t it VBI’s mission
to catch bad guys, even while distracted by an unadvertised triple homicide?

Of course it was.

Willy supervised the scene from where he’d parked in a pull-off beyond the compound’s dirt driveway. It was an abandoned lumber mill, not far from Guilford, maybe five miles south of Brattleboro. Dating back over a hundred years, it was a hodgepodge of metal-roofed wooden shacks, several quite large, scattered across the acreage like carelessly tossed dice. There were a few of these operations around the county, in various states of disrepair, some even functioning in their original role, timber harvesting and lumbering being viable if threadbare occupations in a rural state like Vermont.

But this mill had fallen silent long ago, and looked it. It had sat here ever since, below the road, barely visible behind a screen of scraggly evergreens, seemingly lost to time. Even the local vandals had lost interest in making it look worse than it already did.

Which made it perfect for its current use.

Willy worked his way across country, downhill, through the trees, now grateful for the moonlight that kept him free from the underbrush.

Not that there was a huge risk of getting tangled up. Willy had been trained as a sniper by the military, albeit many years ago. His area of expertise—indeed his literal killing ground—had been the jungle. His instincts remained strong, despite his lack of practice and his ironic disability, and even with the moon’s help, he still moved with the unnerving silence of a shadow slipping along a wall.

He had come here tailing a clueless Robert Prozzo—Bobby, as Sue Allgood had called him, and the man she’d identified as McNaughton’s partner in crime.

Bob Prozzo was no stranger to Kunkle, as was often the case with
the area’s bottom-tier dwellers. Willy had even used him a couple of times as an informant, although with marginal results. Bobby was a thief, a burglar, a drunk, and more—a man self-abandoned to need and instinct. He had no inner level balancing right from wrong; he merely acted on immediate desire. It might just as well have been a physical disorder at this stage in his life, and Willy treated it as such.

But without empathy. Willy had found himself faced with significant moral choices in the past, and had selected poorly. It had been a costly and painful journey, and could have resulted in a compassionate rebirth. But it had not. As a result, Willy wasn’t going to cut anyone any slack who even remotely reminded him of himself. His was the zeal of the reformed, demanding a brutal, unsparing honesty.

Sue had told him that, as far as she was privy, McNaughton was using Prozzo as his front man to rip off the company. Not to an obvious extent—he didn’t want his insurance claims for lost shipments to attract attention—but even the occasional light load, paid for once in a settlement and again on the black market, could buy a lot of toys.

Plus, Willy imagined, it didn’t hurt that every time he did it, Chuck was poking his father’s ghost in the eye. Therein probably lay the true appeal.

Willy reached the relative shadow of the nearest building and paused to listen carefully.

He had first picked up Prozzo as the latter was leaving his house, and had tailed him on a roundabout journey that had ended at the trucking company. This in itself had hardly been startling; Willy’s background check on the man had found him to be employed by McNaughton, giving him legal access to the property.

But things had blurred thereafter. Willy had followed his quarry inside, and watched him cull half a truckload of high-end products
from off the loading floor and an assortment of other places. It soon became clear that the strategy was to skim generally and generously, no doubt supported by an inventory control system purposefully in need of overhaul.

A couple of hours later, in what had originally been an empty ten-wheeler, Prozzo at last headed back out onto the road, aiming south.

And this is where he’d ended up. With Willy hanging far behind, his headlights out, Bob Prozzo took the abandoned-looking lumbermill’s driveway, and electronically opened not just the entrance gate, but the largest building’s double doors, impressing even Willy. To have an entire property off the radar in which to store stolen goods was classy enough. To have it surreptitiously wired with garage openers and God knew what security—to guarantee that a large truck could be on the open road one moment, and gone the next—that was raising the bar.

It also made Willy wonder about covert surveillance.

He looked up, studying the eaves and the outer corners with the small monocular he always carried in his pocket. Sure enough, he eventually located a small camera, discreetly tucked under the roof’s overhang.

“Gotcha,” he told himself, and began considering how to approach the old barn’s entrance.

He didn’t have to worry. The sweep of a pair of headlights touched the treetops at the periphery before taking a plunge as the vehicle headed down the driveway, also opening the gate remotely.

Willy seized his opportunity. Knowing that as the building doors opened, all eyes would be focused there and not on any television monitors, he waited until the mechanical rumbling began before simply stepping out into the open and running for where the new arrival was headed—the ramp to the same large shed Prozzo had used.

He arrived at the corner just as a black SUV thudded across the rough threshold of the building, disappearing into its embrace. Prozzo, and whoever else might be with him, had killed the lights to prevent attracting attention.

They’d also granted Willy a final advantage, allowing him to tuck in behind the car, bent double and moving fast, so that he was inside and hidden behind a small stack of boxes as the double doors swung back shut and the overhead lights reignited.

Willy watched as, in the abrupt glare, Chuck McNaughton emerged from the vehicle and stretched lazily.

“You get it all?” he asked.

Willy shifted his view to see Bob Prozzo approach the back of his own truck and throw open its rear door with a loud clatter.

“Lock, stock, and plasma TV,” Prozzo bragged. “You got the buyers lined up?”

McNaughton waved that away dismissively. “You handle your end, Bobby; I’ll handle mine. Just like always.”

It was a custom-made cowboy moment, designed for Willy to step out, deliver a punch line, and make the arrest. But for once, he’d prepared beforehand. So, he merely took out his cell phone, took several pictures of the scene, and settled back to wait for an opportunity to leave as quietly as he’d arrived. This time—given how much crap he’d catch anyhow—he was going to play it by the numbers, more or less.

The frustration of not being able to pin even one of three murders on his top-of-the-line suspect would at least be mollified by escorting him to jail for embezzlement and grand theft, assuming his legal strategy worked out.

Besides, Willy further comforted himself, none of this meant McNaughton
hadn’t killed anyone; it just meant it wasn’t the only crime he’d committed.

Willy was nothing if not a dog with a bone.

Straight from a full day back at the office, Joe entered Lyn’s apartment on Oak Street, shouted out a greeting, got a mumbled reply from the bathroom, and headed for the armchair facing the woodstove in the living room.

The apartment was on the top floor of a Victorian showcase, all excess and carved hardwood and historically accurate, over-the-top paint colors, and Lyn had honored the effort by decorating her digs appropriately. It was warm, Old World, and very comfortable. Her bar’s success had transformed a financial risk into a sound move, and he came here now as much for the refuge she’d created as to see her in its embrace—it had become a double balm for when things were running rough.

As they were now.

“Boy, you look done in.”

He glanced at her standing in the doorway, dressed in a pair of flannel pajamas she knew he loved to remove.

He smiled tiredly in appreciation. “Not dead yet.”

She laughed, taking his meaning. “That’ll keep. First things first. How ’bout something hot to drink?”

“Deal.”

She faded back to the kitchen, still talking as she fixed him a cup of cocoa. “Bad day at the office?”