The Catch (13 page)

Lyn let out a small puff of air. “Yeah. That sure came out of nowhere. I never thought I’d hear that name again.”

Joe was astonished at this development, even though each intervening step between this woman and a major dealer in Maine not only made sense in itself, but reflected how small a world northern New England still could be. He got up and sat on the edge of the nearby bed, his elbows on his knees.

“You never told me how Steve got into trouble in the first place,” he prompted, wondering how far this coincidence might take him.

“Well,” she confessed, immediately addressing Joe’s unstated question, “it wasn’t Roz. Steve was already years
down that road before his name came up, and I don’t think he ever actually met the man. Roz was where Steve hoped to be headed before he got busted.”

“They were going to go into business together?”

She quickly checked the bedside clock to make sure she had time enough to continue. “Hardly,” she answered, satisfied. “Steve wasn’t in that league. He just wanted to be a runner—get some steady income, along with enough junk to put up his nose. It wouldn’t have worked out. It never does. But that was the plan.”

“And Roz appeared in that plan how?” Joe asked.

“As the ideal,” she told him. “We were living in Gloucester. Boston to the south, Maine to the north—or more properly, Canada. The southern opportunities, as Steve saw them, were scary, even to him—people who would cut your heart out for no reason. Cape Verdians, Jamaicans, Asians of all stripes, you name it. Steve did some business with them, especially when he got desperate, but he knew it would end badly someday. When he heard about the operation Roz had in Maine, bringing stuff in from Canada, he got all excited. Told me that he’d finally found his ticket, whatever that was supposed to mean.”

Joe listened to her tone as much as to what she was telling him, hearing the hardness there. He had met her when she was tending bar in one of the worst dives in Gloucester, surrounded by more people with aliases than the average U.S. Marshal. She’d had a psychological armor then—for when the odd customer would misbehave—that he was witnessing now concerning her one remaining brother, whose long-gone cheerful
company she mourned. He already knew that they hadn’t spoken in a long time.

“Did he and Mroz ever make contact?” he asked her.

She got up from her chair and crossed over to the bureau, where she quickly extracted a clean pair of jeans and a tight-fitting T-shirt which she tossed onto the bed.

“No,” she answered him, her manner back to normal, her mind on what she was doing. “He made a sale to an undercover Gloucester cop right after. As far as I know, he never went beyond just hearing about the guy. Not that he confided in me. I heard most of this from some of his friends.”

Joe had shifted on the bed to face her as she dressed, both to make eye contact but also to simply watch. “That must’ve been tough,” he commented.

She paused in midmotion to look at him, her expression sad. “You have no idea. Well, you probably do,” she added with a small smile. “Steve was such a great kid—a wonderful companion when we were growing up. José was serious, like Dad, and anyhow he was older. But Steve …” She left the sentence unfinished as she went back to dressing.

“He’s out of jail now, right?” Joe asked.

“Out of jail, maybe,” she conceded, pulling her jeans up over her hips. “Out of trouble, who knows?”

Joe turned away from the passing countryside to glance at his companion. Lester Spinney drove a car with the steadiness Joe had noticed in all troopers, past or present. It was as if they, more than other cops, had been specifically instructed on how to look both relaxed and alert at the wheel.

“This trip go down all right with the family?” he asked.

Spinney smiled gently. “Oh, sure. Sue and I have been pulling weird shifts for a pretty long time. And the kids’ll barely notice.”

Sue, Joe knew, was a nurse, and thus susceptible to working nights for weeks on end. “How’s David doing?”

Lester faced Joe directly, his smile broadening. David, Les’s oldest, had flirted with drugs a few years back. They both knew how close it had come to costing Les his job.

“Fine, Joe. Thanks for asking.”

Joe nodded without comment and went back to studying the scenery. It had been raining earlier, but the sun was now out, shafting through the high clouds at irregular intervals, creating oases of dazzling light. They were in Maine, having opted to avoid the faster southern route, east through Keene, Manchester, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in exchange for the famed Kancamagus Highway, twisting among the White Mountains like a string of shining mercury. That leg of the trip had been predictably spectacular, running for thirty miles by the tallest peaks on the eastern seacoast, some with their heads in the mist, and all offering ghostly glimpses along dark, damp mountainous passes.

This southwestern section of Maine, however, was proving less of a treat. Hilly still, and blanketed with trees, it allowed few vistas, a lot of meandering traffic, and was turning into the literal slow road to Augusta, the state capital and their destination.

“Sue did ask,” Spinney said, “how long we might be in Maine.”

Joe laughed at the roundabout question. “Damned if I know, Les. We’re not going on much—rumors of a drug war, a single sighting of Grega near Machias, a few one-liners from dubious sources. If Bill Allard hadn’t been feeling generous—or maybe showing off to Colonel Kirkland—we’d probably still be at home.”

Spinney hesitated before reasonably asking, “So, why are we going, instead of letting the locals dig up something solid? I mean, Grega took a boat when he skipped, right? He could be back in Boston by now.”

Joe had considered the same possibility. In the past, when he’d worked for the Brattleboro police department, there wouldn’t have been an option. This trip was easily categorized as a wild goose chase—as Kirkland would have called it had his department caught the case.

But that was one of the beauties of the VBI. Its charter was purposely less rigid, and its architecture less hidebound by any command structure’s checks and balances. Joe suspected that Allard had signed off on the trip as much to once more set an example as with any hopes of success.

“Just a hunch,” Joe therefore said.

He could tell that’s all Spinney needed to hear.

Willy Kunkle got out of his car quietly, as was his habit. He didn’t slam the door, and he’d long ago disabled his car’s dome light. He’d also parked slightly down the road, to avoid being noticed. These were habits born more years ago than he could recall, when he’d been a night patrol officer and had valued being inconspicuous.

It was also eerily quiet where he was right now, unlike in the urban streets he normally frequented. He was in the countryside, between Burlington and Middlebury, in the midst of Addison County’s farm country, surrounded by the night’s vast emptiness. All around was where Brian Sleuter had once aggressively patrolled, looking for a ramp up to the big time.

Willy was at the address of Sleuter’s ex-mother-in-law, a woman named Shirley Sherman, whose daughter Brian had divorced years before. Sherman was therefore a peripheral member of Sleuter’s family tree, certainly in terms of Mike Bradley’s check into Brian’s past, and as such she hadn’t yet been interviewed. But Willy was intrigued by what he’d interpreted from Shirley’s raw data in the state’s computer files. There
seemed to be an independent streak to the woman that Willy hoped to exploit.

He paused at the foot of the driveway, studying the house before him. Beige, single-storied, wrapped in vinyl siding and topped with an asphalt roof, it was the epitome of suburban architecture, planted in the middle of nowhere. Glancing around, Willy could see only one set of lights from a far distant neighbor.

That and the single quavering light of an approaching motorcycle, its beam reflecting every dip and wrinkle in the road. Instinctively, Willy stepped over to the edge of the driveway.

Sure enough, the motorcycle pulled into the drive with a flourish, scattering a few loose stones toward Willy’s shoes, before grinding to a halt just beyond him. On board was a tiny, squarely built figure, dressed all in black, wearing a full face helmet with its tinted visor down.

One gloved hand reached up, lifted the hinged front of the helmet up and away, and revealed the round, ruddy face of an older woman, her gray hair appearing in loose strands around her forehead.

“You looking to buy the place or just rip me off?” she asked.

Willy smiled and opened his jacket to reveal the badge clipped to his belt. “Neither. I’m guessing you’re Shirley Sherman.”

“That much I know,” she answered him, a pair of steady blue eyes studying him carefully.

“Willy Kunkle,” he introduced himself. “Vermont Bureau of Investigation.”

Her eyes widened a bit. “No shit? I heard about you
guys. Major crimes, razzle-dazzle, best and the brightest and all that crap?”

“Mostly crap,” he conceded. “The best and the brightest in a state with twelve people doesn’t mean much.”

“You look smart enough,” she commented. “What’s with the arm?”

He admired her directness. Most people either didn’t look at the limp left arm at all, as if it were hanging in the next room, or stared at it every time they thought he was looking away. Nobody simply asked.

“Rifle bullet, years ago.”

“And they let you stay on?”

He made a face. “Like I said.”

She pushed out her lower lip, seemed to consider something for a moment, and then gestured ahead, farther down the driveway. “Well, come on in. Let me ditch this in the garage.”

She revved the bike, spat out a few extra stones from under her rear wheel, and made one last quick jaunt up to the slowly opening garage door. Inside, another motorcycle was already parked—a fluorescent dirt bike with knobby tires. This was what Willy had read about the woman—several speeding violations, registrations for two bikes and a four-wheeler, and hunting and fishing licenses dating back decades. She’d been listed as a widow.

He walked to the front door of the house and waited for her to join him, the helmet now off and the jacket unzipped to reveal a T-shirt hugging a well-formed, if matronly, chest. Willy, in a split second’s double take, visualized Shirley Sherman as a small, upended steamer trunk—solid, tough, and sturdy, if a lot more attractive.
For, truth be told, he imagined she could more than hold her own with men ten years her junior, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that she had a proudly held neighborhood reputation.

She preceded him into the house, which he immediately appreciated for its cleanliness and order.

“You want coffee?” she asked.

“Sure. Black.”

The living room was conventionally rigged out, its assortment of impersonal, pleasant accoutrements looking like a movie set about middle-class life. The only exception was on the mantelpiece over the gas fireplace. Willy recognized there several shots of a woman he knew to be Brian Sleuter’s ex—Kathleen Jabri, nowadays—holding a small child in various poses.

“My daughter and grandson,” she commented, watching him from beyond the small counter between the kitchen and the living room. “Although I figure you already know that.”

He wandered over to the counter and sat on one of two stools tucked under its edge. He didn’t answer.

Sherman had removed her jacket and was efficiently preparing the coffee, moving across the kitchen like a well-practiced short-order cook. Willy knew that she’d owned a café for thirty years. He suspected that whenever her small family came by, they left well fed.

“You know why I’m here?” he asked her.

She looked at him with a pitying expression. “Don’t you?”

“Cute.”

He let a long silence fall between them, forcing her to finally concede. “Well, it’s got to be Brian, right? I don’t know why else I’d rate.”

“When did you last see him?”

She kept at her task. “Oh, hell. I don’t know. He’d come by now and then, always around suppertime, of course. Maybe a week before he died.”

“You two stayed friends?”

She still didn’t look at him. “We were never that. He was my grandson’s father. I owed him that much.”

“But not a nice guy?”

This time, she cast him a glance, if only quickly. “You’re not a nice guy, either. So what?”

He didn’t bite. “What happened between him and Kathleen?”

She pulled two mugs from a cabinet above her. “What happens between three-quarters of the people who get married? Most of them divorce, the rest make each other miserable. They got divorced.”

“He was an ambitious man,” Willy commented. “Putting in the overtime, fighting to be top dog.”

He left it at that, but she didn’t cooperate.

“So?”

“Some cops don’t leave that at the office,” he suggested.

“You asking or telling?”

He capitulated. “Asking.”

She poured two mugs and brought them over to the counter, settling onto a stool he hadn’t seen, opposite his.

She shoved one of the mugs directly before him.
“Why’re you doing this? He was shot by drug runners. Least, that’s what they told me.”

Willy gave a dismissive half wave before grabbing hold of the mug’s handle. “Yeah, that’s true, but we still gotta cover our butts. You know, stuff like, ‘Was he in cahoots with whoever killed him?’ It’s all fill-in-the-blanks to make the bosses happy.”

They both sipped their coffee in silence for a moment. Shirley spoke first. “Like I’m supposed to believe that.”

Willy placed his mug carefully on the countertop. “You want to tell me something different?”

“Such as?” she asked.

“He piss off anyone enough to make them come after him?”

She paused before answering, “He pissed people off, probably just like you do.”

“Your daughter?”

Her back straightened and she fixed him with a glare. “If Brian Sleuter was killed by drug runners, then that’s none of my business.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“Too bad. I think this conversation just ended.”

Willy didn’t stir. “Meaning I leave with the wrong impression.”