The Catch (26 page)

Wellman Beale was a barrel-chested, red-faced, angry man of fifty, whose inclination to chat with the likes of Joe Gunther—if it had existed at all—had been atomized by several hours with Cathy Lawless and Lenny Chapman. He hadn’t asked for a lawyer yet, but—according to them—that was mostly because he hadn’t needed one. He knew how to handle cops just fine.

Originally, Joe hadn’t even been scheduled to meet the man. Jurisdictional considerations and the fact that Grega didn’t feature prominently in Beale’s arrest had both played a role in denying Joe a one-on-one. The discovery of Abílo Silva’s boat, however, had led to a fast gathering of minds, and Joe being given his chance.

They were still on the island, it was still night, although barely, and Joe was feeling the full weight of his dreary discovery.

He entered the small room they were using for Beale, rigged with recording equipment and bright lights, and sat at the table opposite him.

“Which one’re you?” he demanded.

“Joe Gunther, Vermont Bureau of Investigation, officially attached to this ICE task force.”

“Vermont? You guys don’t have enough shit on me right here? I never even been to fucking Vermont.”

“That’s okay. You probably wouldn’t like it. And I’m not here for anything you’ve been asked about.”

Beale raised his eyebrows in expectation. “No shit? You from EPA or the ASPCA?”

“Nope,” Joe answered him affably. “I already told you where I’m from. I want to talk to you about Abílo Silva.”

The split-second hesitation before Beale answered gave the man away. “Who?”

Joe smiled. “Nice try. You see, the funny thing is that while you may have never been to Vermont, and I’m a minor player here, I’m the one who can cause you the most pain.”

“Why’s that?” Beale was forced to ask after Joe left his last comment dangling.

“’Cause I’m the one pinning a murder rap on you.”

Beale’s eyes narrowed. “You’re full of crap.”

“The boat in your boathouse—where did you get that?”

“I found it.”

“Where?”

“At sea. I was out fishing and found it floating empty, abandoned.”

“So you stole it.”

“Salvage of the sea.”

“You have to be
awarded
salvage, Wellman,” Joe told him, “by a court or the owner of the vessel. You stole it.”

“I’ll let a court decide that, since I was about to bring it in anyhow. I just found it a few days ago. My sternman will testify to that.”

“Who painted over its name and identifying numbers?”

Beale smiled and shrugged. “Wish I could help you out, Mr. Vermont.”

Joe studied him, all smug and comfortable. There were other topics to pursue. The whole subject of Luis Grega had yet to be broached. But he’d looked at Beale’s criminal record earlier, and what he had facing him only confirmed his suspicions. Beale was a been-there-done-that kind of perpetrator—a hard case with a vested interest in staying just that way.

“You could help someone out here,” he suggested, instead of following his planned line of questioning.

Beale laughed at him. “Meaning me, right? By trading the whole truth for the love of the prosecutor and my own self-respect? I heard that one before.”

But Joe shook his head, yielding to a purely emotional impulse that he knew would be futile, but that he simply had to pursue. “Nobody’s here to help you,” he explained. “Least of all yourself. I was thinking of the family Abílo Silva left behind—a wife and two kids who have been twisting in the wind for years. They would love to know what really happened. Maybe you could give me that without screwing up either your legal case or your ego. You could tell me what a little bird told you, or that you found a letter floating on the water that later self-destructed. Anything so that they can know what to do with all that grief.”

Beale tilted his round head to one side and considered Joe pitiably. “See? There’s the catch,” he finally said. “I’ve had a few wives and kids, too. But I don’t give a fuck about any of them. Why should I care about this
guy’s? It’s a hard world. And hard people are the best at running it.”

Joe stood up, unsurprised but more depressed than ever, and frowned at the irony of what he’d just heard. “You better hope for your own sake you’re wrong,” he said.

Beale countered with a wide smile and offered Joe, in a sudden snapshot, what Steve Silva had witnessed all those years ago—a broad, welcoming, guileless friendliness, free of cant or subterfuge.

“Yeah. Well, the difference is,” he said as Joe reached the door, “I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

Joe didn’t doubt him for a second.

What they’d all set in motion didn’t end until midmorning the following day, after which, exhausted, they called it quits and retired to their various beds, in and around the Augusta MDEA headquarters, where Delaney had decided to process what they had.

They reassembled that evening, for only a couple of hours, mostly to make sure everything was where it needed to be, properly filed, logged, indexed, and accounted for.

And then, Lester and Joe found themselves back outside, in front of the huge office building on the outskirts of town.

“You want something to eat?” Lester asked.

“Not really,” Joe admitted. “I’m tempted to go back to the motel, grab a candy bar from the machine, and call Lyn.”

“You gonna tell her what we found?”

“Not on the phone. This is purely selfish. I just want
to hear her voice. I’ll wait on the other stuff until we get together—God knows, there’s no rush and using a phone call is pretty harsh. How’s your daughter doing on that broken ankle?”

“Fine,” Lester said. “Says it itches. Won’t be much longer now till she gets a walking cast. How do you think Lyn’s gonna take it?”

“I really hate that I’m going to find out.”

They were standing side by side by the curb, facing a parking lot built to accommodate some fifteen hundred cars. It was dark, but not terribly late, so there were a fair number of vehicles still scattered about. While a nice and modern setting, and certainly impressive to the underfunded Vermonters, it was nevertheless a little alienating and added to the two men’s longing to return home.

“How ’bout you?” Joe asked. “Got any plans?”

Lester shrugged. “Maybe a movie.”

They began walking in the general direction of their cars. “You know,” Joe told his colleague, finally giving in to his exhaustion and low spirits, “I think we’ve done what we can out here. We had a thread to follow out of Boston, but with Bob’s death and Beale finally lawyering up, that’s pretty much run out. It’s unlikely Grega’s going to fall out of the sky and surrender just because we’re here.”

Spinney was walking with his head tucked down, listening carefully. “So, we go home?” he asked.

“Unless you can argue against it,” Joe said.

Lester gave it honest consideration but finally shook his head. “I’m trying not to give in to just feeling homesick,” he said. “But I can’t say I disagree.”

They reached the car Spinney had rented for use within the state, since he and Joe had often been forced to travel separately.

Joe placed his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Okay. Why don’t you get rid of this thing in the morning, and we’ll hook up in the motel lobby at nine? We can come back here, pay our respects, and get a good jump on the day, heading back to Vermont. Sam and Willy have been hard at it from their end, but to be honest, we may just have to put this onto the back burner for a while—media hounds and politicians be damned.”

Lester glanced up at the night sky, made milky by the reflected lights of the distant downtown. “Jesus—that’s going to go over big.”

Joe patted his shoulder and began moving toward his own car, several rows away. “It is what it is. People’re just going to have to live with it. Have a good night, Les. See you in the morning.”

He heard Spinney open up his car door and start the engine moments later. By then, he was no longer paying attention, searching instead for where he might have left his sedan only a few hours earlier. He hated huge parking lots.

“Do not move, Agent Gunther.”

The voice was smooth, only slightly accented, and belonging to someone young—perhaps in his twenties, perhaps a little older.

Joe held his hands out slightly, to show they were empty and that he was considering no heroics. The voice had come from behind and slightly to his right.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked, purposefully
choosing a relaxed tone of voice, although his brain was working fast, considering his options.

“I want you to walk toward that delivery truck—the dark green one ahead of you.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You’re after me for killing one cop already …” he didn’t bother finishing.

Well, Joe thought, that cleared up one mystery, and pretty ironically, too, given what he’d just said to Lester about ever locating this man.

“Meaning I’m supposed to make this easier for you?” he asked. “Shoot me now—here. I’d sooner take my chances that some cop’ll hear you and take you out where you stand. You know this is Public Safety’s home base, right?”

Grega’s tone of voice grew testy. “Get in the fucking van, Gunther, or I’ll shoot your damn kneecap off. You want to be a cripple for life just because you had to flash some attitude?”

Joe heard the implication—he was suggesting Joe would survive this encounter. “Okay,” he said, walking to the van. “How did you find me, by the way?”

“You’re a rock star, old man. I got your mug shot through Google, and then I waited around this big-ass parking lot, figuring you’d show up.”

“Jesus. You could’ve been out here a long time. I’m going home tomorrow.” Joe laughed suddenly. “We gave up on you—figured we’d wait for someone to rat you out, or for you to screw up.”

“Could happen,” Grega said philosophically from the darkness. “But I’m working real hard that it don’t. Stop by the rear side door of the van, put your hands
against it, and then step away till you’re almost falling on your face.”

Joe slowly complied, his self-confidence straining under an inevitable rising fear.

He heard Grega step up behind him, felt his hand as he searched for and located Joe’s gun, and then heard him retreat a few paces.

“You got your cuffs,” Grega told him. “I just felt ’em. Take them out and put them on.”

“In front of me or behind?”

“In front.”

Joe did as requested.

“Now slide open the door and get inside.”

Once more, he followed orders. The van’s interior was completely empty aside from two metal folding chairs facing each other.

“Comfy,” he said. “Which one’s mine?”

“Looking to the rear.”

Joe awkwardly hefted himself inside and shifted around to get properly settled. While he was doing so, Grega quickly slammed the side door and reappeared at the back. He, too, then climbed aboard, closing the second door behind him.

They could only see each other by the filtered glow of an overhead parking lot light nearby.

“Okay,” Joe said. “What’s up? You ready to come in?”

Grega smiled and pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead—a gesture of utter amazement.

“That’s really good. You’re something else.” He shook his head. “No, I’m not. In fact, I want you to disappear—you’re my last piece of business before I get my life back.”

“You an innocent bystander all of a sudden?”

He scowled. “Yeah, if you give a goddamn—probably easier not to, though. Fucking cops’re always so lazy.”

Joe considered Grega’s sudden passion and the look of frustration in his eyes. A proud man, eager to take credit for what he did, and maybe one—unlike Bob, so quick to lie to his wife—who considered himself too honorable to claim other people’s work as his own.

Joe sat back. “Okay. Tell me what happened.”

“I didn’t shoot him.”

“That’s it? We got you on videotape, ducked over and sneaking up to the cruiser.”

Grega pounded his own knee. “I
knew
it. You assholes. I thought it was a smokescreen at first—that you were jacking my name in the papers ’cause you knew who it was and you were tryin’ to flush him out. What bullshit. You guys are so lazy—course it has to be the druggie with the funny last name, right?”

He pointed meaningfully at Joe. “I didn’t do it. Somebody else showed up—all of a sudden—and popped him.” He held out his hand, his index and thumb out rigid, like a barrel and hammer, respectively. “Like that.”

Joe scowled. “He was just there?”

“He showed up, like I said.”

Joe shook his head sympathetically. “Luis, I was there, at the crime scene, a few hours later. There are no houses nearby. Did you see a car pull up?”

“No, but he was there.”

“He? So you got a look at him?”

Grega hesitated and then stared at the floor. “No.”

Joe leaned forward, for the first time feeling a twinge of empathy. “Look, take it from the top. Sleuter talks to you, collects your paperwork, and goes back to the cruiser to use the radio. What do you do?”

Grega pressed his lips together.

“For Christ’s sake,” Joe exclaimed. “You’re already accused of killing the guy. You too embarrassed now to admit you had evil thoughts?”

“Fuck you.”

Joe burst out laughing. “Fuck
me?
You
invited
me here.”

Grega slapped his thighs angrily. “God
damn
it. Yeah, I wanted to whack him. The guy was an asshole and he was about to do me hurt.” He grabbed his head in both hands, as if trying to hold it together. “Fuck,” he said, resigned, and dropped his fists back into his lap.

“Okay,” he tried again, calmer. “I don’t know what I wanted to do. Maybe whack him, maybe mess him up a little. I just wanted to get back on the road. I was working on instinct.”

Like an artist having a dry spell, thought Joe. “Then what?” he urged.

“I slid down in my seat, waiting for him to notice. After a minute, I popped open the door and kind of fell out, keeping low. He still didn’t react. I got as far as his front bumper when I saw a flash of something moving—somebody, I thought, but I wasn’t even super sure about that—and then, POW, a shot. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like a cornered rat, all crunched up in front of his car like that. First, I thought he’d seen me, and he’d let
me have it and I just hadn’t felt it yet. I heard of that happening, you know? But that wasn’t it. I was still alone, I was okay, but now there was this total silence.”