The Price of Malice (7 page)

Joe smiled and addressed the entire group, bowing slightly. “And people ask me,” he commented, moving carefully through the crowd toward the door that Willy was already holding open, letting in a blast of hot air, “how I can stand working with the guy. He’s a genius. We should all be so lucky.”

They both left to a chorus of boos and groans.

J
oe loosened his tie an inch and stood before the fan with his arms slightly held out, letting the wash of warm air suggest a passing breeze. At least it was finally night, and the heat had dropped a few degrees. This kind of weather didn’t hit the region often or for long, and he knew people had it worse in a hundred other places, but that didn’t make him feel any better. It was like being in a sauna with no controls and no door.

“Right,” said Willy, walking in. “Block the fan so the rest of us can die.”

Joe reluctantly moved out of the way, saying with sarcastic sweetness, “I’m so embarrassed, Agent Kunkle. Would you like a few moments in front of the fan?”

Willy glowered at him and headed instead for his desk, which was wedged into the corner facing the rest of the office—a perfect reflection of the man himself.

“Fuck you.”

Joe pushed his lips out and murmured, “Indeed,” under his breath.

Sammie Martens and Lester Spinney entered the office, chatting
amicably. They were the two most levelheaded members of this small unit, of which five others—similarly sized—were sprinkled across the state, not including the director at the Waterbury headquarters—headquarters being a single cubbyhole office on the top floor of the Department of Public Safety building.

Joe had a soft spot for Sam, which was in part only a reciprocal tenderness nurtured by her clear adoration of him. Whether he was the father she’d never had or the mentor she’d always craved, Joe could do no wrong in her eyes—which made her a difficult person for him to fault.

She could be a handful, however, which he only privately admitted. Her shaking Eddie Novack like a rag doll this afternoon was a good example of her short fuse. More clinically, her choice of Willy as a lover was a shrink’s fantasy of unmitigated self-destruction, at least on the outside. In fact, they’d both made it work for longer than anyone anticipated. Like twin halves of a devilishly possessed pair of scissors, they functioned best—if sometimes destructively—when joined together.

“How’s the noggin?” Joe asked Lester as the latter settled down behind his own desk, liberally festooned with stork memorabilia.

Les touched the back of his head. “Not a vital organ, as it turns out. Docs were amazed when they looked inside.”

“No gerbil?” Willy asked.

“Several,” he came back, typically self-deprecatory, “but all fully functioning.”

“Seriously,” Joe persisted.

Spinney gave him a thumbs-up. “Seriously—clean bill of health. Ask my nanny.”

“True, boss. All true,” Sam said, dumping a soft briefcase onto her desk and partly collapsing into her chair.

Joe took up one of his usual positions, sitting on the edge of the windowsill, although not before the fan, and addressed them all. “Okay—long day. You’ve worked hard and I don’t want to keep you much longer. Everyone’s earned a good night’s sleep. I did want to compare notes very quickly, though, so we know what to start on tomorrow morning. Sam? Give us a rundown, allowing everyone else to fill gaps as they pop up.”

“Like, who dun it?” Willy suggested.

“If you’ve got that, now would be the time.”

Willy smirked, but remained silent, getting the message.

Sam, yielding to a propensity for notes and lists, opened her case and laid out a few sheets of paper before starting in. “Wayne Castine—autopsy to come, computer analysis to come, along with his phone records and interviews with coworkers, whatever family we can find, and the shrink Joe discovered he was seeing. Castine was presumably beaten and/or stabbed to death by someone who appeared at the door of an apartment he was using without permission and for reasons unknown.”

“What kinds of reasons?” Joe asked. “Just for what-the-hell.”

During the pause following, Lester suggested, “Discretion?”

“He wouldn’t know when Babbitt might all of a sudden come home,” Willy argued.

“He had his own place,” Sam pointed out, “and he lived alone.”

Joe had also thought of that. “I know he brought at least one child there,” he shared. “But it is a dump-and-a-half.”

“Suggesting the need for a more upscale love nest?” Les finished for him, and then added, “Why not a motel room?”

“The thrill,” Willy proposed.

The others looked at him.

He flushed slightly. “Come on—put it together. Guy’s a pervert,
lives on the edge, probably sees himself as a real daredevil. Why not use a borrowed bed, and risk being exposed? Probably gave him a bigger hard-on.”

The image all but killed the discussion.

“Did we ever find the key we think he used to get in?” Lester asked after an awkward silence.

“In his pocket,” Willy answered shortly, clearly irritated.

“Meaning,” Joe suggested, “that there’re at least two keys in circulation.”

“Anything special about Wayne’s?” Lester asked.

“Willy?” Joe asked, but was testily interrupted by the man himself.

“It’s just a key. I interviewed the landlord and got a list of previous renters. I’ll find out who Wayne got it from. I been busy, okay?”

Joe held up both hands in surrender. “We got it, we got it. You’re hot on the trail. Sam, what did we get from the canvass and what do we have left to do?”

“I took up Ron on his manpower offer, so we got a pretty good sweep in before everybody started talking to everybody else and muddling up their stories. The consensus on Liz is what you’d expect—she’s new to the neighborhood, does her grocery bagging and hooking and barhopping on her own, and keeps to herself. She probably has as many friends as everybody does, and we can chase them down when the time comes, but from what I’m getting, she is what she says she is: an innocent bystander who just happened to have the wrong apartment at the wrong time. I’m not leaving it there—I know what I said is a huge assumption. But for the time being, I suggest putting her on the back burner.”

“Fine with me,” Joe agreed. “What about Wayne?”

“Totally different story. A lot of people knew him, even though he
didn’t
live on the street. I’m building a who’s-who list. A bunch of them swear he went after kids, but nobody’s seen anything.”

“Hold it, hold it,” Joe requested. “There were that many kids he abused on Manor Court?”

“No, no,” Sam reassured him. “Sorry—that kind of ran together. A few of those we canvassed said he was a snapper, but I couldn’t get a single kid’s name from any of them. It was all, ‘So-and-so told me he’d done what’s-his-name.’ Super vague right now.”

“A snapper?” Les asked.

Willy held up his wrist. “Comes from them using rubber bands—when they get the urge to fuck a kid, they’re supposed to snap a rubber band they wear around their wrist. Pain equals lust, so lust goes away. That’s the theory. Typical shrink crap. A bullet would make the lust go away quicker—cheaper, too.”

“Thank you for that,” Spinney said, shaking his head but smiling. “Short and concise, as usual.”

“I found a box of rubber bands in his apartment,” Joe told them.

“Bet they weren’t used much,” Willy commented.

Joe had to admit he was right—there’d been no rubber band on the body and the box had been full. “I’ll talk to his shrink tomorrow,” he said. “A word to the wise, though, before we go too far down this path. Right now, this snapper stuff is purely anecdotal, unless you know something, Willy, that you’re keeping in your pocket.”

Willy raised his eyebrows innocently. “Not me. I just heard the guy was dirty—like Sam did—again and again.”

“Meaning,” Joe resumed, “that he probably is. But he doesn’t have a record, which means we don’t have proof.”

“You worried about a stiff’s reputation?” Willy challenged, his face darkening again.

“What I’m worried about,” Joe explained, “is getting blinded by
this. Somebody killed him—maybe because he went after kids; maybe for some completely different reason. I don’t want to lose this case because we got too focused, too fast.”

He looked over at Spinney. “You dug into Castine’s records. Anything you didn’t mention earlier?”

Lester pulled out a couple of notes. “Wayne Castine, aged thirty-two, born Hardwick, Vermont, of Shirley Evans, since deceased, and an unknown father. Evans married when Wayne was five, and a few years later, Wayne cropped up as a person-of-interest in a child abuse case filed against the stepfather. I called a friend at child services and was told that Wayne was the victim. This conversation was off the record, of course, but it told me what you might expect—mom dragged a growing bunch of kids around the state, never making ends meet, and fell in with one loser after another. The abuse was repeated with another of mom’s boyfriends a few years later.”

Lester, the father of two, sighed and concluded, “You get the idea—he was done for from the start.”

“But no criminal record of his own?” Joe asked incredulously.

“No
adult
record,” Les corrected him. “I made another call to Parole and Probation and got the skinny there. Usual bad-boy stuff—underage drinking, criminal mischief, assault, B-and-E. He messed up a lot. He spent time in juvenile detention, was finally taken away from mom and passed around to a few foster homes. But it looks like he learned not to get caught after he reached maturity, ’cause that’s where the legal trail runs out of gas.”

“Except for the person-of-interest computer entries you mentioned,” Joe added. “I hate to say it, but that’s where you’re going to have to spend some time, talking to those POIs, just to see what might pop up.”

Spinney looked slightly glum. “I know.”

“At least you can start from the present and work backward,” Joe added cheerfully. “Take the most recent entry; chances are that whatever got him killed stemmed from some fresh-out-of-the-oven insult.”

He paused to rub his eyes. “God—it’s getting late. Why don’t we wrap this up . . .”

Sam had raised her hand, like a schoolgirl. “Anything specific you want me to do tomorrow?”

“Wayne’s coworkers,” he told her succinctly. “Also, a Bratt PD cop—a new guy named Gary Nelson—interviewed two of Castine’s neighbors, one of whom saw Castine with a young girl he claimed was his niece. Reinterview that witness and see if you can’t get a fix on the girl. Also, there was one neighbor Nelson missed—could be the one who knows something.”

Sam didn’t look up from the notes she was taking. “Got it.”

Joe stood up. “All right. That’s it. Keep in touch. Reconvene here tomorrow at sixteen hundred, but send up a flare if you find anything hot before then.”

Everyone gathered their belongings—except Willy, of course, who merely sauntered out the door. Joe moved to his desk, pretending to settle in for some late-night paperwork, and waved good night to the last person to leave.

But he wasn’t interested in paperwork. What was on his mind had been plaguing him all day—and building for the past few weeks.

With a New Englander’s ingrained respect for personal privacy, he hadn’t intruded on Lyn’s request to be left alone. He had broken the news to her of the lobster boat’s discovery during a hike up Mt. Wantastiquet, across the river from downtown Brattleboro. The view had been spectacular, the weather perfect, her welcome of him earlier
encouraging. He’d recognized the burden he had to share, guessed at the magnitude of its effect, but had hoped it might be tolerably borne, at least after the initial shock.

But it hadn’t been. It had crippled her, and then the two of them. He had tried to keep her company, quietly, supportively. She’d become almost mute, distracted, as if lost in an immense and all-consuming calculation. He had sensed himself changing in her eyes from someone she could just stand to a downright nuisance, before she’d finally affirmed the fact by asking him to keep his distance. She needed “space,” she’d told him, and he’d rarely hated a word more. At first, his distress had been all about her, enhanced by the guilt that he’d been the bearer of her bad news. With time, in her absence, missing her, his emotions had turned more selfish.

He didn’t doubt that this latest case had ratcheted up his desire to see her. Major investigations took time, cut into sleep, and destroyed all previously scheduled events, especially leisure ones. Weekends vanished, nine-to-five had no meaning. But it was also when the job became intoxicating, driving the brain into high gear, allowing adrenaline to replace sleep—and making him crave both a good sounding board, and some company in bed.

He envied Sam and Willy most now, and Lester with his wife, Susan. They all had someone with whom to share the odd thought that comes unexpectedly, over dinner or while taking a shower, the one that sometimes blows a case wide open. More importantly—even with Sam and Willy, who worked together days—such sharing could counterbalance the tension of the investigation with the need to fill a grocery list, or take out the trash, or make love and welcome oblivion.

Whatever his motivation or its timing, Joe missed her. Lyn had
reignited a love of companionship he hadn’t experienced in a long while. Things with Gail had hardened over time, often becoming couched in discourse and debate, disguising that their minds had gradually been asked to handle what had faded from their hearts.

The time Joe had spent with Lyn reminded him of how natural and uncomplicated a relationship could be.

And right now, he was longing for that enough to break his promise to her and act upon it.

Lyn’s bar on Elliot Street, like a reminder of the trouble between them, was named “Silva’s,” which she’d told him once was more in honor of her father than a reflection of her own last name. It was better than a going concern—it had been the proverbial right place at the right time. Opened just recently, it was jammed nightly with appreciative patrons, drawn by the music, the crowd, and, of course, the need to be seen where it counted, for some reason.