The Second Mouse (22 page)

“How do you know so much about them?” Spinney asked.

“Oh,” she admitted, finally bringing over a tray laden with tea things, “you ask around; you eavesdrop a little. Once the postman even dropped off some of their mail here by mistake. That’s how we found out his name—Archie Morgan.”

Lester was fascinated by how guileless they both were about their snooping. “Did you notice if they had a lot of visitors?” he asked.

“There was Linda,” Mrs. Heller said immediately. “She was a regular. Very nice woman. She’s from the city, too. We met her a couple of times, out walking. She was a good friend of theirs.”

“Anyone else?” Lester persisted.

The couple exchanged searching looks. George finally shrugged and handed Lester his tea. “I guess not. Like I said, people tend to keep to themselves—part of the point of living here. We’re not so different, when you get down to it. We love being nosy, but we hardly get out of the house, we’re such hermits.”

“That’s true,” his wife said happily. “This is our cave.”

Lester reached into his inner pocket and pulled out two photographs, one of Mel Martin, the other of Newell Morgan. He laid them flat on the low table between them. “Do either of these men ring a bell?”

“That one does,” they both said, with George tapping Newell’s picture. “Nasty-looking fellow, at least from what we could see in passing. He was Archie’s father, Newell, according to Linda. We heard his personality matched his appearance.”

“What was he driving?”

“An old, beaten-up pickup truck.”

“You never saw him in anything else?”

Again they exchanged baffled looks. “Nope,” George said, speaking for them both.

“And when was the last time you saw him around here?” Lester asked, keeping the timetable of the truck’s sale from Newell to Mel in mind.

“What would you say, George?” she asked. “Two months ago, maybe three?”

He nodded. “That’s what I would say—closer to three.”

After the eviction notice and before the truck sale, Spinney thought. “Did you see him often?”

“Well,” George answered slowly, “over the years, we saw him now and then. You know he actually owned the house, right? That Archie and Michelle rented from him.”

“Yes.”

“We always figured he was just being a landlord, dropping by to make sure everything was okay. He never stayed long.”

“And after Archie died,” Lester asked, “how often did he come by then?”

George shrugged. “Half a dozen times, maybe.”

“Really?” Lester reacted, surprised. “Over a six-month period?”

Mrs. Heller nodded. “About that, yes.”

“Were the visits evenly spaced?”

Her brow furrowed. “That’s interesting,” she said. “They weren’t. Isn’t that right, George?”

“Yup,” he agreed. “There were about four visits that we saw over something like a week and a half, just before they stopped altogether.”

Lester suddenly thought of something else. “When you saw him driving by, was he always alone?”

They both hesitated. George finally said, “Can’t say for sure. From this angle, we could see through the driver’s window, but not to the other side of the cab. And sometimes, when he drove back, it was too dark to see anyone inside at all.”

The old man suddenly leaned forward in his chair, as if hoping to dispel any disappointment. “So, Detective, by your expression, I can tell you’re pleased overall. Have we given you something valuable?”

Spinney hesitated before answering. The question made him uncomfortable, and not just because he didn’t want to answer it. It also suggested the possibility that these two informants had been feeding him what they thought he wanted to hear. In fact—not that they would know this—they’d been the only ones to say that Newell had ever visited the area, at least to the degree they claimed. Cops, like responsible reporters, didn’t like hanging their narratives on the say-so of just one source.

“You’ve been very helpful,” he therefore said blandly.

Mrs. Heller pressed a little harder. “Do you always dig this deep for all deaths? You’ve made us think something bad might have happened to poor Michelle.”

Spinney had to struggle to remember that they’d never actually met poor Michelle.

“That’s exactly why we do it,” he explained. “To make sure nothing did happen.” He tried shifting the focus by picking up Mel Martin’s mug shot. “You’re sure you never saw this man around here?”

George Heller replied cautiously, as if reading Lester’s silent reservations about their enthusiasm. “We never did, but that doesn’t mean he never came by. We don’t actually spend all our time staring out the window. It’s just a hobby.”

“I understand,” Lester told them, “and I really do appreciate your being so helpful.”

Mel Martin was grateful, too, as he sat watching, yet again, in his truck. Banger had been good to him, not just with information but in the way he’d died. After being grabbed outside the Vista Motel, he’d been quiet at first, which had made for a peaceful departure out of town, and then he’d broken down in textbook fashion as soon as he realized what Mel had in store.

For Mel, it had amounted to a watershed. In his progression of killings, this had been the first he’d planned with care, and just as he’d anticipated it, so had he relished its execution. He’d always fantasized this level of violence—had even vaguely pushed at its boundaries during sex with Nancy—but for one reason or another, he’d never taken possession of it.

Until now.

He smiled at the memory of Banger, pleading and spent, totally confused by the violation of such an encounter’s implicit contract—you torture me, I give you all I have. Hey, his expression had told Mel, I gave it up. Why’re you still going?

Because information gathering had only been Mel’s surface ambition. Intelligence about the cousins—Paul and Bob Niemiec, he now knew—could have been collected any number of ways, including by just asking around. They were in retail, after all, and needed to get the word out. But Mel had wanted more. That extra piece—that emotional satisfaction—had been at the heart of his desire.

Not that the promise of big money hurt. Banger had confirmed what Mel had suspected even before he targeted High Top—that the newly arrived Niemiecs were aiming to be major players, exchanging the big city with its attendant overhead and risk factors for the easy pickings of a rural state. But where such operators in the past had used Vermont purely as a retail market, these boys were hoping to create a production base as well. Better still, they’d chosen to step up in style, taking advantage of the local airport to improve importation beyond precedent. Toward the end, Banger had told Mel of a plane delivery of drugs—and of such quantity as to set a man up for decades.

This was what Mel had been longing to hear, which explained why he was watching the Niemiec headquarters now, taking note of all the players, their habits, and their methods of operation.

When it came time to strike, he wanted to do it with military precision. If this was to be their last shot, the Three Musketeers were going to make it their very best.

Chapter 19

“
S
pecial Agent Gunther. Good to meet you.”

Wally Neelor was the head of hospital security—a large, open-faced man with a camp counselor’s friendliness. He greeted Joe with a two-handed shake. No doubt to quell the concerns of nervous patients, his uniform was low-key and looked only faintly official, lacking all but a couple of muted patches that identified his function here. He carried just a radio on his belt.

He preceded Joe down the broad hallway as he spoke, leading the way to his office. “You said on the phone you were checking out the disappearance of that low-level bag. Is there something I don’t know about?”

“Not particularly,” Joe told him, sensitive of being in a public place. It wasn’t crowded, and they certainly weren’t attracting attention, but people were nevertheless milling about.

“I just wondered,” Neelor continued. “We did push all the required buttons here, but I didn’t really think it was that big a deal. Most of our bells and whistles with that stuff are just to keep the local paranoids happy, you know?”

“I do,” Joe told him, grateful to have finally reached the office. They filed past a dispatcher in the front office and ended up in a small, windowless room decorated with charts, maps, and a few pieces of memorabilia showing that Neelor had, in fact, a good deal of police experience in his background.

He waved Joe into a chair and offered him some coffee, which Joe turned down.

“So what’s the concern?” Neelor asked, settling into his seat and giving Joe a calculating look.

“I’m fishing,” Joe conceded. “Pure and simple. The Fusion Center told us the bag was one of several funny events in this area over the last few weeks, and we’re just trying to see if there’s a connection between any of them.”

Neelor’s eyebrows rose. “Other radiological vanishing acts?” he asked.

“No,” Joe admitted, almost embarrassed by the slimness of his motivation. “That’s part of the problem. We haven’t figured out a common thread. It’s a bunch of random stuff.”

Neelor laughed. “I get it—supersecret stuff. Need-to-know only. No sweat. What do you want from me?”

Joe allowed him his conspiratorial fantasy—it was easier than trying to explain their actual situation. “Run me through how you traced the disappearance.”

Neelor made a face. “Simple, really. Each bag has a tag. When the tag’s attached, its number is logged in. When the bag is disposed of once and for all, the tag gets matched to the log, and everybody’s happy. It’s kind of like handling luggage at an airport.”

“Does the tagging include the contents?” Joe asked. “I mean, can you match the contents to who it belonged to?”

“The actual patient?” Neelor came back. “No. It’s more the
level
of waste than who produced it. Chances are, the same patient’s stuff is in the same bag, but it could be mixed in with someone else’s who was treated in the same way at the same time. Why would that matter?”

Joe honestly didn’t know. “No idea,” he answered. “I’m just asking. Was there anything else about all this that stood out?”

“Besides why it would happen in the first place? Nope. In fact, that’s what had us going—we couldn’t see the sense in it. You want to build a dirty bomb, for example, this isn’t a bad place to come to. We have some real hot stuff here. But it’s wrapped in lead, weighs a ton, and is harder than hell to move, even without security, which—not to brag—is pretty good.”

“I’m sure it is,” Joe said appeasingly, not that Neelor seemed to care. “Was there anything else—maybe not connected to the bag—that occurred around the same time?”

Neelor frowned. “Probably is connected, not that anything can be made of it, but one of the nurses got into a jam over her key. It was found dangling from the door lock where she left it. We’re assuming that’s how the bag grew feet—somebody took advantage of finding the key sticking out of the lock. She had no idea she’d left the damn thing behind—kind of thing that can happen to anyone.”

“This is the same door where the bag was locked?” Joe asked, intrigued.

“Yeah, there is only one, at least for the low-level stuff. The fry-your-nuts waste is kept elsewhere.”

“Is that nurse around today?” he asked.

Neelor reared back in his chair and checked one of the charts on his wall. “She should be,” he said, and gave Joe directions on how to find her.

Ten minutes later, Joe was introducing himself to Ann Coleman, who instantly struck him as the no-nonsense type of professional he most liked to deal with.

He told her why he was there.

She groaned and shook her head. “I caught hell for that,” she admitted. “Sad part is, I have no idea how it happened. I don’t do things like that. I’m a supervisor, for crying out loud. It’s my job to make sure other people don’t screw up in just those ways.”

“So you have no memory of leaving the key behind?” Joe asked.

“I have no memory of using it at all,” she said. “Disposing of trash is not one of the things I do anymore, unless there’s a shortage of people, and there hasn’t been in ages.”

They were chatting at the nurses’ station on one of the hospital’s lower levels. It was quiet and largely empty. Joe swept his hand around vaguely. “Where do you keep it?”

She patted her pocket. “Here, now. I used to keep it in that drawer.” She pointed to a section of the semicircular counter.

Joe crossed over and pulled at the drawer. It slid open without a sound, revealing a typical rabble of paper clips, rubber bands, pens, and pencils.

“Unlocked?” he asked.

She sighed. “I know, I know. But give me a break. What’re the chances, right?”

Joe held up both hands. “No argument from me. But if you didn’t use it, and you’ve ruled out all your colleagues . . . I’m assuming you have, right?”

“Absolutely,” she said emphatically.

“Then,” he continued, “it had to be somebody else—somebody out of the blue. Do people loiter around here at all, so they can see what you’re doing and mark your habits?”

As he spoke, he saw her face transform with enlightenment. “Oh, shoot,” she said. “The goddamn pendant.”

He merely raised his eyebrows.

“We had a thyroid patient—a terminal. She had a pendant that got thrown away by mistake. Her son asked me what we could do about retrieving it, and I bent the rules and took him downstairs to the low-level waste room. Found it right off. I gave it back to him, and that was the end of it. I’d completely forgotten about it.”

“Did he handle the key?” Joe asked, a little confused.

“No, but he saw where I kept it.” She waved her arm around. “You see how deserted this place is. He could’ve come in later and swiped it anytime. That’s why I didn’t connect the two events. They happened days and days apart.”

Joe smiled. “Do you remember the son’s name?”

She held up a finger. “Hang on.”

She moved to a computer console and quickly typed in a few commands. “I remember he was listed as next of kin. The mom’s name was Doris Doyle—or still is, I should say. She’s upstairs, hanging on by a thread. But the son had a different last name.” She straightened suddenly. “Here we are—Ellis Robbinson.”

It meant nothing to Joe.

“Too bad,” Ann Coleman added.

“What is?”

“I liked him,” she said sadly. “He was really nice to his mother.”

Ellis stood morosely beside Nancy in the dark shadows by one of the smaller metal outbuildings of Bennington’s municipal airport. Just ahead of them, Mel was pointing out the layout and talking in a hushed but excited voice. Both Ellis and Nancy had been here before, metaphorically speaking, more times than they could count—they’d even come to dub it “Mel’s pep rally,” where he briefed them on the next great adventure.

But whereas they’d once been as adrenalized as he, not to mention as careless of any consequences, now they felt only dread. Like hapless kids led by a dominant bully, they were reduced to finding solace solely in holding hands whenever Mel turned his back.

“Pay attention,” he was telling them, “I don’t want you fucking this one up.”

With a last squeeze of Nancy’s fingers, Ellis moved up alongside his erstwhile friend. So far, neither he nor Nancy had the slightest idea what he had cooked up, although Ellis was gloomily confident that it tied into the death of High Top the other night.

Mel pointed into the darkness north of them. “The runway’s out there. Anything that lands has to take one of the taxiways over to this side, where they park the planes. See there?”

They shifted their attention to the large rectangular apron boxed in by the parallel taxiways, the landing strip, and the buildings. As if to prove Mel’s point, several planes, including an old, hulking DC–3, were sitting there like oversize toys abandoned by a giant child after bedtime. Other planes were scattered elsewhere as well. The night was clear and warm, sparkling with stars. On the far side of the strip, the floodlit Bennington Monument shone eerily in the distance, a misplaced museum piece from an Egyptian exhibition, surrounded by the soft glow of the town’s lights behind and slightly below it. The utter peacefulness of the scene, as much as his yearning to be elsewhere, distracted Ellis from focusing on what Mel was telling him.

“It won’t matter what road they use to get off the runway, since they’re not all that far apart. My guess is, it’ll be the eastern one, ’cause it’s closer to the parking lot. Anyhow, the key isn’t the place; it’s the time—we have to hit ’em just as they’re unloading. That’s when they’ll be the most distracted.”

“Won’t it be when they’re most on the lookout?” Ellis asked, his attention suddenly drawn.

“You watch too much TV,” Mel countered. “This isn’t
Miami Vice,
for Chrissake.
We’re
going to be the ones with the machine guns, not those losers. They probably won’t even be armed.”

Ellis frowned in the darkness. Everybody had guns in Vermont. It was the only state in the Union with virtually no gun laws of its own. And a bunch of drug dealers weren’t going to be packing?

“We’re talking about drugs, right?”

Mel sighed. “No, stupid. We’re talking about illegal squirrels. No shit.”

Ellis ignored him in favor of more pressing concerns. “Why don’t we wait till they’re in the car, halfway down Airport Road?” he countered. “That way, they’ll be contained. The road is dark and isolated. We could ram them, maybe, and be on them before they knew what hit them.”

Ellis could just make out Mel’s scowl in the ambient light. “You are so full of it. Ram them? With what? And how do we get away after we’ve trashed our car?” He reached out and smacked the back of Ellis’s head with his open hand. “Moron. Leave the planning to me, all right?”

Ellis nodded, the familiar shrinking sensation he always felt around Mel setting in. He decided, as always, merely to listen instead of question. For all that Mel could sometimes seem foolhardy to the point of craziness, he hadn’t gotten them killed yet.

“See how those two buildings come together, sort of?” Mel was saying now, pointing again. “They’ll stop the plane there, where there’s some cover. That’ll allow the pilot to finish the loop and end up back on the strip, so he can take off.”

“How do you know that?” Nancy asked, having moved up beside them.

Mel laughed. “I have my sources, babe, and believe me, I trust ’em. Not to worry.”

He turned back to their surveillance. “They’ll be expecting an attack from either corner, maybe even from across the open, so that’s where they’ll be looking. What they won’t be watching is that hangar—right there. See it?”

They followed the line of his extended finger, nodding silently. Ellis resisted mentioning the unlikeliness of people expecting an attack also being unarmed.

Mel resumed, “That’s where we’ll be—inside, waiting. There are two doors about twenty yards apart. You and me’ll come out at the same time. We’ll box ’em in.”

“How many are there?” Nancy asked.

“Four, not counting the pilot,” her husband answered. “Pussies, every one of ’em.” He turned back to Ellis, as if reading his mind. “Which is why, genius, you don’t need to worry about firepower, ’cause even if they’re packin’, they won’t have the balls to use it. And the same’s true if the plane parks somewhere different. Everything stays the same—we box ’em in; we drive ’em to the ground. Total power.”

Ellis saw an opportunity perhaps to learn a bit more about what they were getting into. “These the cousins that guy told us about down near the river?” he asked, keeping his wording vague.

“Yeah,” Mel conceded. “The Niemiec boys. They think they got easy pickin’s here among the local yokels. Won’t they be surprised?”

He suddenly faced them both, the distant light making his widened eyes gleam pale with enthusiasm. “No screwing around, either, boys and girls. This’ll be the big one for us. We get this done, and there’ll be no more trailer parks or ripping off bingo games or any of that bullshit. We’re talking serious money here.”

Nancy and Ellis exchanged glances.

“What d’you mean, hon?” Nancy asked.

Mel laughed. “I thought that might twist your panties. I mean those crazy bastards have a deal goin’ where they’re taking in pounds of coke and heroin both.
Pounds.
You sell what they’re talkin’ about and it means a million bucks, probably more.”

“So we have to sell it,” Ellis said softly.

Mel made a face. “Oh, for Chrissake. You are such a fucking drag. What the hell happened to you, El? You used to eat this shit up. Now, it’s all ‘Golly-gee, it sounds a little hairy.’ Yeah, we’ll have to sell it, and we’ll be able to do that anywhere we want—keep on the move, cut down the chances of getting caught. That ought to satisfy you, right?”

He punched Ellis in the arm. “Think of it. It’s a fortune—more than we’ve ever seen. We’ll be able to go anywhere, do anything. When I caught wind of this deal, I thought we’d maybe grab a few thou. But this is a home run.”

Along with the wash of Mel’s mounting excitement, Ellis felt the trembling light touch of his lover’s fingers against the small of his back, and understood what she was thinking: What was good news for three people would be even better for two in need of a fresh start.