The Year We Disappeared (24 page)

About a week before my shooting, Mitchell told Chuck that he knew a guy who had some information for him; it was something important. Mitchell set up a meeting between Chuck and this “informant” at the Dunkin Donuts on Main Street. When Chuck arrived at the appointed time, it was Mitchell’s buddy, Raymond Meyer, who was there to meet him. Raymond, playing the good guy, told Chuck that he’d heard something through the grapevine. “The town selectmen are watching your house,” Meyer said. “They know that you go home during your shift and spend time with your wife. They’re planning to take pictures of your cruiser in the driveway and get you fired.” Chuck could hardly believe this. Why would the town selectmen care where he took his break—why would they focus so much energy on him?

“If I were you, I’d stop going home for your coffee break,” Mitchell warned his partner.

On the night I was shot, Mitchell called in sick, so Chuck was riding with a temporary partner. He had been thinking about what Meyer said, and it just didn’t add up. He chose to ignore the warning—let the town selectmen come after him for drinking coffee at home for fifteen minutes if they wanted to. Good luck.

He went by his house about ten o’clock that night and brought his partner with him. They had coffee and apple pie and hit the road around 10:20, back to the Heights to break up any parties that were getting too loud. But before they had gotten very far, they heard the radio call that an officer had been shot—back on Sandwich Road. The site of my shooting was less than a quarter of a mile from Chuck’s house.

The next morning, Chuck started piecing things together: clearly the “warning” from Meyer had been a ruse—he just wanted to make sure that no other cops were in the area that night. But there was only one logical way Meyer could have known that Chuck’s routine was to go home in the evenings around that time—and that was through his partner, Mitchell. So Chuck went in and told the investigators what he knew. They questioned Mitchell, and he claimed to be an innocent lamb. Sure he knew Meyer, but he didn’t know anything about my shooting, wasn’t there, wasn’t even working that night. They asked him to take a lie detector test, and he refused. Most unusual.

Word of this got around the department, and the guys who were my friends or were straight cops quickly labeled Mitchell a rat. No one knew, fully, what his involvement was in my shooting, but there was something connecting him with Meyer and the night I was shot—and it smelled bad. Refusing to take the lie detector test didn’t add to his credibility either—that could be grounds for dismissal for an officer, so it made me think he must
have had good reason to avoid it. So there was one lead that the detectives were letting get cold. When I asked them about it, they told me that they were “working on it,” and to let them do their jobs.

I was wondering, too, when they were going to get around to interviewing me about the recent arrests I had made involving members of Meyer’s family. But I wasn’t holding my breath. During one arrest—the night I brought in his son, Paul Cena—Meyer was there and actually told me he was going to kill me, in front of witnesses, other cops. It should have been of interest to the detectives, but it didn’t seem to send up any red flags when I mentioned it.

Paul Cena’s arrest had occurred the previous spring, about six months before my shooting. The Bruins were playing their archrivals, the Montréal Canadiens in the playoffs for the Stanley Cup. It was in overtime of Game 7, sudden death, and I had to go to work. I got to the station and found out that Tom DeCosta and I were going to ride overlap.

They had the game on the radio at the department, and right after I arrived for my shift it went into a second overtime. We were standing around listening to the game when the car patrolling the Far East section of Falmouth radioed in, saying they were in pursuit of a vehicle that wouldn’t pull over. Not high speed, just wouldn’t pull over. The Main Street car joined in, and they both started slowly winding their way around town behind this guy. Then Jean Beliveau scored for Les Habitants
and ruined the Bruins’ season. It still wasn’t quite time for us to go on duty, but there wasn’t any point in standing around either—the game was over. I turned to Tom and said, “Let’s go catch this bastard,” meaning the low-speed perp.

We headed out to Teaticket, on reports that the vehicle had pulled into a yard and stopped. Upon arrival, the three pursuit vehicles and the chase car were parked in a long dirt driveway off Brick Kiln Road. Six cops were milling around with their thumbs up their asses. Turns out the driver had gone to his own house, parked in his own driveway, locked the doors and windows, and wouldn’t come out of the car. “He won’t cooperate. What should we do?” DeCosta said to me.

The driver had been initially observed speeding but then slowed down and wouldn’t stop. Failure to stop for an emergency vehicle or police car is an arrestable offence, so I figured this guy needed to be brought in by the Far East cruiser that originally gave chase. But if he won’t come out, how do you arrest him? “I think I can fix this dilemma.” I turned to DeCosta and said, “Those windows are glass, aren’t they?”

DeCosta caught my drift. “That’s Ray Meyer’s son in there; I’m not breaking any glass,” he told me.

I grabbed my “prosecutor”—a type of nightstick, about twenty inches long, with a six-inch handle at the side—and approached the car. The engine wasn’t on, so I knew he could hear me. I yelled, “Open up,” to the guy inside. One last warning. He was a mousy dude—small and thin. He wouldn’t even look
up at me, so I made a quick jab at the glass with the stick, and the driver’s-side window shattered. As I reached for the lock button inside, the driver reached forward and started the car, quickly putting it into gear. I wrapped my arm around him, trying to reach over to pull the key out of the ignition, but I couldn’t get it. The guy started to accelerate forward in a semicircle, dragging me with him as he swung the car around to exit the driveway. I was holding on and running as fast as I could, but he started doing twenty-five to thirty miles per hour. I couldn’t keep up at those speeds and decided to let go—better to drop at this speed than later, on the pavement, if he decided to go any faster. I rolled down the driveway, shaken, bumped, bruised, covered with dirt but not seriously injured. The other cruisers all turned around and commenced the pursuit. By this time, a state trooper, Ted Tessasini, had heard the call on his way home and joined in too.

It took me a minute to get back to my cruiser, and when I got there the dispatcher was reporting that the perp had pulled into another driveway, down the road a bit. I knew that address. It was Raymond Meyer’s house. When I arrived, another standoff was in progress, this time with Ray standing out in his yard yelling at the cops. I grabbed my nightstick, got out of my cruiser, and headed straight over to the perp’s car. I wasn’t giving him any more warnings. A quick, sharp tap took out the passenger-side window. I didn’t bother to brush the glass away, just opened the door, climbed in, and grabbed the keys from the ignition. Then I realized that the perp had tied the belt from his
pants around the gearshift. It was the first time I’d ever seen somebody do that, but I guess there’s a first time for everything. I yanked the belt loose, grabbed him, lifted him up, and threw him out the driver’s-side window. He didn’t resist, and there was nothing said. I cuffed the perp vigorously, my knee in his back while he was facedown on the ground. “He’d better not be hurt! If there’s one mark on him... ,”Ray started yelling at me, still standing in the yard. I ignored him until he shouted, “I’m gonna get my shotgun!”

I looked over at Meyer and yelled, “Hey, Ray, are you interfering with an arrest? ‘Cause if you are, you can come down to the station with us.”

Meyer glared at me, turned, and went into his house. Dave Cusolito took out his nightstick and slid over to the door of the house, waiting for Meyer to come back out. The other cops on the scene got into position behind their cruisers, guns out.

Meyer came back out, holding up something. I was relieved to see that it was a baseball bat, not a shotgun. “Your head is gonna be in your lap, Busby!” he hollered at me, waving the bat.

“Drop it, right now!” Ayoub had his gun pointed right at Meyer. “Put that bat down.”

Meyer looked over at the guns pointed at him, dropped the bat, and put up his hands. “That’s my boy,” he said, waving a finger at me. “You better not hurt him.”

I lifted the perp off the ground to shove him into the back of the cruiser. “Ray, you’re more than welcome to come down to the
station and see justice being administered,” I yelled over to him. Meyer didn’t do anything else, just continued shouting about how I’d better not hurt his boy. “All I have to do is drop a dime, Busby!” he threatened me. “Your head will be in your lap!”

When we got down to the station, I learned that the perp in custody really was Ray’s boy: his illegitimate son, Paul Cena. The Far East cops issued a citation for speeding and failure to stop, and then I charged him with assault and battery on a police officer with a deadly weapon (the car). Sonny boy sat there like a wilted flower during the entire process. Before we’d even been at the station a half hour, a lawyer, hired by Meyer, of course, showed up to bail him out. We hadn’t even fully booked him, leaving me with hours of paperwork to do on the arrest.

So now I’d bothered one of Ray’s nephews in public and arrested his bastard son—on his property, no less. This was on top of issuing citations to other members of his family and friends, instead of looking the other way like I was supposed to. And I was tight with the other guys on the force who couldn’t stand him, like Mickey Mangum. I’d not only shown Meyer that I wouldn’t back down to his intimidation, but I’d become public enemy number one, a real thorn in his side. I wouldn’t say that I went looking for trouble with him, but by nature of doing my job, I’d found trouble with him. And it only got worse from there.

ONE cold, clear Saturday that winter, Mom decided that we should go and do something as a family—with no guards for once. Instead, she and Dad would wear their guns and we would bring Max for protection. “It’s time we started acting like a family again,” she said.

By this point, my brothers and I had overheard enough conversations to know what was going on. Mom was tired of the constant fear and anger, living in seclusion and under protection. She wanted to move away if there wasn’t a break in Dad’s case soon. “This is no way to live,” she had told Dad. “It’s not fair to any of us.” The town of Falmouth also wanted us to move; the selectmen had offered to pay to help us relocate, which really got Dad steaming mad. “They’ll spend money to send us somewhere else but they won’t spend money on the case,” he wrote in his
notebook. “They want to make us disappear.” If we did want to move, the town had collected over fifteen thousand dollars—most of it donations from the townspeople—that would be ours for a down payment on a new house. The police department would sell our house for us after we left, and all tracks would be covered. No one would know where we had gone.

“Let’s go down to the pond and go ice-skating,” Mom suggested. My brothers and I raced to our rooms to get ready. Ice skating was something that we used to do all the time before the shooting. My dad used to play hockey, and he was a great skater. Shawn was also pretty good, and fast, but Eric and I were just so so. Mom had grown up in Houlton, Maine, on the border of Canada, where it gets really cold in the winters, and she had been skating for years.

We all packed into the van with our hats, mittens, skates, and thick socks, and Max. Mom drove while Dad held Max’s leash. When we reached the pond, Dad would usually find a big log or something heavy and throw it out onto the ice to make sure that it was solid enough to support us. It had been a cold winter, so testing the ice didn’t seem necessary, but Dad found an old tree trunk and went to lift it. He strained under the weight, and Eric and Shawn came over to help him. It was the first time I noticed how weak he had become. He looked emaciated and drawn, his face still covered with bandages and some patchy beard growth. His jeans were several sizes too big, belted to stay up,
and his winter coat hung loosely from his thin shoulders. He barely lifted the trunk, then slammed it down onto the ice. It slid out to the middle of the pond and held firm.

“Okay, looks good!” Mom said happily. She didn’t seem to notice how tired and weak Dad was, or else she pretended not to. We headed out onto the ice while Mom stayed at the edge of the pond, holding Max. Before Dad came out, he gave the hand command for Max to stay, and Max did, never taking his eyes off of us.

It felt good to be out on the ice, free, skating, moving through the cold and not worrying about anything for once. I tried not to notice how thin Dad looked as he skated around us. He had brought a couple of hockey pucks and sticks and started a game with my brothers while I practiced my figure eights. I felt pretty, my long hair streaming out behind me, my breath floating up in white puffs as I twirled around and around. Our voices echoed off the ice and trees—laughter and loud talking. We were just like any other family.

I tried to do a pirouette and promptly fell on my butt—the ice was rock hard. “Nice!” Mom called over from the shoreline. “What do you call that move?” I looked over at her and grinned. Behind her, I noticed a woman in a red coat and two kids coming down the path; they were carrying skates over their shoulders. I was a little bummed that the ice would no longer be just ours, but the pond was big enough for everyone, so it wasn’t really a problem.

Suddenly, Max began to bark. I looked over and saw him lunge at one of the kids while my mom was doing everything she could to hold him back. Max strained against the leash—he weighed at least twenty pounds more than Mom did. He was growling and barking violently, and I knew we were about to see him tear someone to pieces. Dad quickly skated over and used hand signals to command Max to stop and sit, and he took the leash from Mom. But by then, the two kids had already run, crying, into the woods to hide, terrified of Max.