Winter at the Door (25 page)

He shook his head. “Not making it here. Packaging went on in the house and out back. Christ, there were kids living in there.”

A final occupant emerged from the trailer’s front door, her arms firmly in the grip of two female officers. Small, elderly, with matted
gray hair and wild eyes, she appeared confused as she allowed the officers to help her down the concrete-block steps.

“That’s the mom,” said Chevrier. “The sons moved in here and took the place over. We found her locked in a back room. Skin and bones,” he added in disgust, kicking at a sodden Elmo doll on the ground.

It was snowing again, the sky dark and featureless, the color of lead. “They took the kids out first,” he added.

Two federal officers in DEA jackets waved a white van up the driveway, backing it toward a metal shed. Techs hopped from the van, clad in hazmat lite: paper shoe covers, zippered suits, hair covers, latex gloves, and goggles.

If it had been a manufacturing area, they’d have worn moon suits and respirators. “How’s the Brantwell thing going?” she asked, watching the techs pick their way through the litter.

Those paper shoe covers were just about useless in snow, she noted. “Nowhere,” said Chevrier succinctly.

“Or on your shootings in Allagash, either,” he added before she could ask. “They’ve got the shell casings in the lab.”

To see if they could match them with any other crimes, he meant. “But there’s no other evidence. And listen, that hunter from Nussbaum’s camp who went back to New York? Turns out he got it with a thirty-eight, cops down there are running it all down, but—”

“What?” She stared at Chevrier. “I thought that was a—”

“Hit-and-run?” He grimaced sourly. “Yeah, well, there’s a new twist on that. They did the postmortem, big surprise, they found a bullet in him. Someone shot him, then ran him over.”

“Oh, man.” She exhaled dispiritedly for him. “Ballistics?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. And I’m not holding my breath.”

“Right. Not like on the TV shows, is it?” There, the killer always made a mistake or left a clue that some crazily perceptive lab tech or computer-nerd-slash-genius picked up on. Science, logic, and an insane amount of dedication won the day—possibly aided by a few thrown punches or well-aimed bullets—and did it before the final commercial, too.

But not in real life, where most of the time working a case was more like trudging through glue-laced quicksand.

They turned back toward the Bearkill squad, where Crandall was on his cell phone. He looked up as they approached.

“Cody, my wife wants to know was Izzy Dolaby in there with those other jerks.”

Chevrier rolled his eyes. “Yeah, Izzy was there. Tell your wife her no-good cousin needs a kick in the nuts, maybe he won’t leave any more of his spawn all over the County.”

Crandall sighed. “Yeah, honey, he’s here,” he said into the phone, then held it, wincing, away from his ear until the outraged squawking stopped coming out of it.

“Crandall’s wife was a Dolaby before she got married,” said Chevrier as they walked toward the metal shed where the suited-up techs had gone in. “Still is one, you ask me,” he added.

Just then one of the techs came out. “Sheriff, you gotta see this,” she said, shaking her head. “You can go on in, nothing’s spilled or leaking. Just the opposite, actually.”

She waved at the van, which had been idling in the driveway, signaling it to come on back, also. Lizzie let Chevrier go ahead of her, heard his whistle of astonishment, then stepped in, too, and saw the reason for it.

“Wow,” she said inadequately. Shelves like the ones Spud was putting up in her office lined the walls, from the rough plywood floor to the ceiling. Long fluorescent fixtures, their faint hum the only sound, lit the windowless shed.

A vent fan turned slowly at the structure’s far end. In the center, a plywood table held a stack of cardboard box flats ready to be assembled and filled.

Some already had been, with ziplocked plastic bags. Inside the bags were tinier bags packed with bluish-white crystals.

She turned to Chevrier. “They were packing these in the trailer?”

“Nope. Not enough room. This here is a storage facility.”

He glanced around. “Looks like a lot of small-time cooks just lost a hub in their distribution network. Somebody bought from them. Izzy must’ve been warehousing the stuff here and then someone picked up from him, sold it on to someone bigger.”

Despite the exhaust fan, the place still stank faintly of ether and
ammonia. They stepped back outside, the fresh air a bracing relief, as from the end of the yard Dolaby’s harsh whine cut through the falling snow. “Come
on
, man!”

His wrists were in plastic cuffs. One of the DEA cops lit a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth like a pacifier, whereupon he shut up and let himself be helped into the back of another van that had pulled up while Chevrier and Lizzie were in the shed.

“Shouldn’t be too long before they get the next rung up on the ladder ID’d,” Lizzie observed. “Just let Izzy get a nicotine jones going, sounds like he’d give up his mother.”

“That is his mother,” said Chevrier, meaning the pathetic older woman now seated in the Bearkill squad car. Lizzie waved at Caldwell to let him know he should go on without her.

“Yeah, that Izzy’s a little pissant,” Chevrier went on when Wally had gone. “And he’s gonna find out those DEA folks are not as tenderhearted as we are down at the jail in Houlton. I give him maybe an hour in custody before he flips.”

And then they’d know who the courier was. “You have any idea this was going on here?” she asked as they climbed into his Blazer.

Just then Trey Washburn went by in his big pickup with the winch on the back. Taking in the scene, he raised a finger off the steering wheel in brief greeting.

Chevrier waved back, then flipped on the wipers to brush a half inch of fresh snow off the windshield. “Nope,” he said in answer to Lizzie’s question. “And I guess the DEA crew didn’t trust me with that little item of info, either.”

His voice conveyed how he felt about that: one part ticked off, two parts what-else-is-new. “We’ve got a few tweakers, you see ’em around town, and once in a long while some goofball gets a bright idea, tries making the stuff.”

He took the turn toward town, onto the rural highway that an hour of snowfall had whitened again after an earlier plowing. An orange town truck went by the other way, scattering sand.

“But mostly they stay a lot farther out in the sticks, where they can keep out of sight better,” he added.

They drove in silence for a few miles, the passing landscape transformed
by the snow squall. Plowed fields, earth-colored the day before, now sported brown and white stripes; tree trunks were glazed on one side, charcoal on the other, and the dark green spruce trees were white-frosted as if decorated for holiday cards.

Nicki
, thought Lizzie. Any time now, the Christmas wreaths and other holiday decorations would start going up. She’d sent a crocheted dress to her sister’s baby that first year; after that, there’d been no one to send anything to.

“Pretty, huh?” said Chevrier.

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

A pastured horse wearing a red plaid blanket looked up from behind a fence, his dark muzzle sporting a wisp of straw. As they passed, a boy in a denim jacket ran down to the horse from the nearby farmhouse, carrying a leather harness.

“I bet Boston’s good-looking sometimes, too, though.”

She turned, surprised, as they came into town past the Food King. Area 51 sign’s glowing alien shone over the entrance to the bar, its black, slit-eyed stare unblinking through the snow.

“You’ve never been?” she asked as he pulled to the curb. In her little storefront office, the lights were on and the shelves were all up and painted, but Spud was not in sight.

Chevrier chuckled. “Oh, yeah. I’m not a complete rube.”

Embarrassed, she protested, “That’s not what I meant.”

But he just grinned. “I’ve been to conferences there. Just never saw any of the good parts, that’s all.”

Then he frowned. “Look, not to be nosy. But I was talking to Washburn earlier and … did you two have a falling-out? Because he’s a nice guy but kind of sensitive. Easy to get crossways with him, I mean, if you don’t know him.”

Or if you say you’re going home alone and then he sees you coming out of your house the next morning with another man
, she thought acutely.

But of course she didn’t say that. “No. No, we’re fine, I just …” She stopped, flustered.

“Say no more.” He put up his hands in acceptance. “None of my business, anyway.”

She glanced up and down the street: still no Spud. “Trey told me a little about that big place of his the other night. I guess his father left him, um, financially embarrassed?”

Chevrier made a face. “Financially and every other way. Guy gambled his life away, lost his land, got in debt, the stress put his wife in the grave. Trey even wound up in foster care for a while. Gotta give him credit, I’ve never seen a man haul himself out of a hole by his bootstraps like he has.”

“Wow,” she said, thinking about all those acres, the house, and the modern vet clinic. “Those are some bootstraps.” Then:

“Listen, I’ve still got nothing on that other thing.”

Chevrier’s dead-cop case, she meant, wondering if she should confess her growing doubts about it. It would be only fair. But:

“Yeah, well, I never thought you’d just grab it up for me like a rabbit out of a hat,” said Chevrier.

“When things quiet down, we’ll take a ride over to Van Buren, over on the Canadian border,” he went on. “Where Fontine lived.”

The dead ex-cop she hadn’t had a chance to find out about yet, he meant. He glanced in the rearview mirror as she readied herself to get out.

“Meanwhile, just … you know. Pay attention,” he said. “You come up with anything I should hear, give a holler, that’s all.”

He glanced in the rearview again with a small frown; she turned to see why and caught sight of Spud climbing out of a gray van in the parking lot of the Food King.

The van pinged her memory somehow; she put the thought away for later examination. “So you want me to work on the Brantwell baby for now?”

But Chevrier shook his head. “I’ve got people on that. And the whole rest of the world’s on it, too, now it seems like, though I’m pretty sure it’s a local thing …”

Which made sense, she realized, since otherwise how would anyone have known there was a child in the house at all?

“… and you don’t know much of anyone around here yet,” he added. “So …”

Right, so where would she even start? And anyway, the cops whose
case it was wouldn’t like her butting in, any more than she would if it were hers. Chevrier’s radio spat static and then a dispatch voice reported that a snowplow had clipped the fender off a vehicle outside Bearkill and needed assistance.

Leaving Lizzie on the sidewalk, Chevrier took off, the Blazer’s light-bar whirling yellow in the snow, which was once again falling thickly. The van she’d seen in the Food King’s lot was gone.

And so was Spud. Though she stood outside peering around a minute longer in the swirl of fat, white snowflakes, in the few seconds she’d been turned away from him he’d simply vanished.

An hour later she was still in the office, going stir-crazy. She’d driven back to the house to get Rascal, walked him and fed him, then brought him here, but the big dog couldn’t settle down any more than she’d been able to.

And Spud hadn’t returned. Probably he’d decided to go home before the snow got any worse.
And maybe I should, too …

The weather outside continued and the silence in the office went on, as well, while Rascal paced unhappily.
So much for your great plan
, she thought
. Come up here and get a cop job, be an insider so you can hunt for a kid who might not even be here
.

And now here she was with nothing to do, just twiddling her thumbs.
Liaison officer, my great-aunt Fanny
.

She should’ve waited for a real job to open up, she thought, turned her back on Cody Chevrier’s half-assed switcheroo from full-fledged deputy to boondocks benchwarmer. Then at least she’d be out there doing … what?

She didn’t even know. There didn’t even seem to be any leads on the Brantwell baby, or none that anyone had confided to her. The meth distribution operation was a state case, or would be soon; the shootings at the lake were state cop material, too—

And Dylan was gone, almost certainly back at his motel by now with the woman who’d been waiting for him there.

Not that I care. And anyway … oh, the hell with it
. Maybe she
should wander over to Area 51, see if she could save another patron from another drunk with a gun.

It was just her speed, lately. “Come on, Rascal.” Leashing him up, she went out into the swirling snow.

But when she got to the bar’s entrance the smell of stale beer drifting from it was so dispiriting, she couldn’t face going in. Missy Brantwell’s truck wasn’t around, either.

Of course it’s not. She’s probably home waiting for a ransom call, or being cross-examined by social service workers. But if you sit on your hands for much longer, Lizzie, they’re going to attach themselves to your butt
.

Thinking this, she turned abruptly away from the saloon’s front door and strode back across the street, with Rascal prancing beside her, grinning.

Are we going somewhere?
his face asked eagerly.
Huh? Huh?

“Yeah, buddy.” She opened the Blazer’s passenger door; he leapt up as if this was what he had been wanting all along.

And she had, too, she realized. So … 
You want to investigate something?
a defiant little voice spoke up in her head.
Blow the dust off those red-hot detecting skills of yours?

Because there was still one thing she could work on, wasn’t there? Climbing in, she fired up the Blazer’s engine, the heater, and the super-storm-fighting windshield wipers she’d had put on when she bought the new tires. After a quick call to the cops in the town of Van Buren, which Chevrier had said was east of here near the Canadian border, she pulled out onto the street, feeling the DuraTracs bite into the snow with a decisive crunch.