Chat (20 page)
L
ester Spinney was already at the office, writing his report about the Pennsylvania trip on his computer. It was late, after nine.
He looked over his shoulder as Joe and Sam entered, and raised his eyebrows at Sam. “So, what does she look like?”
“Enough,” Joe told him. “Her name is Lyn Silva. She just opened up the new bar on Elliot, and we’re just friends.” He circled his desk and dropped his coat across the back of his chair, sitting down heavily before adding, “Christ. I can’t believe I just said that.”
“It’s okay, boss,” Lester said. “Rumor has it that’s a nice way to start a relationship. Good going.”
“Thanks,” Joe said, hoping to end the conversation. “What did you both find out?”
Fitting her character, Sam began first, pacing the small office as she spoke off the cuff. “Red Fred, Ready Freddy, or R. Frederick, as he registered at the motel, turns out to have been Frederick Nashman, of greater Waterbury, Connecticut. Middle-class, married with a kid, worked at an insurance office. He had no record to speak of, was unremarkable at work, according to his boss, and, from what I could get out of the wife, was about the same at home. He bowled, played cards with the boys every Saturday night at the Elks, took the family out to the movies about twice a month, and—again per the wife—spent a lot of time online, alone, in his office. He told her he had an eBay business going on the side to benefit the Legion, which wasn’t true when I checked it out. What I found after we got past the locks on his desk and filing cabinet . . .”
She stopped and looked pointedly at Gunther, adding, “Legally—don’t worry. The locals were great. I got names and numbers for your Christmas card list. Anyhow, what I found was a huge collection of child porn—pictures, articles, X-rated stories, DVDs, videotapes. Some of it printed or downloaded off the Web, some of it ordered through various sites. It was all neat and tidy and organized like a stamp collector’s dream world, with categories and subcategories in carefully labeled files and boxes. It was textbook obsessive-compulsive.”
“The wife was clueless?” Joe reiterated.
“Totally. I even tried the girl-talk approach, to see what he might’ve been like in bed. Nothing. Unless she was either bullshitting me or as dumb as an ox—which I didn’t get—he performed perfectly normally, if maybe not like a sexual athlete.”
“The kid a boy or girl?”
“Boy. I only met him in passing, since I didn’t have that much time, but he seemed as normal as his mom.”
“So did his dad, from the outside,” Joe mused.
“True,” Sam agreed. “It’s early yet. We’ll get a better crack at both of them soon enough.”
“How come they didn’t report him missing?” Lester asked.
“They didn’t think he was,” Sam told them. “He said he’d be in Vegas at a week-long convention, and that maybe he’d extend his stay to enjoy the sights afterward.”
“It’s been a hell of a lot longer than a week,” Joe commented.
“I said the same thing,” Sam agreed, adding, “I guess it was that kind of marriage. In her defense, I don’t think the wife missed him any. When I told her he was dead, she took it pretty well—more like he was a relative they hadn’t seen in a while. Sad, but not destroyed.”
“Married how long?”
“Sixteen years.”
Gunther cupped his chin in his hand thoughtfully. “He ever do this before? Go off to quote-unquote Vegas?”
“Nope—overnights only.”
“Meaning what?”
“Business trips. I checked with his boss. Nashman didn’t have the kind of job that called for any trips.”
Joe straightened. “Huh.”
“What?” Lester asked him.
“Just a thought,” Joe told them both. “Earlier we played with the idea that both he and Rockwell came here following a recipe—come by bus, get two keys at the desk, stick one on the door, etcetera. How ’bout a part of that being that they were supposed to tell everyone they’d be gone for a week or more?”
Spinney was already nodding enthusiastically. “That’s what happened with my guy. Told his roommates the exact same thing.”
“Makes sense,” Sammie agreed. “It would guarantee the trail being pretty cold before anyone like us started backtracking.”
“Except,” Joe then countered, playing devil’s advocate, “why would they agree to that? It would sure make me suspicious.”
“You aren’t horny out of your mind,” Sam answered. “We don’t know what they were promised.”
“Okay,” Joe said to Lester. “How ’bout you?”
Spinney read from notes, sitting at his desk, while Sam settled down on the edge of hers to listen.
“Rockwell, or Wet Bald Rocky, was actually Norman Metz. Totally different outward appearance. Or maybe just further down the slippery slope than Red Fred. He was divorced, unemployed, living in a dump, and nobody’s best pal among the other tenants I interviewed. They all thought he was weird and antisocial, what little they saw of him. He kept all hours, didn’t go out much, and, like Fred, seemed to spend all his spare time on the Net.”
“How did they know that?” Joe asked.
“When it was hot, he’d leave his door open a bit, to allow for circulation. The only thing people saw or heard was him tapping on the computer. Bit of an assumption, I suppose, but borne out by what I found once we got access.”
“Which was what?” Sam asked.
“Like you did,” he said, “but a lot messier. Metz had porno all over the place, including on the walls of the bathroom—that was gross; I didn’t want to know what he did in there.”
“You interview the ex?” Joe asked.
“Yup. She didn’t live far away. She knew all about it, or him. That’s why they broke up. He had a good job—prospects, as she called them—but got hooked on the Internet and went off the deep end. That’s her take, by the way. I’m not playing shrink here. Anyhow, lost her, lost his job. All this wasn’t long ago, which explains why his clothes were good but worn when we found him, and probably why he checked into the cheaper motel.”
Once more Joe thought back to Hillstrom’s comment about Rocky’s—now Metz’s—middle-class toenails. She’d been right—again.
Joe leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers against his chin, thinking over what they’d reported. “You check into Metz’s background?”
Lester nodded, scanning his notes. “Not lily white like Nashman. He was busted in a prostitution raid, had a couple of minor drug possession charges. There was at least one propositioning-a-minor case that was dropped. There’s probably more, since he didn’t come from Ardmore originally—moved there only about ten years ago from further west. I’ve got a request in for a total records check.”
Joe was shaking his head slightly. “If Metz was going down the tubes and his place was such a mess, with porno all over the walls, why did he use the Internet café? He had an online computer at home. What’re we missing here?”
After a moment’s contemplative silence on all parts, Sam suggested, “Maybe he was asked to.”
Joe stared at the far wall as he spoke slowly. “I like that. All right, let’s recap a bit. So far, in a nutshell, we have two possibly minor league perverts with an interest in Internet porn involving underage kids.” He paused before asking, “Boys or girls mostly?”
“Girls,” they both said.
“Okay—another overlap,” Joe commented, holding up a fist and raising one finger at a time. “Child predators interested in girls; under instructions on how and why to come here; living relatively nearby to us.” He let a second lapse before adding, “And dead under suspicious circumstances.”
“In Brattleboro,” Sam added.
“And as for Metz using the café,” Joe continued, “maybe Sam’s right. Nashman was secretive. That probably came through in his communications. Metz could’ve been told to use a neutral computer so nothing could be traced back to him.”
Lester raised his hand as if answering a question in class. “I can confirm that Nashman was careful. After I got the subpoenas to go after Freddy’s IP address, John Leppman told me that Freddy used what they call a shadow address, meaning that if we hadn’t found Nashman’s car and backtracked it to Waterbury, we’d still be clueless about him and Freddy being one and the same.”
“Looks like we’re after a homicidal avenger—a father?” Sam mused.
“Possibly,” Joe agreed. “At least someone with a specific grudge fitting both victims. Both of you got their computers, right? The hard drives?”
They nodded in unison.
“Process them like you did the garage computer, then. Use Leppman if he’s amenable, or the state police, if they have anybody, or anyone else who’s credible and trained in this. Do it by the book, keep the prosecutor on board, and let’s see if we can figure out who or what is the common denominator between Nashman and Metz. We do that, maybe we find out whoever got them traveling here in the first place.”
He got up from his desk to look out onto the darkened streets of Brattleboro, or what little he could see of them. “Also, let’s throw out a net for angry parental types across the state who’ve voiced any outrage against Internet predators. Not letters-to-the-editor types,” he added, “although we may get there. But violence-prone ones—people who’ve been arrested or detained for acting out. Mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles—the works.”
He reached up and wiped away where his breath had fogged the windowpane. “Somebody is seriously pissed off out there, and I have a sneaking suspicion they may not be through.”
It was long past two in the morning by the time Joe drove by Silva’s, knowing it was well after hours. Still, his spirits sank when he saw the lights out and the place closed for the night. Unsure he should risk aggravating his disappointment, he nevertheless swung by Lyn’s apartment on his way home, his growing anticipation making him feel embarrassingly juvenile.
There was at least one light on in her window, in the living room, and, as he got out of his car, he could see the rosy flickerings of a dying fire reflected off the ceiling.
Quietly, he climbed the stairs to her apartment, his doubts growing as he went. He liked this woman very much—always had, in fact—and having seen Gail with a new companion, he now knew absolutely that both of them had moved on. Nevertheless, he was torn. With Leo still unconscious, his mother hanging from an emotional thread, and several major investigations crowding his brain, Joe knew for a fact that he was poorly placed to begin a new relationship.
And yet, he kept climbing the stairs, trusting to instinct, Lyn’s freely admitted enthusiasm, and the pure dumb luck that had brought them together.
He reached the landing and stopped, the pounding of his heart contrasting with the utter silence all around him. He stared at her door, wondering, still, if he should knock.
Putting an end to his doubts, the door opened. Lyn stood on the threshold, wearing a long, sleeveless nightdress, buttons running down to the hem, her hair loose around her shoulders.
She smiled at him and reached out with one hand. “I was hoping you’d make it.”
He took her hand and followed her through the room with all the boxes. She didn’t lead him to the living room, though, but chose another door to the side, crossed a hallway, and entered a warm, sweet-smelling bedroom, lighted by a single candle beside a large, old-fashioned four-poster bed.
She turned in the middle of the floor and placed her hands on his shoulders. Without a word, she slid his coat off his arms, letting it fall to the ground.
He removed his jacket and shirt, and the rest of his clothing, with her help, until they stood as they had upon entering, she still in her nightdress, he now totally naked.
Only then did he rest his hands on her waist, his fingers warming to the feel of her skin beneath the thin cotton. He drew her near to him, her arms slipping around his shoulders, and they kissed as never before—slowly and deeply. Joe moved his hands up across her shoulder blades and down along her sides, over her hips, feeling his excitement building.
He stepped slightly away and began unbuttoning her nightgown, not hurriedly, enjoying how the candlelight caught her eyes, and the smooth contours of the skin he was revealing.
When he’d reached her navel, he returned to her shoulders, slipped the nightdress’s straps off, and let the garment gather in a circle around her waist.
“My God,” he murmured, drawing her near again, feeling her shiver slightly as her breasts pressed against his bare chest. They kissed again, and with one final sweep, he slid his hands under the swath of cotton at her hips, dropped it to the floor, and lifted her up, feeling her legs lock around his waist.
He carried her the short distance to the bed, and they both half tumbled into its embrace, laughing.
W
illy stood perfectly still in the darkness, adjusting to the cold. He was beyond the glare of a nearby streetlight, in the shadow of a rickety, wooden triple-decker dating back a hundred years, in one of the poorer sections of the village of Bellows Falls.
There wasn’t much activity. It was late, the traffic all but petered out. The weather was keeping most pedestrians off the sidewalks, and although there were windows still glowing with light, Willy was pretty sanguine he’d be left alone.
Not positive, though. Bellows Falls was quirky enough to hold back a surprise. A pretty village, with ancient mills, once fueled by the power of its namesake cascade, it was wedged between the Connecticut River and a prominence named Oak Hill, whose sheer bulk appeared to shove and compress the village onto a narrow shelf paralleling the water’s edge.
Unfortunately, Bellows Falls had a reputation at odds with its appearance. Where once those mills had kept both mansions and worker housing bustling and trim, now their stagnant silence had relegated too many buildings to the status of neglected, parceled-up tenements.
The spirit of the place struggled on, the efforts of its boosters telling and ongoing, but the sheer weight of its financial challenges was like an iceberg’s bulk—just under the surface and massive in proportion.
Sadly, as a result, Bellows Falls was a prime place to conduct police business. Which was why Willy was here now.
He checked his watch slowly, sensitive to making any sudden movements. He’d been here two hours. Ever since being told by old man Griffis that Wayne Nugent had raped Andy in prison, Willy had been in quiet pursuit of the man. E. T. hadn’t stopped at just the name. With prompting—and occasional breaks for more beer and some sobbing—he’d also delivered other pertinent details, all of which had helped Willy get a line on Nugent and begin tracking him down.
Not that it had been a huge challenge. Nugent was one of humanity’s too common opportunists—neither clever nor calculating, but certainly unhesitating to grasp every offer that came within reach. He randomly raped or robbed or simply self-indulged with drugs and liquor. He stayed with people, sleeping with them, robbing them blind, or both, leaving behind a wake of disgruntled sources all too happy to unload into Willy’s accommodating ear.
His latest harbor was a woman in Bellows Falls who lived on the second floor at the top of a narrow exterior staircase, across from where Willy had been waiting ever since he’d spotted Wayne downing shots at one of the watering holes on Rockingham Street.
It wouldn’t be much longer. It was after two a.m., when the bars closed. Nugent was guaranteed to push the limit and then stagger out toward his latest version of home.
It was then that Willy intended to intercept him, between one oasis and the next, and to begin a conversation he anticipated would result in Nugent’s arrest. Lord only knew how many times Willy had made just such things happen in the past—and Wayne Nugent was just the kind of guy he loved to go after. The fact that the man’s involvement with Dan Griffis’s misbehavior or Leo’s car crash was peripheral mattered less to Willy than his own discovery that a bad man had gotten away with driving a fellow human being to suicide. In Willy’s mind, this was merely a logical extension of Joe’s initial assignment to pump E. T. Griffis for everything he could get.
Nugent first emerged as little more than a dark motion against a somber background, although Willy, a combat-trained sniper, had little trouble spotting what most would have missed entirely. He pulled back farther into his own shadows and watched as his target drew nearer, studying his hands, his gait, his manner of dress, and estimating from his body language how he might react to a sudden crisis. He also studied the man’s clothing to see if any allowances had been made for quick access to a weapon.
Satisfied, he waited for Nugent to walk past, trailing a cloud of cheap beer and cigarette smoke, and soundlessly fell in behind him.
As Nugent reached the bottom of the exterior staircase and placed his hand on the wooden railing, Willy clearly but quietly ordered him, “Police, Wayne. Do not move.”
Nugent’s reaction was hair-triggered and totally unexpected. He didn’t freeze, startle, twist around, or shout in surprise. Instead, as instantly as if he’d been launched from a cannon, and using the riser under his foot as a push-off, he simply propelled himself backward, guided solely by Willy’s voice.
Caught completely by surprise, Willy tried fending off the sheer bulk of the body hurtling at him, sidestepping and throwing up his good arm for protection. He staggered backward, hit the hood of a parked car with the small of his back, and catapulted over as Nugent, deflected by the impact, came up against the car’s side instead, thereby managing to stay on his feet. As Willy rolled off the hood and fell hard to the ground, Nugent took off at a sprint.
“God damned son of a bitch,” Willy swore as he staggered to his feet and gave chase, amazed by the other man’s reflexes. Already, Nugent was halfway down the block, despite his inebriated state.
Willy had given no thought whatsoever to asking the local police department for assistance with this, purely on principle. And even now, as his quarry began vanishing into the darkness, he didn’t rue his decision. He was hoping, however, that Nugent’s adrenaline would run out sooner rather than later.
As it turned out, that didn’t matter. When Nugent reached the next major cross street, a car pulled up out of nowhere and—in defiance of typical behavior—came to a complete stop at the sign. With the same reactive fluidity that he’d used against Willy, Nugent ran straight up to the driver’s door, yanked it open, pulled out the astonished young man at the wheel, and all but threw him across the sidewalk. In the time it took Willy to cover five yards, the car’s rear wheels were burning and squealing as the vehicle peeled away, its open door slamming shut from the momentum.
“Shit!” Willy yelled, shifting directions to aim for his own car, parked within sight. No longer simply irritated at his man for being half rabbit, he was already visualizing ranks of irritated senior officers looming in his proximate future.
He unlocked his car at a run using the remote, half fell in behind the wheel, and jammed the key into the ignition. His one hand controlling the car, he used the same technique as Nugent to slam his door, and swerved around the baffled, dispossessed driver, now staggering in the middle of the street.
From the air, Bellows Falls fit roughly between two major streets that matched up at either end like parentheses placed too close together, and which therefore formed an oval-shaped loop. The one cutting through downtown proper was named Rockingham—where Nugent had spent half the night drinking. The other was Atkinson, where, with Willy in hot pursuit, he was now driving north at exuberant speed. As Willy could have predicted given his present turn of luck, the Bellows Falls Police Department was located just beyond the northern juncture of this loop. And, naturally, it was just as Nugent was approaching this spot, hoping to burst through it and beyond to the interstate entry ramp some five miles off, that a patrol officer, no doubt bored with his own paperwork, left the office in his cruiser and began heading south.
He didn’t need a radar to interpret what was approaching. Nor did he have to think twice before hitting his blue lights.
Willy saw the light bar burst to life ahead of Nugent’s stolen car. This time, however, his reaction was almost muted. “Christ,” he snorted quietly, by now philosophical. “What next?” He quickly moved to turn on his own hidden grille strobes.
Nugent’s response was finally predictable. He cut his wheel right, went sliding broadside toward the oncoming cruiser, and, just shy of collision, shot into the parking lot of a gas station at the juncture of Atkinson and Rockingham, intent on heading down the latter in the opposite direction.
The cruiser skidded to a stop, unable to turn without hitting Willy, and swung around instead in his wake, his siren now joining the light show that was jaggedly bouncing off the nearby buildings.
Willy hit the radio transmit button he had mounted to his steering wheel to favor his disability.
“BFPD, this is VBI two-four, directly in front of you. Do you copy?”
The response was a delayed and breathless “Ten-Four. This is M-eight-five-one. What’s going on?”
By now, all three cars were tearing down Rockingham, the nearby red-brick walls whipping past at white-knuckle speed. Willy could only hope that no one else would be taking in the sights on a wintry night.
“In pursuit of a stolen vehicle. Better alert everybody on both sides of the river.”
A woman’s calm voice then broke in. “This is Bellows Falls Dispatch. Do you have a description of the vehicle?”
With a small sigh at the inevitable reprimands to come, Willy rattled off the make, model, and registration of the car ahead, mentioned that it was stolen, and identified Wayne Nugent, knowing that his criminal record would pop up on the dispatcher’s screen.
Nugent, in the meantime, was fast approaching a choice: to turn left at the bottom of the village’s small square and cross the bridge into neighboring New Hampshire, or continue south to the village limits and select Route 5 into Westminster and the interstate’s southern ramp, or west toward Saxton’s River and the back roads beyond.
He skipped the bridge, eliminating New Hampshire for the moment, and led the way up and out of town, abandoning, among other things, its quaint and demure twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit—something Willy thought he’d include on the list of offenses he was mentally tallying up, for fun if nothing else.
“Eight-five-one—Dispatch,” he heard over the radio from the car behind him, “we’re proceeding south on Westminster toward Red Light Hill.”
“Ten-four,” was the laconic reply.
Westminster Street was merely Rockingham renamed, wider and flatter than it was in the village. Nugent took advantage of this to extend the gap between himself and his pursuers, apparently not knowing, as they did, what lay ahead. At the aforementioned Red Light Hill—actually a four-way intersection—his two easiest choices were either a hard left or a steep hill straight up, unless he opted for an even tougher right turn back onto Atkinson all over again. In all cases, the one common denominator was a need to slow down.
Willy didn’t know if Nugent was too new to the area or too drunk and scared to care, but as they approached the junction, he began to realize that the lead car wasn’t going to survive.
He eased off the accelerator and keyed his mike, “This is VBI two-four. I think we’re looking at a ten-fifty in the making. I recommend we drop back.”
The cruiser driver didn’t answer, but he made no effort to pass Willy in the straightaway.
Now far ahead of them, the stolen car chose the left-hand turn, not surprisingly shooting for the distant interstate he’d been aiming at when the patrolman had changed his plans. Willy saw little puffs of smoke in the car’s red lights as the rear end swerved and the tires burned with a sudden braking, and then the whole package yielded to simple physics. Nugent broke into an uncontrolled skid, his car slithered both sideways and to the right until it caught the edge of a concrete median, and then it flipped, vaulting spectacularly into the night air. It hung there for a split second, as if arrested by a movie projector glitch, before coming down into a gas station driveway, careening into both of the station’s outermost pumps.
There was a flash, a flicker, a long and bated pause, and then, almost mercifully, a fireball explosion that made Willy drop onto the passenger seat for cover. A thunderous
whump
filled the air and compressed his lungs, even inside the closed car, followed by a showering of small, hard objects all around, including one that smashed his windshield.
With the patrolman’s yelling on the radio as a backdrop, Willy got out of his car and surveyed the scene before him—a beautiful, constant fountain of flame, with the car and the mangled pumps at its heart.
“Guess there won’t be a trial,” he said to himself.