Gatekeeper (2 page)

Gunther looked at him briefly without comment. Klesczewski answered the implied question. "Some teenage kid walked in just as these two were facing off. He had his sweatshirt hood down low over his face—it's a fad right now, plus it's a little on the cool side. Arnie swore he thought he was a bad guy, why, I don't know."

"The kid was clueless?" Gunther asked.

"Oh, yeah. Went to the hospital, too. He could barely talk, he was so shaken up. Like I said, the whole thing was just waiting to happen—more and more dopers doing more and more rip-offs. Storekeepers getting cranked by the week. Matter of time before somebody killed somebody. Maybe this one was itching for an opportunity, maybe he was just frazzled to the limit."

Despite the nature of the conversation, Gunther suppressed a smile at his young colleague's seasoned attitude. Ron Klesczewski had been a fresh-faced detective when Gunther had run the Brattleboro squad a few years back. He'd been given command of it upon Joe's departure only because Gunther had taken the most obvious successor along with him to his new job. A natural with paperwork and computers, Klesczewski had been slow gaining self-confidence otherwise, although things had obviously improved now that he was top dog. Gunther's amusement was in adjusting the new to his memories of the old.

"She was on drugs?" he asked.

Klesczewski shrugged. "Blood tests'll probably tell us before she will—assuming she survives. But she has the look, all the way down to the fresh track marks in her arm."

Gunther gazed once more at the gore covering the linoleum behind the counter—a body's lifeblood diluted with the root cause of its own destruction. Ron Klesczewski was perfectly correct about the inevitability of Brattleboro's increasing dilemma, but he could just as easily have extended it to include the entire state. While bent on pushing the same old romantic, fuzzy image of cows and maple syrup and grizzled farmers muttering, "Ah-yup," Vermont was in fact facing a heroin epidemic. Almost one hundred fatal overdoses had been racked up in the past ten years, and countless more reversed in hospitals and ambulances. Small potatoes compared to Boston or New York, but not so negligible on a per capita basis, in a state of a half million residents. And it was climbing fast. The state police drug task force, which used to count heroin busts in the single digits five years back, was now spending 50 percent of its time on these cases alone.

"What's her name?" he asked, almost as an afterthought.

Klesczewski again consulted his notes. "Laurie Davis."

Gunther became very still, catching his younger colleague's attention.

"You okay? You know her?"

"She a blonde?" Gunther asked.

Klesczewski began rummaging around in a box he'd placed on the counter. "Hang on. I think I can do better than that."

He extracted a plastic evidence envelope with a driver's license captured within it. Gunther held it at an angle under the bleak lighting to better see the small photo.

"And this was definitely her?" he asked.

Klesczewski nodded. "She's got more meat on her there. I have crime scene photos in the digital camera if you don't mind the small screen."

Gunther shook his head and returned the envelope to him, feeling tired and mournful. "Doesn't matter. I know her."

* * *

Two hours later, Joe was staring at the coffee machine in a hallway off the waiting room at Brattleboro's Memorial Hospital, wondering if more coffee at this time of night would qualify as suicide by insomnia.

"Don't do it," came a woman's voice from behind him, as if his thoughts had been blinking on and off above his head.

He turned to see an equally tired-looking Gail Zigman approaching from the doors of the intensive care unit. She gave him a half-hearted smile and slipped her arm through his. "We both need some sleep," she finished.

"How's she doing?" he asked her.

"She's alive. They did what they could, but the blood loss was huge. Basically, she's in a coma and they have no idea if she'll come out of it." She rested her head against his shoulder and sighed. "At least they're getting some brain activity—whatever that means."

In books written a hundred years earlier, Gail might have been called Joe's "particular friend." She was that, certainly—his sounding board, the echo of his conscience, his lover of many years—but she was not his wife. Perhaps because they'd met later in life, or were in many ways too independent, or simply were loners drawn together by instinct, they'd formed an eccentric partnership as solid as that found in a good marriage, but in which they sometimes didn't see each other for weeks at a time. In fact, for half of each year, Gail lived and worked as a lobbyist in the state capital of Montpelier, which under normal conditions was a two-hour drive away.

Not that these conditions applied. Gail had driven down at warp speed following Joe's phone call to her, and had been monitoring Laurie Davis's progress from just outside the operating room ever since.

Laurie Davis was her niece—her sister, Rachel's, daughter.

Gunther kissed the top of her head. "She might get lucky. Sometimes the brain just needs a little nap before waking up, good as new."

They began walking down the empty, bland hallway toward the elevators at the far end.

"You're talking about a previously healthy body," Gail responded. "Not someone already half dead from drugs."

He thought about saying something comforting, as he would have with anyone else, but that wasn't their way. Plus, they'd both seen the girl, or what was left of her. There was little point pretending she wasn't a train wreck before Arnie Weller's bullet had torn into her skinny chest.

Gail shook her head, her voice hardening as she stared at the floor. "What the hell was she thinking?"

Joe felt uncomfortable. Laurie wasn't his relation. He'd only met her a couple of times. But she'd lived in Brattleboro, having moved up from suburban Connecticut at Gail's urging, and he was wondering now if he shouldn't have known that she'd fallen on hard times. He wasn't on the PD any longer, but he stayed connected. It would have been easy to keep tabs on her. Cops did that for one another's families, even extended ones.

"Thinking probably isn't a huge prerequisite," he suggested vaguely instead. "Seems like it's usually more about dulling the pain."

She looked up at him sharply, and he realized he'd unintentionally turned the tables on her, causing her to question her own responsibilities here.

"Sorry," he added quickly. "I didn't mean it to come out that way."

But Gail wasn't looking for a way out. "You're right," she admitted. "If she had been feeling any pain, I wouldn't have known about it. I didn't keep in touch—barely paid attention to her." She paused to sigh. "My sister's going to fall apart."

"You haven't reached her yet?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Got the answering machine. They're probably on the town. They do that a lot. It was one of the issues between them and Laurie." She paused again and then added, "Everyone thought Laurie coming to Vermont would give them all a break." 

Chapter 2

David Spinney was having what his mom called a space cadet moment, when your thoughts are miles outside your body. Her line was that those were definitely good-news, bad-news times—good if you didn't like what you were doing; bad if you needed to be paying attention, like if you were running a table saw or something. Being a nurse, she tended toward practical thinking.

But David wasn't worried. He was just riding around Springfield in the back of a car with friends, listening to music, complaining about teachers and girlfriends and parents, the car slipping through successive pools of light as it coasted along the cool summer darkness from streetlamp to streetlamp. It was one of the safest places he could think of to let his mind drift. Not that his mind was too far off—just a few blocks, really, to home and family, and the uncertainties he was feeling there.

"Hey, Dave, pass the six-pack up."

Absentmindedly, he retrieved the beer from the floorboards between his feet and dropped it onto the bench seat between the two young men up front. The older of the two, Craig Steidle, who'd bought the beer and owned the car, extracted a can for himself, handed another to Wayne, beside him, and dangled a third over his shoulder from his fingertips.

"Take one, man."

David shook his head at the eyes in the rearview mirror. "Maybe later."

Craig laughed but didn't move his hand. "More for the rest of us, then. Want one, Little Chris?"

Chris was sitting beside David, his head bopping to the music thrumming throughout the car. "Cool."

The can arched through the air and bounced off Chris's leg, making him jump in surprise.

"You were supposed to catch that, dumbass," Craig taunted him. "Make sure you aim it out the window when you open it."

Chris was the youngest of them, at fifteen, although David only beat him by ten months. Nevertheless, it qualified Chris as the butt of most of their jokes, for which David was guiltily thankful. He'd once been the one catching all of Craig's flak.

Chris opened the beer as instructed, literally holding it outside the car as Craig pulled off the road into the Zoo, the nickname for the Springfield Shopping Plaza and the primary hangout for kids from all over town. Once a marsh poking a blunt peninsula into a bend of the Black River, it was completely paved over now, lined with a string of the usual retail outlets and looking—like the rest of Springfield—a little the worse for wear.

"Don't wave the goddamn thing around, stupid," Craig yelled back at Chris over the music. "You'll get us all busted."

Shamefaced and confused, Chris withdrew the can, spilling some of its contents into his lap. He ducked down and took a surreptitious swig to partially restore his self-respect.

Craig aimed the car for the plaza's cul-de-sac, ostensibly at a small cluster of U-Haul trucks, but in fact toward the Zoo's inner sanctum and well-known place of ill repute—a poorly lit footbridge connecting the back of the plaza to Pearl Street and the old Fellows machine-tool plant on the river's far bank. He drove slowly, checking out the social clusters of kids hanging around parked cars like shipwreck survivors clinging to flotsam. His hand dangled out the window so he could flick his fingers at those he knew in a series of studiously casual greetings. From the back seat, next to pimply-faced Chris and his self-consciously suckled beer, David granted Craig a begrudging respect—as obnoxious and transparent as he could be, Craig did have a certain hard-won bearing. Currently a resident of the town's Westview housing development, down-and-out through several generations, he'd turned his limited talents into something his peers saluted with a measure of respect. He also had a criminal record, if a minor one, which added to his luster among the younger teenagers.

Craig slowed to a halt a dozen yards shy of the footbridge steps. These were the key attraction to the place, combined with its isolation and its escape route potential. The steps were seen by the kids as a forum, where like-minded people could privately convene. The merchants and the police saw it differently, of course—as a gathering spot for dopers and drunks and a place where at least one rape had occurred within the last few years.

"Hey, Jenny," Craig called out to a young woman sitting half sprawled across the steps, unaware or uncaring of how her posture and her miniskirt defeated any hope of modesty.

Jenny merely looked at him, scowling slightly.

"Come over here." Craig made to take a swig from his beer can, pausing just long enough to add in an undertone, "Skanky bitch."

Wayne chuckled beside him as Jenny made a show of reluctantly getting to her feet and ambling over to the car, stretching to reveal both her boredom and her bare midriff.

"What do 
you
 want, Craig?" she asked, emphasizing the "you" as if she were addressing a bad smell.

Craig smiled and placed his hand on her hip, his thumb flicking the silver ring piercing her navel. "What've you got?"

She laughed but didn't move away. "More than you can handle."

In the back seat, ignored by both of them, David watched her through the open window, at once attracted and repelled by the messages she projected. He studied the fit of her clothes, imagined her experience with men, and struggled to balance the stirrings he felt with the knowledge that were he to "get lucky" with her, he'd probably end up disappointed—if he were fortunate enough to get off so lightly.

"You never complained," Craig was saying, his hand slipping a little lower on her hip. "You picked up some new tricks?"

"If I did, they weren't from you."

Craig's hand stopped, and David could see from her eyes that she feared she'd gone too far.

"I could maybe pass them along," she added, her sultry tone sounding strained.

But Craig had lost interest. "Yeah, along with Christ knows what kind of disease. I can live without that."

She straightened, stung. "Fuck you, too, asshole." She turned away as if to move off.

He laughed, letting his hand hover against the outside of the door. "I thought that's what we were just talking about. Hey, hey, come back. Lighten up, for Christ's sake. When did you get so touchy? What else you got for me?"

She paused, and David could sense her weighing her options, which, it occurred to him, might have been a bit of a reach.

"Why're you such a jerk?"

Craig brushed his fingertips against the back of her hand. "Come on, Jenny. You got something good, I can ditch these assholes and you and me can find a place."

Wayne laughed a little nervously, as if he'd been asked to do something he didn't completely understand. No one paid him any attention.

"I maybe got something," Jenny finally admitted.

"All right," Craig drawled. "That's my girl."

She straightened suddenly and took a step away from the car. "Shit."

They all followed her stare and saw a police car slowly approaching.

"Fuck this," Craig muttered, but didn't move.

"What d'we do?" Wayne asked plaintively.