Bellows Falls

Chapter 14

IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT when my phone buzzed me back to the present. I’d been sitting half-conscious in my office, the paperwork I’d hoped to complete still littering my desk, victim of a seriously distracted mind.

The voice on the other end belonged to Jonathon Michael, and I could tell from its wavy clarity that he was speaking on a cell phone. “Joe, you up for a small drive? Steve Kiley would like to meet with you, me, and Kathy at the Rockingham barracks in about a half-hour.”

I looked at my watch. It was closing in on midnight. “I take it this is not a social gathering?”

“You got that. Turns out he just found out about our little project. Kathy left a message for him a couple of days ago but never followed up on it.”

“Swell. I’ll be there.”

I hung up, longing for the distracted state I’d just left. What Jonathon Michael had just reported meant that we now had the supervising officer of the drug task force worked up enough to demand a reckoning in the middle of the night.

Kiley was a strong-willed, ambitious man, who as head of this elite team had gained a stature rare among the State Police. It hadn’t inflated his ego-he was a better cop than that-but it had given him power and independence in a system known to be tightfisted with both. The result was a man who was used to more respect than he obviously felt he’d just received from us-and respect was a touchy item for both him and his crew.

The “drug police,” to use the vernacular of some of his colleagues, conspicuously marched to a different drummer. Casually dressed, often bearded and long-haired, task force members kept their own hours, ignored the spit-and-polish of their peers, and sometimes behaved more like the people they were after than the ones they depended upon for backup.

This led to a good deal of ribbing, some of it ill-natured, along with a few suspicions that all that exposure to money and dope could lead to unhealthy habits. Being in the trenches of drug enforcement, far from the ranks and often away from one’s family for long stretches, Kiley and his people became hypersensitive to such innuendoes. Respect and courtesy from colleagues became unstated prerequisites for good morale, and slights were not ignored.

I had no doubts about the nature of the conversation I’d just been invited to join. The surprise was who I met after pulling into the barracks parking lot forty-five minutes later.

A small, compact man wearing a beard, T-shirt, and faded jeans stepped away from the shadows of a pickup truck as I emerged from my car.

“You Gunther?” he asked.

I kept my eyes on his hands. His tone of voice was neutral, but the time and setting were far from it. “Who’s asking?”

“Bill Deets. I’m on assignment with the task force from Bellows Falls.”

I stuck out my hand, which he shook after a slight hesitation. “Glad to meet you. I’m just about to have a powwow with your boss. You coming in?”

He shook his head. “You need to know you’re barking up the wrong tree with Brian and Emily.”

I raised my eyebrows. Padget was common knowledge, especially to someone with this man’s connections. Doyle was another matter. “I’m going after Emily?”

His face hardened. “You looked her up in the computer a few hours ago. You think she’s tied into Norm Bouch and put the screws to Brian. All that’s so full of shit it’s not funny.”

I remembered the quiet dispatcher hovering in the background when Davis and I had done exactly what Deets had described. Unless, of course, Davis himself had spilled the beans. The mere thought of that gave birth to a small headache. “I guess this means you’ve got a better idea about what’s going on,” I told him.

“I know you’re about to ruin two good reputations for nothing.”

I considered several responses to that, including trying to allay his fears. But I didn’t know the truth myself and was suspicious enough at his approach to question his motives. So far in this case, I’d found only surprises where I’d expected the mundane, and I didn’t feel like adding to the confusion by taking Bill Deets into my confidence.

I decided instead to feed him some of his own attitude. “Ruining reputations is something I’ll leave to the rumor mill. Talk to Kiley after we’re done. If he thinks it’s appropriate, he’ll tell you what’s going on. My advice either way would be to tell your colleagues on the PD to lighten up on Padget and give him their support. Right now, they’re the ones acting like he’s already been tried and convicted.”

I didn’t wait for him to answer but made my way quickly to the building’s front door.

The Rockingham barracks of the Vermont State Police was the same nondescript, single-story, brick and cement design that had been used for every barracks in the state. It was, like its clones, too small, unimaginatively designed, and oppressive to work in. It fit my mood perfectly.

I stepped into the small lobby and presented myself to the dispatcher behind the thick glass panel in the wall. A minute later, Kiley, tall and broad, in cowboy boots and a ponytail, threw open the door to the interior. His smile looked sutured in place at great cost.

“Joe. The others just got here. Glad you could make it.”

I bit my tongue and merely shook his hand.

He took me down the long central hallway to an office at the far end. “I heard what you were up to,” he said without looking back, “and asked Kathy Bartlett for an update. She thought it might be helpful if we all got together at one meeting to sort things out.”

Despite my irritation, I didn’t really fault his testiness. His job was among the more dangerous in law enforcement, much of it undercover, all of it dealing with people whose trustworthiness could be doubted by their own mothers. If I’d discovered that a statewide investigation involving my turf had been launched behind my back, I would’ve been irritable, too.

“Nice of you to pick a time we were all free,” was all I said under my breath.

Jonathon Michael and Kathy Bartlett were standing in the room we entered, Jon on his tiptoes, trying to peer out of one of those too-high windows at the gloominess beyond, Kathy in a sweatshirt and loose-fitting jeans, looking as if she’d just been tossed out of bed. Grim-faced, she merely nodded at me as I walked in.

“Grab some seats,” Kiley said like a genial host, pulling a chair from under the large central table and making himself comfortable. “We might be here a while.”

Bartlett gave him a deadly look. “All right. You’re pissed and I’m sorry. It’d be nice to progress beyond that.”

Kiley leaned forward and tapped the tabletop gently with his finger. “The task force reports to your office, Kathy. Was it so goddamn difficult to drop me a line?”

She sat, too, but in a chair against the wall, her hands buried in her pockets. “We’ve been over that. I screwed up. But we had good cause for not involving the task force in the first place, so none of what’s said tonight is going to change anything-except that I promise not to drop the ball again. I mean, Jesus, Steve, we’ve worked well together for years.”

But his concern, as we already knew, had little to do with bureaucratic mix-ups. “We were formed by general agreement,” he said, “so local PDs and the State Police could clear their books of exactly this kind of case. I’d like to know what good cause it was that made you go behind my back.” He looked hard at me and continued, “Joe’s got a criminal case against a cop. Is there something about my own squad I should know?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but Kathy cut me off. “No. Absolutely not. It was pure and simple a conflict of interest, as I already told you. Your Bill Deets is buddy-buddy with his old department, and in particular Brian Padget, and I personally didn’t want to put you in a tight spot. If things had worked out more smoothly, we would have talked about it calmly and at a more civilized hour and settled the matter then and there. I realize paranoia can be a life-saving instinct, but there is absolutely nothing else going on here.”

But Kiley was shaking his head like a disappointed father. “I have officers from half a dozen departments-”

Kathy interrupted. “You ever targeted one of those departments when one of their officers was working for you?” She’d done her homework, like the lawyer she was.

Kiley shrugged defensively. “It wouldn’t have caused a problem. I’ve got enough guys that I could’ve isolated the one to maintain the case’s integrity.”

I hadn’t planned on mentioning my meeting with Bill Deets. Allowing that his motives had been genuine, I’d been willing to forget his combative approach. But I owed him no favors, while I was beholden to Kathy Bartlett. Steve Kiley was no neophyte-he knew half of what he was saying was simple posturing. But he was also human, was feeling self-righteous, and had taken the opportunity to pound us on the head with our own transgressions.

Given the hour, therefore, I felt enough was enough. “I just had a chat with Deets outside in the parking lot.”

It had the desired effect. The tennis match between Bartlett and Kiley disintegrated into open stares.

“Now?” Kiley asked.

“Yeah. Just before I knocked on your door. I invited him to join us. He wasn’t interested.”

Kathy fought hard to suppress a smile. Kiley openly scowled.

“Look,” I continued, finally sitting down myself. “That doesn’t matter, either. He just wanted me to know Padget and Doyle are straight shooters and I was barking up the wrong tree.”

“Who’s Doyle?”

I waved that away. “One of Padget’s fellow officers. The point is, he not only knew I was looking into Doyle within hours after I started, but he knew where and when you were meeting with us. This is Vermont-everybody knows what everybody else is doing. That’s why I asked Jack Derby and then Kathy if we could bypass the task force, that and the fact that my department is becoming increasingly invested in whatever’s going on.”

“That homicide you found this afternoon?” he asked.

“Right-one of Bouch’s runners.”

Kiley was still looking unhappy. “I’m not going to argue the conflict of interest thing. You might even have a point. But have you done a lot of drug cases? It can be like wandering around a minefield without a map, and some of those mines might be cases we are working on, or at least snitches we’re using.”

Jonathon Michael spoke up for the first time, still leaning in the corner near the windows. “We’ll run the names by you, Steve, same as always. You can help keep our noses clean.”

“And if we get our hands on anything valuable after it’s all done,” Bartlett added, “cars, houses, cash, whatever, I’ll try for the federal forfeiture route so the government will cut us each a check for our good deeds.”

Kiley gave her a sour look. “Christ. That’s not what this was about, Kathy.”

She held up both her hands. “I know, I know. It’s also not what I meant-you know that, too.”

Mollified nevertheless-as Bartlett knew he would be-Kiley shrugged and stood up. “All right, what the hell. I guess I had my little temper tantrum. Getting sensitive in my old age.”

Kathy and I joined him and began herding toward the door. “No,” she said. “I had it coming. Lesson learned. Jon and Joe’ll keep in touch, and if you feel things are going off track again, let me know. Just do it between eight and five, okay?”

Having left Kiley behind, Bartlett, Michael, and I stood in the warm breeze of the parking lot, bathed in the colorless glow of a full moon.

“Don’t take that keeping in touch too literally,” Kathy said softly, as if the parked cruisers nearby might report back to their masters. “There are lots of drug investigations that happen in this state without task force blessing or involvement. Right, Jon?”

He merely nodded, his eyes on the invisible horizon. “Is that true what you said about forfeiting any assets federally,” I asked, “even though this is a state case?”

“Sure,” she answered. “They’re separate issues. The forfeiture’s a civil matter. If we pitched it to a state judge, whatever money we got would probably end up in the General Fund. The feds work on the incentive system.” She jerked a thumb at the barracks behind us. “People like Steve can be thin-skinned, but they’re as broke as the rest of us.”

“And as open to legal bribes,” Jonathon added, as if to himself.

“What I’d like to know,” Kathy said to me, her face coming closer and her voice flattening slightly, “is what you were doing digging into Doyle openly enough that Deets found out about it three seconds later. I thought we were putting the Padget case on the back burner for a couple of days ’til we got more background.”

“I yielded to impulse,” I admitted. “After we found where Jasper was killed, or probably killed, I went to see Padget. I kept thinking of him twisting in the wind… ”

I was surprised by her reaction. “How is he?”

“Not good, and he’ll probably get worse. His real problem is he’s not being straight with us. He said he first met Jan Bouch through a domestic call to their house. I checked the log. He never went on any such call. Emily did, though, more than any other officer.”

There was a long pause. Jonathon brought his gaze from the night sky to me. “Which tells you what?”

“That maybe we won’t be going to Burlington quite as soon as I thought.”

I drove home in the morning’s early hours, the only car on the road for the entire trip, my brain struggling with the dozens of loose threads we’d identified so far, many of which didn’t even look like they came from the same fabric.

By the time I crept into the bedroom, the various scenarios had started bleeding into one another like wet inkblots, and with about as much clarity. I dumped my clothes on the floor and slipped in under the sheet, fully expecting to spend the night’s remaining hours staring at the moon in the skylight overhead.

“Been having fun?” Gail’s voice floated in the air like a comforting caress.

I reached over and kissed her cheek. “Non-stop. Sorry I woke you up.”

“That’s okay. I got to bed early tonight. What were you doing?”

“Smoothing political feathers… I wish I could start answering questions instead. They’re beginning to breed like gerbils.”

She rolled over and draped one arm across my chest. “Tell me.”

Normally, I would have begged off, for her sake if nothing else. It wasn’t like she didn’t need all the rest she could get. But her interest was genuine, and she was one of the best sounding boards I had. I gave her a guided tour of the tangled mess we were confronting.

After a few moments’ reflection, she commented, “Sounds like you need to find out what those two young cops are up to.”

“And how Jan Bouch plays into it.”

Gail punched the pillows behind her head and slid to a semi-sitting position. “I know Anne Murphy.”

It was more than a statement of fact. “Does this have anything to do with what you said a few days ago, about how ‘we’ needed to do something about all this?”

“I have a background that could be useful here-outside the SA’s office.”

I knew what she was referring to-two decades of counseling women at the local crisis center, being on the boards of half the social welfare organizations in town, even heading the town’s board of selectmen for a stretch. She had the political and social bloodlines of a thoroughbred. “What’re you thinking?” I asked.

“That maybe Anne will tell me things she wouldn’t share with you.”

“Which we might be able to use to slip through Norm’s back door?”

She laid a hand on my forearm. “Maybe. I’m going to do this strictly by the rules, briefing Derby if necessary. But I’m hoping a man of Norm’s ego wouldn’t think his wife could betray him, even inadvertently, which in my book makes her a good way to get at him.”

“God, how you’ve wandered from your days in the commune.”

She slugged me in the shoulder. “Lucky for you.”