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Chapter 22

The meeting this time took place downstairs, in Ron Klesczewski's bailiwick, the police department's detective squad. Joe always felt odd returning to his old haunts of over twenty years, finding them both familiar and fundamentally altered. Klesczewski, at least, was among the former, looking older outside his white crime scene suit, but as comfortably in place as Joe imagined he felt anywhere. No one who met Ron out of context ever guessed what he did for a living, but he was a good cop, reliable and intuitive, and perhaps, Joe believed, precisely because it had never come naturally.

Joe, Ron, Sam, and a detective named Cathy Eakins were sitting around the battered conference table in the small catchall room adjacent to the actual squad room.

"Okay," Ron was saying, "so-Oliver Mueller. What did you want to know? Cathy's our resident expert, by the way, so now that I've brought it up, don't ask me anything."

"Same for me," Joe echoed. "Sam just told me that he'd come up on our radar and that you guys had dealt with him more than anyone else in the area."

"We have a lot of good intel growing on him," Cathy Eakins acknowledged, patting a thick folder before her. "And it's all pretty recent. He's only been up here a couple of years."

"That's what I heard," Joe said. "Sam told me his daughter was killed in Jersey by an Internet stalker?"

Eakins flipped open the folder. "Yeah. Very sad, but not particularly original. Teenage girl on her home computer, hooks up with some creep who sweet-talks her. They meet at a motel outside Summit, New Jersey, and he murders her. He was caught within two days-basically, the local cops told the girl's computer, 'Take us to the creep,' and it did."

"What was the creep like?" Sam asked.

Eakins shrugged-a no-nonsense type. "A middle-class worker bee-a bean counter in the business office of a large bank, stuck in a cubicle for fifteen years with his packed-at-home sandwiches, his dead-end life, and his out-of-control fantasies."

"And Mueller wigged out afterwards," Joe suggested.

"Yeah," Eakins replied. "He might've anyhow, but the killer only got twenty to life, instead of the death penalty, which they still have down there. That pretty much pushed Mueller over the edge."

"She was his only kid?"

Eakins's eyes widened. "No-that part was weird. She was the middle of three. Not even the only daughter. But he still walked away from all of them, including the wife. He's up here solo."

"Still? No girlfriend?"

"All by his lonesome."

Klesczewski laughed softly. "He has us, instead."

"Okay," Joe broke in. "The reason we're interested is because we want to rule him out for our two killings-Nashman and Metz. From what we can figure, both of them were lured here by a phony teenage girl, told exactly what to do and how-all the way from what transportation to use, to how many key cards to take from the front desk-and then murdered, almost immediately upon arrival. Does Mueller strike you as someone who could do that?"

Eakins pushed her lips out thoughtfully before answering, "I don't want to be a wise-ass, but what did the people working right next to his cubicle think of the predator I just described? Mueller's a pain in the butt. He walks into closed meetings, trespasses onto people's lawns, protests without permits, gets into fights, and even decked one of our own. And, yes, he did threaten some poor bastard who was accused of stalking kids and later proved innocent. All that makes him angry, short-tempered, and violent. Does it also make him a calculating killer? Maybe. Or maybe it takes off the steam and just makes him another of Brattleboro's run-of-the-mill wackos."

"I heard the supposed stalker ended up dead in Mass a few months later," Sam said.

Eakins let out an exasperated sigh. "You been talking to that cop-Mr. Conspiracy Theory. Yeah, I checked into that. It's bogus. I mean, he's entitled to his opinion, but I gave it a good, long look. There was nothing there. I think Mueller's a total pain in the ass-don't get me wrong. But he didn't do that one. Probably the victim got into the same kind of jam in Mass he did up here, and didn't get off so lucky. Maybe the cop's just covering his own inability to solve the case. I don't know. But Mueller's alibi was solid and he's a loner, like I said-not too likely to hire a hit man."

"Let me ask it another way, then," Sam suggested. "If I pulled him in and asked him to help us out with the investigation-as a good citizen-do you think he'd shut down, or maybe give me something I could use later to jam him up?"

Eakins was unequivocal. "The second. You won't be able to shut him up. Even if you accused him head-on, he'd still talk his head off. If there's one impression Oliver Mueller has made on me, it's that he has only one cause to live for and nothing to lose."

It was slow going on the interstate, the snowstorm being one of those thick, blanketing, cotton-wool events. Joe drove north as if poking through whipped cream, the only hint of something dark in a universe of white being the faint trace of the paved road ahead. To the uninitiated, it was a white-knuckle, hunch-over-the-steering-wheel, squint-your-eyes affair. For that matter, even most native Vermonters were notoriously cautious in such weather. But Joe loved it. The music on the radio was good and the traffic virtually nonexistent, his snow tires were new that year, and he'd just gotten the news that Leo had at last woken up.

It still took him two hours to drive roughly sixty miles, and the light was just starting to ebb as he crawled around the hospital parking lot, looking for an opening. For that bit of timing, he was grateful. Driving in the dark in the same circumstances was hair-raising even to him.

He stopped inside the hospital's vaulted entranceway to stamp the snow from his boots and brush himself off.

"Hey, Joe."

He looked up, startled to hear the familiar voice. "Hey, yourself. What're you doing here already? You hate driving in this junk."

Gail gave him an awkward smile. "I came down just before it hit. I heard he was doing better and hoped I'd get lucky."

"So, you were here when he woke up?" he asked, giving her a quick one-armed hug as they fell into walking side by side.

"Yes. What a relief. Your mom started crying."

They quickly reached the building's central, mall-like first-floor corridor, which towered several stories overhead to a skylight a city block long. The Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center was class A, from the ground up-at least, that was the way Joe was feeling about it right now.

"Were you just walking by and happened to see me?" he asked her. "Nobody knew when I'd make it."

"I've been waiting awhile," she confessed. "I figured it would take you a couple of hours after you got the call. I wanted to see you before we went up."

"Oh?" he asked. "What's up?"

She seemed to take a small breath before speaking. "I just felt badly about how you met Francis… Martin. You know, the man who picked me up here last time."

"Yeah," he said lightly. "The Bimmer."

She seemed slightly flustered by his response. "Oh, the car. Right. He's thinking of getting rid of that. Not very practical."

Joe reached out and touched her elbow. "I was surprised, Gail, that's all. I think it's great. I'm happy you found someone a little less hazardous to be around."

"It's not just that, you know."

He thought back to the mood that had carried him here, and decided to do what he could to maintain it, even if slightly at her expense. "Gail, it doesn't matter. It's just semantics now. I've found someone else, too."

She stopped in her tracks, her smile at odds with the look in her eyes. "That's great."

He touched her elbow a second time, this time to get her going again. "Yeah," he said, looking down the vast hall. "She runs a bar in town. Is Leo still in ICU?"

Gail took the out. "No. They moved him. I'll show you." She moved ahead and led the way to the elevators.

Upstairs, they found Leo and Joe's mother and the ever-present Dr. Weisenbeck all in a regular-looking patient room, with Leo lying in bed without a single tube hooked up to him. He was as pale as the sheet underneath him, about twenty pounds lighter, and, ironically, looking as if he needed a good night's sleep, but he gave Joe a broad smile as they entered, which, to Joe, made all the rest of it irrelevant.

He crossed over to the bed, ignored his brother's thin outstretched hand, and planted a big kiss on his cheek instead. "Welcome back, you crazy bastard."

Leo laughed softly and patted Joe's shoulder. His voice, when he spoke, was hoarse. "You, too. Weird to have the tables turned for once, huh?"

The reference bore weight. Joe had been in such a bed any number of times during his career, and while Gail was correct that it hadn't been the sole reason she left him, it certainly played a big role.

Joe looked him over. "Not even an IV?"

Weisenbeck spoke up from the back of the room. "He's not off meds completely, but we thought he'd enjoy at least the sensation of being free. And while he probably won't admit it, he has a terrible sore throat, so try not to make him talk too much. The breathing tubes take awhile to recover from."

Weisenbeck checked his watch, which, by now, they'd all come to know as more of a nervous gesture than a real consultation. He walked to the doorway, adding, "I'll leave you be. Congratulations to everyone."

He left to a chorus of thank-yous as the small group clustered more closely around the bed, most of them unconsciously touching some part of its occupant, as if still unbelieving that he had appeared back among them.

A hundred miles away, Matt Aho was buried in his office in the depths of the Burlington Police Department, far from any windows and oblivious to any snowstorm. He made a tidy pile of some printouts and a couple of logbooks and trudged down the hallway toward the chief's office, feeling like a penitent heading to church.

He knocked on the open door and stuck his head in. Tim Giordi was sitting at his desk, scrutinizing his computer screen.

"Chief?"

Giordi looked over his reading glasses at his supply officer. "Yeah, Matt. Come in."

Aho waggled the pile he had clutched in his hand as he approached. "I've been researching the missing Taser cartridge situation."

Giordi raised his eyebrows. "And?"

"I think I have at least part of it figured out."

"Oh?"

He laid out some of his documentation, upside down, so Giordi could read it. "When this first came up, I consulted only the dispersal log, which showed that Officer Palmiter had been assigned three cartridges. He, of course, said he only got two and didn't think anything about it. That left me trying to figure out not only how it might've gone missing, but from where. The biggest flaw I've found so far is that after I've bar-coded what's headed out to the airport, the stuff's actually carried over there in bulk. It gets signed out by the individual officers who requested it, but the airport log and mine aren't connected electronically. I think I might've discovered this sooner or later the old-fashioned way, but that's why that one cartridge fell through the gaps."

Giordi, knowing his subordinate's meticulous style-one of the reasons he'd been given this job-nodded patiently.

Aho continued. "So I went over the outgoing transfer manifests and the airport receiving logs, totaled everything that I'd signed out against everything that everyone I interviewed claimed to have received, and I found that the missing cartridge never made it out of my office-at least not officially."

"Meaning somebody walked in, when you weren't there, and swiped it?" Giordi asked, thinking privately that was what he'd assumed from the beginning, even though he was sympathetic to Aho's resistance to the idea.

As if reading his mind, Aho flushed slightly. "It seems that way, yes."

"Yeah," Giordi mused. "That's not too surprising. Your office is off of a high-traffic corridor. What's your suggestion for a more secure setup?"

Aho brightened considerably at that. "I've already put in a requisition for a security Dutch door kind of arrangement, with a grilled upper half. It shouldn't be much more inconvenient than the present system, and it'll make things much tighter. But that's not actually where I was headed."

"I see." Giordi smiled. "And where was that, exactly?"

Aho didn't react to the question's wry tone. "Well, having narrowed down the where part of the puzzle, I now had to find out the when."

"Right," his boss coaxed.

Aho pointed to an entry on one of his logs. "As you know… Actually, maybe you don't… but I try to do things like receiving, unpacking, and cataloging at regular times, so that I have a routine I can follow. It helps keep me on track. As a result, I have a pretty good idea at what time of the day I probably set the cartridges out to be shipped to the airport division, putting them on the corner of my desk, as usual… well, as usual in the old days."

"Right," Giordi repeated.

"Not to make a big deal out of it," Aho continued without irony, "I pretty much identified a half-hour time slot when somebody could have taken that cartridge-right here, between eleven thirty and noon."

"Okay."

Aho straightened triumphantly. "Well, the rest was easy. We know what shifts were in the building then, and we have the visitors' log for people from the outside." He laid a final sheet before his chief. "So, there you have it-a complete listing, as best I can figure it, of everyone who had access."

Giordi glanced at the list-a significant number of people-and sat back in his chair. "Nice job, Matt. Above and beyond the call. I'll make sure to check this out and share it with Agent Gunther and his people, and I'll also make sure that your new door gets priority treatment."

Aho smiled nervously, gathered up his exhibits, and headed out the door. Giordi waited until he'd left before getting out his bottle of aspirin.

An hour later, Lester Spinney crossed the VBI office in Brattleboro and retrieved the fax that had just arrived.

"Who from?" Sam asked from her desk.

"Burlington PD," he answered vaguely, reading its cover sheet and contents. "It's a list of all the people who were in their building when that Taser cartridge went missing."

"Huh," she reacted. "I thought that was a lost cause."

Lester stopped in the middle of the floor, bringing the sheet closer to his eyes. "I'll be damned."

"What?"

"One of the visitors was John Leppman. Small world."