Tucker Peak

Chapter 15

I showed up late at the office, milking my bum arm for all it was worth. In fact, I’d taken a small nap after Gail left to catch up on the sleep she’d so pleasantly interrupted. Once I arrived and had awkwardly shucked my coat, though, I wished I’d heeded the commissioner’s advice the day before and taken a few days off. The ringing phones and pink message slips emphasized how popular Lester’s and my little escapade had become. As our director Bill Allard had mournfully commented, it was just the kind of high-profile event VBI had been hoping to avoid, especially during its honeymoon phase. In fact, leafing through the slips, I noticed that many of the callers hadn’t been reporters and politicians, but fellow cops, no doubt seeking some indication of what this might tell of the future. Despite the mistaken perception of what makes law enforcement appealing to those who join it-chases, shoot-outs, and undercover pyrotechnics-it is just those kinds of uncontrolled events that make officers nervous. Cops, more than most, hate surprises.

Which didn’t mean I saw myself as the one to calm their nerves. I dropped the entire pile on Judy’s desk and told her to forward them to Allard. Better he than I, I rationalized, in these times of delicate image molding. I’d let him give me hell later.

Still, Richie’s spectacular death did change how I wanted to approach the several problems facing us, which is why I’d called for a squad meeting from home.

And they were all there: Sammie at her desk, studying the contents of a computer screen; Willy, reading a back issue of Guns amp; Ammo; and Lester, tilted back in his chair with his feet up on his desk, wearing his customary bemused expression.

“How’re you feeling?” he asked me.

“I liked it better when they had me doped up. How ’bout you? The adrenaline settle down yet?”

His demeanor changed to something closer to melancholy. “The adrenaline’s okay. Having killed somebody still needs work. Last night wasn’t great for sleeping.”

Willy looked up briefly from his reading. “It’s like losing your cherry, Les. No big deal.”

Spinney glanced from me to him and back and then silently raised his eyebrows, the half-smile returning, if tinged with incredulity.

I leaned toward him so the other two couldn’t hear and murmured, “You’re being stress-debriefed for this, right? Or do I have to quote the rule book?”

“No, no,” he reassured me. “I’ve seen the shrink once already, last night, and we’ve got a repeat in a couple of days. I’m okay-promise.”

I nodded, sat on the corner of my desk, and addressed them all, “Okay, now that we’re really under the microscope, I thought it might be a good idea to see where we’re standing and decide on a possibly revised course of action. Snuffy Dawson is sweating bullets over the Richie thing, since that’s the investigation he asked us to conduct, so in fairness to him and in light of the fact we may be looking at multiple homicides now, putting that one first seems to make sense. Where’s Shayla Rossi right now?”

“Downstairs,” Sammie said, “but not for long. ’Course we can talk to her in Woodstock after they arraign her and ship her north.”

“Any of you had a crack at her yet?”

“A once-over-lightly,” Sammie admitted. “You might have better luck, but she didn’t sound like a great source to me. Could be why he chose her to hide out with-clueless barely covers it.”

“If you think it’ll do any good. Otherwise, I won’t waste my time.”

“No, no. Have at it.”

I was almost disappointed to hear her say that. Not because her caution wasn’t reasonable, but because there was an added element of self-doubt I was forever hopeful she’d lose. On the other hand, Shayla was the only one we had available from the whole Marty-Richie-Jorja Duval mess.

“Maybe I will, if only to ask her why Richie was so desperate.”

“Gee, there’s a tough one,” Willy said sourly. “He was shitting bricks about whoever iced Jorja.”

“He was shitting bricks when he had Joe in the garage,” Sammie commented. “Why didn’t he kill him then?”

Willy shook his head dismissively. “’Cause he wasn’t sure. When Richie saw Joe the second time, at Shayla’s, that convinced him Joe was a bad guy, especially since he had Lester riding shotgun. It pushed him over the edge.”

“And reintroduces an interesting point,” Lester added. “Richie didn’t know who was after him, not even by name, or he would’ve confronted Joe with it in the garage.”

After a long, reflective pause, I suggested, “Which still doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been Marty.”

Not surprisingly, Willy then countered his earlier, dismissive comment with an interesting suggestion. “What we should be asking is, why this level of violence against a B-and-E lowbrow? The other thing Richie would’ve spilled in the garage-if he’d had the slightest idea-was why he was being targeted and why he thought Marty’d already been killed.”

“Damn,” Sammie muttered. “Maybe they both stole something they didn’t know they had.”

“Maybe,” Lester said doubtfully. “But when whoever they stole it from pounded on the guy who fenced the watch-”

“Walter Skottick,” I interjected quietly.

“-he wasn’t asked what else he might have, just where the guy was who sold it to him.”

Willy seemed to come to Sammie’s aid by saying, “Then it was something they saw, or somebody.”

Sammie’s enthusiasm was still obvious in her voice. “Or maybe the killer was after Richie all along. He’s the one who spent all the time with those women, milking them for personal info. Could be one of them said something important he didn’t realize.”

“And her husband, boyfriend, or whatever decided to be careful and plug the leak,” Lester filled in, tilting his head to one side. “That would play to the theory that Marty’s dead, too. You’d think we would’ve picked up on that kind of family dynamic during all the interviews, though.”

“We haven’t talked to everyone yet,” Willy reminded him.

That jarred loose an idea. “Speaking of people talking,” I said, “Jorja Duval’s the only one we know for sure who met Richie’s bogeyman face-to-face, whether it was Marty or not.”

Willy jumped straight to where I was headed. “Meaning you’re hoping he left something behind the crime lab missed.”

“It was a frustrating scene,” Lester commented. “A ton to process, most of it useless… But they did process it. Still, sounds like a long shot, and you’d expect signs of Marty to be there, anyhow.”

“I’m going to call David Hawke at the crime lab,” I persisted, “see what he says. In the meantime, we need to put all our energies toward building clear and complete backgrounds for Richie, Marty, and everyone else: spouses, caretakers, anyone with even a remote connection to the houses listed in Richie’s hidden documents. I know we’re partway there already, but the heat’s on now, and it’s only going to get worse until we solve this. Along those lines, Allard has assigned us three extra people from the Bennington office. Sam, you can coordinate with them as to how many, if any, come over here, or if you want them to just stay put and work the phone lines and computers from there.”

“What about the TPL investigation?” she asked.

“Back burner again,” I answered her, immediately thinking of the three names that Gail had indicated might have potential. “If anything comes up accidentally, great-spread the word. Otherwise, we’re going to have to divide and conquer here. TPL will have to wait.”

David Hawke had started out at the state crime lab as a civilian scientist back when it was run by the Vermont State Police. That it was now an independent branch of the Department of Public Safety-just as we were-and directed by Hawke instead of a state police captain, spoke volumes about recent efforts the DPS had been making to distribute its resources more efficiently, much to the distress of state police old-timers nostalgic for the days when they’d controlled almost every law enforcement function beyond the municipal level. The VSP was still king of the mountain in terms of size and political muscle, but that mountain was visibly, if slowly, changing shape.

The metamorphosis of the crime lab had been gradual, smooth, and driven by increasingly stringent and sophisticated scientific necessities, antiquating the erstwhile practice of having uniformed troopers do forensics rotations and then leaving just as they became competent. But Hawke still understood the pain of organizational change and thus knew how loaded his opening question was when he asked me on the phone, “How’re things in your neck of the woods? Cold and lonely?”

I could only laugh and admit, “Yeah, pretty much. At least I’m not being taken for a state food inspector quite as often.”

“But you’re still not Vermont’s FBI?”

“Not even close. How’re you settling in?”

“Great,” he said cheerily. “We’re now nationally accredited, and I just had to break the news to the powers-that-be that in order to stay that way, we’ll have to get out of this building and into something that doesn’t date back to the 1800s. So, I’m a happy camper, but I have a lot of depressed bosses. Speaking of which, you call to cry on my shoulder, or are you scrounging for a favor?”

“Ouch,” I said. “I sound that desperate?”

“I read the papers, Joe. How’s the arm?”

“It hurts.”

“I am sorry about that.” Then he admitted, “But it may be just the beginning. The buzz downstairs is that none of them would’ve ever fallen into something like that with their pants down, and that they sure hope you boys get your shit sorted out before one of you gets killed-all quote-unquote, of course.”

I sighed. “Them” in Hawke’s parlance meant the state police, and in particular their Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

I ducked that debate altogether. “You’re right, David, I am scrounging for a favor. You still have access to Jorja Duval’s body?”

“So long as it’s an unsolved case-you bet.”

“Then can you get anything more out of her? We’re heading straight up the creek with this one.”

There was a long pause at the other end as David Hawke considered the request. “We pretty much gave her the full battery, more than just the standard checklist. We could run her blood for specifics, if you have any suggestions. What’re you looking for? Drugs? Environmental chemicals?”

“That’s the problem,” I had to tell him. “I don’t know. We have no idea who killed her, or who spooked the guy we just killed. Basically, she’s the only one left we can interrogate, even if it’s after the fact.”

I could almost see him nodding at the phone in comprehension. This was, as I’d hoped it would be, just the kind of problem he and his colleagues liked to tackle most.

“There is something I could try,” he finally said slowly. “There’s a retired guy in Florida who’s been trying to sell people on how to lift prints from human skin. Has something to do with temperature differences between the skin surface and the material you want to transpose the print to. Anyhow, he’s been fiddling with it since the late seventies, and just recently started getting some consistent results.”

“That sounds perfect,” I said, almost cutting him off.

“Yeah, well, ‘sounds’ may be the operative word. This is still considered iffy stuff, and it has a pile of variables that’ll render it null and void: the body’s temperature, exposure, cleanliness, extent of decay, and a bunch of other things. They all have to work together, more or less, as do factors like was the assailant wearing gloves, were his fingers oily enough, was it the right type of oil, did he press too hard or not hard enough, and so on. You get the idea.”

“Unfortunately,” I admitted.

He sounded apologetic for overdoing the caveat. “Hey, don’t get depressed until I give you good reason. I will try this out, right on the bruises we think his hands left on her arms. In fact, I’ve been looking forward to giving this technique a shot.”

“Okay,” I said. “I appreciate it. And I promise not to hold my breath.”

He laughed. “You can if you want to. This won’t take long. I’ll call you tomorrow or the next day and let you know what I’ve found.”

Shayla Rossi was being housed in the basement, courtesy of the Brattleboro police, sitting in a narrow cell with the traditional metal toilet and a bunk. There were no other short-term residents at the moment, so instead of moving her to the interrogation room upstairs, I left her behind bars. I merely dragged a folding chair to the other side of her door and made myself comfortable.

“Who the hell are you people?” she demanded.

I remembered what the constable had said about her cranky personality. “Vermont Bureau of Investigation. My name’s Joe Gunther.”

“Never heard of it.” She was sitting on the bunk, her back against the wall, her knees drawn up before her. My mind flashed back to what I’d just told David Hawke about our persistent low visibility, a problem I sensed I’d soon be yearning for.

“We work on major felonies, Ms. Rossi-the really bad stuff.”

“That has nothing to do with me. That’s Bobby’s rap.”

I flapped my injured arm slightly, remembering that she’d known Richie Lane by his real name of Bobby Lanier. “Your dog gave me this.”

“I didn’t set him on you.”

“You trained him,” I said.

Shayla Rossi merely pressed her lips into a thin, straight line.

I glanced down at the file I’d brought with me. “I see the gun Bobby fired was yours, too.”

“I didn’t know he was going to use it.”

“You knew he was on the run.”

“So?”

“That’s harboring a fugitive, Ms. Rossi, and aiding and abetting. And say what you want about Vermont being soft on crime, we still take assaulting a police officer pretty seriously. Unless you help me out, you could spend a long time in a cell.” I thought back to her isolated home and what it said about her choices in life, and added, “Except that you’d be living with dozens of other women, some pretty nasty, all piled on top of one another. We have a real overcrowding problem in our jails.”

Her arms slipped around her knees to hug them closer to her. “You’re so full of shit you can’t see straight. I didn’t do a damn thing. My lawyer’ll have me out of here like that.” She tried to snap her fingers, but either her technique or her sweaty hands betrayed her-there was no sound beyond a pathetic plop.

I referred back to the file. “Right-your lawyer. Public defender. Seems like he had a little trouble spelling your name, kept writing down ‘Sheila.’”

I actually had no idea if that were true. There was no mention of it in my paperwork. But it had the desired effect.

“That fucking idiot,” she said, her hot, narrowed eyes watching me as if I might suddenly strike out.

I shook my head sympathetically. “Shayla. I know you don’t think much of us, or the system in general. But you’re between a rock and a hard place here.” I paused before suggesting, “It’s not where you have to be.”

“What do you mean?” she asked slowly.

“Let’s face it, you’re dealing with a bunch of very embarrassed people. Here we were, running all over looking for Bobby, and you had him tucked away, nice and safe, right under our noses, not twenty minutes from this building. That makes us look pretty bad. My bosses, the prosecutors, everybody’s scrambling for cover, you know how it works. And guess who they’re planning to hang most of this on?” I pointed to her.

She opened her mouth to say something, but I leaned forward suddenly and gestured to her to stay quiet. Her mouth snapped shut with surprise.

“Shayla, you know that’s bullshit, right? I know it’s bullshit. I also know it doesn’t need to be. I can get you out of this. A little slap on the wrist, a little kowtowing to the judge and the others, and you go back home, free as all-get-out.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “How?”

“You tell me what you know-here and now.” I pulled a tape recorder out of my pocket, turned it on, and placed it through the bars onto the end of her bunk.

She tucked her heels up even closer. “I don’t know anything.”

“I’m not saying you do, not consciously. I just want to hear your perspective: how Bobby contacted you, what he said, how he got you to take him in. You and I know you’re just the innocent bystander here, the one who gave an old friend a place to stay, but until I can tell my bosses exactly what happened, item by item, they’re going to try to pin it on you.”

She looked both confused and disgusted. “This is such a crock.”

“Talk to me.”

She scratched her head. “I don’t know… Bobby and me go back. We were hot once, but then he went one way, I went another. No big deal. We talked now and then… ”

“About what?”

She stopped, surprised. “Normal shit. What he was doin’, what I was doin’.”

“And what was he doing?”

“Working at Mount Snow and Tucker Peak the last two, three years-longest time he ever stuck with anything. It wasn’t much, but he said he liked the people. He was big on that, always liked being around people. Just the opposite of me.”

“He had a scam going at Tucker Peak,” I said. “He ever talk about that?”

She hesitated.

“Shayla,” I tried putting her at ease. “If you didn’t have anything to do with it, you can’t get into trouble.”

“He was pretty proud of it,” she finally said. “Like he was a spy or something-James Bond the rip-off artist.”

“He ever mention Marty Gagnon?”

“Not till he came to hide out at my place. Before then, I just knew he had a partner-that was it.”

“How did he describe the operation?”

“He called himself the inside man. He’d sweet talk the ladies or con the guys, whatever it took to get into their homes. Then he’d take pictures or draw a map, figure out which windows were alarmed, if any, find out when the owners would be away. That’s what he thought was like being a spy, ’cause he had to be real slick about it, not show his hand. It did sound pretty cool.”

She’d stretched one leg out during this, which I hoped was a sign she was becoming more comfortable with me.

“But then it went wrong,” I suggested.

She stared at her foot for a while, apparently thinking back, maybe wondering how things had turned out as they had. “Yeah. He called me up, said they’d killed Marty and were closing in on him. That was the first time I heard of Marty. He also told me he’d hit one of them over the head who claimed he was a cop, ’cept the name of the police department he mentioned didn’t exist. Bobby was really scared.”

“Who did he say was after him?”

“He wasn’t sure. He thought it was the druggies.”

I glanced at the tape recorder to make sure it was still running. “Who were they?”

But her answer was a disappointment. “I don’t know, probably one of the people he ripped off. That’s what scared him-not knowing. And that it all fell apart super fast.”

“Do you think Bobby stole drugs from someone?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t do drugs himself and he didn’t have the connections to move it. Maybe he tried-I’m not saying he didn’t-but if he did, it’s news to me.”

“Let’s talk about Marty a little.”

“I told you, I didn’t-”

I interrupted her. “I know, I know-you’d never heard of him. But you were told he’d been murdered. Did Bobby know that for a fact?”

She stared at me, looking confused. “He’s not dead?”

“He might be. We haven’t found a body.”

She became thoughtful. “Bobby just said he’d been killed, not that he’d seen it happen.”

“How do you think the two had been getting along?”

There, she seemed clearer. “Not so good. He bitched about how Marty wouldn’t move the stuff fast enough, how he had to keep at him all the time.”

“Did it sound like Marty would get angry?” I asked, my interest growing.

“I guess. It wasn’t like they were ever buddy-buddy. Bobby thought he was low-class, not a people person, which was a real put-down from him.”

Which made me wonder what he’d seen in Shayla, aside from her being the perfect person to hide out with.

“Did Bobby ever say Marty had threatened him?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Nah.”

I considered continuing, going over the same ground again in the hopes of learning more-that was certainly standard practice. But chances were good that Sammie had pegged this woman’s usefulness from the start.

Still, the drug angle was new, if not well defined, and offered the slim possibility of a new line of inquiry. It also helped explain, if true, why the costs in human lives had been so high. From a simple case of unsolved burglaries, we were now facing the possibility of something far bigger-and more lethal.

All that was left now was to hope that our interviews, phone calls, background checks, and general data-crunching would yield just enough light to let us see what was going on.

And maybe lead us to Marty Gagnon, a man I was now very much hoping I’d meet alive.