Scent of Evil

31

I had just been handed my mail, my phone messages, and the daily report by Maxine Paroddy through Dispatch’s freshly hung door when Tony Brandt left his office diagonally across the room and grabbed me on the way by.

“Ready for the slaughter?” He headed for the back stairs up to the second floor, where the selectmen held their meetings.

I was both trying to follow him and go through my correspondence, with more or less success. “I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee first.”

“No can do, unless they have some in there.” We walked down the upstairs hallway to the front of the building. Ahead of us, clustered in front of the doors leading to, respectively, the town manager’s office, the town attorney’s office, and the board of selectmen’s meeting room, were Tom Wilson, Gary Nadeau, and Brandt’s secretary, Judy. Off to one side was James Dunn, whose face looked like he was standing barefoot in manure.

Brandt swept by them as he had me earlier, marching toward the far-left door. “Hi, boys and girls.” By his tone and demeanor, he struck me as the happiest of Hannibal’s soldiers, off to conquer Rome. I just hoped the results weren’t the same.

He led the way into a large, newly redone room smelling of fresh paint, cut wood, and new carpeting. The back, from where we entered, was filled with metal folding chairs arranged in rows. Facing us, their backs against the sunlit windows, the five selectmen sat at a long semicircular table, looking like a half-baked imitation of the Supreme Court.

By instinct, we clustered in separate groups: Brandt, Judy, and I off to one side of the center aisle; Wilson and Nadeau to the other. Dunn stayed disdainfully in the rear, by the door, as if planning to leave discreetly as soon as the lights dimmed and the play began.

Indeed, the lighting was theatrical, coming mostly as it did from the windows. It forced us to squint slightly and made the faces of those across from us dark and slightly menacing. Brandt said something to Judy. She looked doubtful but, with a little more prodding, finally got to her feet and walked around to the back of the selectmen, lowering the blinds of each of the windows with a snap. Dunn, for his part, hit the switch by the door for the overhead lights. Suddenly, the room was bathed in bland, even, artificial light.

Luman Jackson, tall, hawk-like, and furiously scowling, twisted in his chair, hoping perhaps to burn Brandt’s emissary with the heat of his glare. It almost worked; the poor woman returned to Tony’s side looking diminished in stature.

Brandt merely smiled at Jackson. “Sorry. Hard to see.”

I noticed Gail was hiding her smile behind her hand.

Jackson was not amused and pointed at Judy. “What is she doing here? This is an executive session.”

“This is my secretary, Judith Levine. I invited her here to take a verbatim transcription of everything that’s said today.”

“We already have someone doing that.” He nodded toward the most recent member of the board, a pale-faced accountant named Orton, who was already scribbling furiously.

“Good,” was all Brandt answered.

There was a pause, during which I guessed Brandt was supposed to give Judy her marching orders. He just stared at Jackson, waiting for the meeting to begin. Judy looked like one of the vestal virgins about to be thrown on the fire. I seriously doubted that any notes she took following this would be readable.

Jackson tried a more direct approach: “I’m requesting that you ask your secretary to leave before we begin, Chief Brandt.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Chairman, but thank you all the same.”

The silence was thundering. I thought I could hear my watch ticking on my wrist. Mrs. Morse, who’d been ineffectually holding her chairman’s gavel from the start, slowly leaned over toward Jackson and whispered into his ear. His expression didn’t change, but his mind apparently did. He nodded once curtly and announced as if nothing had happened, “This meeting is now in session.”

Gail cleared her throat gently and pointed delicately at Mrs. Morse. Jackson looked from one to the other with irritation and then flushed slightly. Indeed, Mrs. Morse, no shrinking violet herself, looked ready to use the gavel on Jackson’s head.

Jackson muttered an apology, and Mrs. Morse banged the tabletop loudly. “Now we are in session.”

James Dunn immediately stood up. “Madam Chairman, might I inquire why I was asked to be here? My understanding of the town charter is that executive sessions are held primarily to discuss personnel matters, like salaries and such.”

Luman Jackson, whose own frostiness could rival Dunn’s, cocked an eyebrow and shut Mrs. Morse up just as she opened her mouth to respond. “Mr. State’s Attorney, I can sympathize with your wanting to go back to your office, but to pretend this meeting was called to discuss salaries doesn’t do justice to your imagination. We are here to discuss John Woll, who is not only a town employee, but is also being investigated by your office-”

“And as such not a subject for conversation in a setting like this, at least not with me here,” Dunn finished for him. “If you, Madam Chairman, or anyone else in this room, wants to know what the state’s attorney’s office is doing about John Woll, you will just have to wait until that investigation has been concluded.”

With that, Dunn turned on his heel and left the room, closing the door behind him with a bang. Jackson was looking less and less like the vice-chairman he was, and more like an angry, frustrated caricature carved in stone. We hadn’t been here five minutes, and already the air had enough electricity in it to power the town for a week.

Brandt chose that moment to clear his throat. “Madam Chairman, with the departure of Mr. Dunn, I suggest that any further discussion of John Woll be tabled. As you are aware, the police department has been cut out of that investigation and has handed over all its files to the SA’s office. I’m sure Mr. Nadeau would agree with me that any official discussion of the case without Mr. Dunn might well be treading onto very thin legal ice.”

Mrs. Morse, not bothering to compete verbally, merely pointed her gavel at a pale and nervous Gary Nadeau, who nodded, also without a word.

“Let it be noted that the town attorney is in agreement with the chief,” she intoned, pleased at last to be heard.

Tom Wilson, who was no Richard the Lionhearted but who also disliked Jackson with a passion, raised his hand. “That brings up the advisedness of this entire meeting, actually. Mr. Dunn mentioned the town charter; if indeed we are to deal with personnel matters in any detail, it is my understanding that I as town manager am supposed to be the board’s agent in these matters, and that the board should be called together to discuss such a case only after I’ve completed my own investigation.”

Jackson whacked the table before him in irritation with his open hand. “I’ve had just about enough of this. You bureaucrats can run for cover all you want, but something stinks here, and I intend to find out what it is. I don’t give a rat’s ass what’s in the charter, and nobody’s going to tell me that I can or cannot ask certain questions while the whole goddamn town is falling down like a house of cards.”

“That may be overstating the case a bit,” Gail said levelly from her end of the curved table.

Jackson flared. “Maybe from your vantage point, Miss Zigman, but not all of us share your source of information, or your obvious bias.” He shifted his attention back to the rest of us, allowing Gail to redden angrily more or less in private. “My phone is ringing at all hours of the day and night; I’m getting calls from newspapers in California, for Christ’s sake. ‘Is it true that Brattleboro has become the chute for Massachusetts’s dirty laundry?’ That’s what one of them asked me. That’s not good for business or morale, and by allowing it to continue, it might just become true.”

Gail sailed back in. “What’s the point, Mr. Vice-Chairman?”

It seemed to me Jackson’s frustration was so real he could barely give it voice. Despite my antipathy for the man, I began to feel slightly sorry for him. “The point is: I want to know what’s happening here. I hear our building inspector is being investigated for no good reason. I hear one of our most eminent citizens is suspected of fraudulent financial dealings. I hear a perfectly respectable businessman had all his records removed by the police, again for no apparent reason. There’ve been shootings, high-speed chases, and now a DWI involving a cop who’s also suspected of murder. It sounds like our police department is both corrupt and stupid. And the result, I might add, will be more lawsuits than this town has ever seen. I’m sick and tired of looking like a moron to everyone who asks me what’s going on, and I want some answers. Now.”

There was a general rustling following this, as everyone either shifted through paperwork or squirmed in their chairs, figuratively looking for some sort of cover. Tom Wilson glanced at Brandt, who merely smiled and extended his hand in invitation; these people were more Wilson’s bosses than Brandt’s, the gesture said, so be my guest.

Wilson sighed and addressed the board. “Madam Chairman, I wish I could accommodate you and your colleagues here, and I’ll certainly do the best I can, with Chief Brandt’s cooperation, of course. Despite the setbacks, the confusion, and all the press, the police department is doing its job. Progress is being made, and the instances you mentioned of what looked like random police activity all have clear and reasonable explanations-”

“Of which we can give you only the barest outline,” Brandt added.

“I’ll start with that,” Jackson said. “God knows I don’t have a damned thing now.”

I sensed from the tone that things were settling down slightly and entering a purely informational phase. Wilson and Brandt were to become, for the next several minutes, the feeders at the lion cage, doling out morsels to a beast with an appetite for their arms. I turned my attention to the wad of papers that Maxine Paroddy had handed me earlier.

It turned out Jackson hadn’t been the only one to get calls from reporters in California. I gave up on the phone messages about halfway through and turned to the daily report to see if anything new had surfaced during the night shift. Apart from the usual array of domestic disputes, a barroom brawl, and a foot chase after a teenager who’d been trying to pry open a bank’s night-deposit box with a crowbar, the report told me nothing I wanted to know. I wished to hell I’d been able to get to my office before I’d been dragged in here, so I could have had a peek at our own interoffice report.

Disappointed, I returned to my mail, dimly aware of the back and forth goings-on at the front of the room. Wilson, with little help from Brandt, was trying to explain the necessity of checking into everything and everybody in a case like this, even at the risk of stepping on toes.

My mail was also unenlightening: equipment brochures, official junk mail from the state capital, notifications of various classes being offered to police officers, from first-aid to SWAT tactics. I went back to the phone messages, this time starting from the bottom of the pile.

The fifth one up froze me in my seat: Isador Gramm, Beverly Hillstrom’s forensic toxicologist, had called with “interesting news.” The message indicated he’d called just five minutes before I’d been dragged into this kangaroo proceeding.

I snapped out of my reverie at the mention of my name “-been up to, nosing around like some damn tabloid reporter?”

Brandt answered. “His job, Mr. Vice-Chairman, which he can’t do sitting here.”

“He is the one heading this investigation, is he not?”

“He is, but he will not be allowed to speak on that matter.”

Jackson bristled. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Please,” Mrs. Morse warned, looking at Jackson.

“It means I won’t let him. I am head of the department, and everything Lieutenant Gunther does is cleared through me. I will be his spokesman at this meeting, and I think you’ll find that doing otherwise will only get all of us into more hot water if and when the press finds out about this little get-together.”

“I do not intend that they find out.”

Brandt didn’t argue the point. “May Lieutenant Gunther be excused from these proceedings?”

It wasn’t, from his tone of voice, a debatable question.

As Mrs. Morse said, “Of course,” Jackson barked out, “No.” They stared at each other for a long moment, the lady’s knuckles white where she was gripping her weapon of office. Jackson, either cowed or mollified that Brandt himself had no intention of leaving, finally nodded. “Oh, all right.”

I gathered up my wad of papers, smiled back at Gail’s quick and tiny thumbs-up gesture, and left.

Outside, on the landing, I met Stan Katz coming up the stairs. He looked as exhausted as I felt. We eyed one another warily. “Hey, there, Stanley.”

“Hey, yourself. See the paper this morning?” The question was asked neutrally, even tentatively.

“Nope. You take John to the cleaners?”

He sighed and his shoulders sagged slightly. It made me wonder for the first time about the toll this kind of story took on the man reporting it. It was a jarring thought and not one I enjoyed; things were tough enough without wondering if Stanley Katz had feelings.

“I wrote about the accident and put it in context,” he said tiredly. “How’re they doin’ in there?” He motioned toward the room I’d just left.

I feigned ignorance, Jackson’s claim that the press would never hear of the meeting still echoing in my ears. “They?”

“The selectmen. The executive session.”

I played with the idea of giving him the standard “no comment” but thought better of it suddenly, realizing I had nothing to lose here. “How’d you hear about it? Jackson thinks the meeting’s top secret.”

Katz grinned, the carnivore in him resurfacing. “Really? Maybe I ought to call Ted and the others to fill up the hallway. That would startle him.”

I shrugged, resigned to his not revealing his source. “Be my guest.”

He chuckled, the idea growing on him. “I think I will. Why’re you out here, by the way?”

“Brandt cut me loose. Told ’em he wouldn’t let me talk to them-that they’d have to go through him.”

This time he laughed outright. “Damn, your boss has balls.”

“Dunn walked out at the start; said he’d talk when he was good and ready.”

“Christ, how’s Jackson taking it?”

“Hasn’t blown a fuse yet, but Mrs. Morse is about ready to kill him. Might be worth sticking around.”

He shook his head, still grinning. “I gotta get to a phone.” He stopped suddenly, his eyes narrowing to their familiar suspicious squint. “Why’d you just tell me all that?”

I laughed, heading for the stairs. “’Cause I don’t give a damn and I’m in a good mood.”

I didn’t even pause to turn on Buddy’s stolen fan before dialing Isador Gramm’s number.

He answered on the fourth ring. “Dr. Gramm.”

“This is Joe Gunther, down in Brattleboro. Sorry I wasn’t in earlier.”

“Oh, nice of you to call back. I think I may have found something in your case. It was one of those brain-teasers, you know? I kept coming up with reasonable possibilities and getting nowhere. Had it not been for the tissue sample Dr. Hillstrom let me have, I’d probably still be barking up the wrong tree.”

“So what was it that killed him?”

There was a deadening pause. “Killed him? Cerebral ischemia; I thought you knew that. Dr. Hillstrom didn’t tell me I was to determine cause of death.”

I swore softly under my breath at the literalness of the scientific mind. “Sorry, I meant what was injected into him?”

“Tubocurarine chloride.”

“What the hell is that?”

I shut my eyes at my own outburst, but Gramm merely laughed. He was obviously so pleased with his own detective work, nothing was going to dampen his spirits. “In layman’s terms, curare.”

My mouth fell open. “Curare? As in South American Indians and blowguns?”

He was still chuckling. “Pretty weird, huh? It’s a quaternary amine, the bane of toxicology, a real pain in the butt to analyze, unless you know what you’re looking for, or you just get lucky. I guess I benefited from both.”

I was still having a tough time mentally transplanting tribal tranquilizers into a Brattleboro setting. “Why curare?”

“Well, that’s it exactly. Actually, you helped in this discovery. It was your comment to Dr. Hillstrom about the dichotomy of the presenting evidence that started me thinking along the proper lines. The hypothesis ran that the victim was positioned so that he could witness his own death, both visually and, since the method chosen was so specifically painful, sensorially. And yet, while his limbs had been taped to inhibit movement, there were no signs of his having struggled against those bonds, despite the pain he experienced during the terminating process.”

I winced at the phrase “terminating process,” but Gramm went happily on. “That turns out to have been the watershed deduction, steering me away from the narcotics which, while subduing the patient, would have also subdued his sensitivity to pain. It was in thinking about that seemingly contradictory requirement-to numb the muscles but not the neurological sensitivity-that I suddenly remembered an extraordinary experiment I’d read about that took place in the late 1800s.

“There was this doctor who had his colleagues overdose him with curare to test the drug’s properties. Back in those days, it wasn’t as exotic as it seems today, but it also wasn’t very well understood. They were standing by, of course, ready to give him artificial respirations if he needed them, and it was a lucky thing, too. He had the most horrible experience. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do the slightest thing. He felt like he was gagging to death, feeling his saliva running down his throat without being able to swallow. That was the first experiment to clearly identify the full range of effects of curare on a human being. Crazy thing to do, of course, but scientists tended to be that way back then-real adventurers.”

I was running his words through my mind, translating them to fit my notion of how Jardine died. “You said he couldn’t breathe.”

“Ah, right, but he’d been given a series of escalating doses, to determine the various stages of the drug’s effects. The respiratory muscles are the last to go, as it turns out, and the first to recover. So, if the injection came to just below that effect, the victim would never suffer from respiratory arrest. He would just be rendered totally motionless. In retrospect, it fits your case like a glove.”

Gramm sounded positively delighted, for which I couldn’t really fault him. The closest he’d come to Charlie Jardine had been a tiny chunk of meat in a test tube.

“But the victim would feel pain?”

“Oh, absolutely. Remember I said that doctor felt the saliva running down the back of his throat; that indicates that his neurological antennae, if you will, were still perfectly functional. It’s the muscles that are affected. The patient can still hear, see, and feel normally.”

I was still half stunned by the oddness of this discovery, and becoming hopeful that its uniqueness might eventually be the killer’s undoing. A knife, after all, could be gotten almost anywhere. But curare?

“So where can you get this stuff-South America?”

Gramm laughed again. “Good lord, no. I mean, you can, of course, but it’s a lot easier to locate than that. It’s not as rare as it sounds, and it’s not a regulated drug, so no DEA license is needed. It’s not in everyday use, but it’s still handy in surgery where the patient’s neurological receptors need to be intact. Hospitals carry it, and so do most decent-sized veterinary clinics.”

“As in animal vets?”

“Yup. Of course, the doses they carry are smaller, as befits the size of their average customer.”

I was wracking my brain, trying to come up with the right questions, the answers to which might point me in the proper direction. “How do you administer the stuff? Is injection the only way?”

“Yes, that’s why the Indians can eat the birds they kill with their famous curare-tipped arrows or darts. It has no effect when ingested.”

“You mentioned the doctor took it in progressive doses, until he couldn’t breathe. Doesn’t that make it tricky to administer?”

Gramm sounded pleased. “Ah, very good. Yes, the recommendation accompanying tubocurarine chloride is that it be administered only by a trained anesthesiologist. Of course, that’s only true when you’re out to benefit the patient; clearly, that doesn’t apply here.”

“It may not apply, but presumably the killer didn’t want Jardine to die on him before he was ready.”

Gramm’s voice was suddenly doubtful. “Jardine?”

Again, I was reminded of the man’s distance from the case. “That was the dead man’s name.”

“Oh, sorry, I wasn’t told. Well, anyway, I suppose you’re right. Still, the injection could have been administered gradually, so that its effects could be monitored. That would account for the victim being bound. On the other hand, the drug only lasts ten minutes or so, then it has to be boostered with another dose, half the strength of the first. That part’s important, since curare is additive.”

“But there was only one injection site.”

Gramm mulled that over for a while. “True. Well, there’s always the element of dumb luck, especially if the dose was secured from a vet.”

“Because it’s smaller, you mean?”

“Right. The killer could inject the entire dose at once and get away lucky. Chances are a full-sized, healthy man could survive that, if just barely. And I guess the killer wouldn’t be too concerned either way. I mean, the worst thing that could happen is that the victim would die. It wouldn’t be painful, but it would still be a terrible experience, tantamount to suffocating in the midst of fresh air.”

Terrible maybe, but the victim hadn’t died of curare. The dosage had been perfect. I wrapped up the conversation with my thanks and a few pleasantries and hung up.

I stuck my head out the door and yelled for Ron Klesczewski. He appeared from around the cluster of cubicles in the middle of the room and followed me back into my office. I scribbled “tubocurarine chloride” on a piece of paper and handed it to him. “That’s the fancy name for curare. That’s what was injected into Charlie Jardine to keep him still while he was being strangled.”

Ron stared at the name. “Holy shit.”

“Apparently, this stuff’s available in hospitals and vet clinics, and maybe by prescription. I want you to check out every source around here and find out if any of it’s either gone missing, say within the last year or two, or if anyone has bought any legally.”

As he started to leave, I grabbed his elbow. “Ron, if we can nail this down, we might find out who was behind this mess. I don’t want anyone to know what we’re up to, okay? When you’re doing your inquiry, make up a story of some kind-an animal poisoning, anything to throw people off.”

Ron nodded. “Gotcha.”

I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes for a moment, thinking hard. A rare drug requiring careful administration. Which of my suspects had that kind of training in his or her background? And why be so eccentric when any number of more mundane drugs could have been used? I was dealing with an ego here, someone consciously leaving a signature.

Harriet appeared on my threshold holding another pink phone message. “Thought you’d like this right away, pretty mysterious.”

The message I took from her read, “Drop by the library.”

I found Willy Kunkle back in the local-history room, sorting through his card catalog. “Don’t they ever let you out of here?”

He ignored any preliminary niceties, continuing to flip through the index cards as he spoke. “Jake Hanson, Mark Cappelli, and the two bankers were in cahoots, but as far as I can tell, the girl was played for a patsy by her boyfriend. He needed a teller and sucked up to the dumbest one he could find.”

I remained silent.

Kunkle finally raised his head and smiled at me. “The catch is, they were not working with Milly.”

I stared at him, my mind trying to place this new fact in order. “But what about all that coke? You saying it wasn’t his?”

“I don’t know, but the people sure weren’t. Nor was Johnnie Woll, if that’s any comfort. I think he was thrown in because it was an easy frame.”

“Who were the other people on the list? Rivals?”

“You got it.”

“Working for who?”

“Flatlanders from Boston. They aren’t anymore, though. That’s why all you got was the girl. After Cappelli jumped to conclusions and took a shot at you, the publicity caused the Boston boys to end the relationship. Too bad for Hanson; he’d been working with them for years.”

I shook my head slowly. “So the list was a plant, sending us in two wrong directions at once.”

Kunkle grinned. “Yup. It got John Woll into hot water, and it got you guys to close down a rival dope ring.”

I looked at him closely. “You’re sure about all this.”

He held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

“All right. Let’s break this down into segments. If we cross off everyone on the list, who do we have working with Milly? He’s the connection to the streets-the seller. In fact, he may have sold that baggie to Jardine.”

“Or it may have been a freebie to Jardine for having supplied the money to buy the stuff in the first place.”

I nodded. “Okay, which makes Charlie the money man. You think either Charlie or Milly had any big-time dope connections-someone who could supply them with a stash that large?”

“Hanson and Cappelli were supplied out of Boston. I don’t know much about Jardine, but I can guarantee you, nobody in Boston would look twice at Milly, much less sell him a kilo of coke.”

“So the supplier was either Charlie or a third guy.”

“I like Wentworth as the money man. He’s got lots of it. Didn’t you check on Charlie’s finances?”

“Yeah, and they came up clean. He inherited eighty-five thousand dollars and put it all into ABC Investments. In fact, I’m pretty sure Wentworth made him a guarantee of sorts-that if Charlie lost his shirt, Wentworth would make up the losses; ABC was the old man’s idea, after all.”

Willy was obviously enjoying himself. “Sure, what the hell, make Wentworth the money man, maybe unknowingly, and Charlie the pimp in-between, turning the money into dope.”

I put my hands to my temples. “Let’s slow down. We’ve got nothing on these people. Except for Milly, this is all pure guesswork.”

Willy shrugged. “Go back to Milly, then.”

“Right. Why was he killed?”

“Because you were about to talk to him.”

“Come up with another reason.”

Willy shook his head. “Like you and the killer were there at the same time by coincidence? No way; the thumbprint identified Milly, so Milly had to die.”

“But why?” I repeated.

“Because Milly could identify the killer.”

“As what? Were they partners?”

“Maybe; maybe not. If they weren’t, then the dope wouldn’t be the first priority; the killer might not have even known about it.”

“All right. That’s one explanation for why the dope was left behind. What’s another?”

“No time; you and the killer were minutes apart at most.”

“But it took time to plant the list of names. You don’t carry phone numbers like that around in your head.” I snapped my fingers. “Try this: You have a small amount of time available to you, only enough to do one of two things. You can go to a phone book and construct a phony list of numbers to plant, or you can go straight to Milly’s apartment, knock him off, and take the time to steal as much dope as you can.”

Kunkle was tapping his foot nervously. “And the killer opted for the list. What does that tell us?”

“That framing either John Woll or the rival drug ring was more important than the dope, and worth the risk of getting caught while killing Milly.”

Kunkle whistled. “So we’re talking serious motivation, something way beyond just protecting an identity.”

“Right. You implied the Woll frame was an extra, thrown in because it was easy. Why even go to that trouble?”

“Because it’s personal. He’s too low-ranking a cop for it to be anything involving the department.”

“Which makes the list an insight into the killer’s personality. That list, with its flimsy frame of John Woll, is the only evidence combining the two tangents here: the drugs and the Charlie-John-Rose triangle, which has roots ten years old.”

Kunkle scowled impatiently. “I can’t deal with the triangle; it’s too complicated, and you’ve got nothing concrete to go on. I think if you follow the dope, you’ll find the shooter.”

“But he didn’t touch the dope. You said yourself he might not have even known it was there.”

Kunkle waved that away. “I know, I know; I don’t believe it, though. You want a gut reaction? People kill each other over dope, even small amounts of it, and I think that’s why Milly got whacked. Why was the dope left behind? It wasn’t only a time problem; otherwise, the shooter would’ve killed you and Dummy both and had plenty of time to pack up. It was left behind because it was small potatoes. That’s the big question here; it’s not whether Wentworth knew about the money, or whether Jardine was or wasn’t a partner of Milly’s. It’s what’s the story behind the dope?”

I looked at his impassioned face, radiating an enthusiasm I hadn’t seen in over a year. “Will you find out the answer?”

He pulled back a little, flexing the hand he’d made into a fist during his last speech. He made it sound nonchalant. “Yeah, I can ask around.”

I couldn’t suppress a smile. For the first time, I felt we might have gained an advantage and with it reached a turning point. If I was right, the manipulator would become the quarry, and the hunt would begin in earnest.