The Dark Root

10

Gail stirred next to me, and I turned my head to look at her, happy to have her back home, regardless of the reasons. I had tried to call her yesterday, before news of the shooting reached her otherwise, but she’d been unobtainable, and I’d been forced to lay down a paper trail of calming messages instead. Notwithstanding that the gist of those had been to tell her to stay put and not worry, by the time I found her waiting for me after the post-stress debriefing, I was delighted she’d ignored them all.

We didn’t talk much during the short drive home. The emotion of our initial embrace had rendered most of that redundant and trite. And afterward, we immediately went to bed. At first we were content to merely hold one another, knowing the following morning would be ours to enjoy alone. But that had finally proven inadequate. Giving in to a need more demanding and soothing than sleep, we’d made love as long and as passionately as I could ever remember. Only then did we stop fighting exhaustion and give in.

And yet I woke early, the dawn’s light not quite washing the skylight overhead. I hadn’t been wracked by nightmares, or by misgivings concerning Ron Klesczewski’s shaky mental state. It was the persistent frustration of the night before, coupled with the knowledge that, by killing Henry Lam, I’d eliminated one of the few suspects who might have been of use to me.

Gail opened one eye, half veiled by long brown hair, and stretched her arm across my chest. “Yesterday catching up with you?”

“Not the way you mean. The sole effect of yesterday’s fireworks will probably be to attract some federal agency who’ll swallow the case whole and leave us looking like dumb yokels.”

She watched me for a few seconds in silence. “What was it like, being shot at?”

I thought back, pretty sure where she was heading. “A slow-motion blur, mostly. I just remember thinking I better do everything right.”

“How ’bout now?”

“I don’t know… It’s over,” I said dismissively.

She scowled slightly and sat up straighter.

“How are you doing?” I thought to ask, just a bit too late.

“The first radio report said a shooting with three dead and one cop wounded. All the way to Brattleboro I tried to keep calm, but after what happened to you last year, I knew the cop was you. That your luck had run out.”

Last year I’d been knifed by a man on the run and had spent several weeks in a coma. “I tried to reach you.”

She gave me an odd glance, and I realized I’d selfishly missed her point. “The whole drive down, I wasn’t telling myself that you’d be all right. I only thought about how I’d react to hearing you were dead.”

As she finished, I saw a tear cascading down her cheek, wetting the rumpled sheet she’d pulled up to her chin.

Embarrassed, I put my arm around her and drew her against me, kissing the top of her head.

She returned the hug. “It’s okay,” she murmured. “There’s not much anyone can do about it anyway.”

The silence that filled the room made a lie of that statement, and I found myself forcing the obvious words into the void. “I could quit. God knows I’ve put enough time in.”

But mercifully, she shook her head. “You can’t do that. I don’t want you to, either.” She craned her neck up and kissed me softly. “Thanks for saying it, though.”

I frowned, suddenly unsure to what degree I’d meant it, imagining the media circus I knew was almost upon me. “Sure.”

“So, you’re worried the feds will take the case away?” she resumed in a stronger voice, as if setting off on a brisk walk.

I took her lead, leaving the fear and concern behind us. “They can only do that if Jack Derby says they can. But I’m worried he’ll feel politically exposed enough to try to find a buyer-based on the premise that we don’t have the manpower, the resources, or the ability to deal with it.”

“Do you?”

I smiled at her bluntness-and the return of a direct, clear-eyed manner I both cherished and needed. “No. But we have the self-interest.”

“Meaning what?”

“A few weeks ago, a bank security investigator-an ex-FBI agent, in fact-told me about an employee who’d wired sixteen thousand dollars of the bank’s money to a dummy address in another state, just before she blew town. The bank was local, with no branches in the other state, so the investigator had no jurisdiction. But interstate wire fraud is a federal offense-an FBI specialty-so this man called his former employers and tried to sell the case to them. They took down all the information, but they warned him not to expect anything-that it was too small. Not worth the overhead to pursue.”

Gail scowled. “That’s hardly the same thing. You’ve got a pile of dead bodies, for crying out loud. They can’t ignore that.”

“Except that most of those bodies were killed by us. Sensational maybe, but not a federal crime. The federal aspects of this whole mess involve things we haven’t been able to prove yet-organized crime, illegal aliens, money laundering, contraband weapons. If we had a longer reach, we could dig where we can’t now, in order to make a case. The feds have that reach, but they wouldn’t have the vested interest. In fairness to them, they’ve got enough on their plates without fooling around with a small local problem that may or may not grow bigger. Let’s face it, for all the noise this has generated, we don’t have much to go on.”

Gail straightened up, her expression quizzical. “I don’t understand. If that’s true, then how could Derby unload the case?”

“Because his problems are more political than legal right now. For him, there is no case-just a huge PR stink bomb. If he can get the U.S. Attorney’s office to assign it to an agency outside his jurisdiction-politely saying it’s more than us local flatfoots can handle-then he’s free and clear, especially since all the victims were either deadbeats or outsiders.”

“Even though that agency won’t do anything with it?”

“They might in the long run, but only if something else develops that makes it meaningful to them. Otherwise it’ll end up on a back burner.”

Years ago, when Gail and I first met, she was far readier to use outrage as a means of spurring action. That was no longer true. She was as idealistic as ever, but over two decades as a businesswoman and a local politician, she’d become craftier.

“Sounds like you and Derby need to get together. If he does want to kick the case loose, maybe there’s a way you could stay with it-keep everyone happy.”

I mulled that over in silence. It was technically possible, but only if an unreasonable number off actors fell into place in the right sequence.

“A sneakier approach,” she continued, sensing my skepticism, “would be to locate the kind of evidence that would attract federal attention. It might help you sell yourself as an integral part of the package.”

I stared at her in wonder. “I shudder to think what’ll happen when you pass the bar.”

She smiled.

Ron Klesczewski wasn’t in the next morning. Stimulated by my talk with Gail, I’d come into the office early to talk on the phone with Dan Flynn, and had watched Ron’s empty desk outside my door throughout our conversation, increasingly concerned about where he might be.

As soon as I hung up, I dialed Harriet Fritter on the intercom. “You hear from Ron this morning?”

She hesitated before answering. “He called in. He said he was taking the day off.”

I tried interpreting what she hadn’t said. “He okay?”

“He sounded terrible.”

I cast back to his state of mind the day before, and to his listless behavior at the post-stress meeting later on. “I’ll give him a buzz,” I told her and punched a button for an outside line.

The phone was answered almost immediately by a timid, hesitant, woman’s voice.

“Wendy?” I asked, suddenly unsure of who was on the line.

“Yes.”

“This is Joe Gunther. Is Ron there?”

There was a brief, telling hesitation before she said, “He’s not available right now. I’m sorry.”

“Harriet told me he sounded a little rough this morning. How’s he doing?”

Her silence made clear I’d unwittingly stepped through an open manhole. “Is everything okay?” I added.

Her voice cracked slightly. “Not really. I don’t know what’s happening. He won’t talk, won’t eat, won’t sleep. I was so happy he wasn’t badly hurt… I don’t understand.”

“Has he called the department counselor?”

She sounded more hopeful. “Yes, this morning. He didn’t tell me what they talked about.”

“That’s a good sign, though. Shows he knows he’s in trouble. I am sorry, Wendy. I totally misjudged how hard this hit him-people react so differently. Look, tell him I called, that I totally understand, and I think he’s doing the right thing. I’m putting him on administrative leave as of now. That way, he won’t have to worry about showing up at the office, and neither of you will have to worry about his paycheck. Okay?”

“Sure… I guess so.”

“I’ll tell the counselor what I’ve done, just so he knows. Do you think if I dropped by, that would be a good idea?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not right away.”

I quickly retreated. “Just an idea. If it’s better that we all stay away-”

“No, no. I think he should see you. But maybe after a couple of days.”

“Of course. I’ll let you call the shots. If there’s anything we can do, though, don’t hesitate. And let me know if he gets any worse.”

I added a little more forcefully, “And if he stops getting help, I need to know that, too.”

“I understand. Thank you, Joe.”

“Sure. And call any time-day or night.” She murmured something unintelligible and the line went dead. I hung up and stared at the phone for a moment, wondering about all the unacknowledged agonies I’d just glimpsed.

I looked directly at Jack Derby. “Are you going to hand this over to the feds?”

He looked from me to Tony Brandt and back. We were all three sitting in Tony’s office, and Tony was pretending to dig around inside his pipe bowl with a small scraping tool. “Seems like a reasonable option,” Derby admitted slowly, his political sensitivity heightened by the presence of no fewer than three television sound trucks in the parking lot outside. “It smacks of organized crime-that’s a Washington hot button right now. I thought the FBI might be interested.”

“All right,” I countered, “but if you make that call through conventional channels, it’ll be to the Bureau’s Rutland office-Brattleboro’s in their jurisdiction. That means their senior resident agent, a guy named Joshua Bishop, gets the case, which in turn means we never see it again, because Bishop doesn’t work with locals. He doesn’t trust their security, their integrity, or their ability-he was burned one too many times when he was working in New York.”

Derby was slightly confused. “So what’s your proposal?”

“We approach the FBI through its Burlington-based supervisor-that’s Bishop’s boss-using the VSP as a conduit. I talked to Dan Flynn this morning about it, and he’s interested in helping out-”

“Why?” Derby suddenly interrupted.

“Because he sees this-like I do-as being bigger than just Brattleboro-that it’s a statewide problem in the making and that it needs to be nipped in the bud. Also, he has a selfish interest in seeing VCIN shown in a good light. He still has some old-school superiors with strong reservations about his informational lending library.”

“All right,” Derby conceded, still probing for where I was heading, intrigued by now despite himself. “But why will the FBI’s Burlington supervisor be any better than Joshua Bishop?”

“He came up through the ranks ‘far from the flagpole,’ as he puts it, in Montana, Wyoming… Places where he was the only agent for hundreds of square miles. His name is Walter Frazier, and he’s spent his whole career working with other agencies, and mostly in rural states. He’s perfectly happy to take an overseer’s role in a case, trusting the locals to do a professional job. We could put together an FBI-sanctioned task force, largely run by us and the Vermont State Police, working under the U.S. Attorney’s office in conjunction with you. That way, we would gain the advantage of having some federal clout, the state’s self-interests would be served with a fraction of the effort, and everybody’ll come out looking good.”

Derby actually laughed. Brandt, his fiddling with the pipe concluded, sighed and stared stonily out the window.

“And you think they’ll all buy that?” Derby finally asked.

I smiled back at him. “You know as much as I do that personalities count for a lot in this business-getting the right judge on a case, treating the clerk of court decently, showing other cops you’re on their side. What do you think about what I’ve said-purely from your own perspective?”

“I don’t think it’s particularly realistic, but it would make for some good politics.”

I leaned back in my chair. “People don’t think ideas like this are realistic because they don’t think they could get them to work themselves. But if you picked your way through the system carefully, you might be surprised. You just admitted you’re half won over yourself.”

“Well, I’m not,” Brandt finally growled, chilling the air. “Five people have died in this town in the last two weeks. We may have an Asian gang trying to take over the streets. Ron Klesczewski is out on indefinite leave; I’ve got media people jamming the halls like vagrants; and now you want to disappear and play federal task force with the VSP.

“As the one person who has nothing to gain from this scheme, I don’t buy it. To me, it means another man lost whose salary I still have to meet. ATF and FBI and all the other alphabet soups have regional offices precisely so they can inherit cases like this from overworked, understaffed, poorly funded outfits like ours.”

He turned his attention to me. “And I don’t agree that by working with the feds you’ll solve our problems here any quicker. You could do that best by staying put and working from this end while the feds work from theirs-that’s the sort of cooperation that’ll do us the most good.”

He got to his feet and crossed over to the window, propping his elbow on the high cement sill. When he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its edge. “I’m not denying you have real concerns for the town’s welfare if this case isn’t properly handled. But there may not be a hell of a lot any of us can do about that-that’s the reality of the system. We do what we can, and then we let it go, which-I’ll admit if you won’t-is not something you do well.

“I’m also wondering about the effects of this shooting on you. As far as I know, you haven’t reacted to it at all. You shouldn’t be here now. You should be at home with Gail, like Ron is with his wife, or spilling those overly controlled guts of yours to a department-paid shrink.”

I felt hammered by this. Tony had suddenly diverted the discussion onto a totally different path, reducing my advocacy to some sort of psychological avoidance of reality.

I couldn’t find anything to say to him that wouldn’t bolster his argument and make me sound defensive, so I stayed silent, trying to sense through my own anger if he might’ve been right.

Tony removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Look, we all agree on one thing: We probably won’t have this case for much longer. Why don’t we do it by the numbers-keep working on it for a couple of more days, at least until we get some feedback on the inquiries we’ve sent? Maybe by then we’ll have found something juicy enough to make the FBI really take notice.”

“Sounds good to me,” Derby quickly answered and rose to his feet.

I got up also, nodding in agreement. Tony, in an effort to make amends, added with feigned hopefulness, “That’s probably what’ll happen. We’re due for a break.”

“Right,” Derby said from the door. “We’ll kick it around later.”

I made to follow him out, but Tony stopped me. “Joe.”

“What?” I said, not looking back, unsure of what he’d hit me with next.

“You all right on this?” he asked, his voice softened by concern.

“Sure,” I answered, my earlier anger sapped by the knowledge that we were both merely twisting in the same stressful breeze.

“I got a call from Time Magazine an hour ago. They’re going to use this in a cover article on violence in rural America. They want a list of people they should talk to.”

I turned then and watched him standing by the window, the TV trucks outside as a backdrop.

He crossed over to his desk and sat down heavily. “I know I took a cheap shot at you just then, but I am worried. If we screw this up, it’ll be open season on the entire department. With the networks, Time Magazine, and who-knows-who-else zeroing in, our people’ll be made to look like total hicks. I just don’t want to feed that.”

I crossed the room and sat back down. “They may be better at protecting themselves than you think.”

He made a face as if tasting something sour. “Maybe.”

He put the fingertips of both hands up to his temples and gave himself a three-second massage, his eyes shut. Then he hunched forward, put his elbows on his desk, and looked up at me. “I’m not dead against you on this. I just don’t want to jump the gun. I want it clear to everybody we know what to do and how to do it.”

I got up and returned to the door, satisfied that we’d cleared the air.

Tony stopped me for the second time. “Joe.”

“Yeah?”

“Things okay with us?”

I leered malevolently at him and tapped the side of my head. “You know me, Tony-‘Never Forget. Never Forgive.’ Have a nice day.”

He shook his head, but at least he was smiling back.