Dog Eat Dog

by David Rosenfelt

  Sounds like a plan.

  We’re about an hour past dinner when the phone rings.

  Laurie takes the call and I don’t bother picking up the other extension for two reasons. One is that I wouldn’t understand a word Marcus said anyway; I’d spend the entire conversation looking for subtitles. The other reason is that it’s Laurie’s cell phone, so there is no other extension. I could have her put it on speakerphone, but the first reason makes that unproductive.

  Laurie asks a lot of questions, but she mostly listens and takes occasional notes. According to her, and I can’t attest to this one way or the other, Marcus’s investigative reports are generally complete and do not require much prodding or further explanation.

  She finally hangs up. “That was Marcus.”

  “No kidding. What happened?”

  “Well, they’re alive. He took them somewhere else to question them. He wasn’t clear on why, but said something about cars going by on the road. I guess he didn’t want to be interrupted.”

  “Did he get anything out of them?”

  She looks at me with a frown, as if it was a ridiculous question, which it was. “This is Marcus we’re talking about. Of course he got information from them.”

  I wait for Laurie to continue.

  “Stokan is working for Jerry Donnelly, but only indirectly. He’s actually taking orders from one of Donnelly’s lieutenants; apparently Donnelly delegates.” Laurie looks at her notes. “The lieutenant’s name is Carmody … Lyle Carmody.”

  “Does Carmody deal drugs for Donnelly?”

  Laurie nods. “He does. Covers the whole county and neighboring Knox County as well. Donnelly apparently has quite an operation.”

  “So he was supplying Charkin?”

  “That’s the thing. According to Stokan, Charkin was not a customer. Stokan swears that’s the case. He doesn’t know where Charkin was getting his drug supply from, but it wasn’t Carmody. He knows that because he does some collections and deliveries for Carmody, and he never saw Charkin.

  “And Stokan says that if it wasn’t Carmody, then it wasn’t Donnelly, because Carmody has the exclusive on this area.”

  This isn’t making sense. “So if Charkin wasn’t getting drugs through Donnelly, but Stokan was indirectly working for Donnelly, why was Stokan after me?”

  “Stokan swears that he doesn’t know, that Carmody told him to scare you and rough you up a little bit. They want you to back off, but I’m not sure what it is you’re supposed to back off of. It’s hard to believe they think you’d resign the case.”

  “And Marcus believed him?”

  “He did. Marcus has a way of providing incentive to cooperate.”

  I nod. “And if he gave up Donnelly’s name, he’d give up everything. Naming Donnelly puts him in major jeopardy. From what we’ve heard about Donnelly, he wouldn’t be likely to forgive and forget.”

  “There’s obviously something else we’re not understanding.”

  “I can see two possibilities. One is that we’ve turned over a rock with Donnelly under it, even though we have no idea which rock it was. Two is that Donnelly had another reason to kill Charkin that wasn’t drug related.”

  “That five grand found in Charkin’s house … you think he could have somehow stolen it from Donnelly?”

  “Doesn’t sound likely, but nothing else does either.… What did Marcus do with them when he was finished?”

  “He told them that if he saw them within a mile of you again, he would kill them. I suspect they believed him. I don’t know where he left them after that, but it doesn’t much matter.”

  The evening’s events have left me a little shaken, and I’m starting to feel it now. “Did you know there are lawyers who never get their lives threatened? We read about them in law school.”

  “Really? What boring lives they must lead.”

  “I can use a drink to calm my nerves. We have any craft beer?”

  “No, but we have wine.”

  “That will have to do.”

  “Let’s have a glass and then go to bed,” she says. “I find daredevil lawyers to be wildly exciting.”

  I take a different route on my morning walk with the dogs today.

  I have a simple rule of thumb: if I go someplace where two huge thugs try to attack me on behalf of a violent drug dealer, I avoid that place for at least twenty-four hours. It’s a tactic that has served me well.

  This is a more crowded route, at least in terms of other people walking their own dogs. I have to stop a few times to let my dogs sniff the newly met strangers, and vice versa. That’s fine with me, except it forces me to make small talk with their owners. I’m not a fan of small talk; I’m not that crazy about big talk either.

  I get back, grab muffins for Laurie and me, and head upstairs for a shower. Laurie is not back yet. Because she doesn’t have her exercise bike here, she goes for a run every morning. She runs three miles, and I would join her if I was in shape and insane.

  As she is walking in, not even breathing heavily, my cell phone rings. The caller ID says that it’s the US government calling, so I answer in my mature, adult voice, as befitting the occasion. “Hello?”

  “Good morning, Mr. Carpenter, this is Agent Donald Nichols, FBI, Portland office. We spoke in my office earlier.”

  “I can remember that far back.”

  “I’d like to come up there to speak with you this morning.”

  “What about?”

  “If I was inclined to discuss it on the phone, I wouldn’t need to come up there.”

  That kind of logic is difficult to argue with, and I’m intrigued by why Nichols would be calling, so I agree to wait at the hotel for him. It’s not a great concession, since I had no place to go anyway.

  He says that he’s in Brunswick and will be here in about forty minutes. I tell Laurie about the call, so she quickly takes a shower so that she can also hear what Nichols has to say.

  Sam Willis calls to update me on his progress on the cyber-searches I gave him. “Let’s start with McCaskill. In the day that you visited him, he made four calls. One was almost immediately after you left from the burner phone, the other three were that night. Two of the nighttime calls were from his regular phone; the other was from the burner.

  “The two nighttime calls from the regular phone were probably insignificant. One was to his boss at the landscaping company, and another was to a pizza place. Unless people interesting to you work at either of those places, you can probably disregard them.

  “The two burner calls, the morning one and another later that night, were to a guy named Gavin Helms. Helms is also using a burner phone.”

  “So how do you know it’s him?”

  “He was dumb enough to buy it with his credit card; the purchase was in northern Vermont. Anyway, I ran a search on Helms. He’s got five arrests, two for assault, one for illegal assembly, and two for illegal possessions of outlawed firearms. He’s got a media trail also; he’s a member of a militia group called the Liberators.”

  That’s the group that McCaskill belongs to, but I don’t interrupt Sam to mention it.

  “The other interesting thing about Helms is that he was a close associate of a man named Darrin Jeffrey. Do you know that name?”

  “No. Who is he?”

  “You mean, who was he? He was killed in a shoot-out with a rival group about a year and a half ago. It was a pretty big story because he was something of a mysterious figure in the militia world.”

  “Okay. What about Charkin’s finances?”

  “Not exactly a model of consistency. He spent most of the year broke, broken up by intermittent cash infusions. Usually at five thousand a clip; there were nine of them.”

  “That figures.” My assumption is that he hadn’t had a chance to deposit the last five thousand before he was killed.

  “One interesting thing. He wrote a five-thousand-dollar check to Tina Welker.”

  That’s all Sam has for me, but it certainly gives me plen
ty to think about after the Nichols meeting.

  Laurie is dressed and ready by the time Nichols arrives. She looks fresh and clean, like she just got out of the shower. When I get out of the shower, I look like I need a shower. I don’t know why that is, but it’s another mystery I hope to have time to focus on when I retire.

  Nichols calls when he’s downstairs, so I go down to the lobby to meet him and bring up more coffee and muffins for all of us. These are some seriously good muffins.

  When we get to the room, I introduce Nichols and tell him that Laurie will be sitting in on our meeting. I add that she is my investigator and a former cop.

  “I thought we might meet alone,” Nichols says.

  “I trust this woman with my life, Senator. To ask her to leave would be an insult.” It’s a takeoff of a line from Michael Corleone in Godfather II, but I don’t think Nichols gets it.

  In any event, he smiles and says to Laurie, “Agent Spodek told me about you. She said that you were the one that wasn’t a pain in the ass.”

  Cindy Spodek is the friend of ours at the FBI who set up my initial meeting with Nichols. “That Agent Spodek is quite a kidder,” I say. “To what do we owe this visit?”

  I’m hoping he’s here to provide me with more information about Jerry Donnelly; my first choice would be for him to tell me that Donnelly has confessed to the murders and that Matt Jantzen is being released from jail even as we speak.

  That’s not it. “It’s about your investigation into Peter Charkin.”

  That’s almost as good. “What about it?”

  “You spoke to Daniel McCaskill.”

  I nod. “I already knew that; I’m the one that spoke to him. How did you know?”

  “I’m an FBI agent; I know things. Keep that in mind.”

  “I’ll commit it to memory.” Then, “Is that all you have for me?”

  “I’m here to receive information, not to dispense it.”

  “Then you drove a long way for nothing. You should take a couple of muffins home with you, so it’s not a total loss.”

  Laurie rolls her eyes, a sure sign that I am being obnoxious. Laurie rolls her eyes a lot.

  “Let’s go through the motions anyway,” Nichols says. “Can I assume you spoke to him as part of your investigation into Charkin’s death?”

  “You can.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Maybe. If you tell me why you want to know.”

  “The Bureau has an active investigation ongoing into the militia group of which McCaskill is a member.”

  Laurie says, “And Charkin was a member as well?”

  Nichols nods. “He was.” He turns back to me. “The Bureau has two, noncompeting interests here. First, we want to know if you have relevant information that can help us. And second, we do not want you to do anything that would constitute interference in our efforts.”

  “Understood,” I say. “I have two noncompeting interests as well. First, I want to defend my client as best I can. And second, I want to defend my client as best I can.”

  “We should each be able to accomplish our goals,” Nichols says.

  “Good. So let’s set up ground rules. We tell each other any relevant information we have or acquire, as long as it doesn’t go against our respective interests.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Laurie pretends to dab at a tear. “This is a beautiful moment.” It’s the kind of sarcastic comment I would make, and I would roll my eyes at her, if I knew how. My experience in this area is as an eye-rollee, not an eye-roller.

  “You go first.”

  “We have reason to believe that the militia group of which Charkin was a member is planning a significant event. I really have little information beyond that and couldn’t share it if I did. But we have no reason to believe that Charkin, who obviously died two years ago, was a part of it.”

  “But Charkin was a member?”

  Nichols nods. “On the fringe. Not a serious player, and certainly not part of leadership.”

  “Might he have gotten money from them? Five thousand dollars in cash was found in his apartment.”

  “Anything is possible, but I am at a loss as to why they would have paid him anything. I believe it’s your turn.”

  “I’m afraid I have nothing for you right now. I learned in the discovery documents that the police had McCaskill on their suspect list originally, before the DNA ruled him out. It also said that he was a militia member. So I went to talk to him about it, to get a sense of whether he was a viable candidate to have killed Charkin and Tina Welker.”

  “And his response?”

  “He found me to be irritating and obnoxious and threatened to forcibly evict me from his house. Go figure.”

  “Anything else?” Nichols asks, probably frustrated at how little I have to offer.

  “Maybe. I have reason to believe that soon after I left, McCaskill placed a call to a guy named Gavin Helms.”

  “You’re tapping McCaskill’s phone?” Nichols asks, barely concealing his incredulity.

  “No chance. That would be illegal; as an FBI agent you should know that. Think of this as a very strong hunch that you can take to the bank. I am great at hunches.”

  “But you’re sure that McCaskill called him?”

  “Positive.” My assumption is that the FBI might be monitoring McCaskill’s phone, since they seem so interested in him. They would have no way of knowing about his burner phone, though; we only know about it because Charlie Tilton was resourceful enough to steal its wrapping from off McCaskill’s couch.

  “Do you know where Helms is?” Nichols asks.

  “No.”

  “Are McCaskill, and the people he works with, capable of murder?” Laurie asks.

  Nichols doesn’t hesitate. “Absolutely.”

  Neither of us has said anything of value, but we both say that we will abide by our agreement to share information when possible. If it doesn’t benefit my client, I will undoubtedly renege on that agreement.

  Even though I was hoping for better, I think Nichols was being straight with me, so I give him a muffin to take back with him.

  Never let it be said that Andy Carpenter isn’t gracious.

  The meeting with Nichols was disappointing.

  When I found out he wanted to talk, I had this hope, admittedly a long shot but still a hope, that he would have incriminating information about Jerry Donnelly.

  But he obviously didn’t; instead he had his own militia-related agenda. The militia side of it is interesting to me in that it demonstrated that Charkin was involved with people who are known to be violent. I might even try to put it before a jury.

  But at the end of the day it doesn’t fit into any theory I can come up with, at least based on my current knowledge. Charkin was likely on the Liberator payroll; that is probably where the cash infusions came from. His brother assumed that as well. Charkin was performing a service for them, and I’d like to know what it was, but I just don’t know why they would kill him.

  Donnelly is a different story because of the drug connection. By all accounts Donnelly is also a violent guy, capable of murder. Charkin could easily have been into him for money; for a period he was desperate enough to scam his own brother for some.

  But what makes Donnelly’s involvement especially likely is Stokan’s going after me. Donnelly doesn’t know me, and generally it’s only people who know me that dislike me. His only interest in my investigation must be a concern for what I could uncover.

  He, or his people, wouldn’t have sent Stokan after me unless they were worried about what I might find out. Since the only thing I am looking into is the double murder, it’s a logical conclusion that he has some culpability.

  One puzzling thing to come out of Sam’s report is the $5,000 check that Charkin wrote to Tina Welker. I can think of two possible reasons for it. One is that she needed money; her mother was ill and the family may have been strapped.

  Charkin was at that moment rela
tively rich, by his standards, because of the cash he had been accumulating. So maybe he was just a generous guy who cared about Tina and gave her the money. Maybe it was a loan, to be repaid with interest. No way to know.

  Another possibility is that he was using her to hide the money for some reason that isn’t yet apparent. That makes less sense because he wrote her a check; if he dealt in cash so much, one would think that he would have given her cash and told her to hide it. Writing a check to her is not an effective way to conceal anything.

  I might as well follow up on that because I have nothing else to do. So I head back to Augusta General Hospital and Medical Center to talk to Ginny Lawson again. Ginny was Tina’s friend and coworker and was forthcoming last time.

  I call ahead, but she is in with a patient. I leave a message that I’m on the way; hopefully she’ll be able to see me.

  When I arrive, I tell the receptionist that I’m here, an unnecessary act because Ginny sees me through a glass door and comes out. She smiles and invites me into the back.

  On the way, I almost bang into a woman pushing a cart. Bags of dark red liquid are hanging above the cart. When the woman moves on, I say to Ginny, “Is that what I think it was?”

  “Sure was. Blood make you squeamish?”

  “It’s on the list of things that do, yes. What is she doing with it?”

  “Taking it to be irradiated. Makes it okay to give to patients whose immune systems have been taken down.”

  “Oh.”

  We go to an examining room. “Making any progress?” she asks.

  “Less than I’d like. You told me last time that Tina was having money problems?”

  “Oh, yes. Plenty. They never had much money anyway, but her father left her mother, and then her mother got sick. Tina was the only one bringing in any money, and believe me, working here doesn’t make you rich.”

  “Would she have borrowed from friends?”

  “Maybe. She never asked me, but she would know I didn’t have any myself.”

  “Peter Charkin gave her five thousand dollars.”