by Archer Mayor
Dan’s two aces were that by now, he was familiar with the intricacies of the system confronting him, and that last time—as was his habit—he’d left behind a secret key of sorts.
Doing so was a private trademark: With almost every house he entered, Dan made enough subtle alterations to make any later re-entries easier—just in case. Some of these were electronic in nature; others purely mechanical, as in rigging a physical lock. In reality, he only rarely took advantage of his ploy later on, it being more a matter of principle than of need.
The problem here, of course, was that he was no longer confident that he’d defeated the house’s entire system the first time. As he stood in the Lucases’ home, silent and still, he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t being scrutinized as thoroughly as a bug under a magnifying lens.
The irony of this—the snooper being snooped upon—was lost on Dan Kravitz, whose sense of humor was sparse, at best. For him, tonight’s mission was to right a wrong—one he was fearful he’d committed through sloppiness. Willy’s suggestion that Dan’s first visit here might have resulted in a reprisal upon Lester Spinney’s boy had worked on Dan’s conscience like acid. However perverse his sense of propriety, Dan’s devotion to family and orderliness couldn’t stand that he might have violated them both through carelessness.
The problem was that he was very good at what he did, and had been at it for a long time—a combination leaving him with little room to find what he may have missed. Nevertheless, his senses ratcheted up high, he began his survey of the house, almost inch by inch, looking to rule out that he’d been spotted the first time.
Dan had a second, more permanent base than his residence—an office of sorts, located off Arch Street in Brattleboro, alongside the railroad tracks. There, behind a series of locked doors in a building that looked ripe for a wrecking ball, he had an almost sterile laboratory jammed with computers and reference materials, in which he researched not just his people of interest, but where he also kept abreast of the latest developments in surveillance technology.
He therefore fully understood what he might be up against in Lucas’s house—cameras had shrunken to the size of buttons, didn’t need to be hardwired, and could be placed almost anywhere. There was essentially no aspect of any room—from its contents to its architecture—that didn’t offer itself as potential cover for a device.
On the flip side, most of these instruments, and especially the wireless models, emitted signals of some kind. That, along with his experience, is where Dan had an edge. On his own, he’d constructed a portable wavelength sniffer, calibrated to his needs, which he’d brought along. It hadn’t yet picked up anything he didn’t already know about, but it offered him the kind of security a handgun might have during a stroll through the jungle at night—a little.
The downstairs analysis having been completed in just over two hours, Dan silently climbed the stairs to the bedrooms above.
He was still at a disadvantage, given his usual methods. For starters, under Willy’s initial deadline, Dan hadn’t had time to establish the nighttime habits of Mr. and Mrs. Lucas—as in, did either of them have a small bladder?
He got his answer with startling abruptness when, as he stood in the upstairs hallway, the nightgown-shrouded form of Lucas’s wife appeared five feet in front of him.
He froze, standing in plain view, the glow of a faint night-light as effective here as a searchlight.
But she didn’t glance in his direction. She swung away, walked a few feet to the guest bathroom across the hall—which he knew from before that she’d claimed for herself—and noisily placed herself on the toilet, without closing the door.
The safest but longest route to safety was to retrace his steps. But he didn’t know how fast she might finish her ritual. He therefore opted for the bolder course of quickly passing before both bedroom and bathroom doors—timing his move to her turning and reaching for the toilet paper—before she re-entered the corridor without washing her hands, and repeated her near miss of him, in reverse.
It had all occurred within moments. He was still safe—or so it felt—but, along with a rapid heartbeat and suddenly being damp with sweat, he’d also had enough. What he’d been searching for was probably downstairs, where he’d found nothing. Mrs. Lucas’s near sleepwalking experience implied that no one was tracking Dan’s progress. And, finally, now he knew for a fact that the homeowners were clearly no longer fast asleep.
It was time to go.
Nevertheless, he remained of two minds. While he hated to leave unsatisfied, he also remembered that Kunkle had offered no proof of Dan’s earlier entry being recorded—or used to target David Spinney. Indeed, Dan’s lack of success tonight reinforced that Willy had merely been responding to his own hyped-up fantasies.
This wasn’t a bad thing, Dan thought. If nothing else, he could say as much to Kunkle later, and perhaps help him to pursue an alternative scent.
Feeling better, Dan retreated as carefully as he’d advanced, and found himself in the cool night air some twenty minutes later.
It was only then that he tumbled to what he’d been seeking all along.
Leaving the building, he’d carefully attached his wavelength detector to the harness he wore on these adventures. But he hadn’t shut it off, nor had he removed the earpiece he used to eavesdrop on its probings. That turned out to be a piece of good luck.
He froze in place upon hearing the unexpected signal, and carefully unhooked the detector to better interpret the tone’s direction, strength, and distance.
All three came as a surprise. Exterior cameras were nothing new. In general, they outnumbered inside units, both because of their practicality and cost—they could be bigger, more obvious, and thus cheaper.
But they were usually attached to the houses they protected. What Dan quickly calculated was that this signal was originating from nowhere near the building, and, in fact, came from across the road and off the property altogether. Had he not been facing the wrong way, Dan never would have heard it.
This was a first for him, and it put him in a quandary. Not only was he being documented by a camera he hadn’t known about, but the possibility existed that while it was watching the Lucas residence, it didn’t belong to Johnny Lucas.
* * *
Kravitz met with Kunkle early the next morning, still dressed in black, as he had been inside the Lucas house—if minus the ski mask he habitually wore.
“You sure about this?” Willy pressed him after hearing his report.
“Yes,” Dan confirmed. “I had nothing to lose by then, so I tracked down not just the unit that had triggered my detector, but two more that were placed at different angles. They were all wireless and remote, all equipped with long-lasting batteries and hidden solar panels, and, from what I could determine, all rigged to use the house’s own Wi-Fi router for transmission, meaning that whoever was at the receiving end could be anywhere in the country, or outside it, for that matter.”
“Damn,” Willy said. “I wish to hell we could figure out what that’s all about. The make and model didn’t tell you anything?”
“I couldn’t get that close. I doubt it would have mattered.”
Willy nodded thoughtfully and gave his CI a sympathetic look. “What’re you gonna do now?”
“Since I may have been caught twice on camera?” Dan asked. “It depends on who’s doing the watching. You do realize this still doesn’t prove a linkage between my visits and what happened to your colleague’s son.”
“Prove?” Willy asked. “Yeah. I know that. But come on. Sure as hell something’s going on.”
“Can’t you do something legal?”
“No probable cause, not to mention it’s in the wrong state. We don’t even know for sure those three cameras aren’t Lucas’s.”
Dan didn’t argue. He had more pressing concerns. “Mr. Kunkle, do any of your colleagues know about our relationship?”
“My wife—” Willy stopped himself, startled by having used that wo
rd to describe Sammie. “One of them does, but she knows not to repeat it. You’re worried, aren’t you?”
“I’d be an idiot not to be,” Dan said plainly.
Willy shared the concern, and was embarrassed by his role in the man’s predicament. “You want help?”
Dan was sensitive enough to know what was going on, and irritated enough not to let Kunkle off the hook. “In what way?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we could park you someplace.”
“As in jail? Where did you have in mind?”
“No. That wouldn’t work.”
Dan moved in slightly, forcing Willy to look at him. “I wasn’t being serious, and nor are you.”
Willy didn’t respond.
“Mr. Kunkle,” Dan stated. “I think we’ve just officially entered a new arrangement. I do not owe you a thing any longer. Is that agreeable?”
Willy didn’t hesitate. “Yeah.”
“I won’t bring attention to myself, as before, but you leave me alone. Clear?”
Willy nodded. “You could’ve gotten me in almost as much trouble as I could’ve gotten you.”
“If that helps you in your decision, fine,” Dan told him.
“It’s not that,” Willy came back, surprised by how Dan’s tone had stung him. “I just meant I didn’t really see you as a CI anyhow. More like an ally.”
“Well, now you can consider me a nodding acquaintance.”
Willy’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve made your point. I still have a vested interest in your safety. I put you in this mess.”
“Nice of you to say,” Dan said honestly. “If I need you, I’ll reach out. Until then, please leave us alone.” He stuck out his hand—an unusual gesture for him, as Kunkle well knew. “Deal?”
“Deal,” Willy said quietly, shaking hands mournfully.
Dan walked away. Willy watched him go, hoping it wouldn’t be for the last time.
* * *
Dressed in worn jeans and a baseball cap, sitting at the wheel of his battered, secondhand pickup truck, David Spinney was parked along a darkened backstreet in Bellows Falls, a village of roughly one square mile, whose problems—social, political, and financial—had always seemed disproportionate to its small size.
The perpetual irony of the place was that aesthetically, it was quite appealing, in part due to a cluster of abandoned mill buildings that had once made of the town a bustling and prosperous community. Sadly, the quaintness was largely skin deep, and it was, in fact, this darker underlayment, stubbornly resistant to improvement, that had drawn David here, late at night, on his mission of self-redemption.
He knew he was on shaky ground, and that the sheriff, his father, Joe Gunther, and probably even his kid sister would be rolling their eyes had they known of his ambitions.
But they didn’t—nor would they—if he had anything to say about it, at least not until he’d achieved his goal.
He’d never been one to strut around or put on airs. He harbored no embarrassment about loving his parents and seeing the value of a good education, or being patriotic, or having integrity. He believed in all that. But he’d been unnerved by what happened to him—perhaps more so because it had ended so benignly. The sheriff might have hoodwinked the press, but law enforcement’s rumor mill was something else, and Dave knew all too well how that bunch loved to rag on one of their own, especially if he was young, unproved, and the son of a colleague.
For Dave, there was no question that they be delivered a more positive final impression—and that he’d be the one to deliver it.
That wishful thought remained in the future, however. Right now, he was staking out the address of someone he knew nothing about, except for what he’d read on a rap sheet, which wasn’t much. If it hadn’t been for the tattoo, in fact, Dave would never have stopped at Steve Hobart’s name. Hobart appeared as just another aging teenager, hanging out with the wrong people and trying hard to become one of them.
Two hours into his vigil, Dave spotted Hobart leaving his apartment house, highlighted by a nearby streetlamp. Even before he raised his binoculars for a closer look, Dave knew that he’d located his man. Seeing the clear and colorful rendering of the dragon on Hobart’s left shoulder, peering out from under the trendily torn shirtsleeve, came only as confirmation.
Along with that recognition, however, came an unexpected problem. Dave was a cop—no longer simply a young man near bursting with outrage. His actions involved greater consequences than those of a civilian who could simply confront an opponent and bash him over the head. Hobart had done more than debase David Spinney—he’d also broken the law and violated the uniform. It was that law and uniform that had to be honored now—Dave’s personal restitution would have to follow.
This did not involve a belabored internal debate. Dave had watched his father act within the same constraints for as long as he could recall. More, he’d seen Lester live by an equally strict moral code in his dealings with his wife, and children, and the people he encountered every day.
David therefore knew where the right course lay, but it did make him angry.
“Fine,” he conceded, lowering the binoculars and starting up the truck as Hobart climbed into his own car and backed out of the potholed driveway.
Dave’s dilemma was that he had no proof of Hobart’s guilt beyond his own split second’s glimpse of a popular tattoo. Also, he couldn’t account for Hobart’s confederates, had no idea of what alibi he might tender in his own defense, and had no corroboration or witnesses to line up against him.
As a result, now that he had his target identified, Dave needed time to build a case.
Satisfied at last, if missing the gratification of a cleansing outburst of violence, Dave turned on his radio, pulled into the street, and slipped into Hobart’s wake.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Full disclosure, boss.”
Joe sat back and cupped his cheek in his hand, eyeing Willy from across the office. He’d suspected something amiss when he noticed Sammie’s averted glance upon her entrance moments earlier.
Lester stopped typing, anticipating whatever might be coming.
“Do tell,” Joe said.
Willy’s phrasing was conspicuously precise. “In the best interests of all concerned, I will not go into details, but let’s say that if you or any member of the public were to drive down River Road in West Chesterfield and pause opposite the Lucas residence, you might be able to pick out three very well hidden surveillance cameras, aimed at that house.”
He paused, allowing Joe to ask, with equal care, “By ‘opposite,’ I’m assuming you mean across the road, and therefore not on land belonging to Mr. Lucas.”
“That is correct.”
“Are there any visible connections between the Lucas property and those three cameras?”
“None. In fact, if you had the right equipment, and used it standing in the public right-of-way, you’d probably discover that the radio signals from those units are directed right at the house, and use its router to be broadcast wherever.”
Joe smiled. Willy smiled back. Sam and Les watched them both.
“I guess, then,” Joe finally said, “that I can only express my gratitude for your extraordinary eyesight—honed to a sharp edge during your employment by the United States government—and for bringing this observation to our attention.”
Willy sidled around to his chair and sat down. “You’re very welcome.”
Lester was shaking his head. “Are you two done? I think we can now say, if we’re ever deposed or put on the stand, that this discovery fell into the ‘plain view’ category.” He clapped his hands. “Nicely done.”
Joe let loose a frown in Willy’s direction, silently challenging the truth of his story. “If you say so.”
Sammie moved the conversation along. “If it is what it looks like, who has him under surveillance?”
“And why?” Lester added.
Sam was reading her computer screen. “Boss, after BB was found dead and
we all split up to check alibis, it says here that you went back to Lucas’s, quote-unquote, without effect. I take it that means you got the same treatment as last time?”
“Right.”
She took them all in with her next question. “Has anyone ever set eyes on this guy?”
“Presumably his old drinking buddies,” Lester said, based on his conversation with Jimmy Stringer and Carlo Fuentes. “Although I don’t think I asked them when that last was.”
“Stringer’s wife,” Sammie offered, “told me she hadn’t seen Lucas since Ridgeline sold to Vermont Amalgamated and BB and Johnny went their separate ways.”
“That was years ago,” Joe said.
“She also said Johnny kept to himself.”
“What about the fusion report on Lucas?” Joe asked. “What’s that say about him?”
Lester read from a printout. “I just ran that off. The fusion center collects everything, as you know—local tax records, driver’s license, car registrations, houses sold and bought, criminal offenses, marriages and divorces, family members, even next-door neighbors. Given all that, Lucas looks boring as hell. Married to the same woman for ages, nothing criminal, no kids, owns a boat, stuff like that.”
“When’s it say he was born?” Joe asked.
“Nineteen forty-seven.”
“And when’s the first entry on that report?”
“Bingo,” Willy said from the sidelines. “Great minds think alike.”
“Nineteen sixty-nine,” Lester responded after a moment’s scrutiny. He glanced up. “You thinking witness protection?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Joe said.
“Especially back then,” Willy contributed, looking contemplative. “Wild and woolly times.”
Joe made a sour face. “Great. If that’s true, there’s no way the marshals’re going to tell us about it—not without a warrant, and there’s no way we have grounds for one of those.”
Willy and Sam remained silent as Lester asked, “Even after all this time? Couldn’t we claim exigent circumstances?”