When his cell phone chimed softly, distantly, an hour later, Clipper almost ignored it. He was floating outside himself, drifting slowly over a muted landscape of murder and motive, spotting opportunity, tracking down elusive possibilities in the flickering light of intuition. With a sigh, he wrenched himself back to the present and fumbled the phone out of his pocket.
“You rang?” Caleb Mathers sounded jovial, and perhaps a little tipsy.
“Hey, Caleb,” Clipper said lightly, “Where’d you hide your client?”
Mathers got wary. “Far as I know, she’s at her mother’s. Why?”
“Her husband’s business partner turned up dead yesterday, and someone, a man and a woman, broke into her house last night. And, nobody’s seen her since the day before yesterday. Well,” he amended. “I saw her, but not to speak to, at Cleo’s early Saturday morning. She was with an older guy. One of yours?”
Mathers’ voice got serious. “Nope, not mine. I haven’t seen her since we left your office, and I don’t know where she is, Clip,” he said, “but I’ll find her. She’s supposed to come in for a conference tomorrow. I assume you want to talk to her?”
“That’d be good. Bring her in for a statement. If we find her first, I’ll give you a call.”
“Good. Before the rubber hoses, ok?”
Clipper chuckled and hung up. Introspective mood broken, he turned on the TV and hunted through the sports channels for a while, then gave up and went to bed.
Chapter 2.10
Monday morning announced itself with continuous rumbles of thunder and torrential rain sleeting from gunmetal skies threatening to overwhelm Clipper’s windshield wipers. He ran from the parking lot into the nearest station entrance which dumped him, wet and sweating, into the dispatch center. Sergeant Coombs, the pudgy day shift supervisor, resembled a rumpled teddy bear as he struggled to stay on top of a torrent of reports of accidents, downed limbs and power outages caused by the powerful summer storm.
“Hey, Clip,” he yelled excitedly, waddling over from the other side of the room, Washington County S.O. spotted that Canadian bank robber. They couldn’t bag him, but it looks like he’s headed this way.” Never a ball of fire when he was on the street, Coombs tended to enjoy a little vicarious excitement from the communications oversight position.
Clipper waved over his shoulder and headed for the third floor. Patrol could handle the errant bank robber. He stepped out of the elevator and nearly into the arms of Chief Norris who was gesticulating grandly before an audience of reporters and TV cameramen. Clipper winced and tried to slide past, but the pack turned on him in a babble of loud demands, and the chief caught his arm and pulled him close. “Here’s the man who can answer your questions,” he said loudly. “I have personally assigned Lieutenant Clipper to these cases, and I’m sure he’d be happy to fill you in.” The chief stepped back beaming.
Trapped, Clipper took a deep breath. “As you already know,” he said, speaking quietly, trying to quiet the crowd, “there has been a second homicide which we believe is connected to the death of William Owens. Mister Owens’s business partner, Mister Rupert Jones, age 54 of Bangor, was killed Saturday night at their place of business. We are investigating the two killings as one continuing incident.”
“How was he killed?” asked the Bangor News reporter.
“Both men were stabbed.”
“Do you have any suspects? What’s the motive?” This from cute, twenty-something TV-7 reporter.
“We are following several leads, but I’m not going to discuss suspects or motives at this point. Beginning tomorrow, the department’s public affairs officer, Lieutenant Preston will provide daily briefings in the station lobby at 11 am. Now, if you don’t mind, this is not a public area, and I have an appointment.”
A couple of the younger reporters grumbled, but two of the older cameramen and the news reporter glanced towards the Chief and grinned as they filed into the elevator. They knew he’d violated protocol in allowing them access to the third floor and figured they were lucky that Clipper had given them anything at all.
As the elevator door closed, Chief Norris glared at Clipper. “There’s a lot more you should have told them, Lieutenant.” he said, angrily. “We need to maintain good relations with the press, have them on our side. You…”
“You don’t ever bring the press up here,” Clipper snarled, interrupting and pushing into the chief’s face. “If one of them glances through a door and sees a piece of evidence or a suspect, it could blow a case, and if you were a real cop, you’d know that!” His voice rose. “I don’t know what you told them, but if you open your mouth about this case again, I’ll have you restrained by the Attorney General, or lock you up myself. Just stay the hell out of my way!”
Shaking with rage and frustration, Clipper realized that his hands were up, tightly balled into fists as Chief Norris shrank back against the elevator, a tiny spark of fear in his eyes. For a fleeting, red-hazed moment the lizard part of Clipper’s brain awoke and tried to sell its ancient, kill-or-be-killed logic.
Abruptly disgusted, with both Norris and himself, Clipper turned away and strode down the hall to the Criminal Division. He wheeled through the door and stopped, dumbfounded, as first John Peters and then Paula and four detectives rose to their feet, slowly clapping their hands in a solemn, measured ovation. He glared at them for a moment, trembling with residual anger and adrenalin, and then grinned abruptly. “Do you think anyone heard?” he deadpanned.
John Peters considered. “There may be a deaf guy down in Portland who didn’t catch it all,” he said, but dispatch is getting calls and two guys already asked when the Lieutenant’s exam will be.” He looked around the bullpen. “And… ah, I wondered… Can I have your office?”
Clipper laughed. “If that political twerp can get my job, you’re certainly welcome to my office.”
The tension broken, Clipper put the incident out of his mind and called his crew together. Dave Adams was already in route to the State Lab in Augusta for Jones’ autopsy, and the crime scene officers reported they were done at the scene, with nothing new to report.
“We talked to all four employees,” said Peters. “Three had solid alibies for Saturday night, and none of them look good in terms of motive. Same as Owens, he was well liked and nobody would want to kill him.” He glanced at his notebook. “We’ll have the search warrants for the business records and bank accounts this morning. I’ve already spoken to their attorney and the bank, and they’ll have it all laid out for us as soon as we’ve got the paper.”
Clipper told them about the intruders at the Owens house the previous night. “Let’s keep both scenes secure until we figure out what’s going on. He looked at Peters. “We need to find Janice Owens, and we need to get Clara Jones in for a statement. I caught a little whiff of holdout when I talked to Jones at the Owens scene, and we need to press her about any issues between them. And I want to talk to Peeps if you can run him down. In fact, you all need to talk to anyone you’ve got on the street. Somebody’s got to know something.”
When they broke up, Clipper went back to his office and placed a call to Caleb Mather, getting a terse “Still looking, man,” in answer to his question and then spent an hour sifting through the weekend’s incident reports and the division’s follow-ups before being interrupted by a knock on his office door. He looked up as Ellen Davis entered.
“Nobody’s shooting at us,” she said with a smile, “and I know where the guns are.”
Clipper cocked his head in an exaggerated listening attitude.
“Cubby Bates and Jim Smith took ‘em. They’re in Bates’ apartment on Center Street right now.”
“Well, let’s go get ‘em,” grinned Clipper, happy at the prospect of some action.
Davis’s smile slipped. “I haven’t got enough for a warrant,” she said. “I can’t name my informant, and I doubt the court would find her reliable even if I did.”
Clipper thought. Bates and Smith were a couple
of late-teen, brain-dead dropouts that, between them, didn’t have the intellect to plan and execute a major theft. “You got anybody on ‘em?” he asked.
Davis nodded, Ken and Randy are parked down the street, and I’ve got a uniform watching the back.”
“I’m sure Bates is on probation,” Clipper mused. “Why don’t you find out who his PO is and see if he’s got a phone number for him?”
Davis was back in five minutes with the number and a puzzled look on her face.
“Tell your people to stand by,” Clipper said. Using his cell phone, which was set not to transmit caller ID, he dialed the number. “Jesus Christ,” he said in a low, urgent whisper when it was answered, “get those guns out of there. The cops’re on the way over there right now.” He hung up and grinned at Davis.
A half hour later, Clipper was in the bull-pen admiring one of the recovered peacemakers when Davis brought Cubby Bates out of an interview room. A sneer wrinkled his pudgy face as Clipper looked up. “You can’t do that, man,” he whined. “You lied, and that’s against my rights.”
Clipper frowned. “The Detective didn’t tell you that you had a right to be lied to?” he asked, nodding at Davis.
Chuckling, Clipper tried to go back to work at his desk, but his concentration was gone. Still wound up from his encounter with Chief Norris, and wondering in the back of his mind if his job might be in jeopardy, he told Paula he’d be out on the air, and went down to his truck. Enjoying the clean, post-storm air, Clipper breathed deeply as he set out to take to pulse of his town.
Swinging by the Thompson house, Clipper checked with Janice Owens’s mother, who still hadn’t seen her daughter and was obviously getting worried. He suggested she talk with Caleb Mather and urged her again to call him if she heard from Janice. Clipper hated to admit that Janice was on the run, but it was beginning to look that way.
Leaving Oak Street, Clipper swung through Bangor’s downtown, stopping for coffee at Ollie’s Café and wandering through Founder’s park, a narrow, leafy, green slash that ran through the concrete business district, talking to people he knew. He learned that Otis Perkins, one of Bangor’s more determined young entrepreneurs, was hanging around the High School again, probably pedaling speed, and that a recent string of eastside car burglaries were the work of a gang of teens from Hampden the next town down river. He called that tidbit into Allan Oaks, who was looking into the burglaries, and then continued his stroll, listening patiently to an unending litany of complaints about downtown parking, late welfare checks and drunk spouses, but there was no hint of information on the killings and no one had laid eyes on Janice Owens or ‘Peeps’ Pelky. Finally glancing at his watch, Clipper strolled back to his truck to make his one o’clock meeting with Ed Bass.
As he pulled onto Main Street, the police radio under his dash crackled to life. ‘748, Bangor. I got a blue Chevy Lumina on Union, Maine Reg. RA-3828 ten twenty-eight, ten twenty-nine.’ A second after the dispatcher’s laconic “ten-four 48, standby” the officer was back on the radio, voice rising in excitement, ‘He’s running, he’s running. We’re west on Third, passing Cedar.’
Clipper could hear the siren a block ahead as he fumbled a magnetic blue light out from behind the passenger seat and slammed it onto the dash. He jammed the plug into the cigarette lighter as he roared into light traffic, knifing through the yellow light at the top of Maine Street hill. The chase was running parallel to Main, one block over, and headed toward the interstate. Clipper took his truck through seventy and touched eighty, horn blaring, down the broad center lane of Bangor’s main drag. The runner would have to navigate the residential street and turn back towards him to get onto I-395, and Clipper was betting that he could beat him to the entrance. With a quarter mile to go, he grabbed the mike. “712 - 48, I’m on Main. Almost to 395. Herd him this way if you can.”
The young officer’s voice was hard to make out over his siren and the roar of Clipper’s engine. ‘…on Buck… your way.’ came the fragmented reply.
Pulse pounding, Clipper slammed his truck into a tire-smoking four wheel drift, sliding through the final intersection and coming to a shuddering stop across the on-ramp entrance. He looked out his passenger-side window to see the Lumina a block away, coming straight at him. Suddenly, it jinked left and sideswiped line of three parked cars then caromed across the street and jumped the curb into the Speedy Print lot at the corner of Main and Dutton. The car spun one hundred and eighty degrees and stopped in a cloud of dust and steam with the pursuing cruiser sliding to a stop facing it, twenty-five feet away.
Clipper was out of his truck, .45 in hand, and running toward the Lumina when the cruiser door opened and the officer stepped out and crouched behind it, screaming at the Lumina’s driver to get out of the vehicle. Suddenly, the Lumina’s passenger door slammed open and a dark figure rolled out onto the ground. Clipper scrabbled to a stop, and time slowed as the shotgun swung around…
The nine .33 buckshot pellets hammered into the cruiser door like a ragged thunderbolt, and the officer staggered backward on his haunches, as if dancing to the chilling sound of the shotgun’s pump action. Time froze, and sound bled out of the universe as the shotgun foreshortened in its swinging arc towards Clipper. He was acutely aware that he was standing in the open, without cover as unbidden muscle memory, the result of a thousand hours on the range, brought his left hand up to meet his right in a practiced Weaver stance. He clearly felt the sharp snap of the safety coming off and even sensed the phantom drag of the sear sliding out of its notch as the trigger began its infinitesimal journey to hell. “Slow… too slow!” he screamed in the silence of his mind, sure he had lost. The shotgun muzzle was a monstrous black hole, reaching out to engulf him when his front sight blade kissed the prone figure behind it and later he couldn’t remember hearing the shots.
“You was gone, man. He had you dead and you was fuckin’ gone!” Landon Pratt, the officer that had been behind the cruiser door goggled at Clipper from the gurney, his voice trembling and shrill with excitement. Three of the shotgun pellets had made it through the door and hit him in a neat little group, just below the top of the bulletproof vest he wore under his uniform shirt. He batted away the oxygen mask the medic was trying to keep on his face and took another wheezing breath. “No one could’a beat that shot. He had you dead man, he had you fuckin’ dead.”
Clipper was sitting on the curb, behind the ambulance, oblivious to the swirl of activity around him. He looked at Pratt, recognizing the excited chatter for the adrenalin high it was, and wondering dully why he didn’t feel the same way. Other than a bit of minor trembling in his hands, he felt very calm. Bemused, he watched without seeing as more officers sealed off the intersection and began taking pictures and measurements, vaguely relived that he would not have to do the multi-vehicle accident report. “You came pretty close yourself,” he said quietly. “You want to save that shirt for a souvenir.”
Clipper looked up as Lieutenant Ed Bagley, the day shift patrol commander walked up. Bagley was one of Clipper’s oldest friends, a barrel-chested bear of a man with close cropped iron gray hair and football pad shoulders. He had already taken Clipper’s .45 into evidence, and now he also carried a plastic bag containing the empty the shell cases that had been collected after having been measured and photographed in place. “Come on,” he said glancing at the crowds gathering behind the police barricades, “let’s get you out of here before the vultures get too thick. I’ll give you a ride in and one of the guys will bring you’re truck when we’re done here.” Clipper glanced at his truck as he climbed slowly to his feet, shaking his head at the passenger-side window, shattered by the charge of double-aught buckshot that had thundered by his head. The two walked to Bagley’s cruiser, ignoring the shouted questions from the gathering press, Clipper shoving his hands in his pockets to hide the increasing tremor.
When they got to the station, Bagley guided Clipper to the Chief’s office, where Clipper was surprised to see his older sister, Ann Fi
nny, talking with Chief Norris. Ann, who lived twelve miles away in Orono, was an assistant librarian at the University library. She was married to a painting contractor, a nice guy Clipper thought, with two grown kids and a pair of enormous English mastiffs. With their parents dead, Ann and Clipper represented the last of their family and maintained a friendly sibling relationship.
Chief Norris jumped to his feet and touched Clipper’s arm. “Have a seat, Lieutenant,” he said solicitously, guiding Clipper to an empty chair. “I took the liberty of asking Mrs. Finny to join us.” Clipper sat, half expecting Norris to fire him on the spot, but the chief remained the perfect picture of the concerned administrator. Norris looked at Bagley who had remained leaning against the doorway. “Where do we stand, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“The scene’s secured, sir and we’ve found the owners of the vehicles that were involved in the crash. We haven’t identified the shooter yet, prints have gone to the feds, but the plates on his vehicle go to a 1979 Jeep registered to a…” Bagley consulted his notebook. “…to a Mrs. Alberta Goode in Calais, and we found a bag of Canadian money in the trunk. Not much doubt he’s the guy they’re looking for.” Bagley drew a breath and shot a sideways glance at Clipper before continuing. “ID’s on the scene, the weapons are secure and we’ve got a call in for an investigator from the AG’s office. I’ll get together with Lieutenant Preston and draw up a statement for a press conference if you want.”
Chief Norris nodded. “Get me a statement, and you and I will talk to them downstairs in an hour.” He turned to Ann. “We’re going to need Lieutenant Clipper to write his report while it’s still fresh in his mind, but then I’d like you to take him home. He’ll be on paid administrative leave until the Attorney General clears the shooting.”
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