by Archer Mayor
As before, it was quiet and virtually empty. The nurses’ station at the far end showed little activity—someone sitting at a desk, talking on the phone, but that was it aside from a few muffled conversations coming through a door or two. He checked his watch. He had three minutes and thirty seconds.
He left the stairwell and stealthily walked the length of the hall, keeping his eyes on the station ahead. There was only one nurse on—Ann Coleman, the one who had helped him earlier—and her back was turned to him. He made it to the bathroom just shy of her area and quickly ducked inside without being seen.
A very long three minutes later, during which he conjured up every possible setback, he heard Nancy’s voice just outside his door.
“Hi. Nice to see you again. I’m here to see Mrs. Doyle.”
He heard Ann Coleman’s more muted response: “Oh, hi. We moved her upstairs. They only stay here while they’re being treated. She’s in a regular room now.”
Nancy’s voice was hesitant. She didn’t have much time. The plan had been for her to tell Doris that she was stepping out for a soda from the machine. “Do you know the number?”
There was a pause, followed by “Three-oh-four.”
“Great. Thanks. Sorry to have bothered you. How do I get there?”
“Elevators are at the end of the hallway.”
“Where?”
“Down there.”
A second pause. “I’m sorry. I forgot my glasses. Where?”
Ellis couldn’t actually hear it, but he imagined a sigh. He heard footsteps approaching and Coleman’s voice saying, “Straight on down.”
“Could you show me?”
It was childishly transparent, and now that he was actually overhearing what they’d rehearsed, he half expected the bathroom door to fly open and Nurse Coleman to ask him, “And you thought this would work?”
But instead, he heard her kindly comment, “I’ve had days like that. Come with me, and don’t feel bad.”
He waited five seconds and opened the door without a sound. The two women were retreating down the hall, no one else was in sight, and all the doors he could see were closed. He cut to the left, toward the nurses’ station, went straight to the desk drawer he remembered from the last time, and pulled it open, his hand trembling.
The key was where he had hoped it would still be.
He quickly slipped it into his pocket and returned to the bathroom, the sounds of their conversation still echoing down the hall. Moments later, he heard Nancy’s parting thanks as she returned to Doris’s side, and the soft footsteps of Ann Coleman getting back to her post. As soon as she passed, he reversed his earlier move, leaving the bathroom silently and cutting right, making a beeline back to the stairwell.
There he leaned against the wall and wiped his face with his sleeve, wondering if he’d remembered to breathe during the whole ordeal. One obstacle down, two more to go. He headed toward the subbasement.
Downstairs, he felt slightly more comfortable. This wasn’t a medical part of the hospital but the heart of its services area—food preparation and delivery, laundry, the custodial system, and what he was after: waste management.
He retraced the steps he’d taken with Coleman days earlier, blending in with the steady flow of other people who reminded him of himself, with rough hands, work clothes, or homebuilt haircuts, until he reached the same unmarked door they’d commented on at the time.
Looking as self-confident as possible, he fitted the stolen key to the lock and let himself in.
The last time he was here, they’d been alone, so he was startled to find one of the previously closed doors wide open at the end of the short corridor and to hear both music and conversation coming from it.
He stood stock-still for a moment, wondering what to do, expecting someone to appear at any second.
But no one did.
As Coleman had done before, he used the key again to unlock the storage room door and confronted the familiar, randomly stacked pile of thrown-together garbage bags, their apparent chaos mitigated by each one’s having a carefully labeled tag attached at the throat.
Suddenly, he was stumped. Did it make any difference which one he took? He knew that the contents of this room fit a sliding radioactive time frame, but what if his choice was only hot for a few hours, versus one that would percolate for several months?
Standing there, stalled, he suddenly heard a thump behind him, and two voices bursting into the tiny hallway. Instinctively, he glanced over his shoulder as two white-coated lab techs appeared behind him, chatting, one of them fiddling with a key ring that he’d fished out of his pocket. Fighting panic, Ellis took a big step farther into the closet and laid both his hands onto the nearest bag before him, putting on a great show of shoving it about, as if he were attempting to tame the unruly pile.
It worked. After the one with the keys locked his own door, both men passed by Ellis without a glance, still deep in their conversation, and exited into the central corridor outside. Breathing hard, his forehead damp with sweat, Ellis grabbed the nearest bag, shut the closet door, left the stolen key in the lock where it could be found later, and followed the two men outside. Only there did he remember about the telltale tag that cinched the bag shut.
Feeling as if every passerby were staring at him, Ellis nervously positioned his hand to cover the bag’s throat and walked rapidly toward a turnoff he’d passed on the way, leading to a cul-de-sac with three closed doors. There, his back to the central corridor, he fumbled to tear off the tag, ripping part of the plastic in the process.
Now breathing through his mouth like a sprinter, fully expecting alarms, shouts, and the appearance of armed men, Ellis followed the signs to the central waste management area in a near daze. He entered a two-story-high room as big as a warehouse, complete with a yawning loading dock door looking out onto the hospital’s rear delivery lot. All around, in orderly piles, were garbage bags, cardboard boxes, recyclables, returnables, bundles of office paper, and all the other paraphernalia of a major municipal trash-handling plant.
But he had eyes only for that open door.
As he was halfway across the room’s vast concrete floor, however, the alarm he’d been dreading finally went off—a blood-chilling, hair-raising Klaxon that cut right through his skull. Ellis stopped dead in his tracks and waited for the command to drop the bag and fall to his knees.
Instead, all he heard was an explosive oath from a fat man stationed near a ceiling-mounted, cylindrical trash chute in the far corner.
“Stan!” the man shouted to a colleague, pointing at the chute’s latest deposit. “We got a glow-in-the-dark special.”
Ellis watched the two men converge around a bag like the one in his hand, scoop it up, and drop it into a lidded wheeled cart. It had appeared from the chute, presumably from one of the upper floors, and had triggered an alarmed sensor right by the large man’s station, which was also near where Ellis had been planning to exit from the building.
“Shit,” he muttered, realizing that his plan was now in tatters. How the hell was he supposed to get out of the building without tripping a similar sensor?
He retreated from the cavernous room and stood in the hallway, thinking. What, exactly, had happened? he wondered. Something inappropriate had apparently been introduced into the normal trash stream and had been intercepted according to protocol. Judging from the reaction he’d witnessed, this was not a rare event and had been handled in a routine fashion. No doubt, people on the floors above were expected to screw up now and then and mix lightly radiated waste in with regular trash.
So what did that mean for him?
He rubbed his forehead, trying to think this through, striving to ignore the certainty that the longer he stood here, the greater were his chances of being caught.
Finally, shaking his head in frustration, he retraced his steps back to the central corridor and returned to the stairwell. Better to be brazen and get this over with than simply get busted for standing aroun
d. He remembered Mel once telling him that the best way to overcome this kind of roadblock was simply to walk through it as if you owned the place. He didn’t worry about the irony that the very reason he was doing this was to dispose of the source of such wisdom.
Ellis reached the main floor, took a deep breath, stuffed the bag high up under his arm as if it were so much bundled laundry, and strode purposefully toward the front entrance.
He made it, feeling like a man treading through waist-high water, the target of a hundred invisible tracking monitors, all linked to a central room filled with TV sets and eager federal agents.
By the time he reached his parked car in the lot, into which he tossed his hard-won trophy with relief, he was drenched in perspiration. Now all he had to do was return to his mother’s room, pretend nothing had happened, and hope that her usual ability to see right through him had succumbed to her medications.
Shaking his head at the paradoxes that seemed to constitute his life at the moment, he trudged back toward the hospital.
Outside Burlington, Vermont, several days later, William French sat staring at his computer screen, digesting what he’d just read. He considered forwarding the information in e-mail form to the appropriate party—in this case someone from JTTF, the Joint Terrorism Task Force—but then reconsidered. He hadn’t been assigned to the Fusion Center for long, still thought it a real feather in his cap, and didn’t want to run the risk of messing it up with an avoidable stupid mistake.
Better to appear overeager than to drop the ball, and God knows, they’d been told enough times of the latter’s cost. There were posters aplenty of the smoking Pentagon and the ruins of the World Trade Center decorating the walls to make the point without any lectures.
The Fusion Center was an information-gathering point, one of several on the books or already in existence across the United States, designed to integrate and exchange any and all snippets of intelligence of any interest to law enforcement. Clearly, the stimulus and primary focus of the centers was information that might even vaguely pertain to possible terrorist activities, but no cop saw any point in stopping there, an attitude that naturally had most of the nation’s civil liberties groups up in arms.
William French didn’t care about that. A young man, upwardly mobile, already equipped with a file full of supportive letters from superiors, he was a believer in having a clean desk and in documenting where everything went as it left his hands. To say that he was as unloved by his colleagues as he was back-patted by his bosses puts it about right. To the former, he was not a cop’s cop but a pencil pusher with a gun, and a man who could get them into trouble—not just a few of them saw their jobs here with paradoxical ambivalence, as both cushy and a little embarrassing. The William Frenches of the world, tingling with efficient dedication, made them nervous.
French walked down the hall from his cubicle, printout in hand, and rapped on the door of an older man sitting glumly at one of two desks in the room. He was alone, which he preferred, since, unlike his junior associate, he felt trapped in this building and cherished all the private time he could get. His name was Milton Coven, and he had been with the FBI for more years than he wished to recall, most of them unhappy ones.
“Agent Coven?” French asked.
Coven stared up at him. “How long we known each other, Bill?”
“Six months.”
“I rest my case. What do you want?”
French blinked once, deleted from his brain what he clearly didn’t understand, and marched into the room, proffering the printout.
“This just came in from the NRC. I thought you should see it.”
Coven reached out tiredly and took it. The NRC in this alphabet-happy world was an old-timer—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—the watchdog for nuclear reactors, waste disposal, matters of security, and just about anything else having to do with awful stuff that made your balls drop off.
He read the missive slowly, deciphering its many parts—who and where it was from, its level of importance, the topic it discussed, the date at its top, and the nature of the threat it addressed. French stood patiently in place throughout, his irritation growing.
Coven finally laid the sheet down. “Bill,” he asked, “this got you cranked up for what reason?”
French hesitated. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“You got this off the screen, printed it out, hand delivered it to me, and now you’re standing there as if you expect me to order up a fleet of black helicopters. I just wanted to hear what you know that I don’t.”
French thought for a moment. “Well, it’s an event. It might be significant.”
Coven sat back in his chair and placed the sole of one shoe carefully against the edge of his desk. “It’s a report of a single garbage bag of incredibly low-level medical waste gone missing in Bennington, Vermont.”
French nodded. “That’s right—potential makings of a dirty bomb.”
“For about three days,” Coven agreed, “assuming someone was crazy enough to wrap a stick of dynamite with some old Band-Aids, underwear, a couple of pillowcases, and maybe a diaper or two.”
“I thought maybe JTTF might want to know,” French said, losing conviction.
The Joint Terrorism Task Force did admittedly handle a lot of wild-goose chases. They were made up of any number of participants, from fellow FBI agents to members of ATF, ICE, the state police, and anyone else deemed relevant.
In the silence that fell between them, Coven looked at French and eventually sighed, giving up. “Good thought, William. I’ll pass it along.”
As French left, Coven dropped the printout into his out-box, knowing full well that his young messenger was already mentally formulating the memo that would both cover his butt and put Coven’s in the hot seat. Not that the older man was worried. He knew all too well how items like this got lost in the system, follow-up memo or not.
Chapter 16
The VBI office in Brattleboro rarely contained all its occupants at once. Not only their assignments but their personalities dictated that they spend most of their time in the field.
It felt cramped and crowded to Joe, therefore, merely having everybody at their desks on the day he’d assembled them for a staff meeting.
“Okay,” he began, speaking over the exchanges and friendly insults that further filled the small room. “It took a long time to get here, but it’s pretty clear that Michelle Fisher is now officially a homicide.”
“Let’s hear it for the wheels of justice,” Kunkle said quietly.
“At least we caught it,” Spinney commented, forever striving for the upbeat.
“On the face of it,” Gunther continued, ignoring them, “it seems pretty straightforward. Man wants house back so he can sell it. He can’t do that because of a cranky tenant. He kills tenant.”
Kunkle merely laughed.
Joe nodded, smiling. “Right. Or maybe not. For one thing, given the mechanics employed, Newell Morgan, our suspect, is too fat.”
“Plus, he has an alibi,” Sam added.
“A suspiciously airtight one,” Willy threw in.
“Right again,” Joe agreed. “How many times have we met an otherwise total slob with such perfect recall, not to mention documentation, for the one recent event that’ll save his bacon? Not often.”
“Although not impossible,” Spinney said. “That trip was a big male-bonding moment. And according to what Willy and Sam got from the interviews, planned in advance.”
Willy rolled his eyes, but Joe conceded the point. “Granted. Although it seems the murder was planned as well. Still, we have to watch out for tunnel vision. Since we’re already thinking Morgan couldn’t have done this on his own, that means he either had help or is totally innocent.”
“God, I hope not,” Sam murmured, half to herself. “I’d love for him to go down for something.”
Joe used that as a cue. “Well, if we are going to focus on him initially, we should dig into two areas: the actual killing of
Michelle Fisher, and what led up to it.”
“His wanting the house back?” Spinney asked.
“No,” Sammie corrected him, understanding what Joe was suggesting. “Why he wanted the house all of a sudden, after years of Archie and Michelle living in it. There’s the smell of revenge about it.”
“The fat bastard wanted a piece of his son’s honey,” Willy spelled out in predictable fashion.
“And we know that for sure?” Lester asked reasonably. “It could also be exactly what he’s claiming: His son died; the girlfriend became a nonpaying squatter with an attitude, leaving him no other option than to evict her. Could be he did need the money. Do we know anything about his finances?”
Sam laughed outright and Willy readied for a response when Joe cut him off. “Right now that’s as valid a position as any. We have to prove our case here, folks. We need to go into Michelle’s neighborhood and start interviewing people. Flash Newell’s photograph around, and his truck’s, and see if he was a regular visitor. I spoke with Michelle’s friend Linda and got nowhere there, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Michelle might not have told her, for some reason, or Linda may have been coy with me.”
“I didn’t get anything out of the mother on that subject,” Lester added. “I asked her flat out if her daughter fessed up to Newell going after her sexually, and she said it never came up. She wondered but didn’t ask. And Michelle never said.”
“I wouldn’t’ve told my mother,” Sam said sympathetically.
“I wouldn’t have told your mother if a truck was headed at her,” Willy cracked.
“Fuck you,” she said without much emphasis, and threw a pad at him, which he swatted away.
Lester was still speaking, as used to their antics as Joe was. “She did say one funny thing—that she thought Newell probably hated his own life and wished it was more like Archie’s.”
There was a sudden stillness in the room. For all their casual interactions, every person here was a trained investigator, and phrases like what Lester had just quoted carried a telling weight.