The Second Mouse

by Archer Mayor

  “More like Archie’s, how?” Willy asked just as Joe inquired, “How did she know that about Newell?”

  Spinney answered his boss first. “From what I could tell, everything she knew came from her daughter. Michelle told her Newell was fueled by envy. According to Adele, that meant that while Michelle and Archie had each other, all Newell had was anger.”

  Lester turned to Willy. “Which means ‘I don’t know.’ What Archie had, quote-unquote, might’ve just been old-fashioned peace and quiet. It might’ve also been his sexual relationship with Michelle.”

  “That’s my bet,” Willy answered. “Screw peace and quiet.”

  “Don’t we know it,” Sam murmured, smiling.

  “Which brings us back to finding out if he was a regular visitor after Archie died,” Joe commented, adding, “and when we do that canvass, let’s avoid Linda Rubinstein. I’d like her put on the shelf for the time being. Let’s concentrate on less involved people first.”

  He glanced down at his notes before resuming on a slightly different tack. “Sam and Willy, you dug the most into Newell. The crime lab established he couldn’t have done in Michelle, at least not alone—not according to my description of him. How can you make him the bad guy?”

  “Mel Martin,” Willy said simply. “He’s on top of my list.”

  Joe frowned. “Sam mentioned him in her report. He bought a car from Newell?”

  “Truck. He’d be perfect for this.”

  Joe shrugged. “Educate us.”

  Willy crossed his feet, which were already resting on his desk, his chair leaning against the wall behind him. “Ever since the Bennington PD tipped him to us, kind of by accident, I’ve been checking him out. Took all the state CAD records apart, ran him through NCIC, finally called a buddy with the New York State Police, who then put me together with a guy on the Albany PD. Turns out there’s as much against Martin off the record as there is on. He’s suspected of a ton of bad stuff, including murder.”

  He waved vaguely at the jumble of paperwork strewn across his desk. “I’ve got printouts if you’re interested, but my guess is, he and Newell got together on the truck deal, and then like birds of a feather, one thing led to another and Newell popped him the question.”

  Joe paused a moment, waiting for more. Hearing nothing, he asked, “And you’ve got them meeting together, building this friendship? Maybe even some kind of financial exchange?”

  “Not yet,” Willy admitted affably. “But I will.”

  Joe nodded. In another context, with another cop, he might have at least questioned the foundation of what was sounding like a wild guess. But with Willy, he knew better. Willy was holding back. Possibly nothing of enormous obvious merit—certainly something that wouldn’t stand Joe’s scrutiny. But his ego was such that he wouldn’t have said what he had without some basis. Willy didn’t like being caught making mistakes, and he was flagrantly sticking his neck out here.

  Joe glanced at Sam for some form of confirming body language, but she was sitting stolidly at her desk, fiddling with a bent paper clip, her eyes down. Apparently, Willy was on his own.

  “Okay,” he said, “then let’s divide and conquer. Lester, I’d like you to take a crack at Michelle Fisher’s neighborhood. Doug Matthews at VSP has some information from their preliminary canvass. That can be your starting point. We’re now not only looking for sightings of Newell Morgan, but Mel Martin, too. Willy will supply you with mug shots, vehicle descriptions, and the rest.

  “Sam,” he continued, causing her to drop her paper clip and look up, “you and Willy go after Martin. Given his record and who you’re likely to meet, I’d like you to team up on this. Do not split up unless it’s totally safe to do so, right?”

  “Yes, boss,” she said, while Willy merely looked at him.

  “One other thing,” Joe added. “Do your best to tiptoe around this guy at first, okay? I don’t want him to know we’re checking him out until we know what he’s up to, if anything. Try to figure his action from the inside, maybe.”

  “Undercover?” Sam asked, surprised.

  “Not exactly,” he corrected her. “But you’ve both had experience in that line. I’m saying superlow profile for now.

  “For my part,” he continued, already unhappy with the pleased look on Willy’s face, “I want to look at Newell beyond the field trip to Frankfort. I’ll meet with his wife, talk to his former coworkers, try to find out about his fi—”

  Judy, their administrative assistant, opened the door from her small cubicle just off the hallway and peered around the corner. “Joe, I’ve been holding calls like you asked, but I thought you’d want this one. Milton Coven, from the Fusion Center?”

  Joe nodded. Of the various ways the Fusion Center chose to communicate, direct phone calls were few and far between. In addition, Coven was a friend he hadn’t heard from in years. “Thanks, Judy.”

  He picked up the phone. “Milt. The Fusion Center? They give you a double-O number to go with that?”

  “Very funny,” Coven’s familiar voice said. “It’s more like they finally found me a chair to sit on instead of a cardboard box—I’m liaison here, probably until retirement next year. Your lady there said you were in a staff meeting, so I’ll cut this short. I promise I’ll call later so we can catch up.”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “I heard through the grapevine that some of your people were working in Bennington, on what I don’t know, but I got a few recent hits over there you might find interesting, just in case.”

  Joe raised his eyebrows, impressed and a little startled at what he was hearing. He wondered just what and how Coven knew of their activities. They all shared the same law enforcement tent, but this had a quasi-creepy feeling to it.

  “Milt,” he told his friend, with just a touch of perverseness, “your timing couldn’t be better. We were just discussing Bennington. Since you’ve been keeping an eye on us anyhow, I’m going to put you on speakerphone so you can tell all of us what you’ve got.”

  “What? Joe . . .”

  The last word filled the small room.

  “Go ahead,” Joe said. “I’ll spare you introductions. Suffice it to say the squad’s all ears.”

  There was a telling silence as Coven scrambled to think. “Okay, okay. Hey, everybody. I’m Milton Coven, FBI, assigned to the Vermont Fusion Center. As you probably know, we serve as a kind of clearinghouse for intel, hoping to avoid the black holes that preceded nine-eleven. Anyhow, a couple of days ago, one of our gatherers handed me some information about a bag of low-level hospital waste that went missing from the Bennington area—technically radioactive but with a short enough half-life to be harmless. I almost . . . Well, never mind. I thought I’d do a quick follow-up, just to be thorough, and found another Bennington blip. Like I was telling Joe, I knew some of you were in the area poking around, so I thought this might be helpful. Sort of kill two birds with one stone.”

  Joe watched Willy slowly remove his feet from his desktop and sit up, scowling. Trained by years of exposure to such body language, Joe signaled to him to keep his mouth shut.

  Coven’s voice went on, oblivious. “Keep in mind that all we do here is pass stuff along. We don’t know its value necessarily, and we don’t know how or if it connects to anything.”

  “What’ve you got?” Willy cut in, irrepressible.

  “What? Oh, right. It may be the mugging of a night guard at the armory. The guy actually doesn’t know if he fell or was pushed—he didn’t see—but he went down a flight of stairs. He survived, obviously—a concussion only—and nothing was stolen or otherwise disturbed. But since it happened at the armory, we and the locals took notice. The PD probably has some back-burner investigation going into the guard’s story, just to be sure.”

  “That’s it?” Willy pressed him.

  “Along those lines, yeah. I mean, Bennington’s like any other town—something happening all the time. But we look at things that might go bigger, like the missing bag. I m
entioned the armory because it was offbeat and I thought you should know.”

  Joe knew that Willy was cranked up because of the Big Brother implications, although he suspected that the outrage was more because Willy wasn’t the one working the microscope. But the possibilities of what Coven was telling them got Joe’s brain working along other lines.

  “You filter everything, don’t you, Milt, to get to the good stuff?”

  Coven’s voice was guarded. “What’re you after?”

  Joe laughed. “I don’t know. That’s the point. Anything else that’s hanging around without a solution.”

  Coven paused. They could hear him rustling through paperwork. “Well,” he eventually reported, “there’s the disappearance of a young dope seller and user named Conrad Sweet, street-named High Top.”

  “What’ve you got on him?” Sam spoke out, caught by surprise, glancing at Lester Spinney, who was staring at the speakerphone. Their own research into High Top earlier had ended nowhere.

  “That’s about it,” said Coven’s disembodied voice.

  “Anything else?” Joe asked.

  “Nope . . . No, hold it. There’s a mugging of a local firefighter, a little north of Bennington. Almost missed that, being out of town. He was robbed of their weekly bingo money, to the tune of a little over a thousand bucks. He has no idea who hit him.

  “Like I said,” he repeated, sounding back on track, “I don’t know how or if there are any linkages, but it struck me as interesting that there were two unusual, so far unsolved events, in the same area and at the same time you guys were in the neighborhood. I know it’s unlikely, but that’s the kind of thinking that got us jammed up before nine-eleven. You stirring anything up?”

  “You heard about that Wilmington homicide?” Joe asked.

  “Michelle Fisher?” Coven responded immediately.

  Joe knew this time that the response had little to do with high-grade intelligence gathering. There were so few homicides in Vermont that the average well-read newspaper subscriber might have come up with the same quick answer.

  “Her case is looking like it may have ties to Bennington,” Joe explained, his eyes on Willy’s increasingly clouded face—not a man given to sharing information.

  Seemingly by honed instinct, Coven knew enough to quit while he was ahead. “Well, like I said, I figured you might be interested, and I wanted to say hi anyhow. I’ll e-mail you what I got and call you later at home.”

  “Thanks, Milt,” Joe told him. “I appreciate it. One question, though: What’re you thinking was behind the theft of the garbage bag?”

  Coven hesitated, weighing his response. “Well . . . I suppose the natural reaction is a dirty bomb, but that seems pretty unlikely. I mean, this stuff was medical trash—old IV tubing, dressings, junk like that—all slightly tainted. Even if you sprinkled it from a helicopter, it wouldn’t do any harm. On the other hand, if you cancel out the dirty bomb idea, you don’t have much left—somebody stole somebody else’s trash. That’s why I didn’t hit the red button and alert my fellow feds.”

  “It could’ve been misplaced,” Lester suggested.

  “My point exactly,” Coven agreed. “The hospital says not. But like I said, we just pass this info along, no matter how small it looks.”

  Joe saw Willy warming up again and so wrapped it up quickly. “Thanks, Milt. It might be worth a lot. Thanks for thinking of us. Give my best to Sue.”

  “Oh, yeah. Thanks. Love to Gail, too.”

  Joe hit the Off button, causing Gail’s name to float in the air.

  “Guess his intel isn’t all that great,” Willy smirked.

  Sam glared at him. Her words could barely be heard, she spoke so quietly. “You are such an asshole.”

  Joe cleared his throat. “I’ll fatten my own assignment with the garbage bag and the missing dope dealer, just for what-the-hell.”

  “Lester and I can give you a little background on that,” Sam admitted. “We spent some time checking him out when the BOL first came out.”

  Joe nodded, giving his team one last appraising look. “Okay—looks like we’re heading for parts west.”

  Chapter 17

  “Where is it?” Nancy asked quietly, as if being discreet in a roomful of eavesdroppers.

  They were both in Ellis’s apartment again, alone. In bed.

  “In my trunk,” he said.

  She propped herself up quickly on one elbow, her eyes wide, all discretion gone. “What? It’s been days. I thought . . .”

  He covered her mouth gently with his fingertips. “I did, too. But I started thinkin’ about somethin’ else.”

  She slowly removed his hand. “What?” she asked, her confusion clear. “You were going to hide it in his toolbox.”

  He nodded. “And then call the cops.”

  “The feds,” she corrected.

  “I know, Nance. I know. Let me finish.”

  She pressed her lips together, fighting the urge to protest.

  Ellis took a small breath before continuing. “The plan was to have Homeland Security take him away like they did with that guy we heard about on TV—lock him up forever and not even give him a trial, like a terrorist.”

  “But you gotta plant the stuff, Ellis, like we discussed—put the cheese in the trap.”

  His face darkened slightly at her persistence. “Yeah, Nance, I gotta bait the trap. And whose prints are on that bag? And whose DNA? I sweated on that thing.”

  “We wiped it off.”

  He shook his head. “You seen what they can do on TV. Plus, where did that bag come from?”

  She stared at him, wondering what the trick part of the question was.

  “From the hospital where my mom is,” he finished. “How hard do you think it’ll be for them to figure that out? I drop a dime to the feds, telling them Mel is a wack job aiming to blow up the Bennington Monument or something, and first thing they’ll do is take that bag apart. They’ll figure out where it’s from, and nail us instead of him. Far as I know, Mel’s never even been in that hospital.”

  Nancy untangled her legs from his and sat up in the bed, leaning against the wall, her expression hard.

  He tried winning her back. “Sweetie, we can still do it, or something like it. We just need to be more careful.”

  “Give me a cigarette.”

  He rolled over toward the night table and retrieved a half-empty pack. He extracted a cigarette, lit it up, and handed it to her.

  “It’s still a good plan,” he reiterated.

  She took a deep pull, held the smoke for a few seconds, and then let out a long contrail between her lips. She was staring straight ahead.

  “I guess,” she finally said.

  “We need to figure out how to make them look only at him and not us.”

  She was silent a while longer, her eyes still on the far wall, working on that cigarette.

  “I just want it done, Ellis,” she said.

  “I know. Me, too.”

  Joe glanced down at the buzzing cell phone in its dashboard charger. He didn’t recognize the number on the small display, but it was a Montpelier exchange, which gave him a pretty good idea who was calling him.

  Conflicted, he glanced ahead, saw a pull-off at a souvenir stand parking lot, and stopped his car. He was on his way toward Bennington, on Route 9, and had just passed the road’s apex over Vermont’s tree-covered, hilly backbone—complete with a view stretching out for hundreds of square miles. His ambivalence about the upcoming conversation was compounded by a small regret that he’d just missed the best place to have it.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, Joe. It’s me.”

  Gail Zigman had a low voice, and from the first time he’d heard it, it had always hit him the same way, with a stirring he imagined animals responded to in the wild.

  Almost despite himself, he smiled. “Hey, Gail. This is a treat.”

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  He laughed. “I was just thinking about that. I�
�m a few hundred yards past the top of that long downslope into Bennington, between Searsburg and Woodford, staring at some tourists buying stuffed animals and pricey syrup. How ’bout you?”

  Her voice flattened somewhat. “Oh, in the Executive Building somewhere. I had a little time between meetings. I’d rather be where you are.”

  That was perhaps a little richer in meaning than either of them wanted. “Oh, I doubt that,” he said lamely. “Bennington hasn’t changed much.”

  She played along. “Big case there?”

  “Maybe. We have something percolating we need to figure out, but right now we’re just fumbling around.”

  In fact, this was his favorite part of an investigation, when not just he but the whole team had the pull of a strong scent encouraging them. They were largely ignorant, that was true, but motivation was taking care of itself.

  “You still having fun up there?” he asked, moving the conversation along, its emptiness palpable. They were being guarded to an extent that they’d never been before. Their past involvement had epitomized intimacy, and had included their jobs, where each of them had found the other to be a natural sounding board. It was the aspect of their relationship that Joe missed the most—and which was now making him feel awkward. In fact, the depth of his ignorance about what she was doing these days was startling.

  “Oh,” she said with no great enthusiasm, “I wouldn’t call it fun. Worthwhile, though. Definitely that.” She paused before adding, “There are times, though . . .”

  “Right,” he said, not knowing where to go next. Looking out at the parking lot, oddly mirroring this conversation in his head, he envisioned two picnickers in a minefield.

  “I miss you, Joe,” she said after a long silence. “I miss us.”

  “I know,” he admitted, thinking back to his night with Beverly. He didn’t regret it, not even now. But he missed what would have accompanied it had the woman been Gail. It reminded him how much he was in limbo.

  “Well,” she added sadly, interrupting his thoughts, “I guess I only have myself to blame.”