The Catch

by Archer Mayor

  “Some cops don’t leave that at the office,” he suggested.

  “You asking or telling?”

  He capitulated. “Asking.”

  She poured two mugs and brought them over to the counter, settling onto a stool he hadn’t seen, opposite his.

  She shoved one of the mugs directly before him. “Why’re you doing this? He was shot by drug runners. Least, that’s what they told me.”

  Willy gave a dismissive half wave before grabbing hold of the mug’s handle. “Yeah, that’s true, but we still gotta cover our butts. You know, stuff like, ‘Was he in cahoots with whoever killed him?’ It’s all fill-in-the-blanks to make the bosses happy.”

  They both sipped their coffee in silence for a moment. Shirley spoke first. “Like I’m supposed to believe that.”

  Willy placed his mug carefully on the countertop. “You want to tell me something different?”

  “Such as?” she asked.

  “He piss off anyone enough to make them come after him?”

  She paused before answering, “He pissed people off, probably just like you do.”

  “Your daughter?”

  Her back straightened and she fixed him with a glare. “If Brian Sleuter was killed by drug runners, then that’s none of my business.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  “Too bad. I think this conversation just ended.”

  Willy didn’t stir. “Meaning I leave with the wrong impression.”

  Shirley stared at him, motionless. He could virtually hear her working out the angles of the box he’d put her in.

  “He hit her,” she finally said.

  “A lot?”

  “A couple of times. That’s all it took.”

  “Took for what?”

  She pressed her lips together. “They were a bad match,” she finally said.

  “What happened after he hit her, Shirley?”

  Her shoulders slumped. “I talked to him.”

  “He wouldn’t listen to you. What happened?”

  Her right hand closed into a fist. “I persuaded him to listen.”

  Willy thought back over what he knew of this woman. “I’m guessing it involved a gun.”

  She gave half a nod. “He was sleeping on the couch when I shoved a.45 under his nose and I told him he could kiss his career good-bye if he ever so much as raised his voice to my daughter again.”

  Willy found that utterly believable, in all its simplicity. “How long before the divorce?” he asked.

  She smiled bitterly. “You know your creeps well.”

  And how, he thought, having been, at one point in his life, a lot worse than Brian Sleuter.

  “He didn’t last the rest of the week,” she finished. “He didn’t give a damn about either one of them. It was always that stupid job.”

  Willy took another sip of coffee, thinking back.

  “And yet,” he said, “he’d drop by here for dinner now and then. What was that all about—beyond the father-of-my-grandson thing?”

  She shrugged slightly. “That matters to me.”

  Willy again let silence be his lever.

  “I don’t know,” she finally yielded. “Maybe we connected like him and Kathleen never could. We understood each other.” She sighed before adding, “I was a little tough on him before, with that not giving a damn crack. He treated my grandson fine, and to be straight,there were more than a few times when I could’ve smacked Kathleen myself. She has a real mouth on her.”

  “Did she know about his visits here?”

  “She lives in Florida,” Shirley said simply.

  He knew that from Mike Bradley. Bradley’s crew had gotten a local Florida cop to interview her down there, in part to find out if she had an alibi for the night Brian was shot. She had.

  Which, of course, suggested the obvious. Willy tilted his chin at Shirley and asked, “Where were you when Brian died?”

  She actually laughed, shaking her head at him. “What about the drug runners?”

  He smiled back. “Still on the table.”

  When he didn’t add anything, she was forced to address his question, floating like a balloon between them.

  “I was here,” she said, and then added, “Alone.”

  He nodded, took one last sip of his coffee, and stood up.

  “Thanks,” he said, and left her in her kitchen, lost in her own thoughts.

  CHAPTER 15

  Joe stepped through the doorway, moved aside to let Lester enter after him, and stopped, nodding briefly to the small assemblage before them. There were only four people—three men and a woman—sitting around an undersized conference table littered with coffee cups, pads, a couple of cell phones, and a portable computer. The latter sat open before a square-set man, the only one among them wearing a tie.

  The two Vermonters were in Augusta at long last, four miles northwest of downtown, in a tiny section of a sparkling, three-hundred-thousand-square-foot office building, also housing Maine’s Department of Public Safety, along with a host of other operations—a complex that made the Vermont counterpart in Water-bury look straight out of Dickens by comparison.

  The receptionist with them announced, “Here they are, Mike,” and vanished.

  Everyone rose. The man in the tie circled the table, hand outstretched, and introduced himself. “Joe? I’m Mike Coven, director of MDEA. I’m really glad to meet you at long last. You have quite the reputation.”

  Joe laughed and introduced Lester, adding, “You say that too loudly, they might mail me to you in a box, just to get rid of me.”

  Coven smiled and waved his hand over his colleagues. “This is Kevin Delaney, the outfit’s northern commander, and two of his folks, Cathy Lawless and Dave Beaubien.”

  Joe commented to Cathy, “You were the one who took a swim, if I heard right.”

  Lawless gave him a wide smile and a firm handshake. “That’s me—the MDEA Swim Team.”

  Chairs were shifted around and spaces cleared at the table to make room for the newcomers. Noticeably, two extra slots were left open.

  “Lenny Chapman from ICE and one of his guys are still due,” Coven explained, settling back behind the laptop. “You want some coffee, by the way?”

  Both men had just used the bathroom in the lobby after their unexpectedly long drive and were happy to leave their bladders be.

  Coven nodded and cleared his throat. “Okay. Actually, it’s probably just as well that ICE isn’t here yet—lets me fill you in on what we do here and how we do it. You know anything about MDEA?” he asked Joe.

  The latter shook his head, although he wasn’t in fact quite that ignorant. He just liked to take his time with people, and a small lecture from the director seemed as good a starting place as any.

  “This organization,” Coven began, “was started back in ’eighty-six, but we’re actually a task force, and not a full-blown agency, meaning that each of us is still employed by some other state or municipal police agency. That basically makes MDEA a temporary assignment, although, to be honest, a lot of us seem to have made it a career.”

  He sat back in his chair and propped the sole of one shoe against the edge of the conference table. “The rules of engagement are that if anyone in Maine law enforcement gets a drug case during the course of business, we’re supposed to be given a call. This excludes a few of the larger city departments, of course, like Portland, Lewiston, and Bangor, but you get the idea.”

  He shifted his weight. Joe noticed that the man’s colleagues were exhibiting none of the restlessness he would have anticipated among a bunch of cops attending a leader they didn’t respect.

  “Anyhow,” Coven continued, “that’s the quick organizational snapshot. We work with other cops all the time, ’cause that’s who we are; we also work with the feds a lot, specifically ICE, who have yet to screw us the way the old DEA used to and the FBI still does; and last but not least, we’re pretty lean and efficient, and although there aren’t enough of us to cover the
ground or the caseload, we’re pretty well funded and respected by all the players who count, from the politicians on down.”

  “What’re your biggest problems here?” Joe asked.

  “The usual stuff,” Coven answered. “With the heaviest hitter being prescription drugs. That’s taken us by storm. Oxy’s the current favorite, and most of it’s coming from Canada, because of the price differential.”

  “Where specifically?” Lester asked.

  Coven caught his meaning. “No clue,” he answered. “At least, not really. I mean, we catch people crossing all the time, and we know about a lot of activity involving the usual hodgepodge of retirement home rip-offs, crooked docs and pharmacists, and drugstore thefts. But that’s not the mother ship. Someone, somewhere, is making a huge killing here, but we don’t know who. The Mounties have been consulted, of course, but they’re as much in the dark as we are.”

  “At least they say they are,” Cathy Lawless added.

  “The Mounties can be closemouthed at times,” Kevin Delaney said, speaking for the first time. “I’m not as suspicious as Cathy, but we do have some history of being left in the dark. My personal feeling is that one of the Canadian manufacturers or warehouses has a serious leak, to answer your question, but, as Mike was saying, no one really knows.”

  “If you don’t know its source,” Lester asked, “then how do you know it’s from Canada?”

  Cathy laughed. “It’s labeled, believe it or not. At least, the Oxys are. If the pill’s marked ‘CDN,’ it’s a product of Canada. ‘OC’ means the United States, and ‘X’ stands for Mexico.”

  There was a sound at the door, and the receptionist reappeared with Lenny Chapman, accompanied by a young, hard-faced woman, quickly introduced as one of the Maine-based ICE agents, named Dede Miller.

  Once more, chairs were shifted and coffee offered—and accepted this time—before everyone was back to circling the table.

  “So,” Chapman asked, “you guys figure out a plan of attack?”

  “Les and I were getting a history lesson,” Joe told him. “Things are a lot different from back home.”

  “You folks have the Atlantic Ocean, for one thing,” Lester said.

  There was a pause, as everyone, his boss included, gave him a questioning look.

  Les smiled apologetically. “I meant as a border issue. In Vermont, we just have a line in the sand between Canada and us, except for the lakes.”

  Still, no one seemed to grasp his point.

  He forged ahead. “Luis Grega was last seen at a port, right? And escaped by boat? And for all intents and purposes, he’s a smuggler. Made me think of your three thousand miles—plus—of coastline, a lot of it near Canada, and most of it unpatrolled, from what I’ve read.”

  “He has a point,” Dede Miller said softly.

  Again, there was a moment’s silence, which Chapman filled with, “Dede’s from our Washington County office—we’ve got about five people covering Washington and Hancock Counties. You’ve been working here for how long, Dede?”

  “Five years,” she told him. “And I think … Les, was it?”

  Lester nodded silently.

  “… I think Les might have something,” she continued. “We’ve been catching people on the dry border, as best we can, but what about the wet border? That was sure as hell the hot spot back in the seventies.”

  Coven, the most experienced of the group, if just barely ahead of Kevin Delaney, weighed in: “That was also marijuana from South America and elsewhere—not pills stamped from Canada.”

  “Lobstermen have been smuggling booze and cigarettes for generations,” Cathy chimed in.

  “Not to mention short lobsters,” Delaney added.

  “What?” Joe asked.

  “Lobsters that’re too short to be legal,” Delaney explained. “Some guys bring them home instead of tossing them back like they’re supposed to, sometimes hidden under the decking of their boats. Old tradition. Lobstermen are kind of like cowboys that way—do what they want because they wander the wet version of the open prairie, I guess.”

  Joe returned to their primary topic by addressing Miller directly. “Dede, if nobody’s been caught importing pills by sea, what makes you think that might be happening now? Isn’t something like Fish and Game out there on the job?”

  “The Marine Patrol,” she corrected him. “Fish and Game is inland. Marine Patrol is out there, but not looking for drugs—not specifically. There aren’t enough of them. Their focus is the clam diggers, the lobster business … They’re mostly conservationists, out to protect a cash crop. No disrespect, but they pretty much have to fall over any drugs to notice them.”

  Joe asked Cathy Lawless, “Did you get any notion that Grega might be working that angle?”

  Lawless frowned. “I didn’t even know he was there before he poked a gun in my nose.”

  “Yeah,” Joe persisted, “but he was with somebody you knew, right? What about him?”

  “Bob?” Cathy exclaimed. “Jesus. I don’t know … I never thought of him that way.” She paused before saying, “No, I don’t see it. We met where we did ’cause he thought it was secure, not because he had any ties to the water. Far as I know, he doesn’t own a boat and has nothing to do with fishing. Dave?” she asked her partner.

  Dave, typically, merely shook his head.

  “What happened to Bob, anyhow?” Chapman asked.

  “Skipped with Grega,” Lawless said, her voice toneless.

  “That was hardly your fault,” Delaney told her.

  “But it is why we’re all here, more or less,” Joe contributed, adding, “Somehow, Bob and Grega are connected. We may not have either one available right now, but we must have something on Bob—a way to maybe chase him down.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cathy acknowledged, ambition overcoming embarrassment. “We can definitely shake that tree, especially with a posse like this.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Alan watched Luis Grega carefully, as if looking for something to emerge from his head, which Alan could then use for guidance.

  “You worked for Roz how many years?”

  Grega parked his feet on the low coffee table facing him. He was sitting on a couch in the back of a restaurant in Jonesport—the sort of place where you ordered your coffee and sandwich from a counter and then took it to either a table or a cluster of easy chairs. The window overlooking the parking lot advertised free Wi-Fi and the speakers played soft pop tunes from the sixties—treacly crap Alan normally couldn’t stand. It was a place where no one he knew was likely to visit, full of people wearing fleece and drinking herbal tea.

  “I started out as a mule, a few years ago,” Grega told him. “Roz liked how I did my job and moved me up.”

  Alan already knew that. When he was first considering this business for real, back when he was skimming from the pharmaceutical company, he’d applied his college education, if solely for the organizational techniques it had instilled. Having heard about Mroz, he’d quietly interviewed some of the man’s people, done the homework without tipping his hand, and finally crunched the numbers. It had cost him a lot of money, wasted a lot of time, exposed him to a lot of losers and liars, and paid off enormously—even if he had ended up doing most of his strategizing in jail.

  Along the way, the name of Luis Grega had surfaced as a rising star.

  “So, you got to know how the business ran?”

  Grega was watching him with his own careful scrutiny. “I did pretty good.”

  “You know about me, right?” Alan asked him.

  “Bernie told me you were the new boss” was the neutral response.

  “How’s that sit with you?” Bernie had been Mroz’s bookkeeper, and was already slated to stay on as Alan’s. Still, Alan was interested that Bernie and Grega had been talking, since Bernie was notoriously—even pathologically—self-effacing, to the point of being a hermit.

  Grega hesitated, unsure of the question’s intent. “Fine,” he finally said.

>   Alan smiled. “Fine? Upwardly mobile guy like you? Some newbie pops up out of nowhere and steals your action, and you’re okay with that?”

  Grega played along, also pretending to be affable. “I don’t see you stealing my action. I’m doin’ okay.”

  “You weren’t aiming for the top spot?”

  To Alan’s satisfaction, Grega looked genuinely surprised. “Roz’s?” he asked. “What the fuck I want with that? Bunch of headaches.”

  “What are your ambitions, then, now that there’s been a change of leadership?”

  Grega looked thoughtful.

  “Depends on the leader,” he said.

  Alan found that acceptable. In fact, what he’d discovered about Luis Grega was that the man had a kind of old-fashioned work ethic. As far as Alan could determine—ironically by also consulting Bernie, among others—Grega was in the game for the money, the adrenaline, and the chance to tell society to screw itself. No tales of betrayal or double dealing dogged his heels, no reports of violence that hadn’t seemed appropriate and properly surgical, no troubles with women that might come back to haunt him. As societal fringe operators went, Grega had appeared to be a good soldier.

  Which was precisely what Alan was looking for.

  Budney pursed his lips. This was a turning point—a final stage in his plan. Matt Mroz had taken the conventional route to his moment in the sunshine. He’d used violence and coercion, a modicum of brains, and the rudiments of leadership to hammer together a loosely knit, porous amalgam of illegal products, import routes, and marginally capable people—the likes of Bernie and Grega notwithstanding—all to create an operation as substantial as a spec house built on sand. It had been a recipe for short-term profits and long-term disaster, at best. Under his aegis, this wobbly, inefficient, careless operation had grabbed for everything, let a lot slip through its fingers, and had largely trusted to luck for its success. Bernie had admitted as much in a frustrated outburst days earlier. Had it been run in a less rural state, according to Bernie, where there was more law enforcement and a hotter sense of moral outrage, it would have collapsed long ago. That had explained why the bookkeeper had stayed out of the limelight.