Catch as Cat Can

by Claire Donally

  Sunny drove slowly, giving other drivers a lot of room. That was the other misconception some folks had about SUVs. They could go anywhere, but on ice, the problem wasn’t going—it was stopping. Luckily, the long incline down to town was clear, and the sun had begun to shine, causing a little more melt. Sunny drove down to the New Stores, found a parking space, and had more skids on the sidewalk than she’d had on the street. The guys from Judson’s Market had cleared a single lane all the way down the block, with a lot more work done in front of their store. Sunny unlocked her office door and headed to the back of the office to the sack of ice melt. Using an extra coffee cup, she scooped and sprinkled along the front of the store until she had an island of damp but non-slippery pavement.

  She couldn’t help noticing that Kittery Harbor Fish remained shuttered with just the little lane that the Judson’s guys had deiced. Was Neil Garret still stuck out in Sturgeon Springs, or was he in custody somewhere?

  “Would be nice if Will could have let me know,” Sunny muttered as she came inside. But she forgot about that as she got the daily routine started. She’d been working a couple of hours on e-mail inquiries when the phone rang. It was Will.

  “I was thinking of you,” Sunny began, but Will cut her off. “I’ve got a kind of weird favor to ask, and I need a quick answer,” he said. “I’ve got Deke Sweeney on the other line. He says he knows I want to talk with him, but he doesn’t want to do it at the sheriff’s office. If I can come up with someplace private, he can come in right now. I thought of your office, if Ollie isn’t camped out there.”

  “He’s not, and . . . sure,” Sunny replied, thinking, This way I get a front-row seat.

  Will had managed to change and shave since the previous night, but he looked hollow-eyed and tired when he arrived at the MAX office. He was in businesslike mode, so no kiss as he came in the door. “Thanks for this,” he said, taking off his coat and sinking into a chair. “Apparently Sweeney thinks that hanging around with the police is bad for his image or something. He wouldn’t even go for meeting in a restaurant. Too public.”

  “And this isn’t?” Sunny nodded toward the plate glass window fronting most of the space.

  “I think it will be a pretty slow business day,” Will said. “Not many people coming by to gawk in the windows.”

  “You mean people won’t be beating a path to the fish store?” Sunny asked. “I see it’s still closed.”

  “Yeah, I guess they haven’t finished chopping their way through the felled trees to clear the road to Sturgeon Springs.” Will didn’t look happy. “Garret was stuck in his house and apparently didn’t make any kind of a move. Even the wheels of his car were iced in place.”

  “That’s a pretty impressive alibi,” Sunny said.

  “Yeah, unless we can find a cab record that says different, or if Scotty beamed him into town and back, it’s pretty hard to imagine Garret killing Charlie Vane.” Will glanced at his watch. “When Sweeney called, he said he was in downtown Portsmouth. So, depending on how things are moving on the bridge, he should be here fairly soon.”

  Traffic must have been moving pretty well, because shortly afterward a tall man in a parka and a knit cap came down the block, glancing at a scrap of paper in his hand. He opened the office door, stepped in, and said, “I’m Sweeney. I think you’re expecting me?”

  Will stepped forward. “I’m Will Price, and this is Sunny Coolidge.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve read some of your stuff,” Sweeney said, removing his cap.

  So he probably knows Will and I are a team, Sunny thought.

  Sweeney shrugged out of the parka, revealing a rumpled brown suit and a wool knit tie. To Sunny’s eyes, the shark of the fish market looked more like a snapping turtle. Sweeney was a raw-boned kind of man, with knobby cheeks, a hard, determined chin, and a bald head. His remaining hair was cropped so short, it looked like grayish stubble above his ears. His eyebrows, however, were wild and bushy with stray white hairs sticking out. His lips curved in a sort of default smile, giving Sunny the impression that he was a rough but cheerful type until she looked him in the eyes. They were the most shark-like things about him, having as much color and feeling as a pair of brook pebbles.

  “A couple of friends on the Portsmouth force said you were asking after me,” Sweeney said, taking a seat in front of Sunny’s desk. “Of course, with this storm, any formal request you might have made has gotten shifted to the bottom of the pile.” The corners of his mouth moved upward maybe another millimeter. “So I decided to take the bull by the horns. For a person in my position, getting visits from policemen just looks bad. And visiting police stations looks even worse. People might get the wrong idea.”

  “And what exactly is your position, Mr. Sweeney?” Sunny asked.

  Sweeney’s smile went up another millimeter. “Why, I’m the manager of the Portsmouth Fish Market, Ms. Coolidge. I’m responsible for everything running smoothly and honestly.”

  “And publicly dealing with the police would cause a problem with that?” Will inquired skeptically.

  “The market is a rough-and-tumble kind of place,” Sweeney explained. “Certain elements might interpret the presence of the police as a sign of weakness.”

  “That you might be arrested, you mean?” Will asked.

  The smile disappeared from Sweeney’s lips. “That I can’t keep order in my own house,” he said. “I can . . . and I do.”

  “I’ve heard stories that the fish market was kind of a wild and wooly place, until you came in and . . . imposed order,” Will said easily. “Though for a while, that looked like a difficult job. I understand one of the fish merchants made a complaint about you threatening him with a gun.”

  “Is it ancient history you’re interested in?” Sweeney asked. “That happened years ago, and it was never followed up.”

  Will nodded. “Yes, the complainant left town in something of a hurry.”

  “I certainly can’t speak to that,” Sweeney said primly. “But if that old complaint is the only thing you can find on me, then I think my reputation speaks for itself. Besides, waving guns is a young man’s game.” He gestured to himself. “I’m not a young man anymore.”

  “No, nowadays I suppose you’d have to delegate that to, as you say, a younger fellow,” Will said. “Still, I have to ask, where were you a week ago Wednesday?”

  “You’re trying to connect me to what happened next door?” Sweeney’s smile was back. “I have to admit, it was a bit of a shock when I passed the place. I’d never been to Kittery Harbor Fish before. Fact is, I’ve never even set eyes on Neil Garret.”

  “You know,” Sunny broke in, “a suspicious mind might pick up on that statement as actual truth. That someone who’d never seen Garret mistakenly killed Phil Treibholz in Garret’s store.”

  “Well, I’ve never seen either of them, and I was more than a hundred miles from here the night of that murder,” Sweeney replied. “I was over in Hanover, at a Dartmouth hockey game. My son’s on the team, and I try to root for him.”

  “Were you alone?” Will asked.

  “I was with a couple of thousand other fans.” Sweeney’s smile rose a bit more. “But I went by myself. My wife is afraid of all this propaganda about concussions and such. She can’t stand to watch. But this is the sport my boy likes, and Lord knows, I did stupider things when I was his age. Still, the game ran a hair short of two-and-a-half hours, which is about what it would take to drive from Hanover here to Kittery Harbor. I was in the team locker room after the game to see my son, and from what I’ve heard, my schedule doesn’t exactly jibe with yours.”

  Will nodded. “Could you tell me your whereabouts last night?”

  Sweeney’s emotionless eyes gave Will a long look. “Why I was iced in at home, like most of the people in this area,” he said. “My wife and I were lucky enough not to lose our electricity, so we watched some television.
Why do you ask?”

  “I guess your friends haven’t mentioned that Charlie Vane was found dead last night.” Will paused for a second. “He was shot three times.”

  For the first time, a genuine expression surfaced on Sweeney’s face—surprise. “Who would bother with a small fish like Vane?”

  “Excuse me?” Sunny asked.

  “Oh, to hear Vane talk about it, there was a great feud between him and me.” A look of distaste crept onto Sweeney’s face. “But to me he was more of a hangnail than the thorn in my side he made himself out to be.”

  “You blackballed him from the fish market,” Sunny pointed out.

  “More as a warning to others who might get ideas than anything else,” Sweeney replied.

  “So it wasn’t an attempt to drive him out of business?” Will asked.

  “You needn’t go blaming me for that. The way Charlie Vane conducted his business, something would catch up with him and sink him. Same as with Garret.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the store next door. “Too clever for their own good. Those are the sort who, sooner or later, find themselves in bankruptcy court.” He shook his head. “But I never expected it might end up in murder.”

  13

  Sunny and Will spent some more time fencing with Deke Sweeney, but in the end they had to admit defeat. This obviously wasn’t Sweeney’s first rodeo when it came to interrogations. He just kept that masklike smile and stuck to his alibi while they tried their best to trip him up—and failed.

  “Well, I don’t know how much help I was, but I was glad to give it,” the shark of the Portsmouth Fish Market said blandly as he headed to the door. “Good luck on your case.”

  Will glared at Sweeney’s retreating back. “We’ll damn well need it, if he’s the guy we’re after.”

  “Doesn’t look like it, though.” Sunny sighed. “He seemed like such a good suspect from a distance, somebody who leans on people for a living. But that’s the problem—distance. I used to go up to Dartmouth for games and stuff during my school days. It’s at least a two-hour ride.”

  Will gave her a moody nod. “Not to mention that our estimated time of death would fall just about in the middle of that hockey game. That cuts the margin even thinner. No way could Sweeney get from here to Hanover in time to see his son in the locker room.” He considered that for a moment, then smiled. “Of course, maybe this is a carefully constructed alibi, placing Sweeney a hundred and twenty miles away while somebody else did the deed.”

  “That sounds like the theory I suggested about Charlie Vane,” Sunny said.

  “Of course, that theory has a little drawback now that Vane is dead.” Will grimaced. “Two murders a week apart. We have to figure they’re connected.”

  Sunny nodded. “But the only connection seems to be Deke Sweeney and the fish market.”

  Will rose from his chair to work off a little frustration by walking around the office. “This stupid storm delay with the crime-scene people is driving me crazy. If we got a ballistics match, at least we’d have something solid tying in the two killings.”

  “But are you sure the bullets came from the same gun?” Sunny asked. “You told me Charlie Vane had a house full of them.”

  Will halted in his tracks and gave her a look. “Thanks for cheering me up.”

  “Just pointing out that Vane’s murder could be a crime of opportunity,” Sunny said. “With all those weapons around, someone with a totally unrelated grudge against Vane could have killed him.” She paused for a second. “He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who left business partners with warm fuzzy feelings toward him.”

  “Are you seriously suggesting that?”

  Sunny shrugged. “Well, of our three strongest suspects in the Treibholz killing, two of them are excluded from this one by the ice storm—and the third is the victim.”

  “We really don’t have a time of death for Vane,” Will argued, but Sunny suspected he was clutching at straws. “The murder could have happened before the weather got too bad.”

  “I guess that will depend on when those trees fell on the road to Sturgeon Springs . . . and when the bridges from Portsmouth got too icy for traffic—that usually happens a lot more quickly than on the roads.” She glanced at Will. “Figuring that he would hire a killer from his side of the river.”

  From the look on Will’s face, he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or start hollering. “So you think we’re back to square one?”

  “I think that at least for this murder, we need some new suspects who are closer to the scene of the crime.”

  Will frowned. “You’re saying someone in town.”

  Like Val Overton, in her motel on the main road, Sunny thought. Aloud she said, “I don’t think we can go farther out than my neighborhood.” Which would let in Abby Martinson, depending on how early she and her mom hit the hay.

  Will looked as if he’d just bitten into a big, fat bug burger.

  Well, it can’t get much worse, Sunny decided. “How well do you know Val?” she asked.

  “What?” Will seemed thrown by the shift in the conversation. “Why do you ask?”

  “She came on pretty strong with Ollie,” Sunny pointed out. “I’m still wondering if she has a thing for older guys. Because Neil Garret is an older guy, and he’s a lot better-looking than Ollie the Barnacle.”

  “Garret is her witness, and it’s her responsibility to keep him from getting killed,” Will immediately objected. “She would never—”

  “It never happens?” Sunny asked. “An attractive witness, a marshal who’s on the road so much, there’s no room for a private life?”

  “I don’t—it’s not—” Will floundered around for a moment, then said, “You’re making a big jump from bad judgment to murder.”

  “Well, this hypothetical person with bad judgment carries a gun,” Sunny pointed out.

  “And what’s the motive for killing Treibholz?” Will challenged.

  “The crooked detective from California who was playing mind games with Neil?” Sunny shrugged. “Treibholz could put him in the crosshairs for a bunch of contract killers.”

  “But that’s not a reason to kill the guy,” Will said. “If Neil’s new identity was in danger of being exposed, the WitSec people would move him again.”

  “And would Neil still be Val’s witness? Or would he just disappear out of her life into still another new identity and never see her again?”

  Will’s expression turned grim. “You’re throwing a lot of stuff on Val.”

  “I’m just asking some questions,” Sunny replied. “We’ve had to ask them about friends of mine in the past.”

  That got a stiff nod from Will. “Okay. So how do you tie in Charlie Vane?”

  Sunny spread her arms. “Suppose he found out about Neil’s past. Maybe Treibholz came around asking questions that got Vane suspicious. Old Charlie was a guy who cut a lot of corners and needed a lot of money. I wouldn’t put it past him to try a little blackmail on Neil.”

  “And then it would be the same situation as Treibholz.” Will really wasn’t liking this line of thinking.

  Sunny took a deep breath. “It’s not just your friends I’m wondering about,” she said. “How about Abby Martinson? She had a prior relationship with Neil when he was Nick Gatto, and it seems a hell of a coincidence, her turning up here after being away for so long. What if she was in contact with Neil?”

  “That’s a big WitSec no-no.” Will still looked serious, but some of the grimness leaked away as he considered Sunny’s suggestion. “Although the program has been a hundred percent effective when people follow the rules, that’s the one that gets broken most—and gets people killed.”

  Sunny nodded. “What if Abby found that Treibholz was sniffing around and came to warn Neil?” Now she frowned. “The guy died the day after she got off the plane.”

 
“So, motive and possible opportunity,” Will said. “What about means?”

  “Abby’s dad was an outdoorsman,” Sunny replied. “A real huntin’ and fishin’ guy. He had guns.”

  Will strode around a little more, silently stewing. “You’ve got the start of a case—for both of them,” he abruptly admitted. “But there’s no evidence.”

  “Maybe the crime-scene people will get lucky,” Sunny suggested. “They managed to recover the bullets that killed Treibholz, didn’t they?”

  He nodded. “One got pretty messed up after exiting his head—a lot of metal in that freezer. But the other is in decent shape. The slug came from a nine millimeter pistol—which, yes, is kind of government issue these days.” His hand made an absentminded gesture toward the Glock holstered under his coat. “But I need something stronger before I’d ask for ballistics on Val’s piece. Think you can find out anything about the late Mr. Martinson’s gun collection?”

  “I can try.” Sunny was pretty sure her face wasn’t a picture of joy. “Can you let me out of my promise to keep playing dumb about Nick Gatto? That would let me talk to him about that part of his life.”

  Will stared at her. “Why would you want to do that? We just about cleared him as a suspect.”

  “Yeah, we cleared Neil Garret, but Nick Gatto got involved with both of our new suspects. I’d like to see how Nick talks about each of them.”

  Will laughed. “You think your feminine instincts can turn something up?”

  Sunny shrugged. “Something is better than the nothing we’ve got now.”

  Will grudgingly gave his okay. Then he leaned in to give Sunny a quick peck on the cheek before heading up to Levett to report on his meeting with Deke Sweeney.

  Better than when he came in, Sunny thought. But still distracted with work.

  She sighed and returned to her keyboard. Speaking of work, I suppose I’d better get some done.

  But as she went through the day’s activities, Sunny kept an ear out for the sound of the gate next door opening. It finally rattled up sometime after lunch. Sunny actually found herself jumping to her feet but then forced herself to sit down again. Let him get settled first. I’ll want to work my way into this.