“So what is anybody going to do about it?” Justin demanded.
“We’re hoping Jenn left us a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, and maybe something like evidence. She entrusted what she had to Larry here, since it seems she didn’t think she could hide it at the house. We haven’t looked at it yet.”
“Can we?” Justin looked like an eager kid. “I mean, I’m sure you need to give it to the state police, but can’t we take a look at it first?”
“I don’t see any good reason why we can’t,” Art told him. “I think we’ve earned it.”
Chapter 25
“So what’ve you got?” Justin demanded.
“Slow down, son,” Art said. “This is not your party. Jenn gave this to Larry, so more likely it’s his party, or Meg’s, or maybe Seth’s. Or even mine. You’re at the back of the line, and if you try to shove your way into the middle of this, I’ll boot you out. Got it?”
“Yes. Sorry.” Justin seemed to shrink a little.
“Okay, so let’s review. Jenn arrived in the area, what, a month ago? When did she first show up at the house? Larry, you remember?”
“Not right away. Three weeks ago, maybe?”
“Okay. So let’s say she arrived in the area a month ago and spent some time scoping the place out before she made a move. Justin, did she ever show her face at the newsroom in that time?”
Justin shrugged. “Maybe. I wasn’t watching, but it would surprise me if she stayed away as long as a month. She’d probably want to touch base with her editor.”
Meg made a mental note to check with Toby about whether he’d seen Jenn in the right time frame.
“Okay,” Art resumed, “so she’s figured out the lay of the land and zeroed in on Seth’s house and its occupants as the kind of setup she was looking for. She starts hanging out there, and she decides you aren’t really part of the gang, Larry, so she figures you’re safe and she makes a play for you and moves in. Right?”
Larry avoided his eyes. “More or less.”
“And that would be between two and three weeks ago. Anybody else have a girl hanging around?”
Larry shook his head. “Nope. Well, some came and went, but nobody stayed.”
“Got it. So Jenn had two weeks max to observe what went on and who was involved before she was killed. Justin, where were you?”
“I made a couple of quick trips out here from Boston, once I knew where to find her, but I didn’t stay around—I didn’t want to risk her seeing me.”
“What did you think you were going to do?” Seth asked. “Demand to share her byline? Blackmail her? Did you have a plan?”
“I don’t know,” Justin said, sounding like a sulky child. “I wanted to see how things played out. Or maybe I was thinking I’d sweep in and rescue her from the big bad drug dealers, if things went sour.”
“And claim a piece of the story,” Seth added.
Justin didn’t bother to answer that.
Art turned to Larry again. “Okay, Larry, you lived with these guys for a couple of months. I know you said you made a point of not hanging out with them, but you must have formed some kind of impression of them, singly or together. What were they like? Describe them for me.”
Larry looked startled for a moment, then he started thinking. “Two of ’em—Mike Wilson and Tom Reilly—went to UMass, took classes. I’m not a hundred percent sure they were full-time students, but they were over there at least part of the time. Or at least out of the house at regular times. The third one, Ed Lopes, had a job. Not an office job, but he worked for some local factory or contractor. His hours were kind of all over the place—sometimes he was back in the afternoon, other times I didn’t see him until the next day. It’s not like we were keeping track of each other. We didn’t cook together or anything. Me, I was usually down the hill here, with Meg or Seth.”
“So there was no regular schedule—everybody was in and out and went their separate ways. You said there were parties, how often? Every night? Only Saturday night?”
“Somewhere between. And maybe parties makes them sound bigger than they were. Somebody, or a couple of people, would stop by, maybe grab a beer, hang out for a while, then leave again. Nobody stayed really long.”
“And you never saw money change hands, or anybody hand over a bottle or a packet of pills?”
“No. But I never thought about it. Anyway, I was kind of busy with Jenn, so I wasn’t paying attention.”
“And what was she doing? Staying at the house or coming and going?”
“In more than out, I guess. Look, she made up a cover story, right? Like she got out of Boston because she needed a break, but she kind of hinted that there was a guy she’d rather not see again, so nobody should talk about her to anyone outside the house. To outsiders, I mean. Nobody else was supposed to know she was there.”
“So that gave her an excuse to stay at the house and watch what was going on,” Art said, almost to himself. “And somewhere in there she found time to put together some kind of notes, which she told you to hide. I guess we—and by that I mean me, a duly elected officer of the law—should examine whatever she left. You have any latex gloves, Meg?”
“What? Oh, maybe—I use them for cleaning sometimes, and for chopping garlic. You want to preserve any fingerprints there might be?”
“That’s what I was thinking. Meg, you go get those gloves. Larry, hand over the goods.” Art held out his hand.
Larry hesitated a moment, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box, about the size of a tin of Altoids, and dropped it into Art’s palm. In the kitchen Meg rummaged around under the sink and returned with a pair of gloves, which she held out to Art without speaking.
“Should we be recording this?” she asked.
“Why? We aren’t sure what we’re going to find, or what we’re going to do with it. If it’s her market list we trash it. If it points the finger at someone, we’re going to have to think about it.” Art donned the gloves and carefully peeled back the plastic that Larry had wrapped around the package. And the next layer and the next. “Good job keeping it dry, kid,” he said. Meg wasn’t sure if he was joking or not.
Nobody said a word as Art carefully extricated a neatly folded wad of paper, opened the small pile, and laid one sheet at a time on the table. Clearly the sheets all came from a single small notebook; the sheets measured maybe four by six inches, and many were covered with very small lettering in pencil. A couple of pages had columns of numbers and letters.
“Looks like license plate numbers,” Art said. “Buyers, you think? Mostly in-state, but a few from farther away. Easy enough to run the plates, see who’s who.”
“What about the rest?” Meg asked.
“Names, for one thing. Short bios of the guys who were living there—not research, exactly, but things they said, places they mentioned, that kind of thing. Then we have which people came most often, which could be the suppliers. Mostly she got first names only—they must have been careful, or she couldn’t get close enough to get more. Again, easy to run the names in our computer, see if they’ve got prior drug experience. Or any other kind.”
“Like murder,” Larry said, with a hint of bitterness.
“And that’s all?” Justin said, incredulous.
Art turned on him. “What, you expected five thousand words of elegant prose? She was undercover, collecting information. She may have left us details of sellers and buyers. Frequency. Amounts bought. Money that came in. Hard to say, until we look through these pages with a magnifier. But the rest she kept in her head, for the story she was going to write. And now she never will.”
“What are you going to do with it, Art?” Meg asked quietly.
“You mean, who do I give it to? I think I’d give it to Marcus. I can use some points with him, and he can show up the drug guys by handing them information they can use. Win-win, sort of. We all come out looking good.”
“But who killed Jenn?” Larry asked.
“I doubt that’
s included in what she wrote. I think we need to look more carefully at what little she wrote about the people in the house. Not to see who appears to be the best candidate for killer, but because he has the most to lose. Could be money, could be reputation, could be his standing in the dealers’ community, if there is such a thing. Or maybe he figured out what Jenn was up to and panicked.”
“And just happened to have a twenty-two rifle with him?” Seth scoffed. “How did he lure Jenn out of the house to wherever she was killed, so he could do the deed? And why did he bring her back here and dump her?”
“A message to his colleagues? Or to the people he does business with? You know, ‘Mess with me and this could happen to you.’ He didn’t have to know she was a journalist, just that she was a problem—too nosy. Maybe he thought she was working for the police. Maybe he and his pals were afraid she wanted a piece of the action. We may never know what he was thinking, and what gave her away.”
“So leaving her to be found out back was intended as a warning. It was deliberate,” Seth said.
“That’d be my guess. The problem was, he misjudged how hunting works around here and assumed nobody would look too closely. He probably didn’t know that the state police were already on the trail.”
“You want to call Marcus, tell him to come here because we have a present for him?” Seth asked.
Art sighed yet again. “That’s probably the best strategy. That way he doesn’t have to put on a show for whoever’s in his office, and it gives him a little time to think about how he wants to handle it. And it also makes it clear that we’re all involved and we’re watching.”
Nobody around the table put up an argument, so Seth told Art, “Do it.”
“Now?”
“Why not? Let’s get it over with.”
“You’re right.” Art stood up abruptly, fished his phone out of his pocket, and stalked toward the front parlor.
Meg’s emotions were an unsettling mix of fear and excitement. This whole investigation might be over soon. But then again, it might not, since there were several groups of people involved and each group had its own agenda. She and her gang wanted this to be over. The drug unit wanted a big and highly public score, not just a roundup of a couple of amateurs. Marcus wanted to one-up the drug unit. Who was going to win?
“Anybody want to flip a coin to see whether he decides to show up or laughs in Art’s face?” Seth asked.
“What’s he got to lose?” Meg asked. “He doesn’t have to say where he’s going. Either he goes back to the office with a big win or he goes back and doesn’t say anything.”
“Is this a big win for around here?” Justin asked. “I mean, a house with a bunch of scruffy guys selling whatever stuff they’ve got? The real money’s got to be someplace bigger, doesn’t it? Holyoke? Springfield? Someplace like that?”
“Justin, I think you’re missing the big picture here,” Seth told him. “Until recently Granford was a sleepy little town where the same families had lived for a couple of centuries. Nobody had any reason to stop here. But it’s close to some important college communities, particularly UMass, and it’s invisibility turns out to be an asset. Nobody’s looking for this kind of crime here, so it seems safe and it’s easy to set up shop. What I think the dealers weren’t counting on is that the residents here pay attention to what’s going on, so if there’s a flurry of unusual activity—like those cars coming and going at all hours—they notice, and they think about it. Like my mother. She’s not on high alert for drug dealers, but she did comment that traffic has really picked up lately, only because the headlights shine into her bedroom windows. We’re the ones who came up with a theory about why the traffic had increased, out here on a road that doesn’t really go anywhere. The city guys wouldn’t have thought about it.”
“Hey, great image,” Justin said, pulling a notebook out of his shirt pocket and scribbling a note on it. “So how did Jenn figure out what was going on?” he asked.
“I’d guess she did her homework,” Seth said. “Like looking at maps. Pulling up local crime statistics. The presence of law enforcement—or lack of. All before she put together a plan and showed up to get involved on a more personal level. She used Larry to get into the house. You might want to follow her example, if you want a big story.”
“It got her killed,” Justin muttered.
“It did, and we may never know where things went wrong for her. But I’m going to guess that her story would have been better than anything you could write, because it would be ‘real,’ for want of a better word. The details would have been authentic, not pulled from the internet or a conversation in a bar. Face it, the world has gotten kind of scary when the boys next door in a quiet town turn out to be drug dealers.”
Art returned to the dining room and said, “Marcus is on his way.”
Chapter 26
It took Detective William Marcus less than half an hour to arrive at Meg’s door. Seth went to let him in. Marcus’s first words were, “I hope to hell this isn’t another wild-goose chase.”
“Nice to see you too, Detective,” Seth said. “Come on in. The gang’s all here.”
Marcus had never been a person to let his expression give much away, so he showed no surprise when he walked into the dining room and took in the group seated around the table. “Maybe you’d better introduce yourselves.”
Art took the lead. “You know me, and Seth and Meg. The new faces are Larry Bennett, who’s working for Meg in the orchard, and Justin Campbell, who’s a junior reporter for the Boston Globe. He worked with Jenn Chambers. Why don’t you sit down? This may take a while.”
“Can I get you some coffee, Detective?” Meg said, trying to keep a straight face while saying the tired line yet again.
“You got anything stronger?” he replied.
“Aren’t you on duty?” Seth asked.
“Doesn’t much matter. The only action around here seems to be this drug business and the murder, and I can’t touch either one, even though the murder is part of my job, and the drug guys aren’t listening to me. It’s stupid, and it’s a waste of time.”
“Will Scotch do?” Meg asked.
“Sure.” Marcus fell silent again. He really was in a foul mood, Meg noted, but she decided not to comment.
“Anybody else?” Meg scanned the faces around the table, then decided to bring the bottle and glasses and let people decide what they wanted to do. She was tired of playing waitress.
After a couple of minutes of glum silence, Marcus, Art and Seth helped themselves to a drink, followed by Meg. Marcus finally said. “Preston, you said you had information for me?”
“We do. And it was a joint effort, not just mine.”
“Yeah, yeah, you all work and play together really nicely. What’ve you got?”
“A possible solution to Jenn Chambers’s murder and how it’s connected to the drug problem we have here in Granford.”
Marcus swirled his Scotch in his glass. “Interesting—in one sentence you’ve told me you know who the dead girl was, you think she was murdered, and you’re implying that she was looking at the drug dealers Seth has stashed in his house up there. Unless you want me to think she was a user. Tell me you’ve got more than a nice theory.”
“We do,” Art said calmly. “We have Jenn’s notes. Not a lot of details, because she didn’t have a computer or a cell phone with her, but enough to get you pointed in the right direction.”
“Where’ve they been all along?”
“Jenn gave the notes to Larry here to keep safe—he was one of the guys sharing the house. He hid them away from the house, in case anybody went looking for them there. And in his—and our—defense, he didn’t know what he had because everybody was sending such confusing signals or not telling the truth that he didn’t realize what he had might be important. He was doing a favor for a friend, period. We only learned about them this morning.”
“Why are you so sure this guy isn’t just leading you on, sending you off in th
e wrong direction?” He stared coldly at Larry. Larry held his gaze.
“Because I’ve known him since last fall and worked with him,” Meg said. “And so has Seth. We trust him, and so does Christopher Ramsdell. Why don’t you?”
“He’s not from around here, and his family history’s a little murky.”
“Has he ever been in trouble with the law?” Seth demanded.
“Not that I’ve found—yet.”
“My father had a record, mostly small stuff,” Larry finally spoke up. “You’ve probably already found that. Not me.”
“Marcus, which side are you on?” Art said, clearly annoyed. “You want to hear what we’ve got, or do you have something more important to do?”
“Go ahead,” he grumbled.
“And let us tell it in our own way.”
“Just get on with it, will you?”
Art led off with the discovery of the body a week earlier, and the conclusions they’d drawn about the killing. He went on with the bits and pieces of information that had emerged since, from various sources—Lydia and Christopher, Larry, and most recently Justin—and how they’d fit them together. Marcus didn’t comment, but he seemed to be listening. At the end of an hour, Art pulled out the papers that Jenn had left behind, now stored in a plastic sleeve that Meg had provided. “This was all she felt safe in recording, I think, or had time for. At least, we don’t know of anything more, but we haven’t gone through the house. That includes Larry’s room. What we have seems to be a quick sketch of each of the guys living in the house, plus a list of what look like license plates, and a few other names, maybe guys who dropped by regularly—distributors or customers, it’s not clear. The notes cover a period of a couple of weeks, up until just before Jenn died. That’s when she gave them to Larry. She must have known that something had gone wrong.”
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