Trace

by Archer Mayor

  Spinney pretended to look around uncomfortably, fortunately assisted by a chatty oncoming elderly couple. He indicated his vehicle. “My car’s right here, Mind if we talk there? Little more quiet.”

  Hartnett’s distrust grew in his eyes, but he feigned indifference. “Sure. Why not?”

  Lester gave him no time to reconsider, retiring immediately to the car and slipping inside. Hartnett followed suit more slowly, pointedly leaving the passenger door ajar and his right foot flat on the pavement.

  “Shoot,” he suggested.

  So far, so good, Lester thought, unconsciously casting a quick glance at the car’s tucked-up sun visor. He’d earlier secreted a recorder there, hoping Hartnett would agree to his invitation to sit in his surrogate office—and thereby deprive himself of any legal expectation of privacy.

  Lester chose a roundabout start. “I don’t know if it’s a slow time for us, or some political favor being paid off, but I’ve been assigned to clean up a few odds and ends hanging around the Ryan Paine investigation.”

  Hartnett’s reaction was one of carefully worded surprise. “No joke. I thought that was dead and buried, no pun intended.” He kept his eyes forward, as if watching the passing pedestrians.

  “Yeah, well … Didn’t we all?” Lester said. “Anyhow, I’m basically talking to everybody I can think of, making sure the t’s were crossed, et cetera. You know?”

  “Uh-huh,” was the vague reply.

  Lester was struck that Hartnett hadn’t asked why he was featured on that list. Les pursued that anomaly by adding, “So I obviously didn’t want to miss you.”

  Hartnett barely nodded.

  Lester went for the punch line. “Since you and Dee were acquainted.”

  That turned out to be one nudge too far. Hartnett looked at him, his face expressionless, and asked, “Who told you that?”

  But Lester played it out, pretending to be startled. “What? Nobody. I was at the memorial service—with a half million other guys, I admit. But I saw you. You and Dylan Collier and a bunch of family and friends. I know you had stuff to do, so it wasn’t like you were hanging around, but you were definitely part of the inner circle. I saw you and Dee exchanging looks. Made sense to me at the time—Wilmington’s right next to where she lives. I thought maybe you knew Ryan, too.”

  “No,” he said, Lester thought a little quickly.

  “Right,” Les confirmed, almost apologetically. “Just Dee, then.”

  Hartnett didn’t respond.

  Spinney took a file from the dash before him and pretended to leaf through it, looking for something to jog a faulty memory. “And Kyle Kennedy, too,” he said, almost as an afterthought, his eyes roaming across the paperwork.

  Hartnett twisted the rest of his body around, at the same time pulling in his foot from outside. “What? That’s bullshit.”

  Lester looked bemused, holding up a printout and shaking his head slightly. His reply echoed Hartnett’s, “What?” Then he chuckled dismissively, studying the man’s face. “Oh, of course. That happens to me all the time. Why’re you gonna remember every loser you buckle up? You arrested him—when you worked for BF. DUI. No reason to keep that in your head—even with the weird coincidence of your later hooking up with Dee.”

  Spinney replaced the sheet of paper and smiled broadly, his gaze innocently back to scanning the file. “I mean, that’s what they say—Vermont’s got about fifty people, with half of them arresting the other half all the time. Given Kyle Kennedy’s habits, I bet ten cops knew him the way you did.”

  “Yeah,” Hartnett said softly, as if convincing himself.

  “It is funny, though,” Les went on. “Your not remembering—what with the memorial service and getting involved with Dee. You’d think that would’ve jogged your memory.”

  He purposefully put Hartnett between two choices: play along or play dumb. Hartnett, like most people in this position, had more ego than smarts.

  “Right,” he said slowly, as if distinguishing a distant mirage. “DUI. He was just driving through, wasn’t he? And I nabbed him out of pure bad luck.” He laughed unconvincingly, adding, “For him, of course.”

  “That must’ve been it,” Lester said agreeably. “Ruined his night, in any case, ’cause you fed him the whole enchilada, including a night in Springfield to sleep it off. You spent hours with the guy.”

  “Huh,” Hartnett said, as if reminiscing with an old buddy about an ancient escapade. “Becomes a blur after a while, don’t it?”

  “Even more in a busy town like BF,” Lester said supportively. “And you were there a long time.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Wilmington must be a nice break. You and Dee living together by now?”

  “Yeah. I still got a place, but I hardly go there anymore. I’ll probably let the lease run out.”

  “That’s a good feeling,” Les said, and then asked, as if out of nowhere, “Where were you working when her husband got killed?”

  “Wilmington,” was the casual reply.

  “You ever go back to BF, maybe to shoot the shit?”

  He shook his head. “Nah. The place was a hole. I never got along with anybody there, anyhow.”

  “Nicole LaBrie said to say hi if we talked.”

  Hartnett grunted. “I always thought she was a stuck-up bitch. Don’t know why she’s so friendly—used to treat me like crap.”

  “The reason I asked if you’d gone back is ’cause I found something missing from that DUI case file against Kennedy.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Hartnett said. “They never took care of their files or equipment or the evidence locker or anything else. I even once found part of a ham sandwich under the cruiser seat at the start of a shift, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Actually,” Les argued pleasantly, “the file was perfect except for one thing. Kennedy’s fingerprint card was missing.”

  “Yeah? Well, guess it don’t matter now.”

  Lester returned to his paperwork prop. He had been hoping to set a trap of sorts—at least enough of one so Hartnett’s body language might betray a flash of nervousness. But the man’s last response had verged on bored.

  Disappointed, Spinney changed topics. “So when did you and Dee become a couple?”

  Hartnett stared at him, blinked a couple of times, and asked, “What the fuck’s goin’ on?”

  “Just building a timeline.”

  Hartnett’s voice lowered, and he unconsciously placed his right hand on the door release, as if preparing to leave. “The fuck you are. For the past ten minutes, you been poking around me and Kennedy and Paine and Dee like a dog figuring out where to pee. What do you want?”

  Lester decided he no longer had much to lose. He hardened his own tone as he said, “What I want is for you to explain exactly how you fit into one of the tightest little love nests I’ve heard about outside of a novel. And given your past with skating on official thin ice—and the fact that this is a homicide investigation—I’d recommend that, A, you get off your high horse, and, B, you make whatever you’re about to tell me incredibly convincing, ’cause from where I’m sitting, you can either walk away with my blessing—depending on what you say—or go to jail.”

  It was a make-or-break moment, and Lester’s eye fell to Hartnett’s hand on the door, expecting him to complete his earlier gesture. Instead, his mouth fell open. “Go to jail? Why? What the fuck did I do?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Lester told him honestly. “You willing to be straight with me? Right here, right now?”

  “I got nothin’ to hide.”

  “All right,” Lester reassured him, feeling better about his footing. Interviews like this could be like dancing across a stream on a two-by-four beam. “Then answer the question,” he urged. “When did you and Dee hook up?”

  Hartnett’s face shut down for a moment as he studied the car’s floor. “Before Paine was killed,” he admitted dolefully. “Before I even stopped working for BF. She used to come see me sometimes
when I was on duty there—at night, when nobody was around. The sheriff’s office handled dispatch, and sometimes there’d just be one of us on duty, depending on the day of the week. It was perfect.”

  “What about when you had to patrol, or go out on a call?”

  “Depended. I’d put her in the car, like we do for official ride-alongs, or I’d leave her at the station if I had something trickier to handle. If I got tied up, I’d just phone her and she’d split. She didn’t mind. She was a cop’s wife. She liked cops. Still does.”

  “She ever talk about Paine?”

  “Sure. She said he was well named. Pain-in-the-ass Paine. That’s what she called him.”

  “What about Kyle Kennedy? Were you being straight with me there?”

  Hartnett looked irritated with himself. “Not exactly. At first, I had no clue what you were talking about. I pretended to remember nailing him for that DUI. But now that we’ve talked about it so much, I think I really do. I still couldn’t swear to it.”

  “Okay, since the cards are faceup, give me details about you and Dee,” Lester prodded him. “How did you meet up?”

  “What you’d expect. There was a social thing—VSP and local agencies pretending to get along around a barbecue pit. Kind of crap management loves. It was north of BF, at Herrick’s Cove, on a weekend. She and I met there, hit it off. I didn’t have anybody in my life, and she was having problems with Paine.” He paused before adding, “Things evolved from there.”

  In fictional portrayals of police interrogations, they often have the cop studying the suspect’s nervous twitches, or his heartbeat as seen at his carotid. One of the favorite presumptions is that everyone looks down and to the left when they lie. Or maybe to the right.

  Actual cops make these assessments more generally, more intuitively, and never forget that they may be wrong. A compulsive liar can easily fool a lie detector, be it a machine or a seasoned human being.

  Nevertheless, Lester’s suspicions about Pat Hartnett were lessening by the minute.

  “This may be a little indelicate,” he forged ahead, “but were you aware of her seeing anyone else at the same time?”

  “Like Collier?” he came back without hesitation.

  “For example.”

  Hartnett considered his response before saying, “I knew they were close. She never said they were intimate and I never asked, ’cause the implication I got was more of a brother-sister thing, but if you’re saying it was true, I’m not gonna argue. It’s definitely possible. She’s a woman with a big appetite.”

  “How ’bout anyone else?”

  “On top of me, Paine, and Collier?” he asked, half laughing. “Jeez Louise. I didn’t even know about Collier for sure, and her relations with Paine—as far as she told me—had been polite at best for a while. I thought I was the only one.”

  “Let’s talk about Kennedy, then,” Lester suggested. “She ever mention him?”

  “Before the shooting? Nope.”

  “And what about after? How did she refer to him?”

  Hartnett gave that some thought. “I’m not sure.… I don’t remember him coming up. There was a lot about the people running the investigation, and how I better keep a super low profile, so as not to bring the two of us into the spotlight. I guess I do remember her saying one night how she was pissed because some cop had asked if she’d ever known Kennedy. ‘Can you believe that?’ she said—or something like that. That was about it, I think.”

  “Part of the post-shoot folderol was about Paine’s settlement, wasn’t it? Insurance, benefits, partial pay, the rest?”

  “Yeah. That’s where I got it loud and clear that there’d been no love lost between ’em. She had a couple of shaky moments, and she cried at the service, which you probably know. But she was tough with the bureaucrats when it came to what was due her. She gave ’em hell more than once.”

  “What was the issue?” Les asked. “Timing?”

  “Yeah, and the amount Workman’s Comp was going to pay. It’s based on dependents and years of service, and she accused them of lowballing. Got pretty fierce before they reached a number.”

  Lester let a moment pass before asking the most obvious of his questions. “Where were you on the night Paine was shot?”

  Given the small roller coaster of emotions he’d been sharing with this man, he wasn’t sure what reaction he’d get—including a repeat with the door handle, followed by an abrupt departure, or worse.

  But there’d occurred a subtle change between them, and they’d almost imperceptibly slid into being fellow cops discussing a case—detached and objective.

  “At the movies,” was the answer, but said in an almost doubting voice.

  “You don’t sound sure about that.”

  “Oh, I’m sure, all right. Dee and I were supposed to go together, ’cause Paine was on duty. That was the routine. But she wasn’t feeling good, so we took a rain check and I went on my own. I remember it because of how the rest of that night turned out. It’s like people used to ask, ‘Where were you when the planes hit the towers?’ you know?”

  This time, Lester’s antenna did pick up something amiss. “But there’s more,” he proposed.

  “Yeah,” Hartnett said slowly. “It’s stupid—just something I noticed at the time, and completely forgot till now. After I heard about the shooting—which we all did through the grapevine that same night—I went to see her. That’s when she really told me to play invisible—she was royally ticked off for my popping up by surprise.”

  “Okay…,” Lester prompted him as he paused.

  “Well, what I’m remembering is that she wasn’t sick at all—not like she sounded when she canceled on the phone a couple of hours earlier.”

  “What do you make of that?” Lester asked.

  Hartnett gazed at him and raised an eyebrow. “Honestly? Not a thing. Adrenaline, shock … I can only guess what it’s like to get news like that. I’ve delivered it enough times. You probably have, too. When did two people on the receiving end ever act the same? Not really sure why I even mentioned it.”

  Lester mulled it over himself, and saw what Hartnett meant. He also understood that, for the moment at least, he was done with this interview. It hadn’t given him what he’d been hoping for, but certainly additional fodder for the sit-down with Dee Rollins—the increasingly less credible grieving widow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “You have got to be kidding,” Sam exploded. “What the hell is it with this case?”

  “Hey,” Scott Gagne countered, smiling, having grown somewhat accustomed to her moods. “Expect the unexpected. You know that.”

  Sam tamped down her response to this platitude, knowing, however unhappily, how often it spoke the truth. It certainly did in this case, where the Albany entry team, assured of Jared Wylie’s being in residence, had instead found his home empty.

  “What’ve we got?” she asked instead.

  They were occupying a stuffy command center van, parked on South Swan, loaded with the usual array of computer screens, racks of radios, keyboards, and recording equipment. The imperturbable Gagne tapped a monitor on the wall opposite them, featuring a colorful electronic map of the neighborhood. “He had a secret back door we didn’t know about—it didn’t feature in the house plans. Probably something he did himself for something like this, or maybe to get people in and out unnoticed. Doesn’t matter, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause we got him here.” He pointed to a small blinking spot that was crawling across the map’s surface, and now somewhere in the backyards sandwiched between Lancaster and Chestnut. “We got his laptop’s GPS, thanks to your Trojan horse.”

  Sammie rubbed her forehead in frustration. After a long sleepless night in the hospital getting Nick Gargiulo to roll over on his boss, she, Gagne, and their new state police confederates had rapidly created a plan to grab Wylie before he caught wind of their interest and pulled the vanishing act Gargiulo had warned them he would.


  This was apparently falling shy of success.

  “What now?” she asked in a calm voice, her head pounding and her eyes sore. She was, after all, still a guest in this town.

  Gagne had been working with the third member of their tiny tribe—an all-but-mute techie named Tom, who’d appeared as the van’s primary accessory. Both men now indicated another monitor, onto which appeared an overhead image of Albany’s cluster of differing government buildings.

  “Helicopter feed,” Tom explained tersely, returning to his keyboard and knobs.

  “State police put up a chopper with the same GPS receiver we got,” Gagne filled in. “We should be able to track him, and maybe even zoom in enough to be sure we got the right guy—not that I have any big doubts there.”

  He did sound confident, which Sammie found helpful. On the other hand, she had noticed something else troubling.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing several blocks away, to a dark mass occupying a tree-filled rectangle formed by the architectual hodgepodge of the State Assembly Building, the capitol, and the opposing slabs of the Legislative Office Building and the New York State Education Department.

  “Protest in West Capitol Park,” Gagne said, his tone dropping. “Not what you’d call a rare event around here.”

  Sam glanced back at the map with the blinking dot. “Wylie’s headed straight for it. What if he uses it to disappear? There’re a thousand people out there.”

  Gagne got on the radio and alerted the others to Sam’s concern. He also asked the chopper crew if they could get a close-up of Wylie. The difficulty was that the initial plan had not involved surrounding an entire city block. An entry team was just that—small—and now additional manpower, along with the helicopter, had been summoned from afar to help out.

  It was finally more than Sammie could endure from the innards of a windowless van. She rose from her seat and asked her partner, “Can you get a feed of that GPS map onto your smartphone?”