“And you know Desmond Hale will have a good lawyer,” Frank said.
“Exactly. We need more evidence. Something to connect the girl to either the Hale family or the Etheridge family. But now that we know who her parents are, they’ll probably have something for us. So thanks for that.”
“Wait,” Frank headed off the disconnection. “What about Anthony Kinsella? Have you had any success tracing him?”
“That’s not the primary focus of our investigation,” Meyerson said. “My team is zeroing in on who the victim was with before she died, not who brought her to the Mountain Vista. Between The Balsams and the Etheridges’ house, there are ten men who could be suspects.”
“But Kinsella must be related to the girl’s murder. The strange way Caitlin was left stranded at the motel... there has to be a reason for it, and if we –”
“Not we, Frank. This is a state police investigation. We’ll handle it from here.”
Click.
Frank sat with the dead receiver in his hand until Earl spoke. “Guess Lt. Meyerson doesn’t want our help, huh?”
“I should be used to it by now.” Frank returned the receiver to the cradle and tried to focus on the paperwork on his desk. He could feel Earl’s gaze on him from across the room as he shuffled papers.
Finally, Frank looked up. “What?”
“Just wondering if you’re going to listen to Lt. Meyerson or ignore him like you usually do.”
“I don’t ignore him,” Frank protested. “It’s just that he’s so—”
“Wrong?” Earl suggested with a grin.
Frank wadded an outdated report into a tight ball and succeeded in nailing Earl’s head. “Why don’t you go do the afternoon patrol?”
“Sure, boss.”
Chapter 17
On Saturday, Frank loaded his lawnmower into the back of his pick-up truck and took it over to McKenna’s machine shop. He had successfully put the Caitlin Lupton murder out of his mind for two days, and was now back to worrying about Blaine. He wanted to follow up with Rollie’s nephew to see if he could provide some information on who had provided the nearly fatal dose of opioids to Blaine at the jail.
The machine shop building, located on a side road outside of town, had recently received a new red metal roof, which Frank could see through the trees as he approached. A collection of junked cars, tractors, lawnmowers, snowblowers and every other gas-driven machine lined either side of the long gravel driveway, which wound around the shop and turned into a dirt track into the woods out back. The office door was closed, but the garage door was wide open. As promised, Rollie Fister’s future nephew-in-law Todd was there working on an ATV.
Frank unloaded his lawnmower and pushed it toward the young man, who stopped what he was doing and greeted Frank with a smile. Frank explained the sputtering symptoms of his mower while young Todd knelt to examine the patient.
“I can tune it up for you right now if you have time to wait,” Todd offered.
“That would be great, as long as I’m not taking you away from someone else’s project.”
Todd dismissed the ATV with a wave. “It’s a little side-line I got going. There’s a lot of turnover in the ATV market. People who are really into ATVing are always looking to upgrade. But there’s lots of young kids wanting to buy a starter ATV. Then people’s kids move away and the parents want to get rid of their ATVs. Or the kids crash ‘em and the parents say no more. I look out for people willing to sell an ATV cheap, and I fix ‘em up and resell for a profit.”
Frank grinned at the muddy quad between them. “Maybe in a few years I’ll buy one for my grandsons. My daughter will kill me!”
“ATVing is a blast for kids. Get loud. Get dirty. My parents let me run with it.” Todd grinned as he adjusted the spark plug on Frank’s mower. “Maybe a little too much. But I survived.”
“Sometimes I think the wilder you were as a teenager, the stricter you are when you become a parent,” Frank mused. “My daughter tested my limits every day when she was in high school and college. Now, I feel like she’s too tough on my grandsons. No junk food, no cartoons.”
Todd chuckled as he wielded his wrench. “My future kids won’t be able to pull anything over on me. I’ve already done everything crazy they could ever dream up.”
That so? Frank felt an interesting development coming on. “Speaking of your wild youth, I wanted to ask about your friend, Blaine Timmons.”
Immediately, Todd’s good-natured grin disappeared. “Oh, man—don’t get me tangled up in his mess, please.”
Frank held his hands up. “I’m not involved in Blaine’s arrest. But his Aunt Doris is my secretary. We’re trying to convince Blaine to cooperate with the DA to get a lighter sentence. But he’s pretty resistant. I’m just looking for a little information I could use as...leverage, so to speak.”
Todd kicked a tire iron out of his path. “Look, I won’t lie to you—I smoked plenty of weed in my day, but I never touched the hard stuff. I saw what it did to people, and I wanted no part of that.”
“Good decision,” Frank said. “But Rollie mentioned Blaine was going to be in your wedding party before he got arrested. So you must be good friends.”
“Were good friends.” Todd wiped his hands on a rag and gazed out the open door of the garage. “When we were kids we did everything together—hunting, fishing, ATVing, skiing. But then he got more and more into partying. Just got totally messed up out of his mind every single weekend. And it got old for me, ya know? So I stopped spending time with him. And I heard from other people that he got really bad, using every day, lost his job,” Todd shook his head. “Then out of the blue, three months ago, Blaine showed up here. He looked good, and he told me he was clean and had turned his life around. Asked if I had any work he could do—even a few hours a week. I wanted to give him a hand if I could.”
Todd looked heavenward. “My girlfriend told me I was nuts, and I shoulda believed her. The first week, Blaine was great. Did anything me or Bill asked him. Came early and worked all day. Told me how lucky I was to be getting married, so I asked him to be in the wedding. Then one morning, we came in and noticed an ATV I picked up at an auction was gone from out back. Bill figured someone came by and hot-wired it.” Todd pursed his lips into a hard line.
“But you knew the thief was closer to home,” Frank said.
Todd gave one quick nod of agreement. “The reason I was able to get that ATV for cheap was because the seller didn’t have the keys, and that particular model is really hard to hot-wire, but I thought I could figure it out. Since Blaine started working here, I was trying to teach him stuff about engines and starters and wiring—” Todd slammed a screwdriver into his toolbox.
“Guess he learned the lesson a little too well, huh?”
“I waited ‘til Bill went home for the day to confront Blaine,” Todd continued. “First he gave me some BS, but I stayed on him, said I didn’t deserve to be stolen from when I was trying to help him. Said he had a hell of a nerve to use what I taught him against me.” Todd’s voice grew more agitated as he recalled this betrayal. “And then Blaine started to cry. Said he couldn’t get the ATV back because he had given it to these guys to help pay down his debt. Told me he was in so deep with these people he’d never get free. And that he was afraid they’d kill him.”
“What people?” Frank asked.
“All he would tell me was he met them at some party in a big vacation house.”
“Where?” Frank pressed.
Todd returned to the ATV he had been fixing when Frank arrived, got behind the wheel, and prepared to see if it would start. “Didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know.” He turned the key and the engine whined.
Frank pulled out his notebook. “Describe the ATV Blaine stole.”
Todd looked annoyed, whether at the question or the stalled engine, Frank couldn’t be sure. “You won’t be able to get it back.” But Todd recited the make, model, and color of the ATV as requested. “I’ve written off that ATV
. I told Blaine not to come around here anymore. I didn’t want him bringing trouble to my doorstep. And now that he’s in jail, he can’t come around. ” Todd turned the key again and this time the engine roared to life. He backed the ATV out of the garage and took it for a test run on the track out back, leaving Frank coughing in his dust.
Chapter 18
A guard led Blaine Timmons into the visiting room.
The kid looked like shit. Compared to the burly man adjusting his handcuffs, Blaine looked pathetically frail: rail thin arms, hunched shoulders, dark under-eye circles, scabby skin, greasy, stringy hair. He collapsed into the chair across from Frank looking like he expected his day to continue its hourly slide from bad to worse to unbearable. He regarded Frank as if a space alien had wandered into the jail visiting room.
“Blaine, I’m Police Chief Frank Bennett from Trout Run,” Frank reminded him. “Your Aunt Doris works with me. I visited you last week, remember?”
The kid blinked his sunken eyes. The effort of processing this information seemed beyond him.
“Your aunt—all your family—are very worried about you. Since this incident with bringing drugs into this facility, the pre-trial intervention program is off the table. Your folks asked me to continue helping you, but there’s not a lot I can do—”
“—if I don’t want to help myself. Yadda, yadda, yadda.” Blaine let his head fall backwards and gazed up at the ceiling.
“I can intercede with the DA if you give me some information on who brought the drugs to you here,” Frank said.
“I don’t know why the guards revived me. Why didn’t they just let me die?”
Frank shifted uneasily in his seat. Offering uplifting support to the suffering wasn’t his strong suit. He couldn’t pretend to do Pastor Bob’s work, so he plowed forward with his own. “I need to know who smuggled the drugs into this facility? Was he your supplier?”
Blaine laughed. “Good God, no! He’s just another smack head looking for a fix. He owed me a favor, that’s all.”
Frank reluctantly accepted that this answer made sense. The supplier wouldn’t be making delivery calls to the county jail. He pressed on. “I know you’re in debt to someone higher up the distribution chain. That guy you stole the ATV for.” Frank tossed out the information he’d received from Todd and waited for a reaction.
He got it.
Blaine’s body stiffened. He leaned across the visiting room table and squinted at Frank. “Who told you about the ATV?”
“Never mind how I know. I know you’re trying to pay off a debt to your supplier. What happened—you shot up all the product?”
Blaine snorted. “I couldn’t have used that much smack in a lifetime. I lost a kilo. A cop was tailing me on the Northway, and I panicked. Threw the package out the window of my car. Turned out, the cop was after someone else. I went back to get my stuff, and I couldn’t find it. Searched for days.” Blaine shook his head at his own stupidity. “So I owe fifty grand and I got no product to sell.”
Now Frank felt he was making some headway. The scope of Blaine’s problem was wider than he’d suspected, but on the plus side—Blaine was actually a medium-sized fish. Which meant the DA might be more interested in a deal. “We can protect you if—”
Blaine sat up straight with a surprising burst of energy. “You. Can’t. Protect. Me. They can reach me in Dannemorra. They can reach me in Attica. I am going to die, one way or another. If they kill me, it’ll be painful and terrifying. Or I can go out on a nice, blissful high. What would you choose?”
Whoever said drug addicts couldn’t think straight hadn’t met Blaine. Frank thought the kid had a painfully clear understanding of his alternatives. Blaine could inform on his supplier, but he probably only knew the guy one level above him. So they’d send the guy two levels higher to clean up the snitch and set an example for everyone else in the crew.
“I used to be a cop in Kansas City,” Frank said. “I met a lot of addicts there, and you’re right—most of them ended up dead. But I did know two guys who beat their habits and got out of the dealing life alive. Still get a Christmas card from one of them.”
“How touching.” Blaine still sat with his eyes closed, but his body tensed.
Despite the snide response, Frank thought he might have caught the kid’s attention. “The way this guy survived was by striking a deal with the Feds—the DEA. If you know enough, they’ll get the local police to drop the charges. You’ll serve a short sentence in a Federal minimum security prison far away from New York. But when you get out, you’ll have to stay away from here.”
Blaine chewed a hangnail and studied Frank with a glimmer of interest.
“But you have to have something worthwhile to offer them,” Frank warned. “And you have to be totally truthful. You can’t screw with them, or you’ll be even worse off than you are now.”
Blaine’s eyes narrowed as he took in the Trout Run insignia on Frank’s uniform. “And you can set this up?”
Frank took Blaine’s skepticism as a sign he was brighter than Frank had originally thought. “I know some guys from when I was a captain in Kansas City. They could put me in touch with the right guys in this jurisdiction. But you have to give me something to offer them. They’re not going to come clear to Essex County on a promise.”
Blaine tilted his head. “How do I know this isn’t a trap? You could take what I give you and hand it to the state police and then I’m screwed.”
“As you pointed out earlier, you’re screwed even if you don’t talk.” Frank rose. “And even though it wouldn’t bother me to trick you, I could never hurt your Aunt Doris.”
Blaine scratched the ruined skin of his forearm. “Lemme think about it. Give me a few days.”
Frank rose to leave. He’d left his best offer on the table. The next move belonged to Blaine. “Let the warden know if you want to talk to me.”
Chapter 19
Three days passed and still there was no news story about Caitlin Lupton other than a small item saying an unidentified body had been recovered from Mallard Lake.
Frank couldn’t understand the media silence. Once the next-of-kin had been notified, the press should have been all over this murder case. There was no reason for the state police to restrain them—indeed, the coverage might help them shake loose some leads.
Finally, Frank couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer. He braced himself for Meyerson’s frosty response, but he called the man anyway.
“Why the radio silence on the Lupton case?” Frank asked when the state police lieutenant accepted his call.
“I’m all jammed up. We can’t reach Caitlin Lupton’s parents. Rachel’s social media showed she was on tour in Europe, and it seems the parents went along to hear her play several concerts in Eastern Europe. Budapest...Prague...Bratislava. And now they’re all on a two-week trekking vacation in the Carpathian Mountains.”
“Uhm...remind me—where is that, exactly?” Frank asked.
“According to Wikipedia, the mountains go through seven different countries. The Luptons are currently somewhere in Romania.”
Frank leaned back in his desk chair, still holding the receiver to his ear as he stared at the office ceiling. Why had the Luptons taken this trip and left Caitlin behind, stranded at the Mountain Vista? Clearly, she hadn’t missed the trip because of work or school commitments—she had been sitting at the motel doing nothing other than hiking and drawing. Why didn’t she hike and draw with the rest of her family? And Sarah said Caitlin missed her sister, had even been crying over her. What was going on here?
“Who told you about the trip if you weren’t able to reach the parents themselves?” Frank asked.
“We sent the local police over to inform the Luptons of their daughter’s death. They tried three different times and never found anyone at home,” Lew explained. “Finally, a neighbor approached the officers and told them the Luptons were traveling. They asked about other relatives and learned Mr. Lupton’s mother lives in a loc
al assisted living. Went over there and discovered the old lady is in the Alzheimer’s unit, but the director of the facility knew about the trip.”
“When are the parents and the sister due to return?” Frank asked.
“Next week.”
“That’s a long time to wait. Any other relatives or family friends who can tell you more about Caitlin’s connections?”
“None that we’ve been able to turn up. So we’re working it from the other end, trying to connect the Hales or the Etheridges to the girl.”
“The Hales are still insisting they don’t know her?” Frank asked.
“Affirmative. The problem is, we don’t know where Caitlin was between the time Augie dropped her off at the trailhead and the time you found her body. We’ve got signs up at the trailhead and calls out on the news for anyone who saw Caitlin at the trailhead to come forward.”
“Tourists come and go. You’d be really lucky if that panned out.” Frank grimaced.
“It’s possible she returned to the motel late that night and left again, but unlikely,” Meyerson continued. “Did she come to one of the houses on Mallard Lake directly from the Finley Notch Trailhead? Or did she travel on the night she was murdered, coming from somewhere else in town?”
Meyerson answered the questions he had posed without pausing. “If she came earlier, then she stayed hidden out there. Both the Hale house and the Etheridge house have multiple bedrooms and multiple outbuildings. It wouldn’t be that hard for the girl to stay out of sight of the other guests or the household help.”
“If someone was helping to conceal her...bringing her food,” Frank added.
“But if we’re thinking she arrived right before she was killed, the timeline for one of the Hales to have picked up Caitlin and brought her to The Balsams doesn’t add up,” Meyerson said. “At four, Chet picked you and Penny up at the Verona dock in the only motorboat owned by the Hales. You arrived at The Balsams at quarter to five, and Desmond greeted you and was only out of your sight briefly when you and Penny went up to your room for half an hour. So Desmond couldn’t have taken the boat anywhere. His sons had the span between your arrival and dinner time, but the Verona dock is always busy on Friday afternoons in the summer, and we’ve interviewed several people who were there during that window, and no one saw The Balsams’ motorboat.”
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