Clipper danced out of the way and grabbed an empty chair a couple of places away beside Andy Bennett, the man who’d held Clip’s position as chief of detectives nearly three decades before.
Known collectively as the Geezers, every man in the room was a former cop; the small group of women at one end of the tables were all cops’ wives. Friday mornings, the back room of Cleo’s belonged to the Geezers, and it was an exclusive club.
Bennett swallowed a mouthful of bagel. “Shouldn’t you be out looking for snipers?” he asked.
Clipper grunted. “I got people doing that,” he said. “Right now, I’m more interested in snipers you guys might have looked for.”
Bennett nodded thoughtfully. “There were a couple,” he said, “but I didn’t get to chase them much. There was one guy, I don’t remember his name, a lawyer. Was shot right on the courthouse steps. That was in ’64, I believe. I’d only been on about a year, but I was on the beat, so I was one of the guys got sent looking. We never even found out exactly where the shot came from—somewhere up on Hammond Street hill.” He took another bite of his bagel. “I seem to remember there was another one similar to that, down in Newport a couple of years later. And there was one in the late sixties up in Argyle or Greenbush, I think. Do you remember old Inspector Hayes?”
Clipper shook his head. “Before my time.”
“Well, he was retired when I knew him, but he used to tell me about a sniping case he had back in the ‘50’s that he never solved. And he knew about another one somewhere up-country, I think. He had a theory that there was someone out there going around the state shooting crooks.”
Clipper took a sip of the coffee that had been delivered automatically when he sat down. “One of my people is wondering about that same thing,” he said. “She started looking around for similar cases, and it seems there have been eight or nine over the years, all centered around Bangor. The problem is, they’re all cold cases from the fifties and sixties. Pretty hard to see a pattern.”
Bennett was quiet for a time, then he said, “I got time on my hands these days, and I’ve kept in touch with a few of the guys I worked with back in the day. Maybe I’ll check around and see what I can find.”
“Thanks, Andy.” Clipper finished his coffee, grabbed Bennett’s check off the table, and headed for the register.
Kimberly Carpenter couldn’t afford to take another day off work, but the pain in her back was a living thing, twisting and gouging at every breath, every tentative movement. She made the call, told the small lie of a slip on the wet leaves, a fall in the driveway. At forty-two, she was intimately familiar with the agony of a cracked ribs and after seeing the blood in her urine she didn’t need to see the bruise she knew would be blossoming on her back.
It had been a small thing, as it usually was. The coffee was weak—she must have miscounted the scoops—and there were only three pieces of bacon. She’d heard Jack’s chair push back as she stood silently at the stove, waiting on his eggs. He didn’t say anything; that wasn’t his way. She had sensed him behind her, smelled his anger but tried to smile as she imagined that he might let it pass.
The vicious fist that hooked into the small of her back buckled her knees, and she would have gone down if some part of her brain had not known it was coming.
And then he caught her, held her, crushed her hard against him. His voice was gentle, all the more frightening for its reasonableness. “Why do you make me do this, Kimmy? When are you going to learn?”
And then it was over, and he was gone.
Jack Carpenter was one of the top masons in Penobscot County. As hard as the brick and stone he worked with, he stood six foot one and weighed in at two hundred and forty pounds of solid muscle, most of it in his arms and shoulders. He’d been a prominent fixture in the construction trades—and the taverns—of Bangor for more than two decades.
Unlike a lot of men of his generation, and a few of the men on the job today, Carpenter never talked about his wife. He felt that her shortcomings, and his occasional need to discipline her, might somehow reflect poorly on him, and he wanted people to understand that he didn’t have to worry about it; she behaved as a wife should, simply because of his stature as a man.
Carpenter was enjoying the last of his midmorning coffee, sitting on a stack of landscape timbers and squinting across the river into the sun, half-listening to one of the day workers brag about how he kept his girlfriend in her place, when he felt his cell phone vibrate against his leg. He pulled it out of his pocket and jabbed a thick finger at it to bring up the text message.
Kimmy sends her love, asshole.
He was still staring at the screen with a puzzled frown on his face when the bullet took him in the throat.
The construction site was at the bottom of Railroad Street hill, an extension of the brick river walk leading to the open-air concert venue that had grown up on the flat land between Main Street and the river. Clipper and John Peters got there about five minutes after the call came in. Clipper nosed the unmarked car up to the construction barricades, and they walked over to where two patrolmen were standing around a body sprawled over a stack of timbers.
Peters leaned in for a closer look. “Huh.”
“You know him?” Clipper asked.
“Big John Carpenter. He was a couple years ahead of me in school.” Peters looked around and nodded his head at the walkway. “He was a mason, must have been working here. Looks like a single shot to the throat.”
Clipper looked at the patrolmen. “Tony,” he said to one, “go over by the barricades. No one gets in here except cops.” To the other, “What have we got?”
The patrolman, a rookie named Martel, was noticeably pale. “LT, they were on a coffee break,” he said, nervously glancing at the open notebook in his hand. “No one heard a shot, but the victim was sitting on these timbers, facing the river, so it must have come from over there.” He nodded across the two-hundred-and-fifty-foot expanse of the Penobscot River.
Clipper took out his cell phone and called Brewer PD. He asked for the chief, and when he got him on the line, he explained the situation and asked that the riverbank be secured as far up and downstream as possible.
“I’ll get some manpower over there as soon as I can,” he said.
As he finished the call, Lieutenant Jim Thorn, the day-crew commander, pulled up with two other officers.
Clipper turned to Peters. “I’ll wait here for the evidence guys,” he said. “You take a couple of uniforms and see what you can find across the river.”
As Peters was leaving, Dave Adams and Randy Bissonette pulled up, closely followed by Doc Church and two news vans.
Doc Church nodded to Clipper and crouched over the body. “Took a chunk out of his cervical spine,” he said after a moment. “Probably never knew what hit him.”
Squatting down beside Church, Clipper spotted the cell phone, teased it out of the corpse’s hand. The screen lit up and displayed its message as he lifted it. “Huh.”
The house was an older Victorian, well maintained and sitting behind a sturdy picket fence. Clipper and Ellen Davis walked through the gate and stepped up onto the porch. Clipper thumbed the doorbell button, and they both instinctively stepped a little to the side.
The neat yard and fresh paint spoke of a proud homeowner, but the woman who answered the door looked ill. Her face was pale and pinched under lank brown hair, her shoulders hunched, with her left arm tight against her ribs. “Yes?”
Clipper held up his badge. “Are you Kimberly Carpenter, Missus Jack Carpenter?”
The woman nodded uncertainly, a flash of apprehension in her eyes.
“I’m Lieutenant Clipper, and this is Detective Davis. We’re from the Bangor Police Department, and we need to talk to you for a moment. Could we come in?”
She nodded again, and Clipper noticed her wince as she reached to pull the door back. The front door opened into a central hallway. She led them into a rectangular living room with two large leather recl
iners on one wall and a couch and antique-looking wooden rocking chair on the opposite wall. The far wall was dominated by a huge, wall-mounted flat-screen television.
The woman lowered herself carefully down onto the edge of one of the recliners and sat stiffly, looking at Clipper without speaking. Ellen Davis sat on the edge of the other recliner and turned to face her.
Clipper had never found an easy way to do what came next. “Missus Carpenter, I’m afraid we have some very bad news. Your husband, Jack, was killed at work this afternoon.”
Carpenter looked puzzled and shook her head. “No,” she said, “no, he…”
Ellen Davis reached over and took Carpenter’s hand. “We’re very sorry,” she said softly, “but it happened about an hour ago. We’ve just come from there.”
Carpenter looked from Clipper to Davis, what little color she had draining from her face. Suddenly, her eyes rolled up in her head and she slumped back in a dead faint.
“Damn,” Clipper muttered. As he reached to check Carpenter’s pulse, Davis was already pulling out her cell phone to call for an ambulance.
“Not for certain, but there’s a little park at the end of Hardy Street, right off South Main. That’s most likely where the shooter was.”
Ellen Davis had gone to the hospital with Kimberly Carpenter, and Clipper had returned to the station to find John Peters seated at the computer in his office.
“Mixed business and residential neighborhood. Found a couple of people that thought there might have been a small dark car in the park around time it went down, but nobody saw anyone or heard any shots. Here it is on Google Earth.”
Clipper looked at the monitor. “Huh, three, four hundred yards at most. A lot like the Orono shootings. Sniper probably just drove in, took the shot from inside his car and drove away. Find the slug?”
“Yeah, Dave dug it out of a timber behind him. .30 caliber full metal jacket with some good rifling marks.”
“Now all we need’s the rifle,” Clipper said. “Well, I’d better go talk to the chief. Give Max Trimble a call, and let’s see if we can put together a briefing for four o’clock.”
As Clipper stepped into Miss Elliot’s office, his cell phone chirped.
“Hey, Clip,” said Ellen Davis, “this is getting interesting. Mrs. Carpenter came around just as they were getting her into the ER, looks like she just fainted or something. The interesting thing is, when they started to check her out, they found a huge, fresh bruise on her back and at least one cracked rib. They’ve got her in x-ray now, but the doc says he sees evidence of older bruising and a couple old breaks as well. Looks like her old man was beating her.”
Clipper paced in front of Miss Elliot’s desk. “Stay with her. As soon as you can speak to her, try to pin that down and get as much background as you can.” Clipper had already told Davis about the message on Jack Carpenter’s cell phone. “Find out who calls her Kimmy, but keep that text message under your hat. I’ll get started on a search warrant for the house.”
“You got it, LT.”
When Clipped hung up, Miss Elliot showed him into the chief’s office and closed the door behind him.
“Damn it, Lieutenant, this town’s turning into a shooting gallery. When in hell are you going to get on top of it?” Chief Norris’s normally florid face took on the purple hue of arterial blood as he lurched out of his chair and slammed a clenched fist into the top of his desk. He glared at Clipper. “How the hell do I explain this to the manager? Tell me that. All of a sudden, we’ve got rapes and shootings and cops in the hospital and … and how the hell does that make us look in City Hall?”
Clipper clenched his jaw and waited for the outburst to end.
After a moment, Norris slumped back into his chair with a deep sigh. “Well, what the hell’s happened now?” he asked in a more moderate tone.
“All the rapes and homicides we’ve already cleared in the last couple of weeks aside,” Clipper said evenly, “it looks like there’s a sniper, possibly two, operating between here and Orono. The targets don’t seem to be random. In fact, so far the victims all seem to be criminals of one sort or another.”
“You’re talking about a vigilante.”
Clipper shrugged. “Vigilante, nut, cop-wannabe… who knows? We’re coordinating with the State police—two of the cases are theirs—as well as local departments and the FBI. Max Trimble is already talking to the AG about setting up a task force.”
Norris grimaced. “That’s going to draw media attention. You make sure you stay on top of that. We don’t want to come off looking like some inner city here.”
Clipper went back to his office and put in a call to Irwin Myer. “We just got number four,” he said. “Guy on the waterfront shot from across the river in Brewer. No witnesses, no one heard the shot.”
“Another drug dealer?” Myer asked.
“Nope, this one looks personal,” Clipper said. “Apparently the victim was a wife beater, and it looks like the shooter sent him a text message just before he shot him. We’re putting together a skull-session with Max Trimble and Cameron Shibles at four o’clock, if you want to sit in.”
“I’ll be there.”
Clipper went out and found John Peters at his desk. “Get together with Ellen—she’s at the hospital with Carpenter’s wife—and then pull a search warrant for their house and give me a call. That message to his cell phone suggests that the shooter knew one or both of them, so make sure to specify address books, computer, phones records, etc. I’m going to bring John Preston up to speed, and we’ll debrief at four to see where we are.”
Clipper went down to Preston’s first floor office and spent forty-five minutes acquainting the public affairs officer with the facts of the Beaudreau and Carpenter shooting, as well as those of the two State Police cases.
“Why don’t you alert the usual suspects; schedule a press conference for five o’clock, and let the chief know.”
Clipper went back to his office and called Nelson Miller, Ray Wheeler and Cameron Shibles inviting them to the four o’clock meeting with Max Trimble, then went down and grabbed two candy bars and a Diet Coke out of the first-floor vending machines for a belated lunch on his way to the basement lab to talk to Dave Adams about tracing text messages.
Never a dull moment, he thought, wishing very much for a dull moment.
Chapter Twenty-Five
At four o’clock, the conference room was crowded with most of Clipper’s crew, two Bangor patrol lieutenants, Max Trimble and two other State Troopers, Nelson Miller, Irwin Myer and two women from the AG’s office, a Penobscot County Sheriff’s investigator, and Cameron Shibles. Ray Wheeler, and Josh Preston were sitting quietly in the back.
Clipper distributed information packets, then he and Max Trimble stood and outlined their respective cases.
Clipper summed it up. “So, we’ve got one or possibly two shooters, very good shots, possibly military trained.” He glanced at Cameron Shibles and got a brief negative shake of the head. “We’re running that possibility down with the Feds. All of the victims, with the possible exception of the last one, are convicted or suspected criminals so, with that in mind, we’ll be checking nationwide for similar cases.” He glanced again at Shibles.
“Already got a search started,” the agent confirmed.
Clipper nodded. “The Carpenter shooting stands out from the others, because it seems to be a bit more personal in nature. We’ll be looking hard at the vic’s family and friends, but it’s still got a lot in common with the others, so we’ll keep it in the mix. All we’ve got for patrol right now is a small dark car, probably with one occupant, and so far all the shootings have occurred on the day shift.”
When the briefing broke up, Cameron Shibles caught Clipper’s eye, nodding towards his office. Clipper took a second to tell Ray Wheeler that he’d be in touch, then stepped toward his office.
Shibles trailed him and gently closed the door once they were inside.
“Thought you might want to he
ar this privately,” he said, pulling a folded piece of paper from his inside pocket. “It seems you do have some suppressors—and some snipers—in the area. Actually, considerably closer than that.”
Clipper dropped into his chair and gestured for the report with a strange sense of foreboding.
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Bangor, Maine field office
Information request
Regarding your request for registered owners of firearms suppressors residing in Maine as of this date, the following information is supplied by BATF:
Cross, Caleb
84 Brewster Rd.
Glenburn, ME
Davidites, Norman
229 Belview Rd.
Augusta, ME
Franklin, Lawrence
97 Main Rd.
Liberty, ME
Harkness, Aubrey
2119 Rt. 2
Macwahoc Plantation, ME
Moody, Lamont
638 Bowerville Rd.
S. Portland, ME
Spelling, Andrew
721 Ridge Rd.
Westbrook, ME
Weaver, Claude
6 Maine Street
Rumford, ME
Regarding your request for information on retired military snipers Army MOS 11c (ASI b4) and Marine MOS (0317) known or believed to be residing in Maine as of this date, the following information was supplied by the DOD:
Conroy, Otis
1455 Rt. 222
Past Master Page 14
