Spontaneous
Page 8
you’re probably wondering
Did we do the deed? If by “do the deed,” you mean did we make out furiously until we were cut off by Dylan’s phone ringing—if by “do the deed,” you mean did he then give his phone a glance and say, “I gotta take this”—then yes, the deed was most thoroughly done.
There wasn’t much to the phone call. A few “uh-huhs” and “I understands” and then it was back to the ice-cream truck for us.
“Do you mind if I ask who that was?” I said, as I slid into my cracked vinyl seat.
“I don’t,” he replied, and he backed the truck onto the dirt road and jammed it into gear. “It was a woman named Carla Rosetti. I’ve got to go and meet with her right now.”
“You mean Special Agent Carla Rosetti? Of the FBI?” If he couldn’t hear the excitement in my voice, then he could certainly feel it in the vibrations I was sending through the thin frame of the truck by stomping after every word.
“The same,” he said, and he reached to turn on the radio, to fill the truck with music so we didn’t have to talk, I guess. But there was no radio. So he rapped his knuckles on the dash, then gave the wheel a firm squeeze.
“She’s, like, my hero,” I told him.
“Well, your hero wants to talk to me about Cranberry Bollinger.”
“Madness! What do you have to do with Cranberry?”
“Nothing, but I ran into Carla on Friday night. After you left with the Dalton twins. She wants to clear a few things up.”
“Wait, wait, wait. You refer to Special Agent Carla Rosetti as Carla? Like you two are best buds or something?”
“Not best buds. But we go back.”
“You go back? With Special Agent Carla Rosetti? You didn’t skip the light fandango in a silo with her, did you?”
God, what a moment that would have been. I could picture Rosetti folding her coat and placing it gently on the floor, and then grabbing Dylan and waltzing perfect circles around the silo. She would lead of course; and she wouldn’t even take off her holster because she’s always on the job.
“No fandangoing,” Dylan assured me. “But she did arrest my brother, Warren.”
“Hold up. How did I not know this?”
“Probably because you don’t know everything,” he said. He was teasing, of course, but I was beginning to wonder when I’d gotten so far out of the loop. If I didn’t know the sexual preferences and arrest records of my peers, then what sort of nonsense was I filling my brain with?
“I probably just forgot,” I said. “So remind me. What did Warren do?”
“Nothing. They say he posted threats on Facebook. The arrest didn’t happen around here though. He was at prep school in Connecticut. After Dad died, Warren wanted to escape for a bit. Mom had the money to fund his escape.”
“What were the threats?”
“To”—Dylan provided the requisite air quotes—“burn all you fuckers to the ground.”
Holy shit, right? Where was that radio now?
“All us fuckers?” I asked carefully. “Or particular fuckers?”
“That wasn’t specified,” he said with a sigh. “But when you attend a fancy boarding school in Connecticut and you’re the one kid there who doesn’t come from hedge-fund money, then the world notices. And the world calls in the FBI. That’s how Carla entered our lives.”
Crossing my wrists, I put my hands out like I was ready to be cuffed and asked, “Did she, like, stun gun him and toss him in the shackles?”
“Wasn’t like that. There were lawyers. Deals. He got community service and a one-way ticket home. He was sixteen at the time, so he dropped out.”
“So where’s Warren now?”
“Living in a little cottage on the south side of our farm. Working at the Fast Lube.”
“Damn. Has Special Agent Carla Rosetti spoken to him?”
“You bet.”
“So why does she want to speak to you?”
“Because she thinks I’m the one who made that original Facebook post.”
“And why would she think that?”
“Because I did.”
the benefits of cyberstalking
I’d already done my Googling. I knew more than a bit about Special Agent Carla Rosetti. A few highlights, collected from various websites and newspaper archives.
• At the age of eight, a pigtailed Carla Rosetti placed third in a pumpkin-growing contest in Blacksburg, Virginia. 246 pounds. A massive, massive gourd, my friends.
• Thirteen-year-old Carla Rosetti was a member of her high school’s Model UN team. She represented Bhutan. Presumably, she rocked that shit, and for at least an afternoon, Bhutan was the greatest country in the world.
• In an 87–34 drubbing of Christianburg High, Ms. Rosetti, then a senior, but only fifteen years old (!), scored a game-high 27 points. In your face, Christianburg!
• At the University of Maryland, criminal-justice major Carla Rosetti was quoted by The Diamondback as saying the refurbished student center was “pretty boss” and that it seems like a “chill place to hang with friends.” Thanks for the heads-up, Car-Car. If I’m ever down that way, I’ll check it out. Definitely sounds boss. Totally chill.
• After nabbing the infamous “Pawtucket Pyro,” FBI newbie Carla Rosetti received a commendation from the governor of Rhode Island. It may be the smallest in the Union, but they sleep better in the Ocean State thanks to our favorite up-and-coming field agent.
• Carla Rosetti rocks a purple taffeta bridesmaid dress. Congrats on the nuptials Jamir and Heidi. What a beautiful farm that was! What a beautiful wedding! And that picture of you two hugging the llama? Priceless.
• Carla Rosetti has killed a man.
Okay, this one needs a bit more background. The guy’s name was Gordon Laramie and he was one of those mouth breathers with an Armageddon hard-on. A few years ago, he was hiding out in the remote woods of northern New Hampshire, stockpiling Chunky Soup in an underground bunker he’d built out of shipping containers. He’d laced the perimeter with land mines acquired from some shady French Canadians. When a couple of hikers lost their way one foggy autumn morning, they stumbled upon Mr. Laramie’s hideout and over one of the aforementioned land mines.
A land mine is a lot lazier than a spontaneous combustion. By that I mean it doesn’t always finish the job. In this case, it blew the right leg off one hiker and the left leg off the other. Luckily, they were both paramedics and had the Rolls-Royce of first aid kits on hand. They managed to shoot themselves full of morphine and apply tourniquets to each other’s stumps. Then they strapped their bodies together with belts and duct tape and used their two good legs to walk a mile to a logging road, where they flagged down a guy on a quadrunner who strapped them to the back, alongside the nine-point buck he’d just bagged. He rushed them to a ranger station, where they called in a medevac helicopter and the FBI.
Because of her experience with arsonists and explosion enthusiasts, Carla Rosetti arrived that evening with a bomb squad and SWAT team in tow. She commanded the team from a distance—stationed in an ATV decked out with video surveillance—and they stormed the underground bunker aided by assorted gizmos.
Of course, Gordon Laramie proved to be wilier than assorted gizmos. Expecting their arrival, he had devised a ruse. Earlier that day, he had kidnapped Ruben Howe, owner and proprietor of the Grahamville General Store, and locked him in the bunker. The SWAT team was rocking infrared goggles, so when they detected movement underground, they assumed they had their man.
Their man, however, was creeping through the woods, donning the skin and antlers of a recently killed moose as a disguise. As the SWAT team was descending into the bunker, Laramie was creeping up on Rosetti and her small team of unarmed technicians, his makeshift crown of antlers rattling against the low-hanging branches.
Now, I’m not sure how many people have had a good
old-fashioned shootout with a man wearing a moose skin and antlers, but I’m guessing it’s only one.
You know who.
The details of the shootout are sketchy at best. In interviews she did for an extended piece about the case in Salon, Rosetti described the situation as the “fog of war,” and repeatedly talked about “simply doing her job.”
Well, she simply did her job pretty damn well, because that evening they carried Gordon Laramie out in a body bag and a hyperventilating, but safe, Ruben Howe out in a stretcher. Apparently they found a manifesto of some sort, but Rosetti never shared that with the press. After all, you don’t want anyone else influenced by the rantings of a madman.
Reading the Salon piece, I imagined the moose-frocked Laramie running at Rosetti with a shotgun blasting, her diving behind a tree, and chunks of bark exploding in the frosty air. I imagined Rosetti pulling a pistol from her boot, rolling over and unloading—pop-pop-pop—as the fog settled in. I imagined the fog clearing, and Rosetti standing over Laramie’s dying body and pulling out an e-cigarette, taking a drag and it lighting up all blue at the tip as she said, “Moose season is officially . . . over.”
another part of the story
Ten minutes after Dylan dropped me off at my house, Tess was picking me up and I was giving her a rundown of the date.
“So many red flags,” she said as she drove us in the direction of the police station. “So, so many.”
“I know, I know.”
“Let’s forget all the Jane Rolling stuff and focus on the whole ‘burn all you fuckers to the ground’ Facebook post, why don’t we?”
I smiled sheepishly, and said, “He was a child. Twelve.”
“Psychopaths have childhoods too. Full of fire and dissected roadkill. And he let his brother take the blame for him? What’s that all about?”
“His brother wanted to take the blame. Warren wanted out of Connecticut and this gave him an out. Dylan was helping him. Or at least he thought he was.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
I would. I would keep telling myself that, because that’s what Dylan told me before he dropped me off. It won’t surprise you to hear that I’m a skeptical person. I don’t even believe half the garbage that tumbles from my own mouth. So putting my faith in Dylan was a big deal.
“Dylan hasn’t lied to me,” I said. “Not yet.”
“How do you know?”
“Because this is precisely the stuff he should be lying about.”
“So he’s a fountain of honesty. And yet here you are, secretly stalking him.”
We were now parked alongside the road, between two news vans, a half block from the police station. Dylan’s ice-cream truck was in the station’s parking lot. We hadn’t arrived in time to see him go inside, but where else could he be?
“If Dylan asks me, ‘Did you follow me to my rendezvous with Special Agent Carla Rosetti of the FBI?’ then I will say, ‘I understand that Tess might have driven me near the vicinity of the police station while you were inside with aforementioned government employee.’”
“Oh, honey,” Tess said. “You’re in deep, aren’t you?”
“Hit the deck,” I shouted, and I grabbed Tess by the shirt and pulled her below the horizon of the dash.
“Whoa,” she howled. “A simple ‘slide down, please’ would have worked fine. I’m guessing you spotted them?”
Head poking up and on a swivel, I checked the windows. “They’re getting in her car. She drives a Tesla.”
“She’s so rad,” Tess said. “I bet she plays poker. Hangs out at high roller tables wearing aviators and chewing a toothpick. I bet they call her Lady Nightshade.”
“No doubt,” I said, and I sat up. “They’re pulling away. We’re gonna have to tail ’em.”
Tess checked her mirrors, pushed the bangs out of her eyes, checked her mirrors again, slipped the car in reverse.
“Come on, come on,” I said. “Haven’t you ever tailed anyone before? Step on it!”
Ever since forever, Tess could scold me with nothing more than a sigh. She sighed long and deep and said, “We will follow them. But we will be safe. A car chase is not how I plan to go out.”
“Fine,” I replied with a groan. “You know that I love you, right? Bunches and bunches.”
“You better,” she said as she pulled into traffic. “Bunches and bunches and bunches and bunches.”
We were four cars behind Carla and Dylan. If a couple of stoplights didn’t go our way, we’d lose them. Which wouldn’t be the end of the world, considering that Dylan said he’d fill me in on everything, but that was the equivalent of reading a recap of a TV show instead of watching it. When it’s information versus experience, you always choose experience.
As we tailed them around the corner, past the Wawa and the Little League field, a text from Dylan lit up my phone.
Why are you following us?
“Dammit! They made us,” I said.
“That’s Lady Nightshade for you,” Tess replied. “Can’t get anything past her.”
I started to type a response:
We’re out for a drive. You just happened . . .
Then I thought better of it. Deleted and retyped.
Me: Busted! Sorry. Curiosity.
Dylan: It’s cool. Carla wants you to join us. She’ll drive slow.
Tess must have seen my eyes go googly. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Double date.”
a meeting of minds
The parking lot next to the long-abandoned factory off Wooderson Road was thick with weeds. And the weeds themselves were thick. Like, celery thick. The sound of them smacking the undercarriage of Tess’s Honda was a jungle sound. Why the hell were we out here?
Because Special Agent Carla Rosetti was calling the shots, that’s why. As we pulled in, she was already parked, out of her car, and putting up a hand like a traffic cop. Something that looked like a DustBuster dangled from her other hand.
“Reach for the sky,” she hollered as we exited the vehicle.
We did our best, tippy-toeing and stretching out as Rosetti waved the device over Tess’s body. The thing was connected by a cable to her phone, where an app flashed and blipped.
“Metal detector?” Tess asked. “Because I have a tin of Altoids in my pocket.”
“Won’t matter,” Rosetti said. “This detects radiation. Explosives. The nasty stuff. It’s what the Secret Service uses. Top of the line.”
Rosetti moved on to me, leaning in as she swept my body for . . . who knows what? Spontaneous combustion juice? As she bent over and her hair brushed my face, I gave her a good sniff.
A little weird, I admit. But also informative.
Rosetti wore perfume. Nice perfume. Not that I expected her to smell like coffee and gunpowder, but it was surprising how subtle and soft her scent was. Undergarments were now something to wonder about. What manner of lace was rubbing up against her holsters?
“Both clean,” she said as she moved the device past my ankles and stood up. Man, did I want her to spin the thing in her hand and blow on it like the smoking barrel of a pistol, but all she did was slap it to her hip and carry it back to the Tesla.
Dylan had joined us at this point, hands in pockets, looking adorable and a tad nervous.
“Nice to see you again, Dylan,” Tess said.
“And you,” Dylan said, and he did a little bow. Which ignited the polite young lady in Tess and she responded with a little curtsy. I joined in by dancing little pirouettes, because . . . well, because I’m odd.
“Enjoying ourselves?” Rosetti asked when she returned from her car.
Pirouettes are usually best not left unfinished, but Rosetti deserved my respect, so I stopped one halfway through, planted my feet, threw my arms to the side, and said, “Sorry. I get carried away.”
Rosetti
waved a dismissive hand and said, “You’re a child.”
So harsh, but at that moment, unfortunately true. I didn’t say another word.
“And who are you?” she then asked Tess. “Friend?”
“Um . . . I’m Tess McNulty and I like to think of myself as more than—”
“What’s your deal, Tess McNulty?” Rosetti asked. “Give it to me quick.”
The poise that had guided Tess through so many math olympiad victories and slam-dunk babysitting interviews leaked from her body like the whites from a cracked egg. “Well,” she said. “I’m, well, I told you my name and I guess I’d say . . . well, I’m hoping to go to RIT in the fall. Oh, and I was on the field hockey team but, you know, the season was canceled and . . . I like music and movies and . . . stuff?”
Rosetti did her shittiest to feign interest, stare-squinting, and clearly waiting for Tess to shut up. When she was finally given an opening, she said, “Tell me this, Miss McNulty. Do you blow people up?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Good to know. Moving on.”
“Why are we here?” I asked. It was the middle of the day, sunny and perfectly pleasant, but the place was giving me the creeps. It wasn’t the weeds or the cracked bricks of the building, or even the overall hauntedness of the place. It was the odor: metallic and animal at the same time, a rusty rot.
“Glad you asked,” Rosetti said, and she pointed at the building. “Do you know what this used to be?”
“My dad always told me they made fertilizer,” Dylan said.
Rosetti smiled and said, “Dad was a good liar. Or maybe he never knew the truth. Truth is, this place was into far dirtier things than that. And when you’re located on a river and you do dirty things, well, I don’t know all the details, but let’s just say there was a time in the fifties when kids downstream were born with their organs on the outside.”
I couldn’t see it, but I could hear the rush of the Patchcong River through the trees. We were at the bottom of the gorge on the edge of town, not far from the reservoir where all the county’s water originated.