Bury the Lead

by Archer Mayor

  Sam considered that for a couple of seconds, returning the shake gratefully. “It is, and I’m on board. I’ll do whatever it takes to get Mr. Grumpy there, too—although it sounds like you did that already. And I’ll inform Joe and whoever else he recommends.”

  Victoria moved to her desk to fetch a business card, which she handed over. “Even knowing you as little as I do,” she said. “I’d be willing to put money on your success. The only word of advice I’d add is to spur your superiors on. The injury may be old, but we’re at a make-or-break moment. For Willy’s sake and yours, move as fast as you can. He’s like a man on a high wire, being blown by a growing wind.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “You see Rachel’s pictures in the paper today?” Beverly asked. “They’re online, too.”

  Joe smiled at the excitement in her voice. When they had first met, decades ago, she’d been cool, meticulous, unforgiving of sloppiness, and even more comically formal in speech and manner. Everyone, without exception, had been addressed only by title, rank, and last name.

  Her quality of work had made these eccentricities tolerable, of course, not to mention that most cops are inclined to fatalistically accept their superiors being odd. In those days, they adapted by claiming bragging rights if Hillstrom didn’t dress them down in some way, never mind handing out praise.

  Her professional standards hadn’t diminished any. But her sense of accomplishment had slowly allowed for the emergence of a more complex and open woman. The pure happiness and pride he heard now, even over the cell phone’s marginal speaker, were testimony to how much freer she’d become with her emotions—contagiously, in fact, since she had helped him to open up in the process.

  “I did,” he told her. “I should’ve called, but I figured you’d be poised with a sharp knife over someone’s chest.”

  “You figured correctly,” she reassured him. “I didn’t get to see them until an hour ago.”

  “They’re really good,” he commented. “Much more dramatic than I expected. She made it all look like something from an opera. Way over the top.”

  “Thanks to you, she did,” Beverly praised him. “That was very sweet of you. I know your being there was a positive influence.”

  “It was still Jonathon’s call,” he countered. “I only hope it’ll compensate for all the future times we’ll be throwing her out of a crime scene.”

  “You sound like you’re in a car,” Beverly said, changing the subject.

  “Heading to Massachusetts. Don’t know if I’ll get lucky or not, but I’m hoping to drop in on Mick Durocher’s estranged daughter. I got her address from paperwork we found in his trailer.”

  “What can she tell you?”

  “Damned if I know. Right now, it’s just a rock I can’t not turn over. I got the heads-up from the AG’s office to unofficially treat this as an unsolved homicide, which basically moves me from proving Mick’s a killer to figuring out who’d want to frame him and why.”

  “You’re sure he didn’t do it?”

  “Only instinctively,” Joe conceded. “That’s why I’m stressing the unofficial nature of this. All the smoking guns here have his prints on them. I just think they’re planted or circumstantial.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” she offered.

  “Not so far. The AG’s lining up a DNA sample from Mick, to compare it to Teri Parker’s fetus. But unless you can come up with something more, I think you’ve already worked your end of this puzzle.”

  “How are things proceeding with the fire investigation?” Beverly asked.

  “I touched base with Lester before I headed out,” Joe reported. “He said he felt like the only cop directing traffic after the Super Bowl.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  Her response reminded him that her knowledge of professional sports rivaled a Martian’s. “Believe me,” he said. “It’s not.”

  * * *

  Lester sipped from his fourth mug of coffee as he stood before a large interior window overlooking the GreenField warehouse floor from forty feet above. He was in the general manager’s borrowed meeting room, and behind him were two conference tables pushed together, covered with personnel files, organizational flowcharts, and three-ringed binders bulging with information about suppliers and customers of the business.

  Also in attendance was a sharply dressed middle-aged woman with a practical straight haircut, short fingernails, and no jewelry, named Pat Smith. She was the GreenField security head Willy had spoken well of earlier, and another veteran of the Vermont State Police, like Lester himself.

  Despite that, they’d never met, although the “troops,” as they were generally called, were only about three hundred strong at any given time. He had heard of her as a serious overachiever, which in this case had been proving a real asset—even if it had pushed Lester to consume more coffee than he liked.

  In truth, he wasn’t supposed to be here right now, although he didn’t mind. He’d caught a phone call from Sammie—usually the class workaholic—asking him to cover for her as she dealt with an unidentified personal emergency. He had a pretty good idea of what that was, especially since she’d added—parent to parent—“it’s not Emma.” It wasn’t the first time Lester had contemplated what a handful Willy Kunkle must be as a partner. He hadn’t pressed her for details, and she’d left it at that, but Les was perfectly aware that Willy had been off his game lately.

  Smith and he were next door to what had become a virtual war room—larger, windowless, and as rough-hewn as a military barracks. Some eight cubicles had been set up there for interviews, each manned by an agent of the VBI culled from across the state, and each featuring a desk, two chairs, a video recorder, and a presumption of privacy wherein to conduct a nonstop series of employee interviews. The manager’s smaller meeting room, by contrast, had been reserved as somewhere to reflect, strategize, and store the relevant paperwork for what was occurring one door over.

  These two rooms crowned a four-story building-within-a-building—a freestanding, monolithic, plywood-walled stack of offices built on the warehouse floor to make communications between labor and management less of an effort. The company’s executives, bookkeepers, and salespeople were in a large penthouse elsewhere—and harder to reach. The Castle, as this was nicknamed, was the equivalent of the field commander’s headquarters, as stripped of artifice or pomp as a sentry post near a battlefront.

  Pat Smith and Lester had chosen it to facilitate their daunting interview campaign, and to best process and monitor their results. So far, while they had collected almost nothing of worth, they had become privy to a minor avalanche of peeves, rivalries, illicit romances, resentments, crushed hopes, alleged improprieties, and several claims of criminal activity, from theft to sexual assault to sabotage to one case of someone who had copied the key to a food vending machine and was reducing his home grocery bill accordingly—if at the sacrifice of a healthy diet.

  Lester, suffering from lack of sleep like most of them, believed he’d finally achieved the fantasy nightmare of being the only air traffic controller at O’Hare during a snowstorm. He understood the urgency Joe had placed on this investigation, and the fact that its unknowns were potentially more lethal than what they’d seen so far. But it remained an exhausting process.

  “Let’s step back a foot or two,” he suggested to his colleague without looking back at her. “Tell me about the management structure here, from the bosses on down.”

  “Robert Beaupré,” Pat began without questioning the request. “Originally French Canadian, or at least his family was. The name literally means ‘beautiful pasture,’ which is what led to GreenField. Most people think they made it up to fit a grocery business, but it’s closer to the heart than that. Robert’s old man was a farmer, and the son of a farmer. The father was kind of a socialist capitalist, if there is such a thing—he grew crops for income, but also distributed them far and wide to the benefit of the poor and less advantaged.

  “Th
e consensus is Robert smelled the Kool-Aid but didn’t actually drink it. His GreenField is more along traditional lines: He distributes food but according to a capitalist model, although he does contribute more than most competitors to food banks and the like. He also caters primarily to mom-and-pop retailers, small markets, locally run chains, and even a few co-ops, although that’s just a peripheral ploy. Bottom line is he can call himself the grocer of the little guy, shave a little off his profit line by being legitimately charitable, and still walk away at the end of the day with a few million under his belt every year. He’s a tough negotiator—make no mistake.”

  Lester turned to face her. “That much? Just for him?”

  “The margins in this business are ridiculously low, but if you counterbalance them with volume and efficiency—and you’re as sharp as he is—there’s a ton of money to be made.”

  Lester gave her a half smile. “For everybody?”

  She didn’t play coy. “I’m not complaining. I wasn’t going much higher in the VSP, and this’ll put my kids into better schools than before.”

  “Speaking of that,” Lester segued, “what kinds of issues do you handle generally? I mean, whoever torched this place can’t be your standard fare.”

  “Theft tops the chart,” Pat replied. “No surprise there. Everything from filching something out of an open box on one of the aisles to rerouting entire truckloads. It’s not rampant or crippling, and it’s not unexpected, but it’s what I deal with daily. There’s just too much stuff moving through here. It’s a temptation, and a lot of the people we employ—most of whom are terrific, and that’s no bullshit—have led rough enough lives that they just don’t have the wiring to resist taking what’s lying around. It’s like police work. If it weren’t for that small inner core of dirtbag human beings that keep screwing up every system on earth, we cops would be unemployed. But they’re the gift that keeps on giving.”

  Lester repeated the one item that had caught his attention. “Rerouting truckloads?”

  She actually smiled. “We get a few that’re that ambitious. I’m working to get management to equip every rig with a GPS, but it’s more expensive than you’d think. They’re interested, as are our insurers, but there’s a long list of other good ideas waiting to be approved, too. For the moment, I try to control it through other means, but I would like to plug that hole.”

  “Other means?” Lester chuckled. “Almost sounds ominous.”

  She laughed with him. “Don’t I wish. Nah, I’m just talking better inventory controls. It would be fun to be the head of a private army, but I ain’t.”

  “All right.” He stepped back from the window and sat across from her. “Back to the original question. Who’s under Robert Beaupré? This an all-family operation?”

  “Yes and no,” she answered without pause. “There is family involved, but it’s not strictly linear, and not strictly blood related. Robert and his wife have two sons and a daughter: Robert Jr.—called Bobby—Philip, and Elaine. Elaine’s married to a man named Bradley St. John, believe it or not, who’s actually not as stuck up as that sounds. Bobby and Brad do a lot of heavy lifting under Robert, whose hand is still very much on the tiller. Philip is more of a floater within the company, filling in on odd jobs here and there. Kind of a special projects guy. He played a big role in outfitting both warehouses with motion-sensitive LEDs, for example, which is saving us a bundle in utility costs. Elaine’s not involved at all.

  “Filling out the rest of the upper tier are nonfamily, run-of-the-mill professional management types. Finance, computers, development, sales, security, infrastructure, operations, and so on. All that’s pretty standard. Also, a lot of the brass work out of our headquarters building in Colchester, conveniently near both Montpelier and Burlington, so you’re not likely to see many of them around here.”

  “Would it be a big deal if they did show up?” Lester asked, looking down at the reams of files spread before them.

  Pat shook her head. “Nobody would notice. For a building with no windows and only a few pedestrian doors, there’s a lot of foot traffic coming and going every day. That’s something you probably noticed staring at all that surveillance video.”

  “Somebody else did most of that,” Lester confessed. “But I get your point.”

  “Also, we don’t stand on ceremony here,” Pat continued. “If Robert Beaupré wants to talk with somebody inside the building, he might call ahead, or he might just show up. I’ve found him leaning against my office doorjamb to ask a question, when I didn’t even know he was in-state.”

  Lester scratched his head. “Okay. So, back to this fire. It was done for effect, carefully thought out, precisely executed, and apparently loaded with some kind of message. It also had to have been done by somebody still on the inside, not a pissed-off short-termer who got caught stealing pens.”

  “Seafood,” Pat interjected.

  “What?”

  “Seafood, frozen steak, pallets of plastic razors, which are outrageously overpriced. Those’re the high-end products where stealing a little generates the most cash.”

  “Okay. Well, whatever. You get my point. Plus, we’re not talking theft, but arson.”

  She tapped the tabletop for emphasis. “But my point is that some of these items carry a bigger cash value than you might think. I don’t want us missing a clever thief because we get obsessed with a superbrain bad guy driven by a mysterious agenda. You basically just said we don’t know what we’re dealing with, which means it might still be ongoing. These fires could be an opening salvo of some kind, with a big payoff we haven’t seen yet.”

  Lester understood her point. By the same token, her focus on theft—her biggest daily concern—reminded him of who signed her paycheck. Cops—at least good ones—were guided by certain stolid shibboleths of the trade: every death is a homicide to start with; everybody lies; everyone’s a suspect until cleared. It could sound close-minded and paranoid, but in fact, its all-inclusiveness was designed to keep an investigator sharp and open to suggestions. It was the practical, nonliterary, not-so-quotable thinking behind Conan Doyle’s, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

  In that light, it wasn’t lost on Lester that he could very well be sharing this office with the person he was seeking—and who was only pretending to be helping him out.

  He glanced at Pat Smith meditatively for a moment before sighing and saying, “Which still brings us full circle: Go through everything and everybody and see who stands out.”

  With that, almost on cue, a second VBI agent entered the room from next door, to deposit another thick pile of paperwork from yet another round of interviews.

  “Having fun yet?” he asked, heading back out.

  “Nothing but,” Lester reassured him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mandy Lawlor, Mick Durocher’s presumed daughter, lived in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. “Presumed” only because the one document Joe hadn’t found among Mick’s trailer contents had been a birth certificate. There had been a handwritten, notarized will, listing her as Mick’s only child, and bequeathing her all his worldly assets, although calculating those would probably prove a challenge. Joe’s team had estimated that aside from a few small items, the bank owned the bulk of it, including the trailer and the broken truck.

  Nevertheless, Joe was looking forward to meeting the girl, if not to prepare her for any anticipated bounty. In the few days since they’d found Teri Parker’s body, Mick Durocher had become a shape-shifting presence, transitioning from suspect to confessed felon to something far less definable. Joe doubted Mandy would be a wellspring of information—all references to her in the trailer had reflected Mick’s guilt and longing, but no sign of their having kept in touch. Research into Mick’s true inner workings had to start somewhere, however, and clearly this young woman had played an important role.

  Fitchburg, to veer close to political correctness, has been called a challenged to
wn. Roughly forty thousand inhabitants strong, it often crops up in New Hampshire and southeastern Vermont law enforcement bulletins as a source community for drugs and related illegal activities that routinely spill across the northern border. Another classic example of nineteenth-century industrial might gone to seed, it is variously garnished with ancient architectural gems, down-at-the-heels strip malls, quirky Victorian-era artifacts, high unemployment and crime stats, and a museum devoted exclusively to toy airplanes. As Joe, a lifelong New Englander, drove into its embrace, he was reminded yet again of the entire region’s struggles between the glories of its past and the uncertainty of its future.

  Protocol dictates that if officers enter a town not their own on business, especially from out of state, first knocking on the door of the local “cop shop” is good manners and smart procedure. The logic being that if anything goes awry subsequently, the scene of the crime won’t be where initial introductions are exchanged.

  Joe had called ahead and so was anticipated when he stopped at police headquarters on Elm Street. Not surprisingly, the FPD was a busy place. When he presented himself at the front desk, instead of being invited up for the usual cup of coffee in some detective bureau, he was asked to wait in the lobby until a tired-looking man in a tired-looking suit appeared at the building’s inner door and asked, “You the Vermont cop?”

  “Yes.” Joe approached with a smile.

  “Al Danziger,” the man said halfheartedly. “You lookin’ for somebody down here?”

  “Amanda Lawlor.” Joe produced a piece of paper with Mandy’s address on it. “She’s the daughter of a suspect we have in jail on a murder charge.”

  “She a suspect, too?” Danziger asked.

  “No. I just want as much background as she can give me on her old man.”

  “They were tight?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. From what we got tossing his place inside out, she might not even know he exists. The love seems to run one way.”