by Archer Mayor
In his eyes, the least he could do was to serve a pressing social need. In so doing, he’d become wealthy, influential, and popular—at least in specialized circles. He’d also become a source of keen interest to competitors and the police, which helped explain the presence by his side of a bald, muscular, unpleasant-looking man named Harold, who at the moment was checking up and down the street through squinted eyes.
Harold had more than enough to scrutinize. Rockland was a large town—a ferry boat port servicing several Penobscot Bay islands; the primary urban hub for a cluster of nearby communities like Camden and Rockport, whose genteel configurations shied away from some of Rockland’s more practical, grittier offerings; and the host of some small but locally significant industrial enterprises like a harborside petroleum storage facility, a marina, and a large quarrying operation.
More to Roz’s interest, however, was that Rockland was also a magnet for touristy transients—complete with recreational appetites.
“Where to?” Harold asked, content for the moment that no black helicopters were hovering overhead, and no people like him hiding among the throng of summer visitors.
“The Oh-So-High, moron,” Mroz said simply, invoking his nickname for one of the motels where he routinely conducted business.
Harold nodded silently, having already guessed the destination and being used to the abuse. He’d been working for Roz for three years by now and had established a rhythm of what he chose to hear and what he didn’t. He let his boss pass before him, so he could guard his back while watching ahead—what he considered good protective behavior, even though he was shy any professional training.
He could handle himself—had on numerous occasions. But Harold was a realist, and knew he was more thug than bodyguard. On the other hand, that’s how Roz used him—as a two-legged pit bull. He just would have preferred not being spoken to as such.
Which wasn’t to say that his patience was unlimited.
They proceeded down the street between the phalanx of red-brick buildings reflecting downtown’s muscular commercial past. Rockland had been a minor powerhouse once, much more than it was now, even in these tourist-driven times. No Portland, of course, but still a significant influence in Maine’s development. Now, erstwhile businesses from fishing concerns to boat building to shipping and the like had been replaced by boutiques, restaurants, art galleries, and gift shops.
Matt Mroz’s Oh-So-High motel wasn’t of that ilk. Less flashy than its waterfront counterparts, it was set back, down a side street, and sported a straightforward, pragmatic demeanor—parking lot, two rows of stacked rooms girdled by a running balcony. No gym, no pool, no in-room movies, or “Magic Finger” beds. Just the basics. It was, to be fair, not the first stop for travelers hungry for salt air and enchanting views. Commercial drivers used the place for its intended purpose, others for its discretion and anonymity.
“Same room?” Harold asked as they left the sidewalk and entered the parking lot bordered on three sides by the motel’s monotonous door-and-window facade.
Mroz eyed him sorrowfully over his shoulder. “Jesus, Harold. That’s the whole point.”
Harold had his doubts. It seemed to him that conducting business from the same location every time might be exactly the wrong thing to do if you didn’t want to be surprised. But that was Roz’s hang-up— “Safety in familiarity,” he’d said, or something like that. Harold always figured it was because Roz had been kicked around as a kid or something. In any case, it made life a lot easier for Harold—not only did it mean fewer places to check out in advance, but in this instance, it meant that Harold could set things up just as he wanted.
They climbed the exterior metal staircase to the second-floor balcony and proceeded to a room located at the very far end—one that Mroz kept rented on a near permanent basis.
Harold removed the key from his pocket and slid it into the lock as Mroz stepped back to lean against the railing.
“Be right back,” Harold told him, as always, before slipping inside to check the place for safety.
Mroz nodded comfortably and turned to gaze out over the parking lot—the only available view. The light was fading, the clouds were a salmon pink from the setting sun, and the heat of the day had dropped just enough to imbue the air with a soft warmth usually associated with picnics and strolls in the park. Life was pretty good.
Harold stuck his head out the door. “All clear.”
Mroz left his perch and passed into the familiar room, virtually a home away from home, given the volume of business he did here, especially at this time of year.
It wasn’t anything grand, of course—the usual assortment of cheap furniture, bad artwork, and poorly addressed rug stains. But it gave Mroz a sense of comfort and stability, and considering some of the places he’d been, it was even a step up.
Harold was at the window, peering out. “He’s coming.”
Mroz was sitting on the edge of the bed. “Don’t know what I’d do without you, Harold.”
Harold ignored him. The man approaching the motel was a regular, in his thirties with thinning blond hair and a nervous manner, who kept justifying his visits by referring to various ailments.
A couple of minutes later, there was a timid knock on the door. As always, Harold opened up, keeping the customer outside while he checked around. He then motioned the man inside without a word, his tough-guy demeanor firmly in place.
Mroz was still sitting on the bed. “George. How’re you doin’?”
“Not too good, Roz,” their visitor said. “Back pain’s been acting up.”
Mroz laughed. “I don’t give a rat’s ass, George. Don’t you get that? How much do you want this time?”
“Ten might do it,” George said softly, reaching into his pocket.
Mroz stared at him for a moment before giving a silent nod to Harold, who crossed over to the closet, removed a paper bag, and counted out ten OxyContins from an orange plastic pill bottle. He poured those in turn into a small white envelope and handed that to his boss.
Mroz waggled it back and forth between his index and thumb, eyeing George thoughtfully. “What do you think? That a thousand bucks you got in your hand?”
George looked confused. “Isn’t that what you said? One hundred each?”
Mroz stuck out his hand for the money. “That’s what I said—I’m running a special all this week.”
“Is it going up?” George asked, taking the envelope in exchange.
“Call me when you’re in need again, George,” Mroz told him. “I’ll tell you then.”
George nodded a couple of times, fresh out of conversation and now distracted by what he was holding.
Mroz shook his head—the sad but sympathetic purveyor of balm for the needy.
“Get out of here, George. Enjoy the rest of your evening.”
There was a momentary silence following George’s departure. By habit, Harold never said much of anything, but Mroz was a talker, and incapable of letting more than a minute go by without saying something.
“Thousand right out of the gate. Could be a good night. I like ’em when they start strong like that. Puts me in a good mood.”
“That’s good to hear,” said a male voice from the direction of the bathroom.
Mroz leaped to his feet, staggering slightly in the process. A man stood in the bathroom doorway, a gun in his leather-gloved hand. He was smiling slightly.
Mroz jerked his head around, looking for his bodyguard. Harold was standing at his post by the window, still watching for visitors. He turned and nodded to the man. “Nobody coming.”
“What the fuck’s going on here?” Mroz demanded of the newcomer. “Who the fuck’re you?”
“I’m Alan Budney,” the man told him. “His new boss.”
Mroz glanced at Harold again, but without much confidence. “Harold?” he asked.
Harold merely shrugged and went back to studying the outdoors.
Mroz nodded, visibly weighing his options. �
�You want in on the action?”
Budney shook his head. “Nope. I want it all.”
With that, he pulled the trigger, filling the room with a sharp, explosive crack and putting a hole in Matthew Mroz’s chest.
The latter fell back against the wall and bounced awkwardly onto the floor, one hand on the wound, not saying a word. His eyes stayed glued to Budney’s, but without purpose or reproach. If anything, there was a look of wonder on his face before all signs of life slipped away.
Budney wasted no time with Harold. He stuck his arm out, took aim, and squeezed off two quick rounds from across the room.
Harold wasn’t as cooperative as his ex-boss. “You son of a bitch,” he yelled, and launched himself at Budney, as if totally ignorant of the twin stains that had blossomed on his T-shirt.
Budney didn’t hesitate. He fired twice more, hitting Harold once in the head. That dropped the big man like a dead tree, flopping him onto the bed where he stayed without further motion.
“What did you expect, you dumb bastard?” Budney asked no one in particular. He stared at both men for a couple of seconds, as if uncertain about what to do next. He hadn’t anticipated the adrenaline now pulsing through him like an electric current.
He passed his gloved hand across his mouth, shoved the gun into his waistband, and walked over to the window to see if anyone was coming. When he’d set this up with Harold, promising him the world in money and influence, they’d arranged for a big enough break between scheduled customers for Budney to act freely and without interruption. In the same vein, Budney had rented both the room next door and the one below—under assumed names—just to make sure the gunshots wouldn’t be easily overheard. The pacing of Mroz’s client list, however, had been Harold’s department.
Budney looked nervously out across the parking lot, half expecting a cordon of police cars and SWAT members to be ringing the motel. But there was little going on—a young couple crossing the lot, hand in hand, some traffic driving by in the street beyond. All looked peaceful and serene, in total contrast with the contents of the room.
Budney opened the door slowly, pulled his shirt over the gun butt, stored his gloves in his back pocket, and stepped out to enact the next phase of his plan. He didn’t bother collecting either the cash or the drugs. He preferred thinking that, at this point, that smacked of small potatoes.
CHAPTER 3
Joe Gunther rubbed his eyes, blinked, and briefly turned away from the crime scene lights and the long row of parked, strobe-equipped vehicles. He gazed at the rising sun, barely backlighting the tops of the Green Mountains in the distance, but already tinting the tall grasses of the open, rolling fields nearby with the first strokes of dawn’s blush. It was a time of the day he’d especially cherished as a boy, when he’d arise from his bed to share breakfast with his benignly taciturn father before the latter headed out to tend to the crops and animals.
It was an appropriate remembrance, and not solely because of the sunrise—the area around Vergennes was ancient farm country, some of Vermont’s most productive. Joe had been brought up on the other side of the state, but the effect was similar if a bit more spectacular here, and he was too tired to be picky.
He shut his car door and turned to his reason for being here. A sheriff’s cruiser was positioned by the side of the road, in standard patrol stop presentation, its nose slightly angled toward the center of traffic, as if ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Officers placed their cars that way partly for protection as they got out to approach whomever they’d stopped.
There was irony in this instance, though, since it looked like the cop had never left his vehicle.
But that was a first impression, and Joe knew better than to rely on it. In his decades as a police officer, even far from the urban mayhem of New York and Boston, Gunther had seen his share of either straight-forward murderous encounters, or others intriguingly cloaked in misdirection or obscurity. He’d learned that each could first appear as the other.
Nevertheless, this did not look like a slam dunk. There was too much about it that smacked of complication.
He sighed gently. He liked complications, or at least working his way through them. A methodical man—some even thought a little plodding—he had a dogged, nonflamboyant, almost Old World style. He was courteous and considerate, hardworking and slow to take credit—the inveterate team player. Which helped explain his present position. Joe Gunther, after leading Brattleboro’s municipal detective squad, seemingly forever, was now the field force commander of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, the state’s relatively new major crimes unit.
But he felt a true weariness with the nature of this call. Murders in Vermont were few, averaging perhaps seven or eight a year—rare enough to make it standing protocol that he be called to the scene regardless of time or location. But the killing of a cop? That was virtually unheard of—a once-in-a-decade event, at least so far.
As a result, Gunther knew that the entire state would be watching every detail of this one—and that every news outlet would be hoping to dog his heels.
Which still didn’t fully address the heart of his melancholy—Joe Gunther was a combat veteran, a lifelong witness to violence, a man whose entire professional life had been devoted to cleaning up in the wake of human bedlam. He’d seen brutality and the threat of death visit not just his comrades and the general population, but members of his own family. And yet he still couldn’t adopt the commonly held belief that such acting out was as natural to human beings as sex and the need to eat. Killing remained for him a gesture bordering on lunacy.
A square-built, plainclothes detective with a sandy crew cut split away from the group clustered around the cruiser and approached him. “Anyone give you the lowdown on this, Joe?”
Joe shook his hand. Michael Bradley was the squad leader for the VBI Burlington office, some twenty-five miles away, and thus, under Joe, the senior investigator here. “Hi, Mike. Long time. Just that a deputy had been found, an apparent homicide.”
Bradley nodded. “Right—Brian Sleuter. Five years on the job, good record of arrests. Aggressive, ambitious, aiming for the big leagues somewhere—some say anywhere, since he was supposedly frustrated with the sheriff’s department. It’s looking like he might’ve been surprised on a traffic stop.”
Joe was looking past his colleague’s shoulder, taking in what he could see of the crime scene, along with the various uniforms and faces. Gunther had been a presence in Vermont’s small law enforcement community for long enough to have at least met most of its senior members. Thus, he could already see some of the entanglements he’d soon be delicately sorting through. Mixed together, if not precisely mingling, were the state police, the sheriff’s department, the Vergennes police, the state’s attorney, the medical examiner’s lead investigator, and at least a couple of others from Mike Bradley’s office. And that, he knew, would be just the beginning.
“We know about the traffic stop?” he asked Mike, redirecting his focus.
“From Dispatch only, right now, but Sleuter did have his video running, so that ought to help, assuming he had a tape in.”
Joe eyed him carefully. “We haven’t looked at that yet?”
Bradley smiled. A veteran himself, late of the Burlington police department—the state’s largest—he wasn’t given to being flustered. “It’s a cop killing. We’re taking our time—within reason.”
“Right,” Joe agreed.
Bradley laughed gently as a follow-up. “Meaning we’re about to pop the trunk, if you’re interested.”
They began crossing over to the group around the car. “What did their dispatch have to say?” Joe asked.
Bradley pulled out a notepad for reference. “A black, ’04 Toyota Solara, registered to James Marano, from Massachusetts—Dorchester Avenue address.”
“He was the driver?”
Bradley shrugged. “Sleuter asked for the twenty-seven RO, so presumably the owner and the driver were one and the same. And no,”
he added quickly as Joe opened his mouth, “I don’t know if he had a passenger.”
They reached the group and Joe began exchanging handshakes. It wasn’t many years ago that the VBI hadn’t existed and that the state police would have been running this scene. The initial transition—and the sometimes attending resentments—had been partly overcome by the VBI leadership resolutely avoiding the limelight, entering cases only when invited, and referring to their agency as a support tool only. But that went only so far. Every time Joe entered a case, therefore, he paid homage to the past, respected sensitivities, stressed his helpful role, while yet—with as much subtlety as possible—essentially taking over the investigation.
For the moment, however, most of that didn’t matter. Here—now—he was surrounded by fellow cops, all of them concentrating on the murder of one of their own.
Bradley nodded to a crime lab tech, whose team had cordoned off the cruiser. The woman, looking like a futuristic model at a car show—clad in a white Tyvek suit and isolated from the crowd behind a “Crime Scene” tape barrier—opened the vehicle’s trunk to reveal its contents, familiar to every patrol-trained officer in the crowd. Facing them was the standard collection of first aid kit, traffic cones, an officer’s shift bag, and a shotgun case. More pointedly right now, however, was a small steel cabinet bolted to the trunk’s back wall—the video recorder.
With her gloved hand, and using Brian Sleuter’s key, the tech unlocked the recorder’s security door, revealing a standard VCR control panel. She pushed the Eject button, extracted the tape, and held it up to the artificial light.
“About halfway unreeled,” she announced, handing it to one of her colleagues on the other side of the barrier.
“You going to check that out here?” Joe asked him.
The man smiled helpfully. “I can. I have a player in the truck. I know how much you guys want to look at it.”
“I’d appreciate it,” Joe encouraged him.
“Follow me,” he said simply.
A small herd fell in behind him as he trudged toward the large crime lab truck parked somewhat precariously along the grassy ditch separating the macadam from the miles of surrounding fields that were slowly emerging from the darkness. Technically, there was a pecking order involved in who participated in a high profile investigation. The county sheriff had officially requested VBI assistance, rubbing in the state police’s awkward second fiddle position. But Joe didn’t want any such political smog in the air—not when he still had no idea whose resources he might need—so he remained silent.
