by Archer Mayor
Cathy Lawless turned at his entrance and raised a cardboard coffee cup at him in greeting. “Hey there, Joe. Perfect timing for a fresh brew. Dede just made a run to Dunkin’ Donuts.”
Joe raised his hand and waved to both women, and to Michael Coven, who was the last person he expected to find there. Plainly, the MDEA director was a hands-on leader.
Coven was also seemingly good at reading minds. He rose from one of the ornate chairs by the tripod and shook Joe’s hand. “Figured I’d keep the troops company. Gets boring just pushing paper around all day.”
“I know the feeling,” Joe said.
Cathy snorted “Don’t believe a word of it. Mike has slave units to push his paperwork. He’s out here bugging us all the time.”
Coven laughed in turn. “I’m out strangling legislators all the time, Cathy, trying to justify your exorbitant pay.”
“There he goes,” Dede said suddenly, jutting her chin toward the street.
She turned to document the moment on the laptop hooked to the camera. Joe bypassed watching the screen and crossed to the window to glance around the curtain and see what was going on. It was very late, and there weren’t many strollers out anymore. The skinny young man in a short leather jacket stood out, both for his hurried sense of purpose and his scrawny looks.
“Bernie’s runner,” Mike Coven told him. “Kid named Leon. Move over to the other window, and you’ll see where he’s going.”
Curious, Joe followed the advice and saw Leon duck into a large drugstore at the end of the block. He looked inquiringly at Coven, but predictably it was the talkative Cathy Lawless who answered the implied question.
“A TracFone,” she said, referring to a brand of disposable cell phone. “He buys them like other people buy M&Ms. In the half week we’ve been here, he’s probably bought half a dozen of them.”
“Five,” Dede corrected—the keeper of the log.
“He always goes to the same store?” Joe asked.
“Yeah,” Cathy said gleefully, “meaning that thanks to Leon’s lazy butt, Bernie’s sloppy supervision, and Lenny Chapman’s federal legal magic, we were able to record the electronic serial number of every unit they have for sale in there. As soon as Bernie turns on whatever Leon brings home, we can follow her on our GPS.”
Joe matched her smile and nodded appreciatively but had to ask, “And you’re sure he’s giving her the phones, how?”
“There are only the two of them in the apartment,” Dede answered. “And any time we’ve seen her, she’s using the same make and model that Leon’s been buying. Plus, we’ve never seen him use the things. It’s a calculated guess.”
Joe shrugged. “Works for me.”
He was still at the window and now saw Leon emerge back onto the street, a small bag in his hand. He returned to the building opposite theirs and vanished through the front door.
“Which apartment is hers?” he asked.
“Right across,” Coven told him, pointing.
Moments later, Joe saw the door of the apartment opposite open and Leon enter with his bag. Behind him, he heard Dede typing.
There was no sign of any woman, though.
“She’s got an office in the back,” Cathy explained, seeing him studying the bank of windows. “To be honest, you don’t really see much from here. Typical.”
That much was true, as Joe knew from a small lifetime of watching other people’s windows. Only in the movies did you catch more than the occasional glimpse of someone walking by. Surveillance was usually a frustrating, if time-honored, practice.
He stayed watching, with his back to the others, listening to their banter, and eventually saw Leon cross the room and go through a distant door, closing it behind him.
This small team had been in place since shortly after they’d learned of Ann DiBernardo—and after Lenny Chapman had received the go-ahead to finance it. Usually, there were just two people here, over twelve-hour shifts. Joe and Lester had taken advantage of the cycle to return to Vermont and—in Joe’s case—get a briefing from Sam and Willy about the late Brian Sleuter.
They were all here now, however, because of the trap they’d recently set with the disposable phones.
The advantage of now having Bernie’s own phone be part of the surveillance was clear, but the stimulus to make it happen had been born two days earlier, when she and Leon had gone for a drive and had displayed enough paranoia to make keeping a tail on them impossible. They hadn’t used Bernie’s own car, they’d kept switching from one transport mode to another, and the ICE team hadn’t been well enough manned to cover all the angles.
That had been an embarrassment Lenny Chapman had vowed would not be repeated.
“Stupid question,” Joe heard Lester ask in the darkness to his back.
“If you can live with a stupid answer,” Cathy suggested.
“No sight or sound of Luis Grega so far?”
“Sorry” was the answer.
Joe pursed his lips, lost in thought. Maine was such a huge state, the cops so few and far between. None of them knew if Grega was within three thousand miles of here. He sighed slightly, seeing the fog of his exhaled breath briefly flare up against the windowpane. What he had learned back home, from Sam and Willy, and Bill Allard at their Waterbury headquarters, was that people were becoming impatient. The governor, too, had been leaning on Allard to deliver something for the press. Even Lyn had said that she was considering having dinner with Stan Katz of the Reformer, just so she could break the monotony of talking to him on the phone every day.
Joe reached up and wiped the remnants of his breath vapor with the side of his hand. So many people had so little idea of how tightly focused an investigation could get sometimes—all the way down to a handful of cops, hunched together in a darkened room. He finally moved away from the window to join them for a cup of coffee.
Three hours later, there were only three of them left—the regular shift of Lawless and Beaubien, and Joe Gunther, who had no reason to leave. Mike Coven departed first, to prepare for the next day’s paperwork and arm twisting; Dede Miller and Lester went next—the one back to her family, and the other to a local motel to catch some sleep before he was scheduled to return in six hours.
Dave woke them up, the mere sound of his voice and the urgency it contained functioning as dual alarms.
“They’re leaving.”
Joe struggled up from a borrowed armchair while Cathy simply rolled off her couch onto the floor, where she immediately began pulling on her shoes.
“Talk to us, Dave,” she ordered.
Dave was simultaneously glancing out the window and stuffing a few items into a canvas bag. “It’s oh-four-hundred hours and they are not dressed for a trip to the corner store. And young Leon is packing heat.”
It was the longest speech Joe had ever heard from the man.
At about the same time that the lights across the street went out, the three cops stepped into the hallway outside the borrowed apartment.
“Got the keys?” Cathy asked.
Dave merely patted his pocket.
“Got the GPS?”
Dave ignored her and began taking the stairs two at a time, the others in tow.
They paused at the door leading to the sidewalk, while Dave carefully checked the street. After a long pause, he raised his left hand and issued the go-ahead. They all three stepped out and quickly made their way toward a nearby alleyway, Dave activating a remote door lock as they went. Around the corner was an inconspicuous SUV.
Dave manned the wheel, as Cathy climbed in beside him and Gunther slid into the backseat. Immediately upon fastening her seat belt, Cathy removed the laptop from her partner’s canvas bag and fired it up. In the meantime, Dave started the engine, but stayed stationary.
“Okay—acquiring,” Cathy reported, watching the screen. Looking over her shoulder, Joe saw a map of Portland on her screen, with a growing time-out bar blinking at its bottom. Suddenly a bright red dot appeared near the center of the
map.
“Got ya,” she said. “She’s moving out, heading toward the Arterial—probably shooting for 295 after the obligatory diversions so she can see if we’re on her tail.”
Dave pulled into Fore Street unhurriedly. Joe sat back, admiring the ease of it all. Instead of struggling with Bernie’s evasive maneuvers, all they had to do now was follow that dot on the map, closing in only once they sensed journey’s end. It wasn’t a perfect solution, of course—glitches could and did occur—but it was a big improvement over earlier options.
“I was right,” Cathy said soon enough. “Take the Arterial west.”
Traffic was virtually nonexistent, making their ability to hang back all the more important. The Franklin Arterial soon led to the Back Cove, however, and the I-295 cloverleaf, where DiBernardo’s car headed south. The number of vehicles picked up, if marginally.
Unlike the first time they were tailed, DiBernardo and Leon kept to their initial vehicle, their rearview mirror comforting them that they were in the clear with the cops.
Joe watched the city slide by the windows as Cathy continued chatting with—or at—Dave. The tidal flats of the cove soon yielded to parking lots and cheap housing on the right and the Deering Oaks tennis courts and playing fields to the left, which in turn were quickly replaced by the same monotonous landscape of a thousand other midsized cities. The sudden appearance of Casco Bay beneath them, and the futuristic, blinking lights of the airport’s primary runway immediately to the west and seemingly aimed right at them, abruptly returned him to the here and now.
“What’s your guess?” Cathy asked her partner.
Dave soundlessly shrugged in response.
“I say she’s headed for a long haul—Portsmouth or maybe Boston. Perfect time of night for it. For that matter, if she really pours on the steam, maybe we can pull her over for … Whoa. Guess not. Get ready to exit.”
Joe slid forward to look over her shoulder at the computer screen. She tapped its surface to show him where they were. “Route 9—Gorham Road. This is like the back door into the Maine Mall.”
“That doesn’t sound likely,” he said. “What’s beyond it?”
“Pucker brush beyond I-95.” Again, she hesitated before saying, “Ah, that explains it. Dave? Take the next right, onto Westbrook.” She turned back toward Joe, explaining, “It’s a housing development—crackerbox houses, all in a row. For all intents and purposes a dead end, even with a ton of people living in it. Tucks right up against the side of the airport. I wonder who she knows here? It’s a far cry from her ritzy neighborhood.”
Dave was now driving very slowly, alongside a row of single-family homes, beyond which row after row of similar houses stretched off in concentric circles, deep into the streetlight-illuminated gloom.
“Stay right,” Cathy ordered. “Looks like she’s just skirting the whole complex.” She held up her hand. “Hold it. Stop.”
Dave did so, both hands on the wheel.
Cathy stared at the screen for a few more seconds before announcing, “I think this is it. Roll on by, just to make sure.”
Dave got them going again, around a gentle curve, just in time for them to see a couple of distant figures walking from a car to a house just like the dozen they’d already passed. As soon as he caught sight of them, Dave gently turned left, onto a side street, and broke off visual contact, as if he were just another night crawler returning home.
“That’s definitely it,” Cathy confirmed. “She brought the cell with her, so now we have a reading from the center of the house.” She copied the address from the screen and then switched programs, adding, “Time to get educated about who she’s visiting.”
Here again, Joe watched with appreciation, thinking back to his first days on patrol in Brattleboro, where Dispatch raised the beat cops by flashing a blue light attached to the side of a downtown building. Now, in a parked car down a darkened street, they were accessing encrypted files on a computer that they hoped would tell them who was entertaining the woman they’d just followed here via GPS.
As if completing his ruminations, Cathy murmured aloud, “Small world.”
“What?” Joe asked.
“Darryl Mehlin. Not a name you’d know, but we sure do.”
“Not from the trenches,” Dave commented briefly.
Joe glanced at him, wondering at the significance of that. Whether it was true or not, Dave’s trademark silences had Joe half believing that whenever the man opened his mouth, he offered only prized nuggets of wisdom.
But Cathy was also apparently a believer. “Yeah,” she responded. “Good point. Darryl’s a facilitator—a go-to man when you need someone with a special talent. I didn’t know he lived here. He’s a Down East boy.”
“Probably needed to be near a hospital,” Dave suggested.
Cathy explained. “He’s a paraplegic. Used to work on a lobster boat a long time ago. Got injured and found a different career. He’s on every creep’s list of ‘known associates,’ but he’s never been charged with anything, as far as I know.”
“So,” Joe wanted to know, “is Bernie consulting him?”
“My guess?” Cathy surmised. “We’re seeing a reconstruction in progress.” She held up one finger at a time as she went on. “Bear with me—a ton of this is super vague. One—Mroz gets whacked. Two—we tail his supposed Canadian supplier, calling himself Didry at the border, to a big powwow in Calais with somebody we don’t know. Three—Dave and I get shot at by your guy, Grega, out of the blue and for no good reason. Four—Bob, who was there with Grega, then acts like a crazy man and gets himself killed, right after he and Grega were cooking something up involving Bernie. Five—what does Bernie do as a specialty? Finances. And, last—who is she meeting with right now? Mr. Go-between, Darryl Mehlin.”
Cathy closed her fingers. “That all tells me a new organization is being built on the ruins of Roz’s old one. A few of the key movers and shakers are missing, like whoever Didry is, and the person or persons he met with in Calais. But I bet it goes full circle—that the guy who met Didry that day is the one who killed Roz.”
“Wellman Beale,” Dave said, seemingly a propos of nothing.
“What?” Joe asked, surprised not only at the injection, but by the fact that he knew the name.
“That’s what I been trying to remember,” Dave explained, facing them both. “Darryl was on Beale’s boat when he got hurt.”
Cathy slapped her forehead and stared at Joe. “Shit—Kevin asked me to tell you what he’d found out about Beale. I totally forgot. Turns out he is on the rebound—new boat, flashing cash, struttin’ his stuff. Which makes all this fit perfectly.” She punched Dave’s shoulder in her excitement. “Of course. What was I just saying? Why not? And Darryl wasn’t only Beale’s stern-man back then; they’re cousins. That makes the connections even tighter.” She held up a succession of fingers again. “Roz ruins Beale; Roz gets whacked; the Canadian supplier pays a visit; Beale’s cousin is now meeting a shady financier. Nice, close circle. I bet if we scratch hard enough, we’ll find some tie between Bernie and Roz, since Beale would be an idiot not to make use of Roz’s old outfit. That might even be where Grega fits in, since he also once worked for Roz.”
They sat on Darryl Mehlin’s house for over an hour and then followed Bernie and Leon back to downtown Portland. Periodically, Cathy would revisit her theory, sometimes working her computer to check one detail or another, her enthusiasm filling the inside of the SUV.
For the most part, Joe remained settled in his seat, unable to contribute. Two things did keep rattling around his head, however. One was the danger of leaping to conclusions not based on enough facts. The other was that he’d been the one to introduce Wellman Beale to the equation, almost by chance, albeit through Steve Silva’s reminiscences.
Years earlier, he’d heard of the classic experiment of telling a subject to absolutely not think of a given topic—say, a pink elephant—with the result being that, of course, the poor bastard could thi
nk of nothing else.
He now began to wonder if Wellman Beale might not somehow be influencing Cathy’s thinking the same way.
CHAPTER 24
Willy was sitting at the motel’s desk when Sam stepped out of the bathroom, still toweling her hair. He was holding the phone in his hand.
“Calling someone?” she asked, glancing at the clock radio on the night table. It was after ten P.M.
“Someone called us,” he said dourly. “The boss is in a funk so he had to share the pain.”
“Joe? What happened?”
“Nothing,” Willy said, dropping the phone back onto its cradle. “That’s the problem. He says they’re doing good work out there, but he’s not so sure they’re after the right guy anymore. I guess he’s feeling like a second-class citizen. Welcome to the club. I told him to get his butt back to Vermont so he can be top of the dunghill again.”
Sam knew he hadn’t actually said that—even Willy had some limits. But she guessed he’d come close.
“So, he called you because you’re such a good listener?” she asked.
He snorted. “Right. No, he was just micromanaging and bitching at the same time, wondering what the hell we’ve been doing, like we hadn’t talked just a couple of days ago.”
She finished drying her short hair and stood before the mirror to give it a few strokes with a brush. She knew from long experience that just as Joe Gunther had never bitched or micromanaged in his life, so had Willy never delivered a straightforward, simple message without adding his own dark-hearted twist. These were things she appreciated in both of them.
She returned to the topic that was driving them all. “I’m guessing still no sign of Grega?”
“Here and there, yeah,” he told her, crossing the room, “but the task force is getting sidetracked by this whole drug dealer shake-up they got going. Course, Joe is all sympathy and understanding, saying he knows how they have to take care of their own patch first, but he’s getting antsy.”
