The Catch

by Archer Mayor

  “How ’bout you?” Joe asked. “Got any plans?”

  Lester shrugged. “Maybe a movie.”

  They began walking in the general direction of their cars. “You know,” Joe told his colleague, finally giving in to his exhaustion and low spirits, “I think we’ve done what we can out here. We had a thread to follow out of Boston, but with Bob’s death and Beale finally lawyering up, that’s pretty much run out. It’s unlikely Grega’s going to fall out of the sky and surrender just because we’re here.”

  Spinney was walking with his head tucked down, listening carefully. “So, we go home?” he asked.

  “Unless you can argue against it,” Joe said.

  Lester gave it honest consideration but finally shook his head. “I’m trying not to give in to just feeling homesick,” he said. “But I can’t say I disagree.”

  They reached the car Spinney had rented for use within the state, since he and Joe had often been forced to travel separately.

  Joe placed his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Okay. Why don’t you get rid of this thing in the morning, and we’ll hook up in the motel lobby at nine? We can come back here, pay our respects, and get a good jump on the day, heading back to Vermont. Sam and Willy have been hard at it from their end, but to be honest, we may just have to put this onto the back burner for a while—media hounds and politicians be damned.”

  Lester glanced up at the night sky, made milky by the reflected lights of the distant downtown. “Jesus—that’s going to go over big.”

  Joe patted his shoulder and began moving toward his own car, several rows away. “It is what it is. People’re just going to have to live with it. Have a good night, Les. See you in the morning.”

  He heard Spinney open up his car door and start the engine moments later. By then, he was no longer paying attention, searching instead for where he might have left his sedan only a few hours earlier. He hated huge parking lots.

  “Do not move, Agent Gunther.”

  The voice was smooth, only slightly accented, and belonging to someone young—perhaps in his twenties, perhaps a little older.

  Joe held his hands out slightly, to show they were empty and that he was considering no heroics. The voice had come from behind and slightly to his right.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked, purposefully choosing a relaxed tone of voice, although his brain was working fast, considering his options.

  “I want you to walk toward that delivery truck—the dark green one ahead of you.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “You’re after me for killing one cop already …” he didn’t bother finishing.

  Well, Joe thought, that cleared up one mystery, and pretty ironically, too, given what he’d just said to Lester about ever locating this man.

  “Meaning I’m supposed to make this easier for you?” he asked. “Shoot me now—here. I’d sooner take my chances that some cop’ll hear you and take you out where you stand. You know this is Public Safety’s home base, right?”

  Grega’s tone of voice grew testy. “Get in the fucking van, Gunther, or I’ll shoot your damn kneecap off. You want to be a cripple for life just because you had to flash some attitude?”

  Joe heard the implication—he was suggesting Joe would survive this encounter. “Okay,” he said, walking to the van. “How did you find me, by the way?”

  “You’re a rock star, old man. I got your mug shot through Google, and then I waited around this big-ass parking lot, figuring you’d show up.”

  “Jesus. You could’ve been out here a long time. I’m going home tomorrow.” Joe laughed suddenly. “We gave up on you—figured we’d wait for someone to rat you out, or for you to screw up.”

  “Could happen,” Grega said philosophically from the darkness. “But I’m working real hard that it don’t. Stop by the rear side door of the van, put your hands against it, and then step away till you’re almost falling on your face.”

  Joe slowly complied, his self-confidence straining under an inevitable rising fear.

  He heard Grega step up behind him, felt his hand as he searched for and located Joe’s gun, and then heard him retreat a few paces.

  “You got your cuffs,” Grega told him. “I just felt ’em. Take them out and put them on.”

  “In front of me or behind?”

  “In front.”

  Joe did as requested.

  “Now slide open the door and get inside.”

  Once more, he followed orders. The van’s interior was completely empty aside from two metal folding chairs facing each other.

  “Comfy,” he said. “Which one’s mine?”

  “Looking to the rear.”

  Joe awkwardly hefted himself inside and shifted around to get properly settled. While he was doing so, Grega quickly slammed the side door and reappeared at the back. He, too, then climbed aboard, closing the second door behind him.

  They could only see each other by the filtered glow of an overhead parking lot light nearby.

  “Okay,” Joe said. “What’s up? You ready to come in?”

  Grega smiled and pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead—a gesture of utter amazement.

  “That’s really good. You’re something else.” He shook his head. “No, I’m not. In fact, I want you to disappear—you’re my last piece of business before I get my life back.”

  “You an innocent bystander all of a sudden?”

  He scowled. “Yeah, if you give a goddamn—probably easier not to, though. Fucking cops’re always so lazy.”

  Joe considered Grega’s sudden passion and the look of frustration in his eyes. A proud man, eager to take credit for what he did, and maybe one—unlike Bob, so quick to lie to his wife—who considered himself too honorable to claim other people’s work as his own.

  Joe sat back. “Okay. Tell me what happened.”

  “I didn’t shoot him.”

  “That’s it? We got you on videotape, ducked over and sneaking up to the cruiser.”

  Grega pounded his own knee. “I knew it. You assholes. I thought it was a smokescreen at first—that you were jacking my name in the papers ’cause you knew who it was and you were tryin’ to flush him out. What bullshit. You guys are so lazy—course it has to be the druggie with the funny last name, right?”

  He pointed meaningfully at Joe. “I didn’t do it. Somebody else showed up—all of a sudden—and popped him.” He held out his hand, his index and thumb out rigid, like a barrel and hammer, respectively. “Like that.”

  Joe scowled. “He was just there?”

  “He showed up, like I said.”

  Joe shook his head sympathetically. “Luis, I was there, at the crime scene, a few hours later. There are no houses nearby. Did you see a car pull up?”

  “No, but he was there.”

  “He? So you got a look at him?”

  Grega hesitated and then stared at the floor. “No.”

  Joe leaned forward, for the first time feeling a twinge of empathy. “Look, take it from the top. Sleuter talks to you, collects your paperwork, and goes back to the cruiser to use the radio. What do you do?”

  Grega pressed his lips together.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Joe exclaimed. “You’re already accused of killing the guy. You too embarrassed now to admit you had evil thoughts?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Joe burst out laughing. “Fuck me? You invited me here.”

  Grega slapped his thighs angrily. “God damn it. Yeah, I wanted to whack him. The guy was an asshole and he was about to do me hurt.” He grabbed his head in both hands, as if trying to hold it together. “Fuck,” he said, resigned, and dropped his fists back into his lap.

  “Okay,” he tried again, calmer. “I don’t know what I wanted to do. Maybe whack him, maybe mess him up a little. I just wanted to get back on the road. I was working on instinct.”

  Like an artist having a dry spell, thought Joe. “Then what?” he urged.

  “I slid down in my seat,
waiting for him to notice. After a minute, I popped open the door and kind of fell out, keeping low. He still didn’t react. I got as far as his front bumper when I saw a flash of something moving—somebody, I thought, but I wasn’t even super sure about that—and then, POW, a shot. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like a cornered rat, all crunched up in front of his car like that. First, I thought he’d seen me, and he’d let me have it and I just hadn’t felt it yet. I heard of that happening, you know? But that wasn’t it. I was still alone, I was okay, but now there was this total silence.”

  “What happened to the shooter?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t know. There wasn’t nobody. I still couldn’t figure out how there coulda been a shooter. I kept crawling around to the driver’s side, wondering what the fuck, you know? But I was alone, like I said. That’s when I figured, what’ve I got to lose? And grabbed my paperwork and split.”

  “What about Marano?” Joe asked. “What did he see?”

  “Nuthin’. I got back to the car, blood on my hand and on the license, and he just kept saying, ‘What happened, what happened?’ like I knew anything. He even thought I did it.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” Joe couldn’t suppress.

  Grega flared up again, smacking Gunther’s knee with his open hand. “Up yours, asshole. I’m telling you the truth. I want this shit settled. Why else would I grab you right in front of the fucking cop shop?”

  “Half a dozen reasons, Luis, not least to make me think you didn’t kill him.” Joe then abruptly switched approaches, hoping the man’s emotional state might make him more talkative. “And speaking of that,” he said, “why do you give a damn what I think? Killing people should be a good rep for someone like you.”

  Grega made a face, still feeling sorry for himself. “I don’t need the heat.”

  “That’s right,” Joe reacted conversationally, “you’re in a new line of work now—upwardly mobile.”

  He had no idea what he was talking about, knowing only that Grega had been making plans with Bob.

  But he’d hit a nerve. Grega looked at him carefully and asked, “What do you know about that?”

  Joe thought fast as he opened his eyes in surprise. “About Bernie and the rest? More than you might think. We’ve been pretty busy.”

  Grega’s face darkened and he glared ahead, recalculating his position.

  Joe took a chance. “We’ve also been playing the usual ‘what-if’ game that you do when you’re digging around, and we have more than one guy saying that it would’ve been smart for you to have whacked Matt Mroz.”

  That snapped Grega back to the here and now. “What?” he burst out. “I didn’t do that. I wasn’t even around. His murder was the whole fucking reason I came up to this stupid state. I was working for him when that peckerhead cop pulled us over. Holy shit, man—you got everything wrong. How the hell you make a living, being so stupid?”

  “You have benefited, though,” Joe argued, no more sure of that. “You can’t blame us for connecting the dots.”

  Grega shook his head. But Joe thought he saw something besides outrage in his eyes when he spoke next. There was a hint of calculation, also. “Alan Budney did Roz. I had nuthin’ to do with it.”

  Joe was briefly stumped. He’d never heard of Alan Budney, and a whole new name this late in the game was frankly startling. In most ways, the huge majority of police work in northern New England revolved around a small and finite—and generally well known—population base. To have something like this appear out of nowhere was unusual. His only comfort was thinking that Cathy or Kevin or one of the others would merely raise an eyebrow and say something like, “Oh, yeah—Alan. Didn’t know he had it in him.”

  He therefore responded along similar lines.

  “Budney,” he said, nodding. “I was one of the Budney fans. Others thought that was a stretch. I’m not a local, so I bowed to their knowledge.”

  “Yeah, well—so much for the locals. They’re usually assholes, if you ask me. Don’t know their butts from a hole in the ground.”

  “They couldn’t figure his motive,” Joe ventured. “Why he’d stick his neck out so far.”

  Grega smiled knowingly. “Oh, that’s real tough. What about the money?”

  Joe smiled back. “What about the murder rap? That’s got you all hot and bothered. Does that make Budney the bigger man?”

  Grega frowned. “Fuck you. Budney had a crank against his old man. He was all screwed up—thought people owed him something. Wanted to show the world who was boss. Stupid. I’m lucky. I have no clue who my father was. Just another fast fuck. I got no hang-ups like that. Me? I just want the cash.

  “Good luck finding Alan, though,” he suddenly added, Gunther thought a little gratuitously. “The other thing that guy is, is super private. When he took over Roz’s outfit, he said he was gonna tighten things up like never before, and was gonna make goddamn sure no-body could do to him what he did to Roz. He’ll be like a rat in a hole to find.”

  Joe felt he was making headway, but he wondered how long he had before his host ran out of patience.

  “You must like working with Beale—you two are birds of a feather.”

  It was either going to prove accurate or insulting. He didn’t really care. He was just looking for a reaction.

  But not what he got.

  Grega stared at him blankly. “Beale? Who’s that?”

  Later, Joe knew his response should have been more creative. But his surprise was such that he simply blurted, “Wellman Beale.”

  Grega furrowed his brow, muttered, “Never heard of him,” and half stood up to look out the van’s front window.

  When he sat back down, Joe knew his chance was over.

  “Okay,” Grega said brusquely, “enough of this shit. You get out the way you got in.”

  Joe held up his hands. “Cuffs?”

  Grega cracked open the side door and peered outside. Satisfied, he threw it all the way open and gestured to Joe to leave, saying, “No way. You got a key somewhere, and if you don’t, you got a hundred buddies over there that’ll be happy to help you out.” He smiled and added, “Right after they laugh their asses off. I’ll keep your gun, too.”

  Joe did have a key, if no idea how he was going to reach it. Grega was right, though. There was no way in hell he was going to ask for help, even if the next day he would have to fess up to the whole event, in painful detail.

  After he stepped onto the asphalt and watched the van drive off, therefore, he made himself comfortable leaning against his own car and began trying to reach the bottom of his right pocket.

  CHAPTER 27

  Two days after leaving Maine, Joe sat alone in his Brattleboro office, in the middle of the night, with all the lights off except for his own desk lamp. It wasn’t a rare event. He did this often enough, and often not alone, when a major case was being worked and a string of ten-to-twelve-hour workdays was simply not enough to stay ahead.

  Of course, there was a major case on hand. Brian Sleuter’s killer—be it Luis Grega or not—was still on the loose, after weeks of investigating. In addition to Joe’s personal efforts, and Sam’s and Willy’s, dozens of other cops, from locals to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, had all been contributing with interviews, data checks, public service announcements, informant shake-ups, and even a couple of roadblocks. And, of course, an uncountable number of hunches. Every cop with a brain, it seemed, plus a few more with active imaginations, had put an oar in the water.

  All to no effect, and all with a growing sense of futility. Most of them still believed that Joe had been the only one to meet the cop killer, and to let him get away. There were probably as many theories on how that encounter could have been turned around as there were concerning the next reasonable course of action.

  The irony was, of course, that because of the weight of not knowing how to proceed, Joe was in fact alone at this time of night, quite possibly the only cop awake, still working th
is very active major case.

  In fairness, he wasn’t doing much. He had the unit’s small TV perched on his desk, with the tape from Sleuter’s cruiser playing on the machine’s VCR. There was nothing to see here, of course, that he and countless others hadn’t already seen before, but the tape had become, in the absence of anyone under arrest, a form of talisman—the source of it all, if only “it” could be defined—and thus something that a large number of people had consulted in the same vein in which true believers visit a holy shrine, hoping they’ll be touched by inspiration.

  The most revealing aspect of this ritual in Joe’s case, however, was that while the tape was on and he was positioned to watch it, he was no longer seeing a bit of it. His eyes were focused on some middle distance, deep inside his brain.

  Primarily, he was thinking about Lyn.

  He hadn’t told her about finding the boat on Beale’s island yet. He would soon, of course. There was no way around it. It wasn’t the sort of thing that simply went away.

  But he wished it would.

  After all, what did it in fact reveal? That father and son had survived the storm? If so, their fates were tied either to homicide or flight, and the latter didn’t make much sense. From what would they have been fleeing? Family and finances had been secure at the time; nothing untoward had surfaced later to tarnish their memories. That left the horrific but practical conclusion that they had both been murdered, which, in turn, created a slough of nightmarish possibilities that could only fester with time.

  Wellman Beale had been of no help, naturally. Nor would he ever be, at this point, since he had finally stopped talking. Interviews of all his associates, including the ancient mechanic found on the island, along with his erstwhile sternman and cousin, had led nowhere. Either they had corroborated Beale’s story that he’d merely found the boat on the water—empty, drifting, and two hundred miles from its home port—or they claimed to know nothing at all.

  Time and effort might change things, of course. And people did talk eventually, when the right circumstances fell into place. But right now, none of that looked likely. And the Silva family, in the meantime, was going to be left to wonder, and wait.