CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I filled Irene in on what I’d learned, and she filled me in on the latest movements. Things had been quiet in the north end. From what we could tell, the Minutemen had withdrawn to Grand Isle, ferried by Empire State Militia boats, and were trying to rebuild the bridge. Chief was up at Winooski with the mayor, surveying the damage. The uniforms were back on regular patrol, for the time being, and various townie groups kept an eye on all of the roads into town.
Sitting in the library, Irene mulled over Nancy Peck’s story. “This is troubling,” she said, as if conceding a point. “If you’re right, it means there’s someone inside the Rangers who’s spying for the Minutemen.”
“Is there anyone you can communicate with safely within the organization?” I asked.
“I don’t have any secure channels. I haven’t spoken to any of them in months. I didn’t know about their operative in town. Do you think he’d still be at the motel down by the waterfront?”
“Not a chance,” I said. “They know that they’re blown. But they’ll assume the leak was on Peck’s side, that he told someone what he was doing, and that they killed him.”
“It’s a coup d’état within the Union,” I said. “But whoever did this wasn’t only concerned with the leadership of the Farmers’ Union, they wanted to undermine the defence of the city”
“Not just the city,” Irene said. “Of the entire Republic. I know neither you, nor Chief or the mayor wants to admit this, but the Rangers remain our only hope. This is bigger than just the city. The Minutemen and their out-of-state allies know that the Rangers are a real threat. Maybe the Rangers know it too, and that’s why they’ve seemed to pull back. They’re preparing for conflict, but they’re afraid as well, afraid of exposure. If Peck was killed as part of a larger conspiracy, how do we expose it? We can’t send your uniforms to arrest the entire executive, it’ll tip them off, whoever they are.”
“They thought that by cutting off the head of the Union, they could get their way. And it’s a sound approach. Every conspiracy has a head. Peck was the head of the conspiracy to arm the Union. We need to figure out who the head of the conspiracy to kill Peck was, and eliminate them.”
“Is there anyone in the executive we can smoke out?” she asked.
“Hensley. If we turn the screws on Hensley, maybe he’ll talk. Maybe if we offer him safety, he’ll turn.”
“It’s risky. If he doesn’t go for it, our cover will be blown.”
“I think we have to try. But we’ll need to do this the right way.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I had to take Andrew Hensley into custody as quietly as possible. I could have walked in to the hotel, gone up to his room, and escorted him out of the building, but I didn’t want to tip anyone who might have been watching him that we had him. I staked out the main entrance of the Smith House Hotel, hanging out on the corner a couple of blocks down, waiting for him to leave. I didn’t have to wait long. At about five, he walked out the front door, presumably to find food somewhere on Church Street, and I followed, thinking I would approach him if I could get to him as he walked along a quieter side street.
He turned down the next corner and I ducked into the alley behind the hotel and intercepted him as he walked up Pine Street. I approached him from behind, calling out his name. He turned and faced me, his pallid skin white as a sheet, beads of sweat on his temples. I could see this was going to be easy; he was a wreck.
I read him his rights. He put up no struggle, and I walked him up to Church Street, with no handcuffs. I kept an eye out for anyone following us, but I didn’t see anything suspicious.
“I don’t want to have to cuff you,” I said. “People we arrest sometimes end up dead, and I’d like to avoid that happening, so we’re going to the library.”
He looked confused when I said this. “I will cuff you if I have to, though, so no funny business.”
He seemed willing to cooperate. There was nowhere for him to go, really. I marched him up the front steps of the library. I suppose someone could have seen us, but it was unlikely, and Church Street was bustling. If anyone had tailed us, we probably lost them.
Irene was working the floor, handling requests from the few patrons in the library. An older man in coveralls stood in front of the agriculture section, scanning the spines, his hat in his hands. A young girl was leafing through a copy of The Scarlet Letter. A man in a suit perused the radio repair section. Irene flitted between all of them, making sure they had what they needed, before she came to us.
“I need a quiet room,” I said. She nodded in understanding, and took us down into the basement, where she led us to a windowless office. The only light was a small desk lamp, and she turned it on, and left us there, I sitting behind an old desk and Hensley in a folding chair, as if at a job interview.
“You look unwell,” I said, trying to be charitable, for at least a minute, before I got down to brass tacks.
“It’s been difficult. Irving’s death…something like that doesn’t happen every day. It’s hard to know where to go now, how to proceed.”
“Have you spoken at all with the other members of the executive with regards to what you’ll do next?” I asked.
He looked at me, vaguely suspicious. I knew the question sounded innocent enough, but if my theory was correct, they would have already settled on a plan for what to do after Peck was out of the picture.
“We’re all in shock, to be honest. We have protocols for how to deal with an empty president’s chair, but we haven’t gotten there yet.”
I asked him to recount his movements the night of the murder. He protested that he’d already given a statement. This was true, I’d read it, but I made him do it anyway. I spent the next hour with him, going over every detail. He became angry, and by turns nervous and weepy.
I left the room at one point, and walked down the hall to the bathroom. It was safe to leave him. He knew I could always find him. I came back, turned the lamp towards him and made him tell the story again, in excruciating detail. I didn’t really care about the story. I was bored out of my skull listening to it again, but I knew that if I kept him on edge I could get what I wanted out of him, if I waited long enough. I offered to get him some water, and he accepted, and I brought it to him. He asked to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t let him. I made him tell me the story again. It had been hours. He must have been starving, and desperate to use the bathroom.
“Who told you that Peck was talking to the Rangers about arming the Union’s membership?”
He blinked, as if he hadn’t heard me.
“What?”
“Who told you about Peck and the Rangers? How did you know?”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“We know everything, Andrew. We know that Peck was talking to the Rangers about arming the Union, bypassing you and the executive. We know that Harry Smith hired a relative to run the night desk at the hotel so that the killer would have access to his room. We know that someone robbed Nora Cartwright, and took her pendant and stabbed Peck with it, so that it would look like she did it. The only thing we don’t know is how all of you knew what Peck was up to.”
Hensley said nothing. He sat up straight, defiant almost, and stared at me.
“If I arrest you, put you in a cell, you’ll be dead within hours. Your own people will do it. You don’t have any friends left. Only me.”
He started to tear up, and his chest heaved as he tried to hold back the torrent.
“How do I know you can protect me? Where can I go where they won’t find me?”
“Where who won’t find you?”
“Them, all of them. The whole damn cabal.”
“We can hide you. I know people who can hide you, give you a new life out in the countryside. We’ll send you to Canada if we have to, for chrissakes. But if you help me, maybe we won’t need to.”
It was then that he really broke down. He’d been holding it all in, and now I was giving him h
ope. In reality I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with him. I don’t know how much I cared either. He would probably be dead inside of a week.
“It was Wrangel, he was the point man. He had a contact, a man named Leffert,” he said, sniffling.
“Who was he? What was he providing to Wrangel and the others on the executive?”
“I don’t know who he is, but he had a New York accent, definitely not local. Wrangel knew him through Harry Smith. That was how we got the hotel suites for so cheap. Smith was going to let us stay there. But it was Leffert who told us what Peck was doing.”
“What did he want you to do about it?”
“He wanted us to keep track of his movements. I was Peck’s undersecretary, so it was really up to me to keep track of what he was doing. I prepared reports, weekly, which Wrangel gave to Leffert’s man.”
“Where was Leffert?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I only met him once. After that, everything was through intermediaries, at least as far as I know. I only prepared the reports and gave them to Wrangel. I didn’t know he was going to be killed.”
“Did Wrangel?”
“I don’t know. This went on for months. They called us the gang of six, the six of us who got Peck into office. That was thirteen months ago, and I met Leffert shortly after that. One by one other members of the executive were replaced. There was that scandal when Maisie Washington was accused of selling bad wheat to the Middlebury Agricultural combine. Willie Norton died in that accident. Deandra Moore filed for bankruptcy after her crops died. They were all replaced with people loyal to Wrangel.”
“You think these things weren’t accidental?”
“I know they weren’t. Deandra’s crops didn’t die for no reason. Her soil was poisoned. Wrangel let it slip to Wilson, who told me. Someone flew an electric ultralight over her fields at night and sprayed them. She said so much herself, but no one believed her. I mean, who has an ultralight these days?”
“I can think of a few people,” I said. My first thought was the Empire State Militia. They were the only force I’d heard of who had aircraft.
“How do you even find a field like that, in the night? Someone had to have set up flares for whoever was flying the plane. Someone local, who knew her, and knew where her fields were. These people have agents everywhere. I appreciate you guaranteeing my safety, Detective Bailey, but I’m a dead man, sooner or later.”
“Why would they do this?”
“Making sure the Farmers’ Union doesn’t join the fight against the Minutemen is in the interest of a lot of people.”
“The obvious conclusion is that Leffert works for the Empire State Militia,” I said.
“I just assumed he did. He sold the whole conspiracy to us as doing our patriotic duty. He insisted there were dangerous elements coming up in the Republic, the Rangers, and others, infiltrating our institutions, that Peck was at the vanguard of a larger movement that had to be stopped. He said he was looking out for the safety of his own country, that a strong Republic meant New York State would be safe. When we didn’t see him again, Wilson said something about other fights to lead.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Leffert? Small, compact looking man, very trim. About fifty years old. Short white hair. Missing a finger. Terrible scar across his forehead.”
I got up and thanked him for his time.
“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked.
“For now, you’re going to stay at a safe house, but we’ll have to figure out what to do with you long term.”
I didn’t have a safe house to take him to. I’d have to improvise, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. He sat there, looking at the floor. He sighed, and seemed to relax for the first time since I’d apprehended him. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how difficult his life had just become.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“I have something here on a Leffert,” Irene said, looking at her computer screen. She had sent a request for more information to her commanders at the State Troopers’ head office.
“Nothing firm, some information derived from field reports. It says here it’s a pseudonym, so no surprise there. Thought to be an Empire State Militia intelligence officer, operating out of Plattsburgh. Inconsistent physical descriptions. But a lot of reports. Coming from all over the state. Burlington, Montpelier, Rutland, Middlebury, it goes on. He’s been active.”
“Is there anything more specific?” I asked. I suppose I could have read over her shoulder, but I hate looking at screens. I can’t make sense of them and they make my eyes hurt.
“A man calling himself Leffert was suspected for the murder of a state-bonded munitions maker in Barre, eight months ago. Left town before he could be apprehended. A man matching his description but with a different name was caught breaking into the Rutland library. He escaped the local police before he could be tried. Here’s another report from the Middlebury police that a man called Levert sold bad manure to local farmers, ended up destroying about twenty percent of the crops in the immediate vicinity of the town. I’ve got another report here that cross-references his apparent presence in Middlebury at the same time that a dispute between the local Blacksmith’s Union and the Agricultural Workers Union of Central Vermont broke out. Two blacksmiths took it upon themselves to kill an agriculture activist with guns that looked like they came from out of state.”
“Jeez. Where do you even get this information?”
“Librarians write everything down, Bailey. That’s what we do. It all goes to central, and then we can look things like this up.” She gave me a dumbfounded look, like she couldn’t believe she had to explain it to me, which was fair enough. It’s easy to think that something you don’t understand is magic, when really there’s probably a logical explanation.
“Oh, this one is interesting. A man named Lavard was implicated in a dismissal case of a police officer in Morristown. The allegation was that the officer accepted bribes in exchange for information about an active case. The town sheriff arrested the officer, but he was cut loose, broke out of jail and disappeared, along with Lavard. There’s another thing.”
“What’s that?”
“All of these reports end two months ago. Hold on a minute.”
She got up and left the office, and I could hear her rooting around in a nearby room, opening and closing drawers. She came back in holding a map.
“Can you sit down in front of the computer and list off the incidents by date, with the location?”
With the map of the state spread out over the table, she started placing pins on the map for each event. It was immediately obvious there was a pattern.
“See, Hensley tells you that he first meets Leffert thirteen months ago,” she said, pointing to a thumbtack on Burlington. “The next report is out of Shelburne, a few weeks later. Then there’s the incident in Middlebury, Rutland, then Brattleboro, then Woodstock, then Barre, Montpelier, Waterbury, Stowe, Burlington again, St. Albans, and then nothing, that’s it. He toured the entire state over the course of a year.”
“Building his network, carrying out sabotage operations, testing the limits of local law enforcement.”
“And then he goes back to New York State.”
“How does he communicate with his agents?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Any number of channels. But he must be in touch. Things on the ground are changing too fast, and he would have to coordinate with the Minutemen. Their intelligence isn’t very sophisticated. They don’t have anyone as skilled as this guy apparently is.”
“What happens if we cut the connection?” I asked.
“I don’t see how we can, we don’t know how he’s communicating.”
“Then we eliminate the central node of the network.”
“Leffert?”
“Why not?”
“We’d have to find him,” she said.
“Then let’s find him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Hold on,” the mayor said. “I want to hear what their plan is.”
We were in the mayor’s office. Irene, pointing out that the only town official who had any say over what she did was the mayor (and even there her authority was tenuous), had smartly insisted that we meet with Chief there. The mayor might play a moderating influence in the discussion, and we might get our way.
“Everything that’s happened in town over the last few days has been orchestrated by a man calling himself Leffert whom we believe to be an intelligence officer with the Empire State Militia. The murders, the infighting in and between the unions, the coordinated Minutemen assaults. It all speaks to some deeper level of coordination and infiltration, beyond the capacities of the Minutemen alone. And based on reports from the State Troopers, it potentially goes back over a year, before anyone knew the extent of cooperation between the Minutemen and the Militia,” I said.
“And we’ve mapped out Leffert’s movements across the state,” Irene said. “He spent the better part of a year engaged in sabotage operations across Vermont and potentially building networks at the same time.”
“Yes, you’ve explained that, but these sabotage operations as you call them, it’s all small time stuff,” Chief said.
“As far as we know. But these may just have been attempts to probe defences, see how far he could get away with things. We think there’s even deeper infiltration. He has the entire executive of the Farmers’ Union on his side. He was able to intercept communications between Ranger operatives. What we’ve seen so far could be just the tip of the iceberg,” Irene said.
“So you want to take Bailey with you across the lake to try to find this guy? And then what will you do?”
“Chief, this was my idea,” I said.
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