Red Herring

by Archer Mayor

  His team had taken his daydreaming in stride. In fact, they each had their own method of preparing for what might be coming—trying to anticipate everything. Sammie’s forte; getting into a purely martial mental state, which spoke to Willy’s style; or simply trying to control the adrenaline rush, which is where Les usually went. Joe, they knew, tended toward a quiet place first, as if he could achieve a balance between calm and violence when stock was taken at the end of the day.

  As it turned out, none of them need have worried. Approaching from all angles, including through the woods, where several teams had been positioned ahead of time, they found no dogs, no booby traps, no snipers, and no Ike Miller.

  They did get a snarling, half-crippled old lady out of bed.

  “What the fuck do you want?” she demanded, having wrenched at the door after Lester pounded on it for ten minutes.

  Lester produced his warrant and began his speech, as Sam and others squeezed by the old woman and fanned out through the house. Joe stayed outside, taking in the entire compound, and eventually slipped inside the garage, Willy in tow.

  They located a light switch by the sliding door and found themselves in a crude, high-ceilinged, dirt-floored workroom. It was jammed with spare parts, tools, woodworking and metal-cutting equipment, piles of lumber, slabs of steel, and accessorized with an assortment of indistinguishable trash. A partially disassembled car sat in its midst, a long, cluttered work table lined one wall, near an enormous and threatening-looking cold woodstove. And a computer was located on a table in one corner, surrounded by some much abused, dust-covered, electronic paraphernalia, including a printer.

  It was the cave of a messy man with multiple interests.

  Or, as Willy put it, “This place is a shit hole.”

  But Joe was smiling, looking around. “This,” he corrected him, “is a gold mine, and we’re going to be here for a very long time.”

  By the time Joe got to meet Gini Coursen, they had in fact been there for a long time. Foliage season being by now a thing of the past, the surrounding skeletal trees threw angular shadows across the property as Joe crossed from the garage to the house. He had been told of the search results of both trailer and storage shed, just as he and Willy and half a dozen others had stayed in the garage to catalog its gifts. He knew that Coursen had not been dealing well with her uninvited guests, mostly because those watching her kept cycling out to trade places with their colleagues, shaking their heads at her relentless hostility.

  But her being left to rage alone now had been intentional. Not only did Gunther want to learn all he could from his surroundings; he wanted her to stew in her own impotence.

  Joe found her in the back bedroom, parked in an armchair that looked built around her considerable bulk. A spindly aluminum walker stood nearby, frail and puny in light of what might be expected of it.

  Joe closed the door behind him as he entered.

  “Who’re you?” she demanded.

  He located an upright chair in a corner, piled with clothes. These he unceremoniously dumped onto her bed, before placing the chair opposite her and sitting down.

  “My name’s Joe Gunther,” he told her. “I work for the Vermont Bureau of Investigation.”

  She smiled bitterly. “Good for you. Now you can get the hell out of my house.”

  “We will in a while. We’re close to getting done, and I’d like you to know right up front that if you don’t want to talk with me, you don’t have to. You’re not under arrest. You can just sit here until we’re finished and then return to your life.”

  “Fine,” she said, her eyes narrowed. “I don’t want to talk to you. You can go crap in your hat.”

  He nodded slowly, as if mulling over some inner debate. “Problem being,” he said to her, “that your life will no longer include your son, Ike. I thought you should know that.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, the eyes widening somewhat. “You don’t have Ike.”

  “Nor do you,” he said, adding, “and nor will you—ever again.” He gestured outside the door, where they could hear people moving about. “What do you think we’re doing out there?”

  “Tearing my house apart,” she ventured. “I’m going to sue your asses about that, too. Don’t you doubt it.”

  But Joe was looking at her pityingly. “We’re collecting what makes Ike, Ike,” he explained. “Believe it or not, that’s one thing the TV shows get right—we can go through someone’s personal belongings and find out everything about them. How they dress, what they like to eat, how they think, who their friends are. By the time we’re finished, we’ll know more about your son than you do.”

  “Well, isn’t that neat?” she challenged him.

  But he pretended to take it literally, sitting back and crossing his legs. “It is, actually,” he conceded. “This forensics stuff has given us tools I never would have dreamed of in the old days.”

  He suddenly sat forward, as if confiding a secret in a crowded room. “I mean, after all,” he said softly, “neither one of us is getting any younger, right? You and I have seen more than half the young puppies out there put together.”

  She stared at him, at sea on how to respond to someone this dense.

  Joe suddenly frowned, and then cast his eyes down sorrowfully. “Damn.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Well, I’m just starting to worry, is all. I mean, about your situation.”

  She was becoming increasingly baffled. “My situation?”

  Joe pointed to the walker. “My mom’s in a wheelchair. Of course, my brother lives with her, so she’s all set. Every time there’s a problem, small or big, he’s there to help.”

  Joe paused, as if moved to silence. “You’re going to be in a real bind. There aren’t many people in your life, are there? And not much money. It’s going to be tough without Ike.”

  She tried rallying her anger. “You bastard.”

  “It’s going to be like losing Ben all over again, but worse,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

  That brought her up short. “Ben?”

  He rubbed his forehead. “God, that must’ve been hard. Your firstborn. Locked away for the rest of his life. Dying surrounded by jailbirds. Like a nightmare.”

  Her fists were working, opening and closing with fury. “You are a monster.”

  He looked at her sympathetically. “I know I seem that way. You’ve had so many monsters in your life, screwing things up.”

  He let that sink in before resuming. “Those three meddling women, for example—Elise and Candice and Maggie.”

  She froze, her eyes locked on to his.

  “You know?” she finally whispered.

  He tilted his head quizzically. “Of course we do.” He waved a hand around. “Why else do you think we’re here?” Again, he dropped his voice conspiratorially. “Not that we didn’t have to work a bit. You two were clever—I’ll give you that. Making those three suffer, just as you did? Amazing. Most people just lash out. But you thought about this, didn’t you?”

  She glowered. “You have no idea.”

  “But I do,” he protested. “Spending all that time watching the apple of your eye slowly rot to death. You wanted someone to pay. A fast clean death? Forget about it.” He clenched his own fist and held it up, his voice rising slightly. “The point is to make it hurt, to make the pain last and last, to crush their hearts but not kill them. What inspired you?” he asked abruptly. “Was it Betty dying of a heart attack after Alice committed suicide?”

  Gini was disgusted by the suggestion. “That little bitch. She was a worm.”

  “Alice? But she got what she deserved,” he suggested.

  “Hardly.”

  Joe slapped his forehead gently. “Well, of course,” he exclaimed. “What a dope. She took the easy way out. I see what you mean. Betty must’ve been a little more satisfying, though, dying of a broken heart.”

  She shook her head. “She had no heart. She was all high and holy; she an
d her friends.” Coursen pointed her finger for emphasis as she asked, “Do you know anything at all about that little slut of a niece she had?”

  “I know she was very young,” Joe admitted.

  “My son was young,” she seethed. “That little whore spread her legs like a hooker and took him in just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “He was the one who was raped, mister.”

  “Still,” Joe suggested, “there are all sorts of justice.”

  Gini furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”

  Joe looked surprised. “You settled the score,” he said. “Those three threw your son to the wolves; you returned the favor, one at a time.” He dropped his voice again, as if in confidence. “And pretty elegantly, too, I have to admit,” he added.

  “Elegantly?” she queried.

  “Yeah—it was like a perfect math puzzle. That’s what scientists call a solution when it’s damn near perfect: ‘Elegant.’ Has a neat ring to it. That’s what you did. You researched your old pals—”

  “They weren’t pals,” she interrupted.

  “Okay,” he retreated. “But that’s what happened. You found out what made them tick—who was dearest to each one of them.”

  Coursen settled against the pillows stuffed behind her and smiled slightly, her expression self-satisfied.

  Joe let her bask in her victory for a couple of seconds before saying, “Of course, that just means that Ike was your tool, like a hammer or something. So, even if the judge gets soft-hearted and only gives you twenty years, it means you die in jail.”

  He got to his feet as she stiffened and declared, “You can’t stick that on me. Look at me. I’m almost in a wheelchair, too. I didn’t kill anybody.”

  He looked down at her, filling her armchair like poured lava, the layout of the room betraying that she quite obviously could get around, if uncomfortably. “Doesn’t matter. You came up with the idea; Ike carried it out. Makes you one and the same.”

  Her face reddened. “That is bullshit. It was his idea. I had enough on my plate just trying to stay alive with all that’s troubling me. You should see the pills I take. Ike kept bugging me about Ben—he idolized his older brother. He was so angry at all of you for taking him away. He pumped me for information about Elise and the others. I hadn’t thought about them for years.”

  Joe watched her carefully, studying how she was formulating her defense in front of him, hearing herself talk and modulating her argument, almost like a novelist, editing on the fly.

  “I’d be sitting here,” she kept going. “Night after night, my soul dead and my body broken, and Ike would just keep after me, asking me for details like a crazy man. Did you find his notebooks? Maybe he burned them. He would write in them every night, after talking to me. He had them divided into sections, one for each of the three women, getting all their details down. And then he’d go for trips, since what I knew was old and out-of-date, and he’d get fresh information about them. He’d tell me what he’d learned.”

  Joe had replaced the clothes onto the chair he’d borrowed and was standing by the door now. He couldn’t resist adding a little fuel to the fire before him. “Must’ve been terrible, watching him go around the bend like that.”

  She caught his drift immediately and ran with it. “It was. It was. He was crazy, and he made me a little crazy. I saw the whole horrible thing with Ben repeating itself.”

  Joe opened the door and stepped almost out of sight into the hallway, before looking back at her one last time. Caught off guard, she was staring, stone-faced and calculating, the despair of seconds earlier vaporized.

  “Good luck, Gini,” he said. “You’ll need it.”

  He closed the door and encountered Lester near the kitchen. “Have a nice chat?” he asked.

  Joe smiled. “Right. You didn’t find any notebooks, did you, filled with personal intel about Clarke, Ferenc, and Howard? It would’ve been in Ike’s handwriting.”

  Les frowned. “A notebook? Nope. Not so far.”

  Joe nodded. “I didn’t think so.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The morning paper’s front page had little room for anything beyond Ike Miller and his doings, directly and otherwise. In a late-night conference call between Joe, Bill Allard, Neal Kirkland of the VSP, and the commissioner of public safety, David Stanton—and a lawyer from the AG’s office—the decision was made to release Ike’s name to the press as the man accused of the three murders. His photo was prominently displayed, along with advice that should he be spotted, 911 should be called and extreme caution taken. Also mentioned in the press release was that a familial DNA search had played a role linking evidence to the suspect.

  This last tidbit was deemed necessary to at least attempt to head off trouble, based on what Joe reported from his meeting with Gail. And sure enough, sharing the banner headlines was an announcement that candidate Gail Zigman had roundly condemned this invasion of privacy by “elements of the police community.” Last but not least, of course, was the news announcing Robert Hildreth’s suit concerning that very topic.

  “Wow,” Lyn said, looking over the top of her newspaper as Joe poured himself orange juice at the kitchen counter. “I thought you guys were friends.”

  This was the first that they’d seen of each other for over a day, and even now, Joe had merely dropped by to shave, shower, and change his clothes. He hadn’t slept in a long time, and it looked unlikely that he’d get to soon.

  “Gail and I?” he asked. “We are. That’s why she dropped by last night. She wanted to give me the heads-up.” He changed his voice to make it sound more theatrical. “There’s tension in the air. It’s November, after all—only days to the election.”

  Lyn was still reading, largely ignoring him. “You’re mentioned here.”

  “Well, VBI is the lead agency,” he said, taking a deep swallow.

  “It’s not that,” she informed him. “Your name’s in the editorial.”

  He walked over and sat opposite her at the counter. “Really?” He didn’t like the sound of that, and suspected Stan Katz lurking in the background.

  “Yeah.” Lyn quoted, “ ‘Zigman’s stance on this issue shouldn’t come as a surprise, even given the fact that VBI field commander Joseph Gunther and she used to be romantically involved. Those readers who recall Zigman’s days on the Selectboard will remember her occasionally criticizing the very police department that employed her companion.’ ”

  “Jesus,” Joe muttered.

  “It goes on about integrity and whatever, but your name doesn’t come up again. That’s a little tacky, isn’t it?”

  Joe laughed. “I suppose. It’s not untrue, and to be honest, I told her to scream and yell all she wanted, if it would help her cause.” He pointed to the paper. “Precisely because I thought people might make the connection between us and give her marks for disagreeing with me.”

  Lyn put the newspaper aside and gave him a thoughtful look. “It doesn’t piss you off, even a little bit?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. I’m not even totally sure she and I are at odds. I had a crook to identify; the law, or at least the lawyers, gave me the thumbs-up to go down this road. I did it and we got a name. But do I think it was morally right to poke into an innocent man’s life because he just happened to be related to a crook?”

  Joe rubbed his eyes before continuing. “I think so in this case. I didn’t cause any harm; I just ticked the guy off, and he happened to be a privacy freak. But I suppose I could’ve caused real damage to his reputation had circumstances been different.”

  He checked his watch and took a last swig of juice before standing up and coming around the counter. “The older I get, the less worked up I become with all this babble. You do what you do in life. You try to make integrity and honesty and respect for others your key words, but it can get tricky sometimes, and things don’t always turn out the way you expect.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. “Back to the trenches,” he said,
breaking away and heading toward the coat rack near the door, saying further, “I’ll let you know what’s up as the day goes. You at the bar tonight?”

  “Not tonight,” she said, following him and helping him on with his overcoat. “I’ll try to be here to give you a back rub when you get home.”

  He laughed and kissed her one last time. “Now that’ll be something to look forward to.”

  She waved through the window to him as he backed out of the driveway, and then returned to the kitchen counter and the newspaper, flipping it open to page three. There, in a bordered box, was a listing of Gail Zigman’s upcoming planned appearances for the week.

  Ike Miller pulled down the bill of his dirty baseball cap and dropped his chin onto his chest so that he could barely see to walk straight, choosing to look silly over possibly being recognized. He’d been inside a gas station convenience store, near White River Junction, when he’d noticed the pile of newspapers on the counter, along with his own face staring out at him—dead center, right under the headlines. Now he was trying to get outside the building without walking into a wall.

  Back in the cold, he crossed the parking apron, forgetting the hunger that had driven him here for breakfast, and fast-tracked toward the road and the motel squatting untidily on its far side. At the road’s edge, he tilted his head quickly from side to side, to check for traffic, and of course saw a patrol car heading east in his direction.

  “Shit,” he muttered, and dropped to one knee, pretending to tie one of his boot laces.

  After the cruiser had passed by, he repeated his traffic check and then ran for cover at full tilt.

  Inside his room, he didn’t bother removing his coat, but immediately went to his stolen, battered laptop and got on the Internet to feverishly read the news. He flicked from site to site, reading too fast to fully comprehend any one article completely, but getting enough in the end to gather what he needed, including the mention that his mother had been arrested following a search of their home, and that some anonymous “informed source” had reported hearing her loudly protesting that she had nothing to do with anything and that her son had clearly lost his mind, poor boy.