by Archer Mayor
Collier looked at him with a sour expression. “Later, and she wasn’t a whore, if that’s where you’re goin’.”
“I’m not,” Lester said quickly, not wanting to lose his hard-won goodwill. “It’s a reasonable question. I don’t know any of you.”
The trooper took that in thoughtfully. “Okay. Far as I know, it was just Kennedy and me—and Ryan.”
“And how far back did you and she go?”
He smiled slightly. “Years. If it doesn’t sound too sick, we were like brother and sister. I guess they call it ‘friends with benefits’—somethin’ like that. Sounds better, anyhow. Ryan and I were best pals—went through the academy together, worked to get assigned to the same barracks. I guess in that way, it was no surprise we ended up sharing the same woman.”
“But he didn’t know about it,” Lester stated.
“No. He wasn’t that bighearted. Me and Dee were real sensitive about that—making sure he’d never find out. The way I looked at it, I figured Ryan gave her everything her heart needed, and I gave her … Well, the other stuff.”
“Ryan wasn’t a sexual athlete?”
Collier laughed. “You’re a funny guy. You know that? Yeah—that sort of sums it up. He was the greatest friend I’ll ever have, but … Yeah, I guess he wasn’t all that great in the sack. Feels kinda weird sayin’ that.”
“And where does Kyle Kennedy fit in?” Lester asked.
The other man smiled sheepishly. “Maybe Ryan wasn’t the only one who came up a little short?”
Lester couldn’t resist laughing. “Really? Did you know she was seeing him before the shooting? I didn’t ask you that.”
“Nah. But I didn’t care. Friends with benefits—remember? That means no attachments.”
“Meaning the same didn’t hold for her and Kennedy.”
Collier looked a little pityingly at him. “I guess not. I sure as hell wasn’t running around with a gun to shoot Ryan.”
“About that,” Lester asked, “did she ever mention Kennedy having a gun, or target shooting? Anything like that?”
“Nope,” Collier stated flatly. “Never came up.”
“Let’s back up,” Les requested. “I know it sounds like I’m beating a dead horse, but I want to get this right. How did Dee tell you she’d been seeing Kennedy?”
“That night, when she called. They had a notification team come by, like they do, and offer a chaplain’s services or whatever she needed. She turned it all down and then called me. I went over once I was sure she was alone, and that’s when she told me.”
“Details, Dylan. You know how this works.”
“There’s not a hell of a lot more to it. She was upset. She opened the door crying and I held her. She’d already told me on the phone Ryan had been killed, and I got more details through the grapevine as I drove over there, you know—workin’ the phone. But right at the door, she said, ‘Kyle was gunning for him. I didn’t know he’d do it,’ or something like that. That’s when it came out that she’d been sleeping with Kennedy.”
“You must’ve asked why.”
“I did, sure. I mean, I didn’t even know who the fuck Kyle was at first, much less that they’d been screwin’. It was seriously crazy shit for a few minutes. The way she told it, Kennedy had been growing more and more possessive, and pushing her to dump Ryan.”
“How did she feel about that?” Spinney asked, struck by how others had described Kyle’s habits with women differently.
“Not good. She loved Ryan. I know none of this sounds like it, but she’s a special lady. She’s not like other girls. Ryan was the center of her life. People get all hung up on the sex thing, but that wasn’t it with her. It was like craving ice cream or some other quick fix. She had a real appetite. But at the center of it, Ryan and she were like that.” He held up two fingers, intertwined.
Except, thought Lester, that for Ryan, the “sex thing” probably wasn’t so easily equated with a craving for ice cream—nor was his wife’s fondness for multiple flavors.
Especially if he’d found out about it.
“Indulge me with something,” Lester requested.
“Sure.”
“This is just a wild-ass, shot-in-the-dark, what-the-hell hypothesis, okay? It’s not a theory, and it’s not anything I’m pursuing. But since I got you here, I wanted to fly it by you, given that you know most of the players.”
“Okay.”
“What if Ryan did know about his wife and Kennedy? He could’ve pulled him over, killed him, and shot himself before dropping the gun in Kennedy’s lap.”
Collier stared at him as if he’d suddenly sprouted donkey’s ears. His mouth silently formed, “What?” but when he actually did speak, he said, “No aliens from outer space? Damn. I thought I saw a movie deal comin’.”
Lester was laughing. “I know, I know. I get it. But here’s where I’m going: This whole story rests on Dee telling you that Kennedy was gunning for Ryan. What if she got it wrong? He might’ve said something threatening, but not actually acted on it. I mean, you have to admit, you wouldn’t have come up with a fool stunt like that, would you? Get pulled over in your own vehicle, in a setting that’ll guarantee your plate being run before the cop even leaves his car? That is lame, ain’t it?”
Collier mulled it over. “I hadn’t thought about that. But Ryan offing himself?”
Lester continued fleshing it out. “Let’s say he’d discovered not just about Kennedy, but you, too. That would make it his best friend sleeping with his wife, as well as some other guy. If you’re right about what Dee meant to him, then he’s suddenly looking at his two best friends lying to him—you and her, both. Combine that with the way his career was going…” Lester let the line peter out.
Collier didn’t protest. He looked tired and defeated as he said, “Maybe. Dee sounded so positive, and it worked—you know what I’m sayin’? Kennedy goin’ after him so he could have her? We see that kind of dumb thinking all the time on the job.”
“In retrospect,” Lester asked, “and with this in mind, how was Ryan doing during the last month of his life? He must’ve known he was on the edge of being canned. Did you two talk about that?”
“Some. Not much. He seemed more resigned than depressed—like he was sick of the whole thing anyhow, so who cares? He wasn’t having fun anymore.”
“Are you?” Lester asked, seemingly out of nowhere.
“Not really,” Collier conceded. “But it’s a job. I know how to do it. I log in, I log out. When you get the hang of it and keep your head low, it’s not too bad.”
Neither one of them spoke for a few seconds before Collier commented, “It sounds so far out. I’m havin’ a hard time swallowing it.”
“You don’t have to. It’s just an alternate theory. I only wanted to hear your take on it. No big deal.”
Collier smiled. “You gotta admit, it would be one hell of a way to go out with a bang. Were you at the funeral?”
“Yeah. Quite the deal.”
“No kidding. And talk about a gift to the widow.” Collier raised his eyebrows. “Dee made out like a bandit there—double life insurance, workman’s comp for a monthly percentage of his salary, and a hunk of his retirement. Just that’s close to a hundred grand a year, plus, she got over three hundred grand from the government through the Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Program.”
He abruptly straightened and fixed Lester with pure fury in his eyes, once more half rising from his seat. “You cocksucker.” He leaned forward as Lester leaned back and started wondering how he could disentangle himself from the picnic table’s bench before Collier took a swing at him.
“What?” Les half yelled.
“None of that happens if you pin a suicide on him.”
“I’m not pinning anything on anybody,” Lester complained. “I was spitballing, is all.”
“Spitballing, my ass. This is the perfect frame, and you tried to tie me into it.”
He brought his huge fist crashing down onto
the table’s surface. “You bastards. The guy’s dead!” he shouted. “He died in the line of duty. So what if he wasn’t Captain America? He still did his job and paid the ultimate price.”
Lester had swung his legs out by now and stood back from the table. “Nobody’s saying he didn’t, Dylan. Take a breath.”
“Fuck you, I’ll take a breath. I got Dee telling me what Kennedy told her—that he set up Ryan and got killed in the process ’cause he was a screwup. That’s straight from the horse’s mouth, as I see it. What d’you got? Some fantasy about a heartbroken cop. Please. That’s a crock and you know it.” He pounded the table again. “I cannot believe you strung me along like that. What a flamer. Ryan Paine was a hero, you asshole. And all of you’re just gonna have to keep shelling out survivor benefits, just like you’re supposed to.”
With that, he stormed off toward his truck, almost tore off its door, and left leaving twin rooster tails of gravel in his wake.
Lester stood quietly in the following stillness, caught between that explosive display of violence and his own much cooler view of things. Because while what Collier had said was fine and dandy on the surface, it still didn’t explain Kennedy’s prints being forged on the murder weapon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Have you even been home, boss?” Sam asked, giving Joe a hug at the office’s doorway.
He smiled, patting her back while taking in the others in the room. “And miss this? I took a different flight from Mom and Leo, straight to Burlington. They were fine with it once I explained what you all were up to. You know what this mysterious USB is yet?”
“Just about to be briefed,” she replied, eyeing him carefully. She was amused that her otherwise dependably avuncular, steady, and methodical boss had given her a teenager’s rationalization about why he’d flown to Burlington rather than straight home. He may well have been interested in the contents of the USB. Who in the room wasn’t? But he could have just as easily learned of them in an email, or face-to-face with Sammie in Brattleboro three hours from now. The missing link, of course, was Hillstrom, whom he hadn’t seen in far too long. Sam could empathize.
Out of courtesy and the spirit of cooperation, they were at the Burlington PD, rather than at the VBI office, so Joe’s next move was to extend his hand to Mike McReady. “Sam’s been keeping me informed. You’ve been a rock, as always, Mike. Much appreciated.”
“You’re welcome, Joe,” McReady replied. “How’s your mom doin’?”
“For all intents and purposes? A hundred percent. In retrospect, it was the craziest thing, but—to use her words and not mine—for an old bat, she’s as good as new.”
Formalities followed, with the newly arrived Gunther being introduced to everyone in the room, including a thin, high-strung young man sitting before a computer console, who was transparently waiting for all these good ol’ boys to settle down.
McReady finally granted the man’s wish by stating, “Ned, here, was about to give us a show-and-tell concerning the thumb drive. He’s already given me his recommendation, but if we all agree with it, there’s not much time to pull it off. Ned? Take it away.”
Ned hit a key and lit up the screen. “Not much to tell,” he said in a fast staccato. “The drive contains data, and that data is encrypted.” He pointed to the image displaying what appeared to be a chaotic blizzard of letters and numbers.
“No way to decode it?” someone asked.
“Not fast. The easiest solution would be to have the password.”
McReady nudged Joe in the arm, saying in a stage whisper, “This is where it gets really interesting.”
Ned pulled the drive from the computer and held it up. “And this Trojan horse,” he explained, “is the way to get it. It’s also,” he added as an aside, “why I never use these things.”
“Everybody uses thumb drives,” a voice complained.
“Everybody puts their credit card information on the internet, too,” Ned countered. “And uses their smartphones like the entire world wasn’t looking over their shoulder.”
As the drive was in fact wedded to the sunglasses temple, he twirled it before them between his thumb and index like a bent swizzle stick. “There are stick drives that have at least some element of protection,” he began. “And there are high-security drives that’re pretty reliable. This is neither of those. In exchange for the way-groovy design feature that makes it a pair of shades, and in order to keep it affordable, they used a cheap-ass USB stick.”
He held up a finger to further focus his attentive audience. “On top of that, whoever owns this also made a personal error, because it’s not the whole stick that’s encrypted here, but just the file I showed you. That means that the rest of the device is available to us, just like the empty belly of the real Trojan horse.”
Joe smiled, less at the language and style of the speaker, and more at his own pleasure to be at last among such company again. Much as he loved his mother and was pleased by her recovery, he was delighted to be back where he belonged.
“In layman’s terms, what that allows us to do,” Ned was saying, “is to infect the drive with a virus that will allow us to read everything on it after the owner types in his password. That means the encrypted file.”
“Hold on, hold on,” one of the cops protested. “What? How?”
Ned had been well trained to the sliding scale of his audience’s computer savviness. Without breaking stride, he said, “We emplace a virus, which gives us two options. When the bad guy gets his drive back, he’ll shove it into his computer to make sure everything’s copacetic. Option one is that even if he runs a virus detector, we’ll get to watch everything he does on that computer, from then on, because our virus will be privately sending it to us, undetected.
“Option two is that, since I just made a copy of the encrypted data, if all we get back is the password for some reason, that’ll be enough, since we’ll be able to use it to access the data. Needless to say, it’ll be a lot more convenient and entertaining if Door Number One opens wide.”
“Is any of that legal?”
Sam answered, “I ran it by the AG an hour ago. They called their Albany counterpart, since we’re working on the premise that that’s where this gizmo’s from. Everybody’s good to go.”
“And we watch everything?”
“Just like in the movies,” Ned replied, “assuming the internet’s up and running. It’s not instantaneous. The stick’s got to stay in the computer for a couple of minutes to shake hands, but it’ll take that long for the user to double-check its contents. After that, it doesn’t matter. He can remove the stick and we’ll still be able to monitor his every keystroke.”
“I’m the new boy on the block,” Joe said, “so I apologize if you already covered this. But what’s the plan for getting the drive back into the bad guy’s hands without his knowing we’ve fooled with it?”
McReady answered him obliquely: “We just removed the BOL on the man who killed Charlotte Robinson.”
He showed Joe a slightly blurry but telling surveillance still of a man standing before a building entrance. “We think that’s him. He used a badge to con his way into watching the college’s campus security footage of Rachel bumping into Charlotte. To give the campus cops credit, the guy’s credentials checked out via computer; it was only a phone call to the issuing agency that told us they’d never heard of him. Based on UVM’s description and our going through their footage of the facility’s front door—we got this image. The campus cops confirmed he’s the man.”
Joe nodded. “So you’re going to put the dark glasses back where you found them, and open the apartment back up.”
“Right,” Sam said. “Until we found the thumb drive, we thought this dude was after Charlotte’s phone, ’cause it was the one item that was missing. Now, with this”—she pointed at the computer—“we’re thinking it’s a good bet he missed what he came for.”
“Meaning he’ll finish the job if he sees an opportunity.”
He then turned to the rest of the team in the room. “Everybody on board? Any more questions for Ned?”
“We gonna watch the place?” one of them asked.
“Yes, but we’re not going crazy. It’ll be low-key. The point of this is that the thumb drive itself will be our messenger. If we catch sight of the intruder and can slap a tail on him, great. That’ll be our bonus. But I don’t want to mess up the whole point of the operation.”
“He’s a murder suspect,” the same man reminded him. “And now we’re giving away a prime piece of evidence.”
“Yes, he is and we are. But if we’re right about this, and he was put in place by a higher-up, wouldn’t it be nice to nail ’em both?”
A general silence greeted this, prompting McReady to collect the glasses temple from Ned and hand it to Sam. “It’s all yours. I’ll give our patrol officer at the apartment the heads-up. To fade away after you put that back.”
“Then we wait,” Joe commented.
“Then we wait,” Mike agreed.
The meeting broke up, with most participants filing out of the room.
“You heading straight home?” Sam asked Joe nonchalantly.
“Oh … Well. I’m already here,” he replied. “Might as well drop by and see Beverly.”
Sammie laughed, confirmed in her earlier suspicion. “Right—might as well. Say hi for me.”
* * *
Nick Gargiulo slowed down and did a double take before resuming his speed and continuing down St. Paul Street. There had been no yellow tape visible toward the back of the target’s apartment building. Nor had there been the usual police car parked in the narrow driveway, as there had been for the past couple of days. Could it be the cops had released their crime scene?
He continued to Kilburn and turned right, parking in the large lot at the end of the block. It was dark, and late, and raining slightly, which suited his purposes, reducing visibility and the likelihood of people wandering around.
Dressed in black, including a hat, Nick soon became almost invisible as he stealthily and painfully worked his way north—limping still from the blow Rachel had delivered to his knee—to a mosaic of backyards approaching the rear of Rachel’s apartment building.
