by Archer Mayor
She motioned to him to sit back down and joined him in an opposing seat, saying, “Who knew when I contacted you that we’d be dealing with all this?”
“Pat yourself on the back, Doc,” he told her. “It was a good call.”
She made a face. “I wouldn’t go crazy there,” she said. “If we’d done our homework properly the first time, we could’ve headed off what may turn out to be a huge black eye. It’s not what any crime lab needs, especially in tight financial times.”
“There’s more than the fake fingerprints?” he asked.
She laid the folder on a table and opened it for reference as she spoke. “Sadly, yes, and I’ve already informed the director. That’s one reason we were able to so quickly examine the samples you brought in from Kennedy’s abandoned car. This whole case has become a high priority for us.”
“What did you find?” he asked, caught by her almost grim demeanor.
“Another reason to hang on to old evidence, for one thing, regardless of how convinced everyone is that a case is a done deal. I will spare you the scientific mumbo jumbo that will feature at the review hearing later—to the possible cost of a couple of jobs around here—and simply tell you that the GSR you collected from the back of the passenger seat is a perfect match to the ammunition remaining in Kennedy’s Taurus 65.
“What that implies, as you probably guessed when you went looking for its residue, is that the Taurus was fired too far right of Kennedy’s position for him to have pulled the trigger—assuming he was always seated, as found, behind the wheel.
“Not only that, but a new, rigorous, highly detailed analysis of the stippling from around the wound in Paine’s neck—which didn’t go beyond a visual appreciation at the time of the shooting—has determined that the distance between muzzle and target was around four feet, or lined up with the center of the car’s passenger seat.”
She paused to catch her breath and added, “That introduces a different option to the scenario that Kennedy shot Paine point-blank, as he drew abreast of the front door.”
Lester played devil’s advocate. “Maybe Paine stepped back just before impact.”
“Doubtful,” she countered. “That doesn’t fit with how the bodies were found upon discovery, with Paine’s feet almost underneath Kennedy’s car. It also doesn’t match the stippling on Kennedy from Paine’s gun, which had to have been fired almost point-blank, and it ignores what I just said, which is that the Taurus was shot from a position aligned with the front passenger seat.”
Les couldn’t deny his own adrenaline rush at hearing his theory confirmed scientifically. Still, he worked to keep his voice unemotional as he asked, “So what’s the theory now?”
“The one that fits all the evidence, and makes rational and logical sense?” she asked. “I’m almost sorry to say it. It’s looking as if Paine first shot Kennedy in the heart from close range, after which someone, wearing gloves to maintain the integrity of the counterfeit latents placed on the Taurus, aimed it through the passenger-side window from the outside, killed Paine in turn, and then dropped the gun onto Kennedy’s dead lap, making sure some of his blood was deposited on it.”
She handed a typed sheet from the folder. “That’s my synopsis. It suggests that there had to have been three people at the scene that night, and that while Paine shot Kennedy, as suspected all along, a third person then shot Paine.”
* * *
For a man his size, Keith Cory was disconcertingly meek. He sat like an enormous sack of damp laundry in the VBI’s interrogation room in Burlington—pasty pale, glistening with sweat, his comb-over looking painted onto his head—and staring gloomily at the floor. Joe and Willy sat across from him.
“Okay, Keith,” Willy began, “like I said from the top, this is a recorded conversation, but you’re not under arrest. Do you understand that?”
The big man nodded.
“Gotta say it out loud, Keith,” Willy informed him, his tone of voice supportive and helpful.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, what?”
“Yeah, I understand.”
“Along the same lines, do you swear under penalty of law that everything you’re about to say will be the truth to the best of your knowledge?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Last but not least, do you understand that since you’re not under arrest, you may leave whenever you choose?”
He nodded again.
“Speak, Keith.”
“Yeah,” Cory said wearily.
“All right,” Willy continued, sounding almost chipper—an unusual thing for Joe to witness. “I’ve already recorded today’s date, your full name, date of birth, and who else is in the room. You good with getting started, Keith?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re on a roll, then. Let’s get right to it. Do you know a man named Robb Haag?”
“Yeah.”
“From where?”
“Work.”
“That would be Al-Tech Industries, of South Burlington, Vermont?”
“Yeah.”
“And how long ago did you and Mr. Haag first meet?”
“Coupla years.”
“Give us the circumstances.”
Cory slowly lifted his head and gazed at his interlocutor. “Huh?”
Willy smiled encouragingly, enjoying the upbeat playacting for a change. “How did you meet? At lunch? On the assembly line? Walking to your cars after work? What?”
Cory blinked and looked around, as if he’d just been woken up and was establishing his surroundings. It occurred to Joe that the image might have value. Cory had appeared so deflated by their grabbing him outside the market that he’d seemingly entered a dreamlike state.
“I dunno,” he reflected. “I guess it was all that stuff. Ya know, ya work together, ya get to know the other guy. Like that.”
“But you became closer over time, is that correct?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about that. Why did it happen?”
Cory shifted his attention to the ceiling. “I dunno. We were kinda on the outs from everybody else. There were a lot of ex-military types there, and eggheads. Real snotty. Robb was smart—super smart, I mean. But he was a good guy. Didn’t treat me like crap.”
“You became friends,” Willy suggested.
“Yeah. You know how it goes.…”
“And you’re still friends.”
At last Cory made eye contact, slowly lowering his gaze to meet Willy’s. His response was familiar by now, but spoken tentatively this time—warily and drawn out. “Yeah.”
Willy uncrossed his legs, leaned forward, and shifted his chair forward to where his and Cory’s knees were almost touching. Their faces were only two feet apart when Willy asked, “What’s he got you doing, Keith?”
Cory slowly tucked his chin in, but that was as far back as he could go. “Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
Willy smiled again. “Everybody in this room knows what I’m talkin’ about, Keith.”
Cory swallowed.
“So does the Attorney General,” Willy added.
The other man’s voice was strained. “What does that mean?”
“It means that if you’re straight with us here and now, we’ll take it into consideration when we arrest you and Robb for terrorist acts against the United States and ship you to a prison cell somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico where nobody will hear from you ever again.”
Cory’s eyes widened to where the whites were visible all around his pupils. “What?” he asked, genuinely aghast.
“Robb didn’t tell you that part?”
“He said it would fuck up that prick Al Summers, and all the jerk-offs who work for him.”
“Is it becoming clear to you who’s really gonna be fucked up, Keith?”
Cory worked his mouth a couple of times before actually saying, “That’s not fair. I’m not doing anything.”
“You sure as hell are, Keith. Don’t lie to the Attorney General, o
r he might ship you south all by yourself.”
“Tell us what you are doing,” Joe said softly, speaking for the first time.
Cory stared at him as if he’d just materialized like a projection from the Starship Enterprise. “I just add them to some of the orders.”
“‘Them’ meaning what?”
Cory’s voice dropped to a near whisper. “The batteries.”
“The batteries that Haag supplied?”
“Yeah.”
“And you blend them in?” Willy asked. “A few at a time?”
Cory nodded.
“Speak, Keith.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the plan?”
“They look the same as the others. No one’ll know they’ll fail and make the drones crash.”
“And Al-Tech’ll be blamed.”
“Yeah.”
“What about the people those drones kill when they crash?”
Cory looked from one of them to the other. “What?”
“That another thing Robb didn’t discuss, and you chose not to think about?”
There was no response.
Willy got even closer, rising slightly from his seat. “This is important, Keith. How many have you added to the shipment stream so far?”
“Eighteen.”
“Is there any way you can tell the counterfeits from the real ones?” Joe asked.
Cory stared at him as if he were all-knowing. “How did you—? Yeah. I put a dot on the upper right-hand corner of each one’s label with a Magic Marker.”
“You have any at the plant right now that you haven’t fed in?”
“Only five.”
“Where do you keep them?”
“In my locker.”
“How’s the process work? How do you do it?” Willy wanted to know.
“One at a time. I slip it under my shirt—maybe during a break or lunch or somethin’—and I add it to a shipment. Take a good one out, put a bad one in.”
“What do you do with the good one?”
“Throw it in the lake later.”
Joe was struck enough by the image that he blurted out, “Any in your car right now?”
Keith Cory nodded. “Six.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, outside of the interrogation room, Joe was dialing the Al-Tech number in order to tell Alan Summers to immediately instruct his customers to pull any battery marked with the telling black dot.
As he was doing so, Willy asked, “What the hell made you think of asking him that?”
Joe was waiting for the call to be picked up. “Ego,” he said. “Somehow or another, Haag had to have a way of delivering his message.”
“Kilroy was here?” Willy suggested.
“Exactly.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Lester killed the engine and let his hands drop to his lap. He was staring at the staff entrance to the Bellows Falls Police Department, one of the odder buildings in town—purportedly an architecture student’s project years ago—clumsily built of mismatched materials, poorly designed, incompetently insulated and heated, and capped with any number of graceless roof angles and pitches.
John Patrick Hartnett—universally called Pat—was the reason Les was here, and it sat on his heart like a stone. When Lester had started chasing this case, it presented as a scientific puzzle—prints that didn’t make sense appearing as they did. Now it felt to him like all he was doing was chasing fellow cops. Ryan Paine, once the decorated hero, had become threadbare, desperate, and pathetic—saved by a bullet from being tossed onto the unemployment line. His best friend, Dylan Collier, was a self-professed, on-the-job-retirement candidate who’d been sleeping with Paine’s wife, Dee Rollins—rationalizing it by saying they were just friends. And now Pat Hartnett, the same woman’s current boyfriend, who Collier claimed had appeared onstage after the dust settled, but—according to Lester’s most recent homework—appeared to have been standing in the wings, if not in the prompter’s box, at the time of Paine’s killing.
He let out a long sigh. He didn’t have the prejudice against internal affairs so common among cops. He knew it was a job that needed doing, that most IA cases resulted in the subjects being cleared, and—in a suit-happy democracy—that IA ironically most often represented a cop’s best chance.
But it didn’t mean that he liked doing their job. He’d always prided himself on his integrity, his generosity toward others. Even people he was glad were going to jail received his courtesy and kindness. It was an aspect of his personality that he nurtured and protected.
Finding himself in this unusual role was proving difficult.
What he’d uncovered about Hartnett was possibly innocuous, but as part of his delving into the recent past, he’d included several hours reviewing the news footage of Ryan Paine’s funeral—still and video, both. He’d studied the rows upon rows of uniformed officers—himself among them—marching, saluting, presenting arms over the coffin, and mingling afterwards. His primary focus throughout, however, had remained the grieving widow, Dee Rollins.
One by one, he’d separated and identified the people most closely connected to her. Family members—hers and Ryan’s—friends of both of them, colleagues, even people assigned by the state police to deal with her needs.
Until he’d been left with a single man wearing the uniform of the Wilmington police.
Les had been slow to pin the man down. So many others were hovering around, holding Dee’s arm as she sat or rose, opening doors or making room for her as she walked through the crowd. Prominent among them, unsurprisingly, was Dylan Collier. But too frequently for mere happenstance, Les saw this Wilmington cop—always in the background, just out of sight from those in the front, consciously watchful of the cameras, and thus frequently photographed in profile only, or with his face averted.
And twice, Lester had seen where—for a split second at best—this man and Dee Rollins had locked eyes.
It didn’t prove anything, but to Les, it spoke of a connection. No other officer had hung close by so consistently, and no other person had attracted the gaze of the widow, who otherwise had devoted herself to studying the ground at her feet.
It hadn’t been difficult thereafter for Lester to label the image with Pat Hartnett’s name.
So why Bellows Falls right now? Because while Hartnett had been with Wilmington at the time of Paine’s death, he was fresh from the BFPD, and Lester—who by now was questioning everyone’s motives—wanted to find out more about him before a direct confrontation.
The sad fact at the bottom of all this was that as Les had worked his way, like a hunter circling his prey, through the tangles of this case, drawing ever closer to its primary actors, he’d become acutely aware of its no longer being a purely intellectual exercise. He was now looking for a killer—still alive, still unaccounted for, and quite possibly within law enforcement.
And although he was widely known for his sense of humor and easygoing ways—he’d been welcomed into the VBI for good reason—Lester Spinney was a good tracker of men, even more so for his self-effacing style.
As a result of this prowess, he’d become watchful of patterns, like what he’d discovered in that footage, where two people presumed to be strangers in fact shared a little-known history. Collier and Dee, for example—by the former’s own admission—and, perhaps earlier than suspected, Dee and Pat Hartnett. Along similar lines, in yet another curious overlay, Les had recently found out that Kyle Kennedy had once been arrested in Bellows Falls—by none other than Officer Hartnett.
Les got out of the car, faced the closed-circuit camera by the building’s employee entrance, pushed the doorbell nearby, and was buzzed in by Dispatch, along with a friendly, “Lester. Long time, no see.”
He entered the lobby, circled around to the radio room, and gave the dispatcher a kiss on the cheek, leaning over her counter to do so.
“You’re right, Jenn. Too long.”
The woman laughed. “You’re forgive
n. It’s not like you’ve been loafing around. How do you like VBI?”
“I’m a happy man,” he said. “It’s custom-made for oddballs like me. Is Nicole around today?”
“Right upstairs. I know she’d love to see you.”
He waved good-bye as he retreated toward the door. “Thanks, Jenn. I’ll try to drop by more often.”
“We all do what we can, Les. Don’t beat yourself up.”
Nicole LaBrie was the department’s lieutenant, a detective, and the chief’s executive officer. A years-long veteran of the state’s anti-drug task force, where she’d participated in undercover operations beyond counting, she was steady, dependable, unflappable, and a good friend.
Only a few inches shorter than he, dressed in a uniform shirt and blue jeans, she stood and gave him a bear hug as he entered the squad room on the second floor.
He looked around to make sure they were alone, which was all she needed in order to cut straight to business. “Uh-oh,” she said, crossing to the coffee machine and pouring him a cup. “Looks like you’re on the hunt.”
“I’m on something, all right. Not sure what it is,” he said coyly. “Did you know Pat Hartnett when he was here?”
“Sure. He in your sights for something?”
“Hardly. His name came up, and I just wanted to learn more about him. He worked here for a few years, didn’t he?”
“Over ten,” she said. “Longer, now that I think about it. He went to Wilmington, which you probably already know.”
“Right,” Lester replied vaguely. “It was actually one of his old cases I was interested in—involving a guy named Kyle Kennedy.”
She gave him a knowing smile, along with the mug of coffee. “That’s not just some guy. Don’t kid a kidder. What’re you up to?”
“I wish I knew,” he admitted. “I am looking into Kennedy—and what made him famous—but it’s too out of focus right now for me to tell you much. I’m still studying the puzzle pieces.”
“And two of the pieces are Kennedy and Pat?”
“Pat arrested him for DUI, back in the stone ages. Here in BF.”
“Okay,” she said encouragingly.
