by Archer Mayor
He held it up. “It’s already running.”
“Then let’s get out there,” she urged. “Tom can call us if things go south, can’t he?”
“Sure,” the techie said without looking up.
Scott needed no prompting. He rose as well and threw open the van’s side door. “Let’s go.”
South Swan ran the length of the Empire State Plaza’s western edge, cutting across the bottom of Lancaster and leading directly into West Capitol Park. That put both cops only five minutes away from where Wylie was trying to vanish—assuming Sammie’s reading of his intentions was correct.
“Uh-oh,” Scott mumbled as they jogged alongside the plaza’s tall, cold, bordering marble wall.
“What?”
He touched the earpiece he’d fit into place moments ago, connecting him to the radio on his belt. “Something must’ve tipped him off. Wylie ditched the computer—it stopped moving and one of our guys just found it under a parked car, along with a drop phone, on Chestnut.”
“His paranoia got the better of him,” Sam said.
Gagne pointed skyward. “Probably the chopper got him nervous. I bet he thinks the contents of the laptop are bulletproof, or maybe he wiped it clean, either on the run or through a time bomb device. I have no idea. But we sure as hell lost our signal.”
He keyed his radio and asked the pilot above if he’d been able to identify Wylie before the computer was dropped. He listened for a minute before telling Sam, “We’re looking for a dark suit, which might actually be helpful in this mob.”
The crowd he referred to was by now right before them—a teeming, noisy, placard-waving throng of chanters and yellers—almost all dressed in jeans and T-shirts, or other millennial garb. There wasn’t a business suit in sight.
“I told them to try to spot Wylie inside this mess,” Scott said, looking around somewhat desperately. People were milling around, looking indistinguishable from one another, additionally hard to see because of the trees covering the park’s western half. “It ain’t gonna be easy.”
Sam saw a couple of mounted police officers, comfortably sitting astride two of the biggest draft horses she’d ever laid eyes on. They were positioned near the steps of the low-slung, modernistic Legislative Office Building bordering Rockefeller Plaza, chatting and looking faintly amused by what was stretched out before them.
“I’m gonna ask them,” she told Scott before running off in their direction.
She displayed her badge as she approached, hoping to lessen any concerns they might have, which appeared unlikely, given their laid-back demeanor.
“Hey there,” the nearer one said, seeing Gagne approaching from farther off. “What’re you guys up to?”
“We’re looking for a man in a dark suit,” Sam told them, further astonished by the height and breadth of the horses. “You see anyone like that?”
Gagne got close enough to display his credentials as well. “The chopper’s with us, too,” he added.
The two horsemen exchanged glances. “Got something big going?”
“Big enough,” Sam replied. “He’s wanted for a homicide.”
The nearer cop surprised her by reaching into a pouch near his knee—at the same level as her eyes—and removing a pair of binoculars. He surveyed the crowd through the trees from his comfortable vantage point, working methodically from right to left.
“Okay,” he said laconically, handing the glasses over to his partner and pointing. “What d’ya think?”
“Yup,” was the answer.
The first one gazed down at Sam and Scott. “Forties, dark hair, long in the back like a lounge lizard?”
Scott reacted excitedly. “That’s him.”
The police officer chuckled. “Yeah. You want him?”
Sammie almost yelled out in frustration, but Scott understood what was afoot. He placed a calming hand on Sam’s forearm and asked the horsemen, “You gonna strut your stuff?”
Both men laughed, spurred their enormous steeds forward, and slowly, unhesitantly, and inexorably plowed into the midst of the teeming crowd.
It was like watching an act of nature. Scott and Sam both scrambled to the top of a nearby retaining wall for a better view, and saw the two riders part the crowd as if by magic, with no shouted commands or violent gestures or rapid movements. To Sam, it was akin to seeing twin locomotives languorously invade a herd of cattle, all of which simply made way for them.
The two cops had their target in sight, however, and moved in a straight line toward it. Scott laughed with excitement and reported, “The chopper pilot just said they’re almost on top of him. He either can’t move or he’s too scared. Supposedly, he’s just standing there, looking around like a trapped rabbit.”
In the wake created by the horses, Sammie could see clear through the assembly to where, suddenly, a single man in a dark suit emerged from the surrounding humanity, intimidatingly framed by the two colossal beasts. Gently nudged into place by their riders, the horses bookended the man, allowing both cops to simultaneously lean in, hook an arm each under Wylie’s shoulders, and lift him clear off the ground between them.
One perfectly executed, parade-ground, wheeled turn later, the mounted cops reversed their journey, leaving the startled and temporarily hushed horde behind, and deposited a nonplussed Jared Wylie onto the sidewalk.
“This who you’re after?” the one asked Sam, giving her a well-earned cocky smile.
“Thank you very much, Officer,” she told him, and added a small bow.
* * *
At approximately the same time, back in southern Vermont, Lester Spinney was parked by the side of Route 9, just outside Wilmington. Initially, he’d stopped here following his interview of Pat Hartnett in order to check his recording, which was fine, and to enter notes of the event while they were still fresh in his mind.
This wasn’t a unique situation. Many cops take advantage of an available hour, some good weather, and a quiet parking spot to catch up on paperwork. It’s an efficient and nice way to concentrate far from office chatter, ringing phones, and the interruptions of an action-filled world.
However, now that he was almost done, he could admit that homework had been the least of his concerns. In truth, he was worried about how he’d left things with Hartnett. From a starting place of suspicion and wariness, Lester had ended up believing in the man’s innocence.
Which therefore prompted the question: What to do now?
More relevantly—and this is what troubled him most—might Lester have exposed Hartnett to some form of danger? And might Hartnett, if innocent, now impulsively act on his own?
What the hell had happened on that deserted midnight road? And who’d been the missing third person?
Lester stared out the windshield, his heartbeat growing rapid with apprehension. Regardless of why he thought he’d stopped here, he was now overwhelmed by a sense of dread. He fumbled to update Dispatch of his destination via radio, started the car, and peeled onto the road, his anxiety increasing by the moment.
* * *
Dee Rollins lived off Route 100, south of the major east–west road that linked Brattleboro with Bennington. The word “off,” however, invoked a wide selection of road surfaces—from smoothly paved to dirt-strewn and weed-choked—and some significant distances over hilly, forested terrain. In Rollins’s case, fortunately for Lester, the gravel road he ended up on was well maintained and only five miles long. This was all the more auspicious, given his sketchy but growing concern—allowing him to challenge the road conditions with a dangerous rate of speed.
When he finally reached it, her house was at the bottom of a hill, on the edge of a small pond with a pasture beyond, tucked under three towering, ancient shade trees that shrouded the structure in shadow.
He paused a moment at the crest, observing and taking stock. There were two vehicles in the dooryard—Hartnett’s pickup and a sedan Lester assumed to be Rollins’s.
Letting his foot off the brake, hoping that wh
atever was spooking him was a figment of fancy or overwork, Les kept his eyes on the darkened house as he quietly rolled downhill.
Until he saw the single, unmistakable flash of a gun going off, through one of the windows.
“Damn,” he swore, racing once more to close the distance, fumbling with the radio to summon backup.
He barely waited for the car to grind to a stop near the porch steps before piling out, simultaneously running for the front door and unholstering his gun.
Banking on the element of surprise over the more cautious choice of waiting for help—twenty minutes away if he was lucky—he violated his training by tiptoeing across the porch, quietly turning the doorknob, and slipping inside.
He got lucky. The entrance led directly into a large post-and-beam living room with picture windows overlooking the pond, which in turn clearly illuminated a woman in her late thirties, crouching over the inert and bloody body of the late Pat Hartnett.
She was trying to fit a semiautomatic pistol into his hand.
“Do not move,” Lester ordered her, using the doorframe for stability and keeping her center body mass in his sights. “I’m a police officer.”
She froze in place, her body tense, the gun still in a position to be used if she was fast enough.
“Don’t think about it,” he urged her. “Place the gun on the floor.”
She hesitated.
“NOW!” he yelled at the top of his voice.
She jumped slightly, as if hit by an electrical charge, and finally acted on his command.
“Now walk backwards five feet, lie down, and stretch out on your face—arms and legs out straight.”
“I was defending myself,” she said, beginning to turn toward him.
“DO IT!” he screamed.
She bowed her head in submission, and again did as she’d been told.
He moved toward her, his arm outstretched and his finger on the trigger, at the same time removing his handcuffs from his belt. Once he reached her, he placed one knee gently but firmly against her upper back, pinning her in place, before quickly securing his gun and buckling her wrists together.
“That hurts,” she said.
He ignored her, quickly ran both hands down her body to make sure she had no other weapons, and shifted over to Hartnett’s pale, still body.
The man had a gaping hole in the chest, no pulse, and there was relatively little blood on the wooden floor—an indicator that Hartnett’s heart had been stopped almost before he hit the ground.
Lester fought off the guilt threatening to overtake him. He should have figured this out; he should have acted sooner.
“The cuffs are hurting,” Dee Rollins complained from behind him.
The entitled whine in her voice brought him back. He swiveled around, now focused solely on a checklist of crucial things to do.
He pulled out his cell phone first, called Dispatch, officially declared Pat Hartnett dead, and followed the standard homicide protocol of requests and needs, from notification of the medical examiner and state’s attorney to putting the closest funeral home on standby.
He then pocketed the phone, produced his recorder again, and turned it on. He recited his name, the date and time, and the name of the woman he was with, insisting that she state and spell that name and her date of birth. He then rattled off Miranda and seamlessly received her waiver of rights. Through it all, he was direct, emotionless, clear-spoken, and businesslike.
He was also on a mission he absolutely did not want to fail.
“Why did you kill Kyle Kennedy?”
Still lying on her front, her head twisted toward him on the hard floor, she nevertheless managed to look startled.
“What? What’re you talking about? Ryan did that,” she stammered.
“But you were there,” he insisted. “And you shot Ryan. I want it all from the top, Dee. I witnessed you shooting Officer Hartnett through the window just now. That leaves you with one choice only, which is to be completely truthful with me. What just happened is the last act of something that started three years ago, as Ryan was running out of gas as a state trooper, and you were running out of patience with him.”
She lay still, absorbing his words.
“Why was Kyle Kennedy targeted that night, Dee?”
He watched her face, his own sense of purpose sharpening his perception, helping him to read her features, which, to his relief, seemed to be registering an almost calming sense of resignation.
“You were angry,” he suggested.
“He dumped me,” she said.
Lester remembered Dylan Collier’s story—fed to him by this same woman—how Kennedy had been gunning for Paine in order to have Dee for himself. It had been the perfect bit of fiction to make the pieces fall into place, and the exact reverse of what actually occurred.
“Who do you mean by ‘he’?” Les demanded. “I need names. Right here, right now. This is what’s going to help you from being thrown to the feds and the death penalty. Do you understand?”
She did. After a moment, she said slowly, “Kyle Kennedy dumped me. I hated him for it.”
“So you conspired to kill him,” he stated.
“Yes.”
“Why all the theatrics? Why involve your husband?”
“My husband,” she sneered. “What a douchebag. All he was worth was the money I could get out of him. It was like figuring out the combination of a safe—how to line up the right numbers.”
Lester was following along. “His death benefits,” he suggested.
She smiled. “Yeah.”
But he needed the missing pieces.
“What did you tell Ryan to get him to play along?”
She actually chuckled. “He was so stupid. I could always count on that. I told him I’d been bitchy lately because Kyle had raped me one night, when Ryan was on duty. I’d gone to a bar and this man had put the moves on me, and followed me out. You know the routine. Blah, blah, blah. The stupid fucker swallowed it all. It was easy to move him from calling his pals to settling things on our own. I just had to make him think it was his idea.”
“What was?” Lester prompted her.
“He would shoot Kyle, we’d both fake Kyle wounding him, and him and me would end up with my so-called rapist dead, and Ryan drowning in awards, a pension, line-of-duty bennies, the works. I even told him there could be a movie deal down the line, if we played it right.”
“Who came up with faking Kyle’s fingerprints on the gun?”
“Ryan did,” she exclaimed, enjoying her orchestrations. “Can you believe it? He read an article as part of a training. I had to help him, of course, even after I stole the print card from Bellows Falls, when I was hanging out with Pat—not that Ryan knew anything about that. Ryan couldn’t figure out how to get the prints off the card and onto the gun, of course. It wasn’t hard, though—not in a world filled with computers and scanners and printers and YouTube.”
“You stole the gun from Kyle,” Lester suggested.
“Well, duh,” she said scornfully. “He was another penis in search of a brain. Total dumb-ass.”
Lester had her on a roll now. Even in her absurd and hopeless position, her ego was triumphant.
“Where were you the night Ryan pulled Kyle over?”
“In another car, nearby. I had to play both of them—get Kyle to be at the right place, right time—on a deserted piece of road—and tell Ryan that I’d heard through the grapevine about Kyle’s regular night driving routine. That took some figuring out, ’cause I didn’t want to leave any messages on Kyle’s phone or his answering machine.”
Lester recalled how Collier had been fed the story that Kyle had simply driven back and forth over a series of nights, waiting to be pulled over by Paine. Dee had indeed been hard at work.
“All right,” Lester continued. “So Ryan pulls over Kyle at a prearranged spot, and then what? Ryan phones you to join him while he’s officially radioing in the stop?”
“Pretty much,” she
agreed. “Ryan was super mad, which was kind of funny later. At the time, I was worried that he’d screw it up. But he was a well-trained dog and followed the rules and did all that crap you people do when you pull people over. Anyhow,” she went on, sounding almost conversational by now. “He finished that part, walked up to Kyle’s window, and blew him away. Bam. If I’d halfway liked the loser, I would’ve been proud.”
“But instead?” Lester asked leadingly.
She laughed. “Right. Instead, I leaned in through Kyle’s passenger window, like we’d planned, and I shot Ryan. You should’ve seen the look on his face when he realized what I’d done.”
“What were you supposed to do?”
“Hit him in the arm. Like in a Western or something.”
Lester thought back to the autopsy photos of Ryan Paine. “You almost messed it up,” he couldn’t resist saying. “Hitting him in the neck.”
“Whatever,” she replied dismissively. “He died, didn’t he?”
Lester cast a mournful glance at Pat Hartnett before returning to her sullen, angry face. “They all did,” he said, “and now you’ll pay the price for at least two of them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Susan Spinney quietly stepped into her husband’s office and stood by the door, watching him. It wasn’t really an office, nor the “man cave” he kept calling it. More of a messy, cluttered closet in which he could sit and stare out the window.
As he was doing now.
She loved this man, in many ways precisely for times like this, when despite his maleness and cop-ness and his tendency to make light of everything, he showed a frailty, an empathy, and a sadness reflecting the world he worked in. Day after day, through the decades, she’d witnessed his journey through rapes and murders and domestic violence and more, nurturing his sense of humor and love of family, while watching the toll of his job slowly eating into his soul.
“You okay?” she asked.
He turned from his view of the backyard, in which their guests—Joe, Beverly, and Rachel; Willy, Sam, and Emma—were sitting, chatting, or tending to the barbecue grill, along with Dave and Wendy, and gave her a tender half smile.
“Sure.”
