The info showed up after a few seconds: Randall Bates, age forty-two, from Malone, New York. He was bald, blank-eyed, with a brush mustache. No wants or warrants, but had an order of protection against him from a woman named Tricia Long.
Lena leaned over and read from the screen, looked at the picture. “Yeah, okay, he’s interesting.”
Mike called BCI and had a researcher log into the eJustice database – Stephanie was off and it was a new kid named Sven. Sven plugged in the information on Randall Bates and in half a minute came back with criminal records. Bates had done seven years at San Quentin for armed robbery.
Mike hung up and said, “Real interesting.”
* * *
Another hour. They’d exhausted the small talk. Lena knew everything about Kristen that Mike knew – which wasn’t much, he admitted. “How can someone be so close to you, and familiar, and so exotic at the same time?”
“That’s a good thing,” she said. “That means you’re alive. That’s what real parenting is.”
“What did you do with your boys tonight? That same neighbor come over?”
“My neighbor, Rita, yeah.”
“Rita?”
“Yeah, I know. Bit spooky. But I’m lucky to be one of those people with an empty-nester living right next door who loves kids.”
“Is her full name Harriet?”
“Margaret. She’s got eight grandkids. Doesn’t see them much because they’re all over the country. But she seems to love my boys. Her husband spends half the night watching TV, falls asleep in the chair; she’d just as soon come over to my place.”
“Where does she sleep?”
“A sixty-eight-year-old woman, and she crashes on the couch. I’ve told her to take my bed, but she’s too polite.”
“Do the boys each have their own room?”
“We remodeled the basement, Eric moved down there when he was fourteen. He actually did a lot of the work. The kid is handy.”
“So’s Kristen. She’s always liked working with her hands… Okay, we got something.”
They straightened their spines, watched as four men came walking abreast, silhouetted by the main street lights, moving into the dark. Mike grabbed up the binoculars and had a look. Hard to really make out faces, and they were stopping at a parked car, turning their backs. One of them leaned in the driver’s side, popped the trunk. Then two of the other guys started looking around, and Mike recognized them.
“Jesus. You’ve got to be kidding me.” He handed the binoculars to Lena.
She sucked in a breath, looking through. “Fuller?”
“Yeah. Gavin fucking Fuller.”
“And that’s… with him that’s Dmitri Petrov.”
“Uh-huh. That’s the guy Steve Pritchard was fighting with last week.”
“Not only that, Petrov is one of the league guys.”
“You’re shitting me.” Mike leaned forward, squinting. “What’re they doing now?” He could see them gathered at the open trunk, but not much more.
“They’re just looking in the car. How is Fuller out? Must’ve made bail – I didn’t hear about it. He just pointed at something, now he’s laughing a little bit. And the other guy with them, that’s our Harley-driver from Dodd’s house; Randall Bates. The fourth guy – I don’t recognize him.”
“The one who popped the trunk?”
“Yeah. Must be his vehicle, don’t know who he is.”
“Gimme the tags.”
She read off the license plate number and he punched it in, waited, suddenly feeling a kind of frisson he hadn’t felt in years. Maybe ever.
“John Chapman. No warrants. He’s a… okay, he’s fifty, last known address is Ballston Spa.”
“There’s more guys coming.”
“What?”
“More guys.”
Mike saw them, a group of men, their leather clothes sheening under the street lights, on their way over from Main Street, from the bar. “Can I?” He took the binoculars and watched as Chapman closed the trunk of his car, and the men with him dispersed.
“Mike…” Lena sounded like she was getting a little claustrophobic.
“It’s okay… Hang on.”
Gavin Fuller and Dmitri Petrov stayed together, Chapman got in the driver’s side, Randall Bates greeted the others walking to the row of motorcycles. One of the bikers at that point looked toward the back of the lot, seemed to look right at Mike.
He lowered the binoculars, shoved them under the seat. “Let’s go,” he said.
Twenty-Three
“Okay: Petrov, Fuller, Chapman, and Bates. Those’re our four guys,” Mike said, driving fast through the night. “I’ll get Sven to comb through NCIC, check public records, see if there’s anything more on Chapman; it was his vehicle. We’ll see where that leads us. But if this is what I think it is, we’re going to wind up talking to the DEA. These guys are up to something. I’m guessing drugs.”
It was going on 2 a.m. Despite the excitement, Mike caught Lena in a yawn. “Let’s get you home. You got your boys.”
“I’m fine. They’re sleeping.”
“So should you.”
“Mike…”
“Alright.”
Mike slowed on the edge of town, made a turn, hooked into the residential area where Dodd lived, coming in from the back, creeping along. Killed the headlights again, drifted to a stop, the house just barely in view, a large elm providing them some cover.
Mike felt wide awake, his pulse jacked. He thought of his father, Brooklyn in the 1980s, crime and drugs everywhere.
The second motorcycle was still in Dodd’s driveway, his truck, too. The lights were off in the house, no more music drifting out. They sat for a minute. “Where the hell is Lennox Palmer?” Mike asked. “Is he in that house?”
“We still don’t have it,” Lena said, meaning probable cause to search the place. She sighed, and Mike thought she was annoyed with him. He kept watch on the house and the MDT screen beside him. They’d had Mullins drive past Newberry’s parking lot and he’d just sent an update: Chapman vehicle still in parking lot. Mike hadn’t seen anything go in the trunk or come out of it, no hand-off of any kind. But he hadn’t wanted to risk sitting there, either, and be spotted. There was a chance he and Lena had already been made by one of the bikers, and whatever was going on had been shut down for the night.
“One of these guys is tied to the murders,” Mike said. “Maybe more than one of them. I’ll bet you.”
“I told you I don’t like gambling.”
“Either Harriet got involved somehow or she saw something – maybe she told Lennox about it. Shit – maybe she told Corina Lavoie.”
“That’s a lot of maybes.”
“Remind me about Gavin Fuller,” Mike said.
“Okay, so like I said, not a big bust, he was selling Suboxone. We charged him with third-degree criminal possession, intent to distribute. Really just a nucleic bust – only Fuller and his wife. They went to county on five and ten… He must’ve just made bail.”
She got quiet.
Mike glanced over, saw that she looked drawn and pensive in the semidarkness. “What’s the matter?”
“I think I just remembered something about Lennox Palmer. Where I know the name from.”
He waited.
“Remember the case I told you about? The big sweep?”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “From your first year.”
“Right.” She moved around to get more settled in her seat. “So, a day-long sweep, seventeen suspects. I’d say there was about thirty of us; local, state, federal. The Lake Haven end of it began a little after 7 a.m. I was, you know, half-scared, half-gung-ho…”
Mike imagined Lena in her mid-twenties, ready to save the world.
“So we met for the briefing,” she said, “divided into several teams, four to five people per team. Went to the first locations in Lake Haven; most of the suspects were wanted on warrants for selling cocaine or prescription drugs. Xanax, whatever. We ended up making twenty a
rrests, including several people who weren’t on the original list. Four people left the area. Two were arrested in Tupper Lake.”
“Tupper Lake?”
“We covered a lot of ground. Anyway, we executed search warrants at two more apartments and found six ounces of heroin, two ounces of crack cocaine, LSD, ecstasy, methamphetamine. Street value of about twelve grand. It was all wrapped up, individual packages, ready to go.”
“Wow...”
“So that was what set the record. Pretty big for a small town. And during our search of the apartments, we found precursor chemicals for making meth. And that had everybody saying, you know, ‘Meth is creeping into the region.’”
Lena looked off at Dodd’s house. No activity there, Mike saw. Things had gotten quiet.
Meth, Mike thought.
“My son Eric was just a baby,” Lena said, “maybe that’s why… well, I remember this one apartment in particular…”
Mike gave her a minute, and she said, “The couple who lived there were on welfare, you know, but not getting enough money to support their habits – these were the ones from Tupper Lake. Young couple in their twenties with a kid…” She took a breath, let it go. “And they’d started trying to make the stuff on their own; one-pot bags at first, then they expand a little. Started storing some of their precursors in the fridge.”
“Oh boy…”
She was pale. “They got these toxic chemicals they’re storing in their fridge, but they’re oblivious to the fact that the toxins can seep into the rest of their food. So they’re feeding their kid; the mother makes him a sandwich, using ingredients from the fridge, and the kid gets sick. They don’t even pay any attention at first. But then he gets worse. By the time they take him to the hospital, poor kid’s almost dead from a dose of ammonia hydroxide.”
“Ah, God.”
She was quiet a moment. “That’s where I know Lennox Palmer’s name from,” Lena said. “Palmer was the caseworker who ended up dealing with the child, getting him into a foster family.”
“You remember the name of the meth couple?”
“No, but I’ll check into it.”
They sat for a while. A breeze shook the trees, scattering drops of rain. Mike was occupied, mentally trying to fit these various pieces together.
“What about any of these guys?” Mike said. “Caruthers, Randall Bates, Chapman – were they a part of this sweep?”
She was shaking her head. “I can’t remember. Maybe.”
“We need to check that out, too.”
Another silence followed, the house on Baker Street still quiet, and Mike thought back. “I remember a little about that roundup,” he said. “But not much. I was running radar back then.”
Lena seemed to rouse out of her own reverie. “Where’d you work?”
“North Hudson, pulling nights.”
She grinned.
Feeling self-conscious, he asked, “What?”
“Just picturing you working out of a rest-stop. I don’t know. Doesn’t seem like you.”
“Well, I thought it was. Mom didn’t want me following Dad’s footsteps, and I was kind of… I don’t know.”
“Hiding out.”
“Biding my time.”
She nodded at the onboard computer mounted between the seats. “Is that why you have an MDT?”
“Yeah I got used to having one in the car. You know what else I want to know? I want to know who bailed Gavin Fuller out.”
“I’ll put it on the list.”
Mike put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. “I’m taking you home.”
This time she didn’t object.
* * *
Mike leaned over the seat so he could better see Lena as she stood with the passenger door open. “Okay,” she said. “See you in a little bit, I guess.”
But she stayed put a moment, looking in at him before she winked and shut the door.
Mike watched until she was at the front entrance. She used her key then glanced back before slipping inside. The sound of her door closing rolled down to the street.
More than infatuation, he thought. In just a short time, he was feeling things for Lena Overton he hadn’t felt in years. And it worried him.
He faced forward, hands gripping the wheel, suddenly tight in the chest. He didn’t know what this was, maybe some kind of panic attack, and he closed his eyes, willed it to pass.
Molly’s face surfaced in his mind. The clarity of her was shocking – her image had faded not long after her death; in recent years he’d relied on photos to jog his memory. Sometimes he’d find something, like a hair tie hidden deep in a cabinet drawer, one of her hairs still twined around it, and the feeling would overtake him. They were both present now; that feeling, and the picture of her sweet face, living there in the car with him.
Some tragedies you were able to move past. The loss of a spouse seemed eternal.
He hadn’t been able to sit in a cruiser anymore, running radar, after she’d died. He’d needed to stay busy and keep moving. So he put in an application with BCI, took a few tests, jumped through some hoops, and a couple of months later was working death investigations.
His father liked to say, if you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room.
So, death. Death wherever he could find it. Anywhere but in his own life. And maybe he could puzzle out why a death happened, maybe find physical evidence of a crime, or get a confession. Maybe he could answer the questions of loved ones left behind. Some therapeutic value in that, or something.
But not much.
He wondered what his father would think about death investigators working for God.
Mike opened his eyes, pulled away from Lena’s house. He prayed as he drove, maybe to God, maybe to his wife, asking for permission to care about Lena Overton. They’d only just met, but he could sense it, like he’d sensed it when he’d first met Molly – this one was going to be more than a passing thing.
After driving a while, working through it, his mind swung back to the case. He cruised through quiet downtown Lake Haven, everything still and shining wet. This time he took the correct direction down the one-way street and turned into the parking lot.
Chapman’s car was still there. Mike rolled to a stop in a dark corner, grabbed a screwdriver from his glove box, got out and approached. It was going on 3 a.m. and he could hear music still emanating from the bar. Almost closing time. Nobody out, though, just a few other vehicles besides Chapman’s.
Harriet no longer had a voice, and he was her advocate. Did she die because her brother was involved in some drug operation with bikers and white supremacists like Dodd Caruthers? Did her brother want the family property as a place to manufacture methamphetamine, and had he killed her, or had her killed, when he couldn’t get his share? Mike needed answers. Her husband needed answers. The town needed answers.
He slid the screwdriver from his pocket, crouched behind John Chapman’s car. He nimbly removed the casing around the left taillight, checked to see if anyone was watching, unscrewed the bulb, slipped the bulb into his pocket, and replaced the casing. He got to his feet, grunting under his breath at his tired legs. Then he casually returned to his car and drove off.
He took the road out of Lake Haven, nothing but evergreen forests on either side, tall slender pines like sentinels in the night.
Maybe Harriet’s death was drug-related, maybe she’d talked to Corina Lavoie about something, making her a target, too. Or the whole thing was about Caruthers getting his kid taken – the kid who was hurt while in foster care, Tommy – and Caruthers, once out of prison, decided to exact revenge on the caseworkers. Lennox Palmer didn’t show up in the Caruthers case, though. That was either a paperwork error, or maybe because, like Lena said, they were looking at this thing the wrong way.
With a little luck, though, they’d learn what Chapman was carrying around in his trunk, see if it was drugs or not.
In the meantime, Mike let his mind wander. He thought
about Charles Morrissey’s daughter coming to kill him in a dream. Victor Fogarty, bereaved and enraged over his mother. Parents screwing up their kids; kids taken from their parents. Kids inadvertently poisoned by parents who’d kept bad chemicals next to the food in the fridge.
* * *
Mike found himself outside Bobbi Noelle’s apartment building, just sitting there in the Impala, looking up at the third floor where she lived. The lights were off; it was now half past three in the morning. Kristen knew he was on a stakeout and wouldn’t expect him home. He didn’t want to go home. He hadn’t forgotten about Bobbi, and even if her ex-boyfriend didn’t fit as a prime suspect, she’d been threatened, and she still had some role to play in this – Mike was sure of it.
He rolled down the windows, shut the engine off. Listened to the sounds of the night. Frogs, somewhere not too far off, doing their chirping chorus. The rumble of an engine in the distance. Maybe the local police, who were supposed to be driving by to check on her.
Then, nothing. He put his head back.
* * *
The knock against the windshield startled Mike awake. He’d been slumped behind the wheel. A Lake Placid cop was standing outside the door surrounded by a bright Monday morning. The cop passed a paper cup of coffee through the open window; his name tag read Drummond. He was about thirty, with a buzz cut and blue eyes.
“Morning, Investigator Nelson. Didn’t know you when I first rolled by about oh five hundred. Ran you and found out – you were pretty zonked.”
Mike took the coffee. “Time is it?” He groped for his phone and looked at the screen just as Drummond said, “Little before oh seven hundred. I’m just getting off shift.” He gave Mike a look. “You good?”
“Yeah.” Mike looked past the cop at the apartment. What day was it? Monday. He wondered if Bobbi had left for work, then spotted her Honda CR-V down the street, the one that looked just like Harriet Fogarty’s car.
“Alright,” Drummond said, sounding unconvinced. “Well… anything I can do for you?” He seemed reluctant to leave, like Mike needed to better prove he was on an even keel.
Next to Die: A gripping serial-killer thriller full of twists Page 25
