Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series) Read online

  He did not mince words. “My squad and I, working here and in Philadelphia, have been chasing the men we believe killed Ben. But not just because of that. We also think they’re now hunting for someone who can tell them about Ben’s photos, which means you, Rachel, whether they know it yet or not.”

  “What?” she murmured.

  “So far,” Joe continued, “several people have been killed and/or terrorized, and we think three more have been kidnapped.” He stared straight at the young woman. “That’s why we’re protecting you. As for why we didn’t tell you what was going on, or for any other oversights we may have committed, I can only apologize and take full responsibility. Cops are not always great at either sharing information or making people comfortable in times of turmoil. Please accept my apologies for any distress. Their actions were all well intentioned and on my orders, but I took off for Philly pretty abruptly and left a few things hanging. I am sorry.”

  Rachel was staring at him wide-eyed, but her mother responded, “That’s the least of anyone’s worries. What can you say for sure about this threat to Rachel? Why do they care about a college student’s project?”

  “We don’t know why and we don’t know who,” Joe admitted. “It does seem to have something to do with the photographs, like I said, but we’re not sure what. We interviewed Sandy Corcoran, who was questioned by one of these men—there may or may not be two of them—and she said that he wanted to know specifically about the source of the pictures. Not who took them, but the person or persons who brought them to the museum’s attention.”

  “Why?” Beverly repeated.

  “We don’t know,” Joe said. “We can dream up scenarios till the cows come home, but we got nothing to back them up. One of the more obvious possibilities is that the pictures show something these two men think you know about.” He pointed at Rachel.

  “Was the man who was discovered during the excavation of Ben’s house one of these men?” Hillstrom followed up. “Mr. Bajek?”

  “Maybe. A hired hand. We traced him back to Philadelphia. We went to his apartment, talked with his girlfriend, and tried to contact the man we believe introduced him to these killers, but there again, all we ended up with are suppositions. We only think he may have been hired to help chase Ben down in Vermont, which, after he and Ben both died, seems to have led to the murder of Ben’s ex-wife—”

  “Jenn’s dead?” Beverly interrupted.

  Joe rubbed his eyes. “That was tactless. Not enough sleep. I shouldn’t have told you that way. Yes, she’s dead, and it looks like she was questioned beforehand. That’s what prompted us to drive down to see if we could get a lead on some of this, since Bajek also came from Philly. But we don’t know why she was killed, except that it may have been for the same reason: to discover who had access to the photos.”

  “But, as far as I know, Jennifer Sisto hadn’t been in contact with Ben or the rest of the family in decades,” Beverly protested.

  “We know that,” Joe reminded her. “But these guys may not have. And Bajek’s death in that booby trap, combined with Ben suddenly dying of natural causes, probably cranked up everyone’s adrenaline and made things uglier—’specially for Jenn.”

  In the pause that followed that image, Joe tried to bring them back to the issue at hand. “Anyhow, that’s why we yanked Rachel from class. If we’re right about any of this, we need to keep her safe.”

  Beverly rose and moved to the door. “I totally agree. Can you show me where the ladies’ room is, Joe? We’ve been cooped up here drinking coffee for quite a while.”

  “Of course.” Joe rose and opened the door, telling Rachel, “We’ll be right back.”

  In the hallway, however, Beverly placed her hand on his arm. “I don’t need a bathroom. I need to know what you haven’t told us.”

  He glanced back up the corridor, having spotted a small conference room earlier. “Come with me,” he said, steering her by the elbow. “I should’ve known you’d see a few holes in all that.”

  As they entered the room, she said, “If these people went as far back as Jenn Sisto, and from that, you concluded that Rachel was in danger, I’d have to be an idiot not to notice a gap or two. Rachel’s never even heard of Jenn. And I’m also assuming that your euphemism about Jenn’s being questioned beforehand means that Jenn was tortured.”

  He closed the door behind them and conceded, “You’re right. They also grabbed Sandy Corcoran and got her to give them Rachel’s advisor.”

  “Nancy Filson?”

  “Right.”

  “They tortured Sandy, too?”

  “They only scared her half to death.”

  “How’s Nancy?”

  “We don’t know. Sandy called and warned her that she might be in trouble, so we think she went to hide out at her parents’ home, outside St. Johnsbury. But we aren’t sure. The team we sent there found only an empty house, a dead pet dog, and signs that everyone at the house had been forcibly removed.”

  Beverly’s eyes grew round. “Kidnapped?”

  “We think so. But again, we don’t have much to work with.”

  “My God,” she said. “What could be so important?”

  Joe reopened the door. “Let’s get Rachel back into the conversation, ’cause I clearly don’t know.”

  They returned to the borrowed office, where they resumed their seats before Joe asked the young woman, “You want to use the facilities, too? Or are you all set?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Good,” he continued. “As you can imagine, your mom and I were chatting outside about what these guys might be after. Have you been able to think of anything, either from your research into the pictures or your conversations with Ben? Anything—no matter how small—might be important.”

  “I have been thinking,” Rachel said, almost complaining. “I can’t come up with anything. Ben was so…” She paused before saying, “Eccentric, you know? So touchy about almost everything, that I couldn’t really tell what was important and what was just sort of crazy.”

  “Early on, you told me that while he finally got comfortable with the documentary, it was a harder sell to get him to support the photo exhibition. What was it about the stills that he objected to? They fall into two distinct categories.”

  “I couldn’t tell,” she replied. “I know you’d think it was the Vietnam stuff, what with all the trauma he suffered, but he was much twitchier about the junk he photographed than he was about old war pictures. I told you that he was almost vague about those at first, as if they’d slipped his mind. I know it sounds funny, but when he finally agreed to the show—and to my including the war shots with the others—it was like he could only see them in an artistic way. He never referred to their contents. I asked him a couple of times—things like, ‘Wow, that must’ve been scary,’ or ‘What’s happening here?’ but he never answered, beyond maybe an ‘I don’t remember.’ It got to be enough of a thing that I stopped asking.”

  Joe pressed her for more. “A couple of them look like they were taken at the same time—American soldiers near or at a Vietnamese village. You can see an officer giving orders, maybe men fanning out. Was there any discussion about that? They’re the only pictures showing Americans.”

  The girl was still looking dumbfounded. “No. I never felt those particular ones meant anything special—just that the war in total had been a bad thing.”

  “Okay,” Joe conceded, straightening. “One last question. Then we’ll figure out how best to keep you safe and still allow you to have a life. Your mom has shown me the extra pictures you stored at her house. Are there more? For example, how did the college go about reproducing them? I’ve never seen anything bigger than Ben’s original eleven-by-fourteens, but the ones on display are four times that size.”

  “Normally,” Rachel told him, “they’d just print from the negatives, and there was a negative stuck in an envelope on the back of each print. But they decided instead to digitize the process and scan the negs
, so it’s all on the art department’s computer—or at least the ones that caught their eye. I’ve got the originals of what’s in the show, including a few that didn’t make the cut.”

  Joe blinked once, absorbing this detail. “Where?” he asked calmly while feeling a surge of hopefulness.

  “In my dorm room,” she answered guilelessly.

  Joe exchanged glances with Beverly. Without hesitation, she gave him the dorm’s name and Rachel’s room number, adding in an aside, “Sweetie? You have your key on you? I think Joe would like to retrieve those.”

  “If it’s okay,” Joe threw in to downplay his growing sense of urgency.

  “Of course,” the girl replied, digging out the key and handing it over.

  Joe stood and moved to the door. “I’ll be right back. We’re almost at the point of tucking you away somewhere more comfortable than this. I just have to do a couple of things first, okay?”

  Rachel smiled wearily. “Of course—as long as it’s okay with my profs.”

  “We’ll get that covered,” he answered without knowing anything of the kind. He walked quickly to the squad room near the front, where he found a haggard Lester Spinney, as ever sporting a lopsided grin.

  “Hey, boss. Figured you’d want company.”

  “Sue must be loving me right now. I thought you were heading home.”

  “She’s cool,” Les said simply. “In fact, she’s the one who told me to stay with you.”

  Joe shook his head, appreciating how the dedication of his entire team extended beyond what even he had imagined, and motioned to the agent he’d addressed earlier to join them—a recent state trooper transplant to the VBI named Tom Wilson.

  “We need to go to the UVM campus immediately,” he said, and repeated the dorm address and room number he’d just received. “If this thing is rolling the way we think it is, Tommy Bajek’s friends have either been there or are about to be.” He spoke directly to Wilson: “Which means we better round up some backup, too. Tell ’em to meet us there. I’d sooner be safe than sorry, having company where these crazy bastards might suddenly show up.”

  Wilson set to work as Les and Joe headed out at a trot toward their car, Spinney asking along the way, “Why the dorm? What’s there? They after Rachel or something else?”

  “Rachel’s got some of Ben’s photos there—including a few that didn’t make her show. It may not be anything, but given that we think these guys are killing people to get those pictures, I figured we’d better get there ASAP.”

  They’d reached the car. Lester slid into the passenger seat, saying, “Sure. What the hey.”

  Fifteen minutes later, six of them were gathered around the same car, now parked on campus, near the dorm’s out-of-sight loading dock and Dumpster area. Joe, Les, and Tom Wilson had been joined by representatives of the UVM and Burlington police departments.

  “We have no reason to think this threat is necessarily alive and well,” Joe was explaining. “But no point being foolish. The hope is that we get in there, secure the items we’re after, and get out without a hiccup.”

  Joe looked inquiringly at them all. “That seem reasonable?”

  The two uniformed cops keyed their radios to start issuing orders.

  “How’re we selling this to the public?” Wilson suddenly asked. “If it comes up? We’re gonna be pretty visible.”

  Joe waited for the UVM rep to finish his radio transmission. “You hear that question?” he asked.

  The man nodded, replying, “The kids are used to us running around, practicing training exercises or drills.”

  “Okay,” Joe told them all. “When asked, give my name as the contact for any questions.” He glanced at Wilson. “Sound good?”

  “It’ll do.”

  After another five minutes of coordinating details, they went to their separate assignments—Joe, Les, and Tom Wilson joining a UVM patrolman and heading directly for Rachel’s room on the building’s third floor.

  Much of UVM’s student housing is located in a cluster on the south side of Route 2. It doesn’t get the attention received by the central campus, with its eye-catching, high-end architecture. Most motorists pay little heed to the brick-clad, multi-storied, barracks-like buildings across the road. Joe was hoping that Wilson’s concerns about attracting attention might be helped by their being on the campus’s fringe.

  Also, although Joe had personally set this course of action in motion—and for good reason, as he saw it—he couldn’t avoid feeling somewhat odd by how mundane everything appeared all around him. Young adults by the cluster, still enjoying the cold for its novelty, and not yet oppressed by months of freezing wind and snow, spilled out of the dorm ahead. They were laughing and without concern on their way to morning classes, despite many having seen the cops spreading out.

  It didn’t last. The shared radio channel they were using, which had been muttering nonstop with the various units announcing their status and progress, suddenly stopped them in their tracks.

  “All units. We have activity on the third floor—” As the four of them began running upstairs, the interrupted transmission returned with, “Officers down, officers down. Need assistance.”

  It was too early. And, Joe realized, he’d been too lax. His presumption had been that backup might come in handy, but he’d tempered the thought because of the lack of any real threat against Rachel personally. He was kicking himself now.

  “Suspects’re coming down the back stairs,” the radio announced frantically.

  By now on the second-floor landing, but to the building’s front, Joe ordered half his number to race down the length of the hallway in support of the pursuit team, while Joe and Tom Wilson turned tail and headed back downstairs in hopes of an interception.

  It almost worked. They burst out onto the concrete walk just in time to see two figures mirror them from the building’s far end, sprinting toward the adjacent parking lot. Tom took off like a jackrabbit, with Joe hot on his heels, yelling at him to be careful and giving a breathless update on his portable radio.

  Joe also took note of the suspect in the lead. He seemed to be watching Joe directly, almost calmly, his running gait loose and steady, with a menacing, self-confident air—despite wearing a beard, hat, and dark glasses. The body language suggested that he was calculating his next move.

  Joe picked up speed, alarmed by what he was interpreting, trying to catch up to Tom Wilson. “Tom,” he called out. “Watch him. He’s up to something.”

  As soon as the words left his mouth—not that Tom had paid them heed—the man in the beard reached under his coat and smoothly extracted a long-barreled weapon that he pointed and fired without a sound at the two of them.

  Joe saw the muzzle flash just as he threw himself onto Tom’s back, sending them both sprawling as a bullet whined overhead.

  “Under the car. Under the car!” Joe yelled, rolling for cover.

  But there were no more bullets. The shooter had gotten what he wanted, which was to break their momentum. By the time the two VBI men, guns drawn, returned to their feet and looked out over their barricade, all they saw was the last glimpse of their quarry ducking into a sedan and squealing away toward the Spear Street exit and Route 2 beyond. The other cops exiting the dorm, their weapons ready, slowed their running or stopped altogether, realizing that direct pursuit was out of the question, as was returning fire. The radio in Joe’s hand filled with orders to other units to close in on the area, along with a full description of the fleeing car.

  “Think they’ll get ’em?” Wilson asked, staring intently at where the two men had once been.

  “Maybe,” Joe replied without confidence, catching his breath. “My guess is that we’ll find the car empty, wiped down, and rented out to a John Doe.”

  Wilson nodded and slowly holstered his weapon. His voice was quieter as he said, eyes averted, “Thanks for saving my butt.”

  Joe gave his shoulder a soft punch. “Too much paperwork otherwise.”

  �
�I didn’t see it coming,” Tom continued.

  Joe waved it away. He looked around at all the cops milling about the parking lot, feeling the cumulative embarrassment rising off them like heat from fresh tar.

  “You’re in good company,” he added quietly.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Bill Allard didn’t get up or offer to shake hands as Joe entered his office in Waterbury. As the head of the VBI and, technically, Joe’s only real boss, he generally treated his field force commander as an equal. Indeed, Joe was senior in terms of years served. But Bill remained the director, appointed by the governor, and as such, on rare occasions felt it necessary to play the role.

  Like now.

  “What the hell is going on, Joe?” he demanded.

  Today, however, he wasn’t the only one feeling irritable. Joe sat down uninvited and said shortly, “You’ve been getting reports.”

  “This you imitating Willy Kunkle?” Allard asked. “Not a good move. No report I’ve seen explains why homes are being invaded, families are getting kidnapped, cops are getting shot at, and people are getting killed from here to Philadelphia, all because of a museum show.”

  Joe opened his mouth to reply. Bill cut him off by waving a sheet of paper in the air. “This says that an unidentified man, fleeing the scene of a break-in, fired a gun in the middle of the UVM campus, in broad daylight, at a cop. That is correct, is it not?”

  “I was one of the cops,” Joe answered simply.

  “Good for you,” Bill countered without sympathy. “And do we know where that bullet ended up? In some student across campus, maybe? Or better still, in the windshield of a Free Press reporter driving by?”

  “There’s been nothing reported,” Joe said calmly. “It didn’t hurt that the guy used a silencer.”

  “Are they making students that stupid nowadays?”

  Joe allowed for the hint of a smile. “Blame it on texting. Kids no longer look up. So far, it’s worked.”

  “What about the two cops that were bushwhacked in the dorm? How’re they doing?”