Red Herring Read online

  By the time this was wrapped up, and the two cops brought to the dorm room they would share for the next few days, night had arrived and the entire campus had begun glowing from within, with hundreds of windows, skylights, and streetlamps replacing the daylight, giving the lab an appropriately industrial appearance.

  “Some place, huh?” Lester commented as they later made their way toward an on-campus restaurant/bar that Eric had recommended before heading off for his own home and family. “It’s like the place everyone in high school said I should go to.”

  “You were a science guy?” Joe asked him, enjoying how warm the air was in comparison to Vermont, if not the relative dullness of the naturally flat surroundings.

  “Not really. It was my physique. I always looked like a stork. People just assumed I was smart. Probably helped me be better in school than I might’ve been.”

  Joe trudged on for a few seconds before reacting. “Let’s hope the same thing works for our evidence—that it winds up better than we think it is.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The moon was full, bright, and opalescent, its milky shimmer coating the snow-covered countryside like a glowing layer of cream. It reflected off the earth’s white surface enough to light up the somber sides of the otherwise dark wooden buildings scattered alongside the narrow stream creasing the bottom of the gully. Overhead, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  The entire scene was eerily still and as beautiful as a Romantic painting, its canvas stretched out as far as one could see.

  “Shit,” Willy growled to himself, swinging out of the car.

  He was alone, of course, having not told anyone of his plan, including Sam. Not that she wasn’t capable of a little guerrilla action herself. But that was the problem; Willy could never tell which way she might choose—independent or company line. And lately, especially with his obsession to nail Chuck McNaughton, he suspected she’d blow the whistle on him.

  That, Willy could live without. He knew he was right. No matter if Chuck hadn’t killed Doreen Ferenc or Mary Fish with his own hands, the man was definitely dirty. And wasn’t it VBI’s mission to catch bad guys, even while distracted by an unadvertised triple homicide?

  Of course it was.

  Willy supervised the scene from where he’d parked in a pull-off beyond the compound’s dirt driveway. It was an abandoned lumber mill, not far from Guilford, maybe five miles south of Brattleboro. Dating back over a hundred years, it was a hodgepodge of metal-roofed wooden shacks, several quite large, scattered across the acreage like carelessly tossed dice. There were a few of these operations around the county, in various states of disrepair, some even functioning in their original role, timber harvesting and lumbering being viable if threadbare occupations in a rural state like Vermont.

  But this mill had fallen silent long ago, and looked it. It had sat here ever since, below the road, barely visible behind a screen of scraggly evergreens, seemingly lost to time. Even the local vandals had lost interest in making it look worse than it already did.

  Which made it perfect for its current use.

  Willy worked his way across country, downhill, through the trees, now grateful for the moonlight that kept him free from the underbrush.

  Not that there was a huge risk of getting tangled up. Willy had been trained as a sniper by the military, albeit many years ago. His area of expertise—indeed his literal killing ground—had been the jungle. His instincts remained strong, despite his lack of practice and his ironic disability, and even with the moon’s help, he still moved with the unnerving silence of a shadow slipping along a wall.

  He had come here tailing a clueless Robert Prozzo—Bobby, as Sue Allgood had called him, and the man she’d identified as McNaughton’s partner in crime.

  Bob Prozzo was no stranger to Kunkle, as was often the case with the area’s bottom-tier dwellers. Willy had even used him a couple of times as an informant, although with marginal results. Bobby was a thief, a burglar, a drunk, and more—a man self-abandoned to need and instinct. He had no inner level balancing right from wrong; he merely acted on immediate desire. It might just as well have been a physical disorder at this stage in his life, and Willy treated it as such.

  But without empathy. Willy had found himself faced with significant moral choices in the past, and had selected poorly. It had been a costly and painful journey, and could have resulted in a compassionate rebirth. But it had not. As a result, Willy wasn’t going to cut anyone any slack who even remotely reminded him of himself. His was the zeal of the reformed, demanding a brutal, unsparing honesty.

  Sue had told him that, as far as she was privy, McNaughton was using Prozzo as his front man to rip off the company. Not to an obvious extent—he didn’t want his insurance claims for lost shipments to attract attention—but even the occasional light load, paid for once in a settlement and again on the black market, could buy a lot of toys.

  Plus, Willy imagined, it didn’t hurt that every time he did it, Chuck was poking his father’s ghost in the eye. Therein probably lay the true appeal.

  Willy reached the relative shadow of the nearest building and paused to listen carefully.

  He had first picked up Prozzo as the latter was leaving his house, and had tailed him on a roundabout journey that had ended at the trucking company. This in itself had hardly been startling; Willy’s background check on the man had found him to be employed by McNaughton, giving him legal access to the property.

  But things had blurred thereafter. Willy had followed his quarry inside, and watched him cull half a truckload of high-end products from off the loading floor and an assortment of other places. It soon became clear that the strategy was to skim generally and generously, no doubt supported by an inventory control system purposefully in need of overhaul.

  A couple of hours later, in what had originally been an empty ten-wheeler, Prozzo at last headed back out onto the road, aiming south.

  And this is where he’d ended up. With Willy hanging far behind, his headlights out, Bob Prozzo took the abandoned-looking lumbermill’s driveway, and electronically opened not just the entrance gate, but the largest building’s double doors, impressing even Willy. To have an entire property off the radar in which to store stolen goods was classy enough. To have it surreptitiously wired with garage openers and God knew what security—to guarantee that a large truck could be on the open road one moment, and gone the next—that was raising the bar.

  It also made Willy wonder about covert surveillance.

  He looked up, studying the eaves and the outer corners with the small monocular he always carried in his pocket. Sure enough, he eventually located a small camera, discreetly tucked under the roof’s overhang.

  “Gotcha,” he told himself, and began considering how to approach the old barn’s entrance.

  He didn’t have to worry. The sweep of a pair of headlights touched the treetops at the periphery before taking a plunge as the vehicle headed down the driveway, also opening the gate remotely.

  Willy seized his opportunity. Knowing that as the building doors opened, all eyes would be focused there and not on any television monitors, he waited until the mechanical rumbling began before simply stepping out into the open and running for where the new arrival was headed—the ramp to the same large shed Prozzo had used.

  He arrived at the corner just as a black SUV thudded across the rough threshold of the building, disappearing into its embrace. Prozzo, and whoever else might be with him, had killed the lights to prevent attracting attention.

  They’d also granted Willy a final advantage, allowing him to tuck in behind the car, bent double and moving fast, so that he was inside and hidden behind a small stack of boxes as the double doors swung back shut and the overhead lights reignited.

  Willy watched as, in the abrupt glare, Chuck McNaughton emerged from the vehicle and stretched lazily.

  “You get it all?” he asked.

  Willy shifted his view to see Bob Prozzo approach the back of his own tru
ck and throw open its rear door with a loud clatter.

  “Lock, stock, and plasma TV,” Prozzo bragged. “You got the buyers lined up?”

  McNaughton waved that away dismissively. “You handle your end, Bobby; I’ll handle mine. Just like always.”

  It was a custom-made cowboy moment, designed for Willy to step out, deliver a punch line, and make the arrest. But for once, he’d prepared beforehand. So, he merely took out his cell phone, took several pictures of the scene, and settled back to wait for an opportunity to leave as quietly as he’d arrived. This time—given how much crap he’d catch anyhow—he was going to play it by the numbers, more or less.

  The frustration of not being able to pin even one of three murders on his top-of-the-line suspect would at least be mollified by escorting him to jail for embezzlement and grand theft, assuming his legal strategy worked out.

  Besides, Willy further comforted himself, none of this meant McNaughton hadn’t killed anyone; it just meant it wasn’t the only crime he’d committed.

  Willy was nothing if not a dog with a bone.

  Straight from a full day back at the office, Joe entered Lyn’s apartment on Oak Street, shouted out a greeting, got a mumbled reply from the bathroom, and headed for the armchair facing the woodstove in the living room.

  The apartment was on the top floor of a Victorian showcase, all excess and carved hardwood and historically accurate, over-the-top paint colors, and Lyn had honored the effort by decorating her digs appropriately. It was warm, Old World, and very comfortable. Her bar’s success had transformed a financial risk into a sound move, and he came here now as much for the refuge she’d created as to see her in its embrace—it had become a double balm for when things were running rough.

  As they were now.

  “Boy, you look done in.”

  He glanced at her standing in the doorway, dressed in a pair of flannel pajamas she knew he loved to remove.

  He smiled tiredly in appreciation. “Not dead yet.”

  She laughed, taking his meaning. “That’ll keep. First things first. How ’bout something hot to drink?”

  “Deal.”

  She faded back to the kitchen, still talking as she fixed him a cup of cocoa. “Bad day at the office?”

  “I read somewhere,” he told her, “that George Bernard Shaw once said that being attacked by critics was like being nibbled to death by ducks. I know what he meant, assuming he ever said it.”

  “I read the paper this morning,” she conceded.

  He stared at the glass-doored stove before him. He could see a pair of logs burning with mesmerizing intensity. Stanley Katz at the Brattleboro Reformer had finally discovered his bloodthirsty roots and issued an editorial demanding an explanation for the “cloak of secrecy” that the VBI had dropped over its recent investigation, which clearly invoked “the darkly disturbing images of secret police organizations so reviled in third world autocracies.”

  “I know he has to sell papers,” Joe conceded. “I just wish he didn’t have to be such a jackass about it. I can’t wait for when he’s told we actually have three murders.”

  “You two go back, don’t you?” she asked, still making industrious sounds from the kitchen.

  “No, you’re right. Nothing new there.”

  “So, what else?”

  He rubbed his eyes. What else, indeed? “I still haven’t heard from Lester on Long Island. The lab guys there are taking their time, which I hope’ll mean good news. Willy couldn’t stand just doing his job, of course, so he rounded up one of our primary suspects on a grand theft charge, which now means the guy’s lawyered up and unapproachable for anything else. I got a call from someone in New York or someplace, claiming to be from Fox News, wanting to know if I’m the cop who used to sleep with the woman now running for governor.”

  Lyn rounded the corner carrying a tray with mugs, cookies, and the artificial sweeteners and fake creamers that Joe so loved.

  “Are you kidding me?” she asked.

  “The race is down to the wire. Not much time left, and it’s no sure thing for either side. People are looking for ammo.” He thought back to the last conversation he’d had with Gail, about her own camp’s efforts in that area.

  Lyn set the tray on the low table between his chair and her own. He sat forward to doctor his drink the way he liked.

  “How do you feel about all that?”

  He looked up, struck by her muted tone. “What?”

  “Gail. Her race. If she wins, she’ll end up being your boss, won’t she?”

  He smiled at the repetition of that theme. “No more than any other governor. Bill’s my real boss, then the public safety commissioner. You could even argue the entire legislature comes next, since they could kill VBI with a single vote.”

  That clearly hadn’t addressed her concern. She was still studying the contents of her cup, not making eye contact. “A lot has come out in the press.”

  He took a stab at filling in the blank. “About the rape? It’s a big deal in some people’s minds.”

  Now she looked up. “Not yours?”

  He tilted his head, considering his answer, not sure where this was going. “It changed her life, Lyn. I’m sure it changed us both.”

  “And broke you up?”

  “As a couple?” He hesitated. “Probably. The rape made her more anxious. What I did for a living finally got to her. People rationalize memories, especially as time goes by. Maybe she’d tell you something else was to blame, but that’s what I remember.”

  He stopped playing with his cocoa and reached out to touch her forearm. “Why the questions?”

  She broke eye contact, now staring into the fire, as he’d been doing earlier. She sighed. “Just feeling insecure, I guess. Things are going well between us. It makes me nervous.”

  He could understand that. Life had not been easy for her, despite her present success. One bright light was her daughter, a journalist in Boston, but even she was a product of a divorced couple, and no one knew what had happened to Lyn’s ex.

  With a track record like that, happiness had to be considered warily.

  “Gail and I have moved on, Lyn,” he told her. “It’s a rare friendship now, but it’ll never go back to what it was. Even back then none of our friends could figure out how we lasted as long as we did.”

  “But you did.”

  Forgetting the cocoa, Joe slid off his chair and crouched by her side, holding her hands. “So will we.”

  She leaned forward and placed her face against his neck. He could feel the dampness of her tears.

  “God, I hope so,” she muttered into his collar.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Come on in,” Eric Marine gestured to Joe and Les, ushering them into a conference room down the hall from Eric’s office. “We’ve set up a miniature classroom in here.”

  Joe allowed Lester to enter first, noticing how tired he seemed. The younger man had conceded upon Joe’s return to the BNL campus that babysitting a pile of evidence had not only been more boring than he’d imagined, but had involved incredibly weird hours. Apparently, both Marine and Shepard had fit in this project whenever the opportunities arose, including a couple of times in the middle of the night. Joe was both pleased and impressed by their enthusiasm.

  The room was essentially two offices stuck together, but it had several chairs around a table and a pull-down screen against one wall. A projector hooked to a laptop sat in the middle of the table.

  “Have a seat, gentlemen,” Wayne Shepard greeted them, looking up from the computer screen. “I think you’ll be happy with what we’ve dug up.”

  Joe smiled his appreciation. “We’re up for some good news. Les also told me how you burned the midnight oil on this. We really appreciate that.”

  Shepard shrugged. “No big deal. We do that a lot. Sometimes, access to a light beam is catch-as-catch-can.”

  “Besides,” Marine said with a laugh, settling into one of the seats, “it’s fun to surprise the y
ounger guys once in a while. They think we’re such hopeless old coots.”

  Shepard crossed to the windows and dropped the blinds before sitting down at the keyboard.

  “Okay,” he began. “Knowing that neither one of you speaks our form of scientific triple Chinese, Eric and I discussed how to explain all this without sounding condescending.”

  “Thanks for that,” Lester said softly.

  Shepard punched a key on the computer to introduce the first slide. “So, here we go. We started with a good assortment of test items. As listed here, you gave us three blood deposits and either swabs from or pieces of a pair of women’s underwear, a nightgown, a suicide note, an electric cord, an empty bottle of Scotch, a pair of men’s pants, and a section of truck bumper. All from three different crime scenes.”

  The others in the room remained quiet, watching the screen.

  Shepard continued. “The first thing Eric and I decided to do was to break our findings into two separate reports, one for you, which is what you’re about to see, and another for David Hawke, which will be couched in terms he will appreciate with his background and knowledge.”

  Joe smiled. “Very delicately put. Thank you.”

  Eric laughed. “Well, it wasn’t just for you. We know you have others in your chain-of-command who will want to know what happened here.”

  Joe could instantly think of several. “True enough.”