The Second Mouse Page 4

  That didn’t move her. “You’re here now,” she said knowingly.

  Now it was his turn to play her. “I’m here now because the other guy thought you and I might hit it off. He’s feeling sorry for me because my girlfriend and I broke up.”

  Her face went bright red. “Oh.”

  He laughed. “Sorry, but you walked into that. I’m not sorry he did it, by the way.”

  Happily, she joined him. “Thank you. Joe, right? I’ll make sure to give you a call when I’m back in the market.” She made a show of fanning her face, cooling it off. “Okay, you win. No, I didn’t get the feeling that Newell was homicidal about wanting his house back. Just greedy, insensitive, and pissed off. And as for being capable of it, I have no idea. I never met the man and only heard about him through the two of them. But to me he sounded like a bitch-and-moaner—someone to make my own mother envious. Which also means, I guess,” she added, raising her eyebrows, “that you can never tell when a guy like that finally gets enough and snaps—like in one of those road rage situations.”

  Joe nodded and rose to his feet. “True. Well, never hurts to ask.” He moved toward the steps. “By the way, she had a cat, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. Georgia. She named her after Georgia O’Keeffe. You looking for a home for her?”

  He shook his head. “I wish I was. She’s gone missing.”

  Rubinstein frowned. “That’s too bad. She was such a homebody, too. I’ll keep an eye out for her.”

  Joe leaned in her direction and stuck out his hand again. She got out of her chair to take it in her own, smiling.

  “It was nice meeting you, Joe. Tell the other guy he has a good eye,” she said.

  “Heard you went poaching the other day. Not nice, Saint Joe.”

  Gunther shot his colleague an inquisitive glance. He and Willy Kunkle, a member of his small regional VBI squad, were tucked away in their second-floor office in Brattleboro’s creaky, drafty, eccentrically designed Municipal Building—a throwback to the 1800s—once a high school, and architecturally never more than an assemblage of forced-together puzzle pieces. The police department, the town offices, the historical society, and other odds and ends, including VBI and the low-watt community TV station, were all thrown together in a seemingly random pile.

  “How do you mean?” Joe asked.

  Willy leaned back in his chair and planted a foot against the edge of his desk. The desk was wedged into a corner, making access to the chair difficult—an elegant and loaded metaphor for its owner’s personality.

  Willy smiled. “Ooh, so coy. What’s the VBI golden rule?” He dropped his voice to intone, “‘We will not serve where we’re not invited’?” He laughed before revealing, “You went poking into that natural outside Wilmington on your own. Matthews called this morning.”

  “I was nearby when it came in,” Joe told him, hearing how lame it sounded. “I told him to throw me out if I wasn’t wanted. Was he complaining?”

  Kunkle burst out laughing. “Right. Like some wannabe is going to bitch about Vermont’s very own Dick Tracy. Not likely. No, he was sweetness and light personified.”

  As so often in these conversations, Gunther was struck by Kunkle’s ability to spice up sarcasm with biting insight. In Matthews’s place, per law enforcement’s confusingly pseudomilitary self-image, Joe would also have been hard put to uninvite a senior officer. That said, there were times when he wished Willy would stop juggling extremes and either straighten out and play to his strengths, or screw up badly enough to defeat all protection and get fired.

  And protection was something Joe knew a little about, for it was he, time and again, who had been Willy’s sole guardian angel, arguing that he should be kept on the job when virtually everyone else wanted him gone—a paradox that even an otherwise pretty straitlaced Joe was hard put to explain. There was just something indefinably worthy about Willy, as both cop and human being, that Gunther missed whenever the man earned his occasional trips behind the woodshed.

  They’d all almost lost him once. He received a sniper bullet in the left shoulder years ago while on a case, a wound that had permanently disabled his arm. The winner of an Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuit—another Gunther suggestion—Willy had resumed his post, passing a modified police academy physical, and now used his withered limb as an intimidating prop to his already forceful personality.

  Joe bypassed Kunkle’s point and went to what had stimulated it in the first place. “What did Matthews say? He hear back from the ME?”

  “He was sending you an e-mail. I love it when people phone to say stuff like that. Kind of defeats the purpose.”

  Joe was sitting before his computer, writing notes from his interview of Linda Rubinstein. He punched up his electronic mailbox. As promised, there was a message from Doug Matthews.

  “Anything good?” Willy asked after a few minutes.

  Gunther looked up over his reading glasses, his expression at once thoughtful and dour. “He’s calling it a natural.”

  “Based on the ME?”

  “Yeah.” The word came out slowly.

  “You got a problem with that?” Willy asked.

  His boss was equivocal. “Not exactly. Questions.”

  This was pure music to Kunkle, who thrived on complications. “Like what?”

  Joe referred to the preliminary autopsy report that Matthews had attached to his e-mail. “According to this,” he reported, “we have a relatively young woman. She drinks; she smokes; she probably does some drugs now and then. She’s had her kicks over the years. And now she’s dead—no signs of violence, no recent romantic entanglements gone sour, and no lingering diseases. Her lungs are a little junky, her liver could stand a reprieve, and her body chemistry ain’t what it used to be, but there’s nothing lethal anywhere. She looks like she just keeled over. The ME’s ruling undetermined, with nothing suspicious.”

  “Meaning she died of a little of this and a little of that,” Willy restated. “We’ve had those before.”

  “Yeah. But not with a father-in-law/landlord standing in the wings who wanted her out after his son’s recent death so he could get the property back.”

  Willy raised his eyebrows.

  Joe continued, “The old man had served her eviction orders. As far as we know, she hadn’t responded.”

  “So he knocked her off,” his colleague concluded, as if finding that perfectly reasonable.

  Joe thought back to Rubinstein’s assessment. “That’s the way the movies would have it.”

  “No,” Willy countered. “That would be reality—you don’t like somebody, you kill ’em. The movies would come up with a pile of crap that made no sense at all. You talk to the guy?”

  Gunther shook his head and reached for the phone. “That was Doug’s job. Like you said, the golden rule. I was playing support.”

  “That why you’re dialing now?”

  Joe laughed. “So it’s pushy support. Sue me.” He punched in Doug’s extension after the state police answering machine came on.

  “Detective Sergeant Matthews.”

  “Hey, Doug. It’s Joe Gunther.”

  The other man’s voice perked up. “Hi, you get that e-mail?”

  “I’m looking right at it.”

  “Guess if it looks like a duck, it’s a duck, right?”

  “Well,” Joe hedged, “it does look like a duck, true enough. I visited Linda Rubinstein today.”

  He could almost feel Matthews leaning into the phone, his pleasure obvious. “What did you think? Attractive, huh?”

  “And interesting. She got me thinking about the father/son dynamics with Fisher’s dead boyfriend. Did you ever get hold of Newell Morgan?”

  Doug’s voice dropped a notch. This was not the direction he’d anticipated. “I tried. Didn’t get anywhere. I talked to somebody on the phone over there. His wife, I guess. He’s supposedly out of town for a few days.”

  “You going to chase him down?”

  “I suppose, just t
o get it done. It’s not super high on my list anymore, not after that ME report. You have a problem with that?”

  “More like a bug in my ear,” Joe had to admit. “I’d love to get it gone.”

  “Be my guest.”

  Joe straightened in his chair, taken slightly off guard. Cops were traditionally more protective of their turf. “What do you mean?”

  “That if you want to interview him, go ahead. Just copy me a report. I mean, I was going to do it. But if you’re champing at the bit, feel free. Like I said from the get-go, if this does go somewhere, you’ll end up with it anyhow, so it’s a good deal for me if you want to poke into it early. You got a pen handy? I’ll give you his phone number and address.”

  Joe took them both down, impressed by the man’s affability and struck by his own ironic and miserly reaction to it: that Matthews was probably a slacker.

  Maybe spending so much time with Kunkle wasn’t such a good idea.

  “You guys going to get together?” Matthews asked after he was done.

  “What?” Joe asked, confused.

  “You and Rubinstein. Remember, I get to be best man.”

  Gunther almost choked. “Right. I’ll make sure you’re the first to know.”

  He hung up just as another call came in. “Vermont Bureau of Investigation. Gunther.”

  A woman’s voice let out a small laugh. “I still can’t get used to that.”

  He laughed back, but recognizing the caller had stimulated a strong emotional jolt, especially on the heels of Matthews’s parting line. “Hey, Gail. Yeah, you ought to try it from my end. I still feel like an impostor. How’re you doing? This is a rare treat.”

  But not all that rare. If anyone had been keeping score, they’d have said Gail had ended their union, blaming the stresses generated by his job more than her own political ambitions. Of course, that was overly simplified. For one thing, the last “stressor” had involved a nutcase from out of state who’d tried to kill her to get at Joe. No small complaint. But whatever the causal agents, they had split up, and Joe had retreated to his work, to his woodshop at home, and into an unacknowledged emotional cocoon for which his farm-bred New England heritage had richly prepared him.

  For that last reason, if for nothing else, all contacts between them since had originated from Gail.

  “They gave us a break from a bunch of special hearings they’re holding up here, so I thought I’d find out how you were doing.”

  She was a newly anointed state senator, and, as was typical with everything she took on, she was attacking it head-on. He knew for a fact that the meetings she mentioned were low-level affairs, usually skipped by the old-timers during the summer months, when most of Vermont’s citizen legislators were scrambling to do the jobs they couldn’t attend to during the half year the legislature was in session.

  But, in addition to being hypermotivated by nature, Gail was also wealthy, not just by birth but via a long-abandoned, very successful career as a Realtor. She would make being a senator a year-round job, regardless of the low pay and other people’s expectations.

  “Not bad. Things are under control, if not exactly slow.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  There was a time when he had regularly used her as a sounding board. “Not really. Crooks must be losing their creativity.”

  “How’s your mom and Leo?”

  Leo was his brother, who still lived with their mother on the farm they’d both been born on—a handy development for Joe, selfishly speaking, since the old lady now got around only in a wheelchair. “They’re good. No colds or mishaps. She was asking after you a couple of weeks ago. You ought to give her a call. She’d love to hear from you.”

  There was a small hesitation at the other end. “I will. I hate to bother them.”

  “You don’t, Gail. You never will.”

  Another pause. “Well, I can hear them getting restless behind me. I better get back. Take care of yourself, and give them my love.”

  “Will do. Take care.”

  The line died in his ear, and he slowly replaced the phone, reflecting on the irony of the two last calls coinciding—the ache of the past bumping into the giddiness of the future. But that giddiness belonged only to Matthews. Joe had enjoyed meeting Linda Rubinstein but had felt no urge to go further.

  Across the room, Willy watched him over the top of a gun magazine he was pretending to read.

  “Old ghosts?” he asked, not unsympathetically.

  “Yeah,” Joe answered, staring into middle space.

  Chapter 4

  It was stiflingly hot, the pickup had no air-conditioning, and they were moving slowly enough that the one thing circulating through the open windows was an ever-shifting cloud of bugs. As far as Ellis Robbinson was concerned, the only saving grace was that Nancy was sitting in the middle. He kept his eyes glued to the right, sightlessly watching the passing trees, but his mind was completely focused on the soft touch of her thigh and occasionally her breast as she jostled him every time her husband hit a root or pothole.

  Nancy was clearly not as distracted. “Damn, Mel. Do we always have to drive so far out?” she asked, reaching to steady herself on the scarred and dented dashboard after one impressive lurch.

  Mel would not be pushed out of the good mood he’d been in all morning. “Well,” he answered, smiling broadly, “I considered asking the state police if their firing range was available, but then I figured, you know, if I do that, it would just be nag, nag, nag, all day long.”

  He laughed uproariously, and despite herself, so did Nancy. In truth, on days like today, he reminded her of the man she married—making love when they woke up, saying nice things about the breakfast she fixed, being civil to Ellis when they picked him up at his apartment, and generally keeping the abusive, hard-drinking bully she’d grown used to under wraps. These were the moments she wished she could bottle up and feed back to him when he turned dark again—even while she knew the remedy would always fall short.

  They were driving through the steeply sloped woods northeast of Bennington, in the Green Mountain National Forest, along one of the barely visible roads used at various times of the year by poachers, game wardens, loggers, and recreational snowmobilers. These tracks wandered seemingly without purpose or direction, often ending after miles in a copse of trees or at the edge of a bog, or were sometimes simply reabsorbed by the wilderness if left too long without use. The one Mel had chosen, however, he traveled regularly to reach a rocky clearing in the middle of nowhere—his private retreat where he could shoot, drink, do drugs, or just get away from a world he didn’t much like and did his best to combat.

  The combativeness was a constant, and of late had acquired an additional edge, but as his wife had just been reflecting, the mood accompanying it was key, at least for anyone nearby. And on this occasion Mel’s mood was up.

  “There.” He pointed through the bug-spattered windshield. “You can stop your whining. Now we’ll have some fun.”

  The truck lumbered out of the woods and shuddered to a stop where, untold years ago, a rockslide had tumbled from the mountain above and settled in an oddly flat scattering of large boulders, prohibiting the growth of all but a few gnarly plants. With the forest all around and the blue sky above, these sparse green sprouts squeezing up through the rocks provided a view suggestive of the bottom of a dirty fish tank. In contrast to that wet and cooling image, though, this place was airless, hot, and dry.

  Which enhanced Mel’s sense of security, especially for what he now had in mind.

  “All right,” he said, throwing open the door and sliding out with a flourish, “let’s hop to it. Nance, set up the targets. Ellis, get that shit out of the back.”

  Ellis, for his part, was also finding Mel’s good humor infectious. In his element, in control, and in the company of those he considered his family—especially with a fun project in mind—Mel became the life of the party, one Ellis was happy to join.

  Nancy took a garbag
e bag rattling with glass bottles and old cans—her husband’s version of recycling—and lugged it across the broken field of rocks to a distant spot already littered with the shards of prior outings. Even wearing shorts and a tank top against the heat, she’d known to wear boots for the day, although they hurt and made her feet sweat. The shattered glass was already thick enough on the ground to make it slippery as well as blinding, reflecting the sun as it did in a thousand sparks. Slowly, squinting, as the men set up the guns, the ammo, and of course the beer, she placed her targets across the scarred, burning surface of the tumbled granite.

  After Nancy returned, Mel gave her a kiss and a beer, pressing a can on Ellis also, which the latter didn’t resist, and then broke out the two M–16s they’d stolen the night before and had spent the intervening hours cleaning and oiling. None of them had slept more than two hours, and that only because Mel had wanted to get his wife into bed.

  There was laughter and an exchange of bad jokes, body checks, and false punches. Finally, Mel took first honors, looking, with his beard, large stomach, and bandy legs, like an oversize G.I. Joe doll constructed of rejected parts. He fired off the first air-splitting rounds, the shiny flickerings of spent brass shells flashing in the bright sun.

  None of them wore ear protection, and the fully automatic gunfire filled the air, pierced their skulls, and stung their noses with its acrid smell. Nancy covered her ears with her hands until Mel handed her one of the rifles and insisted she give it a try. She did, tentatively at first, then with more comfort, and finally with abandon as she yielded to the gun’s steady thud against her shoulder, and the fascination of watching the continuous spray of rock dust leaping from around the cluster of punctured and smashed targets. The pure power of the moment and its attendant destructiveness hit her like a tonic, and it was only reluctantly that she yielded the gun to Ellis while her husband kept firing with the other one.

  But Ellis saw the look on her face, now glowing with sweat, and rather than take the weapon, he instructed her on how to hold it down by her hip, the butt tucked against her, so that she could spray the field in a cross burst, keeping the barrel steady with her left arm extended down forty-five degrees. As he gently positioned her hands, his back to Mel, he admired the tank top clinging to her body, took in the smell of her, and couldn’t help but notice how her nipples reflected her excitement. It took all he had to merely step back and give her a nod rather than put his hands where his eyes had just been.