Chat - A Novel Part 24

He slid out of the booth, dropped two dollars on the table for the coffee, and left E. T. staring at the empty seat across from him.

Joe was halfway to Chelsea, approaching it from Thetford this time, when his pager went off. It was Beverly Hillstrom's number. He pulled out his cell phone and watched its screen periodically as he drove, waiting for the reception indicator on the tiny screen to reach the level where he could have a decent conversation. It took him ten minutes before he could pull over, predictably at the top of a hill.

"Hi, Beverly. It's Joe."

"I tried calling you," she said, "but the message said you were out of the area."

"I'm in Vermont," he laughed. "So in their terms, I guess they're right."

"I heard back from toxicology about Mr. Nashman. That is the current name you're using, isn't it? The exReady Freddy? I received an update from your office."

"Yup, that's it. The Freddy part turned out to be his first name. Anything interesting?"

"Oh, you bet," she said in a rare burst of exhilaration. "His system had a lethal dose of fentanyl."

He hesitated. "I've heard of it. An opiate? But I don't know why it's ringing a bell."

"Excellent. That's exactly right. A synthetic opioid, fifty to eighty times more potent than morphine, patented in France in the late fifties or early sixties. I had to look it up-fascinating. It's used in childbirth, to control cancer pain-anytime a truly heavy gun is required. The biological effect is identical to heroin but much, much more potent, and it's metabolized at a much faster pace.

"But the reason it probably sounds familiar," she continued, "is because, in 2002, either it or something just like it was used by Russian security forces as part of an effort to take back a theater that Chechen rebels had seized, complete with some eight or nine hundred people."

"They put gas through the ventilation system," Joe blurted out, his memory revived.

"And killed over a hundred people in the process," Hillstrom agreed. "All of the rebels died, but so did fifty hostages or so. I may be a little off with those numbers, but you get the idea."

Joe made a face. "What I'm getting, I don't like."

"Oh, yes," she reacted, "I see what you mean. You're thinking of the terrorist angle. Well, that may be, although I think that's a stretch. For one thing, I doubt that Nashman's motel room was filled with fentanyl gas-sounds a little too James Bond, don't you think?"

Joe thought back to all the careful planning that had gone into the killing of these two men. James Bond didn't seem like such a stretch.

But he played along. "How else does it get administered?"

"Any number of ways, including a lollipop. When we and the Mossad and a few others were considering it as a chemical weapon years ago, all sorts of delivery systems cropped up. I read that we used it in darts during the Vietnam War, since, in the right dose, it can knock you out in a snap."

He heard her fingers click over the phone.

"If it doesn't kill you first," he muttered.

Her mood was not to be dampened. "Right," she said brightly. "That was the problem, and why we supposedly dropped its use for that purpose-the margin between effective and lethal was too narrow. But it does still work as a painkiller."

"In more ways than one," he added.

She chuckled. "True. But your question is directed at how this particular dose was delivered to Mr. Nashman."

"Do you know?"

"I think I do. Did you find any food in his motel room-specifically cookies?"

Joe thought back. "No."

"Well, there were recent remnants of a cookie in his stomach, which I also sent along for a.n.a.lysis. They found traces of DMSO-dimethyl sulfoxide-along with the fentanyl, mixed in."

"What's that tell you?"

"DMSO is a super carrier of other compounds through the skin and other membranes. By itself, it's used as a topical a.n.a.lgesic and as a liniment for horses. It's good for joint pain. But I think it was its first application that came into play this time. Whoever killed Mr. Nashman wanted to make sure the fentanyl really did its job and was taken deep into the body systems. Putting both it and the DMSO into a cookie guaranteed that the fentanyl would hit home like a bullet."

Joe gazed out onto the snow-covered hills around him for a moment, mulling the scenario over in his mind. It was so far removed from the run-of-the-mill, whack-'em-over-the-head murder that he was having a tough time accepting it.

But he wasn't moved to challenge Hillstrom's findings. One thing she never did was stray too far into supposition. She always had the science to back her up.

He did see one loophole, however. "Doesn't it sound like overkill to you, using both?"

She hesitated. "I know what you're saying, Joe. I thought the same thing. You're asking me to theorize, though, and I don't feel comfortable doing that."

"Humor me. I won't quote you."

He could hear her frustrated sigh in his ear. "It struck me like the belt-and-suspenders metaphor."

"He wasn't sure of just the fentanyl, so he threw in the DS . . ."

"DMSO."

"Right . . . For good measure."

"You asked what I thought," she agreed halfheartedly. "But I have no evidence to back that up."

He laughed at her predictable discomfort. "I know, I know. That's my job."

"Correct, Agent Gunther."

"Doctor, as usual, one h.e.l.l of a job. I have no clue what to do with this, but it's got to be a smoking gun somehow. I just need to find which hand it fits."

"Have fun, Joe. Glad I could help."

"Thanks, Beverly. As always."

This time, since Joe had called ahead, finding Rob Barrows at his Chelsea office wasn't simply dumb luck. The deputy met him in the diminutive front lobby and led him back to the tucked-away bas.e.m.e.nt corner they had used the time before.

Barrows cleared a guest chair of a pile of papers and offered Joe a cup of coffee-not quite to cafe standards but appreciated nevertheless. The younger man was in high spirits.

"I'm guessing you've been busy," he said as they both settled down. "I heard half of Bellows Falls blew up last night."

Joe laughed. "Hardly. The gas station owner's going to get a couple of brand-new pumps, though."

"But the bad guy," Rob persisted. "Wayne Nugent-he ties into what we've been doing, right? I ran him through Spillman, soon as I heard, and made a bet right off with one of the other guys that I was right."

Joe nodded-this was, after all, in large part why he'd made the trip. He owed Barrows that much. "Yeah. He was the one who did Andy in prison. One of my people dug it out and was trying to arrest him when he took off."

Barrows shook his head. "Wow. That must've been something to see."

Joe couldn't argue the point, but he doubted that public opinion was going to be quite so appreciative statewide, especially in Bellows Falls, where sensitivities about police actions ran high.

"I also wanted you to know that I told E. T. about Nugent's connection to his son-just so you aren't blindsided later."

"I appreciate that," Rob responded. "Especially since we're about that close to nailing his firstborn." He held up his right hand with thumb and index finger a quarter inch apart.

"Really?"

"I got lucky with the hard drive we confiscated," Rob explained. "Since you were focusing on the Internet p.o.r.n material, I just went after the drug deal between CarGuy and SmokinJoe."

"And you got something?"

"Oh, yeah." He suddenly slapped his forehead. "Geez, what a dope. I'm really sorry. I forgot to ask how your brother was doing."

Joe blinked at the interruption before murmuring, "Fine, thanks. Better. Doc is pretty confident."

"Very cool," Rob said, changing topics. "You know, I did hear back from the crime lab about those tools we seized. They got a positive match between a pair of Vise-grips and the nut we found in the snow. But there were no prints on the handle-too smeared. The only way I can think we can move forward there is to get somebody to squeal. That's actually kinda why I put all my energy into the drug deal-figured if we could get somebody uncomfortable enough, we might get the information about the sabotage as a freebie."

"And it looks like you're almost there?" Joe asked, to bring him back on track. Not that he hadn't been interested in hearing the lab results.

"I knew from the start CarGuy was probably Dan Griffis," Barrows answered. "I mean, we both did, but I didn't have any proof. It could have been Barrie McNeil, just pretending to be too dumb to operate a light switch. But, in any case, I thought it might be cleaner to chase after CarGuy's correspondent first, SmokinJoe. That way, n.o.body could claim I got where I did through prejudice. Anyhow, it worked like a charm. SmokinJoe had about as much survival smarts as a deer on a highway. John Winston is his name-called Joe for short; the Winston is self-explanatory, but he actually does smoke, like a chimney. Stinks of the stuff."

Rob reached behind him and handed Gunther a file folder containing various printouts, including a color faxed mug shot of a narrow-faced man with bruised-looking eyes.

"I poked around a little to start," Rob went on. "Checked him out, talked to a few people, dug into his habits and background, put him under surveillance. And then I pulled him in for a little one-on-one. It was almost a letdown-soon as I opened the door, he couldn't wait to charge through. Gave me a full confession-dates, contacts, even had some samples at home. Not to mention his own computer, which has more on it than I know what to do with."

"And Dan Griffis is implicated?" Joe asked.

Rob's eyes widened. "Like Don Corleone, implicated, you bet. He's all over the place-dirty as h.e.l.l. I laid it all out for the SA, who brought in the drug task force. We wired Winston up and had him make a couple of buys off of Dan-just to put a cherry on top. Now we're coordinating everyone's calendar on when we should drop the hammer on him."

"When's that going to happen?"

"Very soon. I was actually going to call you about that. I figured you'd want to be in on the action."

"Tempting," Joe conceded. "But a potential conflict of interest. Too many tight corners in all this. I don't want anything coming back on me in court."

Barrows smiled. "Got it. You threw me this steak-just wanted to offer to share a little."

Chapter 22.

The meeting this time took place downstairs, in Ron Klesczewski's bailiwick, the police department's detective squad. Joe always felt odd returning to his old haunts of over twenty years, finding them both familiar and fundamentally altered. Klesczewski, at least, was among the former, looking older outside his white crime scene suit, but as comfortably in place as Joe imagined he felt anywhere. No one who met Ron out of context ever guessed what he did for a living, but he was a good cop, reliable and intuitive, and perhaps, Joe believed, precisely because it had never come naturally.

Joe, Ron, Sam, and a detective named Cathy Eakins were sitting around the battered conference table in the small catchall room adjacent to the actual squad room.

"Okay," Ron was saying, "so-Oliver Mueller. What did you want to know? Cathy's our resident expert, by the way, so now that I've brought it up, don't ask me anything."

"Same for me," Joe echoed. "Sam just told me that he'd come up on our radar and that you guys had dealt with him more than anyone else in the area."

"We have a lot of good intel growing on him," Cathy Eakins acknowledged, patting a thick folder before her. "And it's all pretty recent. He's only been up here a couple of years."

"That's what I heard," Joe said. "Sam told me his daughter was killed in Jersey by an Internet stalker?"

Eakins flipped open the folder. "Yeah. Very sad, but not particularly original. Teenage girl on her home computer, hooks up with some creep who sweet-talks her. They meet at a motel outside Summit, New Jersey, and he murders her. He was caught within two days-basically, the local cops told the girl's computer, 'Take us to the creep,' and it did."

"What was the creep like?" Sam asked.

Eakins shrugged-a no-nonsense type. "A middle-cla.s.s worker bee-a bean counter in the business office of a large bank, stuck in a cubicle for fifteen years with his packed-at-home sandwiches, his dead-end life, and his out-of-control fantasies."

"And Mueller wigged out afterwards," Joe suggested.

"Yeah," Eakins replied. "He might've anyhow, but the killer only got twenty to life, instead of the death penalty, which they still have down there. That pretty much pushed Mueller over the edge."

"She was his only kid?"

Eakins's eyes widened. "No-that part was weird. She was the middle of three. Not even the only daughter. But he still walked away from all of them, including the wife. He's up here solo."

"Still? No girlfriend?"

"All by his lonesome."

Klesczewski laughed softly. "He has us, instead."

"Okay," Joe broke in. "The reason we're interested is because we want to rule him out for our two killings-Nashman and Metz. From what we can figure, both of them were lured here by a phony teenage girl, told exactly what to do and how-all the way from what transportation to use, to how many key cards to take from the front desk-and then murdered, almost immediately upon arrival. Does Mueller strike you as someone who could do that?"

Eakins pushed her lips out thoughtfully before answering, "I don't want to be a wise-a.s.s, but what did the people working right next to his cubicle think of the predator I just described? Mueller's a pain in the b.u.t.t. He walks into closed meetings, trespa.s.ses onto people's lawns, protests without permits, gets into fights, and even decked one of our own. And, yes, he did threaten some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d who was accused of stalking kids and later proved innocent. All that makes him angry, short-tempered, and violent. Does it also make him a calculating killer? Maybe. Or maybe it takes off the steam and just makes him another of Brattleboro's run-of-the-mill wackos."

"I heard the supposed stalker ended up dead in Ma.s.s a few months later," Sam said.

Eakins let out an exasperated sigh. "You been talking to that cop-Mr. Conspiracy Theory. Yeah, I checked into that. It's bogus. I mean, he's ent.i.tled to his opinion, but I gave it a good, long look. There was nothing there. I think Mueller's a total pain in the a.s.s-don't get me wrong. But he didn't do that one. Probably the victim got into the same kind of jam in Ma.s.s he did up here, and didn't get off so lucky. Maybe the cop's just covering his own inability to solve the case. I don't know. But Mueller's alibi was solid and he's a loner, like I said-not too likely to hire a hit man."

"Let me ask it another way, then," Sam suggested. "If I pulled him in and asked him to help us out with the investigation-as a good citizen-do you think he'd shut down, or maybe give me something I could use later to jam him up?"

Eakins was unequivocal. "The second. You won't be able to shut him up. Even if you accused him head-on, he'd still talk his head off. If there's one impression Oliver Mueller has made on me, it's that he has only one cause to live for and nothing to lose."

It was slow going on the interstate, the snowstorm being one of those thick, blanketing, cotton-wool events. Joe drove north as if poking through whipped cream, the only hint of something dark in a universe of white being the faint trace of the paved road ahead. To the uninitiated, it was a white-knuckle, hunch-over-the-steering-wheel, squint-your-eyes affair. For that matter, even most native Vermonters were notoriously cautious in such weather. But Joe loved it. The music on the radio was good and the traffic virtually nonexistent, his snow tires were new that year, and he'd just gotten the news that Leo had at last woken up.

It still took him two hours to drive roughly sixty miles, and the light was just starting to ebb as he crawled around the hospital parking lot, looking for an opening. For that bit of timing, he was grateful. Driving in the dark in the same circ.u.mstances was hair-raising even to him.

He stopped inside the hospital's vaulted entranceway to stamp the snow from his boots and brush himself off.

"Hey, Joe."