In a shaft of light from a small window tucked under the gable, I opened the envelope and peered inside. A nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol gleamed back at me.
“It’s that cop’s gun,” Neal explained. “I was supposed to get rid of it. It’s got Norm’s fingerprints on it.”
I WAS STANDING AT THE SECOND-FLOOR
window of the State’s Attorney’s reception area, my hands in my pockets, looking at Brattleboro’s rush-hour traffic. I was lost in thought.
An arm slipped through mine. “How’re you doing?”
I looked down into Gail’s face. “Hey, there. I was just thinking I should be in an incredibly upbeat mood.”
“Which you’re not.”
“I’m not complaining. Kathy Bartlett’s down the hall cutting a deal with Gault’s lawyer so he’ll spill his guts about Norm Bouch. I got an eyewitness to Norm killing Jasper Morgan, a gun with his prints on it, and an electric blanket from Bouch’s apartment with chemical traces of Morgan’s blood. And Bartlett told me that at the inquest, Jan Bouch admitted the whole case against Brian Padget was a frame. She said Norm not only broke into Padget’s place, spiked his aftershave, and dropped that bag of coke into the toilet tank, but that he watered Brian’s gas tank so Emily Doyle would get sucked into the mess with him.”
“Sounds Christmas wrapped.”
“Except the box is empty.” I pointed with my chin at the passing traffic. “I saw Bouch early this morning—I’m pretty sure it was him. He was staking out Gault’s office, probably getting ready to knock him off. An hour ago, I heard they’d found the van he was driving, abandoned on some logging trail… It’s hard to celebrate when the bad guy is still out there.”
“If there’s one thing I’m learning in this job,” Gail said gently, “it’s that you have to settle for what you can get. Brian’s off the hook, and Jan and her kids are headed for a better life. Those are real accomplishments. Bouch will get what he deserves, even if you aren’t the one to give it to him. That’s the way it works out sometimes.”
I smiled and kissed her.
Kathy Bartlett stepped into the corridor and joined us, speaking in a theatrical whisper. “I can’t believe I’m locked in a room with two slimy chiselers, while you two are necking out here.”
“Things going well, are they?” I asked.
Her voice returned to normal. “Actually, not too bad. We’ve gone from where Gault was going to take the fifth, to where he’s going to give us everything we want.”
I thought of the comments I’d just exchanged with Gail. “In return for… ?”
Bartlett smiled. “Use and derivative use immunity, meaning we not only can’t use his own testimony against him, we can’t use anything we discover as a result of that testimony.”
“So he walks away clean as a baby,” I said unhappily.
Bartlett shrugged. “True, but about as poor, too. Steve Kiley’ll love this part. It turns out we’re talking about a lot of property—one to one-and-a-half million dollars’ worth—including Norm’s apartment in Burlington, since he was renting from himself. He’s got apartments, houses, and small businesses all over the state. Once I channel it through federal forfeiture proceedings, we should all be a whole lot richer. It’s been a particular pleasure reminding Mr. Gault of that fact, and that we’ll be watching him like a hawk from now on.”
“So you’re all set?” I asked her.
“We’ll still do the inquest, to formalize everything, but it looks pretty solid.”
There was a small, awkward pause after she finished, all three of us thinking the same thing.
“Except for Norm,” Kathy finally added.
“Right,” I agreed.
· · ·
I found Jonathon Michael back at the police department, working with Sammie and Ron Klesczewski to transfer all they had on the murders of Jasper Morgan and the mysterious skeleton to the AG’s office. Peter Neal had only known the youngster as Billy and claimed he’d been beaten to death by Morgan and Bouch together, an accusation we all knew would probably never make it to court.
We were about an hour into this process when the phone rang and Ron handed it to me.
It was Gail. “I just got a call from Women For Women. Jan Bouch has disappeared.”
“Damn.” I waved my hand to catch Jonathon’s attention.
“I’ll meet you there,” Gail said, and hung up before I could protest.
We drove over in silence, dreading that Norm Bouch had been at work. Gail was already in the parking lot, talking with Susan Raffner, the director and an old friend of hers.
“How long do you think she’s been gone?” I asked Susan.
“It could be a couple of hours. We check on them periodically, but they aren’t under lock and key.”
“And you have no idea where she might’ve gone?”
Susan shook her head.
“Could she have been grabbed?” Jonathon asked.
“No,” Susan said emphatically. “Not being incarcerated doesn’t mean they wander around at will, and people don’t come on these grounds without being noticed. Every door is monitored around the clock. She had to have actually snuck off, taking pains not to be seen.”
“Are the kids still here?” I asked. “Maybe they can tell us something.”
Probably embarrassed by the turn of events, Raffner didn’t argue but urged that the interviewers be limited to Gail and me.
There were five children all told, of whom only two were actually Jan’s, and this was the first time I’d actually been introduced to them. During my visits to the house—aside from the boy with the deflated ball—they’d either been peripheral bodies in blurred motion, or not there. They ranged in age from three to about seven, and were as dissimilar from one another as a pack of street urchins.
Gail, Susan, and I sat next to each other on the floor of a small room, a hollow-eyed TV set in the corner, with the children grouped around us.
Gail started off. “My name is Gail. This is Joe.”
“I seen him,” said one of the older boys.
“Where?”
“At my house.”
“I remember you,” I said. “You were almost tall enough to grab a doughnut out of your mom’s hand, even though it was over her head.”
He smiled with pride. “I got it, too,” he lied, “two of ’em.”
“You did not,” the ball player said, punching him in the arm. “You got ’em after Dad threw ’em out the door, just like we all did.”
Gail interrupted by pretending to glance around. “Speaking of your mom, where is she? I had something I wanted to ask her.”
“She’s gone,” a little girl said.
The older boy cuffed the back of her head. “She’ll be back.”
Gail looked disappointed. “That’s too bad. Where do you think she went?”
“Home,” said one.
“To see the fireworks, I bet,” said another.
“The fireworks?” I blurted.
“Yeah,” the oldest answered, looking at me like I was brain dead. “It’s Old Home Days tonight.”
He didn’t need to elaborate. The Rockingham Old Home Days fireworks display was the largest in the state, running for forty minutes and drawing over ten thousand people to Bellows Falls from all over Vermont. They lined the river and jammed the bridges and railroad yard, since the rockets were fired from the riverbank north of town.
“Did she tell you that?” I asked.
The boy didn’t answer, having obviously supplanted his own desires with Jan’s.
“Why did you say, ‘home’?” Gail asked the small girl who’d spoken first.
“She told me, just before she climbed out the window.”
I could feel Susan stiffen beside me, no doubt wondering, as I was, why Jan had suddenly chosen to leave. Phone calls were screened here, but I suspected Norm had found a way to lure her out. He had been manipulating her for years, forcing her to do things she wouldn’t normally willingly do. It took no great stretch to imagine he’d used her guilt at betraying him to force her across a suicidal line.
Having seen the results of Norm’s ruthlessness, I had no doubts he was going to repay Jan for her transgressions as he had Jasper Morgan, young Billy, and who knows how many others. But where those others might have come under Norm’s concept of business expenses, Jan and his relationship was far more convoluted. She had climbed out that window as a martyr might journey to self-sacrifice, and he, rather than fleeing to parts unknown, had put domination above survival. They were like two halves of a pair of scissors about to snap shut.
I leaned forward slightly, my eyes on a level with that of the small child. “What exactly did she say?”
“She said, ‘Don’t worry, honey. Everything’ll be fine. I just have to go home for a while.’ ”
“She didn’t go home,” the other small girl said, speaking for the first time. “That’s not what she meant. She told me she was going to her thinking place.”
At last, I thought. “And where’s the thinking place?”
“The old milk plant. She took me there once. It’s neat.”
· · ·
It was almost dusk, shortly before the fireworks were to begin. From all over the area, sheriff’s deputies, State Police, and the Bellows Falls and Walpole police were converging either on Bellows Falls or the old creamery itself. This was not, I had stressed to everyone, to be a high-profile approach. Assuming a small child’s guess was right, I didn’t want people spooked, least of all Norm Bouch.
But even if I’d asked for the National Guard, it wasn’t going to be an easy location to surround, much less contain. The plant, as I knew from Greg Davis’s tour of the town days earlier, was at the bend of the river, between the two bridges leading to New Hampshire, just above where the falls turned from neck-breaking rapids into a precipitous drop. That much was actually a tactical advantage—normally. The so-called Island had an unbreachable boundary on three sides, limited access, and was covered mostly with abandoned factories, warehouses, and the open railroad yard. Tonight alone, however, this no-man’s land became Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Fully half the expected crowd of ten to twelve thousand people would be standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the Island, lining the river just above the milk plant. A dozen more would be illegally camped on its roof.
Gail, Jonathon, and I were in my car, heading toward Bellows Falls from the south, using blue lights only to quietly warn of our approach. Well shy of the town line, however, we hit heavy traffic, and from there on, I edged along at a steady five miles an hour. It stayed that way through downtown and onto the Island, where I finally gave up, pulled over, and killed the engine.
“Let’s go on foot. Gail, I’ll leave the radio on channel two so you can hear what’s going on. If the need comes up, I might ask you to use the cell phone, so keep an ear out, okay?”
She slipped in behind the wheel, kissing me through the open window. “No heroics, please.”
I gave her a thumbs-up and went to the trunk of the car, where I extracted two armored vests and a couple of flashlights. I handed one of the vests to Jonathon. “Better put this on under your shirt.”
We jogged down the narrow dirt trail that followed the riverbank to the empty milk plant, looking, I hoped, like two latecomers heading for the show.
I keyed my portable radio. “This is Gunther, approaching from the south, along the river. Who’s in place and in command?”
To my surprise, Latour’s voice came back. “It’s Emile, Joe. The cordon’s still pretty thin. No one’s gone in yet.”
“Any signs of anything?”
“Nothing so far. I’m just ahead of you on the dirt road.”
We reached him a few minutes later. Aside from several genuine spectators circling the building to gain access to the railroad yards, we were largely alone.
Emile explained the layout. “The north side’s as crowded as this is empty, and there’re people on the roof and at some of the upper windows, like every year. So far, I’ve got four people positioned at all corners of the building, a couple more along the north wall, pretending they’re on crowd control, and Greg Davis and Emily Doyle standing by to go inside. I might be getting five or six more, but with the roads and bridges either closed or jammed with people, travel times’re going to be lousy. Do you want to take over command?”
I did, but I kept it to myself. Latour was finally in movement, showing he knew what to do. If this was redemption in the making, I wasn’t about to impede it. “No.”
He gave me a surprised, appreciative look. “Thanks. Then if you don’t mind the suggestion, I think we should just contain the building, wait till the crowd disperses after the show, and go at this nice and peaceful. The only problem is the people already inside—all potential hostages.” He hesitated and then added, “How good is your information that Bouch or his wife are actually in there?”
That wasn’t something I wanted to discuss. “Good enough. I also don’t think we can wait, as reasonable as that sounds. If we do, all we’re likely to find is Jan Bouch’s body. We may anyhow… But I agree with you about the potential hostages.”
Latour shook his head unhappily, and I immediately began reconsidering my decision to leave him in command. But he didn’t disappoint. “All right. How ’bout you and Jonathon go in with Greg and Emily, and I’ll send uniforms to cover the areas you clear as I get them.”
“And if we find spectators, we’ll herd them into secure rooms and post someone on the door,” I added. “It’ll be safer than escorting them through the building.”
“Okay.” He pointed to a far corner. “The entrance is around there. Davis and Doyle are already waiting. Good luck.”
We found them pacing nervously before the front door, both wearing civilian clothes. I told them of Latour’s plan.
Emily looked incredulous. “Jesus Christ. That place is huge. The four of us could be in there all week checking it out.”
I ignored her complaint. “That’s if we approached it conventionally, which we can’t do. Jan’s kid told us her hangout was a room on the top floor, facing the river. Jonathon and I will head there first, while you two and as many others that show up work the problem from below. Emile’ll give us what he can when he can.”
Greg Davis squatted down, picked up a thin stick, and drew an outline of the building’s interior in the dust. “Three floors, more or less.” He pointed at the double doors facing us. “The ground floor’s a mess. Lots of rooms, junk, storage vats, equipment, hallways—a ton of places for someone to hide. The good news is it’ll be totally empty—no windows facing the fireworks. There’s a central corridor right down the middle, with a staircase at the far end. Get there without being ambushed, and it’s almost home free.”