He straightened and began walking down the road ahead, as quietly as the shadows around us, his scope turned off by his side, navigating by the tepid moonlight. He was military-trained and combat-tested, experienced in traveling behind enemy lines for days on end. This kind of world—dark, still, and filled with unseen menace—was as comfortable to him as a walk in the park. It was an adaptation that went a long way in explaining his character.
I fell into step behind him.
We walked like that for several hundred yards, until we came to a barely discernible break in the snowbank, more like a deer path than a driveway. Here Willy paused and waited for me to catch up. I could hear the creaking of the frozen tree trunks and the rattling of bare branches in the light breeze high overhead.
“This is it,” Willy whispered, his voice as gentle as a sigh. “Runs about two hundred yards up to a trailer. Rumor has it he’s rigged trip wires, so keep your eyes glued to where I put my feet. He knows what he’s doing, remember.”
“What’re the wires attached to?” I asked, my curiosity unpleasantly piqued.
Willy shrugged. “You want to find out?”
He led the way down the middle of the path, night scope to his eye, moving like a careful cat, his body above the waist as smooth as a boat slipping through quiet water.
Once again, I followed, seriously rethinking all the decisions that had brought me here.
Willy stopped abruptly about one hundred feet along and fell gracefully to one knee. Then he looked over his shoulder and gestured to me with his one hand, still holding the scope. I came up next to him.
“See the wire?” He pointed just in front of him.
I squinted into my own scope, taking my time, and eventually saw a thin discoloration—like a razor cut across a photograph—about one foot off the ground. I nodded.
Willy rose without comment, stepped over the wire, and continued on.
Ahead of us, behind a slight curve in the path, we could see the glowing green shape of a small trailer in the woods. Briefly, I lowered the scope and found myself staring at complete and utter darkness. All the trailer’s windows had been blacked out.
The scope back in place, I again saw Willy come to a halt. This time, he merely wiggled his fingers at me to move up.
I looked at the ground as before and saw nothing.
“What is it?” I asked in a murmur.
He wordlessly pointed to a tree by the side of the path. I aimed the scope at it and saw a small metallic object about waist level—not very bright, but distinct from the rest of the tree.
Willy then pointed to our other side, where a second dim box was stuck to another tree. “Light beam sensor,” he whispered into my ear.
We both gingerly ducked low and passed under the beam.
The rest of the way was unimpeded, and in about three minutes we were standing before the trailer’s front door, listening to the faint mutterings of a radio from within.
“Now what?” I asked him.
“You go ’round back. For all this to make sense, there should be a vehicle parked there by a rear door, facing another way out of here. Just give me a thumbs up if I’m right, and I’ll trigger that last alarm to flush him out.”
I did as he said, picking my way with extra care around the edge of the hay bales ringing the trailer. At the far corner, I stuck my head out quickly, saw the rear of a four-wheel-drive pickup across from a back entrance, and withdrew to give Willy his signal.
I then retraced my steps, moving more quickly now, and took up position, gun drawn, behind the hood of the truck, hoping the intervening engine block might do me some good.
A minute later, without warning or sound, the back door blew open with a bang and a glare of light, and an enormous man-made shadow fell across the front of the truck.
“Police!” I shouted. “Don’t move.”
Everything went dark again. I blinked once, as if I’d imagined the whole thing, and realized that Meade had slammed his door as abruptly as he’d opened it, leaving me back where I’d begun.
Before I could move, I heard a second loud crash, this one followed by a yell and a heavy thud, accompanied by a vibration I could feel through my boots.
I ran, stumbling and slipping, around the side of the trailer and back to the front, and found Willy Kunkle kneeling by the head of a prostrate, bearded giant, his gun shoved in the other man’s ear.
“Don’t you even quiver, Eric, or I’ll splatter your brains all over the front yard,” I heard him say.
“You okay?” I asked Willy as I drew near. I stuck my head into the trailer and checked it for more inhabitants. It was empty.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I figured he’d pull something like this once you yelled at him, so I hooked his snow shovel across the top step. He landed like a ton of bricks. Didn’t you, Eric?”
There was no response from the man aside from his heavy breathing. I sympathized with his sense of betrayal—Willy had sent me out back knowing full well what to expect, even though common sense would have dictated putting the officer with two good arms in the primary position.
“Any weapon?” I asked.
“Not in his hands, but I wasn’t about to go through his pockets.”
It was a point well taken. Leaving Willy to cover, I cuffed Meade’s wrists behind his back and checked his clothes, finding no more than a hunting knife in a sheath at his waist, which I removed and tossed within sight into the yard. “Clear.”
I reached over, grabbed the big man’s shoulder, and rolled him onto his back with some effort. “You Eric Meade?”
The face staring back at me was large, round, florid, and with a snow-covered beard reaching up almost to his eyes. It was the fierce and theatrical face of a Viking conqueror, which made the meekness of his reply all the more incongruous.
“Yes, sir.”
“You okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you sit up?”
“I guess, with a little help.”
Willy and I each grabbed a shoulder and pulled. Slowly, the man’s huge torso levitated like a log being tipped on end.
“That better?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. Thank you kindly.”
His grateful politesse put a final stamp of absurdity onto the entire scene.
“Eric,” I told him. “We’re from the Brattleboro Police. We want to ask you a few questions. You haven’t done anything wrong that we know of, so you’re not under arrest, but we would appreciate some cooperation. You all set with that?”
“You just want to talk?”
“That’s all.”
“But we don’t want any shit from you, either,” Willy cautioned. “I don’t want to have to blow your balls off.”
Meade blinked once, tiredly, obviously more than familiar with that line of reasoning. “I won’t give you any trouble.”
I bent behind him, unlocked the cuffs, and stood back with Willy to see what he would do next. Sitting like a bear at a circus, Meade rubbed at his wrists, his legs splayed out before him. Then, with slow and deliberate forethought, he organized his limbs, got to his knees, and eased himself to an upright position, leaning on the trailer to do so. I guessed he had to be about six and a half feet tall and three hundred and fifty pounds.
“You want to come inside?” he asked.
Willy, looking like a ferret beside him, quickly moved up the two wooden steps ahead of him, throwing the shovel still wedged there to one side. “I’ll go first.”
I gave our host ample room, cautious of what one well-placed back kick could do, knowing Willy was already checking the contents of the trailer to make sure that wherever Meade moved, it wasn’t toward any part of his reputed arsenal.
But the big man wasn’t interested in harming us. Once inside the trailer, he lumbered toward a stained and torn recliner, next to a small radio and a dropped paperback romance, and settled down with a heavy sigh.
I closed the door behind me, suddenly conscious of the plaintive country music quietly filling the room. I pointed to the radio. “You mind?”
Without a word, he reached over and switched it off.
The room’s warmth began to return, fueled by a propane heater. I opened my coat and sat in a chair near a small breakfast table. The trailer was a tiny one-room affair, broken into distinctly separate functions but, unlike most bachelor pads, neat, tidy, and largely uncluttered. Its most remarkable feature was the wall of weapons, far out of reach behind Meade’s armchair. Arrayed like the display in some modern knight’s banquet hall, rifles, shotguns, and handguns of all sizes were hung in fanciful patterns from one end to the other, interwoven with a sampling of Marine Corps patches, flags, bumper stickers, and memorabilia.
I nodded in its direction. “Nice collection.”
“Thank you.”
It was one of Vermont’s oddities that the only gun laws on the books were federal ones, aside from a few largely ignored local ordinances mostly designed to impede deer hunting at night. Not only could anyone openly pack heat, including when they were strolling around downtown, but they could do so even if they were known felons. Thus Eric Meade’s passion for collecting hadn’t been stymied by a record of minor crimes.
“Must’ve cost a bundle.”
He merely cast his eyes down onto his clasped hands. I was struck by his passive lack of curiosity, and at how it probably stemmed from a lifetime of catering to mindlessly nattering authority figures.
“How do you make a living, Eric?”
He didn’t look up. “Odd jobs.”
“Like selling drugs?” Willy asked him.
“Sometimes.”
I gave Willy a surprised look. This was looking more hopeful all the time. “You been doing that recently?”
This time, he did look at me. “You caught me when I did it last.”
Clever answer. I smiled. “Okay. Here’re the ground rules. We need to have some questions answered, but it’ll probably mean admitting to a few illegal activities. We’re willing to cut you some slack there, assuming they’re not too bad, but only if you’re as honest as you can be.”
“What’s ‘not too bad’ mean?”
“You tell us you killed someone, or played a role in killing someone, the deal is off. You tell us you dealt a little dope to make ends meet, we’ll give it a pass.”
“This once,” Willy amended.
“There’s a big hole between those two.”
“According to the rules,” I said, “we’re not supposed to make any deals without a state’s attorney’s say-so. We’re sticking our necks out as it is.”
A small look of irritation crossed his bland face. “What do you want, anyhow?”
I liked that—a small step toward us. “We want to know if you sold drugs to a girl a few years ago. Lisa Wooten.”
His eyes narrowed and he looked from one of us to the other suspiciously. “She died, right?”
“Yes, but not because of anything in the dope. She just OD’d.”
“But if I sold it to her, that makes me an accessory, doesn’t it? You said you’d nail me for something like a murder. Wouldn’t that be murder?”
“I’m not going to call it that,” I told him, angry at my own clumsiness. “She was going to do herself in one way or another. No reason you should be blamed.”
But he was like a dog with a bone. “The State’s Attorney might not think so. How do I know he won’t be coming here next?”
Willy had reached the end of his patience, as I was afraid he might. He got up abruptly, swung his chair around, and slammed it down directly in front of Meade, straddling it so they were knee-to-knee. Despite his enormous size, Meade seemed to shrink back a little into the cushion.
“Look, asshole,” Willy said, “we’re not here to dick around. You either tell us what we want to know and we keep it between ourselves, or I let Walter Freund find out you been mouthing off, and you can discover if all that firepower and all your stupid alarms out there are going to do you any good. Does that make things easier to figure out?”
“This is got to be illegal,” Meade said, but his heart wasn’t in it. Willy’s Walter Freund trump card had done the trick.
Kunkle jerked his thumb at me. “Probably, if it was only me. My reputation’s worse than yours. But that man wouldn’t do anything illegal—God-damn saint.”
Meade looked genuinely sad, as if his fate in life were to be forever confronted with such hopeless puzzles. “All right. Yeah, I sold it to her.”
“You mix the batch yourself?” I asked him.
“I always do—did. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
I ignored the absurdity of that. “And how long had you been supplying her?”
“A few months.”
Willy moved his chair back and now asked in a less threatening tone, “You were her only source?”
Meade hunched his shoulders slightly. “I think so. She made a big deal about seeing me. If she’d had somebody else, she probably wouldn’t have.”
If true, that let Brenda Croteau off the hook and supported the thesis that Owen Tharp had been set up.
“Tell us about Walter Freund,” I said.
His face closed down. “What about him?”
I got up and began pacing the width of the narrow trailer, suddenly reminded of something only he would know. “Let me put it another way. The medical examiner who autopsied Lisa said that addicts usually OD because they take a dose they’re no longer used to, either ’cause they couldn’t come up with the money for a while, or they tried to go straight. In any case, their tolerance drops, and the next time they take their standard hit, it kills them.”
Meade just watched me walking back and forth.
“You were Lisa’s exclusive supplier, according to you. Given that fact, did you think her tolerance had dropped just before she died?”
“What’s that got to do with Walter?”
I obviously had made another mistake by re-mentioning Freund’s name prematurely. Like a dog distracted by a powerful scent, now Meade couldn’t get his mind off it. That did tell me something about Walter Freund, though.
Tearing a page from Willy’s book, I stepped close enough to him that he had to tilt his head back to look up at me. “Nothing yet. Keep with me here, Eric. You paying attention?”
I waited until he nodded. “Good. What about Lisa’s tolerance?”
“She was buying the same amounts, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yes, I do. But if you were selling to her regularly, and in the same amounts, didn’t it strike you as a little strange that she suddenly died?”