Three Can Keep a Secret (22 page)

Sam turned to Willy upon Joe's departure. "That mean anything to you?"

"He has a itch he wants to scratch in private."

She used that to change topics. "You would know about that."

"That a loaded comment?" he asked. "Or just practice?"

She smiled, used to how his inborn paranoia processed things. "Checking your dipstick," she answered him. "You been on some kind of odyssey. I just want to make sure you're okay. That
we're
okay."

Instead of the usual quick oneliner, he kept quiet, which made her rise from her chair and sit on the edge of his desk, where she rested a hand on one of his crossed legs.

"Herb Rozanski?" she asked.

He didn't look at her. "He's got an arm like mine," he said.

"From the saw?"

"Yeah. He got it sewed up, but it never worked again.
"

"
He okay?"

He gestured dismissively, but answered nevertheless, "He's coping. Might as well be hollowed out, though
—
a living pumpkin. Smile on the outside; nuthin' inside."

She squeezed his leg. "There but for the grace of God? That what you're thinking?"

"Grace of something," he offered. "Don't know about God."

"How 'bout grace of yourself?" she suggested. "Grace of the people that love you?

What's Herb got?"

She'd heard enough about the Rozanski case to know part of what was eating at him. Willy was deemed unapproachable by most people, but to her, he wasn't that complicated. This was a smart man with a big heart that had been stepped on enough to make him angry, suspicious, and in pain. That's how she saw it, all the babble about PTSD and the rest notwithstanding. She'd seen him with their daughter, and had been won over by him herself.

"How'd you leave it with Herb?" she asked, thinking that might have played a role in his present mood.

"Told him to go back to his brother and sister." His voice was so quiet, she barely heard his words.

"You think he will?"

"I doubt it," he admitted candidly. "He's pretty far gone."

"You tell him they'd be open to it?"

His voice rose slightly. "Oh, sure. Mouse fart in a high wind, if you ask me."

"And so there it sits," she mused, hoping to be echoing his thoughts. "Like a ball game suspended in the middle of the last inning."

"Yeah, well . . ." He left it there.

She leaned over and kissed his cheek, and spoke into his ear. "Unless maybe you get one of them to get in touch."

He straightened in his chair, pulling away from her a bit. "Not my problem, babe. They wanna fuck up their lives, I'm not their nursemaid."

She moved her hand up his thigh, smiling. "You know you want to. You just don't want it to fail. It's already failed. How can your giving it a small push do any damage?"

He looked at her then, his expression critical. "Jesus, listen to you. Mother Frigging Teresa. You'd think you would've learned by now."

She laughed and got up, knowing better than to push. "I had, till I met you. You made me an optimist."

Joe stood beside his car, taking in the neat, square, rubble-filled cellar hole on Hillside Terrace. He was struck by the sad irony that what was once the foundation of a family home had become the custom-made receptacle for its charred remains. There was a discussion about preserving the wreckage as a crime scene, complete with around-the-clock guard, but the consensus had been that it was all too little, too late by now, and that the case against the killer of William Friel and his mother would have to rely on evidence beyond what might be lurking here.

Which is what had lured Joe back. For, while the site had been destroyed
—
no doubt with the hope of erasing all traces of a crime
—
that crime had nevertheless taken place. And it was Joe's experience that
—
as with a lingering odor
—
the residue of such an event often hovered in place, sometimes to the advantage of those in search of it.

As if on cue, he saw what he was looking for, even sooner than he'd anticipated. There was a movement at one of the windows neighboring the Barber property, indicating
—
Joe anticipated
—
the presence of the almost customary neighborhood busybody.

He left his car and crossed the street to knock on the front door.

He didn't get the opportunity. The door opened as he reached the front porch steps.

"Are you from the insurance company?" a woman asked, whose body and hairstyle reminded Joe of a Saint Bernard on its hind legs.

"Police," he countered. "Joe Gunther. And you are?"

She stepped out onto the porch. "Karen Freed. I thought the police were finished here."

They didn't bother shaking hands, having already passed that part.

"Oh, you know," he said lightly. "The usual ton of follow-up paperwork."

"I thought it was a homicide," she said, her voice rising.

He continued up the steps. "What makes you say that?"

Her eyes narrowed craftily. "Okay. I get it. Don't worry about me. I'm going to my grave with all my secrets intact. People know that about me around here."

Joe wasn't quite sure what that meant. He stayed quiet.

"I saw it go up," Freed said. "My house was built the same time as Barb's. If you're telling me that was an accident, I'm selling tomorrow, 'cause it exploded like a bomb."

"And that's why you're thinking homicide," Joe suggested.

She smiled, and for a moment, he thought she added a wink. "That's why
you're
thinking homicide," she said.

He didn't argue. "Okay. You seem to be aware of what happens in the neighborhood, could you tell me what you saw that night?"

"I already told a cop in uniform."

"I'm aware of that," he lied, having relied on Jonathon Michael's narrative, rather than on individual statements. "But sometimes, with the passage of time, memories sharpen."

"It was real sudden," Freed recalled, needing no further prompting. "I was sitting watching TV, and there was a bright flash out the window
—
and a boom, like an explosion. Shook the house."

"When was this, roughly?"

"Late. About eleven."

She hadn't asked him in, so Joe settled onto the porch's broad wooden railing, enjoying the sun on his back. She remained standing, framed by the open doorway behind her.

"Any comings or goings from there earlier that you noticed?" he asked.

"Earlier that night? Nope."

"How 'bout right after?"

But she rejected that. "There was tons of action after the fire department got here, and that was pretty quick. They were really fast and good, moving cars around and setting everything up, just like on TV. But it was a goner as soon as I saw it through my window. The whole house looked like the mouth of a volcano. That's why I know it's a homicide
—
that a bomb did 'em in."

"I take it you knew Barb and her son?" Joe asked.

Freed looked disapproving. "Oh, yes."

"That doesn't sound good," he said, leadingly.

She pursed her lips. "Very odd people."

"How so?"

"Oh, you know . . ."

Joe didn't let on that he did, remaining silent.

Freed sighed impatiently. "You ever meet them?"

"Once," he admitted. "Of course, that was after she'd been disabled."

She broadened her stance slightly, as if responding to a boat deck's slow roll. "I know it's horrible to say, but that disease was the only thing left that could quiet that woman down."

Even for Joe, who'd heard some pretty harsh things, that was a corker.

"Really?" he said as blandly as he could.

"She was like the Wicked Witch of the West," she explained. "Treated everybody like dirt, no matter what they did. Most negative person I ever met. And the way she talked to
him.
It was terrible."

"Yelled some?" Joe prompted.

"I'll say. He could never do anything right."

Joe tried to be philosophical. "They say that anger and paranoia often run hand in hand with Alzheimer's."

But Karen Freed was having none of it. "Bah. Unless she'd had it for forty years, I wouldn't hide behind that fig leaf. She was just a terrible person. Sometimes, there's no getting around it."

"And yet he stayed with her."

She considered that. "Yes," she agreed. "That confused me, too, at the beginning. But sometimes a man is just too spineless to act in his own best interest. Plus," she added. "It was her house, and as long as he could put up with her, he lived there for free. I bet he used all her money for groceries and the like, too. I never saw him work a lick, so that has to be true."

Joe thought back to something that Beverly had mentioned in passing. "You think he might have killed her and committed suicide?" he asked.

She looked genuinely astonished. "Good Lord. What a thought." She paused. "I suppose it's possible," she added without conviction.

"I'm not saying that's what happened," Joe carefully followed up. "But you knew them better than I."

"Then I'd say no," she replied. "He didn't have it in him. Besides, the smart thing would have been for him to kill her and live happily ever after. Nobody would have been suspicious
—
a woman in her condition."

Joe reflected on an earlier comment. "Mrs. Freed, you said that when the fire department showed up, they moved some cars. What did you mean by that?" He turned to point across the way. "I see his Chevy right there, and it looks like it got burned pretty badly. Did they move it?"

"No, no," she said. "The other one. Her car. That's the one they moved. It was closer to the house."

Joe was still for a second, trying to process this. "What kind of car?" he asked. "Is it on the block now?"

She moved, marching to the edge of the porch, resting her hands on the rail like Captain Bligh, and scrutinized the street.

"No," she announced. "It's not there. Maybe they towed it. It hadn't been legal for years. It was a Buick Skylark
—
dark green."

"You remember the plate number?"

She gave him a withering stare. "I don't go around keeping things like that in my head."

"Of course," he said agreeably. "Did you actually see the car being moved? I'm just trying to figure out who drove it."

She tucked in her chin thoughtfully. "No.

One minute it was there. The next, it was gone."

"And now that we've been discussing that whole evening, can you recall anything else? Something you saw through one of their windows, maybe? Or something you heard?"

A look of distaste crossed her face. "I'm no Peeping Tom. What do you take me for?"

Joe kept that to himself and thanked her for her time.

Gail was pacing the floor of her office. Once more, the door was closed, and the only people in attendance were her innermost circle, including, among others, her chief-of-staff, Rob Perkins; her personal assistant, Alice Drim; and
—
oddly, in Rob's opinion
—
the head of her security detail, John Carter, who actually worked for the state police.

"You all need to know that a shit storm other than Irene is heading our way," Gail was saying. "Each one of you
—
press secretary, security, legislative relations, and the rest
—
will have to keep an eye open. I know Rob is usually the one to break this sort of news, but this is special."

She stopped long enough to face them. "We were recently approached by Sheldon Scott, representing Harold LeMieur, who was supposedly offering an alliance where his money would be used to supplement whatever FEMA didn't cover.
In true independent Vermont style, this was to be a practical, homegrown solution to some of the confusion and anger that's beginning to heat up and which made Katrina such a disaster years back."

Rob watched her face like the dispassionate political scientist he tried to be at his best, seeing the stress, the sleeplessness, and even the fear beneath the smooth and cadenced prose.

Of course, he wasn't at his best
—
he was feeling directly responsible for her awkward position, and as helpless as she to come up with a good solution.

He gave her high marks now, though. She was sounding strong and well organized. Of course, she was also among her most reliable allies.

"Unfortunately," Gail continued, warming up. "It turns out that the entire scheme was a cynical way to make us look bad during the state's time of greatest need. The offer of financial aid was not made in good faith. It was made so that it could then be immediately leaked to the DC-Three through back channels, colored to show us up as gullible fools for even considering it. The Holy Three already don't like us, of course, so they've just issued a press release stating, item by item, that LeMieur doesn't have near the capital available in the first place to have made the offer; this is simply an attempt to make FEMA and the president and Big Government look bad; the GOP is cynically aiming to make hay during a crisis; et cetera, et cetera. You can fill in the blanks.

"What won't be said in so many words," Gail added, "but will be circulated far and wide, is that (a) this office didn't share the information about LeMieur's offer with the DC-Three when we first received it;
(b)
we were too desperate, naive, and inexperienced to see it as the manipulative, crooked deal it is; and (c) we were so proud of being independent that we sold short the hard efforts of FEMA, the president, and the Democratic Party during this crisis, just so we could score a political point."

She then admitted tiredly, "You have to hand it to 'em. Scott and his cronies willfully risked looking bad, so that Democrats could end up mauling each other in a blame-game. And of course, they'll hide behind the claim that LeMieur does have enough cash available
—
since no one can say, one way or the other
—
and was simply refused out of political spite. A pretty brilliant ploy in a state where the most conservative wing of the Republican Party has little to lose."

Alice Drim raised her hand hesitantly.

"Yes, Alice?" Gail asked, unintentionally sounding like an interrupted schoolmarm.

"What does all this mean to us?"

"It means that if they've done their homework, I may become the first one-term governor in this state since Ray Keyser got booted out by Phil Hoff in the early '60s."

There was an audible shifting of bodies in the room as everyone adapted to her unexpected bluntness.

"I still don't understand," Alice persisted. "We were voted in because of our independence from this kind of trickery. Why wouldn't our bringing it to light simply make it go away?"

Gail smiled sadly. "If it were only that easy."

"You were just supposed to ignore an offer to lighten the burden on all those people out there?" Alice pressed on, her voice rising, gesturing out the window.

Gail quickly agreed with her. "It's an excellent point, and it'll be exactly what we're going to say. Rob and I have been working out the details of our own statement, to be released within the hour." She held up her hands, a preacher at her own hoped-for revival. "Look, folks, I'm not about to lie down and die because of this. I only wanted to tell you about it so you wouldn't be blindsided when you heard it in the news. We've been screwed by some cynical assholes. And just as we taught them how idealism and virtue and independence can win an election, we'll show them how this kind of totally fabricated bullshit can't be pulled on an educated electorate."

Rob Perkins watched Gail's small audience, seeing a rebirth of optimism and determination. He didn't fault any of them for their willingness to fight back. It was Gail's mention of an educated electorate that had him worried. He'd been in the game for a long time, and never once had he been impressed by the clear-thinking and intellectual dispassion of the average voter. They did what they did for the damnedest of reasons, sometimes, but rarely because they'd been moved by a rational, cool-headed explanation of the facts.

He did agree with his governor on one thing, though: It was about to be one hell of a fight.

Joe was on his cell phone as he drove, having already lost his connection twice. Phone carriers protested that the mountains made coverage a bigger-than-average challenge in Vermont. But Joe knew too well that local resistance to the unsightly towers was as much an obstacle as the topography. And in his old traditionalist's heart
—
despite inconveniences like the one dogging him now
—
he couldn't say that he, too, didn't prefer a pristine view over ready access to a phone signal.

He redialed Spinney and picked up where he'd left off. "I didn't get a plate number. The busybody who told me about the car didn't know it. It's got to be the last one Barb Barber had before the Alzheimer's took her off the road. Just have DMV dig it out of their computer files."

"You want that BOL to go out to surrounding states, boss?" Lester asked.

"It can't hurt," Joe said. "But my instinct tells me this car is still in Vermont. I don't know what the hell's going on, but it's personal, and it goes back decades
—
to when Carolyn Barber was alive and well and in the middle of something I don't think she understood. It's my bet that when Irene knocked out the power at the hospital and allowed Carolyn to wander free, she became the first domino in a line of at least three dead people by now, and maybe more."

"Okay," Lester said. "I'll get this out as soon as we hang up. Before you go, though, we got a hit on Travis Reynolds's cell phone records."

Joe paused to concentrate on passing an eighteen-wheeler, conscious of how talking on a phone undermines a driver's attention. "You find out who hired him to ransack Marshall's apartment?" he asked.

"Indirectly," Lester explained. "The number traced back to a Dolores Oetjen, who lives in Calais, north of Montpelier. She makes no sense to me at all right now
—
sells real estate, no record, no involvements that I could find with any of our known players
—
but I definitely want to grill her about this. She's either a wild card bad guy; has a pal who used her phone without her knowledge; or is the patsy of somebody sophisticated enough to have randomly routed a phone call through her number to put us off the scent."

"Sounds like fiction," Joe muttered.

"Still possible, though," Spinney attested, who knew much more about such things than Joe ever wanted to.

"All right," Joe said. "Chase her down. And bring someone with you. I'm getting an increasingly creepy sense about this case."

"Got it, boss. I'll grab Sammie. Willy's gone AWOL again."

Willy pulled over opposite the same address he'd visited earlier, in Burlington's North End.

"You good?" he asked his passenger.

Nate Rozanski didn't answer. He remained slumped in his seat, his hands in his lap, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

"Nate," Willy spoke to him sharply.

He slowly turned his head.

Willy gestured to the warehouse across the street. "The brother you killed is in there. He's alive if not well. He's got a mangled arm like mine. He's alone and cut off and heading nowhere fast, all because of you."

Nate's mouth tightened, and his eyes dropped to the console between them.

Willy smacked him in the chest with the back of his right hand, causing Nate to look up, startled and with a flicker of anger.

"Pissed you off a little there, didn't I?" Willy challenged him. "Good. Fine. Well, turn some of that on yourself, for once. Instead of wallowing in guilt, get mad at yourself; get mad at your loser father; get mad at what you did and start fixing it. How many people have a chance to put things right? For years, you've been holed up with your self-pity for company. Well, guess what, you sorry woodchuck,
you didn't do it.
You fucked up, but you didn't kill him."

He reached out suddenly and cupped Nate by the back of the neck, forcing their faces to be inches apart. "Get your ass in there, Nate.
Fix this,"
he said.

Nate kept the gaze, absorbing the message, and then slowly nodded. "Who are you?" he asked wonderingly.

Willy felt a surge of emotion overtake him, welling up and prickling the backs of his eyes, born of a lifetime of asking himself the same question.

But he wasn't going to let this idiot have the satisfaction.

"I'm the guy who's gonna kill you if you don't get out of my car."

Nate gave him a small smile, and did as he'd been told.

Joe parked before a building that, from the outside, looked like a custom-made incubator for worker dysfunction. It was old, single-story, windowless, and located in a commercial no-man's-land between Montpelier and Barre. It reminded him of a huge grave marker, lying flat on the ground. He found the front door, looking lost and hopeless against the blank slab of the wall surrounding it, and entered to discover a receptionist behind a thick, scratched, cloudy Plexiglas partition with a large hole in its middle
—
through which, Joe thought disjointedly, anyone could have extended a hand holding a gun.

"Joe Gunther to see Jodi Hamer," he announced.

Shortly, a smiling, upbeat woman with a strong handshake greeted him at the lobby's inner door.

"Mr. Gunther? Delighted to meet you. I just got the faxed release document we discussed on the phone. Thank you for doing that. So many other police officers have a tough time understanding our need to cover our butts."

Joe followed her into the building's embrace and down a long, well-lighted corridor. Belying the place's exterior, its residents had worked hard and successfully to brighten up its inner spaces. "Believe me," he told her supportively, "I have been in your shoes. I want to thank you for being clear about what you needed. Did you find what I'm after?"

"Yes," she said happily. "It took a little digging. Right now, because of Irene, we've never been busier in here, duplicating as many records as we can. Our priority, as you can imagine, is to re-create everything lost in the basement of the public safety headquarters
—
fingerprint files, arrest records, et cetera. State hospital admissions from decades ago were a pretty low priority."

She looked back at him and smiled broadly, adding, "In a way, it's a huge kick for me personally
—
selfishly speaking. All this justifies the requests we've made for years to back up hard records with digital copies. I can tell you, it's been like pulling teeth sometimes, and the process has been far from perfect, but we've made inroads, and if there's one good thing that'll come of this disaster, I bet it'll be better funding."

She led him through a door and down a claustrophobically narrow aisle of opposing shelves. "Okay, here we are. Hospital admissions around the time you're interested in." She pointed at a nearby table crowned with a mechanical version of a resting pterodactyl. "That's a microfiche reader. Know how it works?"

Joe smiled at her. "That's very sweet. I'm guessing you know damned well I'm probably more comfortable with one of those than with any computer."

She laughed.
"Well, I wasn't going to mention it.
I'll leave you to it, then. Happy hunting."

It was onerous work. The cardboard boxes containing Hamer's cherished microfiches reflected the era before mental health patients were dumped on to the community, often with the rationalization that they'd become assets to society. What he was poring over was the legacy of the "old days," when people were committed for being eccentric, or offending influential family members
—
or getting in the way of prominent politicians. There were thousands of entries, loosely organized, haphazardly filed, and all but unreadable without resorting to the cranky, eye-straining reader by Joe's side. Even then, most of the forms were handwritten, and frequently tough to decipher.

Nevertheless, after several hours, he located what he was after
—
Carolyn Barber's official commitment papers. And with them, something he hadn't been expecting: the name of the person who'd signed them.