Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series) (32 page)

“Maybe you’re right,” Joe agreed. “I’ll make arrangements tomorrow. Where’s Willy?”

She laughed. “You think I know? He is in town, but as usual, all he told me was that he had ‘stuff to do’ and not to wait up. You know our boy—he does love that ninja-skulking. I’ll try reaching out to tell him the latest.”

Joe let out a sigh and stared at the floor a moment.

“What?” she asked him.

“I was just thinking of the irony,” Joe explained. “Here’s Joyce running around, ordering people grabbed, killed, and tortured, going crazy over a bunch of harmless snapshots a half century old, and we can’t even build a case against him. The most we could do is dent his reputation—maybe make him lose the next election.”

Sam smiled ruefully. “I wouldn’t even put much faith in that.”

He nodded resignedly. “Guess we’ll just keep plugging. Our advantage is that he doesn’t know what we can’t prove. Oh, well. See ya tomorrow. Give Emma a kiss from me.”

*   *   *

Two hours later, Joe and Rachel were standing side by side in his small kitchen at home, he washing their few dishes and she drying them. Dinner, prepared by Joe, had consisted of grilled Velveeta sandwiches, canned split-pea soup, and vanilla ice cream covered with maple syrup for dessert. Rachel had praised his flair for practical and tasty concoctions, which he’d taken as a compliment.

“What’s your mom’s cooking like?” he asked as they neared the end of their labors.

“Dinner’s either something French, unpronounceable, and five hours in the making, complete with opera music and wine,” she answered, “or it’s scrambled eggs and toast at eleven o’clock at night.”

Joe laughed. “That a roundabout way of saying you prefer her eggs to her French la-di-dahs?”

She joined him. “It is, but I think her fancy cooking is more meditative than it’s supposed to be successful. She doesn’t necessarily have guests when she goes wild in the kitchen. Sometimes, she’s all alone, just forgetting about work.”

He drained the sink of its soapy water. “I can sympathize with her there. That’s why I turn out more wooden birdhouses and picnic tables than I’ve got interested takers.”

“I was admiring your wood shop earlier,” Rachel commented.

“I love going in there,” he admitted. “Most of those big old iron monsters belonged to my father. They just hum along, barely vibrating, solid like the engines on a ship from the 1800s. Dangerous as hell,” he added, “but wonderful to work with.”

She hung up her dish towel and eyed him thoughtfully for a moment, making him raise an eyebrow. “What?” he asked.

“I was just thinking how glad I am that you and Mom hooked up.”

He reached out and touched her hand. “So am I.”

The doorbell rang—an almost unique occurrence. Joe’s small house was attached to the back of the property, and was often mistaken from the street as either a barn or an abandoned garage. No one came by who didn’t know him, and if they did, they knew better than to ring the bell.

Plus, of course, there was the recently heightened concern for Rachel’s safety.

Joe pointed to the narrow staircase leading to the bedroom/loft he’d lent her. It was a tiny low-ceilinged alcove that had been added above the kitchen, wedged into the corner of the adjacent living room’s skylighted vaulted ceiling. He kept his voice relaxed but quiet. “Why don’t you head up to your room while I find out who that is? Just to play it safe.”

They split up as Joe passed through the living room to reach the tiny entryway and the door. Instinctively, his hand fluttered above his right hip, confirming that his gun was in its holster.

“Who is it?” he called out, standing to one side of the heavy door.

A young woman’s voice answered. “Hello?”

“What’s up?” he asked, hand on the doorknob.

“Sorry to bother you,” she replied, barely audible, “but I was driving by and almost hit this cat. He’s a little guy and doesn’t have a collar, and nobody answered at the front of the building.”

“I don’t own a cat,” he answered her. “Sorry.”

“Hello?”

He cautiously peered through the peephole in the door, making sure there was no light directly behind him, which could give his motion away and potentially make him a target. Before him stood a young woman, eyes wide and pleading, cradling a young cat in her arms.

“I said: I don’t own a cat. Sorry.”

“Hello? I can’t hear you. The poor thing’s almost a kitten. I don’t know what to do.”

He could barely hear her any better than she seemed to be hearing him.

He opened the door a crack.

Of course, it was a mistake. The door flew open under the charging weight of the woman behind it, spinning Joe enough off balance to allow her to push all the way in. As he fell backwards, she launched the howling cat at his head and swiped his temple with a silencer-equipped pistol she’d been hiding, causing a lightning-like flash to blind his vision. She then efficiently tripped him up with her leg and brought him crashing face-first to the floor.

In one smooth, well-practiced move, she stripped his gun from its holster, twisted his arm up behind his back, and shoved the barrel of her gun against his temple, all while straddling his lumbar.

“You move, you die,” she said quietly, her lack of excitement as menacing as her weapon. “Nod if you understand.”

He nodded. The cat had disappeared.

*   *   *

Above, Rachel heard Joe speaking loudly through the front door as she entered the bedroom loft. So far unconcerned, she crossed to the backpack that she used instead of a suitcase, intent on retrieving her camera’s backup battery, when the house trembled slightly to the sound of a crash and a shout of surprise. Startled, she quietly returned to the top of the stairs and dropped to her hands and knees, hoping to see without revealing herself. She could just make out Joe’s upper half, pinned to the floor by a woman holding a gun. The side of his head was bleeding.

“Ohmygod,” she murmured, and retreated soundlessly.

She looked around fearfully, for the first time fully captured by the threat they’d been discussing around her for so many days. The room was a hopeless dead end. The bed took up most of the floor. The small window was too tight to fit through, and led to a ten-foot drop in any case. Otherwise, there was a closet, a dresser, and a small table.

She opted for the bed, dropping to her stomach and rolling under it to press up against the far wall.

*   *   *

“What do you want?” Joe asked, his face hard against the rug.

“Put your other hand behind your back,” the woman ordered, maintaining her conversational manner.

He did so, feeling the gun’s barrel like a pipe being drilled into his temple. She slipped a thick nylon zip-tie around both his wrists and pulled it tight.

“You know I’m a cop.”

“I’m getting up now,” she said, ignoring him. “I’ll help you to your knees. Then you stand and move to the ladder-back chair in the corner, near the stove. Any sudden move and you get a bullet in the head.”

He felt her weight ease from his back, followed by her free hand grabbing the thick fabric of his shirt and yanking him to an upright position. He coughed at the cutting pressure against his larynx.

“Stand,” she ordered as he struggled awkwardly to his feet.

She marched him to the chair, which she moved away from the wall, and sat him down so that his arms were draped behind the chair’s back. She then attached the zip-tie binding his wrists to the bottom chair rung, and strapped each of his ankles to a front leg. Still feeling dizzy and faint from the blow he’d received, Joe now knew he was more thoroughly trussed up than the proverbial turkey.

But his primary concern was Rachel. Was she aware of what was going on?

*   *   *

Rachel was feeling like an idiot. Under the bed? Really? Why not standing on a stool, with her hands clasped to her open mouth?

She began inching her way back out into the room, straining to hear over her rapid breathing, and rethinking how she could better position herself. If she had to go, she wanted it to be with a little more dignity than cowering on the floor in a ball.

She heard muted voices downstairs as she emerged and straightened, but chose not to return to the staircase to check it out. Joe would come find her if he gained the upper hand. Otherwise? Rachel checked around once more, this time in search of a suitable weapon.

Frustrated, she stealthily opened the closet door and began pawing through the clothes there, finally locating—much to her surprise—an old wooden baseball bat, leaning in the corner. She picked it up and weighed it in her hand, liking the feel of it.

Her spirits slightly buoyed, she calculated a position with some advantage built into it, settling finally for the same corner of the closet in which she’d found her weapon. She wedged herself in—off to the side of the door—awkwardly practiced lifting the bat over her head a couple of times, and settled in to wait.

*   *   *

“Where’s the girl?”

Joe gave his attacker a quizzical look. “After all this, you don’t know? You picked the wrong corner of the state. She’s in Burlington.”

The woman snarled at him. “I know she’s here, stupid. I meant where, here?” She glanced over her shoulder. “Upstairs? That’s where I’d put her.”

Joe smiled. “You’re guessing, or you would’ve killed me at the door. You’re right that she’s under wraps. We knew we’d stir up your boss when we flushed out Morgan, so we first made sure the girl was way beyond your reach.”

The woman was surprisingly frank. “I don’t know who Morgan is, and I don’t care. As for killing you, that’s your choice. My contract’s to grab the girl. Where is she?”

Joe merely shook his head sadly.

She straightened, gave him one last look—as if considering shooting him now to get it over with—and moved to the foot of the stairs.

*   *   *

Rachel felt more than heard the woman’s presence outside the closet door. The house was completely silent. She thought she might have heard a single stair tread complain slightly, moments earlier, but could no longer distinguish reality from her mounting fears. As much to concentrate as to prepare herself, she slowly raised the bat until she was holding it as high above her head as the ceiling allowed. Ever since she positioned herself here, she’d been second-guessing her plan, and finding it wanting.

The moment, when it came, was almost a relief. As the closet door trembled slightly, Rachel found herself solely focused on her grip of the bat, and on how to use it to her best advantage.

It never came. In contrast to Rachel’s soundless, slow-motion preparations, the woman with the gun finished her approach explosively, yanking open the door, crossing the threshold, and—the gun steady in one hand—reaching up like a cobra striking and pinning Rachel’s bat against the wall behind her. The effect was as if she’d been looking through the wall with X-ray vision from the start.

For a frozen fraction of a second, they stood face-to-face, the gun’s silencer looking disproportionally huge between them. Then, a deafening bang and a flash of light burst the darkness from the side. Rachel blinked, uncomprehending, at the abruptly empty space before her, as instantly stripped of the woman as it had been filled a moment earlier.

She felt a motion at her feet and looked down in disbelief at the woman’s body, collapsed and lifeless among the scattered shoes, a pool of blood slowly spreading around her head.

Tentatively, the bat still in one hand, Rachel bent at the waist and peered around the doorway. Standing four feet away, near the top of the stairs, was a man with a limp left arm and a gun in his hand.

“Hey,” he said quietly, smiling slightly. “Remember me? I’m Willy.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Her name was Chris Hadsel,” Ron Klecszewski said.

Joe looked up from his conversation with Beverly, who had driven down from Burlington to be with Rachel. It was five thirty in the morning. They’d collected in a conference room adjacent to the Brattleboro PD’s detective squad, of which Klecszewski was the head. The state police had just wrapped up its post-shoot investigation, as required by protocol. Through the ground-floor windows, they could all see the glare from the TV lights of a half-dozen camera crews. Thankfully, Bill Allard had dispatched a media-relations person from up north to deal with them.

“You ever hear of her?” the state police detective next to Ron asked.

Joe shook his head. “She local?”

“Not even vaguely,” Ron answered, having monitored the VSP’s activities, since the shooting occurred on his patch. “She seems to have mostly worked in the mid-Atlantic states and in Florida, as far as we can tell.”

“All we can do is trace her through prints and mugs,” the detective said. “Which means we only know when and where she was caught for anything, which wasn’t much. There are years where her activities are completely off the radar.”

Joe nodded. “Right. Well, thanks for all the hard work.”

The man nodded as he turned toward the door. “You bet. Good luck with your case. Looks like you’ll need it.” He paused and looked at Willy, slouched in a chair in the far corner of the room. “Good shoot,” he added, as a collegial one-liner.

Willy, of course, was having none of that. “Yeah,” he answered. “Sorry you couldn’t bust me for murder. Maybe next time.”

The detective gave a last, pitying glance to Joe and left, no doubt to spread the news that Kunkle’s attitude had survived the evening’s activities.

Beverly, however, took the other tack, addressing him. “For my part and my daughter’s, Agent Kunkle, I’d like to thank you—good shoot or no,” she threw in with a smile. “You may be one of the most unconventional police officers I’ve ever met, but in this instance, I will not fault your methods.”

Willy laughed. “Least I could do, given what happened to her babysitter.”

“Sad but true,” Joe acknowledged, raising a half-empty plastic bottle of water in salutation.

“How’d you figure that out, anyhow?” Lester asked. He’d joined them hours ago for moral support and was now reclined in a chair with his legs resting on the conference table, as if ready to nod off at a moment’s notice.