Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series) (33 page)

Willy tapped the side of his nose. “I smelled a rat. Figured the Old Man could stand some backup. It never made sense to me that Joyce would just lay off the kid.” He raised his eyebrows at Rachel. “No offense.”

“None taken,” she told him.

“So,” he resumed. “I watched the house. Soon as I saw the crazy bitch approach, I figured what was up, but I couldn’t move fast enough before you opened up and she ran you over.”

Joe appreciated his usual delicacy.

“That means,” Willy said to him, “you’ll have to fix a window in your wood shop. Hope nothing freezes in there tonight ’cause of it.”

Joe smiled ruefully. “Believe me, small price to pay for seeing you sneak in through the shop door and follow her upstairs.”

“I locked the place up after EMS took you away,” Willy added. “Didn’t know what to do with the cat, so I set him up with some tuna and water and put sawdust from the shop in a pan on the kitchen floor. He looked like a good fit. I hear older people do better with pets.”

Joe merely gave him a stare.

“What happens to me now?” Rachel asked in general.

Beverly glanced at Joe expectantly.

“I’m afraid we button you up, like before,” he said. “The fact that we think we know who’s behind this still puts us a long way from locking him up. While tonight’s little surprise party was being dissected, I phoned the State’s Attorney, and everybody’s on board for bumping this upstairs to the U.S. Attorney’s office, given Joyce’s highfalutin’ job. That means briefings, federal investigators, and God knows what else, before anyone threatens him with handcuffs—which also gives him more time to misbehave.”

“Elegant choice of words,” Beverly commented.

He nodded. “Thank you, Doctor.”

Rachel was not looking happy. “Does that mean I don’t get to finish my documentary? After everything that’s happened?”

Joe glanced around the room before interpreting the unspoken consensus he saw there. “I would say that if you can wrap it up today, despite last night’s excitement and lack of sleep, that would work for me. Joyce wouldn’t have a Plan B up and running this fast after Willy’s handiwork.” He looked at Kunkle in particular. “Agreed?”

“Sure,” Willy said. “Sam tells me they’ve almost emptied the house, anyhow. That right?”

“Yes,” Rachel agreed, her expression clearing despite her exhaustion. “And one more day is all I’ll need.”

Joe caught Beverly’s eye. “Okay with you?”

Hillstrom stroked her daughter’s back. “You don’t actually think I’d oppose this, do you, much as I’d like to?”

Joe stood up and checked his watch. “All right, then. We’ve got a few hours to catch some sleep. My house is off-limits right now, but we can put the two of you into a motel for a while—with a guard on the door—before reconvening at, let’s say, ten o’clock.”

They all rose and began heading out. Joe touched Beverly’s arm as her daughter crossed over to say something to Willy. “How’s she doing?” he asked quietly. “Having someone killed at your feet has got to rank above a fender-bender.”

Beverly took the question seriously. “Long-term? I have no idea. For the moment, I think her own recipe for keeping busy and on task is correct. I’m going to stay with her. I’ve already spoken with my office.”

Joe affectionately squeezed her hand. “Good. Glad to hear it.”

*   *   *

They didn’t get to sleep for as long as they’d hoped. At eight thirty, Sammie Martens, who’d missed out on the night’s highlights, called Joe at the office, where he’d been sleeping in his chair, to report, “Boss, you better beat feet to the excavation. We just found a booby trap.”

Joe blinked to clear his mind. “Everybody okay?”

“Oh yeah. It didn’t go off, but it is explosive. I called JP ’cause of his expertise. He’s already on his way. It’s not fancy—I know that much—and it’s small, but I still don’t want to lose an arm finding out.”

Joe rubbed his eyes. “All right. You sure JP’ll be enough? You don’t need the state bomb guys?”

“I don’t think so, but JP’s no cowboy. He won’t do it unless he thinks he can. And I’m freezing the scene till you get here anyhow, so you can call in the big boys if you want to then.”

“Right,” he said, straightening in his chair and getting ready to dial the phone. “I’ll make some calls and head straight out.”

*   *   *

JP Tyler was an old colleague of Joe’s—the Brattleboro PD’s evidence and forensics man, who’d since been moved up to being Ron Klecszewski’s second-in-command. As befitted his almost scholarly nature, he’d long ago become immersed in the study of bomb disposals, to where he’d become one of the highest-rated experts in the state.

Tyler walked up to Joe’s car as the latter pulled into Ben Kendall’s dooryard. “Hey,” he greeted him as Joe swung out into the cold morning air. “Long time. You’d never know we worked in the same building, huh?”

Joe shook hands and laughed. The point had an extra poignancy—before the creation of the VBI, Joe had been JP’s boss at the PD. “I guess that’s typical.” He gestured toward the sad-looking house. “You been in yet?”

“Nope. Figured I’d wait for you.”

Three more cars appeared from the woods behind them—Willy leading Beverly and her daughter in their own vehicle, and Lester bringing up the rear.

Tyler focused on the two women. “That the medical examiner? Little premature, ain’t she?”

Joe patted his back. “Breathe, JP. She’s here with her daughter, who’s documenting this for the record. In fact, if we can make it work, I’d like her to video the booby trap, and maybe even your dismantling of it, if it’s as small as Sammie thinks. I’ll get the appropriate releases signed, for liability, if that’ll help.”

Tyler shrugged. “Okay by me, at least in principle. We can probably rig a remote unit on a tripod. I’ve done that before. Let’s find out what we got, first.”

The excavation team had arrived at seven that morning, as usual, so they’d completed a solid ninety minutes of work before uncovering the trap. During that process, they’d carved a narrow trench into what had once been the living room, right up to the fireplace. It was there that they’d found an aberration in the floorboards, directly before the brick hearth.

The cops, tightly packed, squeezed into the tight space to see what had caught everyone’s attention.

Sam served as their guide. “They called me as soon as they found it, given that we were looking for anything and everything unusual.” She pointed at the floor. “See how the staining suddenly stops? It’s as if something leaked a long time ago, probably spreading unnoticed under all the junk, but instead of leaving a circular spot, like you’d expect, it got absorbed into that crack. The guys thought it looked like a hiding place, and I agreed. So we pried it open, just like it is now, which is when we saw the wiring underneath.”

She took them all in. “And when I called you.”

“Glad you did,” Joe murmured, dropping to his knees to better study the half-open board. He glanced up at JP. “You still interested?”

The small man smiled. “You bet.”

He got down beside Joe and played a small flashlight into the opening. “This shouldn’t be a problem. And Sam was right—it’s designed to blow someone’s hand off. No more. Chances are the charge is no longer volatile. It’s really old.” He hesitated before adding light-heartedly, “Of course, that introduces the chance of decay presenting a last-second surprise.”

His laughter was met with polite smiles. Willy was the only one to say, “You can have that bullshit, JP, I’m outta it.”

They set things up to suit them, including proper lighting brought to the scene, and with Rachel, Beverly, Sam, and Joe positioned behind a solid barrier, far down the trench. The camera was placed as JP had suggested, controlled remotely. That way, whatever was filmed would be captured directly onto Rachel’s laptop computer, in case something went wrong.

That being done, JP remained confident, and set to work with a comfort built of long practice.

Anti-climactically, it took no time at all. JP fully peeled back the piece of floorboard, and the spectators around the corner saw him on screen probe the device a few different ways, cut a few wires, and then lift the explosive into a heavy box that he’d brought along for the disposal. The entire operation was over in ten minutes.

At which point, he looked up into the camera’s lens and said, “You want to see what he was protecting? Looks interesting.”

The restrictions of the passageway forced them to create a pecking order as they filed back down toward the hiding place. Joe got there first, followed by Sam, Rachel, and Beverly. Willy, as announced, chose to wait for the discovery to come to him later.

JP, still on his knees, leaned back to allow them a better view. Nestled under where the booby trap had been located was a faded manila envelope, wrapped in plastic.

“Do the honors,” Joe told him.

JP reached in after donning latex gloves, extracted the envelope, stripped off the plastic, and peered inside. “Interesting,” he said, and slid the contents out into his other hand.

Rachel let out a small gasp. “Those are just like the negative sleeves I found with his photographs. It’s thirty-five-millimeter film.”

“There’s something else,” Joe said, reaching for the package, also having put on gloves. He shifted the negative sleeve to the back, revealing a small selection of eight-by-ten photos of poor quality.

“What are they?” Sam asked.

“They’re called positive proofs,” Rachel explained. “I learned about them when I started this project. Photographers usually did contact sheets of their negatives, to better see what they’d taken, but sometimes they also did quick and dirty blowups, to get a bigger image. The other ones I have of Ben’s look just like these.”

Joe held them up, one at a time, for general viewing, saying, “Folks, this may be the proverbial smoking gun. Looks like Ben had an ace up his sleeve after all, which is what Jack Joyce’s been sweating over since this whole thing broke.”

Silently, they leaned forward to see. Rachel was right about the print quality—they were poorly exposed and had been inadequately washed following development, resulting in brown stains mottling their surfaces. But they unmistakably showed a man from the back, lying on top of a young woman, her bare legs thrust apart; the same man holding a gun on another, dressed in fatigues but sporting a beard; the bearded man then clutching his chest and falling; and a fourth, quite blurred, of the shooter’s gun pointing around at the camera, as if ready to fire. The last picture didn’t show his face—or least not clearly enough to distinguish any features. Instead, the camera had, like prey focusing solely on the eyes of its attacker, instinctively centered on the gun.

“Jesus,” Lester said softly.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “So much for corroboration. Ben must’ve emptied one of his cameras just before Joyce reached him, and maybe shoved the roll into his pocket. I bet there’s an inventory somewhere in the bowels of the VA, listing a roll of film among Ben’s personal belongings.”

“It still may not be enough,” Joe cautioned, his frustration clear to all. “Look at them carefully. It’s definitely an extra nail in Joyce’s coffin, but I doubt you could say for sure that’s Joyce. We’re gonna have to keep digging.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Deputy U.S. Attorney Frederick Rawlings frowned at the files and photographs spread across the conference table at his office back in Burlington. Appealing to Joe’s sense of fashion, he was dressed in an off-the-rack suit, a shirt with a slightly frayed collar, and a pair of boots suitable for the city slush outside. “We still have Frank Niles, supposedly willing to cut a deal,” Rawlings said hopefully.

Joe looked him in the face. “I don’t want to do that. Plus, we have less against him than we do against his boss.”

“I hear you, Joe,” Rawlings said agreeably. “But if we don’t get lucky soon, we may have to get practical.”

Joe said in an even voice. “Niles is a sociopath. He tortured people to death.”

They had just received word that Abigail Filson, Nancy’s mother, had died in the hospital without ever regaining consciousness.

Rawlings let a few seconds elapse before asking, “What’s the status with the Chris Hadsel investigation?”

“We’ve got analysts looking at her phone and background for any linkage to Joyce or anyone near him. So far, nothing. Like Niles and Watson, it seems she erased enough of her history to make her unrecognizable to her own mother.”

Fred smiled. “I have a hard time believing that any of their mothers would care, but I take your point. What about the people Joyce supposedly paid off to keep quiet? You talk with any of them?”

“We’re working on it. But if they’re smart,” Joe reluctantly had to concede, “they’ll keep their mouths shut. I think Bob Morgan was manna from heaven, and probably unique. Not only that, but if Joyce hasn’t reached out to every one of them by now and had come-to-Jesus chats, I’d be very surprised.”

Rawlings sighed. “So, if you don’t want to trade with Niles, the other witnesses won’t play, and you’re not finding any connections between Joyce and his executioners—”he waved his hand at the messy tabletop. “—and none of the Vietnam photos can be used as rock solid proof, what
is
on your wish list?”

Joe looked at him carefully. “Am I supposed to read into that? Like, unless I come up with something, you’re not going to prosecute?”

Rawlings shook his head. “No. I’m perfectly happy to go after a United States senator circumstantially—probably at the cost of my career. I’d just like as much ammo as you can give me.”

Hardly mollified—since Joe knew that Rawlings acted only on the authority of his bosses, who could have a less generous take—Joe answered his earlier question. “I think I’ll go visit the senator.”

“To what effect?”

He stood up and walked to the door. “I’m an old-fashioned man, Fred. I like to do things face-to-face, if I can. Jack Joyce may be a bigwig politician and a rich guy with pals in the right places, but I want him to know who I am—and that a podunk cop from nowhere might have enough stubbornness to match his supposedly unbeatable muscle. You saying that’s out of bounds?”