The Catch (5 page)

He leaned forward and kissed her, his nostrils filling with her warmth.

He pulled back just enough so that he could speak. “How long have you been asleep?”

She smiled. “Trick question. What time is it?”

“Eleven-thirty.”

“About seven hours. Not bad. I wanted to see you when you got back, so I came here instead of my place.”

He kissed her again. “I’m glad you did.”

She reached up and touched his unshaven cheek. “Was it bad?”

“Yes—a cop was killed. We don’t know who did it yet.”

“Oh, Joe. I’m so sorry.”

“So am I.”

She kissed him gently before asking, “Did you get any rest at all?”

“Not yet, and I’ve got to keep going. I just dropped by to freshen up and change my clothes.” He looked
at her and added, “I am really glad you’re here.” He brushed one of her breasts with his fingertips—the hint of a caress.

She smiled up at him and swept the rest of the sheet clear of her body. “Since you’ve got to take your clothes off anyhow, would you like to stretch out for a couple of minutes?”

He laughed. “I would, in fact.”

The southeast office of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation was located on the second floor of Brattleboro’s municipal building, one flight above the town’s police department, where Joe Gunther and two of his three-person team had worked before VBI’s creation. Those were Sammie Martens and Willy Kunkle, who, despite distinctly different temperaments and styles—and a history of having growled at each other for years back in the PD days—had since become among the unlikeliest of couples. The unit’s third member was Lester Spinney, a gangly ex-state trooper who commuted every day from Springfield, Vermont, where he lived with his wife and kids on Summer Street, an address that generally described his disposition. To say that Spinney and Kunkle were a study in contrasts was to put it lightly, meaning that every once in a while, Gunther had the urge to shelter the former from the latter’s excesses, although Spinney had never requested it. Spinney was the least flamboyant of them, but the best grounded and most thoughtful—qualities Joe valued highly, even if they were only rarely heeded by the other two.

Over the years, Joe had grown to know these people like family, trust them with his life, and believe absolutely
in their abilities—which was a good thing in Willy’s case, as he owed his continuous employment to Joe’s many interventions on his behalf.

All three of them were in their small, cramped office when Joe walked in—about twenty minutes later than he’d intended.

“Hey, boss,” Sammie said from her desk, her expression showing concern. “How’re you doing?”

Willy was not so conciliatory. “He’s better off than the other guy. They got a line on the shooter yet?”

Lester merely smiled sympathetically and nodded his greeting, to which Joe responded in kind.

“I’m fine,” Joe said, putting the small backpack he used as a briefcase on top of his desk. “Thanks for asking.” He sat beside the pack, dangling one leg, and looked at Willy. “And they’re working on that.”

Willy was all but barricaded behind his desk, which he’d placed diagonally across one corner of the office, so he could face out as if ready to take fire.

“I bet,” he snorted. “This is about drugs, right? The paper just said nobody was talking, even off the record—that’ll probably change in the next five minutes.”

Joe tilted his head equivocally. “Maybe. Most likely. What we know so far is that a Massachusetts Toyota Solara was pulled over by this deputy late last night—for what reason is anyone’s guess. The deputy—Brian Sleuter—was a hotshot, with a good arrest record, including a lot of drug busts.

“The car contained two men: James Marano, the driver, and his passenger, Luis Grega. We got an almost instant hit when we issued a BOL on the car’s registration, that it had entered the U.S. from Canada at
the Highgate checkpoint about ninety minutes before it was stopped by Sleuter.”

“Drugs,” Willy said again. “I knew it.”

Sammie gave him an exasperated look from across the room.

“What about the U.S. side of the equation?” Lester asked quietly. “The Massachusetts address attached to the registration?”

Joe nodded. “Dorchester Avenue, south Boston.”

“Drugs,” Willy repeated in a bored voice, rolling his eyes.

“Shut
up,”
Sammie told him.

“Marano’s the resident of record,” Joe continued, knowing better than to pay attention. “We’ve asked the local cops to just keep an eye on it for the time being, not to bust anyone, and to identify everybody’s comings and goings, if they can.”

“Good luck with that,” Willy commented. “Those jerk-offs can’t identify their own children, unless somebody pays them to do it—if you get my drift.”

Lester laughed. “Never a problem getting your drift, Willy.”

“Were there any other hits from that Be-On-the-Lookout?” Sam asked.

“Not so far,” Joe answered. “The Toyota pretty much vanished, as far as we can tell. We did a complete records check on both men. They have extensive criminal histories.” He nodded to Willy, adding, “Which are mostly centered around drugs.”

“Which one’s the shooter?” Willy asked, finally contributing to the conversation.

“Sleuter had his cruiser camera on,” Joe told them.
“On tape, you can see Grega, the passenger, slip out the side door and work his way back between the vehicles. You lose sight of him there, but then you hear the shot and see him running back to his car, his and Marano’s paperwork in hand. We interviewed some of Sleuter’s fellow officers to learn his habits during a traffic stop, and supposedly he always attached the paperwork to a clip he’d mounted especially to his steering wheel. It would’ve been no challenge for Grega to see what he needed right after shooting him in the head.”

“I’m guessing he never got a ticket started?” Lester asked.

“Apparently not. Again, on tape, this whole thing takes a few minutes only, from start to finish. Sleuter had both men’s twenty-sevens, but he never got the chance to even finish Marano’s record check, much less start on Grega’s. If it hadn’t been for Sleuter’s body mike, and that Customs got the names of both occupants at the border, we wouldn’t have Grega’s ID at all.”

“Can we milk the border crossing angle somehow?” Willy asked suddenly, as if out of the blue.

And therein lay just one example of why Joe worked so hard to keep Willy on his staff. He smiled broadly. “God, I hate to say this, but great minds think alike. I contacted ICE in Boston, and have an appointment this afternoon. The border involvement is custom-made for us to hook up with them and get the biggest bang for the buck, at least in terms of law enforcement muscle.”

“Meaning you like the Feds?” Willy asked, as if arguing against himself.

“Plus,” Joe added, “they’ve been decent in the past, creating task forces instead of running over us. And
I know the SAC personally. I think that—and the fact that this is a cop killing—will help grease the skids.”

Sam glanced at her watch. “When’s your meeting with them?”

“Three hours, and I need a driver if I want to be coherent when I get there. You available?”

He knew she was. He could tell it from the way she’d asked the question. There was no “Number Two” agent in this office—not officially. But all of them acknowledged the almost father/daughter connection between Sam and the boss. It made sense to everyone there that if Gunther had anyone accompany him on this trip, that person would be Sam.

“You’re not letting the Burlington office handle this alone, are you?” Willy asked, not miffed at being passed over, but not wanting to be left out altogether.

“Not a chance,” Joe reassured him. “This is the first cop killing we’ve had in years where we didn’t have the bad guy in custody right off. By this afternoon, everyone and his uncle’s going to be crawling over this, from the press to the politicians to every cop in the state. Mike Bradley was with me this morning. I want you two to coordinate with him—even drive up there in a couple of days to help them create a command center, if necessary, and to keep ahead of the stampede. We want to see if either one of these bad guys had any local connections. It’s anyone’s guess right now if they were just driving through the state, or had a specific reason for being here. Also, Willy, I want you especially to take a close look at Brian Sleuter—more than just a once-over—just to find out what kind of cop he was. Right now, we’re going with the random-traffic-stop-gone-bad
scenario, but there’s always a chance that somebody knew somebody else here, and that all this is a disguised hit.”

Joe stood up, then paused to add, “But keep that part under your hat. I don’t want any pals of his to start circulating that we think he deserved what he got. We’ll have enough sensitivities floating around without that.”

Willy gave him a mocking salute. “Yes, oh leader.”

Sammie rose also to join Joe as he headed for the door, glancing at her partner as she passed his desk, “You are such a tool,” she told him.

Willy laughed. “Love you, too, darlin’. Should I stay up tonight?”

“Yeah.” She laughed back at him. “That way, you’ll miss me even more.”

ICE stood for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which made sense, since it was comprised of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service and part of what used to be U.S. Customs. But few people missed that the end result was possibly the most self-enhancing acronym in law enforcement since SWAT. There was at least a cynical suspicion—among doubters of big government in general, of course—that INS and Customs had been lumped together during the great Homeland Security shuffle solely so that a few cops could wear hats and jackets straight out of some fictional, way-too-cool, Saturday morning cartoon.

The Boston ICE office was run by a Special Agent in Charge, or SAC, none of which had much meaning to anyone outside the federal system. But to its denizens, such distinctions were weighty matters and played a direct role in pay grade, seniority, and the likelihood of advancement. All cops were obsessively cognizant of their benefits packages, union provisions, wage variances, shift schedules, and retirement dates, among other bureaucratic minutiae. But Feds in particular, Joe had discovered, put the average focus on all this to shame.
They tended to rigorously track not only their own statistics but those of their coworkers, with the keenness of horse bettors studying the dailies.

ICE was headquartered in two downtown Boston buildings—the Tip O’Neill, on Causeway, and—much to the irritation of those who regularly traveled between them—the neighboring JFK Building. Sammie Martens, having chauffeured Joe here once before, parked in the basement of O’Neill.

Joe was a frequent visitor; Vermont being thinly populated and a border state made it a target for those smugglers moving people or product into the U.S. covertly. And, more recently, with the advent of the VBI and its statewide major crimes charter, it had actually become practical for Gunther and a few others to become deputized to ICE.

During this process, Joe had met and become friends with the improbably named Rufus Cole Botzow, the SAC who ran the Boston office.

It was Botzow they were here to meet.

The building was urban blandness personified—a sensation only heightened after Sam and Joe left the elevator and were ushered across the threshold of the ICE office, and herded through a maze of chin-level cubicles, most occupied by people either studying computer screens or talking quietly on the phone. Lacking was any sense of a high profile, hard-hitting bunch of action junkies. The men and a few women they passed appeared to be merely casually attired office workers, looking as if their only concern was finishing the day without stapling their thumbs or getting caught in traffic on the way home.

To Sam, who’d never made it upstairs on her first visit, the overall effect was a little disconcerting. Joe, on the other hand, was quite comfortable with it all, anticipating the turns as they wended their way toward the corner office.

Rufus Cole Botzow was a large bald man with remarkably bushy eyebrows, who came marching out of his lair with a broad smile and an extended hand as soon as he caught sight of them through his extensive inner glass wall.

He brought them both into an office personalized by service plaques, a row of hanging law enforcement baseball caps, photographs of grinning, armed people in military fatigues, and a display of children’s art, mostly magnet-mounted to the front of several filing cabinets. It was the cave of a man who’d experienced a broad sampling of life’s offerings, some of them a little dicey.

Botzow waved them to a pair of comfortable seats and settled himself behind a paper-strewn desk, also decorated with memorabilia.

“Damn, Joe, it’s been a while. I can’t even remember when I last saw you. A year?”

“Almost.” Joe smiled back at him. “You came up to hunt deer in New Hampshire and took a detour to visit.”

Botzow laughed. “My God, you’re right. No wonder I spaced that out. Didn’t see a goddamn thing on that hunt. I thought about shooting a parked car, just to say I hit something.”

Gunther gestured at the walls surrounding them. “Would’ve been a little hard to explain, mounted here.”

Their host shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve got so much crap already, a car on the wall might not even be noticed. Why’d you drop by, Joe? All I know is that it’s got something to do with that deputy’s death you e-mailed me about.”

“The shooter’s driver lives at this address.” Joe placed on the desk a printout of what they’d gathered so far on both Marano and Grega. “We think Grega pulled the trigger.”

Botzow looked sympathetic. “Jesus—tough break. Not like that happens much in Vermont, right?”

“Not much,” Joe admitted. “We had a cop killed in a hit-and-run a few years back, but the guy was caught right off. It turns the whole state inside out.”

Botzow was nodding. “Right. Still, it’s a homicide.”

Joe held up his hand. “I know, I know, and ICE doesn’t do that. We understand that. There is a border involvement, though. This car was fresh from entering at the Highgate checkpoint.”