The Company She Kept (16 page)

There was a pause before he announced, “Got it. Who do you need?”

“Margaret Kinnison.”

“Yup. She's here.”

“Any context given?”

“Just that she works at the State House, is listed as a staffer in the Senate secretary's office, and therefore must've worked with Raffner.”

“Outstanding. Thanks.”

“She a lead?”

Sam laughed dismissively. “Right up there with looking for Jimmy Hoffa's killer.”

She hung up before he could press her further, her hopes overriding a nagging undertow of guilt.

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Vermont State House is a curious combination of elegance—complete with gold dome and classical columns—and lopsided quaintness, because of its small size and oddly imbalanced proportions. But it is pleasingly placed before a broad, snow-covered slope, flanked by the appropriate cannon and statuary, and is a perpetual favorite among camera-toting tourists.

Unless they want to park. On that score—at least while the legislature is in session—Sam found the capital to be the single most irritating place in the state. As she always did when in town, therefore, she abandoned her car at the first illegal spot that she happened upon, threw her credentials onto the dash, and walked to the capitol building.

There, just inside the heavy front doors, she introduced herself at the sergeant-at-arms's office, and asked where she might find Margaret Kinnison.

In terms of efficiency and protocol combined, Sammie knew that she shouldn't be here. Parker and Perry included this town in their territory, after all, and were already fully engaged in the investigation. Vermont cops had jurisdiction wherever they went within the state, and certainly any VBI agent was free to act wherever he or she chose. But there were rules of etiquette, which Sam had already bruised by traveling to see Chris Hartley. Coming here, to meet someone with whom she had no personal connection whatsoever, was a more flagrant affront—and one about which she couldn't have cared less. It was becoming increasingly clear that the influence she and Willy had on each other was happily cross-germinating—good news for him, more complicated to define for her.

She ended up on the first floor, amid a tangle of offices and cramped hearing rooms, fed by an inexhaustible flow of people moving at high speed and either talking to each other or muttering on cell phones. Sam felt like a teenager on her first day in high school, scrutinizing door numbers and labels to find out where she needed to be—hoping not to be run over. The capitol is reflective of the sobriquet “the people's house” in quite concrete terms—for the most part, its elected residents don't have offices. They are therefore readily available to their constituents, unless they're hiding off campus in their cars or at a bar. Everyone tends to mill about, as a result, either on a mission or hoping to find a quiet corner to do some work. It makes the efforts of the shared secretarial and support staff that much more challenging.

At last, Sam found herself in the doorway of a small subcommittee room, overfilled with a long table and a cordon of empty chairs. It was populated solely by a short, sturdy, nervous-looking woman, standing at the table's head and gathering together a thick sheaf of loose papers left over from a just-concluded meeting.

She looked up as Sammie entered. “May I help you?”

Sam showed the badge on her belt by opening her coat. “Margaret Kinnison?”

The woman's expression didn't change, but her hands froze in mid-motion. “Yes.”

“You available to answer a few questions?”

“What about?”

Sam kept her voice at a near monotone—neither threatening nor comforting. “A couple of things, starting with Susan Raffner's murder.”

Kinnison straightened. “Me? What would I know about that?”

Sam barely smiled. “My very point.”

In the brief silence following her one-liner, Sam watched the other woman lower her eyes, swallow hard, fiddle with her papers without seeing them, and then say, “I don't know anything.”

Sam stepped farther into the room and shut the door behind her, severing the hubbub outside as if with a guillotine. She asked, “We gonna be left alone here for a few minutes?”

Kinnison checked her watch. “We should be.”

Sam gestured with her chin toward the chair at Kinnison's waist. “Sit.”

She did so as Sam removed a small recorder from her pocket, laid it on the large table, and removed her coat. “You got a problem with me recording this?”

Kinnison was sitting down awkwardly, bumping her knee against the table's skirt board. “No, no. That's okay.”

Sam sat nearby. “For the record,” she intoned, “I'm Special Agent Samantha Martens of the VBI, and I'm with”—she looked directly at her subject—“would you state your name for the record?”

“Margaret Kinnison.”

“What is your date of birth?”

Kinnison recited it, followed by Sam's informing the recorder of the day's time and date, and their present location.

“What do you do at the State House, Ms. Kinnison?” she then inquired.

“I'm a senate liaison. Kind of a glorified secretary, really,” Kinnison threw in with a sad smile. “I and people like me keep the paperwork moving in the senate and between the senators and others in this building.”

“Did you know Susan Raffner?”

“Sure. I know all the senators.”

“Some better than others?”

“I'm not sure what you mean. I work more for some than for others. A few of them are well enough organized that they don't need much help.”

“And Raffner?”

Again the nervous half smile. “She was one of the needy ones. Very nice woman, and supersmart. Not so good keeping everything in order.”

“So you spent a lot of time with her.”

It wasn't a question. “I guess I did.”

“Outside the building, too?”

“We go over to the Pavilion next door sometimes, if we have to coordinate something with the governor's office.”

“How 'bout beyond there, maybe for personal errands?”

Kinnison repeated the eye shifting and paper shuffling. “I guess,” she replied in a lower voice. “Maybe.”

“What for?”

“You know, normal stuff. Get a sandwich for her.”

“Did you ever see her socially?”

That response immediately invoked a rare flash of direct eye contact, quickly broken off. “Oh, no.”

“She draw the line there?”

“Not in so many words, but she was nice to us, generally.”

“You're suggesting a have/have-nots division.”

“I guess,” she said again.

“How did that feel?”

“Okay. They're the bosses. We just work here.”

“Did you have contact with her only during office hours?”

“No.”

“So how did that work?” Sam pressed her. “She call you?”

“She gave me a pager.”

Sam scowled. “She do that with the other staffers?”

“No.”

“How did you rate the extra attention?”

“I … don't know.”

Sam placed both forearms on the table. “What did she have on you, Margaret?”

Kinnison remained tucked in, with only the crown of her head showing. “I don't know why she was killed.”

“I didn't ask you that. Why did you say that?”

Long pause. “I don't know.”

“I think you have your suspicions, Margaret. She was a powerful, influential woman. She pissed off a lot of people. Did she piss you off, too?”

Surprising to Sam, Kinnison did not look up. “No.”

“Then what?”

No response. Sam reviewed what she'd just heard, comparing it to what she knew of Susan Raffner.

“She scare you?” she asked.

The head nodded wordlessly.

“That's ‘yes'?”

“Yes.” It was barely a whisper.

“To the point where you thought you might lose your job if you didn't cooperate?”

“Yes.”

“Was that because of something she said to you?”

“No.”

Sam fought to control her frustration. This woman was making her think of a small animal, responding to threats real and imagined without discrimination.

“Margaret, I think I'm getting it,” she said in a gentler voice. “Susan Raffner was like a force of nature, expecting a response whenever she made a suggestion. Did you find that both attractive and maybe a little scary?”

“Yes.”

“And it made you feel important and invisible at the same time?”

“Yes.”

“Did that make you volunteer more than you might have for somebody else?”

This time, it was just the head nod again, which Sammie didn't ask to be verbalized. She'd abandoned any notion of a clean and forensic interview by now, opting instead for leading questions only. She was impatient enough that she no longer cared how well this recording would hold up to legal scrutiny—and by contrast, sure enough from her subject's compliance that she'd get what she was after.

“Let's focus on what she asked you to do when you were off the clock, Margaret,” she said. “You said you'd go out for food sometimes.”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“Groceries. Dry cleaning.”

“Buy some drugs.”

The muted noise from the hallway slowly took over the long silence in the room. Sam became aware that Kinnison was crying, her tears dropping on the backs of her clutched hands.

“Tell me, Margaret.”

Nothing.

“We have your fingerprints on a bag of marijuana.”

Still, silence.

Sam changed directions slightly. “What do people call you? Is it Margaret?”

“Maggie.”

Sam rose, her chair screeching on the floor. She leaned across the space separating them, her hands flat on the table. “Maggie, if you were worried you might lose your job because of pissing off Susan Raffner, I guarantee you a lot worse if you don't start talking. Tell me how your prints got on that bag.”

At last, Kinnison looked up, her cheeks damp. “She said her regular supplier had been arrested, and that she needed a refill.”

“How did she know to ask you?”

“She got me talking one day, about when I was younger and a little out of control. She could be really persuasive and nice when she wanted to be, and I was trying to make a good impression. I told her I'd done some drugs but had managed not to get busted. It wasn't then, but maybe a few weeks later, she brought it back up, and told me how I could help her out. Not ‘if,' but ‘how.' That was the way she put it. I didn't feel like I had much choice.”

“Plus,” Sammie suggested, “you were still doing drugs, even if only now and then.”

Kinnison hesitated.

“About which I couldn't care less,” Sam told her. “Keep going. You got hold of your source?”

“Not really,” she answered slowly. “I don't smoke marijuana—never have. I had to find somebody else—sort of a friend-of-a-friend thing.”

“Go on.”

“Well, that was it. I found the source, Susan gave me money, and I bought it for her.”

Sam settled back into her chair, her prayers of the past twenty-four hours answered. Whether it ended up having anything to do with Raffner's death or not, at least she was getting some traction. “From the top, Maggie. Who was the source? How much money changed hands? Where did it happen? Don't leave anything out.”

Maggie's face creased with anxiety. “I don't know names. I only know my guy.”

“What's his name?” Sam almost shouted. “For Christ's sake, Maggie. Get your head in the game. This is a murder investigation. We don't give a shit about you unless you start ticking me off. Then I'll cut you down like grass in front of a lawn mower. Is that clear enough for you?”

There was a knock at the door and a young woman poked her head in. She opened her mouth to say something, but Sam interrupted her with, “Get out. Police business.”

The door shut.

“Talk,” she ordered.

By now, Kinnison was sitting back in her chair, her hands in her lap, openly crying. “His name is Brandon Younger. He lives in Hartford, Vermont. But he gave me the number of somebody in Rutland. It was a TracFone, though, so the number's long gone, and I never was given a name. I called it, said I had a thousand dollars for the best weed he had, preferably Canadian hydro—which is what Susan had asked for—and could we meet up? He said sure, and that's what I did.”

“Alone, or with Susan?”

She shook her head. “No. That was the whole point. Susan didn't want to take the risk, now that she was a senator. I was to be her buffer. That's what she called it. And she paid me, too.”

“How much?”

“Three hundred dollars.”

“Okay, so you go to Rutland and meet this guy. Where? What were the details?”

“I think it was South Street, but I'm not sure. An area they call the Gut. I was told to drive slowly, until I saw a boy wearing a top hat, and then I was to pull over and park. It was night, a little scary, and that part of the block was really dark, as if on purpose. I rolled the window down and stayed in the car, like I was told. That's when some man came up from behind, like cops do when they pull you over, and we did the sale—the money for a really big bag of grass. After that, he disappeared and I drove away. That's all there was to it.”

“What did you see of him?”

“Nothing. His belt buckle. It had the word ‘Indian' written on an Indian's war bonnet, like in profile.”

“He was alone? What happened to the kid?”

“I never saw him again. But there was somebody behind the man with the belt buckle, in the dark. I could just see his outline, but that was all.”

“What was said?”

“Not much,” Kinnison said, calmer now. “Belt Buckle asked if I had the money. I asked if he had the dope, and we made the exchange.”