The Company She Kept (23 page)

“I have,” Gail said forcefully. “With every passing day, I'm more sure of it. Susan and I talked about this before she died, in part because I do have thoughts about higher office. She was the one who counseled that I ought to consider coming out, if for no other reason than to be centered and balanced as the woman I feel I am—before entering the national political arena where they take no prisoners, as you've been implying.”

Gail gazed out the front window as she continued, “I actually reached out to the man to whom you're referring. He's a highly placed Vermont police officer and a truly good guy. I told him, in effect, that I'd never felt more solid as a result of all this, and I sensed he completely understood and was supportive. It hasn't been easy getting here, and I haven't always treated him or others in my life very well.”

She returned to look at her guest. “I am angry at Susan's death, and devastated that she's no longer nearby. But I've done what I've done out of honest self-respect.”

Maureen Bentsen smiled and reached out to pat Gail's hand briefly. “Then we'll see what we can do to keep you in office, Governor—and maybe more.”

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Hartford, Vermont's name may have been inspired by its muscular, urban cousin in Connecticut, but if so, the two stopped speaking then and there. The sole similarity was that they bordered the same river. Otherwise, the northern namesake was a spread-out jumble of unincorporated villages—Hartford, Quechee, West Hartford, White River Junction, and Wilder—containing a small fraction of the original's population. The larger Hartford's “metro area” census, in fact, exceeded one million people, or almost double Vermont's entire tally.

For that matter, the town that Sam and Willy entered—after handing over the scene containing the late Jackie Nunzio to the Rutland police—had always lacked a robust identity. This was perhaps helped by its straddling the junction of Interstates 91 and 89, which made it by default a major temporary stopping-off point for people with intentions both pure and otherwise. Additionally, Hartford's longing for homogeneity had suffered from the extreme contrast between its two most opposite municipalities, Quechee and White River Junction. The first was well known for boutique stores, an expansive golf course, upscale condo clusters, and proximity to affluent Woodstock; the second for being a down-on-its-luck railroad town, surrounded by economic vitality but possessing only a faded, funky charm that it touted with heartfelt, slightly winded zeal.

The two cops were here to find Brandon Younger, Willy's plan B.

Sam was of two minds about this, torn between her initial instinct to salvage her self-perceived damaged reputation, and worrying that Willy's help might create a mess that would turn her first transgression into a minor misstep.

It didn't help that the conclusion she and Willy had reached concerning Jackie's fate hadn't dovetailed at all with their homicide investigation—reducing their field trip to Hartford to a possible wild-goose chase. Jackie's autopsy and tox exam were yet to come, of course, but there was no indication that they'd change what was safely looking like an accidental overdose.

That heightened Sammie's quandary, in her view. As Willy had said, Joe had assigned him the freelancer's job—not Sam. Willy could poke around and pursue leads to his heart's content, as long as he stayed under the radar. Sammie, by contrast, was the Raffner case's coordinator, responsible for making sure that all the cops working this case kept on task, didn't bump into one another, and processed everything properly.

Messing about with Willy on a persistently weakening tangent was guaranteed to bode ill for her.

Willy, unsurprisingly, showed little concern for any of this.

“What was the address Maggie gave you?” he asked, straining to see the passing street signs in what was becoming the worst snowstorm of the season. It had already taken them twice the normal travel time to get here, and the snow had only started falling an hour ago.

Sammie told him. Securing the address had been simple. Once Willy had revealed his strategy—to locate Stuey following the same route Maggie Kinnison had taken on Susan's behalf—Sam had merely called Maggie up, hoping the pressure that she'd applied in person would still yield results. It had. In a monotone, Kinnison had recited Younger's address and phone number, and agreed to not give him a heads-up, although Sam wasn't putting much faith in that part. Presumptions notwithstanding, almost everyone lies to the police, from the hardened criminal to the little old lady caught speeding to church.

She and Willy were fully prepared for Brandon Younger to be either expecting their visit, or conspicuously out of town.

“There.” Sam pointed down a narrow side street, lined with three-story, industrial-era worker's housing, called triple-deckers for their stacked exterior staircases crisscrossing from one balcony to the next. In these near-whiteout conditions, they looked vaguely like a flotilla of ancient, beached riverboats, left to rot by the side of a stagnant stream.

“How the hell're we gonna know which one's his?” Willy said mostly to himself, struggling not to sideswipe any parked cars. “Can't see any house numbers.”

Sam glanced at her notepad. They'd gotten dispatch to retrieve Younger's registration earlier. “It's this one. That's his car.”

Willy pulled over, more or less. As soon as he killed the engine, the windshield was covered with a screen of white snowflakes. They struggled with gloves and hats to better protect themselves from the elements, knowing the wind would seek out any exposed skin for a painful bite.

“You set?” Sam asked.

Willy zipped up his coat. “You do know it sucks to live up here.”

She laughed. “Yes, dear,” and she opened her door.

In contrast to the car's combination of heater fan, engine noise, and the police radio murmuring under the dash, what they stepped into—even with the wind—was an eerie, all-enveloping, world-sized cotton ball of sound-absorbing silence.

Stumbling in the gray light, slipping and catching their boots on unseen obstacles, they made it to the sidewalk, up the swaybacked building's uneven steps, and onto the porch.

Willy leaned in close to Sam's head. “What floor?”

“First,” she answered in a low tone, feeling oddly exposed in a sound vacuum with no visibility.

“There's gotta be a back entrance,” he said. “If he spooks, I don't wanna go after him in this shit.”

“You want to go 'round?” she asked.

He mulled it over before nodding. “Give me five minutes and then pound on the door.”

“Roger.”

Back outside, Willy realized that five minutes wouldn't give him much time. The narrow passage between the buildings was plugged with a Dumpster, two vehicles, and piles of trash, all cemented in place by past snowfalls and ice from the roof high above. Giving up discretion and even safety, he stumbled, lurched, slipped, and staggered through the barricades, cursing nonstop all the way, until—breathless and sweating—he reached what passed for a backyard.

There, simultaneously, a ground-floor plywood door flew open and a heavyset bearded man burst out onto the back porch, wearing only jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers. He gave Willy a quick glance, cut in the opposite direction, and made to vault over the railing ahead of him to escape across the yard. He didn't make it, catching a foot as he leaped and sprawling onto the thickening snow with a resounding thud.

Struggling with his own footing, Willy tried reaching him before he got back up, not counting on the man finding a chunk of cinder block in the snow, which he hurled at Willy's head with surprising ease and accuracy. Willy dove to one side as his attacker made for an opening in the gaping wooden fence surrounding the yard.

Awkwardly regaining his footing, Willy glanced at the back door to see Sam appear, quickly assess where Brandon was going, and vanish again, presumably to circle around from the front to cut him off. Encouraged, Willy continued his chase.

Beyond the gap, he found himself in a narrow alleyway filled with more obstacles and hemmed in by more fencing. Ahead of him by a dozen yards, but already more ghost than man, Brandon was using his familiarity with the terrain to make good headway. Willy began ruing that he hadn't kept his gun in his hand from the start, and shot the bastard when he'd first caught sight of him—counterproductive, maybe, but much more satisfying.

Gasping for air, constantly reaching out for support, Willy found his physical asymmetry costing him distance, to where all he was doing finally was running in the same direction as his quarry, without actually seeing him anymore.

That was explosively remedied when Younger sprang out like a pit bull from behind a stack of garbage cans and caught Willy from the side, lifting him up and smashing him against a tree trunk, wrenching his back and banging his head—the sounds of their bodies colliding and the wind escaping their lungs the only things breaking the universal silence.

Dazed by the blow, Willy struggled against his pummeling opponent. However, it was the dull crack of a gun barrel striking the back of Younger's head, accompanied by Sammie stating, “You move, you die, motherfucker,” that finally did the trick. Willy dropped his arm, fell back, and exposed his face to the falling snow, letting out a groan. “Damn, girl. You do know how to make an entrance.”

*   *   *

Brandon Younger lived alone in a barely furnished ground-floor apartment dominated by a huge, stained couch, an arena-sized flat-screen TV, and little else. Her rage compensating for their difference in size, Sam almost threw the wounded man, covered with snow, onto the couch and stood over him, her gun still out. Behind her, Willy shut the back door and quickly checked the one bedroom and bath for other residents. There were none.

“You are some piece of work, you know that?” Sammie asked their reluctant host. “What the fuck were you doing?”

Younger was rubbing the back of his head. “This really hurts.”

Willy pulled out his own gun and pushed it between Younger's eyes. “You know I can take care of that, right? You resisted arrest—I got the bruises to prove it—so I shot your pathetic ass to save my life. That work for you?”

Younger looked from one to the other of them. “I thought you were cops.”

“We
are
cops, stupid,” Sammie told him. “Pissed-off cops.” She leaned forward and placed the barrel of her gun next to Willy's, pinning Younger's head to the back of the couch.

“You guys are crazy,” he said timidly. “I could get you in trouble.”

“Not if you're dead,” Willy said menacingly.

“This won't hold up in court,” Younger tried one last time.

“It's never going there,” Sam assured him.

The man's body deflated as he sank into the stained cushions. “What d'you
want
?”

“Stuey Nichols,” Willy said.

His eyes widened. “Who? You did all this for someone I never heard of? You're kidding me.”

Sam rapped his forehead with her gun barrel, making him wince. “Let's try Maggie Kinnison.”

This time, they got somewhere.

“That crazy bitch?” he said. “Did she put you onto me?”

“Not even close,” Sam lied, straightening and holstering her weapon. “What's she to you?”

“She
used
to be a customer.
That's
over with, for sure. I don't need shit like this.”

Willy was still standing over him. “Are we gonna have to start all over again?”

Younger scowled. “Give it a rest. I get who's the alpha dog.” He shifted his glance to Sam. “Maggie dates back to the old days. But I haven't sold her dope in forever. People move on, or I thought they did. Now, I can't get rid of the bitch.”

“What's that mean?” Sammie asked.

His face displayed amazement. “Well, damn. First, she calls me outta the blue and asks where she can score some weed, then some crazy queen bee wannabe shows up and demands to know what I told Maggie, and now it's you two. Fucking Maggie Kinnison is like comin' outta the walls. I never made a cent outta any of it, and now I'll probably have to go to the hospital for my head.”

“Not unless you want a brain transplant, moron,” Willy said. “You're not even bleeding.”

“Fuck you.”

“
Shut up,
” Sammie yelled at him. “Will you focus for one goddamned minute? Who's this queen bee you're talking about? What was her name?”

“Right,” Younger retorted. “Like she told me. I don't know your names, either. Good thing, too, considering the lawsuit I could throw at you.”

Willy flicked his hand at him, which made the big man cower. “Don't even think about it.”

“Describe her, then,” Sam persisted.

“Don't have to. She's all over the news. Got herself strung up, which she totally deserved.”

“The woman hanging over the interstate?” Sam asked.

“That's her. The politician.”

“She came here?” Willy asked.

“That's what I said.”

Sammie sat on the couch arm next to him. “What did she want?”

“To know what I'd told Maggie, duh.”

This time, Willy did hit him across the head, albeit with the back of his gun hand. “Manners, asshole.”

“What did she want?” Sam repeated.

“Like I said,” Younger replied in a whine. “She just wanted to know what I told Maggie.”

“Why?”

“She was pissed, is why. She said she'd been ripped off, and nobody does that to her, and heads were gonna roll, and shit like that. It was crazy.”

“How'd she been ripped off?” Sam pressed him, not revealing what she knew.

Younger rolled his eyes. “Well,
weed
, of…” He broke off to cover his head as Willy raised his hand again, still holding the gun. “Okay, okay. I'm sorry. She was complaining about the weed she got—or Maggie got for her, or whatever. She wanted her money back.”