The Company She Kept (34 page)

After another fifteen minutes, Joe finally straightened and shook David's hand in thanks.

“This do you any good?” Hawke asked him, opening the door to the hallway.

“Not obviously,” Joe conceded. “But it was helpful to see it all. After a while, with the e-mails and faxes and phone calls and teleconferences, you sort of lose touch with the reality of the thing. It's nice to return to square one every once in a while. Thanks for that, David.”

“Sure thing, Joe. Happy hunting.”

*   *   *

Montpelier being two exits away from the lab—and on the way back to Brattleboro—Joe stopped by Gail's office in the Pavilion, which was attached to the rear of the Vermont History Museum. A mundane brick structure, it housed a variety of governmental agencies and was overseen by a single guard in the lobby. However, even with the paranoid times and how most other states protected their upper management personnel, the Pavilion was just a fraction more secure than the wide-open, neighboring capitol building. Ironically, given his job and sense of privacy, Joe rather liked the pragmatism of Vermont's minimal safeguards. If it wasn't broke, there was no special need to fix it.

Upstairs, in the waiting room outside the governor's combined office and apartment suite, Joe found John Carter, Gail's head of security, sitting on the visitor's couch, working his smartphone.

Joe sat beside him and shook his hand. “John, how've you been? Things crazy enough for you?”

John pocketed his phone and shook his head. “We've been earning our pay. I can tell you that. How's the investigation going?”

“We're making inroads,” Joe said. “You just hanging around, waiting for more media to storm the door?”

Carter chuckled. “Not at the moment. Things have quieted down a bit. The one-minute-one-mile attention span of most of those people is helping us out there. I'm just waiting for the governor. She's due to head out soon.”

Joe got back up. “I better drop in now, then,” he said. “Don't want to make her late—or miss her altogether.”

Carter stayed put, but held up a hand. “I've been meaning to call you about Nate Fellows.”

Joe paused. “Oh?”

“It's no big deal, but I know your unit's been looking under every rock. Did you know that he'd written threats to the governor, as well?”

“I knew her name was on a hate list he'd made. What was the nature of the threats?”

“Nothing specific. It was more crank than hate. You read the same sort of crap in letters to the editor. But he went on about how she was a disgrace and a traitor to Vermont and should stay in the kitchen and all the rest. You get the idea. We checked it out at the time, but found nothing to move on. He never crossed the line. You know: letter of the law and all that. Freedom of speech.”

“When was this?”

Carter shrugged. “Months ago. I just wanted to make sure you knew he hadn't just targeted Raffner. It seemed like a general kind of thing.” He quickly glanced at his watch. “You better get going. She's already running late.”

“Thanks, John. I appreciate it. Good seeing you,” Joe said, thinking that their Mystery Man's selection of Nate Fellows as a patsy might not have been as random as they'd thought. Within the right circles, it seemed that Fellows had been a known entity.

*   *   *

Alice Drim looked up from the copy machine in the office's front room and greeted Joe with a bright smile. “You here to see the governor?” she asked.

“I am, but I hear she's already running late.”

“Another event to raise money. Things've heated up, what with one thing and the other. We won't all be looking for jobs next year, but she's got her work cut out for her.”

Joe knew that Alice was also the campaign's volunteer fund-raising coordinator. “How's the money holding up? If that's not too indiscreet?”

She laughed. “For you? I don't think so. There was like a big theatrical pause when we were holding our breath, but the governor played it like a pro and the coffers opened back up. So we're looking good. A big break in your case wouldn't hurt.”

He returned the smile as he passed into the office's inner sanctum. “I hear you, Alice. We're working on it.”

He met Gail and her entourage of Rob Perkins, Kayla Robinson, Joan Renaud, and a couple of others coming down the short hallway. Gail's face brightened at the sight of him and she gave him a warm embrace. “God, it's good to see you. Did you need something? I'm afraid I'm running out the door.”

“I know. I heard,” he told her, walking alongside. “I was just in the neighborhood, as they say—at the lab seeing David Hawke—and I thought I'd say hi.”

“Damn. Let me call you later. Things've become pretty nuts, mostly due to my rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick. But the campaign's building steam, too, as a result. This place has been crawling with people all day.”

“It's helped you regain your focus, from what I've been seeing,” Joe said.

She stopped at the front door to the suite and took his arm, looking into his eyes as she'd once used to. “You know that's true, don't you, Joe? Especially now.”

Very briefly, he saw her eyes dampen with the thought. He quickly kissed her cheek and murmured, “You're doing well. Knock 'em dead.”

He stepped aside in the front office, where John Carter and a couple of others were waiting, including a woman who stared at Gail as at a store mannequin, quickly and professionally swapping out her earrings and altering the lay of her collar. She also muttered something to her, which caused Gail to forage through her pockets at speed and empty them of accumulated trash into the receptacle by the door—to smooth out the lines of her long coat. With a false smile and a nod of the head, the handler faded back and let the cortege file out. They moved fast, murmuring urgently—like water released from a sluice gate—most of them with their smartphones out, which were glowing for attention. Joe stayed inside the doorframe, watching them head for the elevator. With their departure, and the absence of Alice as well as the receptionist, who'd vanished into the office's nether regions, Joe suddenly found himself alone and surrounded by silence, as if in the aftermath of a tornado.

His foot bumped against the half-full trash can Gail had used, which had been jostled slightly from its place near the wall. He stared at its contents a moment as he pushed it back, his memory abruptly jarred, and his heart falling. He crouched to take a closer look.

Checking over his shoulder to make sure he was still alone, he retrieved an envelope from his inner pocket and used it to carefully lift a gum wrapper from the trash. It was labeled Black Jack, written on a black oval against a pale blue background. It was a perfect match for a similar wrapper he'd just seen laid out on David Hawke's lab table.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“What did Hawke say?” Sam asked.

Joe shifted the cell phone to his other ear. He was parked outside the forensic lab, to which he'd returned in a fog of mixed emotions after finding the Black Jack wrapper Gail had dropped into the trash can.

“They match. Same fingerprint on each wrapper, but nothing's on file, so we have nothing to go on.”

“But it's the governor's office,” Sam protested. “How many people can that mean?”

Joe's eyes were sightlessly fixed on the snow directly before his bumper. He was reflecting on the possibility of a near lifelong friendship gone lethally sour, and on one woman turning on her lover with a viciousness Joe would never have imagined.

“It's like a beehive,” he replied, doggedly forcing himself to heed the literal truth, in place of his worst fears. He hadn't actually seen the contents of Gail's pockets hitting the trash—he'd merely retrieved what he'd found on top of the pile. He wasn't an eyewitness. “The trash can was by the front door. The wrapper doesn't necessarily belong to a staffer. We can't jump too fast here—not now.”

“But we could ask around,” Sam protested. “Black Jack? That's what you called it? Who the hell's ever heard of that? It's gotta be super rare.”

“That's exactly what I mean,” Joe countered, struggling not to sound testy. “If we show an undue interest, then we've revealed our hand. Assume it is someone in Gail's office. Right now, he—or she—is probably feeling safe. We need to take a careful, under-the-radar look at each of them—backgrounds, lifestyles, whereabouts on the night of the murder, fingerprints, the whole ball of wax—and see if we can find something that ties one of them into this. Speaking of which, what did you get out of Regina Rockefeller?”

“She was better than I thought she'd be,” Sam said, immediately falling into line with Joe's marching orders, which only fueled his guilt about keeping his suspicions from her—his most loyal and trusting of colleagues. “Turns out the chatty crazy lady imitation is partly camouflage, which is maybe a little crazy in itself. But she still didn't have much to offer. She heard what she thought was Susan coming and going that night, but when she called out just as the supposed Susan was leaving the house, there was no answer and the person slammed the door, which was something Raffner apparently never, ever did. Regina wrote it off to Raffner being pissed off for some reason, and said that Raffner came and went all the time in the middle of the night when the legislature was running. It was only later that she wondered if it might've been somebody else.
Oh.
And before you ask, there was no extra key that Regina knew anything about.”

There was a pause—Joe lost in his thoughts, Sam reviewing what she'd just said. “About the background checks,” she then followed. “Does that include the governor? I mean, that's a little offbeat, isn't it?”

The nature of the question allowed him to display some remnants of responsibility. “Of course it does. We can't play favorites. And I shouldn't be anywhere near it. I probably shouldn't even be briefed on it. You handle the details of this and don't tell me of your progress.”

She hesitated before replying, “Got it. You okay? You sound a little off.”

“I've had better days,” he answered, his memory fruitlessly stretching back over the years to any outbursts of anger that he'd witnessed in Gail, searching in vain for demonstrations of real violence.

*   *   *

“You ready to throw away more of the taxpayer's hard-earned cash?” Willy asked. “We ought to head out and do some street work—check out the salvage yard again, maybe, and establish if someone on our lists knew about it.”

Lester was hunched over his desk, studying line after line of what looked like a bill. He didn't stop as he spoke, “I thought of something that might be more useful. Raffner got a piece of mail this morning that got me thinking.”

Willy was intrigued. “What d'ya got?”

Lester kept reading. “Well, if it's nothing, we'll both get called on the carpet for wasting time, so beware the company you keep, but it occurred to me that there may have been one aspect of Raffner's Prius that no one's looked into.”

“Do tell.” Willy leaned over and saw that Lester was looking at automotive gas receipts.

“The Prius had a relatively full tank,” he explained. “Made me think about her buying gas. Most of us are creatures of habit, especially when it comes to our cars. We go to the same mechanic, use our favorite gas stations, and most of us stick to a regular commuter route, at least to and from work.”

“Tell me what I don't know, Grasshopper.”

Lester continued, unfazed. “Well, up until the trip she took with her mystery passenger, from Brandon in Hartford to Buddy in Rutland, Raffner was boringly predictable, back and forth between Montpelier and Bratt. But according to her most recent credit card bill, and the mileage accrued by this routine, I calculated that she was due for a refill, which she had to have gotten near the end of her last trip.”

“Maybe around Rutland?” Willy proposed. “Buncha all-night gas stations there, 'cause it woulda been late. How full is relatively full?”

Lester looked up at him. “That's another habitual thing, right? At least among people who can afford it—filling up the tank when you need gas. I asked for the lab to give me an estimate on the amount of spent fuel, and you're right—it's looking like she burned off enough to get from Rutland to where the car was found in that salvage yard.”

Willy straightened and returned to his desk to grab his gloves. “I think I know where you're heading, but why do we give a rat's ass where she filled up last?”

Lester grinned at him. “We don't. But if we find the station”—here he tapped the receipts before him—“like I just did—maybe—if we're lucky…”

“We find video footage,” Willy finished for him.

*   *   *

The Rutland gas station Les and Willy pulled into an hour and a half later was big, busy, and—Willy noticed before the car rolled to a stop—equipped with surveillance cameras.

“There's no time stamp on that bill, is there?” he asked his colleague.

“Just the date,” Lester answered, killing the engine. “But I'm going with the theory that she filled up before she started pounding on doors.”

Willy was derisive as he opened his door to get out. “You don't think whoever whacked her and stuffed her into the back then stopped here for gas and a quick latte? You're hard.”

The store manager was an accommodating sort—or his unseen boss was, somewhere up the corporate ladder. Upon being shown two badges, he didn't hesitate allowing them access to his video console in the store's back room. Additionally, he administered a crash course on how to run the equipment—including operating the DVD burner—and left both men to their own devices.

That last courtesy, along with two chairs, turned out to be important, as neither Les nor Willy had any idea when the Prius had pulled in, nor could they fast-forward through any dormant stretches, since the station was so busy that there weren't any.