The SA nodded. “I could help you there.” He paused, still thinking hard. “I have to admit, I like the idea. Getting a bunch of SAs to cooperate on any case is like herding cats, and something like this could be even tougher, assuming the teenage cell concept is accurate. Also, having heard his pitch, I don’t know who besides Joe could pull it off. Giving this to another agency would be like asking a stranger to bring up someone else’s problem child. I’d have to sell the AG’s office on it, of course, but if this is as big as you think it is, they might like the smell of it. Everybody loves to make headlines.”
He hesitated and then asked as an afterthought, “Sound okay to you, Emile?”
Latour looked up, his face pale. “Sure. Great.”
Derby stood, forcing us all to join him. “All right, then. I’ll take care of that end of things. Joe, you own this for the moment. Get the warrant, find out what else Brian Padget might have leaning on him, and keep your fingers crossed that all these connections really exist. If they don’t, and all we end up with is a dirty cop, we’re going to have to start blowing one serious political smokescreen.”
Outside, in the SA’s reception area, the three of us huddled briefly like survivors of a storm. I was still slightly in shock. Despite my years on the job, I’m perpetually stunned at how often critical decisions, in a world where multiple legal systems constantly overlap, boil down to a sales pitch overwhelming either precedent or logic.
“You think he can do it?” Latour asked.
Tony looked down at him from his considerable height. “Con the AG’s office? Not without Joe’s help.” He jerked a thumb at me. “This is one grade-A bullshitter here.”
Although my little campaign would undoubtedly be causing him problems down the line, Tony was obviously pleased. He loved stirring things up and never seemed happier than in a stampede of scrambling bureaucrats and/or politicians. It was one of the contradictory things that I thought ranked him among the truly gifted police chiefs.
Latour, by contrast, wasn’t happy at all. “Bad enough I had Padget fooling around with a married woman. Now we’ll be the center of a statewide drug investigation. Just what Bellows Falls needs. Every newspaperman who knows how to dial will be ringing my phone.”
I patted him on the back. “Maybe not.” But I had a feeling he was right. “If it all comes together, you can just forward the calls to the AG.”
He shrugged and we dispersed, Tony and Emile heading for their respective offices, and I returning down the hallway to give Gail a quick visit. As I crossed her threshold, she was only half visible behind a row of paper columns, stacked side by side across her desk.
“You look like you’re preparing for an assault.”
She peered over the top and gave me a weary smile. “Or being buried alive. How’d things go with Jack?”
I didn’t bother asking how she knew about the meeting. In the essentially rural world of Vermont, you got used to people knowing what you were doing even before you did it. “Surprisingly well. He bought my proposal to turn a single cop’s positive urine test into an AG-sanctioned, statewide investigation, with me on board.”
She rolled her eyes. “God-has he got a lot to learn.”
I sat on her windowsill, enjoying the contrast of the sun on my back and the central air-conditioning on my face. “I thought maybe he’d grab this for himself.”
“Crooked cop cases are usually political land mines, and our boy is new yet,” she said, still sorting through her files. “He just needs to be consistent right now. Not that I’m complaining. The whole staff would’ve been sucked into this if it got messy.” She waved a hand at her workload. “This would’ve looked like peanuts in comparison.”
She sat back suddenly and looked at me thoughtfully. “I am curious, though. Why step over the drug task force, the Vermont State Police, and the Association of State’s Attorneys to go to the AG?”
For the next ten minutes, I repeated the pitch I’d just delivered up the hall.
She smiled at the end of it. “Nice snow job. It still doesn’t answer the real question.”
She didn’t elaborate, or need to. “Why me?”
I hesitated before continuing. It was a good point, one I’d rationalized to Derby in procedural terms, but which I hadn’t owned up to emotionally.
“I’m not exactly sure yet,” I answered slowly. “Something clicked when I saw Jan Bouch surrounded by those kids in their kitchen. It was cute on the face of it-all of them clamoring for doughnuts she was holding up high. But she wasn’t having fun. She was at a loss. She couldn’t sort out how to handle it. And then Norm came in, and grabbed the box and threw it outside like he was distracting a pack of dogs.”
I paused again, trying to string thoughts together so they made sense. “Jasper Morgan plays into this, too. When he escaped, raising all that ruckus for no apparent reason, it bugged the hell out of me. Now that he’s resurfaced, and in connection to Bouch, and there’s a cop in the middle who may or may not be dirty… I just don’t want to walk away from it. I want to find out what’s going on. There’s something inside me that needs this settled.”
I’d been staring at the carpet through all this, speaking as much to myself as to Gail, and now shook my head and looked up at her. “You glad you asked?”
Her answer surprised me. “You really think Bouch’s network extends that far?” she asked.
“Yes, but I better come up with some proof. The AG’ll take a couple of days making a decision-listening to Derby, reading through the files, brainstorming with his Criminal Division people. It would help if I dug up a small nugget in the meantime.”
I could tell I’d triggered some underlying notion with my ramblings, but apparently she wasn’t ready to share it. She leaned forward instead, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “We better get cracking, then.”
I didn’t ask, but I wondered what she meant by “we.”
Chapter 9
BRIAN PADGET’S HOUSE LOOKED DIFFERENT to me on my second visit. The concern for appearances that had struck me the first time now seemed violated by the official vehicles parked in his yard. I had asked Latour to be on hand to keep me company, and his car combined with mine threw suspicions on the house’s seeming propriety.
I had also brought two of my own squad to help me. J.P. Tyler, our thin, diminutive forensics expert, and Willy Kunkle, whose withered left arm and infamous bad attitude had made him a statewide law enforcement legend.
Disabled by a sniper years ago, Kunkle had been let go, to much shared relief. But in a move most of my friends, including Gail, had considered a clear sign of dementia, I’d encouraged him to sue the department under the disabilities act and get his job back. He’d never thanked me for that show of faith, and he’d been no easier to work with afterwards, but I’d never rued the decision. For all his temperamental, unorthodox, insubordinate ways, Willy Kunkle was driven to be a cop, and while there were times everyone felt like strangling him, I knew he would get me results regardless of challenge or sacrifice. Unlike any of my other officers, Kunkle came from that slice of society that gave us most of our business-a fact that fueled him with a passion the rest of us would never share.
Tyler, by contrast, fit the scientific stereotype-scholarly, quiet, self-effacing, but also highly efficient. He alone from my squad seemed unaffected by Kunkle’s manner, and perhaps for that reason Kunkle rarely gave him a hard time.
We’d all arrived without fanfare. Nevertheless, the house’s front door opened before I was halfway across the lawn, revealing a broad-shouldered, medium-built young man with the short buzz cut so popular among younger male officers-an affectation I personally believed served no other function than to further alienate us from the public we were supposed to assist.
The look on his face was hard to read. In its various parts I could see surprise, anger, defeat, even disappointment. Overall, however, I was struck by a sense of fatalism, as if our arrival had been anticipated for a long time.