“It’s interesting, though,” I mused. “A woman with that background, responding time after time to the residence of a submissive woman and her abusive husband. It must’ve been like stepping into her own family movie, only this time as the authority figure.”
Sammie watched me carefully. “Which leads you where?”
I pushed away from the partition and began moving toward my office. “Eventually, to a conversation with the lady herself. Thanks. I know that wasn’t much fun.”
After weeks of warm, dry weather, the forecast was warning of a major rainstorm, which prophecy proved true as Jonathon Michael and I approached Bellows Falls early that afternoon. The lead gray sky pressed low upon the broad interstate, making me feel I was racing between two immovable masses-a bug running like hell to escape a descending shoe. The rain was heavy enough to overtake the wipers and made me wary of hydroplaning the tires.
“You get anything on that computer search of Bouch’s assets?” I asked Michael, more to ease the tension than to learn what he would have told me hours earlier had it been relevant.
“Nothing beyond what we already knew,” he said. “No big surprise, of course-if he has any brains, he’s got half a dozen dummy fronts to hide behind. I did get the report back on Padget’s urinalysis. It doesn’t match the sample you found in the toilet tank. What he was carrying around inside him shows no cutting agent whatsoever.”
“It was pure coke?” I asked.
“So they said. What I know about chemistry you could feed to a tick. The bagged stuff was supposedly cut with procaine, and there was none of that in his system. It’s too bad, in a way. Sometimes what they use is exotic enough to trace, but procaine’s pretty common. It’s unregulated and you can buy it through any vet supplies outlet-it’s a topical anesthetic.”
“Huh,” I muttered. “The paper’s informant implied it was all one and the same. I don’t know how or why, but this could be good news for Mr. Padget.”
I entered Bellows Falls from Route 5 and continued on to Atkinson Street. About halfway to the police station at the town’s north end, I turned left onto a rough, dead-end street lined with small, scabby-looking old warehouses. The road was so full of water-filled potholes and patches, it was like driving across a rock-filled pond. At the far end, we stopped next to a cobbled-together, one-story building with a rusting metal roof. A hand-lettered sign over sagging garage doors read “Al’s Auto.”
Jon gave me a questioning glance.
“Quick stop,” I said. “Davis told me this is where Padget had his car fixed when Emily Doyle was taking him to work.”
We got out and ran, hunched over, toward a narrow entrance next to the garage doors. It was no more than a ten-yard dash, but we were drenched by the time we ducked inside.
On a normal day, the building’s interior would have felt dark and hazardous-an evil-smelling hospital for decrepit, oil-bleeding cars. Today, it was almost embracing, its quirkily placed bare bulbs and the thundering rain on the roof giving a sensation of domestic warmth and protection.
We glanced around, seeing no signs of life and hearing nothing over the sound of the rain. I finally made a megaphone of my hands and called out, “Is anybody here?”
The answer came from disturbingly close by. “Yeah.”
We both instinctively stepped back in alarm as two legs appeared from under a pickup I’d been near enough to touch. A man dressed in filthy blue overalls rolled out on a creeper and lay looking up at us. He was holding a flashlight in one hand and a wrench in the other.
“What can I do you for?”
I showed him my badge. “We’re police officers. I was wondering if you could answer a couple of questions.”
The man scowled. “Am I in trouble?”
“Not with us. It’s about a car you serviced-for Brian Padget.”
He pursed his lips, rolled off the creeper onto his hands and knees, and slowly rose to his feet. With blackened fingers, he groped in his breast pocket for a pack of cigarettes and lit his selection from a book of paper matches. I let him take his time.
“What about it?”
“You told Padget there was water in the gas tank. You know how it got there?”
He scratched his cheek, looking from one of us to the other, transparently pondering his best approach. “They say sometimes dealers spike the gas with water to stretch a buck.”
“From what we could find out, Padget buys most of his gas from the same place. There’ve been no other complaints.”
He tilted his head slightly, putting on a philosophical air. “I’ll tell you what I tell some of my customers about that. I warn ’em to stay away from any gas station-even their regular one-when there’s a gas truck filling up the underground tanks. People don’t realize, every one of those storage units has some water in it. Just the nature of the beast. And it’s no big deal as long as nobody stirs it up, ’cause water sinks like lead and stays on the bottom. But you get a big tanker dumping all that gas in there, mixing everything up, and you put that stuff into your car two minutes later, you’re going to be takin’ on some serious water.”
Jonathon spoke from just behind me. “Do you know that’s why the water was in the tank?”
The man pushed out his lower lip and shook his head. “Nope. I dropped it out of the car, emptied it, dried it, bled the lines, and hooked her back up. I checked the container where I poured the gas and saw there was water mixed in. She ran good afterwards, so I told Padget that’s what the problem was.”
“Is this common?”
“It happens, usually when the tank starts to rust through, or after a tanker truck refill, like I told you. But it’s not too often it gets so bad you notice it.”
Jonathon looked around the large room. “What kind of container do you empty the gas into?”
“Big plastic see-through thing. I got it around here somewhere.” But he did no more than glance over his shoulder, as if to summon the container by magnetism.
Jon pressed on. “So you saw exactly how much water there was.”
“Yeah, sure. Maybe a gallon, maybe more.”
“Isn’t that a lot?” I asked.
“Enough to mess things up. The feeder line to the engine comes off the bottom. You get a little water sitting there, no big deal. Maybe you hear a ping now and then, maybe not even that. More water, more of a problem. When you get into a couple of gallons or more, then you’re sucking water and nothin’ else, so the engine doesn’t even fire.”
I looked at Michael and raised my eyebrows. He shook his head slightly. “Okay,” I told the mechanic, “thanks for the help.”
We were almost back to the narrow door when his voice caught up to us. “He in big trouble, Padget?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” I told him.
Back in the car, the dampness rising from our clothes like a mist, I began driving toward the Island, between the canal and the bend in the river.
“What’d you think?” Jonathon asked.
“By itself, not much. Combined with everything else, it makes for one hell of a handy way to get Emily Doyle into Padget’s house.”
The directions Greg Davis had given me led us past where we’d parked to see the petroglyphs, and down a narrow, tree-choked lane that dead-ended at an enormous, ancient red-brick building that loomed out of the surrounding rain-soaked woods like an ominous vision from a fairy tale.
Jon craned his neck to see the roofline high above us. “I take it this is one of the famous mills? It’s creepy enough.”
I turned left down an embankment, picking my way through the weeds, and rounded the building’s corner. There, the lane widened to a broad, grassy parking area, opposite a row of enormous wooden doors, one of which swung back on its hinges as we stopped.
Backlit by a string of bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling behind him, Greg Davis gestured me right into the mill’s embrace. Like Jonah entering the whale, I drove past him, and saw the grayness of the day vanish as the ponderous door slammed shut with a reverberating echo.