Spinney moved the car quickly into traffic and entered New Hampshire. I gestured to Dahlin’s radio. “Who’s on the other end?”
“Lebanon Police.”
Spinney took the right, drove through the village of West Lebanon, and bore right again to take Route 12A into the heart of the most heavily commercialized area along the entire Vermont-New Hampshire border. Almost a mile of plazas, malls, and megastores, this strip of 12A paralleled the Connecticut, crossed the Mascoma River-a small, fast-moving feeder-and went under the east-west bridge of Interstate 89. At the best of times, it was as jammed a spot as any good-sized urban downtown. At the worst, it virtually became gridlock. As we entered from the north, I could see things were about fifty-fifty.
“What’s your location?” Dahlin inquired on her radio.
The voice on the other end didn’t sound happy. “Below the interstate, east side. Chinese restaurant parking lot.”
Spinney found his way there, having gone beyond the lot, turned left onto the airport road, and then doubled back along a back street. Road planning had not kept up with development.
A Lebanon police cruiser was discreetly parked between two other cars, its clearly marked tail end facing a music-store window. One of the patrolmen had draped a jacket over the car’s roof light, further disguising it. All three of us got out and joined them.
The driver, a tall blond with mild acne, looked disgusted. “We figured we’d wait for you here. Find out what you wanted to do. He went in there”-he gestured to the Chinese restaurant far across the big parking lot-“but we don’t know what happened to him then. When he didn’t come out after half an hour, we went inside. Nobody. We showed his picture around. They all said they’d never laid eyes on him.”
Heather Dahlin kept her voice tightly under control. “You didn’t want to call for backup when you first saw him?”
The blond looked uncomfortable. “We weren’t even sure it was him. We only caught a glimpse, from across the street.”
Her eyes narrowed. “So maybe it wasn’t him?”
I moved to defuse things a bit. “Considering he’s vanished, it probably was. It sure as hell was somebody who didn’t want to stick around and chat. Did you check for a back exit?”
The patrolman nodded sadly and looked over at his partner. “Wayne here did a few minutes after the guy went in-that’s why we thought we had him bottled up tight-but I guess he’d already split. He must’ve cut through the place at a dead run.”
Spinney stretched and yawned, seemingly unconcerned that he’d driven at supersonic speed to come to this conclusion. “Well, if he wasn’t spooked before, he sure sounds it now.”
“Wrap it up?” Dahlin asked of me.
I nodded. “Might as well. A half-hour head start, he could be anywhere.” I shook hands with the patrolman. “Thanks, anyway. It was worth a shot.”
He merely shook his head, pulled the jacket from off the cruiser’s roof light, and got back behind the wheel.
The three of us returned to our car.
“What now?” Dahlin asked as we walked.
I checked my watch. “It’s getting late. We might as well bunk down at a motel here, and then head back to Waterbury tomorrow.”
Deflated by the anticlimax, no one spoke as Spinney nosed up to the line of traffic and waited for an opening. Heather sat back in her seat, staring out the side window, her radio ignored beside her. Although totally different in style, she reminded me then of Sammie Martens, which made me wonder how things were going back home in Brattleboro.
Spinney was finally waved into line by a courteous driver and drove up to the red light just south of the interstate overpass.
Reminiscing brought me to Gail, whom I hadn’t seen since the funeral. I had been hoping that tonight I could drive down from Waterbury to South Royalton-a short half-hour trip-and spend a little time with her, but that was obviously not to be. I’d call her anyway, even though the phone had become more of an irritant than a remedy to the isolation I was feeling.
Spinney moved forward on the green light, passed under the interstate, and slowed again at another traffic light on the far side. We were just shy of the bridge over the narrow Mascoma River, and stuck between two huge mall complexes, one on either side of us.
I glanced across Spinney, out his open side window, and onto the vast parking lot of the L-shaped Kmart Plaza. There was yet another Oriental restaurant about midway down the row of stores.
Suddenly, I leaned forward in surprise. “There.” I pointed toward the distant restaurant, now half blocked by the opposite flow of traffic.
Heather Dahlin sat up as if stung, her face glued to the window. Spinney kept trying to look to where I was pointing and watch for the light simultaneously. “What the hell is it?”
“Go left-into the parking lot. I think I saw him.”
“Damn.” Not daring to use his siren, in case Michael Vu thought the heat was off, Spinney switched on the blue lights mounted behind the car’s grille. Nobody seemed to notice. He inched into the line of traffic, now coming on quickly, jerking the car forward in stages.
“Come on,” Dahlin urged from behind. “Where was he, exactly?”
“Going into that restaurant.” Spinney swore and hit the gas, lurching in front of a small red Honda, which slammed on its brakes with a squeal. There was a howl of protest from a horn. Just feet away, I saw its driver contorting her face with a torrent of soundless invective. In a second she was gone, as Spinney sped forward, narrowly missing another collision in the next lane, and finally shot into the entrance of the shopping plaza.
“Stop,” I yelled, and opened the door, which was wrenched out of my hand by the sudden arrest of momentum. I leaped out onto the pavement.
“What’re you doing?” Spinney shouted at me.
I was thinking of the two cops we’d just left. “Going around back in case you chase him through.”
I ran across the end of the long line of shops and down a paved service road dotted with overflowing Dumpsters. To my right, noisy and tumultuous, the Mascoma River hurtled near, far, and near again as it passed through a long, sharp-angled S-curve between trash-strewn, muddy banks.
A hulking eighteen-wheeler appeared at the far end of the road and began trundling toward me, gathering speed, despite the road’s narrowness and clutter. I ran faster, hoping to reach the restaurant’s back door before the truck cut me off, but I was too late. I was forced to skid to a stop behind one of the Dumpsters, and wait until the behemoth went by, my hopes of beating the others to the restaurant defeated.
The outcome was predictable. Just as I began running again, Michael Vu exploded from one of the distant doors. He stopped for a moment in the middle of the road, saw me bearing down from his right, and bolted straight ahead.
Facing him, the Mascoma veered back to within fifteen yards of the rear of the buildings, its current and depth mellowed by the hairpin curves just upstream. At the foot of the gentle bank that Vu was running down, there was an eddy of sorts-a gently swirling radius of calm water, where it looked like someone might take a dip in warmer weather. Beyond it, the water flowed its fastest, pushed away from the far bank by a tree that lay anchored in the sandy mud. Overall, the width of the river was about twenty feet.
Vu didn’t hesitate. He reached the edge of the bank at full tilt and took off in a wild flat dive, landing with explosive force in mid-current. For a moment he floundered, his body twisting and rolling; then he grasped the far reaches of the small tree extending to the middle of the stream. He found his footing on the bottom, which was only some three to four feet deep, and dragged himself to the other bank.
Abreast of him now on the opposite shore, I stopped, my feet in the mud, deafened by the river’s tumble. I cleared my revolver, pointed it straight at him, and motioned with my other hand for him to lie down. He hesitated momentarily, suddenly broke into a grin, and began working frantically to pull the tree’s embedded trunk free of the mud. He’d realized-as I knew all along-the futility of both my command and my weapon. Vu was wanted, as they say in the movies, “for questioning.” And while Hollywood routinely makes that an offense deserving gunplay, we both knew it was not.