Tony smiled slightly. “I think he’s right, Thomas. I can virtually guarantee the state police will politely laugh in your face if you ask them to bail us out. They’ve got far too much on their own plate to waste time helping us with some PR problems. In fact, not to be rude, but I don’t know why we’re even having this conversation, and I certainly don’t know why Gary’s here.”
The town attorney looked as if he wished he could vanish into the rug. He waved his hand vaguely and muttered, “Purely informational.”
Tony rose, forcing everyone to follow suit quickly, as if we all knew the meeting had come to a smooth and natural conclusion. “Please tell the board how much we appreciate their concern, but right now there’s more thunder than storm to all this. And assure them that if and when we feel the need, we won’t hesitate to ask for help. In the meantime, I think you should hold that press conference. We’ll keep at our job, and the town manager can be the conduit between us and the board, as usual.”
Chambers had little choice but to join the small herd as Tony ushered us all toward the door, but he wasn’t leaving without one last shot. “I think you’re being foolish. The way to kill this thing is with overwhelming force-take away the opposition’s firepower.”
By now, Tony had his hand on the door, and was closing it slowly behind them. He’d motioned me to stay. “I think you’re talking politics, Thomas. This is just a police investigation with a few media fireworks-no point breaking out the National Guard.”
We watched them through Tony’s inner-office window, filing by the radio room in a disorganized, disgruntled bundle. I had no doubt the wrath we’d stoked in Chambers was now burning Wilson’s ears.
“That was bizarre,” Tony said mildly.
I laughed, forever impressed by his ability to dismiss such encounters. “I guess,” I agreed. “Why was Gary part of it?”
“He handles discipline and termination matters from the top down. NeverTom had him here to make a point. We screw up, and our asses are up for grabs-or so he thinks.”
He crossed over to his desk and sat back down, clearly conscious of what NeverTom didn’t yet know about our ever-widening investigation. “Ron’s the one looking into the convention center, isn’t he? He find anything yet?”
I was sorry I had nothing to tell him. “I could give him more help.”
He fixed me with a pointed look. “Do that, but tread lightly. If NeverTom catches wind we’re looking into his brother’s new business deal, we won’t know what hit us. He’s powerful and nasty. Not a healthy combination.”
I thought over Tony’s parting words as I returned to my office. Thomas Chambers was an opportunistic, manipulative, ambitious man. When Gail was on the select board, she’d fed me the inside dope on his quiet but ruthless behind-the-scenes ascent to power. It had been textbook Machiavelli. What most of the public saw, however, was someone else entirely-an easygoing local celebrity, wealthy and connected, who’d quickly mastered the art of the populist sound bite and been elected to the board by a working-class mandate. It was a dangerous mixture of perception and reality and would make our job a nightmare if we didn’t proceed carefully. So, while Ben Chambers’s construction project had only dimly appeared on our horizon, we were going to have to give it a paranoid-tinged priority.
I paused at Maxine’s window. “Can you reach Willy?”
She depressed the transit button of the microphone before her. “O-5 from M-80.”
There was a short pause. “O-5.”
“What’s your 20?”
“Green and Whipple, heading north.”
“Stand by for a message from O-2.” Maxine raised her eyebrows inquiringly.
“Tell him to pick me up in the parking lot, if he’s available.”
She repeated the message, and we both heard a “10-4” in the exasperated tone a tired mother reserves for an obnoxious child.
Maxine smiled at me. “He says he’d be delighted to pick you up, Lieutenant.”
“Thanks, Max.”
Willy’s greeting matched his voice on the radio when I got into his car five minutes later. “What do you want?”
I refused the bait. The morning had been taxing enough already. “You find any other connection between Shawna and the building project besides Wallis dropping her opposition?”
“Not yet. Where did you want to go?”
“The building site. I was digging through Milo’s personal effects yesterday-found one of those cheap, complimentary ballpoint pens with ‘Carroll Construction’ written on it. And a pal of Milo’s told me he’d recently come into money.”
Willy’s sour face cracked into a smile. “No shit,” he muttered and put the car into gear.
The construction site of the future hotel/convention center was once again stirring with activity. After a month in mothballs, bulldozers and backhoes were cleaning out several storms’ worth of accumulated snow, and crews were milling around the enclosed shell of the huge building, inside of which most of the work would be done during the winter months.
Typically, Willy parked his car under a large sign reading “No Parking” and pocketed the keys to make sure it would stay there.
We showed our identifications to a listless security guard, and passed through the gate after accepting two visitor hardhats. Not far from us, just inside the fence, several trailers were lined up end to end, housing the managerial and office staff. I headed away from these, toward the building itself-an enormous, squat, L-shaped monstrosity that presently looked either half-built, or half-wrecked. Its gaping windows and doors were covered with thick, slightly ballooning plastic, in an effort to contain the warmth of the dully roaring space heaters within. It gave the place a vaguely bug-eyed appearance.
“What’re we looking for?” Willy asked, as we picked our way gingerly across the newly exposed, rubble-strewn surface.
“I don’t know. This job keeps coming up on our radarscope. You tell me.”
Willy nodded as if I’d formulated a detailed plan of attack.
We entered through a tall, overlapping plastic curtain, much like what they hang before industrial freezers. Despite the openness of the structure’s interior-all girders, steel grids, exposed duct work, and dangling utilities-the atmosphere was comfortably dry and warm.
All around us people were working, either singly or in small groups, paying us no attention. We were standing in a space big enough for a commercial jetliner, minus the tail. This was the lower of two major convention floors, the upright part of the “L” being the six-floor hotel section.
“His buddy told me Milo usually spent the night at the north end of Putney Road before working his way back downtown the next day. If I were a bum, this would seem like a perfect place to crash.”
Willy looked a little incredulous. “You’re going to check this whole place out, just to see where he might’ve spent the night?”
I began crossing over to where three men were clustered around a worktable covered with blueprints. “With a little help.”
“Excuse me,” I called out, introducing myself, “I was wondering if there’d been some kind of cleanup crew early this morning, looking things over.”
“That would be Larry Amirault,” one of them said. “He’s one of the assistant supers-downstairs somewhere.” He pointed to a door in a wall about a football field’s length away.
I thanked them and headed off, Willy in tow.
Downstairs, the scene was similar to the one we’d just left, but without the daylight, the high ceilings, or the sense of burgeoning glamour. This was the building’s practical heart, with cement floors and walls and multiple concrete rooms housing the necessary machinery to fuel the needs of future patrons. Sounds of hammering, sawing, and welding ricocheted off a maze of hard surfaces. The overhead lighting-countless strings of undulating caged bulbs-gave the entire area an oddly disturbing feel.
I stopped one of the first people we came to and asked for Larry Amirault, shouting over the din. The response was the soundless pointing of a finger down one of the wide, gloomy hallways. Eventually, repeating this routine several times, we reached what I took to be the basement of the hotel, where we found a small man standing in front of an enormous, disemboweled breaker panel, a walkie-talkie in his hand.