I could hear her switching the phone from one ear to the other. “Joe, I’d like to help, but there have got to be other dark-haired women with more time on their hands than me right now.”
“I cleared it with Derby.”
There was a stunned silence, so I added diplomatically, “He said it was entirely up to you, but that whatever you were doing could wait an hour or so.”
“Oh, right,” she said sarcastically, “that’s not what I hear.”
I kept quiet, trusting her to look fairly at the issue without further prodding.
“When do you want this done?” she finally said wearily.
“The orderly just called me from the home and said Bernie had pretty much settled down. His name’s Harry. He’ll be waiting for you on the second floor.”
“And you just want me to be chummy, right? No pointed questions?”
“Right-this is purely an icebreaker. The real meeting will be with the shrink later on, tomorrow if we’re lucky. If not, I might ask you to do it again, just to build on the relationship. Would that be all right?”
She let out a short laugh. “Sure, what the hell? Maybe some time with an ancient nut case’ll give me a glimpse of things to come.”
Harriet’s detached voice over the intercom brought my attention to one of the blinking lights on the phone. “Gunther,” I answered, punching the button.
“It’s Sol,” he said breathlessly. “I lost Hennessy. He must’ve spotted me.”
“Where are you?”
“At the gas station where High meets Green. I followed him into the Chestnut Reservoir area, but I had to give him room so he wouldn’t-”
“Don’t worry about it. Get back in your car, switch to the private channel, and stay put.”
I ran out, forgetting my coat, and made for my own car as fast as the slippery ground allowed. I noticed for the first time that it must have been snowing for at least an hour-in big, fat, mesmerizing flakes.
As soon as I started the car, I changed over to the closed radio frequency we didn’t share with the half-million scanner listeners I was convinced inhabited the area. “M-80 from O-3. Contact any units in the Birge Street area to be on the lookout for any vehicles registered to Paul Hennessy or Virginia Levasseur. Sol Stennis is standing by with a description of Hennessy’s car. Get hold of Ron for what Levasseur might be driving or call it up on the computer. No unit is to pursue. I just want their location reported if spotted.”
I dropped the mike into my lap to better negotiate the corner onto Grove Street, heading toward Main, and hit the toggle to the blue emergency strobes hidden behind the car’s front grille. Without them, I knew the traffic would never let me onto Main, and I had a fair distance to cover fast.
I waited until all my instructions had been forwarded before keying the mike again. “Sol? I’m heading for Birge via Canal. Take Union Street to close it up from the other end, all right?”
“Copy.”
Even with a fully equipped patrol car behind them, complete with howling siren, motorists are often at a loss about what to do, assuming they do anything at all. So my demure, silent, flashing blue grille beacons did more to frazzle my own nerves than they did to move any traffic. Nevertheless, mostly through reckless driving, exacerbated by the thickly falling snow, I managed to reach my end of Birge in about five minutes. During that time, the radio informed me that Ginny Levasseur was registered to a ’95 dark green Ford Explorer, Hennessy to a red, plow-equipped ’96 Ford 35 °Custom pickup with dual rear wheels, and that nobody had seen either one since I’d raised the alarm.
Birge Street was one of Brattleboro’s significant historical sites, although you had to know the history to believe it. Narrow, nondescript, and located in a ragged section of town, its south side was dominated by a row of ancient, narrow, slate-walled warehouses, each of which nosed into the curb-long, thin, and tall-like oil tankers at a dock. Once home to the Estey Organ Works, they were now the domain of an assortment of diverse businesses, including Carroll Construction, where Ginny Levasseur worked in Payables.
I was here on the probability that if Hennessy had panicked as I hoped he had, his first order of business would be to warn his girlfriend. Now that I was parked at the end of the street, however, having sent the whole department into frantic motion, it suddenly occurred to me that the basis for my action stemmed from a gossiping, gum-snapping, post pubescent clerk I’d met for the first time this morning.
I picked up the mike again and crossed my fingers that Nicole’s friend Nancy was a sound judge of character. “Sol, can you see the parking lot?”
“Yeah, and the Explorer. Fancy car-has all the trimmings.”
“It should, if we’re right about these two. M-80 from O-3, we’ve located the Explorer. All units can stand down and return to regular duties, but keep your eyes peeled for the pickup.”
Dispatch responded in flat Chuck Yeager fashion, and I went back to watching the snow build up on the hood of my car.
“Here she comes,” Sol said about five minutes later. “He must’ve called her, ’cause she’s moving fast, carrying a man’s briefcase.”
“Which direction?”
“Hang on. She’s still in the lot… Okay, she’s headed my way… I’m on her tail, going back toward Union Street.”
“10-4. I’m right behind you,” I said, and began rolling down Birge to catch up.
Whatever the pitch of her anxiety, Ginny Levasseur did not set us onto any high-speed chase. The combination of slippery unplowed roads and increasingly poor visibility made her move at an almost leisurely pace. The only indicators of her frame of mind were her car’s occasionally nervous sideslips as she overgunned the accelerator.
Not that Sol and I were having an easy time of it. Driving rear-wheel-drive light sedans, we had our own work cut out for us, especially on Union Street’s cliff-like incline up to Western Avenue.
Thereafter, however, things settled down. The Explorer took Western to the interstate on-ramp and headed north. The three of us, mixed in with dozens of other snow-blanketed cars, stuck to the right lane like timid dowagers, relying on the barely perceptible dark double ribbon of cleared asphalt before us for both safety and comfort. One mile south of Brattleboro’s last exit, I got back on the radio and told Dispatch to widen the alert for Hennessy’s truck to include the Vermont and New Hampshire State Police and the Windham County Sheriff ’s Department, and to focus on the area north of town.
A few minutes later, after passing the exit, I was glad I’d invited more company.
For most of its length within the state, I-91 parallels the Connecticut River, servicing Vermont and New Hampshire equally. Exits occur about every ten miles, and in between, the views to both east and west rival the prettiest in the country. Today, however, was like driving through a pale gray tunnel, the only things visible being the taillights ahead, and the only sense of motion the sound of the engine and the occasional small bump passing beneath the wheels. This spatial detachment was enhanced by the endless, hypnotizing wash of snowflakes against the windshield. For all intents a solid indicator of forward motion, this cone-shaped vortex never seemed to move, dulling the driver’s concentration, until his primary impulse was not to steer but to sit back, drop his hands from the wheel, and lose himself in the display. By the time we were approaching Exit 4 in Putney, I felt my eyes might never uncross again.
“She’s getting off,” Sol reported, much to my relief, and I saw his right-hand flasher begin to wink.
The Putney exit is located south of the village, so we followed Levasseur on a slow parade along the main street, still accompanied by several other cars. I wasn’t too worried she’d notice the same headlights had stuck with her all the way from Brattleboro-the nervous, halting way she drove told me she kept her eyes glued to the road-but I was beginning to worry where this little trip might be leading us. If she was going to meet Hennessy, I wanted to make sure I had enough support units to hem him in. But until I knew where that encounter was to take place-or even if it was-there was little I could do to coordinate with other agencies. In frustration, I gave Dispatch a geographical update instead and maintained my twenty feet off Sol Stennis’s barely visible bumper.