Joe laughed. "Top of the masthead. Good going."
Martin smiled back, his eyes betraying that he'd figured out what was going on. "Not that tough when you created the company. I'll never have a reputation like yours-or deserve it."
Joe gave his hand a last squeeze and dropped it. "I guess that depends on the reputation and who you're hearing it from."
Martin nodded. "Good one. You'd make a good lawyer. I promise, I've only heard the best." Here, he glanced at Gail, who was standing quietly, her eyes blank, fingering her cell phone.
"You all set?" he asked her. "We'll have to beat feet to make that meeting."
Nicely done, Joe thought, and stepped back. "Have a safe trip," he said, waving to them both, and added to her, "I'll let you know if anything changes, one way or the other."
He stayed standing there, the polite host after the party, until they'd both settled in, slammed their doors, and the dapper Francis Martin had driven halfway down the drive. Gail's pale face was still visible through the back window as Joe finally turned on his heel and went back inside, his heart beating somewhere in between relief and sorrow.
Sammie Martens parked her car on the street, across from the bus depot parking lot on Liberty Street, and paused before getting out, surveying the surrounding bleakness. Springfield, Massachusetts, was huge in comparison to anything in Vermont, or, as most Vermonters saw it, huge and crowded and blighted and depressing. Sammie had personal knowledge of the social troubles this area visited upon her state. She'd gone undercover in nearby Holyoke for a while in a vain attempt to stifle some of the drug flow heading north.
Of course, she knew that her prejudice was unfair. Springfield was an oversize urban center, no more or less saddled with its ills than most places of its kind. And no bus terminal that she'd known was located in a town's upscale section. This one was wedged against two interstate overpasses, surrounded by industrial-style low buildings and adjacent to the train terminal, which looked as though it dated back to when robber barons called the shots.
Barely visible in the gray, flat daylight, a strung-up sign of extinguished lightbulbs was attached to the low, arching stone overpass that carried the railroad tracks between the depot and the rest of the city, to the south. The sign spelled out, "City of Bright Lights."
Sam popped open her door and got out into the kind of harsh cold that only miles of concrete can exude, the wind whipping between the nearby buildings and shredding the warm cocoon around her. She stood next to the car, getting her bearings and noticing the contrast between the bland, towering, modern Mass Mutual building in the distance, and the ornate, Italianate campanile beside city hall behind it-the only sign of grace within sight. Her contact had told her, on the phone, to park where she had and that everything else would become obvious.
It did. She saw, over the tops of a row of salt-streaked, dirty parked cars, a clearly marked police van, the glimmer of some yellow tape, and several cold human shapes standing around, most nursing coffee cups. She crossed the street and walked down the length of cars to join them.
As she drew near, a tall, white-haired, red-faced man in a down jacket that made him look like a tire company mascot broke away from the small group and approached her.
"Agent Martens?" he asked. "Steve Wilson, Springfield PD."
She nodded in greeting, not bothering to shake, with everyone wearing gloves. "How'd you know?"
A wide smile broke his craggy face. She imagined he was old-school-hard at work, hard at play, and no stranger to the bottle. Some stereotypes existed for a reason. "You walk like a cop."
That made her smile. A cop was all she'd ever wanted to be. She pointed to a small, dark sedan parked almost nose to nose with the police van and surrounded by the yellow tape. "Don't tell me-that's the car, right?"
He laughed. "I wish I could tell you we'd wrapped the wrong one on purpose, but that's it, all right. Good detective work."
Several of Wilson's companions chuckled in the background, eavesdropping and, she knew, checking her out. Not that she minded especially. Guys she could handle. Women cops were tougher to figure out.
She stepped up to the car's hood and looked at the vehicle straight on-a dark blue Ford Escort, several years old, but in pretty good shape. A middle-class car, economical and dependable. Its inspection sticker was up to date and issued from Connecticut.
"You run the registration yet?" she asked.
Wilson nodded. "Frederick Nashman. A couple of old moving violations, nothing big. That's assuming the car wasn't stolen to get it here."
She looked at him.
"It's not reported stolen. I'm just saying…"
"Got ya." Sam went back to studying the car, slowly walking around it, her hands in her coat pockets. "Anybody notice it out here before we raised the alarm?"
Wilson was walking with her. "Nah. Would've happened eventually, but they can be parked out here a long time."
She finished her tour and straightened to give him an eye-to-eye, as best their relative heights allowed. "This when you tell me you've gone through it all already and have everything bagged and tagged in the back of the van?"
His eyes and eyebrows expressed theatrical shock, but his laugh gave him away. "It did cross our minds, what with the weather, but given the respect we have for… What do you call yourselves again?"
She gave him a friendly sneer. "Cute. You got the paperwork at least?"
He nodded, adding, "And we popped the lock, just to make sure we wouldn't be screwed after you got here. Thing opened like a soda can. No one's been inside yet, though."
Sam nodded. "That was nice-I do appreciate it."
"No sweat," he said, liking her more and more as this went on. He made a gesture to the people behind them before saying, "And now that you are here, we got a little extra comfort to throw you."
She looked over at the van as the others swung open its rear doors and pulled out a long, bulky, brightly colored tarp with bundled aluminum tubing, a generator, and an oversize space heater. She recognized the package immediately and smiled at her host. "A heated tent. Sweet."
Steve Wilson bowed. "We try."
Some 250 miles to the south, following a seven-hour drive from Vermont, a stiff and tired Lester Spinney crossed a sidewalk in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, and entered the Lower Merion Police Department, where he'd been told to check in on arrival.
"Help you?" the man behind the bulletproof glass asked.
Les pulled out his badge and held it against the window. "I'm here to see Detective Cavallaro. Lester Spinney from Vermont."
He studied the man's face, expecting the usual Vermont-directed one-liners, but got nothing for his effort. The dispatcher merely glanced at the ID, picked up a phone, and said over the tinny loudspeaker between them, "Have a seat."
Five minutes later, a tall woman with short-cropped hair stepped into the lobby, smiling. "Agent Spinney? Detective Cavallaro. Call me Glenda. You have a good trip?"
He shook her hand. "Lester-Les is okay, too. And the trip was fine. More people than I've seen in a while, though."
She looked at him quizzically. "Where? On the road?"
"The road, the streets, the towns, even the sidewalk outside. We only have about half a million in Vermont, and a third of them are clustered around one town."
She visibly had no appreciation for what he was saying. "Huh," she said. "Interesting. I was born and brought up around here. Never saw it as crowded. New York-that's bad. Most of what you drove through is tied into there, one way or the other."
Spinney chose to drop it. No one outside Vermont could be expected to understand a setting where starlit skies, complete silence, and empty downtown streets at four in the morning were the norm. Except maybe far out west. He'd heard that even a Vermonter could get lonely in Wyoming.