But he wasn't moved to challenge Hillstrom's findings. One thing she never did was stray too far into supposition. She always had the science to back her up.
He did see one loophole, however. "Doesn't it sound like overkill to you, using both?"
She hesitated. "I know what you're saying, Joe. I thought the same thing. You're asking me to theorize, though, and I don't feel comfortable doing that."
"Humor me. I won't quote you."
He could hear her frustrated sigh in his ear. "It struck me like the belt-and-suspenders metaphor."
"He wasn't sure of just the fentanyl, so he threw in the DS…"
"DMSO."
"Right… For good measure."
"You asked what I thought," she agreed halfheartedly. "But I have no evidence to back that up."
He laughed at her predictable discomfort. "I know, I know. That's my job."
"Correct, Agent Gunther."
"Doctor, as usual, one hell of a job. I have no clue what to do with this, but it's got to be a smoking gun somehow. I just need to find which hand it fits."
"Have fun, Joe. Glad I could help."
"Thanks, Beverly. As always."
This time, since Joe had called ahead, finding Rob Barrows at his Chelsea office wasn't simply dumb luck. The deputy met him in the diminutive front lobby and led him back to the tucked-away basement corner they had used the time before.
Barrows cleared a guest chair of a pile of papers and offered Joe a cup of coffee-not quite to cafe standards but appreciated nevertheless. The younger man was in high spirits.
"I'm guessing you've been busy," he said as they both settled down. "I heard half of Bellows Falls blew up last night."
Joe laughed. "Hardly. The gas station owner's going to get a couple of brand-new pumps, though."
"But the bad guy," Rob persisted. "Wayne Nugent-he ties into what we've been doing, right? I ran him through Spillman, soon as I heard, and made a bet right off with one of the other guys that I was right."
Joe nodded-this was, after all, in large part why he'd made the trip. He owed Barrows that much. "Yeah. He was the one who did Andy in prison. One of my people dug it out and was trying to arrest him when he took off."
Barrows shook his head. "Wow. That must've been something to see."
Joe couldn't argue the point, but he doubted that public opinion was going to be quite so appreciative statewide, especially in Bellows Falls, where sensitivities about police actions ran high.
"I also wanted you to know that I told E. T. about Nugent's connection to his son-just so you aren't blindsided later."
"I appreciate that," Rob responded. "Especially since we're about that close to nailing his firstborn." He held up his right hand with thumb and index finger a quarter inch apart.
"Really?"
"I got lucky with the hard drive we confiscated," Rob explained. "Since you were focusing on the Internet porn material, I just went after the drug deal between CarGuy and SmokinJoe."
"And you got something?"
"Oh, yeah." He suddenly slapped his forehead. "Geez, what a dope. I'm really sorry. I forgot to ask how your brother was doing."
Joe blinked at the interruption before murmuring, "Fine, thanks. Better. Doc is pretty confident."
"Very cool," Rob said, changing topics. "You know, I did hear back from the crime lab about those tools we seized. They got a positive match between a pair of Vise-grips and the nut we found in the snow. But there were no prints on the handle-too smeared. The only way I can think we can move forward there is to get somebody to squeal. That's actually kinda why I put all my energy into the drug deal-figured if we could get somebody uncomfortable enough, we might get the information about the sabotage as a freebie."
"And it looks like you're almost there?" Joe asked, to bring him back on track. Not that he hadn't been interested in hearing the lab results.
"I knew from the start CarGuy was probably Dan Griffis," Barrows answered. "I mean, we both did, but I didn't have any proof. It could have been Barrie McNeil, just pretending to be too dumb to operate a light switch. But, in any case, I thought it might be cleaner to chase after CarGuy's correspondent first, SmokinJoe. That way, nobody could claim I got where I did through prejudice. Anyhow, it worked like a charm. SmokinJoe had about as much survival smarts as a deer on a highway. John Winston is his name-called Joe for short; the Winston is self-explanatory, but he actually does smoke, like a chimney. Stinks of the stuff."
Rob reached behind him and handed Gunther a file folder containing various printouts, including a color faxed mug shot of a narrow-faced man with bruised-looking eyes.
"I poked around a little to start," Rob went on. "Checked him out, talked to a few people, dug into his habits and background, put him under surveillance. And then I pulled him in for a little one-on-one. It was almost a letdown-soon as I opened the door, he couldn't wait to charge through. Gave me a full confession-dates, contacts, even had some samples at home. Not to mention his own computer, which has more on it than I know what to do with."
"And Dan Griffis is implicated?" Joe asked.
Rob's eyes widened. "Like Don Corleone, implicated, you bet. He's all over the place-dirty as hell. I laid it all out for the SA, who brought in the drug task force. We wired Winston up and had him make a couple of buys off of Dan-just to put a cherry on top. Now we're coordinating everyone's calendar on when we should drop the hammer on him."
"When's that going to happen?"
"Very soon. I was actually going to call you about that. I figured you'd want to be in on the action."
"Tempting," Joe conceded. "But a potential conflict of interest. Too many tight corners in all this. I don't want anything coming back on me in court."
Barrows smiled. "Got it. You threw me this steak-just wanted to offer to share a little."
Chapter 22
The meeting this time took place downstairs, in Ron Klesczewski's bailiwick, the police department's detective squad. Joe always felt odd returning to his old haunts of over twenty years, finding them both familiar and fundamentally altered. Klesczewski, at least, was among the former, looking older outside his white crime scene suit, but as comfortably in place as Joe imagined he felt anywhere. No one who met Ron out of context ever guessed what he did for a living, but he was a good cop, reliable and intuitive, and perhaps, Joe believed, precisely because it had never come naturally.
Joe, Ron, Sam, and a detective named Cathy Eakins were sitting around the battered conference table in the small catchall room adjacent to the actual squad room.
"Okay," Ron was saying, "so-Oliver Mueller. What did you want to know? Cathy's our resident expert, by the way, so now that I've brought it up, don't ask me anything."
"Same for me," Joe echoed. "Sam just told me that he'd come up on our radar and that you guys had dealt with him more than anyone else in the area."
"We have a lot of good intel growing on him," Cathy Eakins acknowledged, patting a thick folder before her. "And it's all pretty recent. He's only been up here a couple of years."
"That's what I heard," Joe said. "Sam told me his daughter was killed in Jersey by an Internet stalker?"
Eakins flipped open the folder. "Yeah. Very sad, but not particularly original. Teenage girl on her home computer, hooks up with some creep who sweet-talks her. They meet at a motel outside Summit, New Jersey, and he murders her. He was caught within two days-basically, the local cops told the girl's computer, 'Take us to the creep,' and it did."
"What was the creep like?" Sam asked.
Eakins shrugged-a no-nonsense type. "A middle-class worker bee-a bean counter in the business office of a large bank, stuck in a cubicle for fifteen years with his packed-at-home sandwiches, his dead-end life, and his out-of-control fantasies."