She glanced at the door again, considering how unlikely it would be that this building had a maintenance man standing ready with a passkey. Yielding to impulse, she reached out and twisted the knob.
The door opened.
Surprised, Gail stepped inside. The room was small, square, fetid, and a total, absolute, war-torn pigsty.
In its middle stood a man. Staring at her.
"What do you want?" he demanded.
He was skinny, longhaired, and unshaven, wearing a dirty T-shirt and jeans. Both his arms had tattoos and his gaunt face looked mean.
Gail had been raped years before in what she'd thought was the safety of her own home. She had worked hard to place that experience out of her way if never out of her mind, but now it came back like the release from a dam, in a hot and sickening tidal wave.
"I. .," she stammered. "Who are you?"
He took a step toward her. In his hand, he held a small canvas bag. "None of your fucking business."
She suddenly wondered if she hadn't made a terrible mistake-had in fact just walked into this man's home. She looked around in confusion. "I'm sorry. I thought this was Laurie Davis's apartment. A small girl led me here. I just assumed. ." Then she saw a framed photograph, leaning against the wall, of herself, Laurie, and Laurie's mother, linked arm in arm in happier days, laughing at the camera.
The sight of it cleared her head enough that she recognized other signs that this was a woman's bedroom.
"Tell me who you are or I'll call the police," she said more forcefully.
But he'd recognized the earlier fear, an expression he was apparently well acquainted with. He stepped up close to her, smiling, his eyes narrow and menacing. She could smell his breath when he spoke.
"I'm not gonna tell you shit, and you're not gonna call nobody."
"You're trespassing," she countered, hating the tremble in her voice.
He laughed. "And you're not?"
"No, I'm not. I'm family."
Their bodies were almost touching. She felt like a rope under tremendous strain, as if the slightest touch would be enough to make it burst apart.
But the man was as careful as he was threatening. He sidestepped around her and paused at the doorway. "I wouldn't brag about that, if I were you," he said, and disappeared.
Gail closed the door, locked it, leaned her back against its flimsy surface, and shut her eyes tight, fighting for calm.
* * *
Over a hundred miles away, Joe Gunther sat in a small conference room in the Department of Public Safety's headquarters in Waterbury Vermont, part of a large complex of old institutional brick buildings, the centerpiece of which had once been the sprawling state mental hospital-an association detractors still used with high humor.
The room was dark, dominated by a photographic slide that stuck to the far wall like a luminescent painting. It was the picture of a man hanging by his neck from a bridge, suspended like a sack of clothes over a tangle of gleaming railroad tracks.
"This was taken in Rutland this morning-the River Street Bridge," said a voice in the darkness. "The victim's name is James Hollowell, and the Rutland drug unit's ID'd him as a local street dealer, mostly crack and heroin."
"Any leads on who killed him?" Gunther asked.
The voice belonged to Bill Allard, Gunther's immediate boss and the chief of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. A career state trooper, he'd been tapped to head the VBI because of his people skills, his experience, and the fact that the Vermont State Police, housed just one floor below in this same building, hated the idea of the VBI-the brainchild of the current governor and a perceived threat to the VSP's preeminence in state law enforcement. It had been the commissioner of Public Safety's hope that appointing someone with Bill Allard's heritage and qualifications would soften the blow to his erstwhile agency's ego.
But the jury was still out.
Allard turned on a small light by his side to consult some notes. "Not specifically, but things have been brewing in Rutland long enough that this was basically waiting to happen."
Gunther thought back to last evening in Brattleboro, when Ron Klesczewski had said roughly the same thing about the storekeeper shooting Laurie Davis.
"A power struggle?" he asked.
"Nothing so clear-cut," Allard responded, hitting the key on his portable computer to bring up another slide of the same scene. "But the drug unit says things like this do happen, where a dealer tries screwing his supplier out of some product and gets reprimanded."
"I'd say that's being reprimanded," Gunther murmured, but he was beginning to wonder why he'd been asked up here. Dangling bodies from bridges was pretty exotic for Vermont, whose homicide rate usually hovered in or around single digits for a given year, but still, callously speaking, it did look like some lowlifes had merely done in one of their own.
"They must have some ideas," he suggested, extending his private musing.
"They have ideas, all right. Problem is, those ideas cross state lines."
"Holyoke?" Gunther asked. Holyoke, Massachusetts, had been a source of Vermont-bound drugs for several years, and he'd heard from the number crunchers that statistically Rutland had become a primary terminus, which was odd, given both its geographical isolation and its relatively small size when compared to Burlington. But the pipeline was undeniable and well known: Holyoke, Brattleboro, Rutland, with many small stops along the way.
As a result, Allard wasn't surprised by his insight. "Apparently, it's more than the usual scuttlebutt. Doesn't sound like much to me, but there's intel indicating someone's trying to organize the traffic way beyond its current level, which is pretty wide open. And I guess hanging someone from a bridge could qualify as a billboard advertisement. No one's tied it to Holyoke, of course, or to the Hollowell hanging, either, but that's the word from the street."
"Is the Rutland PD having problems handling this?" Gunther asked diplomatically. The commissioner and the governor notwithstanding, both Allard and Gunther saw the VBI as primarily a support service-a major-crimes team brought in only, when invited by the local law. The two politicians, naturally enough, had far grander visions of some look-alike, state-level FBI, but the two old cops knew the value of observing turf: You got ahead by getting along, and in the short, two-year history of their new agency, that philosophy had paid off handsomely. Even the state police were unofficially muttering that the VBI was courteous, competent, well manned, and so far, not headline hogs. Rumor had it that Governor Reynolds was most irritated by this self-effacement, which privately pleased Gunther very much.
And which therefore made Allard's response all the more disappointing.
"The PD's fine. It's Reynolds who's having a cow."
"Why?"
Allard hit the key on his computer again. This time the picture was of the inside of a dingy motel room and of a young girl's corpse lying on its side across a rumpled bed, a tourniquet around her arm and a needle on the floor near her dangling fingertips.
"Because of her. She's Sharon Lapierre, or was-granddaughter of Roger Lapierre, former Rutland Town selectman and party bigwig, who's also raised a pile of cash for Reynolds."
He stopped there, letting silence fill in the obvious.