“No. Hit the sack, rest up, and I’ll see you later. Check in when you’re ready. I’ll finish with Willy and kick him loose, too. We’ve all done enough for tonight.”
I watched her go and then returned to the conference room. Willy was tilting back in his chair and gave me a lewd smile. “Sort out her love life?”
I ignored him, sat down, and asked, “Tell me about Andy Padgett.”
He gave me an exasperated laugh. “What do I know? She met the guy, sparks went off, they been making like rabbits ever since.”
“You telling me you didn’t run him through the computer?”
His small notepad was still lying open before him, but I noticed that this time he didn’t bother consulting it. “Age twenty-eight, been working at Naughton for three years, drove a truck for Rugby before that, unloaded groceries at C amp;S right out of high school, which he attended here. Lives in a trailer in West Bratt. Never been married, no kids, one dog. Owns a pickup and a Harley. No record outside a disturbing the peace when he was in high school, and an equipment violation when he was driving rigs, which went back to the owner.”
I was struck by Padgett’s having once been a truck driver. “What was your gut reaction when you met him, before he and Sam became an item?”
“Just a regular guy. Nothing special.”
I left it at that, sensing his discomfort. “What about the fourth member of this poker party. Who was he?”
Willy reached for his pad. “James Lyon, married, three kids, age thirty, works at Span-Lastic. Plays on a softball team with Carter-that’s how they’re friends. He’s clean as a whistle. I wrote down ‘nervous’ in my notes, but I don’t know if it means much. We do that to people, especially virgins.”
I rubbed my eyes. “What do you think about Frankie Harris being connected to both Brenda Croteau and the railroad killing?”
“Could be a coincidence,” Willy equivocated, then added reluctantly, “but we’d be nuts to just assume it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “You better really look into him-family, friends, co-workers, the works. Also, get together with Sam later and chase down the list of common denominators we compiled tonight-put them under the same microscope. If the law of averages has anything to do with this, Brenda got killed over drugs, money, or both. June Dutelle might be more helpful there, too, if we press her a little harder.”
I paused, and Willy got up. “That it?”
“Yeah. We’ll be crawling all over White Birch Avenue for evidence when it gets light. You’re good at that, so if you can make it, I’d appreciate it, but make sure you get some sleep first.”
He gathered up his notes. “You got it.”
I stayed where I was for a while, thinking. Not about Phil Resnick, who was maybe the dead trucker, or Brenda Croteau, or her cast of dubious friends. I found myself wondering about Willy and Sam. Something was cooking there, at least on Willy’s part. Not only had he ignored his notes while recalling Andy Padgett’s particulars, he’d also known he had a dog.
That depth of knowledge wasn’t available through a criminal records computer.
9
Generally, winter’s brief daylight hours only aggravate people’s moods in Vermont. The morning after my meeting with Willy and Sam, however, I was all too happy to get two hours of extra sleep before I knew J.P. and his crew-by dawn’s tardy light-would be out searching White Birch Avenue.
I drove there straight from home and found them already setting up. Tyler had a team of ten people, including, I noticed, both Sam and Willy. He was equipping them out of the van he’d brought for the purpose, keeping track of his assignments in a three-ring binder.
“What’s the plan?” I asked him during a lull, noticing he was wearing earmuffs and fingerless gloves, like one of Scrooge’s underpaid scribes.
“Three teams: one inside the house to pick up where we stopped last night; another combing about a ten-yard perimeter around the outside walls; and the last working from one end of the street to the other. With this many people, it shouldn’t take too long-maybe most of the morning. I’ll let you know before then if we find anything interesting, though.”
I smiled. “That your subtle way of telling me to buzz off?”
He didn’t see the humor, looking at me with round, slightly surprised eyes. “No. Ron radioed here about five minutes ago. Said he just missed you at home. He’s got something at the office he wants you to see.”
Anyone else would have tacked on a note of curiosity, especially in the midst of two felony cases. Not Tyler. He took most of life as a series of facts or events that could either be analyzed or tucked away for future reference. I’d watched his family grow over the years-a wife and two children, now both teenagers-fully expecting at least one of them to sprout green hair and go slightly bonkers. But so far, they all seemed content to emulate him, going through life doing good, doing well, and not making much of a fuss.
I didn’t mind being dismissed. Poking through trash-strewn bushes or a frozen, blood-splattered house wasn’t my idea of fun. I preferred picking people’s brains to going through their leftovers, even though it was the latter that often clinched the case in court.
I didn’t even reach the office before I discovered what was on Ron’s mind. He came running out into the parking lot without a coat and met me as I swung out of my car.
“I got something you should hear,” he said, his rapid breathing encircling his head with fog.
“You’ll freeze to death before you can tell me. Let’s go inside.”
“I heard back from DMV on that plate number I’ve been trying to unscramble. I don’t know why they took so long, but the number is registered to Jim Reynolds.”
I stopped dead in my tracks. “Reynolds? How’d they come up with that?”
Ron was already beginning to shiver. “Ed Renaud said he saw a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria with a plate beginning with PCH. Reynolds owns that exact car, license number PDH-835. There are some with PCH which aren’t Crown Vics, and Crown Vics that don’t have PCH, but only Reynolds’s has anything even close to PCH.”
I took pity on him and finished walking to the PD’s back door, quickly punching in the combination and ushering him through. “You talk to him yet?”
“No. I only just got it.” He hesitated and then added, “Plus, I didn’t want to jump the gun, especially after this.” He pulled a newspaper from his pocket and unfolded it so I could read the headline.
“REYNOLDS: NO MORE MAYBERRY RFD.” And in smaller type, “Senator Proposes Bill to Revamp Vermont Law Enforcement.”
“Tell me what it says,” I said as I peeled off my coat, collected my mail and messages, and headed for our squad room on the other side of the building.
He fell into step behind me. “It’s the same thing he’s been test-flying at those public hearings for the governor-to replace us with a single police force.”
“The state police?” I asked, cutting through the Officers’ Room to grab a cup of coffee.
“Not according to this. It would be a whole new entity.”
I walked into the main corridor. “What about the sheriffs?”
“It doesn’t say. None of that really matters anyway. All he’s done is refer the bill to his own Judiciary Committee. It doesn’t mean it’ll survive the week. The reason I brought it up is that it’s a hot potato, it’s anti-local law enforcement, and if we hit him on this railroad death without being damn sure of ourselves, we’ll get creamed by the press for smearing him to protect our turf.”
We cut through the administrative office and the conference room and stepped into our own bailiwick. I looked around at the clustered desk cubicles, now all abandoned because of the White Birch Avenue search. “What do you propose?” I asked him.
“Big-time background check,” he answered unsurprisingly, computers and their paper trails being to him what forensics were to Tyler.
I nodded by way of agreement. “Okay, but discreetly. He hired Win Johnston to watch his back, so Win’ll have his nose to the wind. Stick to either public records or closed police sources. No interviewing of family or friends. Okay?”