As serious as the reason for my visit was, that tidbit wasn’t something I was about to ignore.
“Hey, Arvid,” I shouted as I entered the shop, noticing only the faintest touch of warmth from a centralized, rumbling upright furnace that looked like a locomotive begging for food.
There was a metallic crash from somewhere in the gloom, and a cigarette-ruined voice shouted back, “If you’re not from the IRS, you’re some kind of wise-ass.”
“I’m not from the IRS.”
A shadow detached itself from the darkness, looking as oil-stained and solid as the machinery surrounding it, and an old, slightly stooped man with enormous blackened hands and a filthy baseball cap appeared before me. His face showed neither pleasure nor recognition.
“Should’ve known it was you. You got nothin’ better to do than hassle me?”
We didn’t shake hands. It wasn’t something really old friends did. “Nope. Been keeping busy?”
“Enough. What d’ya got? Another cheap piece of junk crap out on you?”
“Not this time. I think we might’ve found something belonging to you.” I handed him the picture of the ball peen hammer.
He hesitated taking it, carefully wiping his hand on the front of an insulated vest that looked as though it had been washed in oil. Despite the lack of light, he didn’t squint to make out the image. He merely glanced at it and returned it to me. “No shit. Never thought that stupid program of yours would work.”
“So it is yours?”
He studied me impassively for a moment. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
“You didn’t report it missing.”
He turned to a nearby workbench and picked up an oddly configured cylindrical object, possibly part of an old drive shaft, and cradled it in his palm, feeling its cool smoothness with his fingertips. Ben Franklin was rarely without something metal in his hands. It seemed to calm him as the feel of rich earth might a farmer.
“You know how much stuff I got in this place?”
I shook my head.
“Well, I don’t neither. For all I know, that thing’s been under a pile the whole time. Never knew it’d grown feet.”
“You know how long it’s been missing?”
“Two months,” he said without hesitation.
I let those two words hang in the air a moment. Two faint plumes of near-freezing air escaped from his nostrils as he waited me out.
“You thought enough of this hammer,” I finally said, “that you marked it and registered it with our department. Now you say you didn’t report it missing because it could’ve been lost in this mess, even though you know it disappeared exactly two months ago.”
He didn’t respond.
“We think it was used to kill a man.”
His lips compressed, his hands grew still, and he seemed suddenly transfixed by something hovering in the middle distance just over my left shoulder.
“Tell me who took it, Ben.”
“You sure you’re not yankin’ my chain?”
This time, I kept silent.
He sighed, returned the cylinder to the bench top, and stood before me with his big hands by his sides, empty and useless. “My nephew-along with a bunch of other stuff. Billy Conyer. You guys know him.”
We did that, but not only because he was a regular customer. He’d also been mentioned by Janice Litchfield as a friend of Brenda Croteau’s.
The rooming house where Billy Conyer lived on Elliot Street was one of the worst examples Brattleboro had to offer. A warren of tiny, dark, evil-smelling cubbyholes, it was as famous for its transient inhabitants as for the illegal activities they practiced there. The lighting was haphazard, the plumbing erratic, the heating quirky, the walls looked like Swiss cheese, and the stench was a combination of rotting food, unwashed bodies, and backed-up toilets. It was a place EMTs, firefighters, cops, and building inspectors all got to visit regularly. One hot summer night a few years back, when the local ambulance had gone racing by the nearby firehouse to respond to yet another call at that address, the on-duty firefighters had lined up in front of their open bay doors and saluted the rescue crew by waving fistfuls of rubber gloves at them.
It was that kind of place.
And now it was our turn.
We’d taken our time, made sure the crime lab could match the blood on the hammer to Phil Resnick’s DNA, and had discreetly studied Conyer’s habits for several days running, using one of the windows at the firehouse as an observation point.
The night we chose to move was possibly the coldest of the year so far, and dark as the inside of a closet. It was tailor-made for keeping people indoors, their eyes accustomed to the lights within.
There were six of us, including Sammie and me, all dressed in black, sporting thick armored vests and short twelve-gauge shotguns. Willy, dressed as a bum and equipped with a radio, had been stationed on the inside, slumped in a smelly, inert pile in a corner of the hallway leading to Conyer’s apartment. We’d watched Conyer enter the building just before midnight, heard Willy report him opening his apartment door, and seen his light come on behind his tattered shade-and go off an hour later.
We’d then waited another thirty minutes, to let him fall asleep.
“Any sign of him?” I radioed Willy, who was equipped with an earphone.
“No,” came the quiet reply. “I listened at the door five minutes ago. Not a peep.”
“Okay. We’re in motion.”
I gave the prearranged signal, and we all moved from various positions inside and around the building, quietly convening at opposite ends of the hallway Willy was monitoring. At our arrival, he faded back to stand guard outside, along with a couple of other unobtrusively placed uniformed officers.
The heat inside the building was terrific, making us all sweat under our heavy protective gear. As we took our places to either side of Conyer’s door, I became aware of how our faces were dripping wet in the harsh overhead light.
I nodded to the man near the switch at the staircase. He killed the overhead lights. For a long couple of minutes, there was no sound, no movement while we waited for our eyesight to adjust to the semidarkness, alleviated only by two bright red exit signs, miraculously still functioning. Then I murmured into my throat mike, “Let’s go.”
The two men holding the short battering ram between them swung it back once and smashed through Conyer’s lock with a single splintering crash. Then they dropped the ram and fell off to either side, pulling out their sidearms, while Sammie and Ward Washburn burst through the door screaming at the top of their lungs.
It was textbook perfect, except that as Sammie shouted, “It’s empty,” a door halfway down the hall banged open, and Billy Conyer appeared, half naked and with a gun, his face gaunt and his eyes wide, his body glowing red in the light from the exit signs.
Pierre Lavoie had been standing by the light switch at the end of the hall, where he could also guard the top of the stairs. Now he was not only blocking Conyer’s escape route, but he was standing where any bullets that missed Conyer might hit him.
I don’t know who yelled, “Don’t move.” All of us, from the sound of it. But it still didn’t work. Billy Conyer fired twice at me, then swiveled on his bare heel and crouched low to shoot at Pierre.
But Pierre had instantly assessed his own predicament. Instead of trying to return fire-and possibly hitting us-he simply launched himself down the staircase, vanishing as if the earth had swallowed him whole.
Conyer quickly straightened, apparently astonished by what had happened, and presented us with his glistening back. “Don’t move,” I yelled again. “Police.” He either wasn’t thinking or had seen too many movies. In one of those moments every police officer dreads, will never forget, and will always hold in doubt, Conyer disobeyed and turned. But whether he planned to shoot again or was actually going to surrender and had simply not dropped his gun, none of us would ever know. Faced with a pointed weapon, we all fired in unison, feeling more than hearing the explosions, and watched as his body was thrown to the floor like a rag doll, spattering the walls nearby with blood.