“And your answer is?”
“Maybe Reynolds staged it himself, to make it look like he’s being targeted by someone.”
“Implying Reynolds killed Resnick?”
“He could have, using hired help. I think the office break-in was for real. The body language Bobby Miller reported sounded right on. But I also think it was more than an interrupted B amp;E. Which means that maybe something happened that night to make the other stuff necessary.”
I couldn’t say he was wrong. Neither one of us had anything concrete to work with. But it sounded far-fetched. “What about the truck breaking down?” I asked. “Forensics said it looked like a straightforward mechanical problem.”
“Maybe,” he agreed, “but it doesn’t explain why Resnick hung around town afterward, his skin burning from chemicals, not going to the ER to be checked out. Why didn’t he seek help? What happened that night? Where did he go? Who did he call? It must’ve been somebody, or those three guys wouldn’t have found him. And that means he must’ve trusted them-or thought he could.”
I started shaking my head emphatically. “Ron, for Christ’s sake. Listen to yourself. Reynolds is involved in trucking dirty goods. One of his drivers-Resnick-has a breakdown and an accident both, pouring God-knows-what on himself. He therefore calls Reynolds for help. Help, however, consists of three of Reynolds’s henchmen, who bean Resnick on the head, drive him to the tracks in a car designed to compromise their own boss, and use a train to kill him. All so we can find the body first and the car later and declare the whole thing a clumsy frame, thereby taking the one guy we never suspected in the first place off the hot seat? It’s crazy.”
He remained silent and tight-lipped.
I instantly regretted my outburst. “Ron, look, I’m sorry.”
“No big deal.”
“You do hear what I’m saying, though, right?”
“Yeah.” He sounded more regretful than angry.
“I’ll grant you most of what you said,” I tried again. “But not with Reynolds as the mastermind. More logical would be that the frame was meant to stick-and only fell apart because the people rigging it had a room-temperature IQ.”
He conceded the point, suggesting instead, “It still means Resnick holed up somewhere-maybe with a friend-until the others figured out what to do. We find out where that was-or who it was-and we go a long way to solving this.”
I couldn’t argue with him there.
We were introduced to Kevin Daly in a basement in downtown Portland, in a small room next to what appeared to be the courthouse archives. The room was windowless, undecorated, and quiet, and dominated by a large table with four wooden chairs.
Daly waved his hand at several document boxes neatly arrayed on the table’s surface and blithely announced, “The State of Maine versus Katahdin Trucking. All yours.”
Ron and I both stared at what was obviously several days’ worth of reading. “Mr. Daly,” I began slowly. “We were kind of hoping we could do some of this verbally. We won’t have enough time otherwise.”
He was visibly caught off guard. “Verbally? You’re kidding. I don’t have any more free time than you do. Try starting with the witness lists and depositions. And the index to the transcript, in case there’s anything you want there. That won’t take too long. I thought I explained all that to someone over your way.”
I backed up a bit. “Okay, I’m sorry-probably just crossed wires. You were the prosecutor?”
He smiled. “Yeah, but I won’t be much use to you.” He pointed to the boxes. “That was a few hundred cases ago, and no big deal either. I barely remember it.”
“How ’bout the basic charge?” I pressed him.
He cupped his cheek with his hand and stared at the floor for a moment. “Well, like I said on the phone, I think it had something to do with Katahdin lying on their manifests. They’d write down construction debris and forget to mention a few oil drums. Or they’d log an empty run to a site for a pick-up when they were in fact transporting an illegal shipment for burial at the site-splitting the profits with the job foreman or contractor or whoever-and then getting legitimately paid for carting out a real load. My memory’s pretty vague, though. They aren’t the only ones we’ve nailed for something like that, so I may be mixing their case up with someone else’s. Do your homework first. If you have any questions after that, maybe I can help you out.”
We thanked him for digging out the files, let him go back to his job, and settled down to work, despite Ron’s grumbling under his breath,
“‘I thought I explained that.’ Bullshit he did. I’m the one he talked to. He barely said two words-I asked if we could meet, he said sure.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said to smooth his feathers. “He probably just forgot and is covering his butt.”
Relying on the index to lead us to the trial’s highlights, we still spent some six hours reading, discussing, and taking notes about The State of Maine versus Katahdin Trucking. The charges were close to what Daly had described, and by the end of our labors I understood why his memory had been so hazy. Katahdin had been found guilty, given a fine and a wrist-slap by the judge, and then allowed to carry on, aside from a few conditions designed to keep them on the straight and narrow. It had amounted to a probation, which I was happy to see still hadn’t run out.
I mentioned that to Ron, who merely raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“It means we have something to hold over them when we meet,” I explained.
He checked his watch warily. “We’re meeting with them?”
I knew he was thinking of the very family he’d been extolling on the way over, and hoping to return to by late tonight. “Ron, what’ve we gotten out of this so far?” I indicated the piles of scattered documents.
“That Reynolds defended Katahdin and lost?”
“Right. We didn’t find anything connected to what we’re working on. What we need is a larger picture of Katahdin’s operations-something beyond the scope of this court case.” I turned a sheet of paper around to face him and put my finger next to a single name on a list of twenty others. “Maybe by having a little chat with this guy.”
“Joseph Crowley,” Ron read aloud. “One of the dispatchers?”
“And the guy who seemed to be sweating the most during the trial.”
Ron looked puzzled. “I don’t even remember what he said.”
“Exactly. Daly put him on the stand to account for a time-sequence gap in his boss’s story but didn’t seem to notice or care that he acted like he was sitting on a keg of dynamite. My guess is Daly already had enough to win his case and didn’t want anything complicating an easy prosecution. Crowley must’ve thought it was his lucky day when he was excused and not asked to explain his guilt.”
“Guilt about what?” Ron asked, obviously mystified.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “What counts is that he thinks he got away with something, and he’s worried about that dreaded midnight knock on the door.”
I got to my feet. “Let’s go find Daly.”
It wasn’t actually midnight-more like ten-thirty-when we rang the front doorbell of Joseph Crowley’s house in the Portland suburbs. The timing was both accidental and strategic. The first because it took a while to work through Kevin Daly to the Portland police in discovering Crowley’s address; the second because if you want to make a man nervous-especially about something that’s been going on at the office-it never hurts to approach him late at night, in front of his family.
He answered the door himself, his wife within sight in an armchair facing the television. He peered at us a moment, adjusting to the darkness outside, blinking like an owl startled from reverie. “Hi. Can I help you?”
Ron and I both flashed our useless, out-of-state credentials, which the poor lighting made impossible to read. I did the talking. “We’re police officers, Mr. Crowley. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”