I reached for the door and pulled it open, letting in a flood of youthful noises from down the hall. “How did Rarig look the morning of the seventeenth?”
She paused reflectively and then answered, “Tired. He had bags under his eyes.”
Chapter 8
“How deep did you go into his past?” Sammie asked me.
“Usual paper trail, a couple of phone calls. Obviously, he could’ve gone to Europe on vacations, but nothing indicated John Rarig ever lived in Austria, or anywhere else outside the U.S. Marcia Luechauer said he spoke the language like a native. That takes time.”
“Or intensive, intelligence-grade teaching,” Ron said softly.
“If all this is CIA,” Sammie said, “then we’re up a creek. We’re not going to be able to touch them. They’ll just pull the shades like Gil Snowden did in DC and turn into the Cheshire cat.”
I held up my hand. “Hold it. We’re getting ahead of ourselves.” We were back in my office, with the door closed-cramped but private-the only ones left after an already long day. “There’s obviously some CIA involvement here, but let’s not turn it into a full-blown conspiracy. If all this was really national security and cloak-and-dagger stuff, the FBI would be sitting here, not us. They sniffed around Hillstrom’s office and apparently didn’t take the bait. We are reasonably assuming a man was killed on our turf-a straightforward homicide. It would be nice to know who he was and what he was up to, but when you get down to it, our real job is to nail his killer. There’s no reason to think we can’t do that.”
“Yeah,” Sammie retorted, “except that if it really was no big deal, the CIA wouldn’t’ve asked to talk to you, and they wouldn’t’ve lied about knowing Boris in the first place. That was obviously bullshit.”
I closed my eyes briefly, fighting the urge to tell her to back down for once in her life. Although, plagued as I was about that supposed mugging, part of my irritation stemmed from the chance she was right. “Luechauer fingered Doug DeFalque, too, Sam. What more have you dug up on him?”
She was obviously unhappy about being cut off, but her expression also told of something surprisingly like embarrassment. “RCMP reported back,” she said quietly. “They have nothing connecting him with the Russian mob.”
Ron stared at her. “This morning, you said he was a free agent working with biker gangs and the mob.”
Sammie turned sullen. “I was right about the bikers. The mob angle was unofficial. My contact’s pretty good up there, and it sounded solid when I heard it. Guess I was wrong.”
“That’s okay,” I said quickly. “It was a theory. They’re part of this process, too. What else did you find out about him?”
“I poked around his neighborhood in Jamaica. I have a friend who lives up there, and another one at the sheriff’s department who actually knows him. They both confirmed he was a bit of a dirtbag-Mr. Smooth around teenage girls, not too swift with anyone else. He’s been seen in town pretty consistently for the last few months. I asked a contact at Customs if they’d run his plate this summer, since they’re keeping tabs on him. Last legal crossing he made was in early June, just before the tourist season, when the inn started using him on a regular basis. If Boris was whacked for some sort of international activity, it doesn’t look as if DeFalque was part of it. Also, despite having a loud mouth and a swagger, he’s never taken a swing at anyone I could find, so using a garrote seems pretty out of character.”
“That confirms what I learned from Dottie Delman,” Ron said. “She called him a slimy little worm. He’s impregnated a couple of girls and left them high and dry, he shirks his debts and talks big, especially when he’s been drinking, but he’s also very good at ingratiating himself when he needs a job, a favor, or a loan, which probably explains his job at the inn.”
I rubbed my eyes with the heels of both hands. “All right. Doug DeFalque may be slipping from our number-one spot. Putting John Rarig to one side, what did either one of you learn about anyone else?”
“I think we can scratch Bob Manship, too,” Ron said. “Dottie confirmed what everyone else was saying-he got into a jam, but he’s a good boy. Always has been, always will be. Dottie thought he’s been taking the whole thing way too hard-that the woman he creamed the other guy for didn’t deserve either one of them. But Dottie’s an old-fashioned sort. In any case, Bob lives like a monk now.
“Marty Sopper-” he went on, consulting his ever-present notes, “Marianne Baker’s boyfriend-might be another matter. Dottie called him mean straight through, and thought he’d slice his mother’s throat for the price of a Coke. She made Marianne sound like the typical abused spouse-a totally dependent target. Marty doesn’t have a steady job. He works wherever he can, or just rips off Marianne, so he fits someone who could be hired to use a piano wire, but we hit a dead end when we come to the international angle. Dottie doubts he’s been beyond Brattleboro, much less into Canada. He tends to work his own patch.”
“How long was he living down here?” I asked. “We sure got to know him well enough.”
Ron checked his cheat sheet. “Only two years. He was born in Wardsboro, so I guess he thought this was the big city. Too big for him, apparently-he still bitches about it, and about us especially. Says we were a bunch of Nazis. This is not a sophisticated man.”
“And presumably not clever enough to sneak up on someone, strangle him, ditch him without leaving a trace, and then keep quiet about it,” I said.
Ron chewed on his upper lip for a moment’s silence. “I guess not.”
“Scratch Marty Sopper,” Sammie muttered darkly.
“Not yet,” I cautioned. “But let’s leave him alone for the moment. Luechauer gave me some new names. Ron, did Dottie mention any guests named Meade, Richter, or Brockman? Ed Meade was a New York physician-a real ice cube. Luechauer said he gave her the creeps.”
Ron shook his head. “Dottie wasn’t much good on the guests. Her bread and butter’s the neighborhood. I tried to see if she’d picked up any names from her inn contacts, but it was pretty useless. By the time she hears about them, they’ve been reduced to ‘the white-haired couple from Florida,’ or ‘Mr. Attitude with the big ears.’ There’s a lot of typical flatlander resentment. Actually,” he added, “as ironies would have it, Luechauer was the only one I did hear about-she passed with flying colors.”
There was a knock at the door. Harriet Fritter, our administrative assistant, stepped in and handed me a fax. “Just came in-RCMP.”
I read it over carefully and handed it to Sam. “The Canadians say Boris Malik is actually Sergei Antonov, one of several point men for the Russian mob, reportedly over here to set up operations. They pegged him through fingerprints, dental records, and the face shot we sent them. They don’t seem to have any doubts about it.”
Sammie passed the report to Ron. “That doesn’t do us much good.”
I placed my feet on my desk and crossed my arms, staring sightlessly out the darkened window that separated my office from the empty squad room. “No. It doesn’t. If anything, it lets more air out of our tires-heightening the suggestion we were just a dumping ground for an out-of-town argument. I wonder where the Canadians are getting their information?”
Ron stared at me in confusion, struck by the implication. “What do you mean?”
“RCMP is a gigantic organization-about six of our major federal alphabet soups rolled into one. It’s interesting to me that we’ve gotten three pieces of information from them recently, two of them contradictory. First we’re encouraged to think Doug DeFalque might be dirty, then that’s canceled. Next, we hear absolutely nothing about Boris for days on end, and now he’s suddenly a major player for the mob. It’s almost as if someone’s either doing a lousy job of feeding us information, or just trying to tie us up in knots. I’m hearing echoes of how Snowden dealt with me.”