Sammie looked disgusted. “Great. We’re getting nowhere here.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I reassured her. “Taken separately, nobody looks particularly outstanding, but if you combine, say, Marty Sopper with John Rarig, things begin to pick up.”
They both stared at me. Sammie spoke first, “Rarig with a sudden European past, and Sopper with the morals of a mongrel and a temper to match.”
“I’d love to look at Sopper’s closet for ginkgo seeds, and under his mattress for a new sack of gold,” I murmured.
“Maybe we can,” Ron said, his eyes bright.
“Right,” Sammie added, “through Marianne Baker.”
I smiled at their quickly recovered enthusiasm. “Like you said-‘maybe.’ Remember what Dottie said about her, though. If she’s willing to be the man’s punching bag, she’s not going to be inclined to squeal on him.”
“She won’t have to,” Sammie continued. “As far as the ginkgo seeds are concerned, all we have to do is either get invited into their apartment, or get Marianne to admit that on the night of the sixteenth, Sopper’s shoes smelled to high heaven. If we don’t tip our hand that we’re targeting her boyfriend, she might even admit he had blood on his clothes, or was out all that night, or said something that might place him at the quarry. We just have to get her conversational. It might take time, but she could be the key to establishing probable cause, after which we really could start cooking.”
Despite the sudden energy in the air, I yawned and checked my watch. It was closing in on nine o’clock. “Okay. Let’s do it. See if we get lucky. Ron, you keep after Marty Sopper. Find out everything you can about him. Does he have a bank account? Has he been throwing money around lately? Any recent change in habits-gambling, drinking more, whatever. Has he suddenly settled any long-standing debts? Paid off back taxes? See if you can establish a daily pattern, and whether he broke it the night of the sixteenth. Did any neighbors hear anything unusual then?
“Sam,” I continued. “Go after Marianne. Take your time, use whatever approach you want. Meanwhile, I’ll see what I can find out about our German linguist, Mr. Rarig. If he is or was CIA, and the paper trail I followed is bogus, there have got to be holes in it somewhere. I’ll try to find people who knew him back when-boyhood friends from his supposed hometown. Things like that. If he’s hiding something, maybe that’ll be big enough for probable cause, too.”
I got to my feet. “Right now, though, we better hit the sack. Tomorrow’ll be a long day. But let’s keep each other updated as we go, okay? No dropped balls, and no idle chitchat. If anyone gets wind of what we’re up to, we’ll probably be left with nothing.”
Sam looked at me closely as we gathered by the door. “You really think the CIA is looking over our shoulder?”
I shook my head. “That’s overstating it. I actually meant don’t tip off Sopper or Rarig. The CIA’s obviously interested, but I don’t buy into the Hollywood hype about their being everywhere and knowing everything. I think Snowden’s curious about Boris, but he’s also probably as ignorant as we are.”
I ushered them out ahead of me, worried my own doubts could be read on my face.
West Brattleboro is tenuously attached to downtown by Route 9, otherwise called Western Avenue. It is the only road crossing over the interstate that bisects our jurisdiction like a knife through a cake, and is predictably busy at most hours of the day, especially, like now, when the neighborhood ballpark empties out. It is also posted at a snail’s speed limit, which about one in every ten cars observes. However, on a road this narrow and congested, that one is usually enough to reduce traffic to a crawl.
I was therefore absentmindedly watching the taillights ahead, and my rearview mirror, when I was struck by the silhouette of the driver behind me.
It was no more than a flicker at first-a memory twinge similar to what I felt a dozen times every day. In a town this size, where I’d worked for well over thirty years, I knew hundreds of people. And given the rural Vermont habit of waving to every driver one knew, I’d trained myself to associate faces with names pretty quickly.
Of course, here I didn’t have a face to go on-merely a backlit outline seen in reverse through two layers of glass. It was exactly this odd lighting, however, that stimulated the notion I should know this person and put an ominous edge on my curiosity.
With time, it was all I could do to keep even one eye to the front. Finally, just shy of where I was planning to turn right onto Orchard Street, the car before me stopped completely, allowing somebody into line. At that point, the headlights of the mysterious vehicle came close enough to be blocked by my car trunk, just as some oncoming lights lit up the driver’s face, fully revealing his features. In that fraction of a moment, I recognized the man who’d tried to knife me in DC.
Without thought or hesitation, I threw my car into park, stepped into the street, and pulled out my gun. Aiming with both hands, I pointed it at the now darkened figure behind the wheel and shouted, “Don’t move. Police.”
A squeal of locked tires and a crash right behind me drowned me out, making me jump to one side to avoid being hit. Simultaneously, the man I’d been aiming at threw his car into reverse and slammed on the gas, sending up two putrid plumes of burning rubber between us.
I began running after him, saw his car collide with the one behind him and slither out into the opposite, now wide-open, lane. “Stop,” I yelled, still waving the gun. But he fishtailed into a noisy one-eighty and disappeared down the road, both taillights broken. I ran back to my car to give chase and radio in, realizing that by yielding to impulse, I’d forgotten to note either the vehicle make or its license number.
Angry now as well as alarmed, I reported in, asked all units for assistance, and hit the switch to my blue lights, all before noticing I had nowhere to go. The two cars I’d caused to collide were now blocking me in entirely. Defeated, I got back out to help direct traffic, hoping to hell the man they’d catch would be the same I’d met that night in DC.
I hung up the phone and sat forward, my elbows on my knees, my chin in my hands. Gail stretched across the bed and rubbed my back. “Was that Tony?”
“Yeah-still no hide nor hair of the guy. By now everyone’s thinking I’ve lost my mind.”
“What were your options, Joe? You reacted on instinct.”
“Instinct should have told me to radio it in and play bait until other units could corner the son of a bitch.”
“You might’ve done that if you hadn’t almost died of a knife wound a couple of years ago and relived that experience just last week. You made light of what happened in Washington, but it must’ve been like a nightmare come back to life. Seeing what you saw tonight-nobody should be surprised you did what you did.”
I laughed shortly and turned toward her. “I had my gun out in the middle of traffic, like in some stupid cop show. It’s lucky I didn’t shoot someone.”
She hesitated a second. “You were aiming at the man who attacked you, right?”
I went back to looking at the rug. “The man I think attacked me. I can’t swear it was him. Sammie, Ron, and I had been working late, talking over the case, and at the end, Sam said something about the CIA looking over our shoulder. I played it down, but driving home I kept thinking about it, and about the guy who mugged me-how unlikely that all was, and how Snowden seemed to know all the details right after. I might have projected my paranoia onto some innocent slob who just happened to be behind me. He’s probably on his fifth scotch at home right now.”
“Except that from what I just heard, he’s totally vanished, and nobody’s reported being attacked by a gunman in traffic.”