He rejoined Merce Patterson in the conference room, and they laid out the evidence on a dusty meeting table. Merce broke the seal on the cash and counted a bundled stack. There was maybe $50,000 total, all circulated bills. Brian shook his head. He took the loose packet of currency and fanned it under his nose.
“Too much to trust to the evidence locker,” he decided. “We’ll double count it, you and me, start a chain-of-custody form, then padlock everything in the sheriff’s office overnight.”
“Right,” said Merce, taking a whiff of the cash himself.
Brian picked up one of the AR-15 rifles, drawing a bead on a pretend target, then set it down and worked on assembling the four-piece puzzle. It came together more easily than the porch furniture that had killed his dad. Brian arranged the open, box-shaped sighting mechanism at the busy end of the barrel, and after a moment of weighing the contraption in his hands, hoisted it up onto his shoulder.
It was one of those surface-to-air missile launchers movie terrorists use to blow up helicopters.
“Jesus,” said Merce.
That solved, Brian set the launcher carefully back down on the table and turned his attention to the double-bag of white powder.
“Drugs,” said Merce. “Or anthrax.”
“Right,” scoffed Brian.
Still, neither of them moved to touch it.
“A narcotics rap is nothing compared to running rifles and missile launchers,” said Brian, recalling the man’s taunting grin. “Reverse psychology? Maybe he wants me to open it?”
“Didn’t seem like a psychology major, that guy. I think he was just playing with us.”
Brian pulled the bag of powder toward him. He lifted the airtight pack carefully out of the loose bag, soft and squishy, almost like a bag of dough.
“Thirteen small arms,” he said, “thousands of rounds of ammunition, a missile launcher.”
“And a little bag of white powder inside a Chock Full o’ Nuts can.”
Brian massaged the bag, feeling its weight. “And the driver, likely a convicted felon looking at the rest of his life in prison, surrenders without a fight?”
He thought of Roby grinning at him again. The condescension, the ex-con looking down on the deputy sheriff. This was a big collar for Brian. He passed the bag of powder lightly from one hand to the other. He did not want the guy’s respect, but did not deserve his insolence either.
Brian pulled apart the top folds of the bag, breaking the seal.
Chapter 2
Gilchrist was a small town nestled in a valley in the broad upland hills of the small-town state of Vermont, in the heart of the region known as the Northeast Kingdom. Geographically defined by the counties of Essex, Orleans, and Caledonia, the Northeast Kingdom forms the bulge of the top-heavy Green Mountain State as it leans, casually, onto New Hampshire and the rest of New England. The Kingdom is modest, conservative, remote. The Kingdom is old country. Glacial lakes and boreal forests, cut from the same rugged stock of timberland that roughs Canada’s wilderness. Farmland that yields its owners a modest living, and dirt-floor general stores run by generations of the same family. It is open, available, and, in parts, still wild and free. Driving through the Kingdom is like taking a trip back through time. This is the place old men talk about when they talk about America.
A man in a somber black suit eased a polished Fleetwood Limousine along country roads grayed with winter, his normal evening commute. He steered the gleaming automobile with slender hands and long, unadorned fingers, navigating corners and hills with the care and concentration of a battleship captain forging a winding strait. Gilchrist Common, as the Fleetwood left it, was postcard Vermont, a white clapboard school, town hall, and steepled church all set around a wide, tree-bordered common featuring a prim, white bandstand. The names of the streets outside the common were like signposts to the town’s past. Railroad Street. Mill Road. Abenaki Way. Then the roadside stops of commerce, such as Corey’s Satellites, Reynolds’s Gun and Archery, and the Pit-A-Pattern store where catalog orders for JCPenney were placed. Then the land really opened up.
The Fleetwood followed the power lines strung along old telegraph poles, two-lane roads linking homes and working farms with expanses of land in between. In early January, the land was generally shin-deep with snow, drifting and settling like time-sand against the crooked stone walls marking century-old property lines. The air was clean and cutting and arctic cold. He passed a mobile home up on cinder blocks in front of a struggling farm. Yellow light spilled out of a kitchen window as children in hand-me-down snowsuits made desperate fun in the fading light, tramping around a yard cluttered with cars in various stages of salvage. A handful of men stood around a pickup in a driveway of frozen mud, neighbors and hunting buddies jawing. One of them waved to the Fleetwood as it cruised past, and Tom Duggan, town undertaker and church sexton, pulled his hand from the smooth steering wheel and waved back.
It was dusk when he arrived. The driveway had been cleared by the Department of Public Works as a favor to him, and he nosed the long Fleetwood under the carport. He could just make out high, curling cirrus clouds, usually welcome as a harbinger of fair weather, though these had been streaking and multiplying all day, the wind increasing from the north, tree branches creaking behind the house. Forecasting weather was a lost skill, another task trusted to radar and computer. The Weather Channel was calling for six to eight inches, but Tom Duggan judged it would be more than that, perhaps much more. If the wind summoned the right momentum, he thought they had all the ingredients for a low-grade blizzard.
He let himself into the house and hung his black undertaker’s coat neatly on the peg in the closet and moved through the kitchen and the dining room to the parlor. The timers had come on, the tasseled floor lamp in the corner spraying sandy light over the tired furniture, the house dim and warm. The radio was playing — it was always playing — tonight, a sports talk show from New York. The broadcast did not matter, only the voices, the companionship.
She lay in the recliner they had picked out at the Wal-Mart in Burlington, her slippered feet up, eyes closed, hands at rest in her lap. She stirred as he approached, opened her eyes, and smiled. “Tommy.”
“Evening, Mother,” he said.
She smiled again, drowsily, radiantly.
“It’s Friday night,” he said. “And you know what that means.”
She gave it some thought before answering. “Franks and beans.”
“As always.”
She reached for his hand and held it a moment. “Shall I get up then?” she asked, and worked the control of her automatic chair to do just that.
Tom Duggan cooked in the kitchen while his mother sat in the breakfast nook watching the Channel Six news. Like the radio, the TV helped fill the absence left by his father, deceased six years now. Tom Duggan’s mother was eighty-six and in good health, careful about fire and stairs and determined to live alone. She was a mortician’s widow, and therefore disabused of the usual superstitions and phobias of death. But recently Tom Duggan had sensed an uncertainty in his mother, a fear of the dark, a creeping loneliness not assuaged by television or radio. He dropped by every weeknight for supper, remaining until she fell asleep, usually around eight-thirty.
In the outside world, an aging bachelor such as Tom Duggan would have been the subject of some gossip, but in Gilchrist, home to many Quaker families, the lifestyle of the “Yankee Amish” was widely understood. While not a peculiar man, Tom Duggan was by now quite set in his ways, a man of routine and purpose; and at his age it was easier to go on living as a bachelor, beholden to no one but himself and his church and his town.