The coffeemaker finished its job as Gail reached the end of her account, and she began pouring out cups for the growing number of police officers who were now gathering around the house. Tony Brandt let her finish filling a tray and then suggested that the three of us get the hell out of there and let Billy Manierre and Ron Klesczewski coordinate the mop-up and search operations. “Given this crazy bastard’s style,” he concluded, “there’s no guarantee he won’t try again.”
Since my car was hopelessly blocked in by now, we used Brandt’s, which was discreetly parked on the street below, and drove directly to the Municipal Building. We decided Gail should spend the rest of the night at the police station and then go “on a vacation” to see her folks in New York City first thing in the morning. She had taken the whole experience well, but her willingness to be packed up and sent off without a murmur of protest told me how thoroughly she’d been shaken.
Back at the station, after settling Gail in, I pulled Brandt to one side. “Something occurred to me when I was at Billie Lucas’s tonight. What do you think about using Katz and the Reformer to reach Billie-or Susan-to persuade her to come to us? Shattuck might’ve actually done us a favor. If we tell Katz what happened, Billie is sure to find out Shattuck is in the area, and realize that turning herself in is her only chance.”
Brandt nodded. “Okay. Let’s make a couple of phone calls. Maybe we can convince Stanley to take one last bow before he exits.”
Stan Katz’s resignation officially took effect in one hour-at midnight. As Brandt had guessed, however, the chance to go out with his byline under a front-page lead was more than Katz could resist. He promised to meet us at the newspaper’s offices.
The Reformer’s night editor, Ruth Tivoli, a local woman and a career journalist with a reputation for integrity, was waiting for us. She was a holdover, as was Katz, from the Reformer’s better days.
She rose from her desk and came to greet us as we entered the building. “Hello, Chief-Joe.” She eyed my face. “What happened? We’ve been listening to the scanner.”
“Is Stanley here?” I asked.
She pointed toward the distant coffee machine, where we could see Katz pouring himself a cup. He raised his eyebrows when he saw us and broke into a grin, “This, I’ve got to hear.”
Ruth gave him a baleful look. The four of us filed into a small conference room and settled around a table.
Brandt headed off Katz immediately. “Let me say something before you let fly.” He then addressed them both. “Things have begun to speed up since we found that skeleton and turned Stanley into a war correspondent. We had information that an attempt might be made to kidnap Gail Zigman, and we took precautions to prevent that from happening. We were successful in that action, although one of our officers, Sergeant Alexander Santos, was wounded in an exchange of fire.
“The stimulus for all this activity is a robbery of sorts that took place some twenty-odd years ago in Chicago. The three people involved fled to Vermont to assume new identities. I say ‘of sorts’ because we don’t think the money was from a legitimate source.”
“What makes you say that?” Katz asked. “We haven’t established it for a fact, but we do know there were no complaints of a theft during the same time frame.”
I had to hand it to Brandt. Over the years, he had mastered that bizarre bureaucratic ability to build walls out of words with the practiced aplomb of a mason-taking his time, refusing shortcuts, and saying only what he wanted to say.
“In any case, Abraham Fuller, which is not his real name, was one of those three. The second was the skeleton we unearthed. The third is still at large.”
Katz opened his mouth to ask another question, but Brandt silenced him with a raised hand. “That survivor is running, we think, not because of us but because of the person who suffered the original financial loss-tonight’s shooter.” Brandt laid Shattuck’s mug shot on the table. “His name is Robert Shattuck. His physical description and a brief history are on the back. You see”-he leaned forward for emphasis, perhaps hoping his body language would compensate for omitting that our discovery of the M-16s in Billie’s house directly linked her to the wounding of the hearse driver-“we have no proof this third person was actually involved in any crime, but we do know he or she is in mortal danger from Shattuck. We are offering a safe haven, and we’re hoping you will make that message clear.”
Ruth Tivoli shook her head. “What makes you think a story in the paper will reach this person? Is he still in the area?”
Brandt let me answer. “We’re working on the assumption that this third person will still be reading the paper, looking for news of the investigation.” I slid a piece of paper across the table at them. “We’ve set up this telephone number as a kind of twenty-four-hour, one-person hotline.”
“Who tried to shoot Gail? Shattuck?” Katz asked.
“We don’t think that was his intention. It was probably a kidnap attempt.”
“Why?”
“To tilt the deck in his favor,” I answered. “With Gail as a hostage, he would have had someone to trade if we found this missing third person before he did.”
“So you’re offering sanctuary. Anything else?”
Brandt spoke up again. “If need be, a new identity. There’s a strong chance there may be enough to interest the federal government in offering protection. What we really want is to save someone who did something dumb, but perhaps not criminal, a long time ago from being tortured to death by some crazy bastard bent on revenge.”
A moment’s silence greeted his calculated choice of words.
Katz had stopped writing and was looking at us quietly, perhaps reflecting back on similar instances when he and I had cooperated and had both come out ahead.
He turned to Ruth. “Let’s do it. I want to ask a few more questions, but I think this looks good.”
There was a knock on the door. A reporter poked his head in. “Someone to see Joe.”
It was George Capullo, our night-shift sergeant, looking as uncomfortable in the newsroom as a cat in a dog pound. “We just found somebody named Gary Schenk, beaten up pretty bad. Claims it’s your fault. I thought you might like a ride to the hospital.”
We drove cross town to Brattleboro Memorial in the stillness of the night. The streets were devoid of life, and as empty as a huge abandoned factory, although I knew that somewhere, behind one of these silent walls, Bob Shattuck lay waiting, watching the clock.
“Where’d you pick up Schenk?” I finally asked.
“We didn’t. The hospital called it in. He was brought in by ambulance from his home in Putney. Apparently, he’d worked the late shift at work, gone to a party after that, and was attacked as he was unlocking his front door.”
“He live alone?”
“Yup.”
That explained the timing, I thought. Shattuck had probably discovered Schenk by following either Dennis or me to the bakery where he worked, but he hadn’t been able to move on him until he was by himself.
We found Gary Schenk on his back in a hospital bed, both his arms wrapped in plaster, his fingers strapped to aluminum splints, his split and swollen lips parted, revealing a row of broken teeth. George had outlined his injuries on the drive over-Shattuck had broken up his victim one piece at a time, finger by finger, arm by arm, like some oversized chocolate Easter bunny, no doubt fueled by his frustration at having missed Gail.
Schenk’s eyes gleamed with hatred as he focused on me. “You prick.”