Allard didn’t respond to my comment about the ticket. He was the head of VBI and an ex-trooper from downstairs, a lineage which, given the state police’s sensitivity about us, had made his selection about as politically subtle as choosing a union head to be shop foreman. But he was highly regarded by everyone in the profession and someone I had instinctively liked from the start, which was just as well, since he was my immediate boss.
Now, however, I could tell he was having problems with my latest scheme. Politics were as important to him as they’d been to the people who’d chosen him. They, especially the Commissioner of Public Safety, were watching the entire VBI experiment as something from which the plug could be pulled at a moment’s notice. It was Bill Allard’s job, therefore, not only to manage the budget and the Bureau’s nascent needs but also to make sure the assignments it took on made it indispensable and not too pushy.
I was proposing that both Sammie Martens and I go undercover as employees of Tucker Peak, while Willy and Lester worked the string of burglaries we suspected Marty Gagnon had been running before his disappearance.
Bill began with a question I’d pondered earlier: “Isn’t there a pretty good chance you’ll be recognized? You’ve been a cop a long time-a lot of people know you.”
“I have a fast-growing beard, and I’ll dye and change the way I comb my hair. Shouldn’t be a week before I look pretty different.”
He switched to a more diplomatic concern. “What did Snuffy have to say about it?”
“It’s a win-win for him. He gets extra police presence on the mountain, a specific focus on his biggest current problem, all the credit if we’re successful, and he doesn’t have to pay for any of it.”
“But why not a conventional investigation? The burglaries are common knowledge. People know the cops are looking into them. Seems to me it would be a lot simpler-and cheaper.”
“Simpler, maybe, but higher risk, too. The Tucker Peak crowd might know about the burglaries. They don’t know a murder may be connected to them. If we do this in the open, that’s bound to get out and make our job harder, with the greater chance that we’ll fail and end up with a black eye. But if we let whoever killed Jorja Duval think we’ve hit a brick wall while we’re actually poking around from the inside, it gives us an advantage.”
“Except that you have no idea who killed Duval, or if it’s connected to Marty Gagnon or Tucker Peak or any burglaries anywhere. Going undercover seems pretty fancy for what amounts to a gut instinct. I’d be happier if you had a single, solid lead.”
“In the absence of anything else,” I answered him, “what we have is a lead.”
“A single phone call.”
“To an employee, lasting twelve minutes, just a few days before the Manning place was robbed.” Then, feeling like a trial lawyer pulling his prize witness out of a hat, I removed a sheet of paper from my jacket pocket and slid it onto his desk.
“A pattern we found repeated three more times on his home phone bill.”
Allard gave me a sour look, knowing full well I’d been working him like a game fish. “Now he tells me.”
“Each time,” I continued, “according to Snuffy’s records, a burglary was committed at Tucker Peak several days after Marty called that same number. And each call lasted about as long.”
Allard was studying Gagnon’s phone record. “And each call was made about the same time of day,” he murmured.
“Yeah, the shift change between the day and night crews, meaning the recipient could’ve been from either.”
Bill Allard sat back and gazed at me thoughtfully. “Bottom line, Joe-you really think this is the way to go?”
I answered him as truthfully as I could. “It is a gut feeling-you’re right there-but, yeah, that’s what I think.”
“All right,” he finally gave in. “But short term, okay? You and Sammie do your sniffing around fast. One month tops unless you get something hot.”
Gail Zigman poured herself a glass of red wine and joined me on the couch, where I was already sipping coffee. We were in her condo just outside of Montpelier, a slightly sterile corner of an apartment complex she’d gotten for the panoramic view of the valley below, which right now amounted to a scattering of lights in the night, hovering like small, pale moths around the spotlighted golden dome of the capitol building far in the distance.
“Undercover? Sounds dangerous.”
I’d been there for over an hour already, but we’d only begun getting conversational. One aspect of living far apart, we’d discovered, was that when we did meet up, we wasted no time taking our clothes off. From the couch, in fact, I could still see a line of shirts, pants, and socks trailing off toward the bedroom. Only now had I told her why I was in the neighborhood.
I waited until she was comfortably settled against several fat pillows, her legs tucked up underneath her thick terry cloth robe.
“The biggest danger so far was getting the go-ahead. We don’t actually have a lot to work with.”
“This connected to the dead girl I read about in the paper?” Gail asked.
“Yup, but I’ll be focusing on Tucker Peak. That’s our only lead right now.”
Her eyes widened. “Tucker Peak? You’re kidding. I’ll guarantee you some activity, even if it’s not what you’re expecting.”
“What do you mean?”
“We were just given the heads-up on a protest there. A bunch of people are unhappy with Tucker’s plans to build a hotel, cut more trails, and tap into a nearby lake for their snowmaking guns. They’re saying it’ll be bad for the land, the fish, and the local bears, among other things.”
I remembered the placard-wielding group Willy and I had passed on our way to Manning’s house-one of the reasons Snuffy was short of help and had brought us in. “Who are they?”
“They call themselves the Tucker Protection League-TPL for short.”
VermontGreen, the firm Gail worked for, often acted as a clearinghouse for such protests, approached by smaller organizations hoping for their blessing, their backing, and their expertise, in that ascending order.
“Are you going to help them out?” I asked.
She paused to take a sip before answering indirectly. “The resort jumped through all the regulatory hoops, and we were watching closely during the entire two-year process. We had a few objections along the way, but Phil McNally took care of them, including the land, fish, and bears.”
“McNally’s the boss?”
“The CEO. I suppose the board’s the boss, technically, but he’s the one we dealt with. Very helpful, unlike some of his counterparts at other mountains. He’s actually cooperating with TPL, giving them space to demonstrate.”
“So why the protest, if everything’s so squeaky clean?”
“Well, that’s always the question, isn’t it?” she mused. “What exactly is squeaky clean? The regulations were put together by politicians, after all. You know how screwy that can get. McNally and his crew, as accommodating as they’ve been, are still corporate types, known to say one thing and do another. And then there’s the science. We all rely on naturalists to give us the straight and narrow, but we’re dealing with human beings on the one hand and Mother Nature on the other. There may not be a straight and narrow. The people bitching now might be right. They might know something the rest of us missed.”
“And they didn’t get around to mentioning it till now?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity from my voice. “I thought this rigmarole took years to reach this stage.”
She laughed. “Okay. I’ll admit they may not be overly organized, but that doesn’t mean they’re not right. They weren’t allowed party status during the regulatory process-in answer to your question-and now that it’s almost a done deal, TPL’s claiming major environmental obstacles were swept under the rug for the sake of big business.”
“But I thought VermontGreen had party status.”