“Not to worry,” I tried easing his discomfort. “We’ll do that, and we’ll try to be subtle about it, although we will act on what we find.”
“I understand,” he said simply.
“I will do my best,” I added, “to keep you out of it, though.”
A small look of distaste crossed his worn face. “I deserve that because of the surreptitious way I approached you. But don’t worry about it. I am not an informant-I acted on my conscience. If it comes out, it comes out-it might even be for the better.”
I noticed how Gail was looking at her old friend and figured the best way for me to end this conversation was by leaving the two of them together to commiserate. I’d catch up with her later.
I did, however, have one last question, “Would you say Norman was mechanically inclined?”
Betts’s face momentarily cleared. “Oh, good lord, I should say so. He trained as an engineer in college and was always the one we called on to fix things. He built his own house-he’s very handy. Why?”
I rose to my feet and squeezed Gail’s shoulder in farewell. “Just curious.”
Outside, after sunset, the wind had kicked up and was blowing down the street in ferocious, snow-dusted gusts. The headlights of passing cars glittered off the airborne ice crystals, making me feel all the more like I was walking inside a huge freezer.
The chirping of my cell phone, deep inside my coat, introduced an incongruous and ineffective spring-like note.
I groped around, my glove in my teeth, until I successfully tore the phone from its inner recesses and flipped it open, shoving my head into a doorway to hear better.
“Joe, it’s David Hawke. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m freezing my ass off on a cell phone. What’s up?”
“I’m sorry it took me longer than I thought to get back to you on those prints. I did get a set off of Jorja Duval’s body-textbook lift. Worked just like the guy said it would. I might have to write him a note of appreciation.”
Why is it, I thought, that when you tell people something like you’re about to die of hypothermia, they immediately prolong what they have to say?
“That’s great, David. Did you get a hit on the prints? Were they Marty Gagnon’s?”
“That’s the cherry on top. I sure did. The FBI coughed it up pretty fast. But they weren’t Gagnon’s. They belong to someone named Antony Busco, nicknamed Tony Bugs.”
All sensation of cold and discomfort vanished. “Does that mean what I think it does?”
Hawke laughed, not often the bearer of such heady news. “You bet. Very connected man, as they say. I sent the rap sheet to your office.” He hesitated before asking, “Was that okay? I didn’t know you were on the road. You going back there?”
“I am now.”
Chapter 19
The heater made the car balmy and comfortable and completely at odds with the weather outside, which had turned gray, cold, and blustery. The blasts of wind I’d experienced the night before in Montpelier had developed into a sustained northern blow, and weather reports were calling for more snow later in the day.
I was happy it hadn’t started falling yet, though. Using the windshield wipers during a covert surveillance was poor form, and right now I was very interested in keeping a low profile.
Willy Kunkle was sitting next to me, one foot propped up on the dash before him. In the distance, behind a thin screen of denuded hardwoods, was Andy Goddard’s generously sized house, which, like most of its upscale brethren, was blessed with a view of the snowbowl beyond. We were parked on the service road, near some dumpsters and a few other vehicles: pickups and sedans belonging either to guests or maintenance crews. Aside from actually being in the car, we didn’t stand out from our surroundings.
“What the hell’re we doing here, anyway?” Willy asked. He’d left his own vehicle at the bottom of the hill and had joined me just a few minutes earlier.
“Waiting for Mameve Knutsen,” I said, knowing the lack of further explanation would irritate him. Every once in a while, I found it irresistible to turn his crank slightly. He did it so routinely with all of us.
He sneered at me. “Cute. Where’d you come up with that?”
I smiled. “Didn’t, that’s her name. She’s one of the cleaning ladies around here.” I pointed at Goddard’s house, “She’s working in there right now.”
Willy didn’t need a more detailed explanation. “Isn’t that a little risky, using her to search for us?”
“We’re not. She doesn’t know we’re interested yet, which means she’s not acting as our agent. If we pick her brains after she comes out-and she cooperates-that puts us in the clear.”
“Which, combined with Kurt Peterson’s affidavit about Goddard being a user, maybe gives us enough for a search warrant,” he concluded.
“Right.”
“Except there’s no reason she should tell us anything.”
I checked my watch. “That’s why Linda Bettina’s meeting us here in about ten minutes.”
Willy nodded without comment, apparently satisfied.
“How’s Sammie doing?” I asked after a pause.
“Good. She’s tough.”
“Maybe. The guy did try to rape her.”
He pressed his lips together, his eyes fixed straight ahead. I didn’t say anything, hoping the silence would work for me.
“She did smack him down,” he finally said. “That counts.”
I couldn’t disagree. Had Gail been able to do what Sammie had, years earlier, I didn’t doubt that the trauma of her own rape would have been easier to handle. Still, the threat alone was bad enough, and nothing to dismiss.
I thought I might approach the subject from a different angle. “How did you feel about it?”
He snorted. “You guys hadn’t been there, I would’ve killed him.”
“I thought what you did was great.”
He mulled that over awhile and eventually said quietly, “I was proud of her.”
“It showed.”
He didn’t respond. I was wondering what to say next, a little curious why I was even pursuing this with him instead of with Sammie, when he suddenly said, “Spinney told me we’re dealing with the Mob all of a sudden.”
I hesitated, disappointed at the abrupt change of subject, and then conceded defeat. Sammie was right, he was a tough nut to crack. “Looks like it. We put out an inquiry on the whereabouts of Tony Bugs Busco.” I reached into my pocket and handed him a copy of Busco’s mug shot that I’d received as e-mail just before leaving the office. “Got this from the FBI. There’s a long rap sheet back at the office, too, but no current information. If it turns out he’s dead or in the joint or we get proof he’s in the South Sea Islands, we’ll go from there, but if not, I’d like him to explain how his prints ended up on a corpse in Vermont.”
Willy grunted, staring at the picture. “In the meantime, we wait for Mameve Knutsen. What the hell’s with that name?” he said irritably.
A pickup truck with the Tucker Peak logo on its side pulled into the lot not far from us. “You can ask her yourself. Bettina just arrived.”
We got out of the car, buttoning our coats and turning up our collars against the cold, as Linda Bettina-tall, broad-shouldered, and seemingly immune to the weather-strode toward us wearing her usual uniform of heavy boots and insulated coveralls.
“She out yet?” she asked. She didn’t offer to shake hands or trade amenities. We were a necessary evil, as she’d explained again on the phone this morning, and cooperating with us was just a means of getting us gone faster.
I glanced over to Goddard’s house and saw some movement by the small car parked in his driveway. “Looks like it.”
Bettina walked by us, heading that way, “Then let’s get this over with.”
“Remember,” I warned her, catching up.
“I know, I know. I’m just here to support her, not twist her arm. I got it the first time.”
Mameve Knutsen was a small, slightly built woman with a lively face and an engaging smile, which she turned on us as we all drew near. Given Bettina’s mood and Willy’s routinely grim expression, I gave her high marks for not running to her car and locking the doors.