Bellows Falls (2 page)

The process, once begun, reminded me of those World War Two Navy movies, where the brass stands around a darkened communications center and listens to a battle taking place over the loudspeakers, tracking its developments by moving small symbols around a transparent Plexiglas panel. In our case, that center was the cafeteria, now empty of its first crowd, with Coven and me and a couple of runners playing the brass, surrounded by several radios, a phone, and three tables covered with blueprints. Listening to Sammie and the others exchanging terse phrases in a clipped monotone, I longed to be anywhere but where I was, standing around, fully expecting to hear gunshots at any moment.

The search was mercifully restricted to the basements, the lower floors, and the utility tunnels that ran in a tangled maze between every building on campus. Tracking Morgan by the damage he’d left behind, we discovered that while he’d tried for higher ground, he’d soon returned to where the traveling wasn’t so confined by locked doors.

Corridor by corridor, section by section, we followed the progress of both Tac Teams until Sammie’s group arrived under the main reception area.

“Lieutenant?”

“Go ahead, Sam.”

“We’ve got a complication here. Looks like a low, broad cement-floor tunnel with some really old rooms off to both sides. They’re all connected, like catacombs, and we can’t tell how many passageways might be leading off them.”

“Hold on.” I looked inquiringly at Ben Coven.

He tapped his finger on the blueprint before us. “Oldest part of the complex, or near enough. It’s a rat’s nest.”

I glanced at another map, to where the second Tac Team was searching. So far, there was no telling which one was hotter on Morgan’s trail. I decided against combining forces.

“Sammie? We’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

Coven grabbed the relevant blueprints and led the way out of the cafeteria and along several passageways that had already been cleared. He reached a narrow steel door at the foot of a twisting flight of stairs and pulled a jangling key ring from his pocket. Swinging open the door, he took us down into a hot, humid, dark environment filled with the restless echoes of Sammie’s team muttering among themselves in a short cul-de-sac just off the bottom of the staircase.

Her face looking unnaturally pale, floating between a black helmet and vest, Sammie appeared out of the gloom. She was dripping with sweat. “Any ideas?” she asked.

I took the map from Coven and spread it out on the rough cement floor. Several flashlight beams suddenly appeared to help us see. I pointed to our location. “This is the official version. How’s it compare to what you’ve seen?”

Sammie crouched next to Coven and me. The plant manager began moving the tip of his finger along the paper. “This is the main tunnel you described.” He glanced up quickly, “Right around that corner. It’s basically north-south and runs from the underground passage between Tyler Building and here to a sealed bulkhead that gives onto the service road overlooking the Meadows. The catacombs, as you called them, are on both sides—basically a series of small, dirt-floored rooms that interconnect to each other and to the central tunnel.”

Sammie straightened from peering at the blueprint. “That’s not so bad. I thought there might be rooms off the rooms, or maybe more tunnels we couldn’t see.”

Ben Coven sighed slightly, the obvious bearer of bad news. “Well, there are a few outlets that don’t show up here. I wouldn’t call them tunnels, exactly, but they are big enough for someone who’s desperate.”

“I think this qualifies,” I said.

“I don’t know what they’re for or where they lead,” Coven continued. “Maybe they’re old drainage pipes. Some of them seem to be dug into the dirt, right under the cement floor, and others look like old, abandoned culverts. I always thought they were mostly dead ends, but I never bothered finding out.”

“Where are they?” Sammie asked, jutting her chin toward the blueprint.

Coven sketched them out. “For sure, there’re three of them, and I
think
that’s it, but to me they’re just something to step around so I don’t break my neck. I can’t swear there aren’t more.”

Sammie looked up at me. “You want to lead it?”

Her deferral was technically in order, since I was the ranking officer, and with her military background Sammie took whatever she was given from the top down, no questions asked. But I knew her better than that.

“It’s your team, Sammie. Tell me where you want me.”

I’d already borrowed a vest, but without a helmet I was correctly assigned a backup position. Ben Coven was sent back to the cafeteria after I’d cleared his passage by radio.

Sammie positioned us as if we were taking a street, house by house—in homage to the eerie layout. The Retreat’s “torture chambers” and “secret caches of human bones” were common topics among the locals, born of the idiot folklore attending any treatment center for the mentally ill. But being in one of the famous cellars at last, and seeing it extend out into the gloom, with ancient brick archways, mysterious tunnels, and an inmate on the loose, it was hard not to give the tall tales some credit.

Sammie went strictly according to procedure, everybody covering someone else, flashlights either directed forward or extinguished altogether, to avoid night blindness and giving the opposition a better target. No corner was rounded without first being checked with a hand-held mirror. Sammie herself operated a night vision monocular and scanned continually back and forth, watching for any surreptitious movements.

The few tunnels Ben Coven had mentioned were trickier, being too tight for more than a single, small, crawling individual. The safest bet would have been to use gas canisters and flush out whoever might be down there, but given the kind of facility we were in, that wasn’t an option. What we did, therefore, harkened back to Vietnam, and the tunnel-rats of Chu-Chi. One by one, again starting with mirrors, the smallest members of the team dropped down into the holes without backup and made their way to a dead end in every case.

By the time we reached the sealed bulkhead at the far end, we were drenched in sweat, our eyes were aching, and we’d built up enough nervous energy to run a generator. It was with obvious relief that Sammie announced the “all clear.”

Only in the following relaxed silence did we all distinctly hear the distant, muffled sound of something in motion.

“Cover,” Sammie yelled, causing us to flatten onto the ground in a circle, facing out. In the total darkness, Sammie made a slow, careful pan of our surroundings with the night scope.

“What do you think it was?” she asked, finding nothing.

“It sounded far away,” I answered, “like an echo.”

Ward Washburn, one of the team, muttered, “There
is
no far away, for crying out loud.”

Instinctively, we all returned to total silence, straining to hear it again. Working from memory, I crawled to a spot left of the bulkhead, and to a small, jagged hole in the crumbling concrete floor. My fingers wrapped around some rebar covering the top of a caved-in drainage pipe—a barrier we’d pulled on earlier to no effect.

This time, I pushed it down instead, and the heavy mesh gave way like a swinging trapdoor. “Sammie, come here.”

They all joined me to stare at the tiny opening. “You’re kidding,” Washburn said softly. Sammie dropped to her stomach and put her head into the pipe, the night scope in her eye. “It’s open as far as I can see toward Linden Street.”

The sound came again, clearer this time—something metallic dropping into place. It floated out of the twenty-inch-wide drain as from an ancient loudspeaker.

“Must be something else,” a voice spoke up behind me.

Sammie looked up. “You going to make that assumption?”

“No one can fit in there.”

“I can,” she countered.

I spoke into the radio. “This is Gunther. Somebody escort Ben Coven back here on the double.”

The plant manager was by our side in under three minutes.

“You know where this connects?” I asked him.

He spread out his papers doubtfully, already shaking his head. “I’d be amazed if we have it. Looks too old and too small for us to mess with.”

A moment later, he straightened up. “Nope. No sign of it.”

“I’m going in,” Sammie announced. “I’m the only one as small as Morgan.”

I laid a hand on her shoulder but looked at Coven. “Sammie thinks this runs toward Linden Street. What might it hook up with?”

Coven consulted his plans again. “Utility tunnel maybe?”

I glanced over at the old bulkhead. “That wouldn’t make sense. It looks more like a drainage culvert, to take away any water that might leak in through that thing.”

Coven tapped a spot with his finger. “Then this is probably your best bet. It’s a collection pipe for most of the drainage in this area. It’s good-sized, and accessible by manhole, so you could backtrack along it and see if this connects to it.”

I looked up at Sammie. “I like that idea a lot better.”

Coven unlocked the bulkhead and led us into the comparative coolness of the night air. We walked along a paved service road to a manhole cover some two hundred feet to the west. He swung his arm like a pendulum, bisecting the road. “Runs in this direction, about ten feet down, angling toward the Meadows.”

Two of the team members had already pried open the cover and were cautiously shining their lights down. Sammie stepped up to the hole’s edge.

I poked Washburn in the side and pointed at his helmet, addressing Sammie. “I’m coming with you.” Washburn handed me the helmet and I followed Sammie underground.

The cement tube at the bottom of a steel ladder was straight, clean, odorless, and big enough to walk in, stooped over.

And utterly silent.

We went up the slight incline, pacing the distance until we reached the approximate axis of the drainage pipe from the basement we’d just left. To my satisfaction, we found a rough opening, eroded by decades of runoff and rot. The tiny garden of brittle, crystalline growth that had taken root on its ragged edge had been partially scraped clean by the recent passage of something large and heavy.

I showed the traces to Sammie. “I think this just turned into a ‘good-news-bad news’ story.” I pointed down slope. “And I bet the bad news is out there.”

We retraced our steps past the manhole, to where the pipe emptied into the Retreat Meadows. There, in a narrow strip of muddy ground, right at water’s edge, a fresh set of sneaker tracks headed off toward the northwest.

I used the radio to expand the cordon we’d set around the campus, asked for additional backup and some tracking dogs, and issued a statewide Be-On-the-Alert for Jasper Morgan, but I wasn’t optimistic. If he’d been motivated enough to get this far, he wasn’t going to be picked up in an hour downing beers at some local dive.

In any case, his escape was no longer what truly concerned me. It was the effort he’d made—and the reasons behind it.

FOUR WEEKS LATER,
Jasper Morgan had all but slipped from my mind. The BOL had yielded nothing, the grapevine had remained silent, and Jasper, along with Pierre Lavoie’s gun, had been put on the back burner, “pending new developments.”

The spike in activity we get every spring—when the rowdier natives emerge from hibernation to wreak havoc—had subsided weeks ago, and life had returned to a predictable normalcy. As had my domestic life with Gail Zigman, my companion of many years, who had finally landed a cherished job as deputy to our local State’s Attorney.

In contrast to my schedule, Gail’s was awash in work, she being the lowest on the totem pole and the one with the most to learn. On the other hand, after countless months of juggling a clerkship, a correspondence course, cramming for the bar exam, and applying for jobs, even she was feeling comparatively sane. We still didn’t have enough time to ourselves, but we were at last enjoying what little we could get.

I was therefore in an unguarded mood when Chief Tony Brandt appeared in my office doorway and inquired, “You have much on your plate right now? Or anyone you can spare?”

I waved a hand at the paperwork before me. “My head’s above water. I don’t know about the others. Why?”

He entered and sat in my guest chair, wedged between the door and a filing cabinet. “I just got a call from Emile Latour. He needs a little digging done on one of his officers.”

Latour was Tony’s counterpart in Bellows Falls, a small industrial-era town a half-hour’s drive north of Brattleboro, just inside the northern reaches of Windham County. “Who’s the officer?”

“Brian Padget. Two-year man, good record, well liked. It’s a sexual harassment claim filed by some woman’s husband. Emile was wondering if we could lend him someone to conduct a quick internal on it.”

I made a face. The request was not unusual. If a grievance was filed against a department or one of its officers, and the outfit was too small to have its own Internal Affairs division, it was routine to ask another agency to supply an investigator. The task was usually mundane—often going through the motions to make everyone feel better. The majority were crank cases resulting in the officer involved being cleared, a happy circumstance that never helped the guy conducting the investigation—that poor bastard was always stamped a Judas before he even reached town.

I hedged my response. “I take it you’d like us to accept.”

“Latour’s a decent guy. It helps to be friendly.”

“Have they even looked into it? Sexual harassment’s a bit of a catchall. Maybe they could handle it themselves.”

Brandt shrugged. “I didn’t ask. Could be they’re just playing it safe.”

“You give him a deadline on how many days we can spend on it?”

“Not in so many words, but I’m guessing a couple.”

I flipped the pencil I was holding onto my desk. “All right, but I won’t saddle anyone else with it. I’ll do it myself.”

· · ·

Bellows Falls is a troubled community. A village swallowed whole by a cantankerous township, developmentally stalled since the Great Depression, and, reduced to being the bedroom to almost every other town within a half-hour’s commute, it has a dour and pessimistic self-image out of all proportion to its size.