Dark Web (19 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

“Mike,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “Been a long time, man.”

“I know, man. Totally.”

Mike could hear the sounds of city traffic in the background on Bull Camoine’s end of the conversation. Mike experienced a wave of nostalgia for the city, and his misspent youth.

Bull was born Paul Anthony Camoine to a middle class Italian family on Staten Island. He’d had his name legally changed to ‘Bull’ two days after his eighteenth birthday. There was, as one might predict, a tattoo of a huge, snorting
Bos taurus
covering the left side of his back, most of it over the shoulder blade, the tattoo a process of needle and patience that Bull had once called “the sweetest pain you’ll ever feel.” He was an ardent libertarian, and a conspiracy nut. He championed an orthodox capitalism, which was pitted against a bloated government that spied, pried, and taxed the holy shit out of every last citizen. They would do this, he believed, until the citizenry had nothing left, in order to render them powerless against a military takeover that the liberals were instituting in order to completely socialize the country, so that no one had to work, no one had to go to church, or stay married, no one had to do anything but hang onto the teats of government while the super-rich got even super-richer.

He was a lot of fun at parties.

Bull never used a cellular phone, only a pager. He switched the number every six months. His parents’ home number, however, was still the same. Bull’s mother, who shared her son’s concerns about over-governing and the secular agenda, guarded it like a sentry. In order to earn her trust, Mike had to remind her of the times when, both eleven years old, he and Bull had eaten brownies in her kitchen after a Cobras football game. When that wasn’t enough, he’d reminded her about her own father, who had played for the Stapletons in 1932 under Coach Hanson. And that her father had arrived from Italy, playing professional football only three months after landing at Ellis Island. All because of a bet he’d made with his brother, who’d remained in the home country.

She’d given out the pager number after that.

“What’s been going on?” Bull asked. There was the characteristic wariness in his voice, but Mike felt it had softened since they last spoke. Bull had gone to work for the MTA, and had actually worked for three years under Mike’s father, who took credit for taking Bull under his wing after Bull’s father had died in a tunnel accident. The boys had originally met at Bull’s father’s funeral, and Bull had been at Mike’s mother’s funeral, many years later, which was the last time the two of them had seen each other. Thus, the two funerals bookended their brief but potent friendship.

“I moved,” Mike said.

“Yeah, I heard.”

“You heard?”

“Linda keeps a Facebook account. No matter how much I tell her it’s just free information for the NSA and the CIA, she keeps it. Thinks I don’t know. But then she comes up with things, like, ‘Oh, Callie and Mike bought a house in upstate,’ and when I ask her how she knows she has to come up with something. It’s a sickness.”

Mike didn’t know whether Bull was referring to his wife’s lying, Facebook, or social media in general. It didn’t matter. Mike wasn’t calling Paul Anthony “Bull” Camoine because of his theories on privacy invasion.

Aside from his doomsday philosophies, Bull was also the person who had physically assaulted more people than anyone Mike knew of, except maybe professional boxers. He’d been in jail at least a dozen times in his thirty-nine years, not to mention all the times he could have got sent up, but the person he’d assaulted was so petrified of retribution they didn’t press charges. Bull’s stay behind bars usually never lasted more than a couple of days; he would be arraigned, his mother would post bail and he would have to pay a fine. None of this seemed to faze him, however. Since the government lacked any legitimacy, he couldn’t see why he should pay his debts. His longest stretch had been a year, and he’d spent it in Sing Sing, a State Correctional Institution. There his doomsday philosophy had really coalesced. Capital, Bull professed, was not paper currency. There was certainly money circulating in prison, but currency was not about dollars. It was about connections. It was strength by ownership. The more guys you owned, the more powerful you were. Bull was a powerful ally to have, and the worst enemy. Plus, he had a lot of guns.

“Yeah, we moved,” said Mike. “And we’ve had some . . .”

“You’ve had some trouble?”

Mike knew Callie hadn’t posted anything public yet about what had happened to their son. He was sure she hadn’t sounded off on any social networks, mostly because she wasn’t ready to break the news to her parents. Bull was just picking up on the tenor of Mike’s voice, and making a guess backed by his usual skepticism.

“Yeah. We’ve had some trouble.”

“Tell me.”

Mike took a breath. He told Bull about losing his job, about his financial straits, about the move towards Callie’s career. He spoke little of Braxton until he mentioned the emails from Tori McAfferty. He told Bull he’d threatened McAfferty.

“Fucking A,” said Bull. “Put that son of a bitch in his place. Up and leaving Callie and his baby like that. That’s not a man.”

This made Mike feel a little better. Just a little. He continued recounting the events, bracing himself for the part where he described Braxton’s death. Surprisingly, he got through the telling without getting choked up, and Bull was silent, listening, some daytime soap on his mother’s TV warbling in the background. By the time Mike was finished, his hands were shaking. But not with sadness; they shook with anger.

“Sweet Holy Mary,” Bull said at last.

“Yeah.”

“So this guy, this piece of shit, he’s up there and he’s got a meth lab in his basement. Probably wants to get the kid working for him, the sick son of a bitch.”

“I don’t know. Yeah.”

“Whatever. He’s not thinking right. He’s fucked up, Mike. You know that. You did the right thing telling him to piss off. Don’t think for a second you didn’t.”

“Oh I think about it every second, Bull. I think if I hadn’t done that, Braxton would still be alive.”

“No. This psycho would have wound his way around Braxton’s life some way or another.”

“Then if I hadn’t lost my job. If I’d had savings. We wouldn’t have had to move.”

“Bullshit. Life happens. Callie got a job offer, you said. You looked for the signs, you saw them, you acted.”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. Look, Mikey? You call me up for a confessional? You call me up to talk about how bad you feel, how you feel responsible, and you want to cry on my shoulder? That why you called me?”

“No.”

“They haven’t caught this guy yet. I don’t watch the TV news — it’s all owned by real estate corporations and banks — but I can bet, I can just bet, they haven’t gotten him yet. Bunch of backwoods cops up there running around, banging into each other, couldn’t find their asses with two hands and a flashlight. So, you’re maybe a little worried? You’re right to be.”

“They have to get him. Eventually they’ll get him. In the meantime, they’re looking at me.”

“At you? The fuck you talking about?”

Mike then explained to Bull about his father setting up the 529 account for Braxton. About how, now that Braxton was dead and the account was in Mike’s name, he stood to collect. How the cops were using this as a reason to sniff around, how the detective, Swift, had asked him if he wouldn’t mind coming down to the station for a bit that very evening.

“Cocksuckers,” Bull said, typically profane. “This is just what I’m talking about.”

Mike could feel heat creeping up the base of his neck. He may have felt better getting some friendly, manly mojo from Bull, some reassurance that Mike wasn’t to blame for this horrible tragedy, but now a new form of guilt was rising up. What exactly was he doing, winding Bull up like this? What purpose did it serve?

“You need help,” Bull said. It was a statement, matter of fact.

“No. I mean, yes, but this has been helpful. Just talking.”

Bull made a dismissive sound. “Nah, Mikey. Come on. I know you. I’ve known you since you was a kid in that cold apartment downtown. I remember seeing the look in your eye then, and I bet you got that same look now. That take-no-shit look after your father . . . you know. Mikey, you didn’t take it from your old man, you sure as shit ain’t gonna take it from your son’s old man.”

The comment about Mike’s old man was like a cold sock to the jaw. He hadn’t expected that, for some reason — and he had let Bull lead him right into it. Into a dead end where bad things happened, and the walls were on three sides, until something came up behind you, trapping you in.

“Same thing,” Bull went on. “Sorry to say — and hey, it sounds like your old man is trying to make amends with this deferred tax account, okay, I’ll give him that, even if it wouldn’t-a bought half a semester by the time that kid was going to school — but your old man made his grown up choices. So did Braxton’s. You want to play a man’s game, you pay man prices.”

“My dad had an affair,” Mike said, feeling the ice of it in his gut. “It’s different.”

“No. Not different. Same shit. You got outta there, is what happened. Maybe — hey, for all you know, maybe this was Braxton’s way of getting outta there, too. I hate to say it; I know it’s tough. But listen, you did what you could do for him, Mikey. You did alright by that kid.”

“Thanks.”

“While he was
above
ground, Mike. You did what you could do while he was
above
ground. You see what I’m saying? Now you gotta do what’s right for the kid’s soul, Mike.”

Bull was an impassioned orator when he got going. Punctuating everything, cursing, using Mike’s name, again and again. Mike knew Bull. He’d heard all the speeches over the years.

“Alright,” Mike heard himself say. “Thanks, Bull. I’ll keep you posted.”

He could almost hear Bull Camoine grin down the phone connection. “Whatever you say Mikey. Just know; I know what you and your mom went through. Yeah your pop helped me out, but I never forgot, you know. I never forgot the things he did to you and your ma. I got your back. You pull the Bull trigger when you’re ready, Mike.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The house on Salmon Run in South Plattsburgh looked like a meteor had struck. Half of the roof was gone. The walls were eviscerated. The yard was a charred, black ring.

The police and fire department were everywhere. Crime scene tape flapped and twisted in the breeze, cordoning off the home and the street both ways. All vehicle traffic had been rerouted and the street was filled with gawkers surging against the police tape and traffic cones.

The McAfferty scene was a jurisdictional nightmare. State Police, Clinton County Sheriff’s, Essex County Sheriff’s, and DEC still hadn’t sorted out the chain of evidence. Evidence techs wore head-to-toe Hazmat suits. News vans — Plattsburgh, Burlington, Albany, even Montreal — were parked beyond the police barricades; photographers vied for the best shot of the smoldering wreckage. A reporter was mouthing into camera as Swift walked past, and her eyes broke away from the lens for a moment to follow him before he ducked beneath the yellow tape. He’d parked well out of range along the shoulder of the road and had moved quietly through the packs of onlookers, making his way inconspicuously towards the scene.

He was so low-profile that one of his troopers tried to prevent him from going inside the crime tape until Swift looked up and locked eyes with the young man.

Just yards from the house, which still gave off heat and a stench like singed brake pads, Detective Remy LaCroix stood looking out over the crowd huddled in the street. There was a steely drizzle coming down, pattering Swift’s overcoat. Rain so cold it was almost snow. The crowd didn’t even seem to notice it.

“Reminds me of something,” said Remy, as Swift walked up the slight rise towards the detective standing in the burnt grass. “There are three types of people in every civilization: The killers, the victims, and the bystanders.” Remy nodded over Swift’s shoulder at the gathered crowd.

“Somebody’s got to watch,” Swift said. “Otherwise, it might not be real.”

Remy paused and looked Swift up and down. “You feeling okay, Swifty?”

“Yup.”

The two men were standing shoulder to shoulder, facing in opposite directions. While Remy surveyed the crowd with disdain, Swift looked at the cinders and ash which were all that remained of the house.

“Whose place is it?” It had occurred to Swift that Tori McAfferty was a man with a pretty flimsy business in HVAC contracting. No employees, not even a yellow pages ad. Remy LaCroix was part of a task force seeking to nip the burgeoning North Country meth industry in the bud. But McAfferty was barely on their radar. So he was either independently wealthy, or he was living off someone else.

“Funny you should ask,” said Remy, still looking through the gauzy rain at the gaping collection of neighbors. “Place is Tricia Eggleston’s. McAfferty’s girlfriend.”

“Eggleston? Oh boy,” Swift said.

Remy scowled and smiled at the same time. “Yeah.”

Swift shook his head, and briefly glanced up at the dark, wet sky. The Egglestons were a family of regional prominence. They were everywhere around Lake Champlain from Plattsburgh down to Schroon Lake. Thomas Eggleston had a car dealership. Anita Eggleston was a teacher at New Brighton. There was also a criminal defense lawyer, and a notable realtor.

“Then she’s probably Tom’s daughter.” Swift said to himself. Thomas Eggleston, or Big Tom. He had a few car commercials that played in several counties. Unlike McAfferty, Big Tom did very well on paper.

No doubt every one of the Egglestons, in-laws included, were cringing in the shade right now, embarrassed, ashamed, or outraged — or all three — by their relative who had shacked up with a cooker and a dealer and was peddling tooth-rot to the community. Thing was, meth addicts weren’t hard to notice. They were all stringy, evasive, and unhygienic. It was likely the family had known of, or at least suspected Tricia’s involvement with meth.

Big Tom would either make a big fuss, or keep a low profile and hope to stay out of the media. It was tough to know how he would play it.

“You think her uncle will represent her?” Swift asked. Tricia’s uncle, Warren Eggleston, was the lawyer.

“He already is.”

“No qualms about representing family? No conflict of interest?”

“Nope.”

“And she was picked up for questioning early this morning?”

“Yeah, at a girlfriend’s. Says she ran out when the cop came in. No idea about where McAfferty went, or the explosion, nothing. Warren is guarding her like a pit bull.”

Swift nodded. Warren had the reputation of being a tenacious lawyer. It was he who’d represented Frank Duso for his drunk driving charges, and, rumor had it, was the one who put an idea in Duso’s head about how he maybe couldn’t see so well after being pepper-sprayed.

“So why you up here, Swifty?” Remy turned his head and looked at Swift with a half-smile.

“I love the smell of burning meth labs,” Swift said.

“Yeah, me too.” Remy turned to face Swift. The wind picked up and pierced both of them with shards of icy rain. “Took half the night to knock that fire down. Twenty-odd hours later, and this place is still chaos. For a while everyone kept back — sometimes you get a couple of canisters of something exploding after the fact. I don’t know — I’m no expert. I started with pharmacy rip-offs of pseudoephedrine, stuff like that. But this place, you know, there’s been some activity we’ve seen here.” He looked at Swift. “You want me to keep you in the loop, yeah? Your thing going on down there with the kid in the road?”

“Simpkins, yeah. I would appreciate it.”

“Well shit, Swift. You could’ve just called. You didn’t have to drive all the way up here. I know I’m a pleasure to be around, of course.”

Swift smiled. Remy was French-Canadian, about half a foot shorter than Swift, round in the middle, with a small dark goatee and a fedora. He was the only cop Swift knew who actually wore one. It made him look like some PI from a pulp novel out of the 50s. Swift liked him. He reached into his overcoat pocket and pulled out a small pair of needle-nosed pliers. Swift held them in the air and opened and snapped them shut once.

“You are a pleasure,” Swift said. “But it’s more than sharing information. This guy is a possible suspect for murder one; my case. So, I’ve got to go have a look around for myself.”

Remy stepped back and smiled broadly. “Be my guest,” he said. He swept an arm towards the ruined home. “There’s everybody in there but K-9. And I guess they’re on their way; it was just cleared for the dogs. Here, take this.”

Remy handed Swift a small white mask to put over his mouth and nose.

“You may have to wait in line before you walk through. I’m working on the concession stand. Give me a minute and I’ll have popcorn.”

“Could probably cook it off the floor in there,” said Swift through the mask. “If there’s any floor left.”

Remy burst out laughing, and then put a hand to his mouth, possibly so the crowd wouldn’t see. “Or hot dogs,” he said in a lower voice. As Swift began to walk away Remy said, “That’s all I want. Nice little hot dog stand. One of those push-carts. That’s how I’m going to retire. Make a killing with those things. I could set it up for the bystanders at a scene just like this. Hey — how’s your thing coming with the Attorney General’s office?”

Swift tossed Remy a look back over his shoulder as he approached the house. “I’ve been playing hard to get,” he said.

Remy’s voice floated back, serious now. “Not after this you won’t be.”

“No,” Swift said, as a trooper in a rain jacket pointed him into the devastated house. “Probably I won’t.”

* * *

Inside, he was once again overcome with culpability. He pictured Cohen walking into the place the previous evening. How long had Cohen been standing in the house before it had blown up?

Swift shrugged this off. He needed to concentrate. The scene before him was absolute mayhem. Remy LaCroix was right; there were people everywhere. Evidence techs were still scraping residue from every conceivable surface. A trio of firemen were in the back, under the supervision of another State Detective — Swift recognized him as a man named Ashburn — and they were erecting some temporary support beam to prevent the roof over the kitchen from collapsing. The ceiling — what was left of it, mere ragged tatters, was dripping. Everything was sodden. The carpet squished under his feet around the mouth of a gaping hole that had eaten up eighty percent of the living room floor and part of the rooms at the back.

All over the walls were dark stains. Swift thought he saw the outline of a body. As if the flash of the explosion had somehow imprinted a silhouette of Alan Cohen against the wall.

Goddamnit. Stop it.

He needed to get through this muck. He needed to take someone out to dinner. Forget Silas, she still had most of her career in front of her. Poehler was more his speed. He would slip his hand down to the small of her back, circle it around the rise of her hips, pull her to him. Crude, he knew, to think such thoughts. But he had to think about something. Anything to get his mind off Cohen.

He had to get to the room which the investigation had deemed McAfferty’s bedroom, and that was straight ahead. Anything back in that bedroom which might relate to Braxton Simpkins, Swift needed it. Of course, Tori himself would be the best evidence, along with what he might have to say about his biological son, but there was no telling how long it would take to find him. It could be in the next few hours, if he was stupid, and hiding close by. Or even stupider, and tried to cut across the border into Canada, or take the ferry across Lake Champlain and into Vermont. But he could have been smart, too. He could have gone downstate, where the population grew denser every mile closer to New York City. Yeah, if he was smart, he would have hopped on the Amtrak the first chance he got after striking that match, and would have already arrived in Penn Station to be lost in the crowd.

Swift didn’t know what kind of a man he was. Callie Simpkins seemed pretty bright. She was emotional, for sure, but her son had just been found in the damned snow. She was an artist, and she was easy on the eyes. We all make mistakes, thought Swift, sometimes we try on the wrong clothes, but there had to be something redeeming about Tori McAfferty if this intelligent, reasonably sane woman had spent time with him, and even had a kid with him. But with every hour Tori McAfferty wasn’t in custody, the less likely it was they would ever find out.

Until he made a mistake.

Most criminals on the run screwed up eventually, and that was how they got nailed. They needed resources — food, shelter, money — and they were apt to go about it in an aggressive, or illegal way. It was all many of them knew. Others, it was impulse. It was entrenched in them, the need for violence. And often part of them wanted to get caught, knew they needed to be taken down.

He reached the back bedroom after hugging the wall to circumnavigate the crater. The room was dark, the floor spongy under Swift’s feet as he snapped on his flashlight and swung it around.

The place was a wreck. The bed was a twisted mass of box springs poking out of wadded blankets. The dressers had mostly burned and were soaked and blackened. There were a few crispy photographs on one, however, and Swift approached and picked one up with his pliers.

He lifted it off the top of the dresser and squinted at it. It was hard to make out, but it looked like a man and a woman standing together. The woman was probably naked.

He moved on to the next picture, which was curled up into a tube. He unrolled it, but it was useless. The image was burned away.

Swift put the photo back. His nose was starting to itch inside the mask and he could smell the coffee on his breath. He looked around the room again. The walls were streaked from the ceiling down to the floor with tar — probably from the melting shingles on the roof. There was a strip of what might have been a poster still tacked to the wall. A mangled guitar sat wet and glistening beneath the poster. Swift crossed the room towards a door at the back of the bedroom, mindful of his footing; he didn’t want to go crashing through the floor. The entire building was a deathtrap. He felt bad for the investigating team, moving gingerly about in their white space suits, looking like astronauts in some alien atmosphere. Swift knew that the prize was out there in the afternoon storm, on the run.

The door from the bedroom led to a small room, even darker, but in better structural shape. Off to his left, Swift could see the firemen and troopers in the kitchen. Standing right in front of him was an evidence tech, a CSI in a Hazmat suit, who was going through the dryer.

It was a pantry and laundry room, Swift figured, looking around. There were a few canned goods left on the shelf, and signs that some of them had exploded in the heat. Spilled boxes of dry goods, a couple of tools, and a mop and a broom had managed to stay propped upright in the corner. He smiled at the CSI.

“Howdy.”

“Howdy,” the tech echoed back in a muffled voice. He sounded like Rick Moranis in that movie, the spoofy one —
Spaceballs
— that was it. Swift was about to excuse himself and leave by the back door when he saw something hanging from the hooks next to the top-load washing machine.

You’ve got to be kidding me
.

There were belts hanging next to the washer. One of them, with a huge buckle, looked like it belonged in a Texas rodeo. A couple of others, while wet and blackened in places, were clearly a woman’s, and there was also an orange extension cord, plus another cord, pure black, coiled up next to it.