The Catch (27 page)

“What happened to the shooter?” Joe asked.

“I don’t know. There wasn’t nobody. I still couldn’t figure out how there coulda
been
a shooter. I kept crawling around to the driver’s side, wondering what the fuck, you know? But I was alone, like I said. That’s when I figured, what’ve I got to lose? And grabbed my paperwork and split.”

“What about Marano?” Joe asked. “What did he see?”

“Nuthin’. I got back to the car, blood on my hand and on the license, and he just kept saying, ‘What happened, what happened?’ like I knew anything. He even thought I did it.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Joe couldn’t suppress.

Grega flared up again, smacking Gunther’s knee with his open hand. “Up yours, asshole. I’m telling you the truth. I want this shit settled. Why else would I grab you right in front of the fucking cop shop?”

“Half a dozen reasons, Luis, not least to make me
think
you didn’t kill him.” Joe then abruptly switched approaches, hoping the man’s emotional state might make him more talkative. “And speaking of that,” he said, “why do you give a damn what I think? Killing people should be a good rep for someone like you.”

Grega made a face, still feeling sorry for himself. “I don’t need the heat.”

“That’s right,” Joe reacted conversationally, “you’re in a new line of work now—upwardly mobile.”

He had no idea what he was talking about, knowing only that Grega had been making plans with Bob.

But he’d hit a nerve. Grega looked at him carefully and asked, “What do you know about that?”

Joe thought fast as he opened his eyes in surprise. “About Bernie and the rest? More than you might think. We’ve been pretty busy.”

Grega’s face darkened and he glared ahead, recalculating his position.

Joe took a chance. “We’ve also been playing the usual ‘what-if’ game that you do when you’re digging around, and we have more than one guy saying that it would’ve been smart for you to have whacked Matt Mroz.”

That snapped Grega back to the here and now.
“What?”
he burst out. “I didn’t do that. I wasn’t even around. His murder was the whole fucking reason I came up to this stupid state. I was working for him when that peckerhead cop pulled us over. Holy shit, man—you got
everything
wrong. How the hell you make a living, being so stupid?”

“You have benefited, though,” Joe argued, no more sure of that. “You can’t blame us for connecting the dots.”

Grega shook his head. But Joe thought he saw something besides outrage in his eyes when he spoke next. There was a hint of calculation, also. “Alan Budney did Roz. I had nuthin’ to do with it.”

Joe was briefly stumped. He’d never heard of Alan Budney, and a whole new name this late in the game was frankly startling. In most ways, the huge majority of police work in northern New England revolved around a
small and finite—and generally well known—population base. To have something like this appear out of nowhere was unusual. His only comfort was thinking that Cathy or Kevin or one of the others would merely raise an eyebrow and say something like, “Oh, yeah—Alan. Didn’t know he had it in him.”

He therefore responded along similar lines.

“Budney,” he said, nodding. “I was one of the Budney fans. Others thought that was a stretch. I’m not a local, so I bowed to their knowledge.”

“Yeah, well—so much for the locals. They’re usually assholes, if you ask me. Don’t know their butts from a hole in the ground.”

“They couldn’t figure his motive,” Joe ventured. “Why he’d stick his neck out so far.”

Grega smiled knowingly. “Oh, that’s real tough. What about the money?”

Joe smiled back. “What about the murder rap? That’s got
you
all hot and bothered. Does that make Budney the bigger man?”

Grega frowned. “Fuck you. Budney had a crank against his old man. He was all screwed up—thought people owed him something. Wanted to show the world who was boss. Stupid. I’m lucky. I have no clue who my father was. Just another fast fuck. I got no hang-ups like that. Me? I just want the cash.

“Good luck finding Alan, though,” he suddenly added, Gunther thought a little gratuitously. “The other thing that guy is, is super private. When he took over Roz’s outfit, he said he was gonna tighten things up like never before, and was gonna make goddamn sure no-body
could do to him what he did to Roz. He’ll be like a rat in a hole to find.”

Joe felt he was making headway, but he wondered how long he had before his host ran out of patience.

“You must like working with Beale—you two are birds of a feather.”

It was either going to prove accurate or insulting. He didn’t really care. He was just looking for a reaction.

But not what he got.

Grega stared at him blankly. “Beale? Who’s that?”

Later, Joe knew his response should have been more creative. But his surprise was such that he simply blurted, “Wellman Beale.”

Grega furrowed his brow, muttered, “Never heard of him,” and half stood up to look out the van’s front window.

When he sat back down, Joe knew his chance was over.

“Okay,” Grega said brusquely, “enough of this shit. You get out the way you got in.”

Joe held up his hands. “Cuffs?”

Grega cracked open the side door and peered outside. Satisfied, he threw it all the way open and gestured to Joe to leave, saying, “No way. You got a key somewhere, and if you don’t, you got a hundred buddies over there that’ll be happy to help you out.” He smiled and added, “Right after they laugh their asses off. I’ll keep your gun, too.”

Joe did have a key, if no idea how he was going to reach it. Grega was right, though. There was no way in hell he was going to ask for help, even if the next day
he would have to fess up to the whole event, in painful detail.

After he stepped onto the asphalt and watched the van drive off, therefore, he made himself comfortable leaning against his own car and began trying to reach the bottom of his right pocket.

Two days after leaving Maine, Joe sat alone in his Brattleboro office, in the middle of the night, with all the lights off except for his own desk lamp. It wasn’t a rare event. He did this often enough, and often not alone, when a major case was being worked and a string of ten-to-twelve-hour workdays was simply not enough to stay ahead.

Of course, there was a major case on hand. Brian Sleuter’s killer—be it Luis Grega or not—was still on the loose, after weeks of investigating. In addition to Joe’s personal efforts, and Sam’s and Willy’s, dozens of other cops, from locals to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, had all been contributing with interviews, data checks, public service announcements, informant shake-ups, and even a couple of roadblocks. And, of course, an uncountable number of hunches. Every cop with a brain, it seemed, plus a few more with active imaginations, had put an oar in the water.

All to no effect, and all with a growing sense of futility. Most of them still believed that Joe had been the only one to meet the cop killer, and to let him get away.
There were probably as many theories on how that encounter could have been turned around as there were concerning the next reasonable course of action.

The irony was, of course, that because of the weight of not knowing how to proceed, Joe was in fact alone at this time of night, quite possibly the only cop awake, still working this very active major case.

In fairness, he wasn’t doing much. He had the unit’s small TV perched on his desk, with the tape from Sleuter’s cruiser playing on the machine’s VCR. There was nothing to see here, of course, that he and countless others hadn’t already seen before, but the tape had become, in the absence of anyone under arrest, a form of talisman—the source of it all, if only “it” could be defined—and thus something that a large number of people had consulted in the same vein in which true believers visit a holy shrine, hoping they’ll be touched by inspiration.

The most revealing aspect of this ritual in Joe’s case, however, was that while the tape was on and he was positioned to watch it, he was no longer seeing a bit of it. His eyes were focused on some middle distance, deep inside his brain.

Primarily, he was thinking about Lyn.

He hadn’t told her about finding the boat on Beale’s island yet. He would soon, of course. There was no way around it. It wasn’t the sort of thing that simply went away.

But he wished it would.

After all, what did it in fact reveal? That father and son had survived the storm? If so, their fates were tied either to homicide or flight, and the latter didn’t make
much sense. From what would they have been fleeing? Family and finances had been secure at the time; nothing untoward had surfaced later to tarnish their memories. That left the horrific but practical conclusion that they had both been murdered, which, in turn, created a slough of nightmarish possibilities that could only fester with time.

Wellman Beale had been of no help, naturally. Nor would he ever be, at this point, since he had finally stopped talking. Interviews of all his associates, including the ancient mechanic found on the island, along with his erstwhile sternman and cousin, had led nowhere. Either they had corroborated Beale’s story that he’d merely found the boat on the water—empty, drifting, and two hundred miles from its home port—or they claimed to know nothing at all.

Time and effort might change things, of course. And people did talk eventually, when the right circumstances fell into place. But right now, none of that looked likely. And the Silva family, in the meantime, was going to be left to wonder, and wait.

As soon as Joe told them what he’d discovered.

“Not a good thing—a man like you watching late night porno.”

Joe squinted into the darkness past the TV set, trying to see the owner of the voice. “Hey, Willy,” he said. “Sam throw you out again?”

A shadow emerged from the surrounding gloom. “Up yours. Couldn’t sleep. What’re you watching?”

“The Sleuter cruiser tape.”

Willy reached out, grabbed a spare metal chair, and dragged it around beside Joe’s, settling down and
propping his feet up on the desk beside the TV. “No shit? I thought you had that memorized by now.”

Joe let out a brief snort. “Me and a hundred other cops.”

“Not me,” Willy admitted, staring at the screen. The action before them was about half played out. “I never seen it.”

Joe picked up the remote from his lap. “Allow me.” He hit Rewind, and they both watched the screen go snowy.

“Any news on Grega?” Willy asked as they waited.

“No,” Joe said dourly. “That whole deal got so weird. I have no idea what the Mainers’ll do about it—probably just wait for something to fall in their lap. That would be my plan.”

“We don’t really care, do we?” Willy asked. “He didn’t do Sleuter.”

Joe shifted in his seat and stared at him. “You believe that?”

“Sure—that’s what he told you.”

Joe laughed. “The man’s a crook, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yeah,” Willy retorted, “which makes him a businessman. What was in it for him to kill a cop? I take him at his word. He’s got bigger fish to fry—like he said when he grabbed you. Which,” he added with an approving nod, “I thought was a really ballsy move. Actually,” he added as further explanation, “that stunt is what makes me think he didn’t kill Sleuter—no bad guy in his right mind would’ve done that otherwise. He seriously didn’t want that particular rap on him, for whatever reason.”

Joe couldn’t argue the point. He, too, had been impressed
by Grega’s determination, especially in the middle of a police department parking lot. “You may be right,” he conceded. “Speaking of which, you remember that guy he mentioned I’d never heard of before? Alan Budney?”

“Claimed he was the one who killed the kingpin in Rockland,” Willy answered. “Got that whole ball rolling.”

“Right. Well, Kevin Delaney sent me an e-mail this afternoon. Nobody can find Budney, either. According to every snitch they’ve talked to, he was there one second and gone the next. His family’s clueless, too.”

“So?”

“I was thinking,” Joe told him. “When Grega was talking about him, he referred to him in the past tense a couple of times and then made a point of telling me he’d be hard to find.”

“Meaning he pinned the Roz killing on the poor slob and then knocked him off as both a smokescreen and a dead end,” Willy filled in.
“That’s
why he didn’t want Sleuter on his tab. I like it. It allows all of them—the Canadian exporter, the finance lady with the guy’s name, and all the rest to keep on ticking while the cops sit around with their thumbs up their ass. Cool.”

Joe pointed the remote at the TV and hit Play. “You are a sick man. Here we go.”

The screen stuttered awake to the image of a distant pair of taillights, accompanied by the rhythm of the cruiser’s strobe lights bouncing off the quickly passing countryside. Standardly, onboard police cameras ignite whenever the emergency lights are switched on. Joe had seen this so many times by now—still, he
couldn’t shake the same ominous dread that hit him every time.

Willy abruptly swung his feet off the desk and sat up. “Rewind it.”

“What?”

“Rewind it.” He grabbed the remote from Joe’s hand.

Joe looked at the picture. Behind the snow, he could just make out the Toyota getting smaller and moving away, and the oncoming car suddenly appearing to speed backward into the distance.

Willy hit Play, bringing everything back to normal.

“What did you see?” Joe asked.

Willy didn’t answer, instead leaning forward in his chair, staring intently. Once more, the approaching vehicle grew larger, got almost abreast of the cruiser, and then froze as Willy hit Pause. He fiddled with the control, changing the image one frame at a time, until he found one where the police strobes acted like a flash to light up the driver’s face.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Willy said softly.

The approach Gunther chose for the arrest was unconventional. Generally, there would have been ballistic vests, an entry team, a backup team, an ambulance in reserve, and maybe—if the politicians got their way—even some journalists out of sight for the follow-up press conference. Finally cornering a long sought-after cop killer—a front page item for weeks on end—was supposed to be at least an opportunity for relief, closure, a little self-congratulation, and a lot of good PR.