The Catch (7 page)

What they saw as they cleared the roofline was wondrous and hellish, both. Under a star-speckled dome of night sky, its bottom circumference ringed by a muted blaze of surrounding city lights, a single man stood in the middle of the roof, his gun blazing in random directions as he twisted and turned, slapped by the bullets of the ICE agents hitting him.

Crouching beside the top of the ladder, Joe watched as the silhouetted figure finally stopped its mad dance and dropped into a heap like a puppet with its strings cut.

“My God,” he heard Sam say behind him.

Joe rose and slowly approached the fallen man with the others, all of them still with their guns out and ready.

But there was no movement. Caressed by the nervous hoverings of multiple flashlight beams, the body lay covered with blood, contorted as if stung by a thousand volts of electricity.

“That one of them?” someone asked.

Joe considered the question, suddenly realizing its significance. In this neighborhood, the dead man might have been anyone with a gun and a criminal record. Not to mention that, aside from a couple of indistinct half sightings, there’d been no solid identification of either Marano or Grega ever since the surveillance team had given the go-ahead.

Lenny Chapman appeared beside Joe, he having opted to join the team going down the fire escape. He had a photograph in his hand.

“Let’s see his whole face,” he requested.

One of the men in black reached out and twisted the
body’s head around while another steadied a light on it. Chapman crouched and held the mug shot up.

“It’s Marano,” he announced after a brief pause.

“What about Grega?” Joe asked in the following quiet.

Chapman looked up at him and shook his head. “He was with this guy in the first apartment—we have confirmation of that. We also know that two men used the bridge over the alleyway. But I and the others saw someone jumping from the fire escape and taking off below. I’m only guessing that was Grega.”

He stood up, put the mug shot back into his pocket, and stared down at James Marano, adding, “Regardless, it looks like Grega beat feet. Your cop killer’s still on the street.”

Joe considered that. “Maybe,” he agreed. “But we still have the apartment to go through. Could be we’ll find something there.”

Chapman turned slightly and gazed out over the vast cityscape all around them, glimmering like a distant grasslands fire. Far off, they could hear sirens.

“Good luck with that one,” he said.

Kevin Delaney exited his car, waited for the traffic to clear, and crossed the street, carrying a cardboard tray full of coffee cups. He’d caught a few hours of sleep at home after Cathy Lawless took over the tail he’d established last night at the Fort Kent border crossing.

But now it was morning, his curiosity had gotten the better of him, and despite the paperwork waiting at the office and the exhaustion still scratching the back of his eyeballs, he was in the border town of Calais, almost two hundred miles from Fort Kent. That’s where Cathy and the source of their interest had settled down for the time being—in a small shopping mall consisting of several stores and two modest office buildings.

He’d heard back on his inquiry to Customs about the van driver’s name—Eugene Didry. This he’d passed along to Cathy, even though it had resulted in no hits anywhere, implying that it had been stuck onto a well-forged passport.

Delaney opened the back door of a delivery van and stepped inside. The air was stale, warm, and unpleasant.

There were two people—a man and a woman—sitting in chairs mounted to the floor, facing a row of
equipment attached to the wall, along with a long tinted window looking onto one of the office buildings across the parking lot.

The woman’s face lit up at the sight of the tray. “My savior,” she said, reaching for one of the cups as Delaney reluctantly shut the door behind him.

“Hey, Dave,” he addressed the man, “want some coffee?”

Dave Beaubien, Cathy Lawless’s MDEA partner, reached out, took a cup, and nodded once. “Thanks.”

Delaney smiled to himself. As far as he could tell, that constituted a full sentence for Dave—the definition of a man of few words. Of course, being partnered to Cathy almost guaranteed not getting a word in edgewise, so perhaps it was all to the good.

“Anything?” Delaney asked Lawless.

She finished taking a long swig of her coffee before answering. “Christ, that hits the spot. Nope. Not a thing. Didry—or whatever his name is—has been inside for about ninety minutes now.” She interrupted herself long enough to point at the parking lot. “That’s his vehicle over there. Of course, that doesn’t mean he didn’t sneak out the back and take off. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Her boss raised his eyebrows. “You suspect that?”

She took another swallow before answering. “I don’t know. There’re just the two of us here.”

Delaney nodded at that and changed subjects slightly. “Makes you wonder why he entered at Fort Kent, just to drive all this way to another border town within U.S. lines.”

“Doesn’t make me wonder,” Cathy said brightly. “He’s been meeting people along the way.”

Delaney’s eyes widened slightly. “Do tell,” he prompted her.

She turned to her partner. “Dave—you got that list?”

Beaubien wordlessly handed her a spiral notepad. She, in turn, passed it to Delaney, explaining, “Four meets, each at the towns listed, each town being a past entry port for drugs that we know about. The people listed are either guys we saw come out and talk to this character, or they live in the houses he entered. Either way, every one of them has a history with us.”

Delaney studied the list, recognizing everyone on it. These were not nickel-and-dime players. More to the point, they’d all been linked, circumstantially and not, to Matt Mroz’s now leaderless network.

“You get a good picture of Didry?” he finally asked. “We’ll need to send a copy to the Canadians—see if anyone there can give us the guy’s real name.”

Instead of answering, Dave merely patted the long-lens camera on the counter beside him.

“Yeah,” Cathy added, “except that Didry has a beard as big as it is phony. I’d be amazed if his own mother could pick him out of a lineup.”

Delaney gazed thoughtfully out the window and mused, half to himself, “What the hell is going on in there?”

Alan Budney was also at a window, peering out discreetly—in an vacated, second-floor office of the same run-down mall in Calais where the MDEA team was running surveillance from the parking lot.

“That them?” Budney asked. “The white van with the tinted windows?”

Eugene Didry, whose real name was Georges Tatien, rose from his chair and crossed the room nonchalantly.

“Oui
—that is them,” he said in a thick Gallic accent.

“Who are they? DEA?”

Tatien shook his head.
“Non.
I do not think so. DEA is almost invisible in your state. That is MDEA, I think. Very good, but too thin with the personnel.”

Tatien eyed his American counterpart from up close. He’d been waiting for Budney for well over an hour, sitting patiently in his chair. Timing was routinely approximate in this line of work, so he hadn’t expected a precise arrival. But he also hadn’t expected the kind of person now before him. Drug dealers weren’t all the losers and idiots that cops liked to portray, nor were they the smooth, well-tailored sophisticates of the movies. But they did tend to fit an overall style—a little reckless, a little careless, often addicted to the product they peddled.

Budney seemed the exception. When he’d entered the room, without apology, he’d asked, “You Didry?” After Tatien had admitted as much, Budney had followed with, “I’m assuming you were followed; did you make the same assumption?”

It had been a deceptively elegant opener, especially to a traditional philosophe like Tatien, who shared the French fondness for oblique and indirect allusions. With one seemingly simple inquiry, Budney had questioned Tatien’s intelligence, ability, poise, and observational abilities—not to mention his trustworthiness. It had been economical and intuitive, reflective of a possibly intriguing brain. A satisfying beginning.

Unless, of course, Budney had intended none of it.

Georges Tatien, born rich, well educated, but too much of a risk-taker to follow society’s narrow rules, had opted for a life of courting danger in exchange for large amounts of easy, untraceable money. It gave him the thrills of the demimonde that so horrified and tantalized his peers, along with a lot of extra cash with which he did as he pleased.

There had been frightening moments. Drug dealers were often unstable, unpredictable, and unreliable—quick to blur the distinction between loyalty and self service, and easily coerced by the police into betraying their colleagues. But therein lay a large part of the attraction for Tatien—he could flatter himself with having a psychological acuity that would keep him safe from the dealers and ahead of the police.

Thus, Alan Budney’s unconventional icebreaker had come like a tonic at a time when Tatien had become bored by the likes of Matthew Mroz—an egocentric hedonist with little imagination.

Budney finally turned away from the window to face the Canadian. “I hear you’re a careful man.” He jerked his thumb outside. “How careful have you been with them?”

Tatien returned to his chair. He liked this setting—a near-empty room, with a thin coating of dust over two metal chairs and a cheap desk. It was theatrically appealing.

“I have discovered,” he answered thoughtfully, “that if I give the police a shadow to chase, it is better than allowing them to make something by themselves. Roads
taken that are wrong are so much harder to drive in reverse. Do I make sense to you?”

Budney smiled and sat in the other chair, completing Tatien’s picture of how this scene should look. “You’re telling me that Didry isn’t your real name,” he suggested.

Tatien laughed softly and touched his voluminous beard. “As fictional as my whiskers.”

“You’ve been in this game for a while, haven’t you?”

Tatien nodded. “I have.”

“You worked with Matt Mroz.”

“I did that, yes.”

“You okay with his being out of the game?”

Tatien’s smile broadened. “I like that—instead of ‘dead.’ Very good. Yes, I am okay.”

“How about your people over here? What about them?”

Tatien shrugged. “‘My people.’ That is maybe not so true.”

“That they’re your people or that they’re okay that Roz is gone?”

“Yes to both: they are not mine, and they do not care.”

Budney considered that. He liked this man, whatever he might be called. He seemed careful and smart, and he’d been quick to respond to Alan’s invitation to meet. He was also highly regarded in the business, although not by the moniker Didry, necessarily. That had been one of the most interesting things Alan had discovered—that “the Canadian” was most widely known simply as that, and not by any particular name.
When they’d spoken by cell phone just a couple of days earlier, and this man had said, “I am Eugene Didry,” Alan had immediately suspected otherwise, and hadn’t cared. The Canadian was reputed to be The Man when it came to pharmaceuticals, and that’s exactly what Alan wanted to discuss with him.

“Do you have any idea what percentage of his trade Roz did with you?” Alan asked.

Tatien made an equivocal expression. “I knew he did many things.”

“Twenty percent,” Budney asserted. “The rest was divided among weed, coke, meth, heroin, ecstasy, and crack, more or less, depending on availability and market demand. And he imported it from all over, from New York to Canada to Aroostook County.”

Tatien didn’t respond, figuring there was some point to all this.

“Any idea what his losses were to theft, busts, bad product, and everything else?”

“You will tell me?” Tatien prompted with a smile.

Alan rose from his seat and began pacing the room. “A full thirty-two percent. Incredibly sloppy. Half the time, he had no clue who had or was doing what.”

“You are well informed.” Tatien had no doubt whatsoever by now that Budney had either had Matthew Mroz killed or had done it himself. The man’s tone of voice betrayed his pride and contempt. But Tatien found such hostility curious—for all of Mroz’s possible faults as a businessman, he still had been making an extremely good living in a literally cutthroat occupation. In some types of trade, profit margins of ten percent
were seen as exemplary; in a bad year, Mroz had to have been quintupling his outlay.

Budney stopped in midstride and stared at his guest. “I
am
well informed. I researched every aspect of his operation, talked to the people who made it work. I knew it a hell of a lot better than he ever did. I also figured out what he was doing wrong, and I know how to make it into something he couldn’t have touched.”

Tatien scratched an earlobe meditatively. “I am listening with interest.”

Budney leaned forward slightly for emphasis, his hands on his hips. “You should be, ’cause I’d like to make you a key player instead of just another supplier. I believe that with your sources and my new distribution network, we can make Roz look like a sidewalk peddler, even in a backwoods, mosquito-filled, prehistoric swamp like Maine.”

Tatien laughed, not only at the allusion, but at the sense of enthusiasm he was catching from this young man. For the first time in a long while, Georges Tatien thought he might enjoy himself once more.

He spread his hands out to his sides, as if in surrender. “You have a captive audience.”

Lenny Chapman was at once angry and motivated. Shooting people on rooftops in Boston was bad enough, the standard joke about all the paperwork being only the half of it. This particular ICE office was a political hotbed, and he hadn’t been here long enough, or kissed enough asses, that he was guaranteed a pass for all the bad press he knew would be churned up from within the office and the media combined.

Which didn’t include the tensions surrounding the obligatory post-shoot investigation.

It behooved him to make the Dot Ave killing of James Marano the start of an investigative cornucopia so rich as to reduce the whole incident to a minor detail.