The Ragman's Memory (33 page)

I waited until all my instructions had been forwarded before keying the mike again. “Sol? I’m heading for Birge via Canal. Take Union Street to close it up from the other end, all right?”

“Copy.”

Even with a fully equipped patrol car behind them, complete with howling siren, motorists are often at a loss about what to do, assuming they do anything at all. So my demure, silent, flashing blue grille beacons did more to frazzle my own nerves than they did to move any traffic. Nevertheless, mostly through reckless driving, exacerbated by the thickly falling snow, I managed to reach my end of Birge in about five minutes. During that time, the radio informed me that Ginny Levasseur was registered to a ’95 dark green Ford Explorer, Hennessy to a red, plow-equipped ’96 Ford 350 Custom pickup with dual rear wheels, and that nobody had seen either one since I’d raised the alarm.

Birge Street was one of Brattleboro’s significant historical sites, although you had to know the history to believe it. Narrow, nondescript, and located in a ragged section of town, its south side was dominated by a row of ancient, narrow, slate-walled warehouses, each of which nosed into the curb—long, thin, and tall—like oil tankers at a dock. Once home to the Estey Organ Works, they were now the domain of an assortment of diverse businesses, including Carroll Construction, where Ginny Levasseur worked in Payables.

I was here on the probability that if Hennessy had panicked as I hoped he had, his first order of business would be to warn his girlfriend. Now that I was parked at the end of the street, however, having sent the whole department into frantic motion, it suddenly occurred to me that the basis for my action stemmed from a gossiping, gum-snapping, post pubescent clerk I’d met for the first time this morning.

I picked up the mike again and crossed my fingers that Nicole’s friend Nancy was a sound judge of character. “Sol, can you see the parking lot?”

“Yeah, and the Explorer. Fancy car—has all the trimmings.”

“It should, if we’re right about these two. M-80 from O-3, we’ve located the Explorer. All units can stand down and return to regular duties, but keep your eyes peeled for the pickup.”

Dispatch responded in flat Chuck Yeager fashion, and I went back to watching the snow build up on the hood of my car.

“Here she comes,” Sol said about five minutes later. “He must’ve called her, ’cause she’s moving fast, carrying a man’s briefcase.”

“Which direction?”

“Hang on. She’s still in the lot… Okay, she’s headed my way… I’m on her tail, going back toward Union Street.”

“10-4. I’m right behind you,” I said, and began rolling down Birge to catch up.

· · ·

Whatever the pitch of her anxiety, Ginny Levasseur did not set us onto any high-speed chase. The combination of slippery unplowed roads and increasingly poor visibility made her move at an almost leisurely pace. The only indicators of her frame of mind were her car’s occasionally nervous sideslips as she overgunned the accelerator.

Not that Sol and I were having an easy time of it. Driving rear-wheel-drive light sedans, we had our own work cut out for us, especially on Union Street’s cliff-like incline up to Western Avenue.

Thereafter, however, things settled down. The Explorer took Western to the interstate on-ramp and headed north. The three of us, mixed in with dozens of other snow-blanketed cars, stuck to the right lane like timid dowagers, relying on the barely perceptible dark double ribbon of cleared asphalt before us for both safety and comfort. One mile south of Brattleboro’s last exit, I got back on the radio and told Dispatch to widen the alert for Hennessy’s truck to include the Vermont and New Hampshire State Police and the Windham County Sheriff ’s Department, and to focus on the area north of town.

A few minutes later, after passing the exit, I was glad I’d invited more company.

For most of its length within the state, I-91 parallels the Connecticut River, servicing Vermont and New Hampshire equally. Exits occur about every ten miles, and in between, the views to both east and west rival the prettiest in the country. Today, however, was like driving through a pale gray tunnel, the only things visible being the taillights ahead, and the only sense of motion the sound of the engine and the occasional small bump passing beneath the wheels. This spatial detachment was enhanced by the endless, hypnotizing wash of snowflakes against the windshield. For all intents a solid indicator of forward motion, this cone-shaped vortex never seemed to move, dulling the driver’s concentration, until his primary impulse was not to steer but to sit back, drop his hands from the wheel, and lose himself in the display. By the time we were approaching Exit 4 in Putney, I felt my eyes might never uncross again.

“She’s getting off,” Sol reported, much to my relief, and I saw his right-hand flasher begin to wink.

The Putney exit is located south of the village, so we followed Levasseur on a slow parade along the main street, still accompanied by several other cars. I wasn’t too worried she’d notice the same headlights had stuck with her all the way from Brattleboro—the nervous, halting way she drove told me she kept her eyes glued to the road—but I was beginning to worry where this little trip might be leading us. If she was going to meet Hennessy, I wanted to make sure I had enough support units to hem him in. But until I knew where that encounter was to take place—or even if it was—there was little I could do to coordinate with other agencies. In frustration, I gave Dispatch a geographical update instead and maintained my twenty feet off Sol Stennis’s barely visible bumper.

We continued through town to the junction with the Westminster West Road, took it for a mile, and then veered left again onto West Hill Road, heading back toward Dummerston, between Putney and Brattleboro. We were starting to make a big circle. I began to reconsider Levasseur’s ignorance of our presence.

“Sol? She given any sign she knows you’re there?”

“I don’t know if she has yet, but she’s bound to soon. These roads are getting narrower and narrower, and we’re about all the traffic that’s left.”

“When she takes another turn, pass by and double back. I’ll pick her up and you can follow me for a while.”

“10-4.”

The opportunity for this maneuver occurred ten minutes later, when the Explorer turned right onto the Putney Mountain Road—a one-lane dirt trail leading to the crest of a string of steep hills separating Putney from Brookline to the west. In the summertime this road went all the way through, giving both communities a significant shortcut to the thirty-minute run-around through Dummerston. But at this time of the year, it was a virtual dead end. Brookline did not plow its side of the mountain.

Coming abreast of a house, I put on my turn signal, as if pulling into the driveway, and let the car ahead disappear into the veil of falling snow.

“What’s up?” Sol immediately radioed.

“I don’t want her to feel crowded. She’s got nowhere to go, and I can see her tracks in the snow. We can just follow them.” I raised Dispatch again and suggested that any additional units should approach from the Putney side.

I moved slowly from then on, focusing on the twin furrows her tires had left behind, my only concern now that we would come upon them too fast and lose our element of surprise.

I keyed the mike again. “M-80 from O-3. Does either subject own any known property on Putney Mountain?”

I drove on for a quarter hour before Dispatch came back. “Negative.”

The Putney Mountain Road is long, twisting, and steep, with deep ditches on both sides. It is also thinly populated and buried in the woods. The oddness of the situation, the growing sense of isolation, and the awareness of the tightly packed trees pressing in from either side of the car began to heighten my anxiety. Something was going wrong—slowly but surely. In a snail-paced parody of some careening, madcap chase, I could sense we were losing the advantage we’d been counting on. The farther I drove, the more convinced I became that instead of following some unaware suspect, we were in fact heading for a destination solely designed for our benefit.

Higher and higher we climbed, past most of the houses here, past Banning Road, the last feeder trail shy of the mountain’s top, and almost to where I knew the road was supposed to be blocked by a season’s worth of accumulated snow.

That very thought jogged my memory, and I spoke into the radio. “Sol, doesn’t Hennessy’s truck have a snowplow on—”

It was all I got out. Directly ahead of me, looming large and fast like the red-eyed monster from a nightmare, the rear end of the Explorer came barreling down upon me, its backup lights blazing. I had time only to throw my arms across my face before the hood of my car crumpled like an accordion and smashed the windshield, letting in a swirling white torrent of snow and shattered glass.

GAIL STOOD AT THE FOOT OF THE
emergency room bed, shaking her head. “My God, Joe, you are the most accident-prone man I know. What were you doing running around the mountains in a blizzard?”

I gave her a lopsided smile, tilting my head so the nurse could finish taping a dressing to my temple. “Hennessy took off, his girlfriend took off after him, and we took off after her. I didn’t realize till too late that he might’ve figured we’d follow her.”

She came up alongside the bed and kissed me on the cheek. “How is he?” she asked the nurse.

“Hard-headed. He has a bruise and a cut where he should have a concussion.” She finished her handiwork. “I’ll get some painkillers. Be right back.”

Gail watched her leave and then examined me again, her concern more apparent now. “Joe, you’ve got to stop getting banged up like this. You’re not built for it anymore.”

I saw the fear in her eyes, and recognized its source. We’d been through a lot in the last couple of years, traumatically and emotionally, and had survived it only by letting go of the independence we’d long thought was the strongest link between us. But the trade-off was what I saw in her now, and felt within myself—a more mindful acknowledgment of life’s transience, and a growing dread that what we’d built together, despite the effort, could be forever destroyed by mere chance.

She retreated to the safer ground of the here and now, leaving to time the task of calming her anxiety. “So what did happen?”

“After Hennessy shook off Sol, he beat it to Brookline through Newfane, put chains on his tires, and plowed his way to the top of Putney Mountain. Guessing we might’ve tumbled to his connection with Ginny, he called her on his mobile phone and told her to meet him using the Putney approach. That way, we’d think she was heading for a dead end, and tell whatever backup we had to come in from the east, which is exactly what happened. Hennessy’s plan was to ram the first car that came along with the Explorer, block the road, and make a clean getaway in his truck. It almost worked.”

She gingerly touched my bandaged head. “Doesn’t look like almost.”

“Ginny got nervous waiting in the truck, and got out just before he rammed me with her car. When he ran back to the truck, they missed each other in the storm. Neither one knew where the other one was, Sol was coming up on foot from behind my car, and Hennessy realized it had all been for nothing. It was either leave Ginny behind or be caught. Sol found her on her knees in the snow, crying.”

The nurse returned with a small white envelope. “The doctor says to take one of these every six hours, or as needed for pain, but don’t exceed the dose—they’re pretty powerful.”

I slid off the bed and put the pills into my pocket.

“I don’t suppose you’re going home to bed,” Gail said, not bothering to phrase it as a question.

I kissed her cheek. “Nope. Too much is starting to come together. We still haven’t nailed down our killer, or located Mary Wallis, but things are beginning to unfold. It can’t be too much longer. How did you get on with Bernie, by the way?”

She helped me with my coat and escorted me out the ER’s front door. “I like him. I can’t say we had any real conversation, but he talks a mile a minute, and he loved the cat. I borrowed it from Susan Raffner—it’s so old, it’s barely breathing, but it did the trick. His face lit up as soon as I showed it to him. He called it Ginger, which I guess was once a cat he owned.”

“So you won’t mind doing it again when the shrink calls?” I asked, heading toward a waiting patrol car.

“No.” She grabbed my arm and stopped me in the middle of the parking lot, the falling snow dusting her hair. “Joe, I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do, but will you at least try to be careful? Take the pills if your head starts to hurt, or a nap if you get tired.”

I wrapped my arms around her and gave her a hug. “I’m stubborn, Gail, but I’ll try not to be stupid. I love you.”

She smiled through her own distress. “I love you, too.”

· · ·

As I’d requested, Ruth Hennessy, Paul’s wife, was waiting for me in my office with Sammie when I returned from the hospital. She was pale-faced and nervous, sitting straight in her chair, and had to shift a wadded-up handkerchief from one hand to the other in order to shake mine in an absentminded greeting.

I sat down opposite her. “Mrs. Hennessy, I’m not going to sugarcoat what’s going on here. Your husband is in deep trouble. He’s broken the law, and he’s decided to run for it. We’ve got a long list of charges against him, and they may be just the tip of the iceberg. That being the case, the sooner we can get him in here to explain himself, the better off he’ll be. If he keeps running, it’s likely he’ll wind up getting hurt.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised by her first words. “They said there was a girl.”

I didn’t hesitate. “Yes, there is, and we have her in custody. They worked together, and she might’ve been involved with your husband in some of his illegal activities. Whether there was more than that between them, I don’t know.”

“What’s her name?”

“Ginny Levasseur—he ever mention her?”

“I met her once—at a company picnic. Pretty… ”

I tried to steer her in another direction. “Mrs. Hennessy, do you have any idea where Paul might be right now? A vacation home we might not know about, or with a friend he could trust?”