Archer Mayor - Bellows Falls

I straightened slightly in my seat. Ahead of me, where the road curved away to the south, I saw something move. There had been sporadic traffic during my vigil, but none of it unusual-until now. This hint of motion, which should have grown into an oncoming car, had stopped.

I strained to peer through the water coursing across the windshield. All I could see was grayness and mist.

I hit the wipers once.

A dark shadow emerged from the washed-out backdrop of the distant embankment.

I slid over to the passenger side of the car, eased the door open, and slipped out, keeping the car between me and the shape in the distance. The rain pounded me on the back, and I pulled an old baseball cap out of my pocket to shield my eyes. I also pulled my gun from its holster and kept it in my hand.

Still bent over double, I worked my way along the ditch, my shoes filling with water as they had when we’d found Jasper Morgan. The dark shadow ahead gradually emerged as a black van with tinted windows, parked so its driver could just see Gault’s building from the corner. As I got nearer, I saw a misty plume feathering out from the exhaust pipe.

Fifty yards shy of my goal, the ditch became a culvert running under a driveway. I was on the other side of the road from the van, and there was no cover to be had anywhere.

Pausing to memorize the license plate, I rose from hiding and stepped onto the road, my gun tucked behind a fold in my raincoat.

The reaction was instantaneous. Its rear wheels spinning, the van leapt forward, making a halfhearted stab at running me over. I stepped aside like some urban toreador, the driver’s side mirror barely missing my head, and watched it fishtail into the gray distance. The van’s darkened windows had prevented me from seeing the driver.

I jogged back to my car, soaked and cold, and called Dispatch on the cell phone.

Maxine Paroddy answered on the first ring. “Brattleboro Police.”

“Max, it’s Joe. I need a Springfield area bulletin issued on a late-eighties black Ford van with tinted windows, possibly being driven by Norman Bouch. There’s already a BOL out on him. Add a possible armed-and-dangerous to that.” I recited the license number to her.

“You okay?” she quickly asked.

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Stay put.”

She put me on hold and issued my request. Chances were slim anyone would spot the van. With so few police officers covering the entire state, it was a miracle when one of these bulletins worked on an abandoned vehicle, much less one in motion whose driver knew we were after him. Still, it was the thought that counted. It also made me hope that if the driver had been Norm Bouch, he’d keep low at least long enough for Jonathon to reach me so we could put Gault under wraps.

Maxine came back on the line. “You want the registrant for that van? You better be sitting down.”

In a puddle of water, I thought. “Fire away.”

“Jasper Morgan.”

I smiled grimly at Bouch’s sense of humor. “Thanks, Max. Keep me informed.”

The cell phone chirped a few seconds after I’d hung up. “Gunther.”

“It’s me,” said Jonathon. “I’ve got all the paperwork and I’m coming into Springfield now. You got him in your sights?”

“Yeah, but I’m not alone.” I gave him Gault’s address and brought him up to date.

Jonathon appeared ten minutes later. I left my car, noticing the downpour was finally easing up, and crossed the road to meet him.

“Jesus,” he said, checking me out, “Did Norm get away by boat?”

“Almost.”

“How many’re inside?” he asked, nodding toward the building.

“He’s alone.” We went in together, Jonathon leading, entering a small waiting room with a couple of old armchairs, a dirty rug, and some calendar art on the walls. Arsene Gault, stooped, potbellied, and with a few strings of hair draped across an otherwise bald head, appeared at the only other door, a sour look on his face.

“Who’re you?”

Not a man used to seeing customers.

Jonathon introduced us and proffered two documents. “We’re from the attorney general’s office, Mr. Gault, and these are subpoenas-one a Duces Tecum granting us access to all your business records, and the other requiring you to appear at an inquest at the time and date stated on the front.”

Gault’s expression didn’t change. He continued looking at us distastefully from under bristling eyebrows. “Swell,” he said, and turned on his heel.

We followed him into a dingy, cluttered, mildew-smelling office. He tossed aside a newspaper spread across his desk and quickly dialed a number from memory.

“Mr. Gault?” I added. “I think you ought to know I found Norm Bouch parked in a van down the street just now, staking this place out. I probably don’t need to tell you it’s a lucky thing I scared him away.”

He gave me a long, considered look and then returned to the phone. “Bob? It’s Gault. Get your ass down here. I’m in deep shit this time.”

It was Steve Kiley’s voice. “Peter Neal has a great-uncle who owns a farm in Addison County, south of Vergennes, in Waltham township.” He gave me precise directions out of Middlebury.

“You sure he’s there?” I asked, the phone tucked under my chin as I struggled to pull on a pair of pants. I was standing in my office, having left Arsene Gault in Jonathon’s care. Gault, after conferring with his lawyer, had demanded protective custody prior to appearing at the inquest the next morning.

Kiley sounded amused. “I thought we’d let you figure that out-least we could do.”

I didn’t begrudge him the dig. “Fair enough. Thanks for the help.”

Addison County extends like a slightly wrinkled blanket from the western foothills of the Green Mountains to the shores of Lake Champlain, south of Burlington and north of Rutland. Addison’s national claim to fame is Middlebury, home to the college of the same name. For Vermonters, however, it is the county’s primary function that matters most. It is farmland-a vast, rolling, dark-earthed footprint of the ancient glacier that split the Greens from the Adirondacks, both of which loom on either border, as if resentful of the valley that keeps them apart. The sky in this part of the state-everywhere else blocked by hills and peaks-is a huge, arching dome, shimmering hot and blue as we drove beneath it, although the remnants of this morning’s rain lingered as gray mist in the mountains, like soiled cotton caught on thorns.

Vermont, despite its reputation for cows and farms, is better represented by trees and stone, another contrast to Addison’s unique features. Driving along the smooth, undulating, narrow black road north of Middlebury, I was struck yet again by the pure plenty of this patch of earth. Each treeless hilltop revealed another panorama of farm after farm stretching off into the distance, pinned in place by clusters of glistening silver and blue silos. The breeze was pungent with cow manure, cut grass, damp soil, and the fresh tang of the cold Champlain waters, forever shimmering like a mirage at the foot of the Adirondacks. The wildflowers scattered by the sides of the fields and ribbon-smooth roads echoed the perennials proudly coloring the window boxes of widely spaced neat white farmhouses.

There were three of us traveling this countryside, all but oblivious to its charms-Jonathon and I in the lead car, followed by a local deputy sheriff, loaned to us as a courtesy.

Jonathon was reading the faxes Steven Kiley had sent us on the heels of his phone call, holding them flat on his lap against the wind from the open window. “Mr. Neal certainly fits the Lenny Markham mold. I wonder how Bouch found these guys?”

It was a rhetorical question. We both knew people like Norm met one another both conventionally and by the good graces of the system Jon and I worked for. Be it through parole offices, prisons, or social rehab and counseling sessions, society had made it a point to bring these people into constant and continuous contact, from where-antisocial though they could be-they learned to network along with the best of the upwardly mobile.