“So’s Kristen. She’s always liked working with her hands… Okay, we got something.”
They straightened their spines, watched as four men came walking abreast, silhouetted by the main street lights, moving into the dark. Mike grabbed up the binoculars and had a look. Hard to really make out faces, and they were stopping at a parked car, turning their backs. One of them leaned in the driver’s side, popped the trunk. Then two of the other guys started looking around, and Mike recognized them.
“Jesus. You’ve got to be kidding me.” He handed the binoculars to Lena.
She sucked in a breath, looking through. “Fuller?”
“Yeah. Gavin fucking Fuller.”
“And that’s… with him that’s Dmitri Petrov.”
“Uh-huh. That’s the guy Steve Pritchard was fighting with last week.”
“Not only that, Petrov is one of the league guys.”
“You’re shitting me.” Mike leaned forward, squinting. “What’re they doing now?” He could see them gathered at the open trunk, but not much more.
“They’re just looking in the car. How is Fuller out? Must’ve made bail – I didn’t hear about it. He just pointed at something, now he’s laughing a little bit. And the other guy with them, that’s our Harley-driver from Dodd’s house; Randall Bates. The fourth guy – I don’t recognize him.”
“The one who popped the trunk?”
“Yeah. Must be his vehicle, don’t know who he is.”
“Gimme the tags.”
She read off the license plate number and he punched it in, waited, suddenly feeling a kind of frisson he hadn’t felt in years. Maybe ever.
“John Chapman. No warrants. He’s a… okay, he’s fifty, last known address is Ballston Spa.”
“There’s more guys coming.”
“What?”
“More guys.”
Mike saw them, a group of men, their leather clothes sheening under the street lights, on their way over from Main Street, from the bar. “Can I?” He took the binoculars and watched as Chapman closed the trunk of his car, and the men with him dispersed.
“Mike…” Lena sounded like she was getting a little claustrophobic.
“It’s okay… Hang on.”
Gavin Fuller and Dmitri Petrov stayed together, Chapman got in the driver’s side, Randall Bates greeted the others walking to the row of motorcycles. One of the bikers at that point looked toward the back of the lot, seemed to look right at Mike.
He lowered the binoculars, shoved them under the seat. “Let’s go,” he said.
Twenty-Three
“Okay: Petrov, Fuller, Chapman, and Bates. Those’re our four guys,” Mike said, driving fast through the night. “I’ll get Sven to comb through NCIC, check public records, see if there’s anything more on Chapman; it was his vehicle. We’ll see where that leads us. But if this is what I think it is, we’re going to wind up talking to the DEA. These guys are up to something. I’m guessing drugs.”
It was going on 2 a.m. Despite the excitement, Mike caught Lena in a yawn. “Let’s get you home. You got your boys.”
“I’m fine. They’re sleeping.”
“So should you.”
“Mike…”
“Alright.”
Mike slowed on the edge of town, made a turn, hooked into the residential area where Dodd lived, coming in from the back, creeping along. Killed the headlights again, drifted to a stop, the house just barely in view, a large elm providing them some cover.
Mike felt wide awake, his pulse jacked. He thought of his father, Brooklyn in the 1980s, crime and drugs everywhere.
The second motorcycle was still in Dodd’s driveway, his truck, too. The lights were off in the house, no more music drifting out. They sat for a minute. “Where the hell is Lennox Palmer?” Mike asked. “Is he in that house?”
“We still don’t have it,” Lena said, meaning probable cause to search the place. She sighed, and Mike thought she was annoyed with him. He kept watch on the house and the MDT screen beside him. They’d had Mullins drive past Newberry’s parking lot and he’d just sent an update: Chapman vehicle still in parking lot. Mike hadn’t seen anything go in the trunk or come out of it, no hand-off of any kind. But he hadn’t wanted to risk sitting there, either, and be spotted. There was a chance he and Lena had already been made by one of the bikers, and whatever was going on had been shut down for the night.
“One of these guys is tied to the murders,” Mike said. “Maybe more than one of them. I’ll bet you.”
“I told you I don’t like gambling.”
“Either Harriet got involved somehow or she saw something – maybe she told Lennox about it. Shit – maybe she told Corina Lavoie.”
“That’s a lot of maybes.”
“Remind me about Gavin Fuller,” Mike said.
“Okay, so like I said, not a big bust, he was selling Suboxone. We charged him with third-degree criminal possession, intent to distribute. Really just a nucleic bust – only Fuller and his wife. They went to county on five and ten… He must’ve just made bail.”
She got quiet.
Mike glanced over, saw that she looked drawn and pensive in the semidarkness. “What’s the matter?”
“I think I just remembered something about Lennox Palmer. Where I know the name from.”
He waited.
“Remember the case I told you about? The big sweep?”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “From your first year.”
“Right.” She moved around to get more settled in her seat. “So, a day-long sweep, seventeen suspects. I’d say there was about thirty of us; local, state, federal. The Lake Haven end of it began a little after 7 a.m. I was, you know, half-scared, half-gung-ho…”
Mike imagined Lena in her mid-twenties, ready to save the world.
“So we met for the briefing,” she said, “divided into several teams, four to five people per team. Went to the first locations in Lake Haven; most of the suspects were wanted on warrants for selling cocaine or prescription drugs. Xanax, whatever. We ended up making twenty arrests, including several people who weren’t on the original list. Four people left the area. Two were arrested in Tupper Lake.”
“Tupper Lake?”
“We covered a lot of ground. Anyway, we executed search warrants at two more apartments and found six ounces of heroin, two ounces of crack cocaine, LSD, ecstasy, methamphetamine. Street value of about twelve grand. It was all wrapped up, individual packages, ready to go.”
“Wow...”
“So that was what set the record. Pretty big for a small town. And during our search of the apartments, we found precursor chemicals for making meth. And that had everybody saying, you know, ‘Meth is creeping into the region.’”
Lena looked off at Dodd’s house. No activity there, Mike saw. Things had gotten quiet.
Meth, Mike thought.
“My son Eric was just a baby,” Lena said, “maybe that’s why… well, I remember this one apartment in particular…”
Mike gave her a minute, and she said, “The couple who lived there were on welfare, you know, but not getting enough money to support their habits – these were the ones from Tupper Lake. Young couple in their twenties with a kid…” She took a breath, let it go. “And they’d started trying to make the stuff on their own; one-pot bags at first, then they expand a little. Started storing some of their precursors in the fridge.”
“Oh boy…”
She was pale. “They got these toxic chemicals they’re storing in their fridge, but they’re oblivious to the fact that the toxins can seep into the rest of their food. So they’re feeding their kid; the mother makes him a sandwich, using ingredients from the fridge, and the kid gets sick. They don’t even pay any attention at first. But then he gets worse. By the time they take him to the hospital, poor kid’s almost dead from a dose of ammonia hydroxide.”
“Ah, God.”
She was quiet a moment. “That’s where I know Lennox Palmer’s name from,” Lena said. “Palmer was the caseworker who ended up dealing with the child, getting him into a foster family.”
“You remember the name of the meth couple?”
“No, but I’ll check into it.”