“Okay. Um, pretty sure he went away for at least ten. She did a year, or something, got out. No idea after that.”
“You remember what happened to their kid? Because I’m looking at the file and it shows temporary placement, but that’s it. Let’s run a search on John Durie, see what comes up. Call Stephanie – or I can.”
“I’ll call her. Why are you looking at this kid?”
“Not a kid anymore. He’d be around twenty-four now. And I guess I’m doing it because of what you said.”
“What did I say?”
“That we might be looking at this in the wrong way.”
“So, which way are you looking?”
“In reverse.”
“Mike.” She sighed. “Did you sleep last night?”
* * *
An hour later, Barb came in. “I’m leaving for lunch.”
“Actually,” he said, “just finishing up.”
She looked relieved, then retreated. He needed a few more minutes. Five, tops.
Fogarty and Lavoie, both working on the Durie case, but no record of what happened to little John Durie, or where he went. And Lena’s memory that Lennox had been involved, too, even if he didn’t show up in the paperwork. Maybe, like Bobbi had admitted, things got lost, misfiled, or were never documented in the first place. A big case like Lena’s drug bust, with six arrestees in Lake Haven, more outside town, some within the school district, some not, some in the same judicial circuit, some not, some arrestees with kids, some without, people everywhere, the DSS swamped – caseworkers were more than likely to put something in the wrong spot, or forget to write it up. In all probability, there would have been mistakes.
They’d been through everything else, spent hours poring over the cases they had. Mike thought that this guy, whoever was out there killing people, could’ve easily been a casualty of the multi-agency drug sweep from ’04. That thing – pulsing in his brain since he saw how Victor reacted to the people around him after his mother’s death, or thinking about the anger Kristen had carried for years, or the dream Charles Morrissey had about his daughter – all that gnawing in his gut subsided when he looked at John Durie.
The only question, really, was why. Had something happened to the kid’s parents? Had he experienced a terrible time in foster care, and so blamed the county workers who put him there? They needed to find out what happened to the kid and the parents, otherwise the whole thing was just vapor.
His phone rang, derailing his train of thought. He answered, “Nelson.”
“Mike, it’s Trooper Farrington. Guess who I’m sitting behind.”
Mike’s focus shifted immediately. “Chapman.”
“Affirmative. How did you…? He’s got a taillight out. I ran the check on him and it says to contact you on the return. So, you, um…”
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s just sitting there. Am I hanging paper on this guy or have you got something? I’m guessing you’ve got something.”
Mike walked to the bank of windows overlooking the high school track. “I want you to proceed with caution, okay? And have a look in his trunk, then give me a status check.”
“You got it.”
Mike ended the call, set the phone on the table, and paced until Farrington called back.
“Holy crap, Mike.”
“Yeah?”
“He’s got boxes and boxes of flares. Plus crates of iodine bottles.”
“That’s… okay… that’s excellent.”
“You want me to hook him up?”
“No.” Mike held out his hand despite being alone in the room. “I want you clear with a citation. You got any slick-tops out there?”
“Notario. But he’s almost to Jefferson County on a—”
“Let Chapman go, but follow him. Alright? Can you do that?”
“I can do that.”
“Thank you, Trooper. Keep in touch.”
Mike dropped the phone on the table this time, feeling the adrenaline. The Durie thing had a spark to it and was worth checking down, but the lead which had caught fire was a group of violent drug dealers killing off a social worker who stood in the way of business. Chapman was carrying red phosphorous and iodine. Mixed together with ephedrine, it was the makings of methamphetamine.
* * *
When it came to feds, there were FBI guys, who could be a bit starchy, and then the DEA, who looked like they’d just driven up from Miami in a Jeep with the windows down.
They had maps spread out in Mike’s office; Trooper Farrington stabbed one with a finger. The small hamlet of Rainbow Lake was about fifteen miles outside of Lake Haven, just a wide spot in the road, a few farms. The Chapman property was one, a fifty-acre plot.
“The place is totally run-down,” Farrington said. “Used to be a working grain elevator once, I guess, now it’s nothing. Building’s about to fall over, silo is still looking good though.”
Mike chimed in. “This is the Chapman family’s place; used to handle grain in bags. Then they built the steam-powered elevator – this is circa 1940. Lasted until the ’80s; Henry Chapman died of a heart attack and the place went to the eight kids.” Mike leaned back and looked over the rumpled agents. “You got here fast.”
“Nothing better to do.” It was a DEA agent named Colin Wright, with rough, pockmarked skin, wearing sunglasses indoors. “Like I said on the phone, our surveillance on Truenol already had us looking this way, wondering which direction the wind was blowing.”
Truenol was an ethanol plant just over the Pennsylvania border, eight hours south. Wright said the DEA had been watching, suspicious that part of the plant was being used to manufacture methamphetamine – that it concealed a full, working lab, one of the biggest in the east.
“So, what have we got?” Wright asked. “You guys were scouting Dodd Caruthers, followed his buddy there, Randall Bates, into town, he meets with Chapman and Petrov and this fourth guy, Gavin Fuller, and they’re around Chapman’s car, looking in the trunk. Is all that right?”
“Chapman bailed Gavin Fuller and his wife out of jail,” Lena added.
“Why Fuller?”
“We don’t know,” Lena said. She glanced at Mike, then said to Wright, “One theory is that Fuller was up at county with Steve Pritchard, and they got talking, arranged some sort of deal.”
“What’s the story on Chapman?”
“The Chapman family is pretty well known,” she said, “and the word is that John, he’s got some money, he worked for North Country Labs for twenty-five years as a chemist, and he’s got a few patents. He’s supposedly fixing the place up to get it going again.”
Wright looked from Lena to Mike. “So how did we get here? Him being a chemist is nice, but it’s not enough to pull him over and toss his car.”
Mike gave a nod, swallowed hard. “Trooper Farrington was in service this morning, made a stop based on a broken taillight.”
Wright stared across the room. “Huh. Lucky for us.”
After a silence, Mike said, “Chapman’s got trucks coming and going from the place in Rainbow Lake. He’s rebuilding. And this just started about a month ago, according to neighbors.”
“You see any signs?” Wright asked Farrington. “Expended propane tanks? Lots of plastic soda bottles? Anything?”
“No,” Farrington said. “Lot of open space, big bins, like dumpsters; some greenhouse-looking things.”
Wright gazed at his other DEA guys, who were expressionless, standing by like they were just waiting for the green light. “Sounds like cold method,” Wright said. “This guy’s hauling Red P. and other precursors around, he’s leaving chemicals out in the sunlight to make the interactions needed for the drugs.”
“Or it’s just a staging point,” one of the other guys said.
The DEA agents continued to talk and theorize, getting ready to head to a house in Lake Haven arranged for them to set up a home base. They all turned quiet when a motorcade of motorcycles went rumbling past out on the road.
“Hey, Mike,” Wright said.
“Yeah?”
“Guy goes to the doctor, wrapped in cellophane.”
“Yeah?”
“Doctor takes a look, says, ‘Well, I can clearly see your nuts.’”
“That’s good, Colin.”