Chat - Archer Mayor [100]
“You gonna go to Canada?” Charlie asked.
Griffis looked down at Mumford and shook his head. “Yeah, Charlie. To Canada, and I’ll give you the address, too, just so the deputy here will remember it and have the Mounties drop by.”
He tilted his head back and glanced at the ceiling meditatively. “Why am I surprised I ended up here?”
Joe was back at his favorite office contemplation spot, perched on his windowsill, overlooking the now snow-clotted parking lot. “John Leppman?”
They were all four there, including Willy, since the Dan Griffis situation had blown up and Dan was on the lam. Deputy Mumford’s colleagues had taken about five hours to locate him, cuffed and stuffed into his own backseat, hidden inside an abandoned barn—time enough for Griffis to return home, clean out his effects, and vanish.
“Guess you never thought to check out the good guys,” Willy gratuitously volunteered.
Joe took it in stride. “Never crossed my mind. He’s worked with all sorts of agencies for years, got thumbs-up all around, is even part-time certified.”
Sammie was less charitable, glaring at her companion. “Like you blew the whistle on him.”
“He wasn’t my assignment.”
“Les,” Joe asked, cutting in. “What do we know about him now?”
Lester, having worked the closest with Leppman, was understandably the most embarrassed. He kept his eyes on his paperwork as he reported. “Right now it’s just background stuff, but it’s bad enough. The whole family moved up here from Virginia about five years ago. Very successful—she, the doc; he, the big-name psychologist. They set down roots fast and wide, made lots of contacts. He started working with the police on computer crimes. Nobody gave it a second thought. But the reason they’d moved was that they used to have two daughters. I should’ve known that—I even saw family photos in his office showing two girls. Wendy is the older one. Her sister was named Gwen, Gwennie to them, and she was abducted, raped, and murdered by an Internet predator a little over a year before they pulled up roots. The killer was caught almost immediately, tried, convicted, and thrown in the hole, but the family couldn’t stand living there, so it was off to Vermont to start over.”
“Why wasn’t any of that ever picked up?” Joe asked.
Spinney looked up for the first time. “It’s not that rare, anymore, boss. And it was a fast case. I found local headlines, but not much else. These people were just victims. If you don’t ask, and they don’t tell . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.
“Okay,” Joe conceded. “That goes under sad but true. What else?”
Lester’s tone became more rueful still. “Turns out the choice of a Taser wasn’t so random. When Gwennie was abducted and raped, a Taser, or at least a stun gun, was used by the rapist.”
“Jesus,” Sammie said softly.
“The connection to a stun gun doesn’t stop there,” Lester continued. “This may be a stretch, but soon after Leppman started helping out the Burlington PD, he was on a ride-along with a patrol unit when they responded to a burglary. It was a sporting goods store, but heavy into personal protection. Among the things missing was a Taser—the store owner’s private property, taken from his office. Later, when they caught who did it, the Taser never reappeared.”
“Did everything else?” Joe asked.
Les held up a hand. “Like I said, this is a stretch. No, a bunch of it was gone forever, sold for drugs.”
“But our boy was at the scene,” Willy commented.
“And according to the case narrative I read,” Lester said, “the Taser was the only thing missing from the office. Everything else had been out front.”
“Was Leppman ever suspected?” Sam asked.
“No,” Lester told her. “They had no reason to.”
“What’s the Burlington PD doing about him now?” Joe wanted to know.
That brought Les up short. He hesitated before answering. “I don’t think anything. They just sent me the list of people who were in the building when the Taser went missing. They didn’t even comment on Leppman. He’s in the