Chat - Archer Mayor [77]
She looked over at the van as the others swung open its rear doors and pulled out a long, bulky, brightly colored tarp with bundled aluminum tubing, a generator, and an oversize space heater. She recognized the package immediately and smiled at her host. “A heated tent. Sweet.”
Steve Wilson bowed. “We try.”
Some 250 miles to the south, following a seven-hour drive from Vermont, a stiff and tired Lester Spinney crossed a sidewalk in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, and entered the Lower Merion Police Department, where he’d been told to check in on arrival.
“Help you?” the man behind the bulletproof glass asked.
Les pulled out his badge and held it against the window. “I’m here to see Detective Cavallaro. Lester Spinney from Vermont.”
He studied the man’s face, expecting the usual Vermont-directed one-liners, but got nothing for his effort. The dispatcher merely glanced at the ID, picked up a phone, and said over the tinny loudspeaker between them, “Have a seat.”
Five minutes later, a tall woman with short-cropped hair stepped into the lobby, smiling. “Agent Spinney? Detective Cavallaro. Call me Glenda. You have a good trip?”
He shook her hand. “Lester—Les is okay, too. And the trip was fine. More people than I’ve seen in a while, though.”
She looked at him quizzically. “Where? On the road?”
“The road, the streets, the towns, even the sidewalk outside. We only have about half a million in Vermont, and a third of them are clustered around one town.”
She visibly had no appreciation for what he was saying. “Huh,” she said. “Interesting. I was born and brought up around here. Never saw it as crowded. New York—that’s bad. Most of what you drove through is tied into there, one way or the other.”
Spinney chose to drop it. No one outside Vermont could be expected to understand a setting where starlit skies, complete silence, and empty downtown streets at four in the morning were the norm. Except maybe far out west. He’d heard that even a Vermonter could get lonely in Wyoming.
“You want to find a motel and start on this tomorrow morning?” Cavallaro was asking him.
Lester checked his watch. It was five o’clock. “Seems a little early,” he murmured.
“Not a problem,” she said immediately, with enough enthusiasm that he took her word for it. “Let me get my coat and bag and we’ll head out.”
It was barely a minute before she reappeared.
“I can’t believe they didn’t put you on a plane instead of making you drive down,” she said, slipping into her coat as they crossed the lobby.
“We don’t have much of a budget,” he admitted.
“Really?” She looked at him. “The Vermont Bureau of Investigation? Sounds rich enough.”
“Yeah—well, we’re kind of new. Still muscling our way into the pack.”
She turned right out of the door and headed for a parking lot to the side of the building. “Where did you work before?”
“State police.”
“No kidding? Didn’t like them?”
“Loved them. But I thought I was running out of options. Numbers again.”
She pulled keys from her pocket and aimed toward what was clearly an unmarked cruiser—the kind of thing street kids love to decorate with “Narc,” written on the dusty side panels.
“How so?” she asked.
“They hover around three hundred and fifty people in uniform, depending on the year and the budget,” he told her. “Upward mobility gets tight. When the Bureau came up, it looked more interesting, less bureaucratic, and now I’m working with the field force commander. Plus, I keep all my benefits and retirement.”
She was already laughing. “Three fifty? We’ve got almost half that in this department alone.”
She unlocked the doors and they both got in, their bodies jarred by the frozen hardness of the seats. Apparently, the car hadn’t been out all day.
She started it up as he changed the subject. “You said on the phone that the IP address I gave you for Mr. Rockwell was an Internet café. You ever have any problems with them before?