Chat - Archer Mayor [94]
Rob reached behind him and handed Gunther a file folder containing various printouts, including a color faxed mug shot of a narrow-faced man with bruised-looking eyes.
“I poked around a little to start,” Rob went on. “Checked him out, talked to a few people, dug into his habits and background, put him under surveillance. And then I pulled him in for a little one-on-one. It was almost a letdown—soon as I opened the door, he couldn’t wait to charge through. Gave me a full confession—dates, contacts, even had some samples at home. Not to mention his own computer, which has more on it than I know what to do with.”
“And Dan Griffis is implicated?” Joe asked.
Rob’s eyes widened. “Like Don Corleone, implicated, you bet. He’s all over the place—dirty as hell. I laid it all out for the SA, who brought in the drug task force. We wired Winston up and had him make a couple of buys off of Dan—just to put a cherry on top. Now we’re coordinating everyone’s calendar on when we should drop the hammer on him.”
“When’s that going to happen?”
“Very soon. I was actually going to call you about that. I figured you’d want to be in on the action.”
“Tempting,” Joe conceded. “But a potential conflict of interest. Too many tight corners in all this. I don’t want anything coming back on me in court.”
Barrows smiled. “Got it. You threw me this steak—just wanted to offer to share a little.”
Chapter 22
The meeting this time took place downstairs, in Ron Klesczewski’s bailiwick, the police department’s detective squad. Joe always felt odd returning to his old haunts of over twenty years, finding them both familiar and fundamentally altered. Klesczewski, at least, was among the former, looking older outside his white crime scene suit, but as comfortably in place as Joe imagined he felt anywhere. No one who met Ron out of context ever guessed what he did for a living, but he was a good cop, reliable and intuitive, and perhaps, Joe believed, precisely because it had never come naturally.
Joe, Ron, Sam, and a detective named Cathy Eakins were sitting around the battered conference table in the small catchall room adjacent to the actual squad room.
“Okay,” Ron was saying, “so—Oliver Mueller. What did you want to know? Cathy’s our resident expert, by the way, so now that I’ve brought it up, don’t ask me anything.”
“Same for me,” Joe echoed. “Sam just told me that he’d come up on our radar and that you guys had dealt with him more than anyone else in the area.”
“We have a lot of good intel growing on him,” Cathy Eakins acknowledged, patting a thick folder before her. “And it’s all pretty recent. He’s only been up here a couple of years.”
“That’s what I heard,” Joe said. “Sam told me his daughter was killed in Jersey by an Internet stalker?”
Eakins flipped open the folder. “Yeah. Very sad, but not particularly original. Teenage girl on her home computer, hooks up with some creep who sweet-talks her. They meet at a motel outside Summit, New Jersey, and he murders her. He was caught within two days—basically, the local cops told the girl’s computer, ‘Take us to the creep,’ and it did.”
“What was the creep like?” Sam asked.
Eakins shrugged—a no-nonsense type. “A middle-class worker bee—a bean counter in the business office of a large bank, stuck in a cubicle for fifteen years with his packed-at-home sandwiches, his dead-end life, and his out-of-control fantasies.”
“And Mueller wigged out afterwards,” Joe suggested.
“Yeah,” Eakins replied. “He might’ve anyhow, but the killer only got twenty to life, instead of the death penalty, which they still have down there. That pretty much pushed Mueller over the edge.”
“She