Chat - Archer Mayor [95]
Eakins’s eyes widened. “No—that part was weird. She was the middle of three. Not even the only daughter. But he still walked away from all of them, including the wife. He’s up here solo.”
“Still? No girlfriend?”
“All by his lonesome.”
Klesczewski laughed softly. “He has us, instead.”
“Okay,” Joe broke in. “The reason we’re interested is because we want to rule him out for our two killings—Nashman and Metz. From what we can figure, both of them were lured here by a phony teenage girl, told exactly what to do and how—all the way from what transportation to use, to how many key cards to take from the front desk—and then murdered, almost immediately upon arrival. Does Mueller strike you as someone who could do that?”
Eakins pushed her lips out thoughtfully before answering, “I don’t want to be a wise-ass, but what did the people working right next to his cubicle think of the predator I just described? Mueller’s a pain in the butt. He walks into closed meetings, trespasses onto people’s lawns, protests without permits, gets into fights, and even decked one of our own. And, yes, he did threaten some poor bastard who was accused of stalking kids and later proved innocent. All that makes him angry, short-tempered, and violent. Does it also make him a calculating killer? Maybe. Or maybe it takes off the steam and just makes him another of Brattleboro’s run-of-the-mill wackos.”
“I heard the supposed stalker ended up dead in Mass a few months later,” Sam said.
Eakins let out an exasperated sigh. “You been talking to that cop—Mr. Conspiracy Theory. Yeah, I checked into that. It’s bogus. I mean, he’s entitled to his opinion, but I gave it a good, long look. There was nothing there. I think Mueller’s a total pain in the ass—don’t get me wrong. But he didn’t do that one. Probably the victim got into the same kind of jam in Mass he did up here, and didn’t get off so lucky. Maybe the cop’s just covering his own inability to solve the case. I don’t know. But Mueller’s alibi was solid and he’s a loner, like I said—not too likely to hire a hit man.”
“Let me ask it another way, then,” Sam suggested. “If I pulled him in and asked him to help us out with the investigation—as a good citizen—do you think he’d shut down, or maybe give me something I could use later to jam him up?”
Eakins was unequivocal. “The second. You won’t be able to shut him up. Even if you accused him head-on, he’d still talk his head off. If there’s one impression Oliver Mueller has made on me, it’s that he has only one cause to live for and nothing to lose.”
It was slow going on the interstate, the snowstorm being one of those thick, blanketing, cotton-wool events. Joe drove north as if poking through whipped cream, the only hint of something dark in a universe of white being the faint trace of the paved road ahead. To the uninitiated, it was a white-knuckle, hunch-over-the-steering-wheel, squint-your-eyes affair. For that matter, even most native Vermonters were notoriously cautious in such weather. But Joe loved it. The music on the radio was good and the traffic virtually nonexistent, his snow tires were new that year, and he’d just gotten the news that Leo had at last woken up.
It still took him two hours to drive roughly sixty miles, and the light was just starting to ebb as he crawled around the hospital parking lot, looking for an opening. For that bit of timing, he was grateful. Driving in the dark in the same circumstances was hair-raising even to him.
He stopped inside the hospital’s vaulted entranceway to stamp the snow from his boots and brush himself off.
“Hey, Joe.”
He looked up, startled to hear the familiar voice. “Hey, yourself. What’re you doing here already? You hate driving in this junk.”
Gail gave him an awkward smile. “I came down just before it hit. I heard he was doing better and hoped I’d get lucky.”
“So, you were here when he woke up?” he asked, giving her a quick one-armed hug as they fell into walking side by side.
“Yes. What a relief. Your mom started crying.”
They quickly reached the building’s central,