The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [59]
“That’s a certified British government birth certificate for Ellen Turnley. Turns out she lied about her age to get the au pair job. According to the law you just quoted, you raped a child.”
Freeman was looking ill, all fight drained out of him.
Gunther picked up the recorder and carefully retrieved all the paperwork, bundling them together as he walked to the door.
He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “You might want to call a lawyer, Floyd. I think you’re going to have bigger problems to tangle with than Beverly Hillstrom.”
Lester Spinney tore the latest arrival off the VLETS Teletype and read it quickly to determine where to file it. Primarily the harbinger of BOLs, or “Be on the Lookouts,” for the state’s wandering, as yet unaccounted for miscreants, the Teletype also served to deliver relevant news of all stripes, including, as here, a missing-person report.
“High Top,” he murmured quietly. “Now, there’s an alias.”
“High Top?” Sam asked from across the small room.
“Can’t really blame him,” Spinney sympathized. “His real name’s Conrad Sweet.” He crossed over to a row of in-boxes, each reserved for different crimes or events, and deposited the latest arrival. Lester Spinney was the only one of the four Brattleboro-based VBI agents not to have come from the police department downstairs. His background was the state police, where he’d felt increasingly stifled by bureaucracy and oppressive oversight, and which he’d exchanged—all benefits intact and with a sigh of relief—for the freer, more autonomous style of the Bureau. He was a very tall and angular man of almost perpetual good humor, and jokes aimed in particular at his physique, mostly images of storks, festooned the area surrounding his desk, testifying to his easygoing demeanor.
“Where’re you putting him?” Sam asked, her irrepressible curiosity surfacing.
“Missing persons,” he answered, adding as an afterthought, “He’s from Bennington.”
That caught her attention. She turned toward her computer console. “Conrad Sweet, you said? Common spellings?”
There were only the two of them in the office at the moment, explaining why there’d been no rejoining wisecracks from Willy Kunkle.
Spinney changed directions and laid the report on her desk with a smile. “Go get ’em, tiger.”
She laughed and typed the name into Spillman. “Ooh, bad boy,” she said moments later. “Earned that nickname, too. Major druggie. Not too bright, either, according to the times he’s been busted. Looks like he fed his habit the old-fashioned way—by stealing.”
“Think we’ll end up with him?” Lester asked from his desk.
Sam picked up the fax and read it carefully. “His probation officer reported him missing, added a footnote that High Top’s never missed a meeting in the past—not once.”
Lester nodded meditatively. “Guess we will, then.”
Sammie Martens sat back in her chair, still gazing at the screen. “What interests me is the Bennington connection. You know what they say about how things come up in clusters . . .”
She leaned forward suddenly, as if yielding to some internal debate. “What the hell,” she muttered, “I’m going to run his involvements. See if any names come up that might be interesting.”
Lester looped a gangly arm across the back of his chair and looked at her. Without comment, he’d also brought up High Top’s record on his screen. He raised an eyebrow. “You wanna work from the top as I work from the bottom?”
She laughed at him. “Gotcha. Go for it.”
Joe was in his car, heading south on Interstate 91, when his cell phone rang. He pulled over to the shoulder before answering. This wasn’t so much for safety, since he couldn’t swear that actually speaking on a phone was any more dangerous than chatting with a passenger—unlike dialing the damn things, which he thought was suicidal. He was simply being practical—there were so many mountains and so few cell towers in Vermont that maintaining a clear connection while in motion was unlikely. “Can you hear me now?” was no joke around here.
Not that he minded stopping. Two