The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [80]
“That’s it?” Willy pressed him.
“Along those lines, yeah. I mean, Bennington’s like any other town—something happening all the time. But we look at things that might go bigger, like the missing bag. I mentioned the armory because it was offbeat and I thought you should know.”
Joe knew that Willy was cranked up because of the Big Brother implications, although he suspected that the outrage was more because Willy wasn’t the one working the microscope. But the possibilities of what Coven was telling them got Joe’s brain working along other lines.
“You filter everything, don’t you, Milt, to get to the good stuff?”
Coven’s voice was guarded. “What’re you after?”
Joe laughed. “I don’t know. That’s the point. Anything else that’s hanging around without a solution.”
Coven paused. They could hear him rustling through paperwork. “Well,” he eventually reported, “there’s the disappearance of a young dope seller and user named Conrad Sweet, street-named High Top.”
“What’ve you got on him?” Sam spoke out, caught by surprise, glancing at Lester Spinney, who was staring at the speakerphone. Their own research into High Top earlier had ended nowhere.
“That’s about it,” said Coven’s disembodied voice.
“Anything else?” Joe asked.
“Nope . . . No, hold it. There’s a mugging of a local firefighter, a little north of Bennington. Almost missed that, being out of town. He was robbed of their weekly bingo money, to the tune of a little over a thousand bucks. He has no idea who hit him.
“Like I said,” he repeated, sounding back on track, “I don’t know how or if there are any linkages, but it struck me as interesting that there were two unusual, so far unsolved events, in the same area and at the same time you guys were in the neighborhood. I know it’s unlikely, but that’s the kind of thinking that got us jammed up before nine-eleven. You stirring anything up?”
“You heard about that Wilmington homicide?” Joe asked.
“Michelle Fisher?” Coven responded immediately.
Joe knew this time that the response had little to do with high-grade intelligence gathering. There were so few homicides in Vermont that the average well-read newspaper subscriber might have come up with the same quick answer.
“Her case is looking like it may have ties to Bennington,” Joe explained, his eyes on Willy’s increasingly clouded face—not a man given to sharing information.
Seemingly by honed instinct, Coven knew enough to quit while he was ahead. “Well, like I said, I figured you might be interested, and I wanted to say hi anyhow. I’ll e-mail you what I got and call you later at home.”
“Thanks, Milt,” Joe told him. “I appreciate it. One question, though: What’re you thinking was behind the theft of the garbage bag?”
Coven hesitated, weighing his response. “Well . . . I suppose the natural reaction is a dirty bomb, but that seems pretty unlikely. I mean, this stuff was medical trash—old IV tubing, dressings, junk like that—all slightly tainted. Even if you sprinkled it from a helicopter, it wouldn’t do any harm. On the other hand, if you cancel out the dirty bomb idea, you don’t have much left—somebody stole somebody else’s trash. That’s why I didn’t hit the red button and alert my fellow feds.”
“It could’ve been misplaced,” Lester suggested.
“My point exactly,” Coven agreed. “The hospital says not. But like I said, we just pass this info along, no matter how small it looks.”
Joe saw Willy warming up again and so wrapped it up quickly. “Thanks, Milt. It might be worth a lot. Thanks for thinking of us. Give my best to Sue.”
“Oh, yeah. Thanks. Love to Gail, too.”
Joe hit the Off button, causing Gail’s name to float in the air.
“Guess his intel isn’t all