Bellows Falls Read Free Page A

double.”
    The plant manager was by our side in under three minutes.
    “You know where this connects?” I asked him.
    He spread out his papers doubtfully, already shaking his head. “I’d be amazed if we have it. Looks too old and too small for us to mess with.”
    A moment later, he straightened up. “Nope. No sign of it.”
    “I’m going in,” Sammie announced. “I’m the only one as small as Morgan.”
    I laid a hand on her shoulder but looked at Coven. “Sammie thinks this runs toward Linden Street. What might it hook up with?”
    Coven consulted his plans again. “Utility tunnel maybe?”
    I glanced over at the old bulkhead. “That wouldn’t make sense. It looks more like a drainage culvert, to take away any water that might leak in through that thing.”
    Coven tapped a spot with his finger. “Then this is probably your best bet. It’s a collection pipe for most of the drainage in this area. It’s good-sized, and accessible by manhole, so you could backtrack along it and see if this connects to it.”
    I looked up at Sammie. “I like that idea a lot better.”
    Coven unlocked the bulkhead and led us into the comparative coolness of the night air. We walked along a paved service road to a manhole cover some two hundred feet to the west. He swung his arm like a pendulum, bisecting the road. “Runs in this direction, about ten feet down, angling toward the Meadows.”
    Two of the team members had already pried open the cover and were cautiously shining their lights down. Sammie stepped up to the hole’s edge.
    I poked Washburn in the side and pointed at his helmet, addressing Sammie. “I’m coming with you.” Washburn handed me the helmet and I followed Sammie underground.
    The cement tube at the bottom of a steel ladder was straight, clean, odorless, and big enough to walk in, stooped over.
    And utterly silent.
    We went up the slight incline, pacing the distance until we reached the approximate axis of the drainage pipe from the basement we’d just left. To my satisfaction, we found a rough opening, eroded by decades of runoff and rot. The tiny garden of brittle, crystalline growth that had taken root on its ragged edge had been partially scraped clean by the recent passage of something large and heavy.
    I showed the traces to Sammie. “I think this just turned into a ‘good-news-bad news’ story.” I pointed down slope. “And I bet the bad news is out there.”
    We retraced our steps past the manhole, to where the pipe emptied into the Retreat Meadows. There, in a narrow strip of muddy ground, right at water’s edge, a fresh set of sneaker tracks headed off toward the northwest.
    I used the radio to expand the cordon we’d set around the campus, asked for additional backup and some tracking dogs, and issued a statewide Be-On-the-Alert for Jasper Morgan, but I wasn’t optimistic. If he’d been motivated enough to get this far, he wasn’t going to be picked up in an hour downing beers at some local dive.
    In any case, his escape was no longer what truly concerned me. It was the effort he’d made—and the reasons behind it.

Chapter 2
    FOUR WEEKS LATER, Jasper Morgan had all but slipped from my mind. The BOL had yielded nothing, the grapevine had remained silent, and Jasper, along with Pierre Lavoie’s gun, had been put on the back burner, “pending new developments.”
    The spike in activity we get every spring—when the rowdier natives emerge from hibernation to wreak havoc—had subsided weeks ago, and life had returned to a predictable normalcy. As had my domestic life with Gail Zigman, my companion of many years, who had finally landed a cherished job as deputy to our local State’s Attorney.
    In contrast to my schedule, Gail’s was awash in work, she being the lowest on the totem pole and the one with the most to learn. On the other hand, after countless months of juggling a clerkship, a correspondence course, cramming for the bar exam, and applying for jobs, even she was