“Okay, okay,” Lester soothed him. “You saying the old guy took a swing at whoever this was?”

“Nah. I woulda called you guys for that,” Reynolds conceded. “I think my guy got embarrassed. He tripped and hurt his arm or something. I don’t know. It wasn’t Shaw’s fault. I mean, they tussled slightly, but the whole thing was stupid. The bouncer just walked out, like a girl at a party—I thought just to cool off.”

“So it wasn’t the bouncer who threw him out?”

“No. I backed his action ’cause Shaw was being a butthead and needed to go, but I threw him out. Course, I also thought my guy was still outside. It was then that Shaw came back in and said his car was missing.”

Sam was almost open-mouthed by now. “The bouncer stole the car?”

Reynolds protested theatrically. “How do I know? Maybe.”

Lester slid in with, “What was the guy’s name, Al?”

“Don … Something … Johnson?”

There was silence at the bar for a slow count. Lester reached into his coat and produced the mug shot of Don Kalfus, laying it flat between them. “Him?”

“Yup. That’s Don.” Al rubbed his forehead. “And it was Thompson. I remember now. Am I in trouble?”

“Not compared to some,” Les reassured him.

CHAPTER FOUR

Joe Gunther was no dinosaur, but he did like some things run old-school, among them staff meetings. He practiced occasional on-screen briefings and had worked his way to texting on the device that had replaced his old flip phone, but to him, nothing beat a face-to-face encounter.

As a result, and to no one’s objection, he called the unit together on the second floor of Brattleboro’s municipal center, in the small office they occupied despite official urgings that they “co-locate” with the state police. The latter had a brand-new barracks in Westminster, up the interstate a couple of exits, with room enough for extra tenants. But while the VBI had been chartered as supportive and self-effacing, this particular branch of it stayed stubbornly autonomous. The three people Joe had selected to join him in the state’s southeast corner had a strong independent streak uniting them, among other things.

He waited until everyone had settled down at their desks before beginning. “This won’t last long. You are tired, hungry, and I know you want to go home for some well-earned downtime. We’ve been going for almost twenty-two hours, mostly because we had to get a child out of harm’s way and determine that Don Kalfus’s death was not an ongoing public threat. Are there any arguments that we haven’t addressed both hurdles?”

No one answered, which he’d expected.

“Okay. Great. You’ve been fairly good about maintaining the virtual log of this case as we went—”

“You say the nicest things,” Willy interrupted.

Everyone laughed as Joe shot back, “I said fairly good. That excludes you and makes this meeting all the more necessary.”

“I take it back,” Willy said, faking a wounded expression. “That hurt.”