Concord Rules
The story behind ‘Concord Rules’
When I wrote ‘Deal Killer’ in 2008, I envisioned it as a stand-alone story; an opportunity to tell a fast-paced tale of corporate intrigue and murder using young investment banker Lynn Kowalchuk as an accidental sleuth, with state trooper Lou Bergeron providing both the fire power and a romantic interest.
My agent convinced me that these two characters (plus worldly wise Detective Claude Johnson) had more crimes to solve.
That was in early 2008. Eliot Spitzer’s abrupt resignation as New York’s governor in the wake of a high-priced ‘escort service’ scandal was front page news and I was learning more about such services than was probably healthy because I thought there might be a story line for another book. The more I thought about it, though, the more it made sense that my New Hampshire trio could get involved in solving an escort-service-related murder.
Spitzer was undone by the IRS looking at odd movements of money in his election accounts. My contribution was to have Trooper Lou Bergeron stop a speeding limo and catch a glimpse of a beautiful woman in the back seat, and then learn the next day that the woman had been found dead of a drug overdose in a cheap motel. Obviously, somebody killed her. The question is, who?
Writing ‘Concord Rules’ allowed me to explore more than just the shadowy world of escort services. It also let me delve into the questions of loyalty to institutions as well as to friends. How far over the line can a professional step in order to get at the truth? Both Lynn and Bergeron have to deal with uncomfortable realities before they can solve this crime.
I completed the manuscript for Concord Rules in 2009 but got distracted by my work on The Garden Club Gang, which I was told (correctly) was a more ‘commercial product’ (i.e., more people would want to buy it). A year went by, and then three. I recently re-read the manuscript: it’s damned good. But I’m now pegged as a different kind of writer. I have vowed to myself to update the story and bring it to readers. Someday…
The story in brief
What begins as a routine traffic stop for New Hampshire state trooper Lou Bergeron will turn into a murder investigation conducted against the wishes of nearly everyone within the state police hierarchy. Hailed just a few months earlier as a candidate to become the state’s youngest state police detective, Bergeron will be told his career may be derailed. His mentor, Claude Johnson, will be informed his pension is in jeopardy. And Bergeron’s girlfriend, investment banker Lynn Kowalchuk, will find someone is eavesdropping on her computer.
When Bergeron pulls over a speeding Lincoln Town Car with Massachusetts plates, he can’t help but notice the leggy blonde in the red party dress the back seat. She looks to be in her early twenties and she’s beautiful. When Bergeron finds that the livery driver has a phony license, he tells the woman she’ll have to find alternate transportation to her destination. A few phone calls later, a cab arrives and drives her away.
His girlfriend, Lynn Kowalchuk, points out that young women can rarely afford to hire chauffeured Town Cars for hundred-mile trips and that Lou likely inconvenienced an ‘escort’ en route to meet a well-heeled client. The matter is dropped until a day later, when the woman’s photo appears on the noon news – she’s been found, dead, in cheap motel in Manchester. The cause is a drug overdose and the matter is ‘under investigation’.
But it’s a murder no one wants to pursue for reasons that are first baffling and then chilling. There’s a coverup, and it originates at the highest levels of the New Hampshire state police.
It will fall to Lou, Lynn, and Claude to pursue the ugly truth, even at risk to their lives and careers.
Concord Rules
1.
Wednesday, November 19
3:00 p.m.
State Trooper Lou Bergeron barely saw the black blur as it sped by him. With his windows rolled up against the afternoon chill, he never heard an engine. The radar unit on his dashboard, though, efficiently registered a blinking ‘94’.
Too damn fast, Bergeron thought. He fastened his seatbelt, started his engine, threw the switches for the patrol car’s flashers and siren and tore out of his position in pursuit, gravel flying as the wheels found traction.
The driver of the black car had initially hit his brakes as he or she flew by Bergeron and spotted the unmistakable tan cruisers used by the New Hampshire State Police. Such behavior was instinctive on the part of drivers: Get back to the speed limit. Make the trooper think you just let your speed drift up inadvertently and you’ve got it all under control now. If the black vehicle slowed to sixty-five, Bergeron would be able to catch it quickly, guide the car into the weigh station a mile up the road, issue a citation, and be back in position in fifteen minutes.
But the vehicle did not slow down to sixty-five. The tap of the brakes was short-lived and the car, now already half a mile up the highway, was accelerating.
The idiot is going to try to out run me, Bergeron thought. The blare of the siren added a jolt of adrenaline to the pursuit. Bergeron leaned back in his seat and pressed his hands against the steering wheel as he jammed his foot down farther on the accelerator. His cruiser responded by jumping a gear and the dashboard showed 4500 rpm. His engine screamed, as loud now as the sound of the siren.
What the driver of the black car likely did not know was that it was five miles to Derry, the next exit. Unless that black car had something very special under its hood, Bergeron could close the gap before the exit and, even it he didn’t and the driver turned off, Bergeron knew what would happen next. The Derry exit came to a traffic signal on heavily traveled Route 102. There would almost certainly be a line of cars waiting to turn left at the light, forcing the black car to turn right where it would seek refuge at one of the gas stations or fast food restaurants east of the exit. Bergeron had done this chase a dozen times in the past few months. He had never lost a vehicle in traffic.
So, why are you running? Bergeron thought, pushing his patrol car to one-twenty. What have you got? Drugs? A trunkful of illegal immigrants?
As he decreased the distance between himself and the car he could discern the distinctive boxy profile of a Lincoln Town Car. A Town Car surely was an unlikely conveyance for Latino or Fujian laborers, but the driver must have something to hide because its speed increased well past a hundred miles an hour. It was three in the afternoon and traffic was light on this section of Interstate 93, a few miles over the Massachusetts border. It was mostly trucks this time of day and most of them were in the right lane, obediently acknowledging the ‘weigh station open’ sign. Bergeron flew by them in the left lane. The handful of passenger cars on the four-lane highway veered into the right lane as soon as they saw the flashing lights behind them.
Bergeron radioed dispatch. “I’m northbound on 93 in pursuit of a black Town Car traveling at 100 mph-plus. No ID yet on the vehicle. I’ve closed to within two thousand feet. Suggest you alert anyone on patrol between Derry and Manchester if I need assistance.”
“Roger that,” came back the dispatcher’s voice. “Please keep us advised.”
The chase continued past the Derry exit. Bergeron’s siren blared and his lights flashed and cars and truck continued to obediently move out of his way. Traffic was heavier here. There was now a thousand feet of distance between the two vehicles with Bergeron’s Crown Victoria pushing past 125, gaining consistently on the car in front of him. While he couldn’t see the license plates, he would bet a week’s salary that it bore livery plates because virtually all Town Cars were executive limos and he had yet to encounter a black Town Car that was not a chauffeured vehicle. Out went the thoughts of a trunk filled with cocaine or heroin. The cargo was probably a corporate executive, urging the driver to press on to a business meeting in Manchester. The driver of the Town Car could well lose his license because of somebody’s promise of a big tip.
At a hundred yards, Bergeron saw that the car did indeed bear livery places, and from Massachusetts. By now, the driver knew he was going to be caught and, regardless of what the corporate titan in the back seat said, it wasn’t worth playing out the game. Bergeron had the driver on a reckless driving charge, which was $500, and fifty miles an hour over the speed limit, which was a minimum of $350. If the usual ‘soak the tourists’ prejudice held sway in the court, the total fine was likely to be north of a thousand dollars. It had better be one hell of a tip.
The driver slowed as they approached the Rockingham Road exit and Bergeron put on his blinker. The driver did the same and the two cars slowly drove into a service station parking lot. As they did, Bergeron plugged the vehicle’s license plate number into the computer on his dashboard. In under a minute he would know if the car was stolen, as well as a history of other citations written to drivers behind its wheel.
The two vehicles came to a stop, though Bergeron noted the Town Car’s engine was still running. Perhaps it was to keep the occupants warm. But perhaps it was to effect a quick getaway. Bergeron gave the dispatcher a location and full description of the vehicle. A ‘just in case’ precaution.
A few moments later, the computer gave a short ‘beep’ and a message appeared. The license plate did indeed match the vehicle description. The owner was ‘Executive Transport Solutions’ which was based in East Boston, putting the vehicle’s home near Logan Airport. There were a string of two dozen citations from New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Massachusetts connected to the Town Car, though issued to at least half a dozen different drivers. This gave Bergeron some comfort that, when he confronted the driver, any anger on the part of the driver would be directed at the vehicle’s passenger rather than at the trooper issuing multiple citations.
As Bergeron approached the Town Car, its window rolled down half way. His right hand instinctively unsnapped the holster of his weapon. This was the moment of truth. A limo was one of the least threatening vehicles a policeman could pull over, but then a month earlier, a patrolman on duty near Portsmouth had watched, incredulous at the incongruity of the event, as two shots were fired at him from the Toyota Prius he had just stopped for speeding. In that instance, both bullets were high and considerably wide of the trooper, but it had resulted in a two-hour standoff while a SWAT team was deployed. The Prius had been stolen, the eighteen-year-old thief had panicked.
Now, Bergeron could see the driver in the Town Car’s side-view mirror. Forties, thinning dark hair, and a moustache. The man wore sunglasses.
“May I see your license and registration, please?” Bergeron asked. The state was adamant about these encounters. Keep it cheerful. Always make it sound routine.
“Is there a problem, officer?” A thick accent. Not Spanish but something like it.
Is there a problem? Bergeron thought. I just chased you for ten miles at well over a hundred miles an hour. Hell, yes, there’s a problem.
“I observed you driving over the speed limit,” Bergeron said. Keep it factual. Do not frighten the driver or otherwise intimate that they are in trouble. Do not bully them. Use your authority as a last resort.
Bergeron noted that the man had not started reaching for his wallet nor had he opened the glove box where the registration would likely be kept.
“I’ll need to see your license and registration at this time,” Bergeron said. Three additional words.
The man sighed and reached for his wallet. Bergeron’s right hand, invisible to the driver, slowly went to his holster. Only when Bergeron saw the leather of a wallet edge did he allow his hand to leave the grip of the gun, and even then, he did not allow his fingers to stray more than a few inches from his weapon.
“The registration is over here,” the man said, indicating the glove box. It was at that point that Bergeron first peered into the car’s back seat.
A woman. Young – early twenties – honey blonde and incredibly good looking. Dressed in a low-cut red party dress that shouted expensive. The hem of the dress came eight inches above her knee. This was not someone who was planning to spend a lot of outdoor time in New Hampshire in late November. In her left hand was an iPhone.
The woman glanced at Bergeron, then resumed doing something with the iPhone. Perhaps sending an email, he thought, though with an iPhone, it was impossible to be certain because everything was done by tapping a piece of glass.
The man had opened the glove box. This was the final serious risk point. If the driver’s hand emerged with anything other than a piece of paper or the kind of leather document case into which registrations were routine stuffed, Bergeron would draw his weapon.
Out came a slip of white paper. The driver handed it to Bergeron, then opened his wallet and extracted a plastic-coated license.
“This may take a few minutes,” Bergeron said. “Please stay in the car.”
As soon as he was back in his car, Bergeron glanced at the registration to make certain it matched the license plate. It did. Bergeron turned his attention to the driver’s license.
And froze.
The license was counterfeit. It wasn’t even a good phony. There was no bar code on the back and the front gave the impression of a second- or third-generation photocopy. Where there should have been a hologram on the license, there was instead a dull, silver-colored circle.
Paolo Nunes with an address in Framingham. That would make the guy Portuguese, Brazilian or from the Canary Islands. Illegals couldn’t get drivers licenses, so someone had phonied up one for him.
Bergeron saw his afternoon slipping away from him. He radioed in the information and asked if there were any specific instructions.
“Impound the car,” came the reply after less than a minute.
“It’s a limo with a passenger,” Bergeron said. “How about letting the guy drive into Manchester?”
Another brief silence. “HQ says impound the vehicle and bring the driver to Manchester for booking. We’re dispatching a tow truck.”
Bergeron swore under his breath. He would have to cuff Nunes and tell the woman she was on her own. All this so the state could add a five hundred dollar towing fee to the list of fines and expenses piling up. This was bureaucracy in action. These were the actions of a state that was broke.
Bergeron considered his options. There were none. The driver’s name and the vehicle tag had been entered into the system. Telling the driver to turn around and head back to Massachusetts wasn’t an option. The guy was going to feel like the victim of a police state. He wouldn’t be far off the mark.
Bergeron went back to the Town Car.
“I’ll have to ask for the keys to your vehicle, Mr. Nunes,” Bergeron said. The manual said a trooper should make such a request sound apologetic. Bergeron’s tone added a touch of embarrassment to the appeal.
“Why?” Nunes asked.
“There’s a problem with your driver’s license, sir. I’m afraid you won’t be able to continue driving the car.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” the woman in the back seat said. “Can’t you just give him a ticket and let him finish driving me?”
“I’m afraid not, ma’am,” Bergeron said, leaning lower to speak to the woman. “Your driver doesn’t have a valid license. I’m sure the service can send another car for you.”
“Can I drive the car?” she asked. “I’ve got a license.” She had a terrific voice. Very melodic. Also very sultry.
“It isn’t your car and state law requires that the vehicle has to be impounded,” Bergeron said. “I could call you a cab.”
“They have cabs up here?” Condescension crept into her voice.
“There’s one based just a few miles from here.”
The woman began tapping the surface of the iPhone. “City Cab in Manchester?” she asked Bergeron.
“That’s one of them,” he said.
The woman tapped the glass once and then held up a finger, asking for silence. “City Cab? I’m at the Sunoco station on Rockingham Road by I-93. How quickly can you get a car here?” A moment’s silence. “Concord,” she said.
Amazing little gadget, Bergeron thought.
Ten minutes later, the stunningly attractive woman in the expensive red party dress, her shoulder-length, honey blonde hair swaying ever so slightly, stepped out of the Lincoln Town Car and into the back of an aging white Taurus. She carried a small bag with her, dark brown with tan handles,with little ‘LV’s’ and stylized flowers on it. She gave Bergeron a brief smile as she closed the door. It was a smile that meant, ‘no hard feelings’ and he felt a little better for having inadvertently caused the inconvenience.
Bergeron was still waiting for the tow truck. He had declined to handcuff Nunes, which was probably dereliction of duty under some arcane provision of the New Hampshire penal code.
It was 3:30 and, already, the light was fading. The wind had come up. The woman’s dress snapped in the wind as she transferred cars.
Someone should have told her it’s even colder up there, Bergeron thought as he pulled his jacket around his neck.
2.
Wednesday, November 19
7:30 p.m.
Lynn Kowachuk laughed. “She was a call girl, Lou. A hooker. An escort. Whatever you want to call it. That was a lady who was getting paid by the hour.”
“But you don’t know that,” Bergeron protested. “Isn’t it a little sexist to assume that any woman in the back of a Town Car is a prostitute? You ride in limos all the time. Do you think people assume you’re a….” He struggled for the right word and settled for ‘pro’. Bergeron was in his apartment, his nominal, eight-hour shift extended three hours because of the need to book Paolo Nunes. Lynn was at an office in Boston.
“Lou,” Lynn said, still laughing, “If I’m in the back seat of a Town Car, I’m going to be accompanied by at least three other bankers because the client would have apoplexy otherwise. The only way it would be a Town Car is if someone a whole lot more senior than me booked it. And you can be absolutely certain that I wouldn’t have on some slinky red dress. That isn’t the way it works in the real world. That was a working girl. You interrupted an assignation. Get over it.”
Bergeron bit his tongue. That had been his first impression as well, but he had expected Lynn to come down on the side of the woman being a young, hotshot entrepreneur.
“So, were there panties?”
“What do you mean?” Lou asked.
“I mean, if her dress was as short as you say it was, you ought to have been able to see some panty. What color were they? My guess is red, matched exactly to the dress.”
“She was wearing stockings,” Lou said, carefully. In fact, there had been the briefest glimpse of red panties when the woman’s leg shifted position. It wasn’t a fact he intended to acknowledge to Lynn.
“I’m disappointed in you,” Lynn said, but her voice was teasing now, though the laughter had subsided. He heard the squeak of an office chair. Lynn would likely have her feet up on a desk, Bergeron imagined, her shoes off. She would be flexing her toes. It was seven thirty but, for an investment banker on a due diligence assignment, the day was only half over. Lynn’s days frequently stretched until after midnight, only to resume at nine o’clock the following morning.
Much had happened to both of them in the past two months. Bergeron’s role in solving the multiple murders surrounding the sale of SoftRidge Corporation had gotten him the attention of the state police hierarchy. He was now spending three days a week at the academy in Concord, working toward an appointment as detective. He spent two evenings a week listening to Claude Johnson tell him what they didn’t explain in the academy classes – the ‘real’ chain of command and the limits that could be pushed but not exceeded. Sixty-one-year-old Claude Johnson brought out case files on which he had worked, some of them decades old, identifying both major and minor crime figures that Bergeron would likely encounter as he advanced from patrolman to detective.
He spent two days and nights a week in the company of Lynn who, as much as he, had solved the SoftRidge murders. Lynn had identified a multi-million-dollar fraud that had eluded the accountants and lawyers. Though nominally based in New York, she now had her pick of assignments and requested ones that took her to Boston, thirty miles away from where he now sat. Bergeron also knew Lynn’s secret: that she had put out feelers to several Boston investment banking firms and she had already gone on two interviews.
Where the relationship was headed was not something that either one attempted to put into words. He was twenty-eight, she was twenty-seven. It was the first truly close relationship either had ever had. These nightly calls sustained him through the five days they were apart.
“So what’s going on down there?” Lou asked.
“Same old same old,” she said, the chair squeaking again. “There’s supposed to be a collar on the deal, but we’ve already found enough stuff to drive the price down by another ten percent.” Lynn carefully did not breach confidentiality by divulging the name of either the buyer or the seller, though she gleefully went through the details of the shoddy bookkeeping she and her team had encountered. “We told our client this morning that he should either walk or renegotiate. My guess is that they’ll lower the deal price by another ten million or so. So was she a real blonde or was it a dye job?”
Lou shook his head. When had he mentioned the arrest? “Lynn, she was a blonde. I didn’t look at her roots. She had shoulder-length blonde hair and bangs. What more can I tell you?”
“I’d say the probability that the hair was natural was maybe one in three,” Lynn said. Lou heard her take a sip of some kind of drink. “The guy who hired her also ponied up for the Town Car, which means he was paying for the night. The Town car alone would be – what? – three hundred bucks. For that, you expect a blonde. And, assuming the Louis Vuitton case was the real thing and not some knock-off, she was some really hot ticket. That’s a thousand-dollar bag at retail. You didn’t happen to get a look at the dress label, did you?”
“Lynn!”
“All right, all right. I’m just having fun,” Lynn said. The chair squeaked again. Bergeron could imagine her standing up now, walking around the office, stretching as she did so, easing the muscle strains that came from being hunched over spreadsheets all day. “This assignment is basically boring. I’ve been doing cost justifications all afternoon, so coming up with a total package cost for an escort when three hundred buck worth of limo time is part of the cost basis is a hell of a lot more fun than doing discounted cash flow analyses. And I can’t wait until I can see you this weekend.”
Lou almost missed the last part. “I can’t wait, either,” he said. “You want me to pick you up?”
“I have a car,” Lynn said. “If you drove me, I’d probably attack you half way up there and one of you state trooper buddies would pull us over for driving to endanger.”
Lou couldn’t wait for the weekend.
* * * * *
When they hung up, twenty minutes later, Lynn had trouble concentrating on the work in front of her. Outside of the office she had commandeered for the assignment, two first-year associates were peering at documents on their laptops, simultaneously ruining their eyesight along with their posture.
How did I hit the jackpot? she thought. On her laptop, her screensaver was now a photo of herself with Lou, taken two months earlier at an Alpine Zipline in the White Mountains. They had known each other just a few days then. Lou Bergeron was six feet tall, well-muscled, and ruggedly handsome with curly brown hair and a kind face. She looked at herself in the same photo. Her hair was a mousy brown, her face round, her glasses thick. What could he possibly see in her? Was it only a matter of time before some blonde in a convertible noticed how good looking he was and offered him a telephone number along with her license and registration?
She shook off the panic. No. He sees the real me. Lou had stirred feelings in her she had suppressed for years. A yearning to be close. A desire to be wanted.
“God, you really drank the Kool-Aid,” her friend Deb had told her when Lynn confided she was requesting assignments in Boston to be nearer to Lou. Lynn had told only Lou that she had put out feelers to Boston investment banking firms. She had not even told Lou that Highsmith and Co. had put a package on the table the previous week.
A day at a time, Lynn thought. A weekend at a time. A month at a time. They had been thrown together, two months earlier, packing a lifetime of danger and excitement into a few tense days. Three times he had saved her life. Once she had saved his. Was that enough on which to build a relationship? Could a New York investment banker find true happiness with a New Hampshire state trooper?
A day at a time, she repeated to herself.