First Light (31 page)

I hesitated at the top of those steps, suddenly aware of a foul, putrid odor wafting up to me. My stomach lurched, and for an instant I thought I was going to puke.

I turned my head, took a deep breath through my mouth, then started down the steps.

The first thing I noticed were two men. One of them had his back to me. He held a long-handled spade-shaped shovel in both hands, and he had it cocked back like a baseball bat. The other man was J.W. He'd fallen backward and was lying on the dirt floor with his arms crossed defensively over his face.

The second thing I noticed was that awful odor. It was more foul than an open septic tank, more acrid than rotten garbage, and it made me gag.

The third thing I noticed was that some of the dirt
floor had been recently dug. There were mounds of loose dirt, several digging implements lying around, and on one of the mounds of dirt sat a kerosene lantern, casting its flickering orange light around the old cellar.

Both J.W. and the man with the shovel were caked with mud as if they'd been rolling around on the dirt floor, and as I watched, the man stepped forward, raised the shovel high over his head, and smashed it down. J.W. tried to roll away from it, but its flat side grazed off the back of his head, and J.W. groaned and pulled himself into a fetal position.

I jumped off the bottom step and grabbed the first thing my hand found. It was a pickax, the kind with one pointed end and one end shaped like a hoe. It was heavier than I expected, but then a jolt of adrenaline hit me, and I hefted it as if it were weightless and went after the guy.

He was standing over J.W., raising the shovel over his head again. J.W. was staring up at him. His eyes were glazed over and unfocused, and his breath was coming in quick, strained spurts, and his scalp was bloody.

“No!” I yelled.

The guy with the shovel whirled around and in the same motion swung that sharp-bladed shovel at my head. I managed to duck away from it. The momentum of his swing momentarily threw the guy off balance, and that's when I hit him with the pickax. I swung it up at him like a golf club, as hard as I could. He lurched right into it, and the hoe-bladed end crashed against the left side of his rib cage.

He uttered a little wet gasp, took two steps, then fell facedown on the dirt. I went over to him and lifted the pickax. I was ready to hit him again, to hit him as many times as it took, to smash in the back of his skull, to destroy him, to—

“Brady, don't!”

It was J.W. His voice was small and strangled with pain.

I hesitated, let out a long breath, and dropped the pickax. I looked at J.W. He didn't look good. I went over and knelt beside him. “You okay, man?” I said.

He blinked up at me. “Did you kill him?” he whispered.

“I don't know and I don't care. He was trying to kill you.”

“Came damn close to it,” he said. “But I'm okay. See if he's alive.”

I went back to the guy. He was sprawled spread-eagled with his face in the dirt.

I grabbed his shoulder. He was heavy, like dead-weight, but I managed to roll him onto his back. His chest was rising and falling rapidly. The entire left side, where I'd caught him with the pickax, was wet and black with mingled blood and dirt, and his face and hair were coated with mud.

At first I didn't recognize him. A mud-stained pale green surgical mask covered his mouth and nose. But I could see that his hair was blond.

I pulled down the surgical mask, turned, and eased J.W. up to his feet. “It's Patrick Fairchild,” I said, “and he's still alive. You wanna tell me what the hell happened?”

I
carried a flashlight with me as I left the house and headed down toward the beach to find Nate. I didn't feel so smart about other things, particularly the blond man. At the far edges of my mind some semiformed idea about him frustrated me by refusing to take real shape. I'd had the same experience with logic problems, when I had all of the information that I needed to solve them, but was just too dense to put it together. It wasn't quite maddening, but it was irritating.

In the fading light I walked fast in the darkness along the driveway, then took the fork and headed toward the beach. I figured there might be a shorter route leading from the house down past the cottage, but I didn't know where it was and didn't want to waste any time finding it. I wanted to locate Nate and have him and his sledgehammer go with me to the cottage so I could find out what was behind that padlocked cellar door.

By the time I reached the beach, the stars were beginning to come out, and there was a moon in the eastern sky. They cast only the faintest shimmer on the
dark waters of Vineyard Sound that lapped against the sands of Fairchild Cove and against the now invisible rocks where Brady had been left to drown.

Nate wasn't on the beach.

I turned and looked up toward the cottage. I could barely see it in the darkening night. I started up the hill.

The sagging porch facing the sea opened into the room where Nate and I had carried Brady. I ignored that door and walked around the building. Then I heard something and stopped, feeling that little shiver that runs through you when you're in a strange place and don't quite know what's going on. The sound seemed to be coming from inside the cottage. I flicked off my flashlight, eased around the far corner, and looked in the window. There was a sliver of orange light coming through the cellar door.

I crept around to the front of the cottage and slipped inside.

Maybe Nate and his lock-breaking sledgehammer were ahead of me.

Maybe not.

I floated to the cellar door and saw that the new padlock was unlocked. I took a breath of sickeningly foul air, pulled the door open, and started down the stairs.

Light from a kerosene lantern flooded up through the dusty air. With it came a terrible stench. The lantern sat on a mound of dirt, and then I saw a man working with a shovel. His back was to me. The sounds I'd heard were those of dirt being dug and tossed aside.

I almost gagged, and I dug my handkerchief out of a pocket. I recognized the stench. It was the smell of death. Long ago, when I'd been on the Boston PD, I'd smelled that smell when I'd been on a team that had entered an apartment where an old woman had died alone many days before.

Holding my handkerchief over my nose and mouth, I looked around for other people, but the man was alone. I went down the remaining steps to the reeking cellar floor.

I could see blond hair between the man's cap and his collar.

“Hello,” I said, and he spun around. He was wearing a surgical mask over his face, but I recognized him instantly. “Patrick. What in blazes is going on?”

His eyes were bright in the lantern light.

“J.W.!” His voice was sharp. He grasped the shovel like a battle-ax.

I looked around. Almost at my feet, half covered with dirt, was a black medical bag. I knew instantly that he was digging a hole to bury it.

“Christ,” I said, filled with bitter certainty. “It's you. You're the one. You killed Molly, and you tried to kill Brady. And you killed Kathy Bannerman and those other women, too.” I gestured toward the awful floor. “You buried them all here.”

He shook his head. “No! No, it wasn't me. It was … it was Nate. I used to see him come down here. I never trusted him. I tried to get in here before, but he'd locked the door. Tonight I got in and … and I found this. It's terrible. Terrible!” His voice was a wail.

“No,” I said. “It wasn't Nate. It was you. You play
golf and tennis. Nate doesn't. And you use that Enchanté cologne. Nate doesn't. I remember smelling it on you. You smelled like you'd just come out of the shower. And you have that hint of the South in your voice. Nate doesn't. You're blond. You're the one. It's time to give it up. It's all over.”

He crouched, wide-eyed. “Who's that with you? There, right behind you?”

It was a sucker's trick, but if there really was somebody there, I needed to know who it was. I wasn't about to turn my back on Patrick and his shovel, though, so I took a quick step to the side and gave a fast glance behind me. The quick step was a mistake. I had just enough time to see there was no one in back of me and to whip my eyes toward Patrick again, when my foot landed on Molly's medical bag. It turned beneath my weight, and I was instantly off balance.

At that moment Patrick leaped forward and swung the shovel. He didn't kill me with that first blow because the shovel hit a beam as he swung it, and the beam slowed it and turned it so the flat side, not the sharp side, hit me. I went down like the '29 stock market.

My head was ringing. The shovel went up and came down again as I rolled. But Patrick had hurried this blow, and the shovel glanced off the back of my skull. He swung again and hit me as I rolled into a depression in the floor. Trapped there, dizzy and almost blind, I tried to get my arms and legs up between me and that deadly shovel. This time Patrick was patient. He lifted the shovel. I felt fatalistic but also incredibly stupid and irritated. It seemed like a particularly dumb way to die.

Then suddenly Brady Coyne was there behind Patrick, a pickax in his hands. He shouted, “No!” and Patrick spun and swung the shovel at his head instead of mine. Brady ducked and swung the pickax and Patrick staggered and fell.

Brady's face had the look of death. He stepped toward Patrick and lifted the pickax again.

“Brady,” I gasped. “Don't!”

Somehow he stopped his blow. He looked toward me and the madness went out of his eyes. He tossed the pickax aside and came to me. “You okay, man?”

I didn't have much of a voice. “Did you kill him?”

“I don't know and I don't care. He was trying to kill you.”

“Came damn close to it. But I'm okay. See if he's alive.”

Brady eased me up to my feet and then took a look at Patrick. “It's Patrick Fairchild, and he's still alive,” he said. “You wanna tell me what the hell happened?”

I touched my head and looked at the blood on my hand. “Well, the most important thing from my point of view is that you just saved my bacon. First Nate, and now you. Zee said maybe I should take up safer sports than fishing, and maybe I should.” Then I told him what had happened and what I thought, and why. I pointed to the floor. “That smell tells you something's buried down here, and he was about to add the black bag. I think he killed several women and buried them here, although I'm no shrink, so I can't explain why. All I know is that they all looked something like Molly Wood. They were all fortyish and blonde and pretty.”

Brady listened as he looked at the hole Patrick had been digging and the medical bag, and then nodded. “I may have an insight about that.” He described what he'd seen happen between Patrick and Eliza in his bedroom, then wrinkled his nose and said, “Let's get out of here before we die from this air.”

We weren't as gentle with Patrick as we might have been, but we got him up the stairs and out onto the grass. I waited with him under the stars and moon while Brady went to the house and called the police. I wanted no more part in discovering what the cellar might reveal.

After they'd cleaned me up at the hospital, I called Zee from the state police barracks and told her I'd be late getting home. And I was, because Dom Agganis was at the crime scene and Officer Olive Otero was asking me the questions, and Olive did not go out of her way to be kind and gentle with me. Finally, however, she let me go, but only after warning me not to leave the island.

“Warning me not to leave is like warning the tide to keep rising and falling. While you're at it, maybe you should do that,” I said grumpily as I went out.

At home, Zee was awake and anxious. She looked at the bandages on my head and held my face in front of hers. “Are you really all right? Don't lie.”

“I am, really.”

“Then let's get into bed and you can tell me everything that happened.”

In bed, she wrapped her arms around me as if she thought I might slip away and do something else that was stupid and dangerous. “Talk,” she said.

I did, telling her everything she didn't already know, including Brady's incest theory. “It's up to the cops and the DA from here on out,” I said, “but if I'm right, they'll nail Patrick. They'll find bodies in the cellar, including Molly Wood's and Kathy Bannerman's. They'll track down people who saw Patrick with Molly, and Patrick with Kathy, and maybe Patrick with some of those other missing women just before the women disappeared. They'll have the cologne and the note Brady found at Edna Paul's place and the one you found under your windshield wiper, and they'll be in touch with the detectives down on Hilton Head about women there who may have dated Patrick and then disappeared. They'll know about Eliza chasing after every man she meets, and Patrick being crazy with jealousy. Then they'll have their shrinks dueling with his shrinks about the psychological implications of the relationship. I'd guess they'll argue that Patrick killed women like Molly, who looked like his mother, because he couldn't bring himself to kill her, which is what he really wanted to do. You can get a shrink to say anything in court.”

“Spooky.” She shivered.

We lay together in silence, our arms around the grief of the ages. Then Zee said, “I'm glad you're home safe.” She gave me a sharp squeeze. “Don't you ever do anything dangerous again.”

“I promise,” I said. “Never again.”

The next day, at noon, I waded out to the rocks in Fairchild Cove. It was low tide and I had my quahog rake and Buck Rogers with me. Normally I only used
the peep sight during scallop season when I was dip netting, but now I used it to scan the bottom of the cove in search of other treasures. And I found them. There, not far from the rocks, lay Brady's fancy fly rod and reel. As I'd guessed, murderous but smart Patrick, when preparing Brady for his “accidental” drowning, had made sure that the fly rod would be near the body.