Nantucket Five-Spot (17 page)

She spoke to the ground: “You knew Roy Elkins, too.”

“That has nothing to do with this.”

“Are you kidding me? It has everything to do with this. It's the same situation, except this time you get to be the brilliant detective. This time you get to save your friend and win.”

I looked around as if the proper tone of voice and the right words could be found in the thread of water at the head of Hummock Pond, or the silent houses on the other side, the empty fields, the fat white standpipe braced against the sky at the edge of the sound like a sentry. A few pale cirrus clouds sketched against the blue sky moved over us, pushed by a different wind in a different world. I wondered if this was what the ship-bottoms looked like to the creatures that lived on the sea floor.

“You never really know people. No matter what you think. You don't really know Haden Krakauer. You know what he chooses to show the world. But that's a mask.”

I wasn't going to let her budge me. “I know him. And I know you.”

“So this is about me now?”

“How could it not be? Because our positions really are reversed this time, Franny. That's what really bothers you. This time I've dug deeper than you, I've thought harder about the case, working it when you thought it was all wrapped up. You got lazy. You don't want to face the fact that I'm in the lead this time and if you admit I'm right you'll be following me.”

“I just want the truth. I'm not twisting things. You're twisting things. I don't even think this is about your friend any more. It's all about proving how smart and cool you are. How you can be better than me, even though I've been promoted ten times since those days, and I'm actually responsible for this nation's security now, with fifty people working under me and I make ten times what you do. You're a guy who got fired from his only real job ever, marking time as a local cop in the middle of nowhere, wondering what happened to his career. You blew your career all by yourself Hank. Don't take it out on me.”

I raised my arm, pointed a stiff finger at her.

“I am the Chief of Police of Nantucket.”

“Right. The Mayor of Whoville.”

I had to laugh at that. But I was touched, also. She remembered I'd been reading the Horton books to my kids when we first met.

I quoted the elephant's other motto back to her now.

“A person's a person, no matter how small.”

She stuck her hands in her pockets and kicked a stone into the weeds. “It's a nice town, Hank. And you do a good job. You take care of your town. We'll handle the investigation. It's pretty much wrapped up now, anyway. A few more days of interrogation and we'll be moving Krakauer to a federal facility. Then we'll be out of your hair.”

“I don't want you out of my hair, Franny. I want to help you solve this thing.”

She stopped walking, pulled her hands out of her pockets and grabbed my forearms. She was strong. She squeezed, and then she squeezed tighter as she spoke. It felt like blood pressure wrap.

“Hank. Look at me. Listen. The case is solved. I solved it. It's over.”

She released me.

“All you're doing right now is distracting me. And undermining me. It's not helping. It feels destructive and unethical and pathetic and…bad. I think we should stay away from each other for a while.”

“You'll be gone in a while.”

“That's probably for the best, Hank. I'm going back to the real world. I belong there. You belong here. You were looking for a home and you finally found one. That's good for you. I'm happy for you. It's your world. Live in it. Enjoy it, it's beautiful.”

Mike and Cindy Henderson were approaching along the path, their new baby girl, Molly, hugging Cindy's chest in a snugly. They walked slowly, pacing themselves with their ancient collie, Gus. His muzzle was white and his hip dysplasia was worse than ever. But he wagged his tail and trotted over to me.

“You see?” Franny said. “You know everyone. And they all know you. That would be a living Hell for me, Hank. It would drive me insane. But not you. It's Heaven for you.”

I had no answer for her. She was right.

“Hey, Chief,” said Mike. “Did you get a chance to look over my bid? If you let those town buildings sit for another couple of years, it'll be too late for a paint job.”

“Talk to Dan Taylor,” I said. “It's up to the selectmen, now.”

Franny lifted a hand, like she was swearing to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but, then sidestepped the dog and started away. She was gone a second later, jogging toward the parking lot. She had used the crowded path, the flicker of social confusion, and slipped through the open moment like a door. It was already closing behind her.

I stood talking to the Hendersons, admiring the baby, Gus solemnly licking my hand, until I heard the engine note of Franny's car pulling out.

Maybe it was true: maybe I really was nothing more than the Mayor of Whoville, a small-time loser, living in a speck on a thistle. But I was right about Haden Krakauer.

And I was going to prove it.

Part Three:
Paper Covers Rock

Ezekiel Beaumont: Ten Minutes Ago

They met at Altar Rock, deep in the moors, less than a hundred yards away from the spot where Zeke had buried the girl.

This little hill was the perfect venue for a meeting, far from any microphone, solitude guaranteed, with a spectacular three hundred sixty-degree view of the island that meant you could literally see anyone approaching from a mile away. Zeke looked around. Altar Rock was the highest point on Nantucket, just over a hundred feet above sea level. He caught his breath, admiring the view. Rolling hills of dense scrub oak and rosa rugosa, wind-stunted pine trees and bayberry bushes, lush and green after the summer rains, cut by winding dirt roads edged at the horizon by the blue marker of the ocean. There was water everywhere. Half a dozen ponds glittered in the sunlight.

He stepped onto a flat slab of granite, gained an extra two feet. You could feel the smallness of Nantucket from up here and the island's isolation. A gentle breeze touched his face. The only sound was the faint ringing in the chambers of his own brain. He was going over and over what he wanted to say. He knew Scooter could be persuasive, overwhelming. The waiting was worse. By the time he finally saw Scooter's car he had almost lost his nerve

“I can't do this,” he blurted as Scooter climbed the last few feet of the trail.

“What?”

“I can't do this. I can't go through with it.”

“Stop.”

“It's too much, it's too—and I'm losing it, I'm not safe, I'm not reliable now and I—”

“Stop!”

Zeke bit down on the next incoherent sentence, panting.

Scooter stared at him. “What happened?”

“Nothing! Nothing happened. I just—”

“Tell me. You made a mistake. You fucked up. What was it?”

There was no getting around it. Only the truth would convince Scooter. “The girl I was seeing—”

“That Bulgarian whore?”

“She—yes, I guess, but—”

“What about her?”

“She came with me when I—I forgot to plant the tape and when I went back she talked me into letting her come along.”

“Shit.”

“And she saw things, she saw the grenades in the basement, and she—I could tell she—”

“Zeke. Where is she now?”

“She's dead. I killed her.” The words sounded insane. Scooter stared at him with shock and horror and something else, something rich and sweet. Respect? The beginning of a new respect. “I buried her right down there,” Zeke went on. “I almost got caught. There were two rich jerks on fancy bikes…but they didn't see me.”

“Are you certain?”

“Sure I am. I mean…she would have been dug up by now, and the cops—”

“All right.”

“Then I had to go to this big party…I had met one of Vika's customers, at a restaurant, and he invited me to this big fund raiser and he called me, as I was burying the girl—on the Gibson cell, to remind me, to make sure I'd be there and I said yes—”

“Why? Why would you do that?”

“I was—I had to stay in character. And I was flustered. So I went. I just went. Jesus, I still had dirt under my fingernails, and I almost lost it, talking to the police chief. I never killed anyone before. I never…I didn't know what—”

Scooter reached out for Zeke's shoulder. “You almost lost it, but you didn't. That's the point.”

“But the girl. If anyone—”

“The girl was illegal, Zeke. No one cared, no one's going to miss her but her pimp and he's not involving himself with the NPD. If those people live by any rule besides ‘Hurt people who refuse to give you money' it has to be, ‘Avoid the cops.' Am I right?”

“I guess so, but—”

“Forget her. The bitch played you, kid! You got taken by an expert. How does it feel to be on the other side?”

“But she said…she told me—”

“You're pathetic.”

Scooter walked away, studied the roof lines of the houses at the edge of the moors, the sea beyond them. The breeze was freshening, out of the south

“This is getting out of control, Scooter,” Zeke said to his back.

Scooter turned. “Stop it. Stop it and listen. Everything is fine! The plan is working fine. Yeah, the girl could have wrecked it, but she's history now. Forget about her. We're standing on the threshold of big things, great things, Ezekiel. Don't turn away.”

“But all those people—”

“Those people? Those people have been sucking the blood out of this country for decades! They're leeches, Zeke, and you know that, and you know the only way to get rid of a leech is to burn it off.”

“I know, but—”

“And don't forget your old commanding officer. The one who betrayed you, and let them ship you off to Miramar without a second thought. This is all coming down on him, Zeke. We've made sure of that. You've done well. You saved our asses when you terminated that girl. There'll be no way out for him now. Think of it! He'll be vilified and hung in effigy and sent away forever so he can have a lifetime in some supermax jail cell to rue the day he ever crossed us. That's what he has to look forward to. If we stay strong. Can you stay strong, Ezekiel?”

He shook his head. “I don't know. I just don't know anymore.”

“There's something else,” Scooter said. “Something I haven't told you.”

Zeke looked up.

“There's one more guest at the Pops concert, my friend. I just found out a few days ago. A member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, invited by no less a dignitary than Vice President Joseph Biden himself. Oh, yes. Apparently they're old friends, ever since Joe became Chairman of the Foreign Relations committee, after 9/11. They go back a long way. A long, long way.”

Zeke was alert now. Could it be? He felt the thrill in his blood.

“Eddie,” he said.

“Brigadier General Edward Claymore, your erstwhile partner in crime, that's right. The one who got off scot free. The one who made millions on your drug connections while you rotted in jail. He'll be front and center at the concert, my friend. Front and center. Could it be better than that?”

“No,” Zeke whispered.

He breathed the word out and filled his lungs again, as much with hate as with the silky Atlantic air. The hate tasted better. You could feel it infusing the corpuscles like a drug, the best drug, the most addictive drug of all.

“Remember when we used to play rock-paper-scissors? Back in Iraq?”

“Sure. You were teaching me strategy.”

“No. I was teaching you how to read people. How to predict their next move. I remember something you said one day—how rock blunting scissors made sense, and scissors cutting paper. But paper covering the rock you couldn't figure out.”

“Yeah, right. I mean, the rock tears the paper, that's what would really happen. But in the game, paper wins because…the game says so. It's bullshit.”

Scooter stepped up to stand on a flat rock and took a deep breath.

“It may seem that way, Ezekiel. But it's not bullshit at all. In ancient China you made your request to the emperor with a rock. If the answer was yes the rock came back sitting in a piece of paper. If he turned you down, the paper covered the rock. That's where it started. But it means something else to me. The game may be bullshit like you say, but in life, Ezekiel…in life, the paper really can beat the rock—the weak and flimsy and marginalized can take on the solid and powerful, and win. Just ask Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Think about those Lakota and Arapaho Indians charging the 7th Cavalry Regiment at Little Big Horn. Chief Gall and Crazy Horse took Custer down, my friend. I know they lost in the long run, but a Pyrrhic victory still goes in the win column. And goddamn, it does feel sweet when the fight is raging. But you already know that, don't you?”

“What?”

Scooter smiled, “I'll let you in on a secret about yourself, Ezekiel. I'll tell you the real reason killing that girl can't blunt your resolve. Do you think you're ready to hear it?”

He wasn't. But he knew what Scooter was going to say. Somehow he knew already.

“You enjoyed it. Zeke. You liked killing her. It was better than the sex.”

Zeke stared at him, speechless, remembering the feel of her smooth throat under his hands, the spastic kicking of her leg as the light flickered behind her eyes.

“You see? I know you better than you know yourself. We should go our separate ways now, Ezekiel. We both have work to do.”

He walked back to his car, climbed in, and drove away. Zeke watched tail of dust the big car kicked up. It was true, Scooter was right. He had the taste for killing now.

And there was a lot more coming.

Chapter Fifteen

The Best Defense

I knew what I had to do now: start over from scratch, question every assumption, pick apart every conclusion, re-examine every piece of evidence. We had all missed something. No frame is perfect. People make mistakes. Sometimes too much organization and planning is a mistake in itself. You get attached to the way things were supposed to happen, you tighten up and you can't improvise. This person framing Haden Krakauer must have slipped up at some point along the line.

I had to find out where.

I started with the paperwork—the police reports on both bombings, the evidence lists and photographs, the interrogation transcripts. I even reread the journal page Franny had printed off Haden's computer.

Going over it again, I saw the mistake immediately:

I love the bomb. More now then ever before. The sheer surprise of it, the light and the noise, the dislocation. It's the perfect metaphor. Things go bad in an instant. You are never safe. Everything is inevitable in retrospect, but you can't prepare. You expect the worst but you can't imagine it. All memory is ironic. You never knew then what you know now. You scarcely even know it now. Most of the important stuff you've already forgotten.

It wasn't the style—for all I knew this was the way Haden actually wrote. I had never been privy to his journals before. But I knew he was a grammar hound and he would never write “More now then ever before.” First of all, it was a sentence fragment. More importantly, he would never confuse “then” for “than.” He had actually caught that same mistake in one of my poems. The line was underscored with a big red exclamation mark in the margin.

Whoever wrote that journal entry knew what they wanted to say, and they knew how they wanted Haden to look. The only thing they didn't know was Haden himself.

It wasn't evidence I could take to court, but it was a start. No one wanted to hear my theory, but they weren't stopping me either. That was my one tactical advantage No one cared enough about what I was doing to get in my way.

Or so I thought, until the attack.

Taking that morning apart later, the only leak I could find was my phone call to Billy Delavane.

“I didn't tell anyone and neither did you,” he said afterward, when we were both safe and sound, drinking good single malt in his cluttered living room. “That means you had someone's ear at your door. Or else someone bugged the phone. The Feds found a transmitter on my line, Chief. How about yours?”

Tornovitch had made a show of checking all the phones at the station, personally. “Electronic surveillance is a passion of mine, Kennis.” He had told me. I wasn't sure he knew what he was doing, but no one was going to question him.

Too bad, because someone had to have been listening that morning, while I told Billy my plan to revisit the golf course. I wanted to walk the moors behind the clubhouse, slowly and methodically, in daylight this time.

They knew I was going to be there.

So they made some phone calls of their own. And the Bulgarians were waiting for me.

***

I couldn't have told you what I was looking for that day, in the moorlands beyond the golf club property. Looking for something specific is usually a mistake, anyway. Better to just wander around with an open mind.

I saw signs that the JTTF had tramped through—broken bushes and flat city-shoe footprints; a discarded take-out coffee-cup. They obviously hadn't searched with much care or precision. And why should they? They already had their perpetrator, along with that tidy pile of gift-wrapped evidence.

I quartered the dense underbrush north of the club, working my way back toward Polpis Road along the deer paths. It was nearly four o'clock when I reached the construction site. The crew had left for the day, but I could still smell the sawdust in the air. The house rose a full three stories, the open stud skeleton of its future self, built on a gentle rise in the land. The widow's walk would have a spectacular view of Nantucket Sound one day. I could see table saws, step ladders, and other equipment scattered across the plywood subfloor among the wood shavings and the tangled power cords, along with dropped tool belts and discarded bottles of Gatorade and bottled water.

I examined the parking area in front of the front deck. Half a dozen sets of tires had cut their pockmarked runes into the soft dirt, but the vehicles pulled up to the house didn't matter anyway. They had to be workers' trucks. I was looking for someone else who might have parked at the edge of the cleared land and walked cross-country to the golf club.

I didn't have time to find anything though, because the Bulgarians found me first.

There were four of them, obviously foreign, with their bowl hair cuts and stubbly beards, tight jeans, leather jackets and brightly colored, flat-footed basketball sneakers. One of them wore a beret. Another sported a dirty New York Giants cap, obviously scavenged from the dump—not the best way to travel incognito in Patriots country.

I looked up from the tire tracks to see them standing around me in a rough circle. Two of them carried knives. One of them was pointing a Glock nine at me.

I recognized two of them from the Essex Road house. Drug dealers with no drugs to sell.

“Now you really are in trouble,” I said.

The unarmed seemed unimpressed. He said, “Into the building,” and pushed me toward the house.

The one with the gun stood back from the others—there was no chance of jumping him before he pulled the trigger. I'd been shot at before, and taken a bullet. I remembered the flat shock of impact, the nausea that spread along the nerves faster than the pain. Once was enough. A slick jitter slid through my arms into my fingers, down from my groin into my knees and my ankles.

There was no one nearby, no one coming to this job today, no neighbors close enough to help. The Glock was silenced, so they might not even hear the shot as far away as the golf club.

I looked into the Bulgarian's eyes. It was obvious to me and everyone else that he would shoot me just for fun, out of boredom, like Billy Delavane's father, potting rats at the dump.

I scrambled up to the half-finished deck and walked from stud to stud with the four men spread out behind me. When we were deep in the house, I said “What do you want?”

“You hear that, Grigor? He doesn't know what we want!”

“What we want? We want to get paid!”

They all thought this was hilarious.

“Man who pays us—what he wanting. That is question.”

“Your English is good.”

“I am study. Man who pays, he want you to stop.”

The four of them backed me into a chest-high pile of strip oak flooring. There was a hammer on top of the pile, but no way I could grab it in time to use it. A plane droned by overhead. Did I hear something moving in the bushes?

“Stop what?”

“What you do. Make trouble. Ask questions. Poke where you don't be welcome.”

“Sorry. That's my job.”

“Then you need new job! Drive cab like everyone else!”

“Or sell hillbilly heroin to teenagers, like you do?”

“If I had this heroin I would use myself, not sell! Life is hard for us. We need to relax.”

“So you never even grab a free ride with one of your prostitutes?”

“Prostitutes? Those are my sisters! Still—if you like, maybe we can make arrangement—once you heal.”

Another round of laughter.

“Now listen Mr. Police—man who pays, he say to hurt you. Not kill you this time. But hurt you so you remember to keep out of other people business. Give him beating? But everyone would see. Break leg? Everyone would know. So I say, No. Do with secret. In Bulgaria I studied with Mohel. You know what is Mohel? He is man who performs the
brit milah
. You know what is
brit mila
? Circumcision. I leave Sofia because I kill this Mohel and rape daughter. What can I do? She would not marry!”

Another round of laughter.

“Now she marries no one. No one wants girl who is rape. But I know procedure. Yes? That is the word? Procedure.”

He pulled a surgical scalpel out of the side pocket of his jacket. I flinched back involuntarily, and knocked against the pile of lumber.

“Today we perform the bris. Next time we take it all. Eh?”

One of the others edged up next to me, unbuckled my pants, and yanked them down.

“Good,” said the leader, “Fear makes hard. Hard is easier for cut.”

There had been a noise. I heard it again. My head was clanging, but somehow I heard it. Someone else was inside the building.

With two quick flicks of the scalpel the leader cut away my boxers. I could feel the air on me. That was the worst part.

The leader spoke again. “Hold him tight.”

They grabbed my arms. I found my voice. “Don't do this.”

“Then how we get paid, Mr. Police? Who will pay us for do nothing? Hold him tighter.”

The two big men immobilized me. They stank of sweat and cigarettes.

The leader reached between my legs and grabbed me. I felt the cold edge of the blade against my skin. I shook my head, I tried to speak, but nothing came out. I begged him with my eyes.

He grinned. “Now we cut.”

I sensed a movement and glanced over his shoulder. Billy Delavane gave me a maniacal thumbs up. The leader must have sensed something, too. He paused for a moment.

Billy Delavane. I had to be hallucinating.

A second later the air compressor kicked on with a deafening roar. Everyone lurched away from me, screaming like children, mouths gaping open. I couldn't hear anything over the ear-ripping clamor of the big machine. But I knew what it was. I grabbed the hammer and swung it at the leader's head. He ducked. I still connected with his shoulder. The blow knocked him sidewise, and I dove after him as the gun went off. Billy must have slammed into the shooter, because the next round went wild and they were both falling. I whacked the leader's neck and fell across him to chop the hammer into another one's knee. He dropped his knife and crumpled with a howl of pain. I kicked free of my pants and scrambled to my feet.

Billy was on top of the one called Grigor, pounding the hand that held the Glock against a hard edge of wood. The last one faced me, knife against hammer. We circled each other. Billy drilled one last punch, stood up, and the Bulgarian, outnumbered, dropped the knife and bolted. Billy grinned, stepping aside to let me chase him. I lunged forward, hit him full force in the knees, pitched him face-first onto the plywood. He went limp. When I looked up, Billy had the gun.

The compressor turned itself off. The sudden silence was explosive.

Billy let out a war cry that gargled into a laugh. “Goddamn, Chief! I haven't had this much fun since those Le Eme hoods jumped us in Rosarita.” He looked around at the sprawl of inert bodies. “Seriously, though. Nice work. You'd have come in handy with those Mexican Mafia punks, Chief.”

“Thanks.” My voice was shaky. I stumbled past him, picked up my pants and pulled them on.

I leaned against the stack of oak boards, feeling flimsy and feverish. My body jerked, my teeth chattered. I wanted to grab the gun from Billy and empty it into the leader's head, a spasm of deferred shock and rage.

Billy got what I was thinking. “You don't have to kill him, Chief. But you could kick him around a little.”

I stood up straighter, zipped my pants, cinched the belt.“Give me the gun. I have a bundle of flex-cuffs in the trunk of the cruiser. Grab them, will you? I'm parked at the golf club. I'll keep an eye on these guys.”

I reached into my pocket and threw Billy the car keys. He caught them, stepped over the leader's body and handed me the gun, holding it by the barrel.

“Sure thing, Chief. Back in a flash.”

Two of the Bulgarians were stirring, but the leader was still out. I saw the scalpel glinting in the sawdust, and I picked it up. Another shiver ran through me, as if the blade was an animal that could still attack. I held it by the edges of the handle and set it down carefully on the oak boards. It was evidence now, another part of the crime scene. I pulled out my cell and called Kyle Donnelly. I thought of calling Jack, but held off. I wanted the scene taped off and examined, but there was no need for the kind of advanced forensics the JTTF could supply. The criminals were already under arrest, caught in the act with an eyewitness.

Kyle drove out with Barnaby Toll. We left Barney to secure the scene and drove the Bulgarians back to town in two cars.

An hour later they were in jail, and I was drinking a single malt in Billy Delavane's living room. A swell had finally materialized, pushed by a low pressure system off New Jersey. We could hear the continuous boom of the breakers beyond the dunes.

“What were you doing out there?” I asked him

“Looking for you. Just bored and curious, I guess. Never occurred to me that someone might jump you, Chief. That kind of stuff doesn't happen in Nantucket. Or it didn't use to, anyway.”

“It's a new world, Billy. We have three translators in the court house, now—Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. We get 911 calls in more languages than that. We go into every house guns drawn as if a murder was happening because we don't know from the caller whether it's a domestic dispute, or a burglary, or a bird trapped in the kitchen. It's crazy.”

We drank our scotch and listened to the ocean.

Driving back into town, I had to pull over, just past the dump. There's a little dirt turnout that the NPD uses as a speed trap. I sat there while a sluice of nausea heaved through me. It was like being seasick on the ferry as the big boat pitched in the swells. I gripped the wheel, trembling, watching the cars slow down as they drove by. They could have been drag racing that afternoon, but they didn't know it. I read about some town that set up a replica cop car on the shoulder of the road. It controlled the traffic just fine for more than a month, until it got blown over in a storm. That was how I felt, sitting there—like a plywood cut-out of myself, knocked flat by the wind.