Nantucket Five-Spot (8 page)

“So I'm picking up his dry-cleaning?”

“You know Jack. That's just talk. There'll be a lot for you to do. There already is. He wants a suspect in custody when he talks to the press tomorrow, with the watch and the voice machine in an evidence locker.”

Haden came back to the car, and folded himself in beside me.

“What's happening?”

“How's Patterson?”

Haden shrugged. “He'll live. So?”

I keyed the car and backed out of the space. “The Joint Terrorism Task Force arrives tomorrow,” I said. “Tornovitch wants Billy in jail tonight.”

“He wants to set the bail at half a million dollars,” Franny added.

Haden laughed. “That should work.”

“Why wouldn't it?”

“Billy looks like a beach bum. That's the old money look around here. Drive a beater and let your house fall apart around you. Get your clothes at the take or leave it pile. They don't show off. The new rich people pretend you're rich, too—‘Come to Gstaad with us for the weekend.' As if you could. The old money act poor. That's the difference.”

Franny gave him a slow, assessing nod. “You've made quite a study of it, Lieutenant Krakauer.”

“Well, this is the place to do it, Agent Tate.”

I blew out a breath. “The bail seems high, anyway. Given the evidence.”

We were rolling down Pleasant Street, heading back to the Harbor House. Franny started to say something, stopped, started again. “There's more.”

“What?”

“I searched Delavane's e-mail records.”

“Since when? You told me you were just thinking about it.”

“Jack put me on it as soon as we could boot up a computer. I spent most of the afternoon working it. I wasn't supposed to tell you—Jack wasn't planning to use the information unless enough other evidence developed and we could show just cause.”

I stopped at the corner of Pleasant Street and Upper Main—one intersection where we actually needed a stop sign. A couple of pickup trucks rattled by on the cobblestones, heading for the center of town.

“It usually works the opposite way,” I said.

We all sat in silence for a few seconds. Franny didn't make the rules, but she had always been expert at breaking them. I turned the car, and we jostled over the cobbles toward Gardner Street. I knew what Haden wasn't saying. I'd be hearing it all in full detail, later, anyway. He tended to be fairly old school about the Bill of Rights.

“The e-mails are bad, Hank,” Franny said. “He's constantly talking about the island being ruined and getting rid of the rich people, ‘burning off the leeches before they suck the island dry.' And using bombs to ‘scare off the parasites' and wreck the property values here. That's what I found in his sent messages file.”

I pulled over. A line of Escalades and Navigators swerved around us. At the back of the line was a battered Chevy Metro, a lone hold-out from the pre SUV era. Finally the street behind us was empty.

“Billy talks about bombs?” I said.

“He's obsessed with them, Hank. Read the e-mails yourself. I have the printouts at the station.”

I pulled back out into the street. I drove a couple of blocks before I said the obvious thing. “So Tornovitch was right.”

“It happens.” After a little silence, she added, “He thinks like a terrorist.”

“Tell me about it.”

We dropped Haden off at the station and I drove Franny back to the hotel. We got out and she hugged me.

“Thanks for a lovely evening,” I said into her hair.

She disengaged an inch. “You still owe me dessert.”

“And I had such a good one in mind. We could have had it in your room.”

“Not tonight.”

She pulled me toward her and kissed my cheek. I kissed her neck. We couldn't seem to align our faces properly. Franny was good at that.

She reared her head back and our eyes met. She looked away first. “Go do your job. I'm going to watch C-Span for a few hours and write my report.”

“Party girl.”

“You have no idea, buddy. I may iron my work clothes, too. And floss. It's gonna be wild.”

“Good night, Franny.”

I grabbed her one more time.

Then I drove to Madaket and arrested Billy Delavane.

Ezekiel Beaumont: Ten Weeks Ago

Zeke Beaumont stood at the rail of the Eagle and watched Nantucket slide toward him across the harbor. It was Daffodil Day, a chilly April 28th and the local holiday had packed the boat with tourists. Zeke counted half a dozen antique cars on the vehicle deck, polished and preening, draped with baskets of yellow flowers, tucked between the Stop&Shop trucks and the eighteen-wheel lumber trailers.

The little town was crowded when he ambled off the boat, the cool wind touching his face. The Chamber of Commerce had dressed up the wide, cobblestoned Main Street today as an antique car showroom. Each Buick Roadmaster and Willys Jeep and Winton Flyer, each VW camper and wood-sided station wagon festooned with yellow ribbons and daffodils. The street swarmed with people, grandmothers in straw hats, Dads carrying their kids on their shoulders, gangs of boys circling packs of girls, people greeting their friends from the beds of World War II vintage pickup trucks, a thousand cell phones, texting and tweeting, or taking pictures.

Zeke walked awhile, away from the center of town, trying to get a feel for the place, past meticulously restored grand old houses standing side by side with teetering derelict piles that looked like the mansions in a gothic horror story. Other homes perched on temporary wooden footings, windows impaled by rusting steel I-beams, their foundations excavated for new basements. It reminded him of Charleston, where he'd grown up, all that encapsulated money, newly released, the kids high-fiving each other at grandma's funeral, waiting out the probate court, taking Granny's haunted relic and converting it to cash.

Zeke felt a quick twinge of Scooter's loathing for them all, the spoiled and the spurious, the happy ones, the lucky ones. Zeke smiled to himself.

Be patient, Scooter.

Happiness is fleeting and luck can change.

Zeke rented himself a car and took a quick tour. The grotesque, oversized police station on Fairgrounds Road. Security would be state of the art, so he'd need a clever little con to get into that fortress. The Garrison house off Polpis Road, not nearly as secure as their bigger place in Newton. Not that the fancy Walnut Street palazzo had given him much trouble. The Garrisons turned their high-end alarm system off when they came home, so all Zeke had to do was wait until three in the morning, people are most deeply asleep at that hour, pick a few locks, tiptoe into Debbie's room, and spend five minutes with her iPhone.

That was it.

Then he was gone, slipping out the way he'd come in, nothing disturbed and nobody the wiser. It was all so easy, that was the part that shocked him. He had almost burst out laughing in little Debbie's bedroom.

The next house on his Nantucket itinerary turned out to be even less of a challenge. The neighbors had already gathered on the green lawns at either side of Milestone Road, where it swelled into a broad, tree-shaded Main Street on its final run into the little town of Siasconset, organizing tables and blankets and lawn chairs, baskets of food, coolers of wine and beer.

The police had already set up barricades closing the avenue to normal traffic, but Zeke told the uniformed kid on duty that he was renting a home on Morey Lane. Zeke calibrated his tone to a perfect pitch of potential threat. For the wealthy, anger was a weapon you brandished but rarely used. The kid didn't want any trouble. He backed down, moved the barrier to let Zeke through.

Zeke nodded, and a few seconds later he turned down Morey Lane, looking for the address. He found it, parked fifty feet farther on, and walked back. He glanced around—the street was deserted for the moment. He slipped through the untrimmed hedge under the peeling arbor, and stood facing the old gray-shingled house with its tilting shutters, its twin dormers like a pair of startled eyes. Even the man's house looked drunk.

Zeke found the key in the shower and let himself in, exhaling a short laugh. You had to love small-town life.

He found what he was looking for in the first five minutes. The rest was just set dressing.

Driving to the third house, at the west end of the island, a sense of correctness settled on him. This place deserved what it was going to get, over and above Zeke's personal vendetta. All these weathered houses, plain and unadorned with their gray shingles and simple white trim, there was something so goddamned smug about the fake austerity of them, and the entitled careless pharaohs in faded denim who sipped their drinks on the porch. Scooter was right about that.

From what Zeke had read, he expected the third house to be full of kids, but they surfed around here, and he could hear the waves booming across the dunes. Between that and the Daffodil Day pig-out he had the whole neighborhood to himself. The house was unlocked. Of course it was.

Zeke found the wallet in the front pocket of a pair of blue jeans on the bedroom floor. The temptation to steal it tickled him for a second, but timing was everything. All he needed now was the credit card number and the security code off the back.

When he saw the computer, he gagged. Who the hell were these people? Where did they think they were living? Mayberry RFD?

This idiot had all his passwords written on Post-it notes stuck to the side of the screen, complicated ones with lots of numbers and punctuation marks. He scribbled the passwords and left.

He drove too fast on the way back to Madaket Road, and banged the undercarriage on a couple of deep craters in the dirt track, but he didn't care. He was flying. Everything was going perfectly. He was charmed this morning. He could do no wrong. Maybe that was why he wound up shooting his mouth off again, talking too much, getting himself in trouble. He just couldn't resist.

He made his mistake with a real estate lady, Elaine Bailey her name was. She was showing him the house on Deacon's Way and made some comment about the area between the Washing Pond stand-pipe and the microwave tower on Eel Point Road. “Very exclusive,” she said. “Very desirable. But in my mother's day no one substantial would even consider living out here. My grandmother called it ‘utility acres.' That's how things change.”

“Now it would be a perfect spot for Occupy Nantucket,” Zeke had blurted. “I guess no one ever thought of occupying Nantucket, though.”

“I don't think that movement could ever take hold out here.” She drilled him with a long, assessing look. She was smart and tough, good-looking for her age but hard-edged, packed, constructed.

“It's quiet.” He tried to shift the conversation to neutral topics. Occupy Nantucket? What the fuck was wrong with him? But he had wanted to needle her, to shake her up a little, crack that porcelain composure.

“You can't buy that for any amount of money,” she said.

“I know, believe me. Where I live, in Westwood, in Los Angeles…I'm half a mile from Supplevita Avenue and you can't open the windows on the west side of the apartment without hearing the San Diego Freeway.”

She laughed. “Supple Vita? What a city! Even your street names sound like health drinks.”

He sensed that he'd fucked up at that moment. Later on, in his room at the Jared Coffin House, he went on line and confirmed it. He'd take the next flight off the island, before he could make any more mistakes. He was okay so far—the blunder didn't seem to have registered. Elaine Bailey might not even remember what he said. She was much more interested in the rental agreement than any of the small talk that preceded it. She was happy. She was starting her rental season ‘with a bang.' Zeke had to smile.

He couldn't have put it better himself.

Part Two:
Scissors Cut Paper

Chapter Seven

Tourist Season

The rest of Tornovitch's DHS team arrived the next morning, along with a pair of special agents from the FBI, a contingent of State Police, three bomb techs, a group of surveyors from the Army Corps of Engineers, a quiet man named Gould from the Secret Service, a fleet of local press trucks, reporters from every national newspaper—and my ex-wife.

She had my kids with her, that was the bright spot. They had been visiting her parents in Los Angeles for a few weeks, as they did every summer. I met them at the airport. The NTSA had tripled the security and there were National Guard soldiers, armed and in full uniform, patrolling the terminal.

“Well, this is going to wreck the rental season.” Miranda gave me a brief hug as we waited for the luggage. The kids grabbed my legs.

No matter what subject Miranda was talking about, she wound up talking about real estate. I could laugh about it now. Someone was dying of cancer? Were they selling the house? 9/11? Oh, it was devastating for the real estate market. Chernobyl? You can pick up a nice three bedroom ranch style next to the reactor for a song these days.

Miranda was in her element on Nantucket. She was fascinated with the wealthy people she worked for. She told me one day after a parent teacher conference, that the man to whom she'd just sold a house made—she had actually figured it out with a calculator—he made my yearly salary every three and a half hours. Of course that was before my cost-of-living raise.

I looked down at the kids, Tim in shorts and a t-shirt, Caroline in a summer shift that Miranda must have paid a small fortune for. I couldn't begrudge her the expense, though I knew Caroline would grow out of the dress in a month or two. Buying kid's clothes was one of life's great pleasures, fleeting as a four-star restaurant dinner, doomed as a sandcastle. Tim's brown hair was wind scattered, Caroline's red hair was tied into a pair of perfect braids. But they were a matched set of smiling round faces. You could almost forget they were at war with each other.

“Did you get us something?” Tim asked.

“Hey—you went off-island. You're supposed to bring me something.”

That gave him pause. “How about a hug?”

“Sounds good.” I lifted him up, thinking, whoa, he's getting big. He was a sturdy little eleven-year-old, but he'd been a baby last week. Time was going by so fast it felt like a wind blowing hard out of the north, pulling the air out of your chest.

“I got you something,” Caroline said. Tim writhed in my arms to stare at her, outraged at this bit of sibling one-upmanship. “When we were at Trader Joe's.” She wrestled her back pack off and rummaged inside. After a few seconds she pulled out a bag of unsulfured dried apricots.

“Your favorite!” she crowed. It was true. She'd been studying my vices.

“I saw the new Ian McEwan novel at Barnes & Noble,” Tim said. “”I wanted to buy it for you. But I didn't have any money.”

“You spent your allowance,” Miranda pointed out.

“I saved mine,” Caroline said smugly.

Tim thrashed for a second, trying to get loose. I knew he wanted to pounce.

“I didn't even know there was a new Ian McEwan novel,” I lied. “So that's a great present. We'll go to Mitchell's tomorrow and pick it up. Maybe we can find you a book, too.”

“What about me?” Caroline demanded.

“Both of you. We'll have our own private book fair.”

“You spoil them.” Miranda grabbed the first of the suitcases.

“Oh yeah. Books. The scourge of today's youth.”

I grabbed the other suitcases and we started out through the terminal toward the parking lot, the kids dancing in front of us, the squabble forgotten. They stopped to pet a pair of Bernese mountain dogs. We paused and watched them charming the harried woman holding the leashes. Tim said something and she laughed, while the dogs licked both sides of Caroline's face.

Standing there, it occurred to me that having children made regret impossible—at least for all the time up until the exact moment of their conception. If you had done anything different, or even done the same things in different order, your children might not exist. Certainly, given the way you rolled the genetic dice every time sperm met egg, they wouldn't be the same people. Looked at that way, not even a disastrous marriage could be considered a waste. I glanced over at Miranda, seething with impatience, worried about dog germs, distrusting strangers, eager to get back to the office and check the new listings. Across the floor, Caroline was teaching the dogs to give their paws, shaking them solemnly as if the dogs were graduating from high school and she was handing out diplomas.

I slung a duffel bag over my shoulder, took Miranda's arm and guided her toward the kids, thinking—an ordeal and a tragedy—but not a waste.

I drove them back to Miranda's house on Rugged Road, and promised again to look for a new apartment. Mine only had two bedrooms, and technically the kids were roommates when they stayed with me. They were getting a little old for that, and in practice I often wound up yielding my room to one of them and sleeping on the couch. It wasn't a particularly comfortable couch.

I got the luggage inside and hugged the kids while Miranda checked her messages. I hurried out and no one tried to stop me. They'd all seen the newspapers and the ubiquitous TVs in the airports. Nantucket was the lead story this morning.

“Are there really terrorists on Nantucket, Daddy?” Tim had asked me in the drive home.

“I don't know. I don't think so. There's at least one crazy person.”

Caroline closed the subject. “Daddy will catch them, whoever they are.”

Miranda gave me a quick skeptical look but said nothing. I could have told her we already had a suspect in custody, but I had a feeling it would come back to haunt me. Despite the mounting evidence, I still didn't buy Billy Delavane as the mad bomber, though I hadn't read his e-mails yet and I wouldn't get a chance to this morning. I had to check in with the Army Corps of Engineers at the Steamship Wharf, and get back to the station. Billy was sitting in one of the holding cells there, waiting for his first interrogation. He had waived his right to have a lawyer present. His point was logical but naïve—there was no way he could incriminate himself, since he was innocent, and he wanted his family lawyer more productively occupied, getting ready for the bail hearing that afternoon.

I was going to be present at the questioning, but they hadn't let me see Billy since I'd brought him in the night before. Too bad. I would have told him that being innocent wasn't necessarily going to help him with Jack Tornovitch.

My first stop was the Steamship Wharf. Floyd Pollack, the chief engineer, gave me the bad news. Two of the cement support dolphins were going to have to be replaced, forcing the Authority to run the big car ferries and the fast boat out of the same slip for at least a month. The timing couldn't be worse.

But maybe that was the point.

When I got to the station, a State Police car was blocking the entrance to the parking lot. Two of Lonnie Fraker's boys, in full leather and crew cuts, dangling guns and handcuffs, sauntered up to my cruiser. They looked like twins, though one of them must have been from off-island, since I didn't recognize him. Joey Thurston, the local boy, approached the driver's side of my car. I rolled down the window and let in a dense wedge of warm air.

“I gotta see some ID, Chief.”

“Move the car Joey. I'm late.”

He just stood there. “Sorry. Chief. It's the new rules. Everybody has to show ID.”

“So you don't let in any impostors?”

He shuffled his feet, glancing back at his new partner. “So I don't get in trouble.”

I flashed my ID. The other kid took it out of my hands and examined it. You couldn't be too careful where National Security was at stake. Finally they moved their car and I drove through. There was another security check point at the side door. No one had looked at my badge with such interest since my kids on the first day I got it.

Inside, Haden Krakauer wasn't any happier than I was. Strangers were giving him orders, he hated his new cubicle, missed his Mr. Coffee, and pined for his FAX machine. There wasn't much I could do for him. I was outranked, too.

The JTTF had Billy in the main conference room on the first floor. Franny and Tornovitch were inside with Lonnie Fraker, the Secret Service guy and a couple of FBI agents. The two FBI guys, Daly and Knightley, stood with their arms crossed against the far wall. All the stupid jokes had already been made about that unfortunate piece of nomenclature—Lonnie referred to them as ‘24/7.' Daly was white, Knightley was black. They looked like the strong side of the Clemson offensive line. By contrast, Gould, the Secret Service agent, resembled nothing so much as my son's new math teacher—small but lumpy, with horn-rim glasses and a comb-over. Still, he seemed much more dangerous than the FBI goons. And he was smoking with impunity. I knew that had to be driving Lonnie crazy. He was allergic to cigarette smoke.

A big man with a reedy nasal voice, Lonnie was a startling mass of frailties—allergies to everything, weak wrists, fallen arches, asthma. He was always at the chiropractor or the acupuncturist, always coming down with some new ailment, from shingles to swine flu. He coughed deliberately, as everyone turned their attention to me and Gould exhaled another cloud. It made me want a cigarette myself, but then again, what didn't?

Jack and Franny had placed themselves seated across the desk from Billy. Jack sported his usual suit. Franny wore what must have been DHS dress code: khaki pants, a button-down shirt and a mannish brown jacket suitable for hiding a shoulder holster. Billy's jeans and a vintage Killen Construction “Death and Resurrection” t-shirt broadcast his contempt for the proceedings. If the JTTF meant to intimidate him, they were failing.

Billy was only forty but already graying at the temples, a twisted cord of sunburned muscle, his dark blue eyes clear and steady. He had surfed all over the world—the North Shore of Hawaii, Indonesia, Peru; big waves on remote coral atolls, cold winter heavies among the rocks and sharks at Mavericks. After the ten-wave hold downs in forty degree water, this motley law-enforcement clusterfuck must have seemed like a bad joke. But he was in trouble, and I hoped he knew it.

I eased myself inside and took up a position against the wall next to Lonnie.

I was late. The show had already begun.