Dead Silence (20 page)

“Yeah, yeah.” The man still faced the mansion but his breathing was slowing. “Since that morning, I’ve been a dead man just waiting for the lights to go out.”

I glanced toward the cottage, hoping Tomlinson wouldn’t choose that moment to exit and call my name. I was calculating the possibilities. Virgil Sylvester would either come at me with the gaff, or charge the house, or realize that attacking was pointless and contrive an excuse for doing nothing.

I relaxed a little when he turned and said, “You really a cop?”

“No. Someone asked me to help find the boy. He’s fourteen. Lives in Minnesota, but has an Oklahoma accent.”

“Why tell me?”

“He might still be around.”

The man nodded as if it made sense. “I can’t picture anybody being friend to a child killer.”

“I’m not. I don’t know the person who killed Annie.”

“Looking for a missing child, it’s the only hell I believe in. You think one of the summer people took the boy?”

“If I was sure, I think I’d ask to borrow that gaff.”

Sylvester faced me, and I could smell his clothing again. “Sounds like you mean it. But you don’t. You’re just trying to talk me out of it.”

“I’d want someone to talk me out of it. Kill a man for revenge and he lives with you the rest of your life.”

“Let the cops handle it, I suppose?”

There wasn’t much I could say to that.

“You don’t know what it’s like out here. The power these summer people have.”

On the drive to this remote peninsula, we had passed estates that were small sovereignties, mansions as ornate as cathedrals, visible only because their twelve-foot hedges were frost-barren.

“A man can’t fight that kind of power. Since Annie died, I’ve visited family in California . . . Texas, too. Rich people everywhere, but it’s spread out. Not like here, the Hamptons. I saw an iceberg once, fishing in Nova Scotia. It comes into my head when I try to tell people. Peaks lit up like fire at sunrise, but the ocean was dark under the surface, a whole mountain of ice down there, and cold. It’s that kind of power they got. Even when they use it, you don’t see it.”

Sylvester looked at the mansion. “Is someone up there? Besides the caretakers, I mean.”

“A friend of mine.”

He said, “One of the Tomlinsons.” It wasn’t a question.

“My friend didn’t kill your daughter. Even if he’d lied to me, I would know.”

Because I had provided a reason to retreat, I wasn’t surprised when Sylvester used me as a target for self-contempt. “If you’re such a fuckin’ genius about who did what, why is that boy still missing?”

I said, “You’ve got a point. I shouldn’t be standing here wasting time.”

The man said, “Hah! Cops”—I was watching the way he held the gaff—“they sell coffee and doughnuts uptown at the 7-Eleven.”

“Probably my next stop—once you’re gone.”

“Uh-huh, now you’re tellin’ me to leave. I’m fifth-generation Bonnacker. My people killed whales on this beach.”

I said, “Virgil, if I ever hear anything about your daughter, I’ll find a way to get in touch. I’ll let you know, okay?”

The man appeared to sag. I had robbed him of his anger. “You cops, you think you know so much. Let me tell you something about them Tomlinsons. They’re evil. Big brains and dried-up hearts. You know how the old man made his fortune?”

I did, but he didn’t expect an answer.

“It’s blood money. Three generations fed on it. Everything crazy all rolled into one family, that’s the Tomlinsons. I should know. I worked for those sonuvabitches. When one of them murdered my Annie, they gave me a month’s bonus and fired me after they was all safe, gone back to Florida for winter.”

T
omlinson’s brother, Norvin, had been a member of an elite secret fraternity, Skull and Bones, at Yale. Tomlinson hadn’t volunteered the information, which irritated me. I knew because of things I saw in Norvin’s room.

Tomlinson pretended not to hear me say, “I’ve read that Skull and Bones stole Geronimo’s skull. Pancho Villa’s, too. They have a place off campus, not a typical frat house, called the Tomb. Some say they still have the skulls.”

I was looking at a photograph of fifteen young men standing in front of a grandfather clock. Norvin Tomlinson was near the center. The family resemblance was eerie. Norvin was a little taller, with short pale hair, but the haunted eyes were familiar. The brothers had the same look of sinew, bone and muscle.

Norvin was near the fraternity banner, which I recognized. It was similar to a Masonic symbol I had seen on rings: a primitive skull and crossbones, the lower jaw of the skull missing. The number 322 was prominent.

My uncle had been a Freemason, as was Hooker Montbard. He wore an antique Skull and Bones ring. It was Hooker’s interest in Masonry and the Knights Templar that had fired his conviction that artifacts from the Crusades were somewhere in the jungles of South America.

I stood, looking at the photo, until Tomlinson finally had no choice but to comment.

“That was Norvin’s senior year at Yale. It’s a weird fraternity, but our father was so stoked he bought Norry an MG convertible when he was tapped.”

“Tapped?”

“Chosen. Members of Skull and Bones are considered chosen people. I didn’t realize it’s such a huge deal until later, because Norry’s best friend was tapped the same year.”

Tomlinson pointed to one of the men in the photo. It was Nelson Myles, he said, the man who owned Shelter Point. I now understood the horse trainer’s reaction.

“They were our neighbors practically, that’s why I took it for granted being tapped. It seemed common. But it’s not.”

I turned to him. “You don’t think I’ve heard of Skull and Bones? Why didn’t you tell me your brother was a member?”

“I didn’t think it was important.”

I said, “Hey, old buddy, it’s
me
.”

His smile was a mix of chagrin and admission. “Sorry. I’ve got a problem with power, you know that. The Bonesmen scare the hell out of me. That fraternity produced how many presidents and vice presidents? A couple of Supreme Court justices and at least two directors of the Central Intelligence Agency. In almost two hundred years, no Bonesman has ever gone public with the fraternity’s secrets. Do you have any idea how much power they have?”

Fifteen minutes earlier, I had heard Virgil Sylvester say something similar about the Hamptons.

“But, hey, I
did
tell you I’m pretty sure Norvin was recruited by the CIA. It was almost the same as telling you.”

Sort of. Skull and Bones is a favorite of conspiracy kooks. The fraternity’s tradition of secrecy invites wild theories, but so do the few known facts. The OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, was founded by Ivy League graduates. Most, if not all, Bonesmen are offered interviews by the various intelligence agencies. The amount of wealth and power the fraternity wields is remarkably disproportionate to its tiny membership.

Even so, the theories are ridiculous. I don’t believe that secret societies hatch international plots, for the same reason I don’t use comic books as research material. When I meet more than three people who can keep a secret when their lives aren’t on the line, I’ll starting giving conspiracy theories another look.

Tomlinson said, “They recruited us heavy back at Harvard, too, of course, spook agencies. Thank God I couldn’t remember my Social Security number or they might have hired me full-time instead of just cashing in on my special skills. But you know about that.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know.” Tomlinson’s credentials to lecture on clairvoyance were better than most. He had participated in a program called Stargate by its many critics. The Pentagon preferred Asymmetrical Intelligence Gathering Research, and funded the study after discovering the Soviets were recruiting telepathic savants to work as “psychic spies.”

This wasn’t conspiracy theory fantasy, it was documented fact.

My friends in the intelligence community had confirmed that Tomlinson turned in one of the highest scores ever recorded on what must have been a bizarre test used to cull prospects.

We were in Norvin’s room—an apartment, really. One of several in the family’s thirty-room “summer residence.” The place had been built during the days of mustang capitalism, back when the Du Ponts, Rockefellers and Kennedys were making their fortunes.

Tomlinson had introduced me to the family maid, Greta Finnmark, now one of the caretakers. Good-looking older woman, blondish and busty, with Nordic eyes and a Nordic accent, who had to have been a knockout in her day. She slipped her arm through Tomlinson’s, cooing and smiling, saying, “Guards, my dear sweet boy, it is so good to have you home!”

Guards
, short for
Guardian
—her strange pet name for Sighurdhr.

“Because, even as a child, he was always looking after people, trying to raise their spirits if they were sad,” she explained to me. Sincere, too, because she didn’t get it when I replied, “Oh, yeah, he’s a regular Boy Scout. Still raising everything he can.”

Greta led us through the restaurant-sized kitchen, then turned us loose in the first of two great halls. The furniture was covered with tarps, and it was cold as a cave. Greta had confirmed that the main house was rented each summer, then closed in the off-season.

“The rent charged by your family’s trust company is incredible!,” she had said. “For the same money, you could buy a house most places. But they pay. Oh yes, the rich people from New York, they wait in line to pay!”

There was a grand piano near the fireplace. Tomlinson tossed back the cover and played the first plaintive notes of “Clair de Lune” before he noticed that I was staring at a painting over the mantle. It had to be his great-grandfather, the man who’d built the estate. Remove the tux, add a decade of tropic seas, taverns, midnight water, rock ’n’ roll plus salt-bleached hair, and it was Tomlinson.

I wasn’t surprised when my pal stood and motioned me along, saying, “Speak of the devil, huh? Say good-bye to Hank—friendly name for a cold-hearted genius.”

“That was your father’s name, wasn’t it?”

“No, Dad’s name was Hank, as in
Hank.
The old man’s name was Hank, as in
Henry.
I told you how he made his dough. Blood money, which is why I’ll never take a cent of it.”

There it was again.

During World War I, the elder Tomlinson had made a fortune off of royalties from a couple of patents. Something to do with a synchronizing device that allowed airplanes to fire machine guns through spinning propellers.

I had read that the invention had changed the course of the war—maybe history—and accounted for huge kill ratios. In that war alone, the invention had facilitated many thousands of deaths.

From the great hall, Tomlinson led me to the west wing, which was sealed by massive doors. He was perturbed they were locked. “It’s the only modern section of the house, if you catch my meaning. There’s a five-car garage, so if anyone’s around . . .” I didn’t hear the rest because he jogged back to the kitchen for the key. But Greta said she didn’t have it.

“She’s got keys,” Tomlinson told me as I followed him outside, “but she can’t let me use them. It’s the same reason she pretends not to know anything about my brother or father. She’s scared.”

I said, “If her job’s on the line, can you blame her?”

“For sure. I loved that lady, man. With a rack like that, who wouldn’t? She was my wet nurse.”

I said, “Huh?”

He wagged his eyebrows—
End of subject
—before saying, “If there’s a trust company running the place, it means my father’s still alive. Hell, he could be on the property right now and she’d be a fool to tell me. Or my brother could be holed up here. Fifteen acres—there used to be anyway—including two guesthouses, staff cottages and a machine shop the size of a barn.

“Old Hank would crap his burial skivvies if he knew the place was being rented. Commoners? Yuppies? God forbid, a Protestant. Damn, I should’ve brought a flashlight. But you’ve got one, I bet. The ultimate flashlight snob.”

I said, “I do, and you might be right,” as I took a mini ASP Triad from my pocket. Palm-sized, but it fired a beam so bright it was considered dangerous. I shined it through a garage window. Empty. Next, we went to the machine shop. It was a museum piece of 1890s technology. Industrial lathes, metal stock, instruments for precise threading and tolerances. Both guesthouses were locked, no sign of activity through the windows.

In a wooded area was a cabin where Tomlinson said he’d often slept on summer nights. I watched him stand on tiptoes, feeling along an overhead beam, until he said, “I’ll be damned,” then showed me what looked like a Wonder Bread bag twisted into a knot. Inside were two brittle Trojan packets and a rusted harmonica. Unfortunately, the harmonica still worked.

Outside was a faded outline of a catcher painted on the wall. Sixty feet six inches away was an indentation where there had once been a pitching rubber. Tomlinson stopped blowing on the harmonica long enough to tell me, “Fifty to a hundred pitches a day,” then showed me where his first and only dog, Elvis, a springer spaniel, was buried.

He was right, the estate was huge, at one time a self-sufficient village. It would take a full day to search the place.

We returned to the main house. As I followed Tomlinson up a winding staircase, I said, “When you told me rich, I had no idea,” hoping he’d put the damn harmonica away if I kept him talking.

He clomped up the steps, eyes sweeping over familiar details. “The only difference between doves and pigeons is where they crap. I was one of the fortunate ones—materialism sucks if you’ve had everything. Plus, my old man made us get jobs, so I learned at an early age that employment sucks, too. I didn’t choose to be a boat bum, God chose me. He replaced my thirst for status with a thirst for beer. It’s a calling, sort of like religion or drug exploration.”