Digging Too Deep (11 page)

“He went to Saddleback College, working his way through school with a job on the ferry.”

Tosca offered the detective a drink, and he opted for water. She poured herself a small glass of mead and sat back down. “All right. So what are the new questions you have for me?”

“You seem to be a pretty observant lady. Have you noticed anyone strange on Isabel Island?” Aside from yourself, he refrained from adding.

He could see she appeared to be considering the question carefully before answering.

“Frankly, detective, as you know, I am a newcomer here. There are cultural differences that strike me as odd, but to you they’d be quite normal, and I respect that. So, no, I can’t say I’ve noticed anyone strange, certainly not anyone a Brit would consider eccentric. We’ve a ton of those back home. I think some of the neighbors find me a little unusual when they hear me swear in Cornish, but I use very mild swear words. My parasol, too, seems to evoke comment.”

Parnell consulted his notebook. Maybe he should quit while he was ahead. Her formal manner of speaking was getting to him. Two more questions, and I’m out of here, he decided.

“Are you sure there was only one coin in the boy’s shoe? I know you told us so, but please think back. It’s a Greek coin, an aegina, by the way. “

“Really? Are you a numismatist?”

“Uh, I consulted a local coin collector, Gustave Vernays. Are you sure, Mrs. Trevant, there weren’t more coins?”

“Just the one, detective. I’m positive. Did you examine the other shoe and the toe part of both?”

“Yes. Nothing.”

“Did you find fingerprints in the ferry office?”

“No. Everything was wiped clean.”

“Who does that coin belong to?”

“Still working on it.” Parnell found himself answering the questions she threw at him before realizing he shouldn’t have. He flipped his notebook closed and stood up to leave.

“Detective, I would really like to look at your report,” said Tosca. “I can come along to the police station right now.”

“Sorry, ma’am. The file is confidential. Thanks for your help.”

He ran down the outside steps as fast as he could, got into his car and headed for the police station, breathing a sigh of relief.

After Detective Parnell left, Tosca returned to her laptop. She’d already worked on the scene of the ferry boat crime for the article she intended to send to her editor
.
Perhaps Stuart will take me more seriously now, she thought. He’ll surely promote me to crime reporter right here in America, but first I have to solve the puzzle of the finger bones. Shouldn’t be that difficult. All I have to do is what I’ve done for years, snoop around and figure it out. Stuart will appreciate the fact that Newport Beach and Isabel Island, with their reputation as playgrounds for millionaires, are the perfect setting for a nasty murder.

The seafront homes, the expensive yachts, the chic boutiques, exclusive tennis, golf, and sailing clubs, and the ritzy restaurants will all intrigue him as the backdrop for a killing. When she’d traveled to the private West Indies island of Mustique for the first time to cover Princess Margaret’s vacation there and later Prince William’s visit, her editor had impressed upon her the need to describe Mustique’s exotic, tropical beauty for her readers,.

But she’d also written about its seamier side and discovered she was fascinated with the criminal element. Now, on a platter, she had just been handed the golden opportunity to further her ambition by reporting on not one but possibly two crimes. But although the ferry boat fare-taker was a definite murder, and the skeleton fingers in Professor Whittaker’s garden needed to be sorted out, she was still worried about the royal lawsuit.

Her editor’s earlier email had been unnerving. “We have our solicitors talking to the palace again this week. Is there anything else you’ve neglected to tell me about what was going on in that room on the fourth floor? Are you positive about whom you saw? What a bloody mess.”

“Stuart,” Tosca wrote back, “of course I am positive. Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve seen the royals often enough to know who’s who. It’s not my fault I opened the wrong door. The footman pointed one out and then scuttled off like a scared mouse. Now look, I am involved in figuring out not one but two murders here. You’ll have a story soon. Toodle-oo, love.”

She continued to tinker with her description of Isabel Island, adding a few historical details about the decades-old ferry and its daily trips across the sheltered bay. She wrote a paragraph on the stately palm trees shipped in from Fiji, thought by tourists to be home grown, and she composed a few sentences praising the nearby mountains and canyons while noting that the lack of rain kept them more golden than green.

Tosca described the students who took summer jobs as surf instructors, busboys and lifeguards, how the ferry boat murder was the first to be committed on the enchanting island, and the luxury lifestyle of Newport Beach. Her words painted a stark contrast between the beauty of the bay and the horror of the crime, but Tosca knew she couldn’t write more until she found out what the police had discovered.

She decided to send the half-finished draft to Stuart right away and get his comments. He answered almost immediately.

“Why would our newspaper be interested in murders in America?” he wrote. “They have dozens every day, I understand, especially in Los Angeles.”

“Not with England’s top gossip columnist hot on the trail, “ Tosca wrote back. “I am personally involved in the case.”

“All right, all right. Don’t get your dander up. Let me know when you’ve brought the murderer to heel. Shouldn’t take you more than a day or two, the way you jump to conclusions.”

After reading her editor’s sarcastic words, Tosca closed the email connection and went back to ponder a dilemma. She needed to visit the police station and take a look at the police file. Maybe she should take some mead with her, debating whether they’d consider it a bribe. It might be a waste of her good wine. Even if it were appreciated, they’d probably never heard of mead. She hadn’t seen any mention of mead on a restaurant’s wine menu or at a bar.

Looks like I’ll have to make a new batch, she decided, a different recipe this time. Closer to twelve percent alcohol rather than the usual fourteen percent.

Whittaker finally received the phone call he was anxiously awaiting from coin broker Gustave Vernays.

“You’re in luck, Professor. Two collectors, one in Spain and another in Dubai, are interested, but the bids are much lower than I expected.”

“I want top dollar. What are you trying to do, give it away for nothing? You told me it would take a long time, and here you have a couple of offers already. Keep trying. Keep trying.” Whittaker crashed the phone’s handset back into its cradle.

Damn, my blood pressure’s going through the roof again, he fumed as he waddled into the garage and grabbed a rake, a shovel and a bucket. As he made his way to the front yard he was reminded of the summer he was eight years old.

“What are you doing with that dead rabbit?” his cousin Betty, two years younger, had asked the first time they spent their summer school vacation together at her parents’ ranch in Arizona. “Don’t touch it. It could be full of germs. I’m going to tell on you.”

Without answering, Haiden had carried the creature into the barn and, for no reason he could explain, suddenly chopped off its paws with what he assumed was a tomahawk but was actually a hatchet hanging on the wall. Betty screamed and ran off, calling her mother. Fortunately, dear sweet Aunt Lillian hadn’t been able to believe such a horror, Whittaker remembered. He’d used a shovel to bury the rabbit under some hay before his aunt came into the barn. The tiny paws were in his pocket, dripping a small amount of blood.

That night he washed the pocket linings of his shorts and hung the clothing on the windowsill to dry. Before he went to bed he’d taken his Play-Doh from its plastic bag and encased the animal’s paws in the soft clay, rolling them into tennis-sized balls. Since then he’d acquired other dead animals’ paws with which to fashion sculptures and ornaments. He knew he wasn’t the first to indulge in such macabre behavior; and in any case, he reminded himself, Stone Age hunters made weapons, tools, trinkets and vessels from skeletal remains. In 2007 a gravedigger in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, stole human bones to fashion into ashtrays. What did the man call it, recycling? The professor chuckled quietly. Who could argue with that? And what does my own little quirk make me?

His victims had all been animals, of course. It had never occurred to him to kill a person until he was talking to Dr. Joel Bernstein a few months before Monica died.

“Look at this, Haiden,” Bernstein had remarked a couple of months earlier, holding up a tiny glass vial.

They were in the pharmacology lab at the University of California, Irvine. Bernstein’s daughter, a promising cellist, played in the school orchestra and had taken private lessons from the professor. Once or twice, like today, Whittaker had felt free to ask Bernstein, a chemist, for his opinion about certain acids for cleaning the coins in his collection.

He peered at the glass vial the doctor was unwrapping from a large box on the counter.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Death.” Bernstein shook the small container filled with a translucent bluish liquid before repacking it in its plastic cover and replacing it carefully into the box with dozens of similar vials. “It just arrived. Liquid morphine, derived from opium. Mix several drops with some strong booze, and poof, you’re at heaven’s gate.”

“Is that what those thirty-nine suicides swallowed?” Whittaker asked, referring to a group of cult members who had killed themselves in San Diego because they were convinced a spaceship awaited them.

“No. They took phenobarbital capsules along with liquor. That’s what did the trick. Mix this pretty juice with booze, too, and you’ll get the same result, and it would be invisible if you used it in, say, a blue or green liqueur. Now what was your question?”

“Ammonia. If I use it to remove the oxide from this coin, will it damage the surface?” Whittaker passed a Turban Head one-cent piece enclosed in a small plastic bag to Bernstein, who took it and turned it from side to side.

“Actually, Haiden, you’re talking about a hydroxide solution, the same thing dry cleaners use, so it shouldn’t do any harm unless someone ingests it. Let me look it up to be sure. I’ll be right back,” he said, returning the coin envelope to Whittaker.

As soon as Dr. Bernstein went into his office next door, the professor peered into the packing case that contained the vials of morphine. He took a vial from the box, removed it from its plastic wrap and slipped it into his trouser pocket. Haiden stuffed the empty slot in the box with the packing material. Impulse again, he supposed, but the doctor’s words had given him the germ of an idea, and as long as the vial was not missed he’d be home free.

The doctor came back into the room smiling. “You’re safe. Go ahead and use the hydroxide. It should give that coin a nice clean surface.” He turned to the box of morphine and closed its lid. “Better get these locked up. Students nick all kinds of stuff around here, looking for a cheap thrill.”

Tosca was surprised to receive a phone call from Thatch almost as soon as he’d left her house. He’d decided, he said, that he’d like to take a look himself at Haiden Whittaker’s yard. From the sidewalk, of course. Was it convenient to return?

Guess he thinks there’s something dodgy going on after all, Tosca mused. Or, being retired from the U.S. Secret Service, maybe he’s planning to set up his own private detective agency. Well, I’ll see about that. This is my criminal case, and I’m not about to share it with anyone.

She quickly changed into a pink and lavender cotton sundress. Not too dressy but feminine,
she decided. She added purple amethyst and silver clip-on earrings and pale gray high-heeled shoes.

When Thatch arrived she again poured two glasses of mead. He was obviously anxious to get down to business, as she noticed he ignored the drink. Placing his Stetson upside down on the coffee table, as before, and sitting on the sofa, he said, “I have to persuade my FBI friend that the rock you gave me is something special. So I need to see its exact location. I have a pretty good idea what it is, but I’m not going to say right now.”

“Why not?” said Tosca. “It’s fingertips, isn’t it?”

He grinned at her. “Be patient.”

“All right, you win. You can drink the mead later.” Tosca nodded at his untouched glass. “Come with me.” Unabashedly she took his hand and gave a little tug to pull him off the sofa. He picked up his hat.

“Oh, I knew I wanted to ask you something. Why do you place your cowboy hat upside down when you take it off?”

“Gravity. Keeps the brim curved up.”

Well, he certainly doesn’t waste words, she thought. His explanation made sense, though she’d never seen a cowboy do that in a Western movie.

“Are you a native Californian?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. I’m from Wyoming and a Cornhusker.”

Tosca stood still for a moment, frowned, then said, “Sorry. What’s does that mean, that you eat mainly corn?”

Thatch let out a booming laugh. “Means I went to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and played on the football team. I was a linebacker, and sure, I do eat plenty of corn. I’m a vegetarian. Now how about we get along to this professor’s house?”

They walked toward Whittaker’s garden.

“There’s a second rock exactly like the one I gave you,” said Tosca, “but it’s smooth and unbroken.” As they slowed their steps a few yards from the professor’s gate she whispered, “It’s on top of the little shrine he has at the rear, against the wall in what he calls a rock garden. The plants around it are high, but you might be able to see it.”

As they approached the fence, she drew in a breath.”Oh, no! He’s weeded,” she said in disgust, “and dismantled the rock garden.”