Killer Waves

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KILLER WAVES

A Lewis Cole Mystery

By

Brendan DuBois

Forward

While this is the fourth Lewis Cole mystery, it’s also the second novel that I was fortunate enough to have published with Ruth Cavin, the legendary editor from St. Martin’s Press, and it was always a dream working with her.

             
In preparing this novel, I was so very tempted to “clean it up” for current readers, but I decided in the end not to.  So, be prepared to enter an old world where the Internet was still in its infancy, people still carried pagers about, cell phones had covers (and retractable antennas), and Libya was still ruled by a guy named Al-Qaddafi.

             
What was fun about this novel was exploring the history of my home state of New Hampshire and its seacoast, and also diving into Lewis Cole’s past as a research analyst for the Department of Defense. 

             
But in doing so, Lewis also suffers setbacks, which you’ll eventually see.

Chapter One

The night I saw the dead man began loudly enough, with my clock alarm at my bedside chiming at one in the morning. I slapped it shut and stared up at the dark ceiling, listening to the waves of the Atlantic Ocean crash in on this portion of Tyler Beach, New Hampshire, that belongs to me. Remembering why I had set the alarm at this ungodly hour, I swung out of bed, put on a thick terry-cloth robe, and padded downstairs in my bare feet. The living room was barely lit up by a quarter moon and I found my way to the couch and flicked on the television. The channel had been preset to CNN and I waited in the near darkness, huddled in my robe. Embers glowed from the nearby fireplace. The sound on the television was muted, so as I watched grainy television footage of refugees in some far-off place fleeing their bombed homes, I had no way of knowing if it was in Russia or Kosovo or Colombia or about a half dozen other places. It had been that kind of year. Then the footage broke away to a CNN "Breaking News" logo, and there it was, more than a thousand miles to the south of me, the space shuttle
Endeavour
, about two minutes away from being launched into space. I switched the mute off and watched the countdown flick its way down to zero, feeling my chest tighten as each second flashed by.  Seven astronauts were aboard the
Endeavour
, and some months ago I had met the mission commander, a New Hampshire native, at a Tyler Rotary Club function. We had talked for a while and he seemed like a nice enough guy, until Paula Quinn, a reporter for
The Tyler Chronicle
, asked him why he had entered the astronaut corps. His answer-which I'm sure he was glad didn't appear in the next day's paper-was bitter: "I joined up to go to the moon or Mars, and instead I'm a truck driver, going to the same place a couple of hundred other men and women have gone to, low-earth orbit. A hell of a deal, don't you think?" Then he smiled at the two of us and that had been that.

I looked over at the coffee table. Two empty wineglasses were in the center, where Paula had been not more than six hours ago, sharing a dinner and good conversation with me. Not a bad night, and I was hoping this shuttle launch was going to put a nice cap to the April evening.

"T minus thirty seconds," came the voice from shuttle launch control, and I found myself leaning in toward the television, clenching my fists, my chest quite tight, knowing that sitting on top of those millions of gallons of explosive fuel was a slim man with a mustache with whom I had shared breakfast and quiet conversation last fall. Then it began, with the three main engines starting up with a roar, and then the camera showed the twin solid-rocket boosters lighting off, and up she went in the Florida night sky, rocketing up and then slowly rolling over as the shuttle began its long and quick climb into orbit. I watched for about another minute or so, and then I got up and headed toward the sliding glass doors that led outside. From the kitchen counter I retrieved a pair of binoculars, and after sliding open the glass doors, I stepped out to the rear deck.

My feet were quickly chilled on the cold wood of the deck, and I thought about going back in to put on some footwear, but it was too late, too damn late. I shivered and looked out on the ocean, where I saw the running lights of some freighter, probably heading up north to Porter, the state’s only port, but my focus was on the south.  The night was clear, with the moonlight washing out some of the stars, but it was still fairly dark.  Toward the south I made out the muted glow from the lights of Tyler Beach, and the only sound came from the waves and the wind. I picked up the binoculars, scanned toward the south. Nothing. I shivered and stamped my feet. Maybe something was wrong. Maybe it had already gone by.

I brought up the binoculars again. Nothing. Just the stars.

I put the binoculars down and was going to rub my hands together, and there it was.

A small, fast moving dot of light just above the horizon, heading to the north.

“I’ll be damned," I whispered.

In the binoculars the light was a large dot. I could make out a small, fuzzy triangle of red and orange at the dot's rear, and I tracked the space shuttle overhead as it raced into orbit. Usually the shuttles don't come up the Atlantic Coast, but a certain orbit had to be achieved for this mission, and I had lucked out. By now the twin solid-rocket boosters had dropped off and all that was left were the main fuel tank and the shuttle itself. I kept them in view, willing my hands not to shake, and then the little triangle of flame disappeared. Then there was a small flash, and then another, and I kept on watching the little dot until it disappeared. My throat felt heavy, knowing what I had just witnessed: when the flame went out, it had meant the shuttle engines had shut down. The first flash was when the fuel tank had broken away, and the second flash had been a quick burn of the shuttle's maneuvering engines, pushing it away from the now empty tank.

And I had seen it all.

With the binoculars now resting around my neck, I wiped at my eyes. Some years ago, what I had just witnessed would have been news enough to be the lead story on all the networks and on the front pages of the newspapers. And now? I glanced through the sliding glass doors at the television set. The five minutes or so of coverage had ended. A taped interview with some movie star had taken its place.  No doubt a more important thing in some people’s minds, but not this one’s.  I looked up at the stars and then noted an orange one, high up in the sky.  How appropriate, and how ironic.  Mars, waiting up there patiently, waiting for whenever we decided it was time to stop sending truck drivers into space.

I rubbed my hands again and thought about how warm my bed would be, and I turned and headed into my house, and then I spotted the lights. I stopped, looked to the north, past the low rise of hills and trees that marked the boundary of the Samson Point State Wildlife Preserve. In the years I have lived here in Tyler Beach, not once have I ever seen lights up there in the preserve at night. But now there were flashes of blue and red, rising and falling, and being reflected on a low band of haze. Up again went the binoculars and I tried to focus in on what was going on, but I couldn't make sense of it. Blue and red, rising and falling. I rubbed one cold foot against the other. What did make sense was to crawl back into bed. That would have been the smart thing. But having just seen a spaceship go overhead and now faced with the little mystery of these colored lights just up the coast, I knew it would be a long time before I got sleepy again.

I went back inside, got warmed up for just a minute, and then got dressed.

When I stepped outside and started walking up to Samson's Point, I felt the odd and nervous energy of being wide-awake when most of the surrounding world is fast asleep. I had a small flashlight and picked my way through the rocks and boulders that marked this part of the shore, and then I scrambled up to solid land that formed the outer boundary of the nature preserve. Years before, Samson Point had been the site of a coastal artillery station, ready to defend Porter and its harbor from a long series of enemies-Spaniards, Germans, Germans again, and then Soviets-and after it had been deactivated and its big guns hauled away, it now belonged to the state. Besides giving New Hampshire all or the buildings, bunkers and underground tunnels, the federal government also thoughtfully left behind a couple of toxic waste sites, which meant not many tourists got to this part of the park, which suited me fine.

In the woods I made my way along a dirt path, using the flashlight beam to guide me. The branches on the hardwoods were still bare, though buds were beginning to form, and I could hardly wait for the annual explosion of green and life this spring. It had been a long winter, filled with a lot of dark and long nights, and I was beginning to feel bored and disconnected. I had a reasonable job as a columnist for Shoreline magazine, but writing and researching those columns took about five or six days a month. That meant a lot of hours left over, with the snow piled up high to the windows and the wind racing down from Canada to batter at the house, hours where you began to think too much.

The faint light from my flashlight caught an overgrown bunker, off to the light. There were two huge concrete gun emplacements farther up into the park, but scattered throughout the land were other bunkers as well, marking either storage areas or spotting stations or installations for smaller artillery pieces. At the top of a rise of land I stopped and looked back The ocean's waves looked almost metallic in the light from the stars and the moon, and I could also make out the lights of my home, standing there alone on the shore, almost like a sentry, before the faint glow in the sky that marked the town of Tyler Beach. An apt thought, for throughout the Atlantic coastline and especially these New England miles, the shores had always been places for forts, naval bases, and other icons of war.

I resumed walking, and disturbed something in the underbrush that skittered away in the old leaves. It startled but didn't scare me; the only animals one had to worry about out in these woods had two legs, not four.

Within a few minutes the woods thinned out and I was in an area of grassland, and that's when I noted the sounds of engines running. The lights were now brighter, flickering at an even faster rate, and by now I was pretty sure of what was going on. I yawned. All this walking, and for what? Probably to see the local cops roust some high schoolers, out drinking and smoking where they shouldn’t be. I went up a small hill and looked down at the parking lot for the nature preserve, to the west of the point itself, and shut off my flashlight.  Not a high schooler in sight, but what was there looked like trouble.

There were two police cruisers and an ambulance, their lights still flashing. I could see two cops and two ambulance attendants, all clustered around a parked car, their flashlights examining the interior. There was a shape in the car, a shape I couldn't make out, but the fact that the ambulance attendants were talking to each other, hands in pockets, seemed to indicate that their services as EMTs were not required. I shivered. I write for a monthly magazine, not a daily newspaper. The types of articles I write for
Shoreline
don't usually involve dead people in cars. Whatever was down there was not really my business. But still ... I was wide awake and maybe I could find something out for Paula Quinn. By the time she got to work tomorrow, the cops would have a sanitized press release about what had happened here. I could get her some on-scene notes, and then ... well, she would beat the competition and be grateful to me, and that wasn't a bad result.

I switched on the flashlight again and made a production of going down the hill toward the parking lot, whistling and making a lot of noise. The nature preserve was in North Tyler, the next town up from Tyler and its beaches, and while I knew all the cops in Tyler and was best friends with the town's sole detective, I didn't know the North Tyler force all that well. Plus, I'm sure both cops were pretty wired at the moment, and I didn't want them to overreact by having a stranger pop up in their midst.