Life Guards in the Hamptons (36 page)

Russ used his computer to get Vanderman’s current driver’s license up on a screen behind the chief. Yes, those were the eyes I’d seen, only they weren’t as threatening in a static flat picture. I passed around a drawing I had made of him, with as much intensity and menace as I could get in a sketch. Lou let out a loud breath. The chief held that picture next to the one I’d showed him of N’fwend.

“Holy hell.”

It was Lou who continued: “DUE scooped him up before he got himself arrested, or killed by one of his victims. They tried to teach him values and the proper use of power. When that didn’t work, they threatened to divest him.”

“Divest? You mean you can take away someone’s talent?”

Lou wouldn’t look at me. “For the greater good.”

Uh-oh. What if they decided to wipe my mind? I’d never write another book. “And that person was Axel Vanderman?”

“Vance Axelrod.”

Russ put another driver’s license up on the screen, this one from the UK, a much younger man, with a different hair style, a longer nose, but with those same piercing eyes.

“Shit.”

“Yeah. He got away. And he’s so good, he can cover his trail anytime he wants by hypnotizing anyone he wants—as long as he stays clear of another psychic.”

Uncle Henry nodded. “We think that’s how no one saw anything at the robberies. All the scumbag needed to do was get them to look at him, which they’d naturally be doing if had a gun and a ski mask. He got them to forget, kind of like the mayor’s talent, but for his own gain.”

“But what about shutting down the security systems and bypassing the codes? You can’t hypnotize a machine.”

“And computer hacking wasn’t in his profile, but he must have learned, to create the false identities and wipe out the old ones.”

“No, he only had to find someone good at it, and make them do it.” Russ added that he’d found an Ajax Vance and an Alastair VanDyke who fit the descriptions, both with arrests for financial misconduct, changing wills, absconding with dead people’s money, bilking single women out of their life savings, but no convictions. The computers were still looking for more.

Meanwhile, the professor was standing close to the screen, studying the magnified driver’s licenses. “According to the early one’s birth date,” he said, “Vanderman, or Axelrod, was born nine months to the day after I confronted the Wyrm off Bermuda. Which means he would have been conceived that very night. I would not be surprised if his parents honeymooned there.”

Lou started pushing buttons on his Blackberry.

Grandma Eve shook her head. “They cannot be related. That is simply impossible. An evil water spirit and an evil man?”

“Both with maelstrom eyes, both with no conscience. One conceived while the other lost its power,” the professor mused. “When dealing with magic, anything is possible.”

Anything but understanding it.

“S
O WHERE IS HE NOW? Why haven’t you picked him up?”

“I went by his house on the way here, just to talk,” the chief said. “No one answered the bell, and I had no warrant to break in. Half the townspeople left before they get flooded out or stranded here, so that’s no surprise. We have an alert on his car, but with so much going on, it’s not high on anyone’s list. I’ve got a call into the Suffolk DA for the warrant, but it’ll be a tough sell. The judge is at his sister’s in Ronkonkoma. We’ve got nothing to charge Vanderman with, nothing to tie him to the robberies. We don’t even have his fingerprints on file to prove he’s this Axelrod guy.”

“Lolly cleans his house,” I reminded him. “She must have a key, and she could get one of his drinking glasses, with prints on it.”

“Which would be inadmissible evidence and screw up any chance for a conviction. Not that I haven’t considered it, but Lolly’s gone missing, too.”

We all thought about that. How there was more than one robber, how a master hypnotist could get a person to do anything he wanted, especially a susceptible woman like Lolly.

“I say we go get him.” Lou patted his inside jacket pocket, maybe where he carried his Divesters-R-Us device. Okay, so I’d seen all the
Men in Black
movies a hundred times. I’d watch them again, for the pug.

The chief shook his head, in regret. “It’s got to be by the book. Otherwise the robbery cases stay open and we stay under the Feebies’ thumb.”

“What about Lolly? She could press charges.”

“If we knew where she was. Her aunt has no idea, and she didn’t call in sick. It’s too soon to file a missing person’s report, with Lolly an adult, and not with the whole east end population on the move anyway because of the storm.”

Mrs. Ralston brought in a tray of coffee. The chief poured something from his silver flask into his cup and the professor’s. Everyone else declined.

After we filled the village administrator in on the latest news, Mrs. Ralston tried to find some hope. “Perhaps Mr. Vanderman took Lolly with him to a safer location. Her aunt’s house is quite near the water.”

“And she didn’t tell her aunt where she was going? Didn’t call in to take time off from work so we could get a replacement? That’s not like Lolly.”

Mrs. Ralston held her coffee mug out for additional fortification. “No, it isn’t.”

“Wait a minute,” I said into the gloom. “My father had a vision about a lollipop. In a cage. Could he mean Lolly? The lollipop was in with a skunk.”

Russ almost spilled his coffee on his laptop. “Did you say skunk?”

I shrugged. “That’s what my father says he saw. He wanted me to stay away from them. But you know my dad and his—”

“I’ve been tracking the black hat infiltrators, trying to find where the embezzled money went, where the commands came from. Twice I’ve come upon the letters, SKK. That could be the skunk!”

I wasn’t sure. My father could barely send an email. How could he know someone’s screen name?

Then Matt rushed in, crowding the little room worse. Before I could ask why he’d left the vet’s office on such a busy day, why he looked so disheveled and pale, he went past me to demand the chief send out a missing person’s report. “My niece has disappeared. She didn’t
show up for work and when I called her house, her roommates said they hadn’t seen her since Saturday morning. She doesn’t answer her cell. That’s Melissa Kovick.” He slapped a picture of her on the chief’s desk. “She’s only twenty years old.”

I put my hand in his. “Maybe she got back together with that boyfriend and they forgot about the time, celebrating.”

“She wouldn’t do that, not when she knows we have all those boarders coming, all needing Bordetella shots against kennel cough. No one else in the place knows how to run the computers to check for vaccinations and enter contact information, much less back it up in case we lose power. Sissy wouldn’t do that to me.”

Russ made the connection first. “Sissy Kovick? As in Skk? Does she know Axel Vanderman?”

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t either, but I knew she put a white stripe through her black hair. “There has to be a connection.”

“To what?” Matt wanted to know, ready to fly out the door to find his sister’s kid.

The chief explained how Lolly was missing, too, how she cleaned Vanderman’s house, how we all suspected him of hypnotizing people into taking part in his criminal activities.”

Matt shook his head. “Not Sis. She’s no crook.”

“Not intentionally,” I assured him. “But think about how she’s been so tired and temperamental lately. Maybe she had guilt feelings.”

“Damn it, she’s a kid who had her heart broken. They’re always emotional. That doesn’t make her a thief.”

“But dressing like a skunk? Russ can check your computers to see what screen names she uses.”

He put as much distance between us as he could in the crowded room. “You never liked her. Now you’re trying to pin some frigging felonious conspiracy on her?”

Doc Lassiter tried to lay his hand on Matt’s shoulder, but Matt shrugged him off. He turned to leave. “I’ll go
find her myself, if you inbred, arrogant bastards won’t help.”

I got in his way and gave him a shove, which naturally didn’t budge his solid body. “Hey, buddy, you’re one of us now, even if you don’t have it in your genes. And I never liked your niece because she’s a bitch who treats your clients like dog poop. And that’s the truth. Look at the chief if you don’t believe me. He’s not groaning, is he?”

Uncle Henry waved his hand at Matt. “Sounds true to me.”

“She was rude when I met her a month ago, before I ever laid eyes on you. But she
is
a computer geek. She
was
dating a man she never introduced to you. She
does
try to look like Pepe le Pew these days, and her initials
are
SKK. If she’s been under someone’s thumb, made to do things she wouldn’t, it’s not her fault. No one is blaming her. We just need to find her so she can help us get to Vanderman. We need him to find Lolly before she’s lost in a hurricane somewhere.”

Russ offered him a seat. The chief offered him some whiskey. Doc offered a hand. He took mine, instead. “Melissa couldn’t rob a bank.”

“Neither could poor Lolly. But your niece could hack into the computers, if Vanderman forced her to.”

“So where do we look?”

“We call the plumber.”

“No, I got the toilet unclogged with a plunger and—”

His phone rang at the same time my cell did. So did the chief’s. We all picked up, hoping for good news. Instead, we heard music.

“What the hell is this?” Uncle Henry shouted into his receiver. “You are interfering with police business.”

“Don’t hang up!” I yelled. The chief switched his phone to speaker so we all heard the sound.

Russ recognized it first. “It’s ‘Eye of the Tiger.’ You know, from the martial arts movie.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said into my phone. “We’re on it. You okay?”

When the phone clicked off, I set it down.

The chief slammed his back on his desk. “Who the hell was that?”

“The House. It’s been calling me. I think it wants us to watch out for the eye of the storm. That’s where the worst trouble will be.” I touched the picture of the water demon. “My father says so, too. Except … maybe everyone is telling us we
need
that evil eye, that hypnotist, to defeat this other monster.”

The chief drank straight from his flask.

They brought Joe the plumber in a squad car, sirens squealing. Janie came after, in her own car.

“No one needs their hair cut for a hurricane, and I love to see Joe in action. When he bends over a toilet …”

More than we needed to know. We needed water, though, so we all trooped into the ladies’ room, explaining the situation as we went.

“We’re looking for girls, ain’t we?”

And the men’s room was not a sight fit for feminine eyes, according to Big Eddie, not with Lolly being AWOL for a couple of nights.

Joe filled the sink after Janie wiped it down with paper towels. He stared into the water, then at the picture of Melissa that Matt handed him. He knew Lolly, he said, so did not need her photo ID from her employment record. He bent over to get closer to the water and stared some more. I tried not to stare at Janie, who was staring at his ass. Everyone wanted a turn to look in the sink, but no one saw anything until Joe stuck his finger in the water and swirled it around.

“Got them, both of them together,” he called in triumph.

I stood ready with my sketch pad in case he could describe their surroundings.

“And I think I found your tiger, too. There’s tiger stripes on the upholstery where they’re sitting, tiger stripes on some pillows. I think that’s a bronze tiger head on the wall.”

The House was right!

“Yeah, but where are they? And are they alive? Are they tied up?”

Joe swirled the water some more. “They looked asleep, kind of rumpled, but I can’t tell more. It’s gone.”

He described what he’d seen and I quickly drew it, adding colors with marking pens.

None of us recognized the scene, except maybe from pictures of Graceland’s jungle room.

The professor closed his eyes, searching his memory. “I think … Yes, I am fairly certain that’s the decor of the lounge where I had a few drinks.”

“Where was it, this lounge?”

“Why, on the ship, of course. Some woman sang there.”

“Tina?” Matt and I asked at the same time.

“I never got her name. Lovely to look at, dreadful voice. Wouldn’t smile for an old man like me.”

“That’s Tina. So the girls are on the
Nova Pride
?”

Good grief, what if it sank after all?

We flew out of the bathroom and put on a TV in the outer office. The ship was upright now, and men in wet suits and life jackets were tossing lines back and forth, to tugs and every other kind of boat they could commandeer. We could see pumps shooting water out of doors and windows and hatches, but saw no one signal for a life raft or a helicopter rescue.

The announcer speculated that the authorities—or the cruise line’s insurers—must have declared the
Nova Pride
seaworthy enough to be towed toward Montauk Point and the Sound, instead of being scuttled where it lay.

That’s what they told the news people, anyway. The ship was actually going to turn the corner at Montauk Point and keep coming to us.