Missing Witness (12 page)

Frances extended her hand to Fiona, who shook it warmly and surrounded it with her other hand.

“I'll certainly pray for you, Mrs. Willowby,” Fiona said. “That God grant you peace in the midst of this very difficult time.”

Frances stopped and gave Fiona a somewhat startled look. Her eyes locked with Fiona's as they stood, holding hands.

Then she turned and began brusquely sweeping out of the room—but stopped and turned slightly to Fiona before exiting.

“You must come back again, darling, so that we can talk some more. I'll have my staff give you a call.”

Fiona was led to the front door by the maid, whom she thanked for the hospitality. As she walked to her car, she saw the chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, with Frances Willowby in the back, slowly making its way down the long driveway from Willowby Manor.

16

I
N THE WORKSHOP OF THE
O
CEAN
S
EARCH
salvage building, Orville Putrie was hunched over a panel of electronic equipment attached to a police scanner, a wireless receiver, and a keyboard. It was after eleven o'clock at night, and all of the other lights in the shop were out, except for a lamp over Putrie's workbench. He thought he was alone.

Putrie was startled and jumped a little when he heard a noise. He turned and spotted Blackjack Morgan in the doorway of the workshop.

Morgan was laughing, and he pulled out an extra-long Cuban cigar and began lighting it.

“You just about gave me a heart attack,” Putrie exclaimed.

“You're too young for a heart attack,” Morgan said, lighting the end of his cigar and taking a few puffs.

“You know that smoking really bothers me. Particularly when I'm concentrating here. Could you smoke outside?” Putrie whined.

Morgan took a few steps toward Putrie—until he was an arm's length away. Then he held the Cuban cigar out delicately between two fingers and showed it to the other man.

“Are you talking about this? Do you realize how hard these are to get—how much I have to pay for these?”

“They really make me gag.” Putrie began to cough.

Morgan put his mouth to the end of the cigar. He took a deep drag and then blew the smoke in his employee's face.

“Get used to it,” he sneered as the smoke sent Putrie into a coughing fit.

Morgan strolled over to the workbench and took a look at what Putrie was engineering.

“I've got a new job for you,” he said nonchalantly.

“Great. Just keep piling it on. I'm still working on this project. I've got a ways to go. Why don't you let me get this one finished first?”

“The new project is urgent. This one's important—but it ain't urgent,” Morgan said, pointing to the electronic equipment.

“That's not what you told me before,” the smaller man snapped back. “You said we've got to figure out a way to monitor Coast Guard radio transmissions and radar from a several-mile distance. That's what you told me. So that's what I've been working on. I'm frying my brain here—working late—trying to jerry-rig this thing on a fast timetable.”

“Yes. That's what I told you. But like I said, this new project is urgent. And seeing as I pay the bills—and I'm the one who picked you up and gave you work at a pretty good salary after you flunked out of MIT—I figure you owe me a lot.”

“Not true,” Putrie shot back, beginning to flush and shake ever so slightly. “I never flunked out of MIT. I was number three in my class. I had the highest entrance scores of any other engineering student. I was kicked out for conduct. And you know exactly why.

“Sure. Right,” Morgan said with a chuckle. “Which makes me question exactly how smart you are. You threaten to kill one of your professors. So they boot you out. How smart is that?
Don't threaten somebody,
my motto is—you just do it. You do your payback. And then you make sure nobody finds out. You don't bother to make threats. Little girls make threats. A real man simply does it—quietly, in the night, when no one's looking.”

Putrie was getting agitated. Both hands were clutching the stool he was on, to the point that his knuckles were turning white. Morgan laughed a little at his master technician and then continued.

“Let me give it to you short and sweet. I need some information. Historical. You need to retrieve this data for me pronto. I don't care how you get it. I want it put together ASAP. I need you to check every public record. Every piece of state information for North Carolina having to do with a date and a place.”

“You're not making any sense,” Putrie said, shaking his head.

“Okay. Let's do this again,” Morgan said, becoming irritated. “Here's the date. October eleventh. Use the year 1718. And the geographical area would be from Bath, up the Pamlico Sound, and all through the Outer Banks coastal area. I want you to check every record and public document. Newspaper reports. Anything you can retrieve. I want to find out what happened on October 11, 1718, in the geographical area I just gave to you.”

Putrie took off his thick glasses, wiped the lenses off on his T-shirt, and then put them back on. He continued staring with bewilderment at Morgan. And then the light broke.

“I get it. This has to do with the October eleventh date written on that shell we found at the dive site.”

“There is no shell. You understand me?” Morgan demanded, walking up close—so close that Putrie could smell the cigar smoke on his breath.

“There is no shell. There never has been. You get my drift? And there was no shell with the date of October eleventh on it. Now, you input that date into your computer—you got that?”

Putrie smiled thinly, tilted his head a little as he studied Morgan, and then nodded.

“So—how do you think you're going to do this?”

Putrie was silent. After a few moments of near catatonia, staring off into space, he broke into a twisted little smile.

“I'm going to break into the database of the state of North Carolina. They got historical records for everything. Birth records. Death certificates. Real estate transactions and transfers. Judgments entered in civil cases. Criminal cases. Tax liens. I think some of this stuff goes back to the English colonies. I'm hoping most of it's been transferred from the old hardcopy records. I'm pretty sure a lot of it has. So I hack into it and do a selective search with a two-vector convergence. One by time, consisting of our date. The other intersecting line for the search consisting of every geographical place name within the area. The key here is to add some qualifiers. Modifiers so that I can narrow the search down to what you're really looking for.”

With that, Putrie smiled and stared into Morgan's eyes. “So—tell me what the goal is,” Putrie asked coyly. “What you're ultimately after. Then I can add some modifiers to my database search. That'll ensure accuracy. Exactly what are you looking for?”

Morgan had a small penknife in his hand that he was using to widen the hole at the end of his cigar. He looked up at Putrie, not smiling.

“What am I after?” Morgan asked with a tinge of disbelief in his voice. “You expect me to tell you that?”

“I need that information. Otherwise you got me doing a database search in the dark. I'll be retrieving this information—trying to pull it together like a blind man.”

“Let me just tell you this,” Morgan said, taking a step toward Putrie and raising the penknife until it was even with Putrie's right eye, only an
inch away. “You ever ask me that question again, and you
will
be a blind man.”

Putrie knew better than to push. He had heard the stories about Blackjack Morgan's background—in his younger years, in the merchant marine. How he had beaten a murder rap for the death of another sailor up in Nova Scotia. How one of his former girlfriends mysteriously went missing and was never found again. So Putrie did not respond. He merely waited for Blackjack Morgan to wheel on the heels of his black boots and limp out of the workshop.

It took a few minutes for Orville Putrie to refocus his attention on the electronics in front of him after his boss had left the workshop. By that time the only evidence remaining of his visit was the odor of his expensive Cuban cigar still lingering in the air.

17

W
ILL
C
HAMBERS CHECKED WITH
Boggs Beckford's law office to get the address for August Longfellow.

Beckford's secretary made the call to Longfellow to explain that Will Chambers had taken over the case, and she set up the interview between the two of them.

Longfellow's beach house was a small, single-story cottage with a covered porch overlooking the ocean. It had once been painted yellow but was long overdue for repainting. The yellow had faded and was peeling down to the gray, weathered wood. The main entrance was in the back, facing the ocean, so Will made his way around to a porch that was surrounded by sand dunes and ocean grass.

As Will stepped up, he noticed two large flowerpots with plants that were limp, and in dire need of watering.

Over the front door there was a rusted metal plaque that read,
Know Thyself—You're the Only Self You Got!

Will knocked on the peeling wood door, but as he did, he realized the door was unlatched. It glided open with a loud creaking noise.

In an instant, August Longfellow was standing in the open doorway. He was a man in his mid-sixties. His hair was iron gray and worn long, almost down to his shoulders, and parted in the middle. He had a gray beard that flowed down to the well of his neck. He was wearing a cardigan sweatshirt unbuttoned in the front, revealing a faded T-shirt that bore the message,
I Studied with a Tibetan Holy Man, But All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
. Longfellow had a pair of bifocals perched on his nose, which he quickly snatched away so he could give Will a closer look. Longfellow had a handsome face, ruddy and rugged, with deep creases.

“You're the lawyer?” he asked, thrusting his right hand out toward Will.

Will introduced himself, and his host led him through the house, back to the kitchen.

The little cottage was awash with books. There were floor-to-ceiling bookcases everywhere. In the living room, there was a short stairway that led to a door. But each stair was stacked with books, like a bookshelf. On the coffee table, and on all of his end tables, there were books in various degrees of literary consumption, with torn pieces of paper as bookmarks.

The kitchen was small, with an old linoleum-top chrome kitchen set in the middle.

Longfellow reached into the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of beer, and popped the top off. Then he held it out to Will.

“No, thanks,” Will said with a smile.

“Teetotaler?”

“That's one way to describe it.”

“If you don't mind my asking—why did you swear off alcohol?”

“I had a problem with it. Actually, it was my life. My problem with alcohol was simply the symptom. But I found it wrapping itself around me—like some big anaconda. It was dragging me down in this black pit. So…I managed to get away from that snake. I'd rather not have to wrestle it again.”

“‘Wrestling with an anaconda'…interesting turn of phrase, Mr. Chambers,” Longfellow said, sitting down at the kitchen table and talking between slugs from the bottle.

“I spend a lot of time thinking about language,” he went on. “I don't know how much you know about me. I dabble in poetry here and there. I write books. Teach some philosophy classes in comparative culture. Some people would say I've dedicated myself to the ‘life of the mind.' But I don't prefer to look at it that way. It's really a life of language. Ideas come into the world like naked little babies. They need to be reared. And they need a good suit of clothes. That's where words and language come in.”

Longfellow seemed particularly pleased with his last comment. He smiled broadly and took another large swig from his bottle.

“Professor Longfellow,” Will said, trying to direct his host to the point of his visit, “I was told by Boggs Beckford you had agreed to be an expert witness for him in Reverend Jonathan Joppa's case. Beckford told me that you are quite knowledgeable about regional history down here in the Outer Banks. Going all the way back to the early 1700s. The age of piracy. Edward Teach and the Isaac Joppa story. Is that right?”

“Oh, I really don't like that word ‘expert,' ” Longfellow said, scratching his beard. “I've had two volumes of poetry published. But does that make me an expert? I teach classes in philosophy at Duke as adjunct professor.
Does that make me an expert? Actually, that's why I feel such an affinity to the eighteenth-century philosophers. Because generally speaking, they weren't
professionals
. They were always something else. They were monks, theologians, lawyers, merchants. Descartes was a soldier. Philosophy is what they did on the side. They did it because they believed it was a noble pursuit. But they had regular day jobs—that kept them honest.”

“Yes,” Will said in reply. “I've always figured the biggest problem with philosophy is that it is relegated to philosophers,” Will remarked casually, grabbing for his legal pad and his pen.