Nantucket Five-Spot (10 page)

“Tell us.”

For that moment there were just the two of them in the room. Franny had conjured some evanescent cocoon of intimacy. Tornovitch stepped slowly back. He had seen her work before, and he knew better than to break the spell.

“Okay,” Billy said. “I knew one thing as soon as the Chief grabbed me last night—Someone was framing me.”

“And how could you possibly know that?” Tornovitch couldn't help himself.

“Because I'm innocent, asshole.”

“Go on,” Franny said. She reached across the table and touched Billy's wrist.

“I'm not the only one who got one of those watches. She gave one to Haden Krakauer.”

“His was stolen,” I blurted out. Everyone stared at me.

“So he says. It's a smart thing to say, under the circumstances.”

“He filed a theft report.”

Billy shook his head, amazed at my stupidity. “Well, it must be true then.”

Franny squeezed his wrist. “I want to understand what you're telling us,” she said. “I don't want any confusion here. You're saying that Assistant Chief Haden Krakauer is framing you for this bombing? Why would he do such a thing?”

Billy laughed a short bitter laugh. “Oh, he has his reasons.”

“He wants to hurt you?”

“Let's just say—he knows how to hold a grudge.”

“What did you do to him?”

“I fucked the love of his life. And even after I dumped her, she wouldn't go back to him.”

“No. She married one Theodore Garrison instead,” Tornovitch put in. Once again, he had almost derailed Franny's line of questions. Billy was talking to Tornovitch now.

“If you know everything already, why ask me?”

“Well, for one thing, to see if you're lying.”

“So—she married Garrison?” Franny asked.

“It was his lucky day. He'd been chasing her for years. They went to the Justice of the Peace and they were gone a week later.”

“And she never came back?”

“She's back right now. Her mother died and they're dealing with the estate.”

“So you think Haden, seeing his old flame after all this time…”

“I don't know. But he took it hard. I don't think he's had another relationship since.”

Tornovitch again: “And when did this little scandal happen, exactly?”

Franny gave up and sat back in her chair.

“2003.”

“I see. Any idea why he didn't just beat you up at the time?”

“Try beating me up. You'll find out.”

“So he was afraid of you?”

“Ask him. He was afraid of something, that's for sure. Because he ran away so fast it was like a fucking cartoon. I expected to see a puff of smoke and a Haden sized hole in the wall. He enlisted in the Army and we didn't see him back here for five years.”

“So…any theories as to why he waited a decade to take his…revenge?”

“I don't know. Something must have set him off. Maybe seeing Joanna again, like you said. But he's never made any secret out of his feelings. I lost count of how many times he's pulled me over for expired inspection stickers and over-sand permits. I get into a hassle at the dump, trying to take some shutters out of the woodpile. Who shows up but Haden Krakauer. I spent the night in jail over that one. Plus all the noise violations. He even got Dave Fronzuto to bust me for taking more than my limit a couple of times last season.” He registered the blank looks. “Scallops,” he explained. “Dave is the harbormaster. But that's not all. If I drive at night you can bet Krakauer will pull me over for a breathalyzer. Which is hilarious, because he's the drunk. He had the drug sniffing dogs in my car last time. We were blocking Union Street for half an hour.”

“And they found nothing?”

“Of course they found nothing! That's why he's doing this, now. He's your guy. Think about it. He dealt with explosives in the Army. You say bomb, I see a bowling ball with a fuse sticking out of it. He knows how I feel about the island. And he could screw with my e-mail. He knows computers. I can't even set the margins on Microsoft Word.”

Silence dropped like a curtain. No one was quite sure where to go from here, how to proceed. Franny sat forward, rubbing her face, as if she was trying to massage the fatigue from below her eyes with her finger tips.

“All right, Mr. Delavane,” she said. “Let's start from the beginning.”

“Not right now,” Tornovitch said. “We all need a break. I still have an ongoing interagency investigation to coordinate, and I think Mr. Delavane needs to think about what he's told us this morning, and reflect on the consequences of any further prevarication. We'll reconvene tomorrow morning. Nine o'clock.” He glanced at me. “Sharp.” He made a roundhouse gesture with his arm that included Billy and the two FBI agents. “Take him back to the holding cell. Don't feed him. We'll keep the lights on tonight. And play him some of that German techno music.”

“No waterboarding?” Billy asked.

“You're a surfer, Mr. Delavane. I'm afraid you'd find the experience recreational.”

Outside a state trooper trundled up to Tornovitch.

“There's someone at the driveway checkpoint to see Delavane, sir.”

“Get rid of them.”

“It's a girl. Her name's Debbie Garrison? Apparently she knows Delavane. She's making quite a scene. She won't leave the driveway.”

“It's one girl. Do we need to call in the National Guard here, son? Or can you handle it?”

“Let me,” Franny said. “I want to talk to her anyway.”

“For what possible reason?” But before Franny could answer, his cell phone went off again. “Tornovitch,” He waved her away. Franny hurried off. I started to follow, but Tornovitch gave me the traffic-cop raised palm. I stopped and he lifted one finger—cell phone sign language for ‘I'll just be a second.' I waited.

‘Well let me know when they arrive,” he said. “I want a full report.” He closed the phone, grabbed my arm, and pulled me closer. “Not a word of this to Krakauer,”

I was shocked. “You didn't actually believe any of that shit, did you?”

Tornovitch shook his head sadly, as if I was a promising student who just flunked a midterm. “This job has nothing to do with belief, or faith or trust, Kennis. I don't believe anything. I have no faith and I trust no one. I follow the evidence. I investigate. Delavane offered some interesting alternative paths for that investigation. Was he lying or telling the truth? We can determine that. I never argue about facts. And I will not ignore any new evidence, any new lead, any fresh thought—however dubious or unlikely, however unexpected the source. Preconceptions destroy cases, Kennis. Keep your mind open.”

“Fine, I understand that, but I happen to know Haden Krakauer and there's no way—”

He barked a laugh. “The ‘happen to'; construction! ‘This-may-seem-like-a-coincidence-to-you, but-it's-much-more-significant-than-that!' The favored rhetorical flourish of the desperate and the defensive. And why should you be feeling desperate and defensive, Kennis? Perhaps because every step in this investigation brings it closer to you and your circle of friends. Perhaps when we get to the center of the labyrinth we'll find you waiting: the minotaur in cop's clothing!”

“You're losing it, Jack.”

“Maybe. But no one is above suspicion here, Kennis. Not even you.”

“Or you?”

“I welcome suspicion! I thrive on it. I have nothing to hide, Kennis. Can you say the same thing?” Before I could answer, he waved me away. “Let's get busy. We have a lot of work to do before tomorrow morning.”

As he stalked off, his cell phone rang again. “Tornovitch.”

Then he was gone, heading upstairs to Haden's office. I knew he was right, there was a lot to do, but at that moment, I couldn't think of a thing. The morning's events had immobilized me.

Franny appeared beside me. She was breathing hard, as if she'd been running. She took my arm and walked me toward the empty interrogation room.

“Come with me,” she said. “We need to talk.”

Ezekiel Beaumont: Ten Days Ago

Zeke Beaumont was feeling under-appreciated. Scooter was treating him like some witless grunt who couldn't do anything but follow orders. Here's your twenty pounds of C-4, here's your blasting caps, here's your throw-away cell phone to detonate them with.

Zeke had felt like saying—I don't need your government issue crap, I can make this stuff myself. All you needed was some RDX, some plastic binder material and a little motor oil. And my stuff is better, it's more pure because I leave out the DMDNB that the government puts in as a security marker. As if Scooter would have even known what Zeke was talking about! He was acting like it was nitro-glycerin from some old movie—shake it up and ka-boom. In fact the stuff was so stable you could use it for a cook fire if you ran out of Sterno. They'd done it plenty of times in Iraq.

There was no point in correcting Scooter, though. Better to nod, tip the forelock and go about your business. But it was tough sometimes. Scooter wouldn't even let Zeke remove the motor attached to the asymmetrical wheel and wire the circuit to the blasting cap. As if Zeke didn't know how a cell phone's vibrator function worked! It was infuriating. When he had tried to explain about the illegal batteries they were going to need, the ones without the self-shorting safeguards, Zeke knew where to buy them on the black market—Scooter had brushed him aside, like Zeke was a child, showing off at tying his own shoelaces.

“It's all handled,” Scooter had said. “Bury the device out at the golf club, by the clubhouse, next to a load-bearing wall. And make sure you hide it clean. We don't want any good Samaritans stumbling over it. Think you can handle that?”

Of course he could handle that! He was handling it fine.

He was supposed to be alone out here tonight, but Scooter had obviously fucked up, because five minutes after Zeke arrived, picking his way from a half-constructed house off Polpis Road through the dense bushes behind the clubhouse, making sure to leave little tidbits of evidence behind him, laid among the thorns and prickles with a careful, gloved hand, the cleaning crew arrived.

Most people would have panicked at this new development, but not Zeke. What could he say? Fear paralyzed some people. It inspired him. Zeke watched the men climb out of their trucks. Did these guys work every night? Scooter had to be told, they had to change the plan. Zeke had nothing against a bunch of immigrant workmen. He was no terrorist. Or was he?

Zeke glanced down at the steamer trunk-sized block of C-4 he had lugged through the moors on his back. He was sitting on it now—his own personal IED. Just like some cold-blooded Sunni insurrectionist, booby trapping a highway outside Najaf or Mosul. They didn't care who they killed. Zeke wasn't like that. He'd talk to Scooter, make sure he warned these guys, somehow, make sure they were safe.

But right now he had work to do. He cut away the square of sod he would use for camouflage, unstrapped his old army-issue entrenching tool and began to dig.

He was almost finished when one of the workers came out to his car for a cigarette. Zeke froze. The guy was no more than ten feet away. Zeke slid into his own hole, smeared dirt on his face, held his breath. The asshole was walking toward him. If he kept moving this direction he'd literally step on Zeke's head. Zeke tried to think of some explanation. He could say he was landscaping, digging the trench for a hedge. At this hour? How about a cop? Private security? It didn't matter. The guy would remember him.

The man was two feet away from him when the cell phone went off. For a crazy panic-glaring second, Zeke thought it was his own phone. He should have turned it off. What an idiot! What a criminally stupid, careless—but it was the cleaning guy's phone. Zeke fought to hold in a gasp of relief. The guy stopped walking. Zeke could see the New Balance “N” on the guy's scuffed sneakers. A quick exchange in Spanish, and then the guy turned around and headed back inside.

Zeke waited ten minutes before he resumed working. Finally he shoveled back the last of the dirt and laid the turf over his excavation, scattering more soil and walking over it to tamp it down. He checked it with the flashlight and added some twigs.

It was like so many things. If you weren't looking for it, you wouldn't see it.

He paced the square of loose grass again, thinking of something else his grandmother always used to say, “I felt like you walked over my grave.”

Zeke stretched, took a few breaths of the sweet night air. They must have mowed the fairways that morning. He walked over to the kid's car and memorized the license plate. He'd need that to get the rest of the kid's information. When they had his cell number they could call him before the bomb went off, get him to evacuate the building, convince his friends to get out also. He'd be alive to testify, and the rest of the crew…they'd just be alive. Scooter didn't care about collateral damage, but Zeke did. That made Zeke different. That made him better.

He walked back to the corner of the building, picked up his entrenching tool, and took a last look around. The grounds looked frosted in the moonlight. Very pretty.

But not for long. Soon the captains of industry and the trust fund babies would be picking their way through the smoke and rubble and hopefully getting the message that they weren't quite so invulnerable after all.

He shot the place the finger with both fists, and disappeared into the night.

Chapter Nine

Fathers and Daughters

Franny closed the door behind us. Her eyes were wild, the way she had looked after our one stolen kiss in the Santa Monica Mountains. But this was her real romance, her real adventure. She had made a connection, figured something out. She was hot on someone's trail again, sniffing the dirt, quivering like a bloodhound.

“What's going on? Are you all right?”

“Have you met Debbie Garrison?”

“Sure. I gave her a tour of the station when she came in with Billy.”

“She was hanging around with Billy Delavane?”

“That's right.”

“And you didn't see it?”

“Franny, what are you talking about? Is something wrong with Debbie?”

“She's his daughter.”

“She's—what?”

“She's Billy Delavane's daughter, Hank. The family resemblance is—it's almost comical. She has the same thin nose, the chin—or how about those ears? Small ears, tight to the head, no lobes. You don't see that too often.”

“I can't believe you noticed Billy Delavane's ears.”

“I can't believe you didn't! The no-lobes thing is so bizarre. That's not all, anyway—look at her eyes. She has the same little fold over the lid. There has to be a genetic marker for that.”

“Franny, you can't be sure—”

“So it's a coincidence? You're the one who told me you didn't believe in coincidences.”

“I said they were dead ends.”

“She's on Nantucket, she sought him out. She came here today.”

“Why didn't she identify herself as his daughter then? Jack might have let her in to see him.”

She shook her head. “I don't know. Something's going on there. I'll talk to her and figure it out. That doesn't matter now. What matters is her age. And Delavane's story. It didn't add up. There was something he wasn't telling us, Hank. Seeing your old flame ten years later doesn't set you off like this.”

“No, that's what I was trying to explain when—”

“But if Billy Delavane not only took her and slept with her, but he also got her pregnant and she actually had the child? The child that should have been Krakauer's and then that kid shows up and looks so much like Billy? It's eleven years later. She's eleven years old…you didn't put it together, but you can bet Krakauer did. ”

“We saw her coming off the boat.”

“Oh my God. How did he react?”

She touched my chest as if she could pull the memory out of my body. I felt her fingertips against my shirt with the same old physical jolt.

I did my best to ignore it. “He didn't react. At least not then. But I smelled booze on him, the next day at work.”

“Funny that this is all about bombs,” Franny said quietly. “Your friend is the real bomb. The time bomb with an eleven-year fuse. The watch clinches it.”

“But he told us about it last night. Why would he do that?”

“Come on, Hank. I can think of a lot of reasons and so can you. He wanted to be sure Tornovitch asked the question. He knew I'd tell Jack what he said. This way he sets up Billy and distances himself at the same time. His watch was stolen, supposedly. So that puts him in the clear. It's the way a bomber would think—set the fuse, and be sure you're safe when it detonates.”

I pulled back. “Wait a second. You can't prove any of this. It's all conjecture and guess work and—”

“Hank, listen to me. You're right. Okay? This is probably just some absurd red herring. I know that. I'm not going to tell anyone, not yet—least of all Jack. He'd go nuts. It was hate at first sight with him and Krakauer anyway. But I have to check it out. I have to talk to the girl, poke around into Krakauer's phone records, his movements over the last few weeks, his Internet activity—quietly, okay? It'll just be my private project for now. I earned that for myself. No one else saw the connection, not even you.”

I shrugged. “It's not like I could stop you.”

“That's right. I'm a juggernaut. That's what you used to say. It's one of the things you love about me. Remember?”

“You weren't going after my friends in those days.”

She took my hands. “I'm not doing that now, Hank. If he's innocent I'll be able to clear him. I'll have proof if Jack comes after him. That's a good thing.”

For some reason she reminded me of my daughter, soberly explaining that popping all the bubble wrap would make it easier to fit the plastic into the recycling can, when both of us knew she just wanted to do the firecracker dance.

“Tell me what you find out,” I said finally.

She went up on tiptoes to kiss my cheek.

“Thank you.”

She whispered it into my ear, hugged me quickly and then started for the door. I let her go. The door shut behind her. I stood listening to the streamlined silence of the new headquarters—my own breathing, the rush of the air-conditioning. The building had its own power, its own inertia. It was hard to get things moving at Valhalla. But once they were in motion they were almost impossible to stop. Franny's persistence had set our legal juggernaut rolling downhill. Now it was picking up speed, heading straight for my friend, and all I could do was watch.

***

The judge set Billy Delavane's bail at half a million dollars. The hearing ended at two in the afternoon; by three, Billy's lawyer had posted bond and Billy was leaving the courtroom. Tornovitch was furious, but there was nothing he could do about it.

“Why did no one tell me this bum was a goddamn millionaire?” he said to me on the street outside the town building.

I couldn't resist. “We assumed you'd done your homework, Jack.”

“Very funny. But no one's going to be laughing if he sets off another bomb in this town. So I want him followed, and not by my people, either. They stick out like a bad haircut. Pick someone local, someone who can keep their head down and not get spotted. Krakauer's a local, use him. It would look funny if you didn't, and I don't want him to guess he's under suspicion. Let him pick a team. I want eyes on this little prick twenty four seven.”

I nodded. “I'm on it.”

“Is that so? Because at this moment he's walking to his truck, and in another two minutes he'll be driving away and you'll have lost him. Which isn't the most impressive way to begin the operation.”

“Good point. See you later.”

I sprinted to the station, ran into Haden at the dispatch desk and gave him his orders. Jack was more right than he could have imagined. No one on the force knew the island—or Billy Delavane—as well as Haden Krakauer. None of them had his experience or his military training. He was the best person for the job, though I wasn't sure who to replace him with on the night shift. I even considered buying some NoDoz and letting him work around the clock for a few days.

But it wasn't necessary. Events happened too fast for that.

This is how it went down, according to Billy's deposition and Haden's surveillance log. Billy drove out to the Lomax jobsite to tell Pat Folger he'd be back at work the next day. Then he drove to Cisco and checked the surf. He grabbed a board out of his truck bed and surfed for a few hours. Haden was watching him with binoculars from the widow's walk of a nearby beach house.

Billy drove home to Madaket. Haden parked behind Jack Rivers' house, took up his post in the outdoor shower, and settled in for the stakeout.

Half an hour later Billy burst out the front door, ran to his truck and drove away, tires spitting gravel. According to him, he had just received a frantic phone call from Debbie Garrison. There was some crisis with her mother. Debbie was hiding out in the scrub woods near the fourteenth hole of the new 'Sconset Golf Club. Her mother despised the club and its ostentatious members, but Debbie had friends on the staff and she often hung out there, playing Wii games in the locker room or cadging free food from the kitchen. Her mother knew nothing about this, so the club made an ideal hide-out.

Halfway up Milestone Road Billy became aware that Haden Krakauer was following him. Haden's car, a used Ford Expedition with a rack of PVC pipes bolted to the front grill for his fishing rods, didn't stand out on an island full of used cars, dump scavengers, and fly-casters. But Billy's eyes were drawn to the shredded roof rack pads. From a distance in the rear view mirror, they looked enough like the flasher bars on top of a police car to make him touch the brakes. The big car slowed down also, and that gave the game away. Billy turned off the state road onto the dirt track beside the cranberry bogs.

He lost Haden in the moors, but he never found Debbie at the golf course.

She denied making the phone call. There was nothing on her cell phone or her home phone records to indicate she was lying. I thought she might have used a pay phone, there was still a bank of them in the lot behind the old Masonic lodge downtown, as well as various other locations—the Stop& Shop, the airport. But we got the call records from every pay phone on the island. Nothing.

Haden found his way to Altar Rock and then picked his way among the ruts and puddles, backing up once for a hundred yards when a dirt road narrowed into a footpath through the brambles. Eventually he wound up skirting Stump Pond and emerging onto Polpis Road. He never caught up with Billy. He drove back into town and checked in at the station.

It seemed like a routine slipup, more fodder for Tornovitch's contempt. I didn't understand the real implications until later. But the fact remained—for whatever reason, neither Billy Delavane nor Haden Krakauer could account for their whereabouts that afternoon.

The town seemed to be settling down. The Army Corps was starting to work on the dock, and the Steamship Authority had reconfigured its schedules around one slip. Boats were running on time. That was all that mattered to most people. Even the disruptions were a sign of normality. Nantucketers dealt with such detours and delays routinely. Half the streets you turned into were blocked by dump trucks full of dirt, delivery trucks full of lumber, or fork-lifts and bulldozers moving the stuff around.

As dusk approached, it felt like a smooth-rolling summer night in America's premiere summer town. Restaurants were crowded. Nat Philbrick, Nantucket's most famous popular historian in the seven years since David Halberstam died, now was back lecturing at the Atheneum. The buskers had returned on Main Street.

Franny and I took the motor launch out to Wauwinet and ate at Topper's. Franny insisted on paying. I pulled out my wallet. She closed her hand over mine.

“Ask me about the case,” she said.

I shrugged. “Any progress on Haden Krakauer?”

“Not yet. But I'm glad we had this talk. Now we can make Homeland Security pay for dinner.”

“Including the cashew nut financiere and the fig foie gras crème brulee?”

She smiled. “Especially those things.”

“Maybe we should get doggie bags for Tornovitch.”

“Sorry, my rule is to piss him off only when absolutely necessary.”

Riding the Wauwinet Lady back to the Hy-Line dock after dinner, leaning an elbow on the humming gunwale of the little boat, with the lights of Polpis flickering over the water and town gradually configuring itself out of the ground mist, I let her gripe about Jack—his passion for paperwork and his tendency to take her written reports and just sign them, turning them in as his own. I breathed the mild salt air and listened to her voice—the music, not the lyrics. I'd heard these songs before. Nothing much had changed since Los Angeles. It was higher profile now, with promotions and press coverage. She was making more money. And she rarely had to pay for dinner.

The talk circled back to Jack at my apartment later, after a world tour that included her marriage and mine, the virtue of the Colt 45 ACP over the nine millimeter handguns various government agencies preferred, her mother's lingering cancer and my father's death, by way of various regrets and missed opportunities, like unfinished novels, abandoned graduate degrees. We meticulously excluded our own relationship from that last topic. It was late at night. We'd been talking for hours. We were both tired, and neither of us had the stamina to launch a post-mortem on our time in L.A. I leaned across her for the bottle on the coffee table and poured us out the last of my sixteen-year-old Lagavulin.

She toasted the empty bottle and took a sip. “You died serving your country, sir.”

“A true hero.”

I took a swig, tasting the smoke and the peat bogs.

“Anyway,” she said, “I felt bad, running down Jack before. People don't realize—he's had real tragedy in his life. No, I mean it. His wife left him when he was in the Army. She was a drunk. She was driving across country with their kid and got into some kind of horrific car crash. The kid died. She lived but she's quadriplegic now. Jack was having an affair in Kuwait. He had just divorced his wife. I guess he was planning to marry this girl. She died, too. He never told me what happened. But it must have been bad. The one time the subject came up, he lost it. We were in the Town and Country Lounge at the Mayflower a couple of years ago, getting a drink after work. Jack loves the place. J. Edgar Hoover used to hang out there. Anyway, right in the middle of talking about the girl, he excused himself and did a mad dash to the men's room. I was worried, I thought he was sick. I followed him, I listened at the door. He was crying. I scrambled back to the bar, and when he came out we both pretended nothing happened. But that was weird. Jack crying in the bathroom. Over some girl.”

“Well, he was drunk.”

“Not that drunk. Believe me. Jack never gets that drunk.”

We sipped our scotch and let the specter of a heartbroken Jack Tornovitch fade away. Someone with a bad muffler roared down York Street and started the neighborhood dogs barking. Franny was looking at me with a quizzical little smile.

“What?”