Nantucket Five-Spot (11 page)

“So when do I get to hear one of these poems of yours?”

“You don't.”

“Come on, Hank. You may be the only poetry-writing law enforcement officer in the continental United States.”

“That doesn't mean I'm any good at it.”

She assembled a stern face. “Let me be the judge of that, Chief Kennis.”

“I don't think so.”

She slid her hand up my leg. “Poets are sexy.”

“Are they?”

“I always fell for the arty types at school.”

Her hand moved another inch.

“Okay,” I said. “I never memorized too many of them. But this one sticks in my mind.”

“Is it a love poem?”

“Sort of. I wrote it for my daughter when she was three. Actually, that's the title—‘Three.' It might not be a great poem, but it's an excellent prophecy. It's already coming true.”

She cocked her head, eyebrows lifted. “Well?”

I recited the poem.

There is a grace to parenthood,

And so there must be a fall.

I gaze at my daughter,

A self untested, uncertain, but pure

Wearing a purple dress

Looking not small but miniature

A cameo impression of a future self

Composed and separate

Going off to a dance

Or to college, or to work

Walking just as she does now

A little more steady

Posture just as straight

Striding without looking back

Across some future lawn

The same person, but bigger

And gone.

I miss her already

I cannot see her enough

Human perception is too small

It rattles like a pea

In the vast box of a single second

The loss cannot be reckoned

The predicament is too peculiar to mention:

I stand indicted by a future self

For the crime of divided attention.

So I stare

Grabbing at the swift flow of time,

Fistfuls of stream water

Standing five feet away from my daughter

Until my eyes begin to blur

Watching and watching

And watching

Her.

***

Franny wiggled next to me and eased her head into the cup of muscle just below my shoulder.

“It's beautiful,” she said.

“It's true, anyway.”

She sighed comfortably. “Truth and beauty.”

“So—you think poets who write about toddlers are sexy?”

“You know I do.”

She was staring up at me with that little half-smile, and the silence settled in. It had its own authority. It seemed to prohibit conversation. Every hurtling second made talk seem more puny and meaningless. I cupped the back of Franny's head in my arms and kissed her. She kissed me back, pressing against me, pushing on my thighs to climb my body. Somehow I tipped over and she was lying on top of me on the couch. In the rush of feeling everything was new but also familiar. I was kissing her on that trail in the Santa Monica Mountains. It was the same kiss, interrupted by some indeterminate amount of time—a few seconds, to watch a hawk rising the thermals over the backbone trail? Or five years? I didn't know, and it didn't matter. Somehow we had found our way back to this same stream, both of us parched, heads ducked into the solid pulse of the current, gulping the icy water, drinking our fill.

I had just slipped my hand under her shirt, running it up the smooth warmth of her back, when we heard the noise.

We both froze for a second. Then Franny pulled away.

“What was that?”

My mind spun wildly, looking for a neutral explanation. Sonic boom? But no planes were flying at this hour. Thunder? But the sky was clear. Kids playing with illegal fireworks before the Fourth of July? But, faint as it was, the sound was too big, too deep, too wide for that.

“Shit,” I said. “It's another bomb.”

Then the phone rang.

I eased out from under Franny, rolled off the couch, and grabbed my cell from on top of the television. It was Tornovitch. They had hit the new 'Sconset golf course, the Nantucket Golf Club. The bomb took out half the clubhouse and most of a cleaning crew, getting the place ready for a members' tournament the next day. Three innocent Ecuadorian immigrants, working the late shift for minimum wage. The other three made it out all right.

“Brief Agent Tate and get out here. This is our case now, Kennis. In my absence, you take your orders from her. Don't forget it.”

He hung up.

I had a childish moment of thinking that whoever this bomber was, and whatever the ultimate purpose of these attacks, so far they were doing an excellent job of wrecking my love life. It was my last personal thought for quite a while, crumpled and gone even as it occurred to me, like a gum wrapper out a car window.

Everything was different now. There were casualties this time.

This was murder. We were at war.

Chapter Ten

Disinformation

Two fire trucks passed us on the way to the golf course. We could see the glow of the blaze from the rise in the road, after the first Tom Nevers turn off. A sinuous length of smoke was rising from the fields beyond the cranberry bogs, dispersing against the high clear stars. It was almost two thirty in the morning. A full moon was casting a chalky light over the moors.

We drove east on Milestone Road without talking. I didn't want to say what I was thinking and I suspect Franny didn't either. You could make the case that Billy was out on bail because I failed to inform Jack Tornovitch of the Delavane family's financial status. If in fact he set off this bomb, then part of the blame would fall on me. It wasn't much of a case, but it was a real concern. You don't have to be found guilty to feel that way. Billy was the obvious suspect, running out of the house on the basis of that phantom “emergency phone call” from Debbie Garrison the previous afternoon.

Billy had been heading for the golf course, according to Haden Krakauer. He took evasive action, lost Haden in the moors—and twelve hours later the bomb went off. That was bad enough.

The other thoughts were worse.

Haden had been missing for part of the afternoon also. We only had his word that he was chasing Billy. He had plenty of time to set a bomb, and he knew the island well enough to approach the club from behind without being spotted. Could Haden have faked that phone call from Debbie? No, no, that was nuts. At least it sounded nuts. But was it really impossible? All he needed to do was bug her phone, get her on tape, then mix and match any usable quotes. Haden certainly had the technological know-how. He was a geek. I remembered him telling me about the 1960s phone “phreaks,” using their black boxes to cheat the phone company. It had something to do with “supervision signals” and “Zener diodes.” I nodded along, the way you do when someone in a foreign country thinks you speak their language, but I understood the most important part. Haden knew what he was talking about. That stuff fascinated him, which was a little odd for a cop.

This was ludicrous. It was late at night, I'd had a few drinks at dinner, I should have been home in bed, preferably with Franny. I stole a glance at her. She was looking out at the moon-washed landscapes streaming by. I had asked her about Haden at dinner—I was half joking, just giving her an excuse to put a meal on the government tab. She had joked back, but was she telling the truth? She kept things to herself until she had a solid case. Was she almost there? What had she actually found out?

I didn't ask her. I didn't want to know.

Two staties I'd never seen before were manning the yellow tape at the guardhouse at the bottom of the driveway. They let us through and we drove up the long series of curves toward the clubhouse.

The fire was mostly out by the time we got there. The left side of the big building seemed to be intact, but the right side was a smoking ruin. Gouts of water from four different hoses arced into the smoldering heap of charred timber. Bomb techs and forensic teams were swarming the blast site. Fraker and some local state cops were standing around drinking coffee.

We sat quietly in the car for a moment after I turned off the engine. Franny started to roll down her window but rolled it back up, hastily. Tornovitch appeared at my window. I dutifully rolled it down. The acrid air rushed in.

He looked past me and talked directly to Franny. “There are three survivors,” he said. “Two of them can talk, but only one of them speaks English. Apparently he got a call a few minutes before the bomb went off, telling him to vacate the premises. He and his two pals believed it. The others thought it was a prank. Fraker is rounding up the groundskeeper and a couple of other locals who were in the vicinity. I want full statements from everyone. Speak that good Castilian Spanish of yours. They love the lisp. Make them comfortable. Get me some answers. Fraker has his people rousting the club personnel who were on duty yesterday. I want them deposed on a minute-by-minute timeline. I want to know if they saw anyone, any unfamiliar vehicle, any unusual activity, anything. The local cops can help with the transcriptions and the tape recording.”

He turned to me. “Get your boys out here, Kennis. Your job is—keep the press away. Feed them some bullshit. The story is a gas main blew up. Stick to it. Put some summer specials out on the course. The press'll be cutting across the greens to get access. This is a world class PGA facility and I don't want those ghouls trashing it. My forensic team has already found fragments of the device. Residues indicate military issue C-4. I have a National Guard division on the way to Madaket right now to arrest Delavane, and an FBI team will be interrogating the brother within the hour. I want to know how he got his hands on this stuff.”

Franny nodded and climbed out of the car, jogging away toward the makeshift field hospital at the back of the building.

“I can handle Billy,” I said to Tornovitch. “You don't need a bunch of trigger-happy weekend warriors charging in there and—”

“You can handle Delavane? Are you drunk? I smell booze on you, Kennis. So maybe that explains your idiotic remark. Let me refresh your memory. You didn't want to arrest this lunatic in the first place, and then you withheld information which put him out on the street the same day we brought him in. Don't fuck with the United States government, Kennis. That's called treason where I come from.”

This was pointless bullying. There was no way he could bring charges against me without admitting his own negligence. And it didn't matter anyway—he could never have gotten Billy held without bail at that hearing. The judge knew Billy too well and the evidence was too flimsy. Still, Jack never missed a chance to play the bully. It kept his blood pressure down. He let everyone around him suffer the strokes and the heart attacks. He'd be the picture of robust good health at their funerals.

The firemen turned off the hoses, and the place was quiet for a second after Jack strode away, apart from the murmur of hushed conversations, the dripping water, and the subsiding crackle of the burnt lumber. The scorched, sodden smell was stronger here in the aftermath of the explosion. The big shingled clubhouse had the look of one more McMansion under construction: half-finished, ostentatious, dominating the hillside over the golf course.

I called Kyle Donnelly and Charlie Boyce, gave them their marching orders. The entire press corps would be closed out—with one exception. When I called Haden Krakauer he was halfway up the driveway with David Trezize in the car beside him. David had been trying to get past the staties, telling them I had called him out to the crime scene. They weren't buying it. Haden arrived in the middle of the argument and backed him up, just to annoy the storm-troopers.

“They made David leave his car at the guardhouse,” Haden told me. “Too many vehicles up here. I can take him back if you want.”

“No, no—it's okay. Let him come.”

I liked the idea of David Trezize scooping everyone, including the
New York Times
and CNN, not to mention our own
Inquirer and Mirror.

David Trezize was the editor and sole proprietor of an upstart local weekly called the
Nantucket Shoals.
He had named the little newspaper after the lightship station that served as a landing mark for transatlantic sea traffic off the island until 1983. That was typical of him. His knowledge of Nantucket history was almost perversely encyclopedic. Standing on a random spot in Polpis he could tell you it had been a commercial holly grove in the early twentieth century, a dairy farm before that, and the site of a Wampanoag village a century earlier. He had the arrowheads to prove it.

The
Shoals
was the most successful effort yet launched to provide an alternative to the
Inky Mirror.
The little newspaper had almost gone under the year before, because of a feud with a vindictive plutocrat named Preston Lomax. When the man was killed, David had found himself on the suspect list, but only briefly. And it had turned out well for him.

Rumor was, Lomax's daughter Kathleen had put a lot of money into the paper, and they'd been seen together at various high-end island restaurants. Good for him. She was a good kid, he deserved a little romance, and his newspaper deserved a second chance. The writing was sharp because David edited and largely rewrote every article. The photography was striking because he took most of the pictures himself. He also fixed the computers, laid out the paper every week, and sold most of the ad space.

David was small and chubby with thick glasses. He seemed pale and unimposing at first sight but he had a termite intensity. He would chew into anything that caught his interest. It made sense that he was the first one to the crime scene, and that he'd managed to talk himself into riding shotgun with the assistant chief.

They climbed out of the cruiser, and I was glad to see the look of shock and horror on Haden's face. “It's a fucking war zone,” he said to me when I walked up to them. “I never thought I'd see another one. Casualties?”

I nodded, and told him to secure the perimeter with the troops as they arrived, coordinating with Boyce and Donnelly. For the moment, we were just crowd control. There was no real police work for us to do. The off-island experts had that side of it handled.

“That's a comforting thought,” he said. Then he pulled me aside. “Can I have a quick word with you, Chief?”

“Sure.”

We took a couple of steps away from David Trezize.

“We need to talk.”

“Listen, Haden, I don't know if this is the right time. Maybe tomorrow morning, when—”

“It is tomorrow morning. Listen, something weird is going on here. I've been thinking about it a lot. I didn't want to say anything because it sounds so crazy. And now, with some swat team arresting Billy Delavane…I don't know. It's like…a
Twilight Zone
episode or something.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “I know you feel bad about this, Haden. We all do. But we're standing in the middle of a crime scene right now. We have a lot of work to do before dawn. That has to take priority. We'll talk about this later. All right?”

“All right. But soon.”

“Soon, absolutely. Tomorrow or the next day. I'll clear some time.”

He went off to do his job, and we didn't get around to talking until it was too late.

Trezize strolled up to me. No one noticed him in the urgent bustle. “Quite a mess, Chief.”

I nodded.

“Another bomb?”

“Word is, a gas main exploded.”

“Would that be a Semtex gas main or a C-4 gas main?”

“Very funny.”

“On the contrary—I think we're both dead serious here, Chief. And you're a terrible liar. No offence.”

I glanced around. No one nearby. “It's C-4. Military grade. They're taking Billy Delavane into custody right now. This time they're holding him without bail. And you didn't hear any of this from me.”

“Absolutely not. You're the soul of discretion.”

“I mean it, David. Homeland Security is on the warpath right now.”

He gave me an ineptly playful punch on the shoulder. “Hey, I always protect my sources, Chief. Just as if I ran a real newspaper.”

David wandered away, and I pulled my mag-light and some zip-lock plastic evidence baggies out of the car. I walked around the undamaged side of the clubhouse, skirted the medical tent and pushed into the dense bushes of rosa rugosa, pitch pine, and scrub oak and huckleberry. I found an overgrown path, not much more than a deer track, and started down it slowly, shining the light a hundred and eighty degrees ahead of me. Soon I was out of sight of the club grounds and almost out of earshot.

I didn't know what I was looking for, but this struck me as the most likely clandestine approach to the property. Maybe I'd find the spot where the perpetrator had parked his car. Tire tracks could help us, so could paint residues if the brambles had scratched the finish. A good foot print in the soft dirt with a unique tread pattern would help. So would anything he left behind. Once in L.A. we found a bank thief's cell phone at the crime scene. People were careless. They left messes behind. Cleaning up after them was one of the best ways to put them in jail. So I moved through the underbrush at a measured, deliberate pace, looking for what didn't belong.

What I finally found in the brambles made my stomach lurch.

It would have looked like an inconsequential scrap of litter to anyone else. I almost missed it myself—a little square of wax paper, caught on a thorn at knee level, a yard off the path. I got a swarm of tiny cuts reaching for it, taking one corner with my tweezers and delicately lifting it free. My knees cracked as I straightened up, holding the powerful light on the paper. It was the wrapper from a Halls cough drop, Haden Krakauer's favorite brand and constant companion.

Had he been here, trudging along this path, sucking his cough drops, cradling the bomb in his hands, the plastic-wrapped explosive he was so familiar with from his Army days?

The thought brought a chill, a feverish little shudder.

Franny was right.

Haden was framing Billy Delavane for some long-ago sexual peccadillo. He held grudges, just as Billy said. Haden was the bomber. And now he was a murderer, too. He was nuts, but he was good at hiding it. He had fooled everyone for years. Most of all, he had fooled me. I hadn't seen it because I didn't want to see it, just like I didn't want to accept that people were jacking deer and turning the island into a toxic waste site.

I looked aside. I preferred the fantasy, I preferred to live in my own little dream world, just like my ex-wife always said.

Well, not anymore.

I fumbled for one of the evidence bags. My hand trembled as I slipped the wrapper inside. In the process I dropped the flashlight and stood in the dark for a minute or so, the beam cutting a tangled path through the shrubs. I pushed the on-off button with my foot and breathed in the darkness, deep breaths that pushed the first spasm of anger and confusion out of my lungs.