Nantucket Five-Spot (15 page)

I handed her the watch case.

“This can only be one thing,” she said.

I nodded.

She opened the box and let out a low hiss through her teeth. “He's finished.”

“Yeah.”

“Look, Hank…You feel betrayed. You feel like an idiot. It's humiliating. You're sad and angry and part of you just doesn't believe it. But the other side is…we solved this thing. He's not going to be able to blow up any more bombs. He's not going to wreck the island's economy or kill the governor at the Pops concert. It's bad, but it's over. And we finished it. That's what we live for. Some part of you has to feel good about that, Hank. There has to be some satisfaction there. It's bittersweet. But it's real.”

I didn't want to discuss it. “Let's just finish searching downstairs.”

Twenty minutes later we found Billy Delavane's wallet folded into a towel in the linen closet. Five minutes after that Haden Krakauer came home. We read him his rights, handcuffed him, and took him into custody. Franny called Tornovitch and first thing in the morning, he sent a team to do a full search. They found a crate of rocket grenades in the basement behind a shelf of old paint cans.

It was like Christmas morning, all the evidence a greedy little apple-cheeked Homeland Security agent could have wished for, all wrapped up and tied with bows. All Jack needed was a dog romping in the wrapping paper and an empty cookie plate by the fireplace.

But it was too perfect. Haden might have been trying to get himself caught, but there are easier ways to commit suicide and smarter ways to get revenge. It wasn't his style anyway. Haden was smart and cautious. Festooning his house with clues this way, undermining a plot he must have been brooding over for the better part of a decade, just seemed incomprehensible to me. Even that sketch of Haden as the brooding master strategist fell short. If Haden was pissed off at you he'd tell you so. In Franny's opinion, he was secretive, brooding, diabolical. That explained everything.

Except, he wasn't any of those things.

Or maybe I really didn't know him as well as I thought I did. The chaos of his house remained a sharp reprimand. My opinion was irrelevant anyway. No character witness was going to get Haden out of this one. The evidence was too strong.

I didn't like it, but I was willing to be moved along by the momentum of the case, like a twig in a stream. I was just the local cop without a security clearance. I wasn't even allowed to talk to Haden.

Franny gave Jack the credit for the arrest, as usual. It was the best way to stay out of trouble for working behind his back. Jack played it up, and the newspapers were portraying him as the brilliant Homeland Security investigator who might just wind up saving America single handed. Next thing I knew he'd be running for office. He could probably win.

So I punched the clock, caught up on my paperwork, and stayed out of the way. I took on some of Haden's duties, so there was plenty to keep me busy. The regular police work was mostly futile. We raided the oxycodone pusher's house on Essex Road, after Doug Folger gave us the address and the layout. We found two Bulgarian guys with about-to-expire work visas and a sorority's worth of dangerous-looking Slavic girls cleaning the place. If this was the fabled Nantucket whorehouse, they were definitely multitasking.

We found no drugs of any kind apart from some convenience store packets of Advil. It was as if they knew we were coming, or didn't happen to be criminals. There were plenty of law-abiding immigrants on the island—the bulk of the immigrant population, in fact.

Cops see crime everywhere, I know that. Dealing with criminals all the time warps your perceptions. Still, the question remained, how had Doug Folger gotten it so wrong? I had guessed the answer to that before we ever showed up at the big cheaply-built house on Essex Road. Most likely the dealers had in fact been using the place—but had moved on, spooked by Pat Folger's snooping, just as I feared.

None of the Bulgarians knew anything and their English was terrible. Back to square one. It's the only numbered square, and I was beginning to see why. For the moment, I let it go. The island was quiet and I went back to doing a lot of not very much.

My inertia might have lasted through the summer, but the following Monday I saw something that tilted my perceptions about Haden Krakauer and brought everything into focus. The incident had no apparent relevance to his case. I had barely talked to Franny since Haden's arrest, and she was working around the clock. My little epiphany didn't even involve police work.

I was house hunting with the kids when I figured it out.

Chapter Thirteen

The Envelope House

For me the Fourth of July always felt like the beginning of the end of summer. The fleeting sense that the season was permanent, which took over in June, was always dissipated by the fireworks. The island had peaked. It was all downhill from here.

By the middle of the month, the second round of renters had arrived. Days were getting shorter again and Labor Day loomed six weeks away, casting its pall on the temporary perfection of high summer. The kids wouldn't feel the pressure until mid-August, when they realized they had to cram all their summer reading, and the mornings turned chilly again.

Shut out of the ongoing investigation of my assistant chief, with little to do on an uneventful Saturday afternoon, I decided to take the kids with me while I looked at real estate. They loved snooping houses. Pacing the perimeter of giant mansions closed for the season, squinting into the gloomy rooms and laughing at the tasteless ‘interior design' on display there, was a favorite winter sport on Nantucket. As police chief I should have been strict about such trespassing; but I enjoyed it, too. The idea that these fortresses of privilege couldn't even be approached by lesser mortals was as pretentious as the German appliances and marble countertops we glimpsed through the windows.

Looking for a rental was less glamorous but more exciting, since summertime snooping was a rarity. Even better, the kids could actually get inside these houses and explore them; maybe even stake a claim to one.

We took my NPD cruiser for the drive out to the Tom Nevers area—a windswept barren chunk of scrub oak and coast, a mile or two west of 'Sconset, with no stores or amenities, zoned for cheap houses on small lots.

Tim got a kick out of the big police car, though it embarrassed Caroline. She had reached the age when everything about me embarrassed her, so it really didn't matter what car I was driving. We turned through a white gate and I followed the winding roads of a recent subdivision around to the house, pulled into the crushed shell driveway past a high clipped hedge, and got my first look at the place.

The house was big and angular, with a wrap-around deck, and I immediately got the feeling I wouldn't be able to afford the rent. But Miranda's boss, Elaine Bailey, had assured me it was a year-round lease and a “fantastic bargain.” Yeah—like her six thousand dollar Neiman Marcus couch.

No sign of Elaine's Land Rover. She had insisted on showing me the house personally. My kids' theory was that Elaine had a crush on me. Terrifying thought. A hard, calculating woman in her early fifties, with the best hair and prettiest face that money could buy, pulled, tucked, tinted, dermabraded, injected and spa-pampered. Elaine had cold eyes and a humorless little incision of a mouth that rarely smiled. She was a petite woman who gave the impression of a battering ram, and Miranda laughingly called her “the Force.”

She always got what she wanted, and it was blind good luck that she didn't want me. Elaine was always late. She liked people waiting for her. Today was no exception. I glanced at my watch.

“Dad, can I talk to you in private?” Tim said.

“Sure.” I turned around to face the back seat. “Carrie?”

She sniffed “I know what he wants to talk about.”

“You do not!”

“He has a crush on Debbie Garrison.”

So Debbie's Mom had enrolled her in Murray Camp after all. Looking at Debbie, you could see that she was going to be a heart-breaker someday, but I didn't think it was going to start so soon—or that Tim would be her first victim.

“Shut up! You're such a jerk.” He started over the seat, going after Caroline. I pulled him back.

“Oooo, that hurts! What a comeback! It's true, Dad. I heard him talking to Tommy Whitlock about it.”

“Can I just talk to Dad alone for a minute, please?”

“I can't believe you even like her. She's such a little bitch.”

“Carrie—”

I squeezed Tim's shoulder. “Come on. We can talk by the house.”

Caroline sighed, giving up. Tim and I climbed out of the car and walked to the porch to sit on the steps, with the warm breeze on our faces.

After a while, Tim said, “Do you think Debbie's a bitch?”

“I only met her once, but—no. What I really think is…I hate to hear that word coming out of your mouth.”

“Sorry.”

“Actually, I got the impression she's a lot like Caroline. They're both bossy and people like that don't usually get along very well with each other. It makes sense. Only one person can decide which game the whole neighborhood is going to play. But you're perfect for Debbie. You come from a long line of men who actually enjoy taking orders from women.”

He considered that. “I take orders from Carrie.”

“And I took orders from your Mom.”

“Then why did you get divorced?”

I looked up into the cloudless blue sky, piecing together the right words. A hawk was riding the thermals above us. “I guess there were some orders I couldn't obey. I couldn't be somebody else, for instance. That was basically what your Mom wanted.”

“I like you being you.”

“Me, too. Which is a good thing, because we're both stuck with me.”

Caroline was out of the car by the time Elaine Bailey arrived. Both kids were playing with a neighborhood black Lab who had ambled over with a marshy tennis ball in his mouth.

“You are going to love this house,” Elaine said as she climbed out of her car, followed by a billow of refrigerated air. She was wearing a white linen pants suit with a pale blue silk blouse. Her hair was cut short, a perfect blonde helmet.

The black Lab trotted over to investigate the newcomer and Elaine dodged back. “Where did that
dog
come from?”

“He's the welcoming committee,” I said.

She sniffed. “There are leash laws on this island. Why don't you get your dog officer out here?”

I petted the Lab. He shoved the ball at me and gave me a little tug-of-war when I pulled the soggy mess out of his mouth. I threw it down the driveway, watching it spray a fan of spit as it bounced. The Lab bounded away after it.

“I like dogs.” I wiped my palms on my pants.

“I figured it out, Daddy,” Caroline said. Then, to Elaine: “Last week, I said I dropped something like a hot potato and my Dad told me to think of a better way to say it. He hates clichés.”

Elaine cocked her head with a condescending exaggeration of interest. “And you thought of something now?”

Caroline turned back to me. “I dropped it like a dog-slobbered tennis ball!”

I laughed. “Good one.”

“We really need to do this, Henry.” Elaine started toward the house. “I'm just swamped today. And these renters won't stay at the beach forever.”

We followed her inside. The rooms were big and sunny but the furniture was sparse: bean bag chairs and blond-wood tables; an uncomfortable-looking couch, toys scattered across the floor; wall -to-wall carpeting, no book shelves, no pictures, but some kind of hideous macramé rug dangled from a three-penny nail, a refugee from a 1960s hippy apartment. An enormous flat screen TV perched on a pedestal cabinet near the sliding glass doors. All the furniture tilted toward the gaping screen, like some Renaissance painting with all the perspective lines converging on Jesus. The place smelled of burnt toast, sour milk, and the faint formaldehyde tang of new carpet.

“This is horrible,” Caroline's pronounced. “It's like some creepy motel. Except with kids.”

Tim was more practical: “Do we each get a bedroom?”

“There are actually four bedrooms in the house,” Elaine said. “And a full basement—with a ping pong table and a juke box.”

“What's a juke box?” Tim asked.

“It plays records, dummy,” Caroline snapped. “It's from the seventies.”

Tim brightened. “Like Dad,” he said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“We have an iPod hi-fi,” Caroline told Elaine. “So we don't really need, like—vinyl.”

I was looking out the window, at the view toward the ocean. There was a twelve inch gap and then another wall, with another set of windows.

“This is odd.”

“I'll tell you what's odd. Some money manager telling me Occupy Wall Street should occupy Nantucket.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, back in the spring. But I saw him in town today. I keep thinking about him. A very odd person—more like Hillbilly Hollow than West Los Angeles, where he said he was from, and kind of a creep. Scary.”

“West Los Angeles?”

“Supplevita Boulevard, near the San Diego Freeway. I remember because the street sounded like some hippy vitamin product.”

“It's Sepulveda, Elaine. And no one from L.A. calls it the San Diego Freeway. It's the 405.”

She shrugged. “See what I mean? Odd. Something for the NPD to keep an eye on.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

She was all business again. She took two steps and stood beside me. I was still looking at the extra set of windows. “That's the wonderful thing about this place, Henry. It's an envelope house—a house built inside another house. The gap creates a thermal envelope. It's the most energy efficient structure in the world—state of the art. It's green. It's sustainable. All of that touchy feely stuff. But what really matters is—the place costs nothing to heat. You'll save thousands of dollars next winter.” She waved a hand dismissively, reading my mind: “They'll get rid of all this furniture. You can decorate it any way you want.”

A house built inside another house, like Russian nesting dolls, the outer one shielding the inner one. That was it. In that moment, listening to Elaine's sales pitch, I finally understood. I didn't have to think about it or put the pieces together. No leap of intuition was required. I didn't need to find the answer.

I was standing in it.

I saw exactly what was happening to Haden Krakauer. Someone had done this thing, someone had built an envelope house around him, caught him in a double-layered, perfectly insulated trap, sustainable and energy efficient. He was being framed, but not for an ordinary crime. He was being framed for something else, for something so eccentric it might never have occurred to anyone that it was even happening.

Haden was being framed for framing Billy Delavane.

It sounded crazy, but it made perfect sense. In fact, it was the only answer that made any sense at all, that actually fitted the jumble of contradictory facts. This was state-of-the-art construction, all right. Every piece of evidence that pointed to Billy had been built to blow back on Haden—the watch, the wallet, the fake message from Debbie Gibson, the e-mails, the voice machine…all of it, even that wild goose chase in the moors. Haden lived in 'Sconset, he knew the moors like his own backyard, because they actually were his backyard. If he wanted to set a bomb at the golf course he could have done it at any time. So why do it during the single two hour period when he had no alibi for his whereabouts?

It was diabolical. Franny was on the mark about that much. Except, Haden wasn't the Devil.

But who was? Who was doing this? And why?

“—because of the increased fire hazard they had to install a sprinkler system to bring it up to code,” Elaine was saying. “But the house is perfectly safe and—Henry?”

“What?”

“Hello! We were hoping you could join us here on the planet Earth. The climate is lovely.”

“Sorry, Elaine.”

“Have you heard one thing I've been saying to you, Henry? Because I really don't have time to—”

I hugged her. “Thanks Elaine. This is great. You've been a huge help. I can't even tell you. But this—this is fantastic. This is just what I needed.”

“So you'll take the place?”

“The place? The house? No, the house is bad. But thank you—thank you so much!”

I scooped up the kids and bolted, leaving her standing in the living room among the toy fire engines and the half-completed lego robots, no doubt more convinced than ever that the Nantucket Police Chief should be fired, ASAP. I wasn't worried.

I had bigger things to think about.