Nantucket Five-Spot (20 page)

I smiled at her. “Having fun yet?”

“I saw a great bumper sticker yesterday. It said, ‘If it's tourist season why can't we shoot them?'”

“Come on—it's lively. It's exciting.”

“It's waiting in line for an hour to buy a five dollar ice-cream cone.”

I shrugged. No way to argue with that. But I had an idea. “Can I borrow Debbie for a minute? We'll be back before the line gets to the front door.”

“That gives you plenty of time.”

I took Debbie's hand. “I want to ask you something.”

“Police business?” she asked hopefully.

“Absolutely. Top secret police business.”

We strolled up toward the Steamship Authority building. I thought about Chuck Obremski again, and his faith in chronology. “Why now,” he always asked.

What had brought Debbie to Nantucket at this precise moment? Her grandmother had died, it was true, but Joanne could have handled the estate problems by phone or e-mail. And there was no need for Debbie to be here. Didn't she have a social life at home? What eleven-year-old girl wants to lose a summer with her friends, wandering around some sandy tourist town as a complete stranger? It made no sense.

But according to the evidence against Haden Krakauer, Debbie's arrival had set his whole revenge scheme in motion. Seeing her had turned his passive resentments active. No, it was more than that, much more. His hatred turned imperative when he saw this girl, when he realized who she was and what she meant about the waste and failure of his own life.

So, I could begin to generate the time line I needed. Tyler Gibson disappears, late May. A couple of weeks later Debbie arrives on-island and the Nantucket Police Department receives its first bomb threat. If Gibson was dead and the man who killed him was the staff sergeant in Kuwait that Ed Delavane had told me about, then the ten year delay had to be a jail sentence.

The prison term started the time line. Haden had sent this guy away. Now he was out, and making his moves.

Ahead of us, a crew was setting the new dolphin in place with a crane. The bright lights made it look like a stage show. Debbie was staring into the glare of the reconstruction, the aftermath of chaos. “I hope you catch that bomber person soon,” she said.

“That's why I want to talk with you tonight,” I said.

We walked along. I was still working out how I wanted to broach the subject.

To set Haden up, the staff sergeant needed to use Debbie for ‘motivation'. That meant getting her to Nantucket, somehow. The first contact was crucial. But how would he go about it? A face to face meeting was out of the question. A phone call could be overheard, or written off as a crank or a prank. A letter was so twentieth century, not to mention encumbered with all kinds of potential forensics problems: finger prints, saliva DNA, postmarks. As we walked, another possibility blindsided me, like finding the last line of a poem, unexpected but unimpeachable. I ambushed Debbie with it.

“You can settle a little bet I made with myself,” I said.

She glanced up at me. “Okay. Was it for a lot of money?”

“I have to buy myself dinner if I lose.”

She smiled. “Uh oh.”

“It has to do with you and Billy. When I showed you around the new station house, you said someone was calling Billy a terrorist. But you wouldn't say who. I think that's because you didn't know. I think you read it in a posting on your Facebook page.”

She dropped her eyes, sidestepped a pizza crust.

“Whoever it was told you Billy was your father. He told you people suspected Billy of wanting to bomb all the rich people off the island. He said Billy needed you, maybe? To stabilize him, give him perspective, show him there were more important things in life than his grudges? I'm not sure about that part. Except, it got you here this summer, for the first time in your life, just ahead of the bomb scares.”

She stopped walking, dropped my hand. “How did you know that?”

I shrugged. “Just a guess.”

“No, I mean it. Just tell me the truth. How could you possibly know that stuff?”

I raised both hands a little to calm her down.

“I didn't know, Debbie. I've been trying to figure it out. I knew this guy could get past your Facebook firewall, friend himself somehow. I knew he'd been reading your e-mails, and your mother's e-mails. He knew Billy was your mom's secret and you were bugging her about it.”

“Wait. How could he know that?”

“He had probably gotten access to your mom's computer as well—all her private e-mails. You were pressuring her to tell you who your dad was. She must have mentioned it to someone—”

“My Aunt Polly. They talk about everything.”

“There you go. So this man wanted to get you here, and he had the perfect item of information for bait. The only question was—how to tell you. Do you remember any new friends you couldn't explain?”

“I have like two thousand friends now, and I block most of them. It was someone from school, I think. Maybe Tom Conena or Shawn Kennelly? They're here in the summer a lot. Not this year though.”

“So he just picked a friend with some Nantucket connections and used the link.”

She squinted in thought. “I wrote to Tommy—his family moved to South Carolina last year. He denied saying anything and got all weird about it. I figured he just felt bad about it. He always needs to have the 411 on everything and he's a total Chatty Cathy.”

I nodded. “The guy lucked out there. Tommy was the weak link. Picking someone who had moved out of state was a shrewd move, though.”

“Who? Who are you talking about? Who knew all this, that Billy was my dad, and my mom not telling me and—and reading my e-mail, all our e-mail, and watching us and spying on us and—who is this guy? Is he here now? Is he watching me or something? Is he following me, did you see someone following me? What's going on, because—”

“Debbie—”

“Because if someone is watching me you have to—”

“No one is watching you. You're safe here.”

“I don't get it.”

“I'm not sure I do, either. But if I'm right, this guy got what he was after. He's happy now. He has no reason to bother you.”

“So this person, he tricked me and used me, and he got away with something. He hurt somebody, or did something bad, or…and I helped him.”

“You didn't mean to. And he hasn't gotten away with it yet.”

“Are you going to catch him?”

“Yes.”

She stared up at me, unblinking.“Promise?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay. You better.”

Caroline was right—she was bossy. I led her back to her mom, said my goodnights and went home.

The next morning was a Purgatory of delay. I was waiting for Chuck Obremski's phone call, checking in with my people on the ground at Jetties Beach. But we'd already organized the security for the Pops concert—the town's part of it at least, which was mostly traffic control and crowd management, going through the SOP binder with Fire Chief Ted Deakins and the Secret Service people, reps from the hospital, the WAVE buses, the taxi companies, Lonnie Fraker, and the harbormaster. The concert had been a smoothly running machine for decades before I arrived on the island. No one needed my help.

The beach would be closed as of Friday morning, when the stage sections were off-loaded from the ferry. The carpenters would assemble the big platform, while other crews put up the tents, set up the tables, organized the crowd control barriers, the porta-potties. I could feel the countdown in my head—three days until the concert. The only encouraging thought was that no one could frame Haden Krakauer for bombing the Pops concert if he was sitting in jail. And if they couldn't frame Haden for it, there was no point in doing it.

So maybe nothing was going to happen after all. Maybe it really was over.

I managed to take a few positive steps. I called Gene Mahon and asked for a copy of the photograph he took of Gibson and me at the AIDS benefit. He e-mailed it and I printed it up between phone calls. I wanted Haden to give me a positive ID on the picture, though how I was going to get it to him, I had no idea. There was a rumor circulating in the station, Kyle Donnelly had heard if from Lonnie Fraker, that I would be driving the police car that took Haden to the airport—the lead vehicle in a JTTF motorcade. It would be a typical Tornovitch gesture if it was true: a slap in the face disguised as a courtesy. Normally Sheriff Bob Bulmer got that job, but supposedly he and Tornovitch had hated each other on sight—good judgment from both of them.

If Jack's plan worked out, I'd be able to show Haden the picture on the trip. If he recognized it, I'd have my identity thief's name and a vital piece of evidence to support my theory.

I must have dreamed about another way to track him down—the idea was in my head when I woke up the next morning. It didn't take long to find out that in most noncapital crime cases during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the convicted offenders were shipped off to the Naval Consolidated Brig at Miramar, California. I knew enough about my identity thief—slight southern accent, physical description, computer skills, approximate date of release—to get a possible match from someone on the brig staff. I put a call in to the commander's office, and got bumped to voice mail. Of course: it was six in the morning there. I left a detailed message and got back to pacifying some CEO who objected to the north end of Beach Street being closed for the concert.

I heard back from Miramar as I was leaving to pick up the kids from Murray Camp.

They knew my identity thief. The dates and descriptions matched up. They couldn't tell me much—after one bad incident, he had been a model prisoner, working in the brig office and doing IT work on the computers. In fact, they were a little lost without him. He had dropped out of sight after his release—no contact with approved halfway houses or designated social workers. He hadn't used any of the job placement services.

“I may have found him for you,” I said.

His name was Ezekiel Beaumont.

“Zeke to his friends,” the commander's chief of staff told me.

“If he has any,” I answered.

The chief of staff laughed at that. “Hey, everybody has a friend or two, sir.”

I hung up, thinking about that casual comment. It stuck in my mind all the way out to the Delta fields. The Murray Camp day had ended with a pickup softball game on the windy baseball diamond near the Sun Island storage facility. I drove slowly out the airport road, past the new commercial developments and the grim, dark little condos with sad names like ‘Anchor Village,' built just ahead of the popped housing bubble.

I was late, but I was content with the sluggish traffic. I wanted to think, and it would be impossible once I had the kids in the car. I kept turning that Miramar chief of staff's phrase over in my head.

Everybody has a friend or two.

Friends, or allies anyway. Beaumont would need help for an elaborate scam like this. Someone else was involved, they had to be. Someone from the Iraq war days. Someone who'd been involved with the drug bust that sent Beaumont to Miramar.

I thought of Dan Taylor, bragging about commanding men in Iraq. When had he actually come to the island? A self-righteous gasbag who had almost single-handedly pushed the funding for a drug sniffing dog through at a Town Meeting, he was the perfect candidate, the obvious choice for the role of military drug runner. Guys like Dan Taylor always had some kind of dark secret, and they always managed to skate. He blustered his way through.

So, how would this work? Dan Taylor was the front man, arriving years early to lay the groundwork for this plan? Doing what exactly? He had no real power or influence. No, it didn't make sense. Beaumont needed someone inside the investigation. But there were at least sixty people in the JTTF on-island—more like seventy-five if you included the Army Corps of Engineers crew and the Coast Guard transfers. There was no way to vet all of them in the time I had left.

I turned down the short drive to the softball fields. A little girl broke out of a crowd near the concession stand and started running toward the car.

It was Caroline.

“Daddy, Daddy!” she was shouting. “You have to help Tim! Jake Souter is beating him up and no one's helping!”

I pulled into a space and scrambled out of the car.

“Where is he?”

She pointed at the crowd and we took off.

“You're late,” she said, between ragged breaths. Her tone was accusatory, but she was right. I should have been here ten minutes ago. Blaming traffic was pointless: you automatically added a few minutes to any drive in July on Nantucket—you leave time so stuff like this won't happen. I'd been tempted to use my flashers, but that was a needlessly trivial abuse of power. Pushing through the crowd with Caroline right behind me, I wished I'd done it.

Jake Sauter was a fat kid, twice Tim's size, with close-set eyes and a slab forehead under rank long hair. He had Tim's right arm forced halfway up his back. Tim was trying not to cry, but the tears were squeezing out of his eyes. I stepped to the struggling boys, and grabbed Jake's arm just above the elbow.

“Okay. That's enough. Let him go, Jake. Pick on someone your own size.”

He released Tim and turned on me. “What about you! You pick on someone your own size!”

I pulled Tim over to me. “Let's get out of here.”

“My dad's gonna kill you,” Jake shouted after us. “You wait and see!”

Driving home, Tim was quiet.

I said, “Are you all right?”

He made a contemptuous little bleat, still turned away.

“Tim?”

He faced me. “I was handling it, Dad? Okay? I was doing fine—but now…“

“Tim—”

“Why did you have to do that?”

“I didn't think about it. He was hurting you.”

“So now everybody's seen me being rescued by my dad. I thought this couldn't get any worse.”