Nantucket Grand (4 page)

“I know. That's what I'm saying. What a creep.”

“So you're saying—what? You think Todd was murdered?”

“I don't know.”

“And Chuck Forrest pulled the trigger?”

She started to laugh but it collapsed into a sigh. “That's how it would be if it happened in one of my books, Chief. Maddy would be out in the moors, looking for spent rounds and shell casings while Chief Blote worked on his memoirs and told her to keep her nose out of police business.”

“He always tells her that,” Billy said.

Jane shrugged. “He never learns—supposedly. But he's not above asking Maddy a question or two, from time to time—on the sly. Of course he never gives her the credit when he finally solves the case. And that's fine with Maddy. She works behind the scenes.”

“Sounds familiar,” I said. I was thinking of my old flame Franny Tate and the late, unlamented Jack Tornovitch. Franny had taken over Jack's old job at Homeland Security. I read about her in the newspapers from time to time. She was finally getting the credit for her work.

As for the fictional Police Chief Blote, he couldn't be quite the pompous buffoon everyone thought, if he was smart enough to take Madeline's Clark's advice. I could do a lot worse myself. Jane's words stuck with me, as did Chuck's ominous “word to the wise” remark. I hadn't visited the spot where Todd had fallen. At this point the patch of moorland where the kids discovered his body hadn't even been listed as an official crime scene.

That was probably the right call. Jane spun out fantastic theories for a living, She was more interested in drama and intrigue than the boring facts of any actual case. I looked across the lawn as the mourners started to disperse. Chuck Forrest was on his iPhone, talking intently to someone, shaking his head, performing a spot-on pantomime of an agitated suspect. All the more reason to give him a pass. No real killer would put on that show fifty feet away from the local police chief.

But it couldn't hurt to check.

Chapter Four

Hunting Grounds

It was a typical weekend outing with my kids—breakfast at Fog Island, followed by hot chocolate at Jim's on the Broad Street Strip, and a drive out into the moors, where we bundled up and hiked the deer paths. The kids found a cache of arrowheads that had tipped the quiver of a Wampanoag hunter half a millennium ago.

I found the bullet that killed Todd Macy.

I kept my purpose secret. Tim had been shaken by Todd's death, unusually quiet, but waking me up in the middle of the night to talk about God and death and the meaning of life…or the lack of it. I didn't want to exacerbate the situation (or prompt another of Miranda's “your-job-is-poisoning-their-lives” diatribe), but I was stealthy and they were easily distracted, so it was worth a try.

We parked at the cranberry bogs and walked southwest toward Altar Rock. I had chosen the route carefully—I had the GPS coordinates for the spot where Todd's body was found and I wanted to inspect the scene for myself. The hole in Todd's chest was big. The bullet passed through him and disappeared, according to the ME's report. But the medical examiner had a plane to catch, and no real interest in one of a dozen hunting accidents in a busy season.

We had examined the body together briefly. Shotguns are the only legal weapon for hunting at that time of year on Nantucket, and the damage to Todd's body was not consistent with the twelve-gauge buckshot standard for island hunters. This was one bullet, not a spray of pellets. It made a small hole going in, and a much bigger one going out. The ME acknowledged that the round was illegal but found my suspicions amusing. “Right. Someone's rifle hunting during shotgun season. Wow. I'm shocked. I have literally never heard of that before. Next thing you'll be telling me people are still hunting after the season closes. What'll they go for next? piping plovers? I hear they taste like chicken.”

We chuckled at that reference to a locally famous bumper sticker, but I had continued to examine the body. The bullet had entered around the third thoracic vertebra and exited just above the solar plexus. The angle indicated a shot from above, so as I tramped through the bracken now with my kids, I was looking for a nice concealed perch in the low hills above the moors that the hunter might have been using for a blind.

The kids had other concerns. Caroline had no interest in digging for arrowheads. She wanted to drive out to Great Point.

“We always do what Tim wants,” she muttered, kicking through a stand of beach plum. “I hate these stupid bushes! It's like they're attacking you all the time. Ow! They prick you right through your pants! This sucks.”

“We never do what I want,” Tim said. “That is such—” He caught my look and cut the rest of that sentence off. “This is the first time I ever got to—”

“Are you kidding me? All summer we had to go to Dionis because you're scared of the waves! Dad got me a boogie board and I never got to use it once!”

“I am not scared of the waves!”

“Oh, really? So what bothered you so much then?”

“Jellyfish. There were tons of jellyfish at Surfside last summer.”

“Oooo, that's scary,”

“They sting!”

“All right,” I said. “Enough.” I turned to Caroline. “You're supposed to find some arrowheads for school, right?”

“Tim could just give me some of his.”

“That's not the point. Come on, Caro. It's fieldwork. You're supposed keep a journal and write down where you find them and try to figure out where the nearest Wampanoag settlement was located, and—”

“I can fake that. Hello—Wikipedia.”

“Just because you can doesn't mean—”

“Besides, you told us that learning to bullshit teachers was—”

“Caroline!”

“You said it! You said it was the most important thing you ever learned in school.”

“That was college!”

“I'm starting early!”

Tim laughed and I started laughing, too. “Okay, but we're going to do some real work right now, No bullshit, pardon my language. And it's actually fun. That's what you're going to learn today.”

“Fine.” In other words—anything but. Still, I chose to take it as a victory and move on. We pushed into an open field. A few minutes later Caroline said, “Can I go to Debbie's sleep-over tonight?”

“She's grounded!” Tim said. “That's why we couldn't go out last night.”

Caroline spun to face him. “First of all, she isn't grounded. She just told you that to get rid of you, and second of all—going to movies with a bunch of other kids and getting picked up by somebody's mom isn't exactly a
date
.”

This one-two punch rocked Tim into a stunned silence.

I said to Caroline, “Will Billy be there?”

“Dad!”

“Well, sorry. I don't like the idea of a bunch of eighth-grade girls running around that house unchaperoned.”

“Of course he'll be there. God.”

“Your mom said it was all right?

“She said it's up to you. She also said you don't want to lose a night of being with me.”

“That's true, but it's okay. Tim and I can have boy time. Too bad you can't go to her mom's house, though. It's so much bigger.”

“It's horrible there. They fight all the time. Debbie's mom and her uncles.”

“You're lucky. You only have one uncle and he's never around.”

“Do you fight about money?” Caroline asked.

I laughed. “Neither of us has any so there's nothing to fight about.”

“But he's a big FBI agent.”

“Right. With a government paycheck.”

“How about Grandpa? Didn't he leave you anything?”

“He did. It's called your college fund.”

Caroline mulled this for a few steps. “Well, Debbie's grandmother left them a lot. I mean, like a real lot. So all they do is fight. Everyone wants to do different things and so they're all mad now all the time. The last time I stayed over, Billy came and got me and Debbie and took us back to Madaket.”

“Yeah, I remember that. I asked what happened and he said, ‘The kids just wanted to hear the ocean.'”

Caroline shrugged “It's better than crazy grownups screaming at each other.”

“Good point.”

“I found one!” Tim shouted. He had lagged behind us, poking through the rosa rugosa, ignoring the prickles. He actually dug up a nice cache of arrowheads and I left the kids to sort them out because we had come to within ten yards of the spot where Todd Macy was killed. I vectored the exact location on the GPS and started digging with the trowel I'd brought along. The ground was hard with the cold, and tangled with stiff spiky bushes. The bullet must have buried itself in the turf at high velocity, cutting through the brambles and lodging itself deep in ground. I figured I had an area of roughly two or three square feet in front of the impact zone to search. It doesn't sound like much but it took me almost an hour to find it. By the end, my wrists were bleeding from the prickly bushes, and of course the kids had figured me out. Carrie was annoyed. I'd tricked them, dragging them out to the moors on police business, bribing them with hot chocolate and distracting them with arrowheads.

But Tim surprised me. When Caroline pronounced the project a pointless waste of time, he turned on her. “Dad's trying to solve a murder!”

“Not exactly. I'm trying to figure out if there even was a murder.”

“Probably there wasn't,” Carrie said. “People don't get murdered on Nantucket.”

“Yes, they do,” Tim snapped. “People get killed all the time here! The people who died in the bombings last summer and Preston Lomax and—tons of people.”

“Tons of people,” Caroline mimicked him. “That's what you say when you run out of examples.”

“There are,” Tim insisted. “Like—that lady who was killed by her boyfriend. And those guys at the Chicken Box.”

Caroline shrugged. “Whatever. It's not like some big city, I'm just saying.”

“
Whatever
. That's what you say instead of admitting I'm right!”

“You are such a useless little—”

She lunged at him. I stuck my arm out, separating them. “Enough! Look, I found it.”

It was a big bullet, deformed by impact into a rough oval shape. The kids crowded in and then stepped back.

“Ugh, that's creepy,” Caroline said.

“It actually looks like an arrowhead—the ones we saw at the museum last summer.”

Tim just stared down at it quietly. I took a picture with my phone and sent it to my assistant chief, Haden Krakauer. He had served in the military, so I thought he might recognize the round.

He did. The phone chimed when we were halfway back to the car. Haden sent a picture of a tall gleaming brass cartridge pointed at the tip like a miniature rocket, lying across two dollar-bills—maybe five, five and half, inches long. The kids clamored to look at it.

“What is that?” Tim asked.

“I'm not sure, but I think it's what our bullet looked like before it was fired.”

I read Haden's e-mail quickly to myself. The bullet was an M82 series 0.50 caliber sniper's round, probably fired from a Barrett M107 rifle. That's a military grade weapon the Coast Guard uses to disable smugglers' boats, shooting from a helicopter. It can take most vehicles out with one shot to the engine block. According to Haden, a typical sports rifle has a muzzle energy of two to three thousand foot pounds. This rifle's muzzle energy measures between ten thousand and fifteen thousand—five times more powerful than the sport requires. So this was not a hunter's gun—not a deer hunter's, anyway,

And Todd Macy's death was not an accident.

***

That night I got the call from State Attorney General David Carmichael. I had just put the kids to bed, reading them the long passage in
Catcher in the Rye
where Holden goes to see his sister Phoebe. Tim had calmed down—I think he was glad to see me working the case. That was the part Miranda never understood.

It was a little after nine and I didn't expect a call. Haden? Some problem at the station? Miranda? But it was a Boston number. I took the call out of curiosity.

“Kennis? It's Dave Carmichael.”

“Dave? It's kind of late to be calling.”

“We work late here. We have seventeen ongoing cases and six more pending. I'm preparing nine jury trials right now, I'm hip-deep in discovery and jury selection and opening arguments. I'm shorthanded and I need help.”

“I know the feeling.”

“No, I don't think you do. This is the real world and these cases matter. I have four RICO investigations ongoing, a couple of huge drug busts, and a corruption scandal on Beacon Hill. Big stuff. You've got some rich punk with an open-container violation.”

I thought of the deformed sniper's bullet I had just dig out of the ground. “I may have a murder on my hands.”

“Really? Well, I have fifteen murder cases going right now, and I'm dead-ending on most of them. Leads are going cold because I don't have the manpower to chase them down. But that's not even the problem. Clues are falling through the cracks because my guys don't have the brains to see what they're looking at. I don't even know what evidence I'm missing because I can't add up
what I can't see
. I know we're falling behind, though, Henry. I can feel it.”

“So what can I do for you, Dave?”

“Work for me. Quit that dead-end bullshit job and come to Boston. I have an opening for chief investigator and I want you to fill it. I know the way your brain works. You're a chess master and you're down there playing checkers with the day-trippers. It's a waste.”

Knee-jerk arguments twitched along my nerves as he spoke. We had big cases on the island—obviously. I'd first met Dave during the Preston Lomax murder investigation, and I knew he'd followed the bombings that had threatened the island last summer. But it was pointless to argue because I knew he was right.

This was an extraordinary opportunity, the break I'd been looking for since I left Los Angeles. It was the difference between a job and a career. The only limit to working for Dave Carmichael would be the line between what I wanted and what I was able to achieve. I'd been pacing in circles in a tiny closed room and Dave knocked the walls down. Turns out the room had been sitting in some vast alpine meadow that stretched away to the high peaks in every direction. All I had to do was step out into the coarse grass and start walking.

But it was impossible.

I couldn't leave the kids, and Miranda would never let me take them. The silence on the line said everything, but I still had to fit the words to it. Speak the syllables, make the truth manifest, make it real. The wonder and the glory of language. “Sorry,” I said. “Maybe when the kids are grown.”

“I'll be governor when your kids are grown and you'll be too old to keep up.”

“You're probably right, at least about me.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, buddy.”

“Just kidding. But seriously—”

“You could commute.”

“Not really.”

“Give them that quality time!”

“Kids don't care about quality. Just quantity.”

He was quiet for a second or two. Then: “At least think about it, will you?”

“I will.”

“I mean, seriously consider this.”

“I will.”

“All right, family man. Go and get some sleep.”

I couldn't sleep that night. I went into the kids' room and watched them for a while, Carrie wrapped like a little burrito, Tim with the covers thrashed off after the exertions of some dream. I pulled the comforter up over him, eased his right leg back onto the bed, thinking; “If a body catch a body coming through the rye,” just like Holden Caulfield.