I move toward them, close enough to hear the men speaking to one another. They’re mostly quiet, occasionally piping up with a directive in Spanish. It’s hard work, and I can hear them breathing beneath the weight of the bags. None are Morales. I walk past just to be sure. They don’t notice me. Over the years, I’ve found that being a small, nondescript person has its benefits. I’m often overlooked. Unlike Lee and Dorsey, who might as well be wearing their SCPD badges on their foreheads, the men in the driveway don’t eye me with suspicion. They nod politely when I walk past them for a second time and watch only for a moment as I head toward the end of the drive.
I can see the outline of a few parked trucks. As I get closer, the rain picks up. I hunch down, driving my hands into my pockets. My jeans stick to my skin. My sneakers are soaked through. Lightning sparks in the sky, followed by a deep roll of thunder. The storm that everyone’s been talking about has finally arrived.
A shout behind me pierces the air. I turn. A man sprints out of the back of the farm stand, toward the drive. Lee and Dorsey run after him, their feet slapping against the wet, muddy grass. I dash behind the nearest truck. My lungs burn. My shoulder throbs.
Fuck you, Lightman, I think to myself. You were right about PT.
I unzip my vest, pull out my weapon. My foot slips in the mud and I stumble, righting myself against the side of the truck. I blink back rain.
Then I see him. A body emerges from between the cars. His right arm is outstretched in front of him. In his hand, he holds a gun.
He is looking backward, toward Dorsey and Lee. I could shoot now and take him out. I don’t. Instead, I sprint. Three big leaps. He hears me and turns, but it’s too late. I’ve caught him off guard. I tackle him to the ground. He’s small, not much taller than me, with a wiry build. The gun is knocked from his hand. I pin him down, face in the mud. He twists and jerks, but I have him. My knee is in his back. My weapon is trained to his head.
“Don’t fucking move,” I tell him through clenched teeth.
“Esa perra,” he mutters. That bitch. He turns his head just enough so I can see him spit.
We hold that position for what feels like an eternal stretch of time, each of us straining hard against the other. The rain is coming down in sheets. My hair hangs around my face, making it hard for me to see. Finally, I hear footsteps behind us.
“Holy fuck, Flynn. Nice work,” Lee exclaims.
“Some help would be good.”
Morales squirms beneath me. I push harder into his ribs. He breathes heavy, fighting hard against the weight of my body.
Dorsey drops to his knees beside me. He slips cuffs on Morales. I roll back off him, my face turned up toward the rain. I close my eyes and lie there, my body shivering against the gravel, my shoulder alive with pain, until I feel Lee’s hands beneath me, pulling me back onto my feet.
13.
You okay, kid? You sure you don’t need to see a doctor?”
I’m not in a position to remind Lee to stop calling me kid. He’s offered to drive me home and I’ve accepted; I can barely keep my eyes open, much less handle a car in my condition. I’m slumped in the passenger seat. My dad’s truck is still in the parking lot at Harald Farms. Dorsey promised one of the guys would get it back to me. No one seems to notice that it fits the description of the truck that was seen at the motel where Sandoval disappeared, the truck that Elena Marques saw in front of her house, and the one that Sally Hayes, James Meachem’s housekeeper, remembered seeing at Shinnecock County Park at night. Or maybe they do notice. That’s the possibility that scares me most of all.
My eyes slip closed. The pain is excruciating. I focus on the drumbeat of rain on the roof of the car. Pain radiates from my shoulder to my fingertips. I’ve done something to my shoulder that can’t be undone with Tylenol and a drink. I need a doctor and soon. But not now. I have too much to do. I need to get into Dad’s office. I want to talk to Grace Bishop. And I need to check back in with Milkowski. Every second counts.
“I’m all right,” I mutter. “Nothing scotch can’t fix.”
“That was a helluva move you pulled out there.” Lee shakes his head. “I can’t believe that son of a bitch was armed.”
“He may have just been scared.”
Lee shoots me a look. “You going soft on me?”
“Not soft. Just realistic. He’s undocumented. He’s been questioned before. He’s probably terrified of the police.”
“He should be terrified.”
“Everything you have on this guy is circumstantial. Maybe enough for probable cause. Maybe. But definitely not enough to convince a jury.”
“He worked at both sites.”
“So did a bunch of other people, I’m sure.”
“The bodies were both wrapped in burlap, which we found in his car.”
“The same burlap that you yourself said is commercially available all over the North Fork.”
“He smokes.”
“Come on. How many smokers do you think there are in Suffolk County alone?”
“His pickup was seen in front of the motel where Sandoval went missing, again in front of the Marques home, and late at night at Shinnecock County Park.”
“No. A red truck was seen in those three locations. You don’t know if it was Morales’s truck. You’re extrapolating.” The seatbelt tugs against my shoulder. I move it behind me so at least it’s not pulling across my wound. “Honestly, the most significant thing you have on him is that he was armed and resisted arrest.”
Lee lets out an exasperated sigh. “Anastas is on his way over to search Morales’s house. And Dorsey is questioning him. We’ll get what we need.”
I shift again, unable to find a comfortable position. I turn my body away from Lee and stare out at the rain. The definitive way he says this unsettles me. It echoes something Ann-Marie Marshall wrote in an op-ed from twenty years ago: The police worked Gilroy over until they got what they needed.
“You know there’s a lot of evidence that’s pointing away from him, too, right?”
“What, the height thing?”
“Yes, the height thing. Milkowski seemed pretty convinced the shooter was taller than Marques. Morales is my height. She thinks the shooter was left-handed. From what I saw out there, Morales is definitely right-handed. And think about the clothes in her closet. Morales wasn’t sending Chanel bags and Louboutin shoes to his victim.”
“So? Some other john did. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“I’m going to bet that Morales didn’t send a town car to pick her up the night she went missing, either.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe Calabrese owns that town car, and he picked her up in that instead of his Escalade.”
“Possible. But we should talk to Calabrese. At the very least, doesn’t it bother you that an ex-con is using his limo company as a front for a prostitution ring and two of his girls have ended up dead? And then there’s James Meachem, who has wild parties with young escorts and happens to live next to the park where one of the bodies was buried. I feel like we lifted up a rock and a million creepers crawled out from underneath it.”
“All of that bothers me. But right now, Morales is a prime suspect in two murders. He just tried to resist arrest while brandishing what I’m sure is an unlicensed handgun. So personally, I think we should focus on him before we start up on prostitution rings and dirty johns. Let’s see what Dorsey pulls out of Morales in questioning and we’ll go from there.”
I grit my teeth, wondering why he’s so determined to pin this on Morales. Maybe I’m not the only one who sees my father as a viable suspect, too. The thought makes my blood run cold. What if Dorsey’s so determined to close the case without implicating Dad that he’s pinning it on an innocent man? It would explain why he’s so unwilling to bring in the Feds, except for me, Marty’s own daughter.
“You know, I’ve be
en driving a red truck all day,” I say, unable to help myself. “One that belonged to a tall, left-handed expert shooter.”
One who visited Adriana’s home two weeks before his own death. One who was married to a woman who looked exactly like the victims.
Lee frowns. I can tell from the look on his face that this is not a possibility he’s considered. “What are you saying? That your dad did this?”
“It’s possible. Honestly, he fits Milkowski’s profile better than Morales.”
“Nell, come on. He was a cop, for Christ’s sake.”
“He had a serious temper. He had a drinking problem. And this isn’t the first time he’d be suspected of murdering someone.”
Lee makes an exasperated sound. He thinks I’m playing devil’s advocate, and his patience is wearing thin. “This is not the fucking BAU. We don’t spend months crafting unsub profiles here. It’s the Homicide Division of the Suffolk County Police Department. We have a finite number of officers and resources. We need to stay on point. And that means not entertaining outlandish theories about one of our own.”
“Forgive me. I thought you actually wanted to solve these murders, not just squeeze a confession out of the first person of interest. Isn’t that why you were so eager to get into my dad’s office?”
“You should take it easy tonight, okay? Get some rest. Have a drink. I need to be on hand for the interrogation. I’ll keep you posted.”
“Why did you get me involved in this case if you didn’t actually want my opinion?”
Lee pulls into my driveway and cuts the engine. He doesn’t answer my question. “You want me to walk you in?”
“It’s not the prom. Thanks for the ride.” I hop out into the rain, shutting the car door a little harder than I intended.
14.
Outside, the sky is dark. Salt rain pours in rivulets from the gutters. The temperature has dropped significantly since the morning. My hands tremble so hard I have trouble fitting the key into the lock. Lee waits, his engine idling, his headlights illuminating the front porch, until the door closes behind me. Then he pulls out of the driveway, so hard that his tires spin on the gravel. I watch his taillights disappear through the glass.
I flick the lights on. Nothing. The power is out.
“Fuck,” I say aloud, my voice echoing in the hallway. Power outages are not uncommon for Dune Road during a storm. Most of our neighbors have installed backup generators, but Dad was too cheap for that. Anyway, he was unfazed by darkness. There are flashlights stocked throughout the house. Canned food in the pantry. And enough wood to start a fire. I’m fine, I tell myself, though there’s a weight in my gut that insists otherwise.
I get to work on the fireplace, laying newspaper and kindling and logs. Soon, the living room fills with crackling heat and enough light to brighten the room. In the bathroom, I strip off my wet clothes. There’s no point in taking a shower; it won’t warm me up. I need to get into my father’s office. I’ve been thinking about it ever since Elena Marques mentioned his name. I dry myself with a towel. My clothes are filthy with mud; my hair is caked in it. Blood stains the stiff fabric. I pull the bandage off my shoulder, feeling the sting of cool air against the open wound.
Once I’ve changed, I find a large flashlight, a stepstool. My father kept the key to his office hidden in a coffee can in a cabinet. I know this because once, when I was a teenager, I spent two days systematically searching the house until I found it. I was always more resourceful than he gave me credit for; more keen-eyed and more stubborn. I learned, after all, from the best.
The key is unmarked, suspended on a rusted wire ring. I cross the living room and slip the key into the lock. I flinch when I push open the door. Even now, it feels wrong to go into Dad’s office. It was his private space, specifically off-limits to me. If he was inside and I so much as knocked on the door, I better have had a damn good reason.
I have a damn good reason now. I can’t shake the feeling that my father’s death is inextricably bound up in these murders. What if he killed those girls? The possibility eats at me. Maybe he killed them and then killed himself. Or maybe this is all more complicated than I could imagine, and I won’t understand it until I step back and start seeing a bigger picture.
The air in Dad’s office is stale. The sound of dripping emanates from the ceiling. I point the beam of my flashlight around the corners of the room but can’t isolate the source of the leak. The light falls to a framed photograph on my father’s desk. I walk over, pick it up, examine it closely. Dad and Glenn Dorsey. They stand side by side on Dorsey’s boat, the blue expanse of Long Island Sound glittering in the background. The sky is cloudless and serene. It is the end of summer. They are tan and grinning ear to ear. Dorsey is wearing Oakley sunglasses. An SCPD baseball cap casts a shadow across my father’s face.
Together, they hold up the body of a giant striped bass. I remember when they caught it: at seventy-eight pounds, it was one of the largest caught in this area. They made the local paper. This was a few years back, when Dad and I were in a relatively communicative period. He was proud of it, of them. He cut out the article and sent it to me in the mail.
A striped bass is a beautiful thing, and this one is particularly grand, both in scale and proportion. Its silver-scaled body gleams in the late afternoon sun. Its mouth gapes wide in protest; its eye is round and still. When I was young, I used to ask my father to throw back the fish we caught. I hated watching them squirm on the boat deck, gasping to be back in the water. Even more, I hated killing them.
Dad told me it was cruel to catch and release. The fish were injured, he told me. Damaged goods. They’d have trouble surviving in the wild. It was better to end it for them, he said, quickly and cleanly. The humane thing to do. Dad had a small club designed for the job, called a priest. He’d strike the fish hard on the skull, just behind the eyes, killing them instantly or at least rendering them unconscious.
My mother thought fishing and hunting were both barbaric. She wrinkled her nose in protest whenever my father took out the rods. I still remember the first time he taught me to shoot. They fought about it in the kitchen, the staccato sounds of my mother’s anger rising to the rafters. I still don’t know why she relented. Dad called up to me, told me to hurry up and get a move on. I scurried down the steps. When I passed her, she hugged me hard and then released me. “Go with your father,” she whispered, “have fun.” She patted me on the back, as if to tell me that it was okay. I turned around as Dad pulled the truck out of the drive, looking for her through the rear window. She was watching us from the kitchen window, her arms crossed against her chest, her mouth hardened into a straight line.
Dad and Dorsey were both avid hunters. They enjoyed the sport of it, the thrill of the hunt, the victory of the catch. But were they just hunting fish and deer and birds? Or had they moved on to larger prey? Were they putting damaged girls down, freeing them from the burden of surviving alone in the wild?
I put the picture of them facedown on the desk. I can’t look at it anymore. I turn my attention to the file cabinet beneath it. It has a padlock on it, the kind that unclicks once you align four numbers correctly. I drop to my knees and begin to fidget with it. I try various iterations of my father’s birthday, then my own. Nothing works. When, as a last-ditch effort, I try my mother’s birthday, I feel the lock give in my hand. I pop it open. Jackpot.
Dad’s files are meticulously organized, each one labeled in his obsessively precise block-lettered handwriting. I flip through them, scroll past one labeled “WILL” and another that reads “BANK STATEMENTS.” I stop when I see a large accordion file labeled “GC LIMO SERVICES.”
I withdraw the file. It’s heavier than the rest. When I open it, a photograph slips out and flutters to the floor. I pick it up and stare at it, bile rising in my throat. It’s a photograph of Adriana Marques.
The photograph is taken from a distance with a telephoto len
s. Adriana is entering what looks like a warehouse. She’s dressed for a party. She’s wearing a tight blue dress that crisscrosses her body like a bandage, stiletto pumps, a large golden cross nestled in the hollow of her neck. Her lips are painted a deep shade of red. She looks back over her shoulder, her eyebrows furrowed. She knows someone is watching her. I turn the photograph over. On the back, my father has written: “A. Marques, 18, entering GC Limo Services on 8/29/18.” Two days before Adriana disappeared.
I pull open the folder. At the bottom is a burner phone. I have to believe it’s the one I’ve been looking for, the one Dad removed from Adriana’s room just after she was reported missing. Beside that is a gold cross, just like the one Adriana is wearing in the photograph.
I stand up. Blood rushes to my head. I close my eyes, steadying myself. I’m not well. It takes work for me to remain upright. My body screams for rest. I have to keep going, I tell myself. If I lie down now, I may never get back up again.
Why did he have her necklace?
When I open my eyes, I focus on the large map of Long Island. It runs the length of the office wall. It’s new; at least, it wasn’t there when I was a kid. I wonder why he put it up. I walk toward it, looking for any markings. Maybe the locations of the bodies had some kind of significance. My eyes linger for a moment on Sears Bellows County Park, where Dad and I camped the night my mother was murdered. I study the small green expanse before forcing myself to look away.
It strikes me for the first time that Long Island is shaped like a body. I wonder why I’ve never seen this before. It seems clear as day to me now: a woman, floating lifeless in the water. Brooklyn composes her head. Her face turns southward toward the ocean. Smithtown Bay rests in the small of her back. Her legs—the North and South Forks of the island—part at Riverhead. Between them flows Peconic Bay, where Dorsey and Dad would take me boating as a kid.
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