Dead to the World

by B. D. Smith

  Lutz stayed silent, pointedly gazing at his laptop with feigned concentration.

  Nigel Underwood broke the silence.

  “There you have it. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. Ms. Binford, what can you tell us about your plans for video coverage of the race?”

  Louise Binford smiled at Underwood and started in on an oleaginous update.

  “First let me say how thrilled I am to be a part of this exciting event Mr. Underwood. It’s a real honor to be involved in one of your productions. A real honor.”

  Louise paused momentarily for Underwood to nod in acknowledgement of her abject ass-kissing and then continued.

  “I’ve gone over our proposed coverage with ESPN and they have signed off on it. For the Friday time trials to determine which boats will qualify for the match races on Saturday we’ll have a total of three drone-based cameras in rotation. They will follow the boats around Pine Island. There will also be a stationary camera suspended from a balloon tethered above Pine Island, and several other boat mounted cameras will roam the course, catching shots of boats as they go past. For the match races on Saturday we’ll have the same trio of drone cameras and the balloon mounted long-lens stationary camera will be shifted to the narrows where it can provide coverage at a distance of most of the match racecourse. In addition, we’ll have cameras on the race boats, providing close-up views of the competitors. Footage from all cameras will be monitored on viewing screens and stored on hard drives here at the roller rink. We’ll be running some boats around the course this coming week and working on camera angles and coverage, but that should be straightforward. That’s all I have. Any questions?”

  Nigel gave the group at the table another of his thousand-watt smiles and pushed away from the table.

  “Well, I guess that does it. If there’s nothing else, I have to get back down to the coast. Let’s meet again in a week – same day, same time. And get in touch if there’s anything I need to know in the meantime.”

  Doug stood as soon as Nigel pushed his chair back and circled the table to stand next to him. Reaching out to shake Nigel’s hand, Doug reminded him of their upcoming interview.

  “We’ll need you back up here to be interviewed in the next few days, unless right now works. No? Well talk to your lawyers then. You can bring them along if you want, but make sure you don’t avoid us any longer Nigel. It’s in your best interest. Two of your close associates have been murdered, and I don’t think you can count on your two bodyguards by the door to keep you safe.”

  Pulling his hand away, Underwood managed a curt nod in reply before heading for the door, where his two shadows flanked him for the walk to his waiting town car. Anne and Doug headed back into town, stopping at the Spruce Mill Farm and Kitchen for an early lunch. Reaching over to wipe a spot of mustard from Doug’s chin, Anne offered her depressing take on their cases.

  “We’ve got two murders, both staged to look like accidents, and so far, no good leads. The Eastman murder is a complete blank as far as I can see, with not even any suspects or motives coming into focus. And none of our leads on the Don Robertson killing have panned out. His widow Rosemary seems to be in the clear, at least according to Tom, and Wes Fuller and Gary Crites never were very promising candidates for the crime.”

  Nodding, Doug responded.

  “I think we can close out those possibilities and focus on Nigel Underwood. He’s a slippery character and I think he has quite a scam going with this patio boat race. Everybody else is doing all the work to make it a reality and based on a small initial outlay of money to the Kiwanis, probably a bank loan, he stands to make a bundle when the race airs on ESPN.”

  Anne agreed.

  “He may not be directly involved in the killings, but I’d put some money on the two murders being linked. And it’s lookin like Nigel and his patio boat race are right in the middle of whatever’s going on. Robertson was entered as Underwood’s co-pilot in the race, and both Robertson and Eastman appear to have had lots of involvement with Nigel on planning the event. And I think Ximena Lapointe is also potentially in the mix. She was Robertson’s lover, beneficiary of his life insurance policy, and is also directly linked to Nigel. She had dinner with him the night of the killing, supposedly to discuss selling Nigel a lakeside home, but then nothing ever came of it. And remember what John Eastman’s widow Elizabeth mentioned – Don and Ximena and Nigel all were dinner guests as a group at the Eastman’s home on a number of occasions.”

  “Nigel’s the key,” Doug agreed. “He might be behind the killings, or he might be next in line for someone intent on keeping the race from taking place. The sooner we get him in for an interview the better.”

  13.

  Nigel Underwood’s patio boat mishap at the entrance to Bucks Cove was a popular topic of conversation around Dover-Foxcroft’s watering holes for the next several weeks, and accounts of those who had witnessed it firsthand were in high demand. “Nigel’s mishap,” as it was soon labeled, had all the elements necessary to give it legs – a rich arrogant fool from away, ignorant and disrespectful of the local environment, destroys his ultra-expensive boat and lands himself in the hospital in spectacular fashion. What could be better?

  The eyewitness accounts were quite colorful and tended to become more embellished over time, but the footage captured by Lou Binford’s drones provided a crystal-clear high-resolution record of what actually happened. Nigel’s Manitou tri-hull patio boat could be seen approaching the narrow entrance to Bucks Cove at an estimated speed of 35 to 40 MPH. The boat’s massive wake washes the rocky shore on both sides as it roars into the narrow opening, and Nigel and his boat appear to have successfully cleared the narrowest part of the entrance when the boat suddenly jerks violently as the stern is lifted high above the water line. The boat’s large outboards break loose and spiral wildly through the air as Nigel is launched high over the bow, landing hard in the rock-strewn shallows a good thirty feet away.

  The next morning at the roller rink, as he and Anne watched the drone footage, Doug knew what was coming before it happened. He had been through that opening into Bucks Cove many times growing up on Sebec Lake and knew that a massive boulder lurked just below the surface on the left side of the channel a little past the entrance. The boulder was clearly marked by a large white hazard buoy and Doug couldn’t understand how Nigel hadn’t seen it and angled off to starboard to avoid it. The boulder, not visible from an approaching boat, could be clearly seen in the drone footage, a large dark shape directly in the path of the boat.

  When Doug mentioned his puzzlement regarding Nigel, the boulder, and the buoy, Anne’s response surprised him.

  “What buoy Doug? Run the tape again. I didn’t see any buoy.”

  They ran the footage several more times, and the clear calm water of the lake revealed the hazard buoy. It was there but submerged under water about ten feet to the left of the boulder. A bright blue line could be seen running underwater from the buoy toward the shore. Someone had apparently tied a second line to the buoy and, leaving its anchor line intact, had pulled it sideways until it disappeared below the lake surface. Then they tied it off. In the aftermath of the crash it would have been a simple matter to remove the blue line and let the buoy pop back up to its proper place above the boulder, which was now known locally as “Nigel’s rock.”

  Anne and Doug hitched a ride to the crash scene on the Bowerbank fire boat, which was dispatched to haul Underwood’s patio boat and outboard engines up from their resting place on the bottom. As they anticipated, the buoy was floating in its proper place right above Nigel’s rock, with no sign of the blue line that had pulled it below the surface. A small flotilla of boats as well as a collection of onshore people from nearby camps had gathered, and several uniformed officers from the Warden Service were busy canva
sing them for any information or leads about the accident. There was a festive atmosphere, and although the onlookers were friendly enough and forthcoming, none appeared to have anything relevant to offer. It took a little over an hour to drag first the patio boat and then each of its engines up onto shore, where Underwood’s insurance company could decide what to do with the mangled wreckage. Having cleared the passage into Bucks Cove, the Bowerbank fire boat carrying Anne and Doug headed back to Greeleys Landing.

  In the moments after the crash several of the boats that had been filming Nigel’s ill-fated run quickly arrived on the scene. Nigel was carefully loaded onto one of them and rushed back to Greeleys landing, where a waiting ambulance took him first to the Mayo Regional Hospital in Dover-Foxcroft for initial assessment and stabilization, and then on to Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor.

  Underwood had several broken ribs, a fracture of his left femur, and a sprained wrist. By far his most serious injury, however, was a fractured skull and concussion. A craniectomy to relieve pressure inside his skull had been performed soon after Nigel arrived at Northern Light, and the swelling had come down overnight. All his vital signs had remained stable since his arrival, which was encouraging, but Nigel had yet to regain consciousness.

  Doug and Anne were meeting with Jim Torben and Jack Walker that afternoon at the sheriff’s office when Tom Richard called in to report on his meeting with Underwood’s physicians and to update them on what little the computer technicians had learned about the 321A file hidden on Rosemary’s old printer. There was no firm estimate of when Underwood would regain consciousness, Tom reported, but they thought it would be a matter of days, perhaps weeks. Access to the ICU where Nigel was being treated was tightly restricted, and Doug and Tom agreed he would not need any additional protection.

  Offering more bad news, Tom passed on the results of the analysis of the computer file found hidden on Rose’s printer. Rather than being revelatory it looked as if it was going to turn out to be another dead end, even though they were able to identify in general terms what it showed. The file’s columns of numbers listed a series of deposits flowing into a Deutsche Bank account over a period of several months the previous fall. The deposits could be traced back to a half dozen accounts in overseas financial institutions of sketchy reputation, often linked to Russian oligarchs involved in money laundering. Just over fourteen million dollars had been deposited in the account, in total. The identity of the account holders on both ends of the money transfers could not be determined, and when queried, Deutsche Bank provided a curt reply- the account in their bank into which the funds had been deposited was no longer active. The funds had been transferred. Deutsche Bank declined to indicate where the funds in the account had been transferred. Don’s widow Rosemary was stunned when Tom told her of the existence of the account and the amount of money involved, which was far beyond what Don usually dealt with, and far outside his normal realm of funds management.

  For the investigators sitting around the table in Jim Torben’s office, Tom’s account of the computer file and the financial transaction records opened up an entirely new avenue of possible suspects and motives for the series of crimes they were pursuing. While they were waiting for Underwood to wake up, if he ever did, Tom Richard would take on the task of tracking down and talking to his relatives and business associates, as well as taking a closer look at the ESPN deal Underwood had put together.

  Tom also reported an additional item of bad news that sobered his colleagues in Dover-Foxcroft. He had received a phone call from one of the detectives that had interviewed he and Rose after the knife attack in Quebec City. Doing a routine follow-up on the case, not really expecting any results, the detectives had contacted local hospital emergency rooms asking about any reports of someone seeking treatment for mouth trauma and missing teeth on the night of the attack or the next day. They were surprised to find out that a hospital not far from the hotel where Tom and Rosemary had been staying had treated someone for a battered mouth within hours of the attack. The man had given what turned out to be a false name and had abruptly left halfway through treatment when several uniformed police officers brought in a prisoner in need of medical attention. The man, in his haste to leave, left behind his coat. In one of the pockets of the coat they found a recent photograph of Rosemary, with the name of their hotel written on the back in Cyrillic. It had not been a random attack. The knife-wielding assailant had clearly been targeting Rose. Tom would have to stay close to Rose for the foreseeable future – a responsibility he willingly took on.

  On the Dover-Foxcroft side of the investigation Jack Walker was going to circle back and interview the Eastman widow again to see if she had remembered anything relevant, and to press her harder both on her late husband’s recent activities and contacts, and who might have harbored a grudge from his long career in property development. Did she remember any recent altercations or local disagreements he had experienced, even of a seemingly minor nature? Was her husband seeing another woman? Had any disputes occurred with contractors they had employed in their house construction? Had there been any unusual encounters or unexpected appearances of individuals from his past life?

  When Nigel’s catastrophic attempt to run the narrow entrance to Bucks Cove was added to the Don Robertson and John Eastman killings, which had also been set up to look like accidents, it was a no-brainer for Doug and Anne to decide to take another look at Ximena LaPointe, this time as a possible target. If her babysitter hadn’t had an SAT test the next day, Ximena would have been in the cabin with Robertson all night and would have died alongside him. She had escaped that night, but three people she had been closely associated with had since either turned up dead or ended up in the ICU. Jim Torben ended the meeting by underscoring their need to cast a wider net and follow up with the other individuals that were at the roller rink meeting – Louise Binford, Bob Lutz, and Don Wilson.

  Anne called Ximena as soon as the meeting was over to set up another interview with her. The call went right to voice mail and Anne left a message saying that they needed to talk to her as soon as possible.

  They needed a few things for dinner, and rather than going all the way out to Shaw’s Supermarket, Anne and Doug stopped at Will’s Shop ‘n Save in town. Will’s was a local landmark of sorts because of the large mural painted on the side of the building that featured several hot air balloons. The Dover-Foxcroft Hot Air Balloon Festival, like the upcoming pontoon boat race, had been an earlier effort to draw attention and visitors to Piscataquis County. The festival had deflated after just two years and about the only remaining record of it was the Will’s Stop ‘n Save mural, several abandoned web sites, and an occasional vintage T-shirt seen around town. Anne and Doug were loading groceries into the back of Doug’s Jeep Cherokee when someone called to Doug from across the parking lot. Turning to see who it was, he recognized Ted Height hurrying toward them.

  Ted had been a childhood friend of Doug’s late son Eric and had been with him on the day Eric drowned jumping off the dam in Sebec Village. Ted and Eric had belonged to the “Water Rats” - a very loose assemblage of maybe a dozen or more boys, and a few tomboys, who, following a tradition reaching back generations, spent a lot of their free time on Sebec Lake during the summer months – exploring every cove and stream with their small outboard motorboats, pirate flags flying. They would share cigarettes snagged from their parents, seek out the best fishing spots, have impromptu obstacle course races through shallow rocky waters, and try to sneak up on the river otters that frequented Seymour Cove. They weren’t a formal club or anything, and as you might expect, exhibited a wide range of personalities and interests.

  Ted Height was one of the serious ones, more interested in studying the carnivorous aquatic plants by the beaver dam in Flag Cove than pranking adults, which was not an uncommon activity for some of the Water Rats. Pranks varied in severity, dependi
ng on the perceived degree of disrespect shown either to them or to what some of them considered the very sanctity of Sebec Lake itself. They thought of themselves as protectors of the lake – stewards of its plant and animal communities and arbiters of appropriate behavior toward the environment. Their pranks would most often involve a stealthy approach under cover of darkness by one or more swimmers to the target’s shorefront and dock area. Minor insults might call for turning the offender’s flag upside down on their flagpole, or perhaps lobbing the offender’s life preservers up into the trees, or loosening the sparkplug wires on their outboard. Things that could easily be reversed with no lasting damage.

  Pranks could be more serious, however, particularly if it appeared that a major crime against nature had taken place. Someone who recklessly disturbed a nesting loon, or cut down trees within the shoreline no-cut zone, for example, could wake up to find that while their boat was still moored securely to their dock, it was also resting solidly on the bottom of the lake due to the simple overnight removal of a boat’s drain plug.

  There was no formal membership list for the Water Rats, and the size, composition and degree of internal communication and integration of the group varied considerably over time. Each year some of the older members would be drawn to other pursuits and would be replaced by younger, newly joining members, eager to become part of a long established, if never explicitly formalized, tradition.

  Ted Height had aged up and out of the Water Rats, but his interest in the environment and threats to Maine’s freshwater lakes and waterways grew and matured. After graduating from the Foxcroft Academy he had gone on to attend the University of Maine at Orono in Ecology and Environmental Sciences. He was back in town this summer working part time at Will’s and spending long hours helping to organize and supervise the Foxcroft Academy student research teams carrying out systematic surveys of Sebec Lake’s aquatic plants. For the past several summers they had been using kayaks and a glass bottomed boat to search the shallow shoreline habitats of the lake, carefully documenting aquatic plant communities and looking for any of the dozen or so exotic invasive species that were turning up in an alarming number of lakes farther east and south in the state. The exotics – Eurasian and variable leaf watermilfoil being the most feared, could be carried in on boats and boat trailers.