by John Philpin
“I have my doubts.”
“So do I. Somebody should shoot the bastard anyway.”
The waitress brought the check and Jacobs grabbed it. “You want to know what I think?”
“Sure,” I said, wondering what was coming next.
“Karen Jasper did it,” she said, and erupted in choking laughter.
“SWING BY MARTIN INTERNATIONAL,” I SAID TO JAWORSKI as we drove out of the city.
“Plan to. I’ve never seen the place.”
“What’s with this Saymes character?”
“It’s like I told Jacobs,” he said. “Hubble Saymes thinks I’m too old.”
“Is he responsible for the ‘dump Jaworski’ radio editorial?”
“His wife owns the station. Saymes says the public sector should be run with the same businesslike efficiency as his insurance agency. He wants a forty-year-old chief with experience and degrees in criminology and public administration. The rest of the board didn’t pay any attention to Saymes until these murders.”
“I’ve seen young hotshots hobbled by serial murder cases,” I said. “Education, experience, age… none of it matters when you’re dealing with a psychopath. They don’t operate according to our logic. That’s why they’re always a step ahead. We follow a few threads and hope they lead us in the right direction.”
“Tell that to Saymes.”
“He wouldn’t listen to me, either,” I said.
“We had a woman come in who said she had information about the murders. Turned out she’s an astrologer, and Mercury’s screwing around with Pluto. A guy came in this morning after driving all the way from Newport, Rhode Island. Says he got hit on the head when he was a kid and now he has visions. I was staring out the window at the ocean while he was telling Jasper that our killer lives near a body of water. Maybe it ain’t efficient, but we don’t know what someone’s going to say unless we take the time to listen.”
Five minutes later we sat in the crowded parking lot in front of a fenced-in, low brick building.
“There’s no sign,” Jaworski said. “How’s anybody supposed to know what it is?”
“Maybe we’re not supposed to know.”
I gazed at the gated fortress and watched as two German shepherds approached the razor-wire-topped fence. “What’s the need for that kind of security?” I muttered.
“Keeps out people like us. You think there’s a direct connection between MI and the murders?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been a fan of coincidence. This outfit keeps coming up.”
I opened the car door. “I’ll be right back.”
As I walked to the gate, the dogs followed silently on their side of the fence. I pressed the buzzer beneath a small plastic sign that read INFORMATION. A woman’s metallic voice blatted from a shielded speaker. “Do you have an appointment, sir?”
“My name is Lucas Frank. I’d like to see Melanie Martin.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
She was not a recording, but the experience was unsettling—a crisp, disembodied voice similar to a tape you would expect to hear when dialing the IRS. “Yes,” I lied. “I have an appointment.”
“I have no record of any appointment in your name, sir.”
“Then no. Ms. Martin is not expecting me.”
“This is a secure facility, and I must ask you to leave the grounds immediately. The Portland police will be notified of the name you have given and the license number of the automobile in which you arrived.”
In my best, post-ironic, clipped British accent I asked, “Are you doing anything for dinner, love?”
I walked back to the car and felt like pissing over the top of it. “Let’s head north,” I said to Jaworski.
“This the right place?”
“It’s either Martin International or the Department of Motor Vehicles.”
Jaworski looked at me. “Bastards, are they?”
“They just called in your plate to the Portland P.D.” “Must be we don’t look Iraqi,” he grumbled as he opened a stick of cinnamon gum, popped it into his mouth, and guided the cruiser out of the parking lot.
WE DROVE IN SILENCE AS WE APPROACHED THE TURN onto the straightaway to Ragged Harbor. Gift shops and food stands lined the road, offering everything from wine-colored murgatroyds—lawn ornaments consisting of glass balls on plaster pedestals—to neon-red hot dogs.
The commercial area gave way to mudflats and eel-grass marshes on both sides of the two-lane road.
“Did you know that Jaycie Waylon was an MI intern?” I asked.
“I saw that in one of the reports.”
“Didn’t you have an internship there?” Kai Lin asked.
“Still do, but I’ve never met Ms. Martin.”
“Why doesn’t anyone ever meet Melanie Martin?” I asked.
“Guess she doesn’t want to be met.”
“From the unofficial welcoming committee.”
“Jaycie Waylon and three of her friends came by the house the first night I was there. They brought me a gift, a carved whalebone letter opener.”
“Scrimshaw? Sounds pricey even for the kids on the hill.”
“There’s a shipwreck scene on the blade.”
“There’s stories behind all that stuff. I don’t know ‘em. Never had much interest. If you get time to play tourist, that little shack ahead on the left is Ben Loudermilk’s. Ben’s a silversmith, but he sells scrimshaw. He knows all the folk tales.”
Loudermilk’s one-room shop squatted at the edge of the tidal flats. His weathered sign offered works in silver, pewter, and scrimshaw.
Delicately etched whalebone. A whaling ship yawing in windblown seas. A sperm whale harnessed on the side of the ship. A giant serpent prepared to swallow it all.
“Why you thinking about that now?”
“I’m not. I’ve moved on.”
“What?”
I imagined the students’ apartment and retraced my movements when I’d walked through the crime scene. “Let’s stop at the house,” I said.
“I swear I can’t follow your head.”
“I’m ready to spend more time there,” I said. “Not in my head. In the apartment.”
“Lucas, in maybe thirty seconds you went from MI, to whalebone, to murder.”
“It’s not asking why that allows me to speedthink,” I teased.
“I ain’t sayin’ it’s a talent,” he shot back.
Jaworski made the left turn onto Crescent Street and skirted the roadblock where one of his officers talked with two reporters. He stopped the car in front of 42 Crescent, and sorted keys as we walked to the porch.
Jaworski remained by the apartment door. I crossed the living room to my left, stood between the two beds, and reenacted the shooting as I had done at my house.
Squeeze off a single round to my left, another to my right. Take two steps back, aim at Jaycie across the living room.
You were confident of your shot. You knew that she went down dead, and you were not concerned about time.
I wandered into the bathroom. Black fingerprint powder coated the bathtub, sink, counter, toilet, walls, and towel racks. The counter held the usual array of toothpaste, brushes, shampoo, mouthwash. Nothing caught my attention, so I moved to Jaycie’s room.
You methodically cut away the nightgown and placed it over the chair’s arm. You arranged the body, and you did not cover Jaycie.
“What time did the guys in the upstairs unit return from the concert?”
“They estimated three A.M.”
“The neighbor, Luther Peterson, saw the young man with the knapsack walk to his Volvo at three-thirty.”
You heard the guys returning from the concert, didn’t you? You listened, but you were not concerned.
“An earthquake wouldn’t have distracted Dorman’s killer,” I said.
It didn’t matter if someone came to the door. You would have killed them all.
“Who rented the video?” I asked.
Jaworski flipped open his notebook. “Kiss the Girls,” he muttered. “Jaycie did.”
“When?”
“Saturday at eight-fifty P.M.”
“She was here, studying and listening to music,” I reminded him. “Someone used her card.” “The killer?”
You curled up on the sofa, ate your orange, and watched a good movie. Was it your selection? “Possibly.”
I had a decent reconstruction of the triple murder and could begin to consider what the criminology types call “offender characteristics.”
You completed your chores, patiently attended to the decorative details, then relaxed.
“This stinks of Stanley Markham,” Jaworski said.
“It does and it doesn’t,” I said with a sigh.
As Jaworski and I stepped onto the porch, a shout from farther out Crescent Street near the lobster pound snapped my head around. A man in a police uniform ran toward us, waving his arms. His hat blew off his head.
“That’s young Dickie Stevens,” Jaworski said. “I just made him corporal. What the hell’s he doing?”
We stepped into the street.
Stevens stopped running, bent at the waist, vomited, then resumed an awkward jog. He was forty yards away, still yelling as he staggered along the road.
Finally, I understood what he was saying.
“His face,” Stevens bawled, his arms raised in the air as if he were pleading with the heavens. “Somebody shot him in the face.”
Jaworski and I converged on Stevens as the corporal’s knees buckled and he fell to the pavement.
“Oh my God,” the young cop moaned. “What is happening here?”
Two news reporters standing behind the Crescent Street barricade stiffened to alert status. One of them raised a camera, the other a cell phone.
Jaworski’s face glowed an unhealthy purple. “Dickie,” the chief began.
“He’s still in there,” Stevens gasped. “I heard noise at the back of the house. Last place on the right before the lobster pound.”
Jaworski grabbed Stevens’s portable and called for backup, and medical attention for his corporal. “Sounds like we got one dead in there that we know of,” he growled into the radio. “Shooter possibly on the scene.”
He handed me his nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. “You know how to operate one of these?”
I nodded.
Jaworski spit out his cinnamon gum, grabbed a double-barreled shotgun from the trunk of his cruiser, rammed two slugs into it, and led the way down Crescent.
The house was a white Cape Cod, its red door standing open.
“You go in the front the way Dickie did,” Jaworski said. “I’ll come in along the seawall out back.”
I watched as Jaworski made his unsteady trek through a yard of sea-thrown rocks. His eyes moved from window to window along the side of the house. He held the shotgun like someone prepared to blast clay pigeons from the sky. Anything that moved back there ran the risk of getting cut in half.
I released the nine’s safety, engaged its action, and stepped through the open door into a narrow hall with a flight of stairs on the right and an archway ahead on the left. I slid along the wall to the arch and peered around the corner at a man lying on the living room floor, his face bloodcovered and unrecognizable.
The dead man’s multicolored T-shirt bore the logo of the Grateful Dead and the words “Highgate, Vermont, Keep On Truckin’.”
Steve Weld.
I stepped into the room in time to see Jaworski slip through the back door into the kitchen. He signaled that he was headed upstairs.
I knelt beside Weld and made the futile gesture of feeling his throat for a pulse. The body was warm with no rigor, but the soul had made its exit.
I sighed deeply. What a waste.
Things were beginning to get very complicated. Tests on the bullets that had slammed into Weld’s face would take a couple of days, but I was already certain that we were dealing with a busy killer.
“What set you in motion?” I whispered to no one in particular.
Jaworski moved slowly across the plank flooring above as backup arrived: two Ragged Harbor auxiliary officers and Karen Jasper, all with guns drawn. The four of us waited in silence until Jaworski descended the stairs.
“Everybody out on the porch,” he said. “I don’t want this place tramped over. The crime scene techs and the medical examiner get first crack at it. You get Dickie tended to?”
One of the temporary cops said that paramedics were with Stevens.
“Lucas?”
“It’s Steve Weld,” I said. “He hasn’t been dead long.”
Jaworski nodded his head once, then ushered all of us onto the porch.
Karen Jasper snapped on latex gloves.
“What are you doing?” Jaworski asked her.
“I’m going to take a look at the body,” she said.
“No you aren’t. You help secure this scene and make sure nobody goes in there.”
The color disappeared from Jasper’s face. She placed her hands firmly on her hips and said nothing.
“Who’s at the barricade?” Jaworski asked.
“I was,” the temp said. “Dispatch said you needed me down here.”
More reporters gathered at the end of Crescent. Three of them advanced forty yards onto the street.
“Cooper, get your ass back to that fuckin’ roadblock and herd those assholes off this street.”
The young man ran toward Crescent’s intersection with the village’s main street.
“Jesus,” Jaworski grumbled.
He turned his attention to the second temp. “Batson, get the roll of crime scene tape out of the trunk of my cruiser. You and Jasper tie off this place.”
Jaworski walked toward the seawall. “Maybe the sonofabitch didn’t get off the peninsula yet. If he went out the back, he might be down in the rocks near the lobster pound. I’m going to walk out that way.”
I was ready to follow the chief when the squeal of tires distracted me. I turned and saw Jasper and Batson run to the side of the road and draw their weapons as a gray Volvo roared by, picking up speed. The three reporters propelled themselves over a roadside barrier. Both cops yelled after the car’s driver, who paid no attention. The car was hitting fifty when it crashed through the roadblock, slamming Cooper against the side of the Tradewind restaurant on the corner.
The battered gray car was the same one that I had seen pass my house and, I was willing to wager, the same one spotted on Crescent Street the night of the murders.
Jaworski ran back across the rocks behind me yelling, “Jasper, radio for a roadblock at the end of the flats. Tell them what we’ve got here. Lucas, you get a look at that bastard?”
“It was quick,” I told him. “Dark-colored baseball cap. Blue vest. The car has a Maine plate. I didn’t get the number.”
Jaworski breathed heavily. “Look like anyone you saw at the memorial service?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“That’s got to be the same car Luther Peterson told us about.”
“It’s also been on my hill,” I said. “First day I was at the house. He had the cap on backward, and he waved to me. Nearly forced Jaycie and her friends off the road.”
“Wonder if he likes snakes,” Jaworski muttered.
I returned the chief’s nine-millimeter; there was no point bothering with the lobster pound. “You’ll have your hands full here for a while. I can hike to my place.”
Jaworski took the gun, then pointed a finger at Batson. “We ain’t had shit for evidence. Put somebody out back and don’t let air get in that fuckin’ house until Jasper gets the mobile crime lab down here.”
AS I WALKED TO MAIN STREET, I PICTURED STEVE Weld sprawled in a pool of blood. I inched through the press contingent standing in the debris that had been a barricade. Their eyes were fixed to the action on Crescent Street. Two reporters glanced at me, then turned away.
There were five dead and, I believed, one
fast-moving killer with more than a passing interest in me.
Why the hell did I ever come out of retirement?
I WALKED THROUGH THE HOUSE, ALERT FOR SNAKES OR other uninvited guests. When I felt confident that I was alone, I turned my attention to the phone.
The answering machine blinked at me, its rhythmic succession of three red winks hinting that three messages awaited me. I was well on my way to mastering the technological age.
I put on my reading glasses and studied the buttons, pondering which to push first.
I pushed the one labeled Save in case I screwed up anything when I pressed another button. The flat, tan box beeped four times; the light continued to blink.
When I pushed Play, nothing happened.
I poked one button marked <<<, heard a whirring noise, then a click, then nothing. Shit.
I hit Play again.
The first message was from my daughter Lane in New York. “Hi, Pop. If you can figure out how to operate your answering gizmo, then you can punch the numbered buttons on the phone and give me a call. Talk to you soon.”
I chuckled.
The second was from Ray Bolton. “Lucas, this is Ray. Call me as soon as possible.”
Bolton was gone from his office for the day, so I called his home number and left a message on his answering gizmo.
I propped Gretchen Nash’s sketches of Dorman and Crandall, and her painting of the headless woman, against the dining room wall. Then I wandered back to the photos and files, grabbed a legal pad and a felt-tipped pen, and doodled when I didn’t have a thought, scribbled notes when I did.
The caricature of the over-chubby Mr. Crandall squatted like a headless troll against the wall. Put a head on that full-figured dude, I thought, and you have a Gilman ready to prowl backyards and peer in windows.
I was not about to lose sleep over MI’s failure to file IRS Form blah-blah-blah. The feds had an army of raincoat-clad cops who packed adding machines and specialized in tracking numbers. Let them get the glory.
Gilman bothered me because he lied, his face and most of his body were in permanent jitterbug mode, he had had an early career in voyeurism, his name had surfaced in the Markham investigation, and Steve Weld had pointed a finger at Gilman as an information source.