by David DeLee
Singleton gratefully accepted.
While the former NYPD detective dusted off his old investigative skills, starting with walking Sam Riggi through the gristly task of identifying his dead son’s body—an experience no parent should ever have to endure—Bannon walked Ruth Riggi and Meredith Palmer back the half mile to the Keel Haul where they could rest, warm up, and get something to eat if they wished.
The sleepy seaside town was quiet this time of year, but especially this early in the morning. A few gulls circled and cawed overhead in search of food. Waves lapped up onto the beach. The sun felt warm on their skin, but the October temperatures were less than beach perfect.
Meredith walked with her arm around Ruth Riggi’s hunched shoulders.
When they reach the Keel Haul, Bannon unlocked and opened the front door.
The recently renovated bar retained its nautical, 18th Century sailing ship motif with a mix of square wooden tables and diner-style booths along the front and side walls. There was a long teak bar across the back wall and a full-service commercial kitchen in the back. Bannon’s cook wouldn’t be in until much later but he could whip them up something to eat if they wanted.
“Come in,” he said to Ruth and Meredith. “Make yourselves comfortable.”
Bannon opened the shutters across the front windows. Three large picture windows. The Keel Haul logo in gold, JSL Ancient Italic font covered the center pane. There were no gaudy neon beer signs. From outside the Keel Haul looked more like a restaurant than a bar.
The morning sun shone in from over the beach on the other side of Ocean Boulevard, the main drag, brightening the place immensely. The place smelled of hot, fresh brewed coffee. A wonderful thing.
Bannon wasn’t surprised to see Tarakesh “Blades” Sardana seated at the bar drinking coffee form a blue Coast Guard mug.
His business partner and bartender, she had on a loose fitting, white blouse unbuttoned halfway to her navel and worn under a dark blazer with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. Tight dark denim slacks and black leather boots up to her knees completed the outfit. She wore her raven black hair loose and bouncy over her shoulders, letting it spill down her back. A pair of fashionable sunglasses sat on top of her head.
The white blouse accentuated her dark, Egyptian skin. Tara, in her early thirties, had a thin, straight nose, and a lean physique that was deceptively strong. Her training as a marine commando with the Indian Navy and her fondness for edged weaponry, as well as her sharp tongue, had earned her the nickname Blades.
She glanced up from an iPad she was reading from. She noticed Bannon’s guests and did a double take. “Morning.”
“Tara, this is Meredith Palmer and Ruth Riggi. Ladies, my associate Tarakesh Sardana.”
Tara slipped off the barstool and shook Meredith’s hand but Ruth kept her arms wrapped around tightly around her stomach.
“There’s been an incident,” Bannon said.
“I saw the lights and police cars when I came in. Is everything all right?”
The bar pass-thru shelf was propped open. Bannon went behind it and grabbed the coffee pot from the machine. “Ladies, please, have a seat. Coffee? Water?”
Meredith took charge, guiding Ruth to a stool. “I’ll take a coffee. Ruth, anything?”
She shook her lowered head. Bannon noticed the tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Is there a place where Ruth could lie down?” Meredith asked. “This has been a very difficult morning.”
“Of course.” Bannon stopped in mid-pour. Above the bar, accessible by stairs behind the kitchen was the two bedroom apartment where Bannon lived. “Tara, would you take Mrs. Riggi upstairs. The bed in the spare bedroom’s made up.”
“This way.” Tara guided the woman off the barstool and directed her through the kitchen. She spoke to her in gentle tones as they pushed through the swinging doors.
Bannon poured coffee in a bone white cup and saucer. He offered her a container of half and half, with the coffee, but she shook her head. “Black is fine.”
She picked up the cup with two trembling hands. She sipped the coffee then gingerly put the cup back down in the saucer, careful not to spill it.
“What’s going to happen now?”
“Chief Singleton will do everything he can to find your son and to find whoever did this to Alex.” She looked up. He read skepticism in her expression. “Singleton’s not just a small town chief. He’s former NYPD and has a lot of experience investigating homicides. He’ll also have the full resources of the New Hampshire State Police at his disposal. If anyone can get justice for you and the Riggis, it’ll be Singleton.”
She sat and stared at the coffee cup for a while.
Bannon poured a cup for himself. “What can you tell me about your son?”
She looked up. Her eyes were wet with tears. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to hold it together.”
He padded her arm. “I understand. Take your time. Is there anything I can do to help?”
She held up her coffee cup. “Maybe add something to this that’ll take the edge off.”
Bannon poured a splash of Maker’s Mark bourbon into her cup.
She forced a smile. “He lives in Boston. He works very hard so I don’t see him often.”
“You and Mr. Palmer still live in Amherst?”
“There is no Mr. Palmer,” she said sharply. “We divorced when Billy was quite young. His father was killed a few years later in a drunk driving accident.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He was the drunk and not a very good man,” she said. “He wanted nothing to do with Billy. I know it’s mean to say, but I’ve always believed Billy was better off missing his dad because he was dead rather than thinking his father didn’t care about him.”
Bannon could feel her anger and a lifetime of resentment in her tone. He said, “Families can be difficult.”
“Was your family…difficult, Mr. Bannon?”
“I was orphaned very young. I have no brothers or sister. My parents died before I could get to know them.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…”
“You’re going through a lot.”
“That’s no excuse for me to be rude, and mean. I’m sorry.”
She sipped her coffee. When she looked up again, she said, “Billy grew up next door to the Riggis. Ruth and I have been friends since the day we moved in. When the police contacted them, naturally Ruth called me right away. Alex and Billy have been best friends since the first grade. If something’s happened to one, it’s likely it’s happened to both of them.”
“We don’t know that,” Bannon said.
She looked at him with steely eyes. “Alex has a bullet in his head. I’m not a fool, Mr. Bannon.”
“I’m didn’t mean to…I’m sorry you’re going through this.”
Tara returned to the bar, quietly coming in from the kitchen. She went around to the coffee machine and poured herself a fresh cup. The blue mug had the Coast Guard emblem on it in gold and white.
“All settled in?” Bannon asked.
Tara nodded. “She’s lying on the couch just staring off into space. I offered to make her something to eat and get her a cup of tea, but she told me she just wanted to be left alone. When I left, she asked that we let her know when Sam was back with news.”
Tara came around the bar and sat down on the stool next to Meredith. “What news?”
“Her husband’s in the process of identifying their son’s body.” Bannon brought her up to speed on what they knew so far, which wasn’t much. “Chief Singleton will bring Mr. Riggi here when they’re done.”
Bannon prompted Mrs. Palmer, “You were telling me about Alex and Billy.”
“Yes, they grew up together. There were no other siblings, so naturally they became like brothers. They’re good boys,” she assured Bannon and Tara. “Not angles, mind you.”
“Arrest records?” Bannon asked.
“Oh, no,” Meredith insisted. “Nothing like that. Ju
st teenage boy stuff. Billy would come up with some hairbrained scheme to make money or get a girl and Alex would be there, carrying it out.”
She sipped her coffee. “After high school, Alex joined the Army and Billy went off to college. He studied business. He graduated with honors and became an accountant. He worked for several firms until he got his CPA, then he went freelance. He’s very good with numbers and figures, and business. The stock market and investments, stuff like that. He’s done very well for himself.”
Condos in Harbor Towers don’t come cheap, Bannon thought.
“And Alex?” Tara asked.
“He was out of touch most of the time he was in the service. He did two tours in Afghanistan. The rest he was stationed at Fort Hood in Texas. Part of the 1st Cavalry Division, I think. He didn’t re-up after his initial enlistment. When he came home, he and Billy picked right up where they’d left off. He moved in with Billy for a while, until he could afford a place of his own.”
“What does he do for a living?”
For the first time, Meredith gave Bannon a puzzled expression. “I don’t know for sure. Guess I never really asked. That’s terrible of me, isn’t it?”
“Tell me about Billy’s boat.”
Meredith brightened a little from her self-imposed guilt. “He calls it the Bottom Line. It’s a Yamaha 212 Limited S. Twenty-one feet long with an eight foot beam, seats ten, with twin 1.8 liter marine engines. It has a swim platform with rear facing seats and a cocktail table with cupholders.”
“Sounds like you know a lot about boats.”
She smiled. “Not at all. It’s just the way Billy when on and on about that boat I couldn’t help but remember all the things he told me about. He loved that boat.” She wiped at her eyes again. “He has a slip for it at the Hampton River Marina.”
“Yes, you mentioned that.”
Bannon knew the facility well. He had a twenty-seven foot Sea Ray of his own docked there. McMurphy had a slip there for his dive boat there, as well. Like Palmer, they both used the facility for their winter storage needs, too. It was a small, but well-run marina. They’d probably see Billy there and not known it.
“Was it normal for Billy to take the boat out at night, in the middle of the week like this?”
“I don’t know. This was for a ‘final spin’ as he called. How often he took it out and when during the season, I don’t know. He works really hard and long hours, and of course, he’s a young man living in Boston. We’re close, but we don’t talk every day. He’s living his life.”
She looked down at her hands in her lap. She clutched them, one over the other.
Tara reached out and covered the woman’s hands with her own. “We’ll do everything we can to find out what happened to him.”
Meredith looked up at her and then at Bannon. “What can you do? No offense, but you work at a bar.”
“Brice is…”
Bannon shook his head, but Tara wouldn’t be deterred.
“…a private investigator.”
“What Tara’s trying to say is I’m an experienced diver. Chief Singleton’s asked me and a friend of mine to take a look and see if we can find your son’s boat.”
“Dive? I don’t understand. Wait. Do you think it sunk?”
“We don’t know that. There were some items found, debris around where Alex’s…”
At his hesitation, she snapped, “I’m not a porcelain doll, Mr. Bannon. Say it. His body. Where Alex’s body was found. You think they were together. There was some sort of accident or they ran into trouble and Billy’s boat sunk. Like what, pirates? I mean if Alex was shot to death…”
“We shouldn’t go there yet. The police are just being thorough is all, checking every possibility. That’s what we’re going to do. Check it out.”
“Mr. Bannon, I’m a strong woman who raised a strong-willed boy all by myself. I can take bad news. What I won’t tolerate is being lied to or having information kept from me. I won’t stand for that.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “And what I won’t do is speculate about what might be. We don’t know anything except your son’s out of touch and possibly missing. Once my friend arrives, we’ll go out and see what we can find.”
“If you find Billy…down there, you’ll tell me, won’t you?”
“There are procedures. The police—”
She held him with a hard stare. “Promise me you’ll tell me. I’ll pay you. Hire you, if I have to.”
“That won’t be necessary, Mrs. Palmer. Chief Singleton’s a good man. He’ll conduct a very thorough investigation. Of that I’m sure. I’ll help out anyway I can. But whatever we find, we’ll let you know. I promise.”
Bannon’s phone rang. He checked the caller ID. It was McMurphy.
“Excuse me.” He pointed at the phone. “This is the friend I spoke of.”
He took the call.
From the other end of the line, without preamble, McMurphy said, “I’m at the beach.”
“I’m on my way.” Bannon ended the call. “Skyjack’s waiting.”
“You want me to come with?” Tara asked.
“No. We’ve got this. Stay here. Mrs. Riggi’s husband will be back soon. That won’t be easy. Mrs. Palmer, anything you need. Food. Drink. Tara will get you whatever you need.”
She touched Bannon on his arm. “Just tell me what you find. I’d rather hear it from you than the police.”
He patted her hand. “You’ll be the first to know.”
“Thank you.”
Bannon nodded. He grabbed a blue Coast Guard baseball cap, his Ray-Bans from the bar. He headed for the door.
CHAPTER FOUR
McMurphy owned a 32-foot, aluminum, flat-bottom, monohull dive boat outfitted with a landing craft-style hydraulic drop-down bow door. Powered by twin three hundred horsepower Yamaha outboard engines, Skyjack’s Folly had a top speed of thirty-eight knots. With an enclosed, walk around wheelhouse featuring forced hot air and air-conditioning, the boat has removable passenger benches, a dive bottle rack that held up to fifteen tanks, port and starboard side dive doors with fold out ladders and handrails, a deck crane, a Garmin GPS, depth sounder, duel screen navigation displays, a 5Kw generator, and an electric anchor windlass. It also had a sonar tether system capable of deploying advanced bottom scanning sonar pods that McMurphy used for salvage operations as well as an umbilical winch and tow davit for performing bottom scans.
If the Bottom Line was on the ocean floor and they got anywhere near its vicinity, McMurphy had the equipment and the know-how to find it.
By the time Bannon jogged across Ocean Boulevard and reached the sandy beach, McMurphy had already nosed Skyjack’s Folly onto shore and was lowered the drop-down bow door.
John McMurphy was a large, ruddy Irishman with dark red hair. Six feet tall, he was as wide as any linebacker who’d ever took to the gridiron. He’d earned his nickname, Skyjack, years ago while stationed in Hawaii, when he stole the President’s helicopter: Marine One.
After he was caught, he explained to the MPs he’d been late for a date with a girl waiting for him on the big island. Stealing the helicopter was the only way he could get to the island in time and not stand her up. When the incredulous military cop asked if the date had been worth the trouble he’d put himself in, McMurphy gave him one of his biggest grins. “If you’d ever seen Arielle Dubois, son, you’d never ask that question.” He pursed his lips and kissed his fingertips. “Perfection.”
At the moment, he stood by the controls and activated the bow door hydraulics, lifting the gate once Bannon was aboard. He wore gray running shoes, blue jeans, a black and gray plaid flannel shirt, open and untucked. Underneath it he had on a red T-shirt that read: My Other Truck’s a Truck along with a picture of the front grille of a Hummer. He wore a pair of mirrored sunglasses and chewed on the end of a thick cigar, the end lit and glowing.
Mean as they come when he needed to be, unprovoked McMurphy’s demeanor was jovial and as self-deprecating as they come
. A former career Chief Warrant Officer with the Coast Guard, like Bannon, he put in his papers when the Deployable Operations Group disbanded. Since then, as he was apt to tell anyone who asked, he was between employment opportunities.
His story for the last five years and he was sticking to it.
In truth, McMurphy, Bannon, and Tara Sardana spear-headed a small covert ops team put together to conduct unique, sensitive, and if necessary, secret missions outside the normal channels of either Homeland Security or the Department of Defense.
It was a secret passion project brought to fruition a few years earlier by Elizabeth Grayson, the former Senator from Louisiana and retired four-star Army General and current Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. They worked for her and her alone, often outside the normal purview of DHS. The existence of their little group of troubleshooters was known to only a few. Besides Grayson in her role of Secretary of Homeland Security, the Secretary of Defense was on board, and of course, the President of the United States.
When the bow door was up and in place, McMurphy finished securing it before they got underway. Around the cigar clutched between his teeth, he said, “Singleton filled me in.”
“He did?” Bannon asked only then noticing the large cop at the boat’s stern, a cell phone pressed to his ear and a Styrofoam cup in his hand. He turned, saw Bannon and nodded.
“Right. Keep me posted.” Singleton ended the call and pocketed the phone.
The two men shook hands again.
“Didn’t expect you’d be tagging along on this excursion,” Bannon said.
McMurphy moved past them and into the wheelhouse. The two big outboard motors rumbled to life and McMurphy backed Skyjack’s Folly away from the beach. The sun filled a cloudless sky. The morning air was nippy, even for late October, making Bannon regret not having a chance to grab a change of clothes.
Singleton said, “Truth is there’s not a whole lot for me to do at the moment. Sam Riggi confirmed his boy’s identity.” He leaned against the gunwale. “I thought I was done with that kind of crap when I left the city. Twenty-plus years, it doesn’t get any easier.”