Mitch shrugged. “Keep an eye out.”
Vicky called from the kitchen. “Dinner!”
Billy hugged the women, squeezed Ricky’s shoulder, grabbed a new potato off Mitch’s plate, and left them to their meal.
A few minutes later, he pulled off Polpis Road onto the grass beside the bike path and called the NPD crime tip line. He recited Ham’s phone call as best he could, put his truck in gear, and drove home to his beach shack in Madaket, thinking he had done well.
In fact, he had made two serious mistakes. The first one was not pushing through the computer menu to speak with a live human being. Hamilton Tyler was monitoring the tip line, and he deleted Billy’s call the moment it ended. That only delayed the message—deleted calls could be retrieved if the sabotage was detected. But delay was crucial in this case, marking in minutes and seconds the difference between life and death.
The second mistake was worse. He failed to watch his back. He put off acting on Mitch’s dire precautions until the morning. He was feeling relaxed and resolved when he climbed out of his truck and started for his little house, lulled by the low boom of the surf and the prospect of a good night’s sleep.
He never made it to the door.
Chapter Ten
Stalkers
Mark Toland stepped out of the nimbus of shadow, into the spot-lit glare. He flipped a coin to Haden, who caught it reflexively. “Thanks for the magic silver dollar,” he said. “Worked like a charm. Didn’t it, Mr. Peanut?”
—From Todd Fraker’s deleted blog
As we reconstructed the incident later, Roy Elkins met the three o’clock Hy-Line fast ferry at Straight Wharf and followed Marcia Stoddard home to her cottage on Bank Street in the Codfish Park section of ’Sconset.
First, he followed her on foot to the town parking lot, and he must have had to scramble when he realized she was heading for her car. We have to assume his own vehicle was nearby, most likely at the harbor Stop & Shop, where he was lucky to find a space even in the early fall. I could visualize him watching as she unlocked her battered old Subaru, racing back for his own ride, picking her up on Orange Street, probably a few cars back, tracking around the rotary and east on Milestone Road. There was a fair ration of luck involved—the devil’s luck because Roy Elkins was as close to the devil as anyone I’ve ever known. Circumstances just break well for bad people, it seems…until they don’t. The most intelligent and cunning bad people make mistakes, and Roy made a catastrophic one that day, for himself and for Marcia Stoddard, whose only crime was bearing a superficial resemblance to my fiancée.
He must have felt things were going well as he rolled on after watching her pull into her tiny driveway. He probably parked on Beach Street and walked back uphill around the corner to Marcia’s house. It had to be a short walk—the next-door neighbor heard the shot something like two minutes after she heard Marcia’s car pull in. This was Edie Kyle, aged sixty. Her husband, Arthur, had driven into town, so no vehicle indicated a human presence in the house. Roy most likely thought the little street was deserted, another lucky break.
Did they speak after he entered the cottage? Perhaps a few words, but this was an efficient gangland-style execution: two in the chest and one in the head.
Roy had fled by the time the frantic, whispered 911 call was transferred to my cell. I dropped Jane off at the Darling Street house and tore out to ’Sconset, lights flashing and siren blaring. I got to Marcia’s door in a record-breaking twelve minutes, leaving a string of panicked drivers in cars scattered across the grass verge of Milestone Road behind me.
I stepped into Marcia’s house. The last time I’d been there, she was under suspicion for murder, having quit her long-standing job as production designer for the Nantucket Theatre Lab, and she’d been planning to leave the island for good—embattled, bitter, already in exile.
Since then, she had been cleared of the murder charge, gotten her job back, and rejoined the island community with a heartwarming flurry of activity—sets and costumes for Sebastian Cruz’s play Fundamental Attribution Error, enthusiastic contributions to the annual flower show and Arts Week—she designed the posters and the programs, with a lovely playbill for a dramatization of Gertrude and Hanna Monaghan’s lives at Greater Light, complete with a cover that duplicated the hand-forged art deco iron gates of the old house. Rumor had it she had even found a boyfriend—the new technical director, fresh off the boat from some regional theater in Indiana. All in all, Marcia Stoddard was having her own personal renaissance.
And the grim fact was, she should have left the island while she had the chance. If she had fled in despair and disgrace three months before, she’d be alive right now. Miserable and angry, sad and bereft.
But alive.
Instead, she was lying on her living room floor, in a growing puddle of blood. The wide-eyed stare of shock and terror on her face was pitiful, tragic, infuriating. This was the flood I had joined the police force to fight, with my puny sandbags always overwhelmed by the muddy water. I turned away, understanding why people instinctively cover the faces of the dead.
I pulled myself together. Brooding and self-recrimination would help no one. This killer had to be stopped. That was my job.
I addressed the rest of the house, from the RISD diploma on the wall to the drift of mail on the floor below the slot in the front door. Then I looked at Marcia again, and I understood what had really happened here.
The execution-style killing was the new signature of Roy Elkins—every murder he had committed since breaking out of jail in California had been performed with the same three-shot precision. I saw no shell casings, but he always collected them. He had come here to kill Jane, but he had followed the wrong woman off the boat. And how long would it have taken for him to realize his mistake? Marcia’s name was everywhere in the little house—on the wall, on the floor. He wouldn’t have wasted time. He had to find Jane, and the most efficient way to do that was through me. Roy had been a private detective as well as a homicide cop. He had access to all the databases. A quick scroll through any one of them would turn up my address—even the Inquirer and Mirror website. They’d done a puff piece about our family and toured the Darling Street house.
I ran out to my cruiser, hitting 911. I got Barnaby Toll on the line and told him to send every unit to the house. But I didn’t trust them to get there fast enough.
I called Dimo Tabachev—he and Boiko were guarding the house, the first and last line of defense at this moment.
Voicemail.
I called Haden Krakauer.
Voicemail.
I jabbed the ignition button and ripped out of Marcia’s driveway, dry-skidding around the turns onto Beach Street and up the hill under the pedestrian bridge to the top of Milestone Road. I opened it up on the long, straight run into town, calling Jane as I drove.
Pick up, pick up, pick up.
“Henry?”
I kept my voice calm against the surge of relief. “You have to get out of the house. Grab the kids. Go out the back door. Take Dimo and Boiko. Go to the Horners’ next door. I have units on the way, but they might not get there in time.”
“Roy Elkins.”
“He killed the wrong woman, and he’s coming for you.”
“Roy?” She wasn’t talking to me.
“Jane—”
He was in the house.
“Roy? Mr. Elkins? Don’t do this. I don’t know you, I never did anything to you. But we can talk about it, we can work it out. Maybe I can help if you can let me try to—”
I could imagine her edging closer, plotting her moves. She had been studying tai chi with a local devotee named Chris Feeney. I prayed Jane wouldn’t make a rash move now, but what choice did she have?
“Roy! No!”
Shots rang out. Her phone dropped and disconnected.
By the time I got to the house, Jesse Coleman
and Quentin Swann were stringing yellow tape, Quentin happy to be outside and off the booking desk, Jesse happy to still be on the force. He had screwed up, but that was a few years ago, and I believe in second chances.
I got my own second chance a few seconds later.
My delay pinning Roy Elkins as Marcia’s killer and those frozen moments while I deciphered his real intention weren’t fatal, after all. Jane wasn’t dead, and neither were the Tabachev brothers.
Only Roy Elkins was dead, taken down by the one guardian angel I didn’t expect. Her presence was inevitable, though, once I thought about it, her demeanor as cool and unflappable as always.
She walked out of the front door, the same slim, sharp-eyed live wire of controlled energy, brushing past my chief detectives Kyle Donnelly and Charlie Boyce as if they were just two more bystanders, which they might as well have been. There were some new frown lines between Franny Tate’s eyes. The time at Homeland Security had aged her a little.
She ducked under the yellow tape to give me a quick hug.
“It’s over, Hank. All the kids—Tim and Caroline and—Sam, right? Jane says they’re at a Whalers game. I assume that’s football? They’re safe. Elkins is gone. I was waiting for him.”
We disengaged. “I should have been.”
She touched my arm. I remembered the gesture. “You had Jane protected.”
“I thought.”
“What were you supposed to do? Guard her yourself twenty-four seven with a cocked Remington 870?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“You had a job to do. Elkins was my job.”
“Thanks for that.”
“It’s true. You don’t abandon this town’s police force for God knows how long because you think some crazy guy might show up. And besides, Hank…no offense…do you really think you could have gone up against Roy Elkins, one-on-one?”
I shrugged. “No. Not really. But I could have gotten Jane off-island.”
“Would she have gone, though? She has a business, too. She’s a landscaper, right? I remember you told me that when we saw her walking around that big park a few years ago—”
“Sanford Farm.”
“Right. We were debating the bombing case, and we saw Jane with her little boy. You didn’t know her then, but you told me she was a landscaper—and a writer.”
“And you remembered that.”
“Well…she was a good-looking woman, and you were obviously interested, so…and anyway—remembering things is my profession. The point is, Jane wouldn’t have wanted to walk out on her job over some vague threat. People flip out when they miss work for jury duty. And this wasn’t one morning, and getting released because all the cases got settled without a trial. This could have been days or even weeks of hiding out, feeling terrified, and going broke.”
“I guess.”
“Elkins was an anomaly, Hank. He hurt a lot of people. I was the only one of them who could do something about it.”
I nodded. “I wouldn’t want to have you on my trail.”
At that moment, Jane burst out of the door, slipped under the crime scene tape, and threw herself into my arms. She knocked me back a step, and I held tight. “Oh, my God, Henry, he was going to kill me. He was—I couldn’t—”
“It’s okay. You’re okay. It’s over.”
“It was his eyes. I’ve never seen eyes like that. They weren’t even human. They were like—seagull eyes. That was the scariest thing. Those eyes. You couldn’t talk to them. They had no…no feeling. No mercy.”
“But you were going to attack him, weren’t you? Some tai chi thing? Dim mak? Fa jin? You were trying to lull him while you moved closer.”
“It didn’t matter. He saw it, he stepped back. He was about to—”
“Shhh.”
She shuddered as I held her, and we stood still, with the damp autumn wind pushing at us.
Finally Jane eased away. “She saved me. Who is she?” She took a step toward Franny. “Who are you?”
Franny extended her hand formally. “Frances Tate, deputy assistant director, National Protection and Programs Directorate, Department of Homeland Security.”
Jane shook the offered hand. “Well, you certainly have the protection part covered.”
“I do my best.”
“You did a great job. Thank you.”
Franny addressed me. “We’ll be taking over the body. It goes to an anthropological research facility, probably the one at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, after we take the head back to DC. I know that sounds a little ghoulish, but we’re always trying to figure out what makes people like Elkins tick, and postmortem forensic brain analysis occasionally turns up something that helps. Anyway, we’ll be out of your hair soon, and you can go back to business as usual.”
“Keeping the peace in Whoville?”
She shot me a rueful smile. “I guess I’ll never live that one down.” She answered Jane’s baffled look: “Ancient history.”
There was a moment of awkward silence. A hearse pulled up from the funeral home commandeered by DHS to store Elkins until he could be airlifted off-island. A small crowd had gathered on Darling Street. Finally, Franny said to me, “I suppose that’s it. I’ll let you know if we find anything interesting.” And to Jane, “You snagged one of the good ones, sister. Treat him right.”
Jane echoed Franny’s words, and her formal tone. “I’ll do my best.”
I devoted the rest of the afternoon to paperwork, protocol, and logistics. I arranged for Marcia Stoddard’s body to be removed to the funeral home, notified her family—an older brother in Connecticut, an aunt in Maine. I scanned Karen Gifford’s email about Billy Delavane’s deleted message, and I read the transcript after I sent Kyle Donnelly out with a couple of uniforms to secure Marcia’s house for the Barnstable Crime Scene Unit. I wanted the gun Elkins had thrown down after the shooting. When I identified the prints, I’d know which Hispanic individual Ham had targeted for the frame. I was ninety-nine percent sure, but I needed that last one percent confirmed before I confronted Ham Tyler. Franny was happy to let me have the gun. Her investigation was finished, and her unsub was dead.
I got Jane home and settled in with a glass of wine and an episode of Gardeners’ World on Britbox, figuring that Monty Don could soothe her nerves better than anyone else. And I was right. As England’s most beloved horticulturist pushed his wheelbarrow over the graveled paths of Longmeadow, trailed by his two golden retrievers, quietly declaiming an elegy for the summer, I left her smiling.
Chapter Eleven
High School Reunion
Then Ed told us what he was going to make us do, and I said, “But we’re not gay!” He laughed at that one. “Of course you’re not gay. This wouldn’t be any fun if you were gay.”
—From Todd Fraker’s deleted blog
Todd Fraker clenched his fists until his nails cut his palms. Stigmata—that was perfect. His bloody hands spoke volumes. He was betrayed, shamed, persecuted, forgotten, and forsaken, and all his wounds were self-inflicted.
Sincere, trusting little Toddie Fraker taken down again.
He wanted to scream, but he had to stay silent. He shouldn’t be here; he couldn’t let himself be seen, couldn’t let himself be captured. He ducked down behind the line of shrubs, opened his fingers, let his hands shake and dangle at his sides.
The plan had gone perfectly up to now—all the abductions, even ambushing Haden in the police station parking lot, the trip to the liquor store to create the “bender” narrative, the quick sap behind the ear, the drive out to Coatue, clipping him to the steel bar with the rest of the prisoners, all without a hitch. He had followed the advice of the great Miyamoto Musashi, whose sixteenth-century manual on strategy, The Book of Five Rings, Todd had found, dog-eared and coffee-stained, on the paperback shelf in the Bridgewater library and held ever since as h
is constant companion and guide. Musashi instructed—Suppress the enemy’s useful action, allow his useless actions. He had done that perfectly with Haden, letting the man’s own weaknesses take him down. It had almost seemed too good to be true.
And it was. For Todd Fraker, at least, it always was.
It was the same with this house. He had chosen it so carefully 9 Darling Street, just across from the Kennis home, with a deep lot that extended all the way to Hiller’s Lane, plenty of greenery for concealment, and an easy escape route past the patio with its high-end blue cushioned white wicker, past the clutter of bicycles and surfboards on the grass, beyond the deck, and out the open white gate onto the brick parking apron. From there, it was an easy jog to his parked car on Fair Street—two minutes in and out, owners gone, renters not yet arrived.
But there had been cars parked on the bricks today.
Someone was living in the house! He was trespassing officially, crouched in a flower bed halfway along the side wall of the mansion in full view from the glass door of the basement laundry room. The housekeeper could glance up and see him; anyone looking out a window could see him just as easily. He was exposed, vulnerable, baffled, raging, stuck in place.
He remembered the day his mom’s car ran out of motor oil on Pico Boulevard. One minute cruising along, the next minute broken down, engine seized, blocking traffic, going nowhere.
After all the dry runs and rehearsals, he had come to Darling Street today ready to kidnap Jane Stiles, prepared to knock out her comical bodyguards with his flexible rubber blackjack or shoot them if necessary, whatever was necessary, whatever he had to do. He had tensed his spirit as he would tense his stomach, ready for a punch. But it never came.
He was moments away from being discovered. The Kennis house had been invaded; the street was full of cops; nothing made sense. First, the stranger had knocked out the Bulgarians, so easily, so quickly, a couple of blows with the butt of his gun; then the stranger was inside, and the woman appeared—who the hell was she? What was she doing there? Then the gunfire and the sirens. It was like watching his own worst nightmare coming true, except it wasn’t happening to him. Someone else had come for Jane, someone else had been shot. The police were swarming Darling Street; the cars were blocking both ends. And there was Jane, with the police chief and the other woman.
Nantucket Penny Page 14