Then it got worse.
During the annual Lock-In, in which the senior class spent the night in the empty high school, Sippy had hunted her through the dark halls and classrooms. “It was like some kind of low-budget horror movie,” Jane told me at dinner after the body in the private jet had been positively identified. “He tried to rape me, but he couldn’t…it didn’t work.”
I just stared at her. I had never heard this story before. “Did you fight him off?”
“No, just the opposite.”
“I’m not sure—”
“I had this idea that going along with him—turning it into some kind of bizarre romantic interlude?—might work better than struggling with him. Sippy wasn’t ready for that; he didn’t want that. It’s all power and control for people like him. So I did something a little crazy. I took his face in my hands and I kissed him.”
“Jesus.”
“It was a big risk, but I didn’t have too many options at that point. Anyway, I guessed right. And it worked. The kiss knocked him right off the rails. He got his pants off, but he couldn’t do anything. It was his big moment, his dream come true, or it should have been. But he didn’t know how to respond…and he didn’t. He couldn’t. He had thrown me on a table. I was lying there, and he was standing in front of me, limp and furious and mute, and I think he was actually starting to cry when Billy showed up.”
“Late to the rescue?”
“I don’t know. Not necessarily. Sippy seemed really crazy at that moment. I don’t know what he might have done. I don’t even like to think about it.”
“But Billy showed up. What did he do?”
“He didn’t have to do anything. When he gets mad, he gets super calm, and that’s ten times scarier than someone yelling. He just sort of appeared out of the shadows and said, ‘That’s enough of that, Jim.’ It seemed to freak Sippy out, Billy using his real name, like he was saying I know who you really are. But it was kind of, I don’t know—respectful?—also. This was the two of them man to man. Like Billy was holding him to some code of behavior. Whatever it was, it worked. Sippy had picked the lock on one of the gates. We went outside for a smoke. That’s when we found Todd Fraker trying to burn the place down.”
“Quite a night.”
“Billy had his phone in his pocket. He managed to hit 911 by touch, and the police and the fire department came. They took Todd away, and that was pretty much that.”
“Close call.”
“Several of them. But it all turned into a lot of nothing.”
“Maybe for you. Not for Sippy. Or Todd. One of them has been killing your look-alikes for the last ten years, and the other one spent the last two decades in the looney bin.”
Jane wound up using the Lock-In for one of her books, and Sippy was the obvious model for the mopey, delusional killer who kicked off the mystery in the haunted-house corridors of the deserted high school in Pimney’s Point. But she never wrote about what really happened on the night of the Lock-In. She never reported it to the police. It had been their secret ever since.
Sippy never gave up, though. He turned into a cyberbully at the end with constant friend requests and a creepy Instagram account that featured shots of Jane taken without her knowledge, complete with snarky, conflicted captions. A shot of her pushing a lawn mower while her two El Salvadoran crew members blew leaves and edged the lawn: “The Queen among the Peons.” A picture of her fully dressed, picking storm-beached sea clams from the beach at Surfside: “Venus among the Quahog shells.” The saddest one was from a reading she gave at the Atheneum. He snapped the picture during the Q&A. Jane was smiling at some comment from the audience. It was actually a good picture—she looked alert and relaxed and happy.
Sippy’s one-word caption: “Heartbreaker.”
Then he was gone, and all his social media accounts were closed. After a few years, various theories surfaced—he had joined some bizarre cult, retired to a compound in Myanmar or the Canary Islands, died of a drug overdose, killed himself.
What no one managed to guess was that Sippy had finally snapped. His passport had an Australian visa that matched the date of the Bondi look-alike murder. Other visas matched the locations of the other killings.
On top of all that, there was another copy of Beyond Brant Point Light in the jet along with some fetishistic Jane Stiles memorabilia, including her long-lost Lamy fountain pen, inscribed by her father, and her favorite winter hat from the old days, a gray woolly thing with a pom-pom that had gone missing back in high school.
Very dark, very creepy, but the consensus was we’d dodged a bullet. On the eve of his ultimate crime, something in him had collapsed, and he’d taken his own life instead. Killing Jane herself would have concluded the whole purpose he’d built for his existence. Maybe that made him realize how hollow that existence had actually become. Anyway, he’d chosen to end it almost as soon as he arrived at his old stomping ground. All in all, the story of Sippy Bascomb’s self-inflicted demise was neat and well constructed, clear and comforting, complete with poetic justice and happy ending.
There was just one loose end still dangling—the CCTV footage from the General Aviation office that showed someone, face tilted down and obscured by a Patriots cap and wraparound sunglasses on the tarmac near Sippy’s jet around the time of death. And three days before his death, another guy, roughly the same height but with a heavy beard and a noticeable limp, had been caught on camera near the plane. The images were blurred and fragmentary, stitched between camera setups, seeming to take advantage of gaps in the coverage. The same person? And if so, who?
My first thought was Todd Fraker, but Lonnie shot that theory down. Todd was out of Bridgewater, but he remained closely watched and heavily medicated—safely tucked away in a Boston halfway house, where he had been given a low-level janitorial job and had to sign in twice a day.
Jane doubted the connection between the two random tarmac pedestrians, anyway. Security at the General Aviation area of the airport wasn’t exactly military grade, and they often caught lookie-loos trying to get a close-up view or taking selfies beside one of the big private jets. You could park in the GA lot and walk right out onto the airstrip. Plus, maintenance crews were also there all the time, along with all the other owners, and their guests.
We were still discussing it over dinner. Jane had gathered mussels at the jetties that morning at Bill Sandole’s special spot before her meeting with Diana Fox. My mom had given directions, and I prepared a simple moules meuniere—one of the many dishes I’d learned to cook from watching her in the kitchen when I was a kid. “Quick and easy!” she said gaily, adding a little more Pinot Grigio to the pot. It was her kitchen battle cry, and I had adopted it myself, rarely cooking a meal that took more than twenty minutes. In her healthier days, we had bandied around the idea of writing a “half-hour meals” cookbook, but we never got around to it.
The Parkinson’s had affected her mind in peculiar ways. “The past is coming for all of you,” Mom said that evening over Häagen-Dazs bars and coffee. I wasn’t sure what to make of her oracular tone. She was still sharp, but she could come out with bizarre, cryptic statements, apropos of nothing. A few days before, driving home from the grocery, she had waved a hand airily at the clapboard-and-shingle homes on either side of Pleasant Street and remarked, “All of these people are dead.”
“Excuse me?”
“All the people in all the rooms in all the houses. Dead.”
I forced a strangled little laugh. “I guess so, Mom. I mean—eventually.”
I asked her about it later, but she didn’t remember making the comment. I didn’t press her. When your septuagenarian mother has a disease no one understands, you have to let some things go.
Her statement this evening sounded a lot less crazy and a lot more disturbing. “What do you mean?” I asked her, nervous about my kids listening. Sam was already upstairs doing hi
s homework. This could easily lurch into the kind of lurid “true crime” chitchat that my ex-wife dreaded.
The standard dinner table topics she imagined—head-wound forensics and spatter patterns—never really came up. Mostly we talked about the irritating math teacher who never gave Carrie her homework back, and the English teacher who hated Tim because he refused to use capital letters. “Tell him you’re reading E.E. Cummings,” Mom had suggested.
When we did indulge in shoptalk, it ran to discussing how I could get my officers to tidy the break room and debating Jane’s theory of “bespoke” versus “found” clues in her jury-rigged mystery plots. She much preferred building her stories around the real-life details I provided and the day-to-day anomalies she noticed that could be seen two ways and trick the reader.
But Mom’s comment was nudging us toward the dark side this evening. And it was about to get worse. “Think about it, Hanky. Elkins comes for you, and this Sippy person comes for Jane. And it’s still at least possible that someone else was coming for Sippy! Not to mention all these disappearances, people just kind of slipping away lately. I know everyone has a reason, and it all makes sense if you look at each case individually. But taken together… I don’t know. Your grandmother always said, ignore the past and it will tiptoe up behind you and slip the piano wire around your neck.”
“Mom!”
“She had a difficult childhood.”
The kids were staring at her, wide-eyed. Miranda was going to love this.
Jane stepped in. “I’ve been thinking about this whole business with the plane, Henry. There’s no footage of anyone boarding.”
“No, but there were no cameras on that side of the plane. So, I mean…”
“Besides, and I hate to say this, suicide is a lot more common than murder—especially around here. Anyway, murderers kill themselves all the time. That ‘Facebook killer’ and Keith Hernandez committed suicide on the same day! I studied killers’ suicide notes for a book I never wound up writing. More of them than you think talk about protecting the world from themselves and their uncontrollable impulses. Like werewolves locking themselves in a cage during the full moon.”
“Maybe.”
“I hate the way you say maybe. It sounds like ‘no way.’”
“Sorry. I just hate loose ends.”
“Okay, but think about it. Let’s say Sippy was coming here to kill me. Let’s say Patriots-cap guy or beard-o, or both of them, really knew him, and even knew about his plan. They stopped him. They killed him. They saved my life. That’s a good thing, right?”
“Sure.”
But I thought of Chuck Obremski back in LA getting that coke-dealing movie producer out of jail so he could wear a wire with the Russian mobsters. And Hamilton Tyler covering for Sebastian Cruz in Airport Park so he could call him to a nonexistent crime scene when Elkins was doing the murder. What had Chuck always said back then?
“All motives are ulterior. All agendas are hidden.”
Chuck was a cynic. But he wasn’t dumb.
I decided not to push the point any further. I could see I was scaring Jane, and protecting her was more important. I wanted her cautious, not rattled. Panicky people make mistakes.
Tim stepped into the awkward silence, like a model onto the runway. “Debbie and I are back together,” he announced.
Carrie expelled a breath just forcefully enough to turn it into a snort of contempt.
I ignored her and spoke to Tim. “What happened?”
“We had a huge fight, and she promised to stop flirting with that new kid, plus I convinced her she was being a total bitch to Judy Gobeler, and she invited Judy to her house for a sleepover and told Carrie not to come. They’re not best friends anymore.”
“All because of you,” Carrie hissed.
“No, all because of you! Because you’re so horrible to people. Did you know that Judy plays the tuba?”
“That is so ratchet. A tuba? It’s bigger than she is!”
“Ratchet?” I asked.
“God, Dad! Gross, stupid, annoying, okay?”
Tim glared at his sister. “So she’s short—that’s the problem?”
“She spits when she talks—that’s the problem. And shows her big pink gums when she smiles. Plus she gets her clothes at the seconds shop.”
“She has style. She can sing! And she speaks, like, three Slavic languages. Not just Russian—Belarus and Lithuanian, too.”
“She should talk in weird languages more often. We wouldn’t know what she’s saying when she starts blabbing about fashion weirdos from the sixties and her favorite creepy furniture or whatever. And that stupid Mexican music.”
“It’s called Tejano, and it’s really cool.”
“Cool, really? Cool? Did she teach you that word?”
“Everyone says cool.”
“Everyone who’s not.”
I used the brief, seething silence between them for a little parental diplomacy. “One day when you’re grown up, you two will look back on this constant warfare and wish you’d been a little nicer to each other.”
Carrie rolled her eyes. Tim pushed his chair back and stood. “Grow up. That’s the key word, Carrie. Grow up! I’m walking the dog. Come on, Bailey.”
The Portuguese water dog jumped to his feet, eager for a little action as always.
Mom said to me, “You and your brother were worse.” She turned to Carrie. “Fistfights in the living room. They broke one of my favorite chairs once. I’m surprised they didn’t kill each other.”
“Don’t give me any ideas, Grandma.”
“Carrie.” I shot her a cautionary frown.
“Just kidding, Dad. Sort of. Can I be excused? I have a social studies paper to finish for tomorrow.”
We cleared the table and started the dishes. The kids’ departure was like stepping into a stone hut, out of the wind. The new silence reverberated with the subsiding echoes of adolescent strife. I felt bad for Jane—what was she getting herself into with this family? Nevertheless, the marriage was still on, and she chatted with Mom about our wedding plans: justice of the peace on the beach at Madequecham, lobster salad sandwiches from the Straight Wharf fish store, Prosecco. A few friends and family. Reception at the old Admiralty Club in Madaket, and a one-night honeymoon at The White Elephant.
When we were finished cleaning up, Jane quizzed Mom about her days working for the Connecticut College Upward Bound program. After her interview, Josephine White had stuck the tiny, raspberry-blond, freckle-faced candidate for assistant program director in a room full of African American inner-city New London high school kids—“Sink or swim”—and then faded back to watch the show.
Mom set about discovering what was on the kids’ minds and discovered that they had been hurting themselves during college interviews because they habitually said “aksed” instead of “asked.” They needed some mind trick to help them remember the proper pronunciation. Mom thought about it for a second and then said, “Repeat after me—everyone! Say ass kisser.” Bewildered giggles and some outright laughter greeted this bizarre request. Little white ladies weren’t supposed to swear. But Mom remained stern, albeit with a twinkle in her eye. “Come on, say it. After me: ass kisser.” They had no idea where this was going, and I could see that Jane didn’t either as Mom recounted the story. “So finally they all said it. And I told them—just leave off the ‘isser’. Ask–isser.”
Jane said, “Wow.”
Mom flashed an impish grin. “It worked! I got the job. And six of those kids got into college.”
I was back at my own job the next day dealing with DHS, the FBI, the LAPD, and the California Department of Corrections over the Elkins interstate rampage, Franny’s officer- involved shooting, and the Ed Delavane prison break. I had posted a BOLO and alerted the Steamship Authority and the airport TSA personnel, in case he was foolish enough to h
ead back to Nantucket. I expedited the Marcia Stoddard autopsy and personally took Hamilton Tyler’s confession. There was also a load of paperwork pertaining to project security for the proposed sewer project, various shellfish bylaw infractions, and new Selectmen’s rules for the use of mopeds on the state highway, otherwise known as Milestone Road.
By two in the afternoon, I was ready to deal with my own business. I met Dimo and Boiko Tabachev at Siam to Go near the airport for a late lunch. They had been so crushed at their failure to protect Jane from Roy Elkins, they had offered to quit, offered to give me my money back. I tried to console them—Roy had been one of the most dangerous men on the planet, without scruples or reservations, a human-guided missile that would have taken anyone by surprise.
“Except for the government lady,” Boiko said softly.
“The government lady is plenty dangerous herself—and she knew exactly what she was dealing with. Roy was hunting Jane, but Franny was hunting Roy. That’s the difference. She had the element of surprise.”
“Maybe so,” Dimo said. “But we have idea for you. We add to the team.”
“Our friend Angel,” Boiko added.
“That will be more safe for you. Look at Boiko. Big and scary, yes?”
I nodded. “Definitely.”
“He scares me! But Angel scares him.”
Angel lived up to Dimo’s description—six foot four, probably two hundred and forty pounds of hard muscle with a wide, flat face and a military brush cut. He had been standing at the counter at the far end of the restaurant, a little apart from the others, when I walked into the warm air and the smell of soy sauce and ginger.
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