Nantucket Penny

by Steven Axelrod

  I was ready to go before he finished. “I need a state police helicopter.”

  Lonnie stared at me blankly. “It’s—what? Why?”

  I turned to Charlie. “That halfway house, High Hopes, it’s outside of Boston, right?”

  He nodded. “Medford. You take the Green Line to Lechmere and transfer to a bus—takes about forty-five minutes.” He caught my startled look and explained, “I went to B.U., and my girlfriend went to Tufts. The good news is it’s only about ten minutes by car. Maybe fifteen from the airport if the traffic’s okay.” He grinned. “Or if you have a siren.”

  Lonnie still didn’t get it. “High Hopes?”

  “There’s only one person who can help us now—one person who knew Sippy and Haden and all the victims, who just might have the answers to every question on this case—the guy who literally wrote the book on it, twenty years before it happened. Well, the short story, anyway. I need to talk to Todd Fraker.”

  Lonnie frowned. “The choppers could be a problem.”

  “Why?”

  “One’s out in western Mass doing drug intervention in the Pioneer Valley. The other one’s down for scheduled maintenance. We’re grounded. Nantucket’s the last priority, with the Coast Guard doing the medevac runs.”

  I turned to Pete Salros.

  He knew what was coming. “That would be unauthorized civilian use of military aircraft, Chief. You’d have to clear it through the head of Station.”

  “That would be you.”

  “You make a request like that, you have to hope the CO is one of those smart, fearless level-headed Coasties we were talking about before, who knows how to follow orders—but takes the initiative in a jam.”

  “And that would be you?”

  “Fuckin’ A right, that would be me. Let’s go.”

  Half an hour later we were in the air over Nantucket Sound in a Coast Guard Sikorsky HH-60 Jayhawk, heading for Boston, with a state police cruiser on the tarmac at Logan waiting to take us to the Medford halfway house and Todd Fraker. It was the fastest possible route, short of rappelling down from the chopper to the High Hopes roof in a military-style fast-rope extraction. I should have taken some solace in that.

  But I couldn’t shake the feeling we were already too late.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dominoes

  So we meet again. Old people fear the internet. And they should.

  How else could this reunion happen? And what terrible consequences will befall our enemies because of it? I suspect this is the first comment you’ve ever gotten on your blog, or any blog. You cry into the night without even an echo returned to you. Well, my friend, that long silence has ended.

  —From Sippy Bascomb’s deleted blog

  As the big Sikorsky banked over the island and the sun flared on the surface of the ponds, I pulled out my phone and logged on to Haden Krakauer’s Instagram feed. It was an idle gesture, a moment of web-surfing through a lull in the action. There was nothing else to do for the moment, as the big blades chopped the air, and the island gave way to Nantucket Sound below us. I had the idea that I might be able to scavenge a scrap of information from Haden’s social media accounts. A selfie with the mystery hoodie person? An image of the spot where he was keeping his victims? Careless, self-besotted criminals often posted pictures of themselves in the act of burglarizing a house or robbing a convenience store. If Haden was drinking, anything was possible.

  It was worth a look.

  I scrolled through endless pictures of birds and trees, moors and bogs, rosa rugosa and milkwort. I skipped by the only important item, but something made me backtrack. I remembered the day Haden had taken the photo at the airport park after the attack on Sebastian Cruz. Lonnie Fraker had driven up, and a green snake had slithered out of the bed of his pickup. Lonnie told us he’d been fishing in Quidnet. I had sensed a flicker of tension, an off-balance moment when he confessed to that lapse in his work ethic. He hated to be caught having fun. He liked to say, “My idea of a good time? Overtime!” Of course the Staties paid time and a half, and Lonnie liked the money, too.

  I stared at the picture of the green snake. What had Haden said to him in the park? “Guess we know where you’ve been today.”

  How? And why?

  Haden’s caption held the answer:

  Smooth green snake, Opheodrys vernalis. Habitat, Coatue. Found nowhere else on the island—except Lonnie Fraker’s truck!

  It all came together at that moment, all the facts and details that had somehow not collided, crashing into each other like the traffic pileup I had witnessed years ago in LA—a vintage Porsche stopping for a dog crossing the street, car after car behind it jamming the brakes, missing rear-ender after rear-ender by inches—until the natural-gas tanker plowed into the last one and sent all the cars slamming into each other, front to back, front to back, bang bang bang, like giant dominoes.

  Dominoes. I found the liquor store video, froze it at the newspaper rack. The picture above the fold showed a surfer at Madequecham riding the hurricane swell.

  That was the latest issue. I knew it because the week before had featured the girls’ lacrosse team posing ahead of the new season. Carrie had been thinking about trying out for the team, and the kids had been fighting about the “losers’ gallery” photograph over dinner.

  The paper came out on Thursday. Billy Delavane was gone by the day before. He couldn’t be the man in the hoodie, and Haden hadn’t kidnapped him. In fact, the man in the hoodie had very likely kidnapped Haden.

  It was all coming faster now.

  I pulled up Cindy Henderson’s diary page:

  That drive out to Snake Hollow, why would I hide that? No one’s going to read this. And why would I even want to go back there, especially with Mark? It was perfect, we almost got stuck in the sand just like the old days. Flat cactus souvenirs, quoting Eliot, Hollow Men in their local habitat. All the echoes. Mark said remember rowing against the tide? He was laughing but it was one of the scariest days of my life.

  Eliot, that poem: “Here we go round the prickly pear at five o’clock in the morning.” Haden had shots of the Coatue prickly pear plants on his Instagram also.

  I had my own pictures. I found the screen grabs of the drone photographs—the viewing stand on the Coatue property. I spread the picture with my fingertips for maximum enlargement, and then I saw it, the faint square etched into the middle of the platform: a trap door. And outlining the edge of the platform, a three-sided square of heavy beams. Were those hinges at the feet? Raised vertical, it would become a gibbet. I wasn’t looking at a viewing stand at all.

  I was looking at a gallows.

  Todd Fraker was at Snake Hollow, he was “Mr. Peanut”—probably some sort of high school nickname or slur. The villains must have had a falling out—Bascomb was a stone killer, but Todd wanted the elaborate ritual of his deranged “Nuremberg” trial, obviously an obsession since he’d written that disturbed short story in high school. They never should have let him out of Bridgewater. Someone would have to pay for that lapse of judgment.

  Meanwhile, Lonnie was up to his own neck in Todd’s psychotic vendetta, running interference for his half brother. That meant throwing suspicion on Haden Krakauer, who was innocent, more than innocent. He was one more victim waiting for his turn in the noose. I had believed the worst of my assistant chief too easily, but my own suspicions of Haden’s and Lonnie’s sly deceptions had combined with my stubborn respect for the uniform, my fundamental trust in the state police, and Lonnie had used all of that, weaponized it, with shocking skill.

  But I still didn’t understand—why? Why throw his life away for Todd’s psychotic crusade? It couldn’t be just loyalty to his half brother. Lonnie must have had some dark grudges of his own. I couldn’t imagine what they might be, and I had no time to speculate.

  Meanwhile, I did clear up one more minor mystery: th
e vanishing porta-potty. Lonnie stole it; he must have been delivering it to Snake Hollow when he got the call out to the airport park.

  I thought of Miles DeSalvo, the administrator at High Hopes. He was guilty, too. Another co-conspirator—though perhaps not a willing one.

  I pulled Bascomb’s moleskin out of my pocket.

  Alibi research. Blackmail? Check browser history

  Of course: Bascomb had been blackmailing this guy with something from his internet searches. I took a breath, letting the engine roar vibrate through me.

  There was no need to go to Boston anymore.

  I leaned forward and shouted to the pilot. “Turn back to Nantucket! Get this bird on the ground ASAP.”

  He stared a question at me then shrugged and started into a long banking turn toward the airport. I needed to get away from the engine noise and put my feet on the ground.

  I had a rescue to organize.

  ***

  At that moment, or close to it—her computer had actually chimed just as the state-police Sikorsky was taking off from Nantucket Airport—Karen Gifford found solid proof for Henry’s case.

  Her search had started a few days before, when Francis Tate of Homeland Security stopped the Roy Elkins attack. Karen had taken the woman aside for a few seconds. “Can you recover a deleted blog? I mean—the government. Homeland Security. Can you do that?”

  “Sure. All they really delete is the start index. It’s like trying to find a book in the library when someone’s taken the card out of the catalogue. The book is still on the shelf.”

  “But impossible to locate.”

  “Well—difficult. You do a search tied to a few key words looking for orphaned files…books without that reference card. You’d have to work all the platforms—Blogger, Wordpress, Hibu…”

  “That would take forever.”

  The woman smiled. “That depends on how powerful your computers are. Don’t try these tricks at home.”

  “You could do it fast?”

  A curious squint. “What exactly do you want done?”

  Karen told her.

  And two days later, Francis Tate and her powerful Homeland Security computers had finished the job.

  It had all started with a theory—the disappearances that had plagued the island were connected and rooted in the past. All the vanished people were the same age—odd coincidence—and they had all spent some part of their childhoods on Nantucket. They were part of the NHS graduating class of 2003. She had known most of them—or at least known of them. She was a freshman that year, so she might as well have been living in a different universe.

  She started poking around in the archives, refreshing her memory—police reports, newspaper stories, school records, old issues of the school newspaper, Veritas. She came upon a late-spring editorial by David Trezize, one of the two editors that year, written after the Columbine shootings and ominously titled “Are We Next?” She had no recollection of it, but she had been too much of a journalism snob in those days to even glance at the student rag. She read it now, though.

  This was how David’s editorial began:

  “We read about the Columbine shootings, we watch the aftermath on television, and we think, “That would never happen here.” We feel superior. We feel very relieved. Most of all, we feel lucky. The problem is, we’re wrong. It’s going to happen here, and we’re not ready for it…”

  Karen had sighed when she read that. It had taken almost twenty years, but David was right. The mainland pandemic of gun violence had finally reached her hometown. David described the situation with the analogy borrowed from a friend’s father, who painted houses:

  “Never leave a pile of rags with linseed oil or stain on them. It takes a while, but they’re gonna catch fire. It’s called spontaneous combustion. A lot of too much bad stuff in one place with nowhere to go, and all them chemical reactions reacting on each other in that tight little space, and it looks like nothing until it all lights up.

  Works that way with people, too.”

  David started there and proceeded to inventory the separate rags that might lead to a Columbine-like conflagration on Nantucket. Chief among them was a blog posted by a kid named Todd Fraker called Law of the High School Jungle. She remembered him as the pathetic misfit who had tried to burn down the school during his senior year Lock-In.

  Todd had used Bolt.com, a teen social networking service, shut down since 2006. But once a blogger always a blogger. Karen searched for a new blog with Todd’s name or “high school” or “jungle” in the title and found nothing. Either it had never existed, or it had been taken down.

  Hence the challenge she had presented to Francis Tate.

  Karen knew the searchers had a few advantages, the main one being a conveniently narrow window of opportunity. If Todd had created and deleted a blog, it could only have happened in the eighteen months since his release from Bridgewater State Hospital. There was no access to computers there for even the most privileged inmates. Frances Tate had assured Karen that if the blog had ever been live, the Homeland Security software could find it. They no longer needed a court order or a warrant, and, in any case, most blogging platforms were happy to cooperate with any reasonable request. They left it at that, and Karen settled back to wait.

  Now the waiting was over. The Homeland Security email contained screenshots of the entire blog.

  It was called The High School Military Tribunal.

  URL: hstribunal.blogspot.com

  Karen stared at the screen of her computer feeling a feverish chill of dread, a queasy reluctance to take a first step into that darkness. She shook it off. She was a professional law enforcement officer. She had done good work, and the fruit of her labors was laid out and waiting for her. She wrapped those comforting facts around her like a blanket, opened the file, and started to read.

  She was a fast reader. Still, she had barely finished when she looked up to see her desk surrounded by two FBI special agents, a Barnstable SWAT team leader, and five state police troopers in full regalia.

  The taller FBI man flashed his badge.

  “We need to find Edward Delavane.”

  ***

  I made my first call from the tarmac, walking toward the terminal building. I hit the cop-shop speed dial and got Kyle Donnelly on the line.

  “Chief?”

  “Find Lonnie Fraker. Check his house and activate the GPS tracker in his cruiser. Check his gym, check the Chicken Box, take as many men as you need.”

  “Hold on, he just called. He’s coming in to the station. He wants to pitch in with the Haden Krakauer search. Some cottage near an osprey nest in Madaket? Near Long Pond. Krakauer might be hiding out there. It’s all dirt roads, but Lonnie knows the way.”

  One more diversion. Lonnie was good, and he wouldn’t give up until he had bought his half-brother every minute and second he possibly could. I knew exactly where Haden Krakauer was, but I didn’t have time to go into it with my junior detective.

  “Lock him up. Mirandize him, charge him with conspiracy to commit murder, aiding and abetting a known felon, accessory to kidnapping, aggravated assault, voluntary manslaughter—”

  “Wait a second! What’s going on?”

  “Just do it. I want him in a holding cell. Now.”

  The next call was to the state police in Medford: arrest Miles DeSalvo—conspiracy, aiding and abetting. “And try to get a warrant to search the hard drive on his computer. There’s some nasty stuff on there, and someone’s been blackmailing him with it.”

  Next call: State Attorney General Dave Carmichael in Boston.

  He picked up on the first ring, gruff and jovial, no secretary, no assistant. “You finally coming to work for me, Kennis?”

  “I need your help, Dave. It’s an emergency.”

  A quick, sober silence, then: “Shoot.”

 
I explained the situation. He added the occasional “Holy shit!” or “What the fuck?” and, when I was finished, a quiet “Damn. What can I do?”

  “It’s what I don’t want you to do, Dave. I’m putting together a rescue team—just me and a couple of people I trust. We have to act fast. But if we send in an assault force, we could have a Branch Davidian situation on our hands. This guy is armed. He’s violent and unstable, and he’s holding people I love out there.”

  “Okay. Here’s the deal. Set up your raid, I’ll call the governor, we’ll get the full STOP team mobilization backing you up. We’ll coordinate out of the State Police HQ on Nantucket.”

  The Special Tactical Operations teams, with their M4 carbines, sniper rifles, and BearCat armored vehicles, were exactly the kind of paramilitary full-court press I wanted to avoid.

  “Listen, Dave…if this guy thinks the National Guard is closing in on him—”

  “I get it.”

  “Plus, that section of the island is remote. There are no roads; you can only access it by over-sand vehicle or boat.”

  “Or by air.”

  “No way. You can’t put state police choppers up there. The guy will freak out. It has to be ATVs from Wauwinet and boats at the Head of the Harbor, but everyone keeps their distance.”

  “Okay, okay. But I want choppers in reserve for the cleanup.”

  There was a long silence after that. I had a call-waiting message from Karen Gifford. I ignored it. More silence. I thought Dave’s call had dropped. He was hesitant when he spoke again. “You have the people for this, Henry? I mean…a bunch of inexperienced local yokel Keystone Kops gearing up and charging that beach…I don’t know.”

  “I have the people, Dave. And none of them are cops.”

  Unless you counted a pair of hard-asses who had beaten the Bulgarian Voenna Politsiya and a thug-pounding spy who had quit the CIA.

  I made the last calls.

  Mitchell Stone and Dimo Tabachev got to the airport ten minutes later.

  My team was ready.

  ***

  Later, the chief would tell her that she had “batted .500” on that fateful day, but Karen Gifford took no comfort in those baseball statistics. She thought of her father’s daunting words on her first unrequited crush: “You feel a hundred percent for this boy, honey—but that’s still only half of the equation. And fifty percent is a failing grade.”