Kindle edition Copyright 2014 by Brendan DuBois.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors' imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law.
All Rights Reserved.
SHATTERED SHELL
A Lewis Cole Mystery
By
Brendan DuBois
This is for my brothers:
Michael
Brian
Neil
Dennis
Stephen
A finer group of men I have never known.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deep thanks and appreciation for my wife Mona, for her sharp eye and unflagging encouragement; to my agent, Jed Mattes, for keeping this book out there; to Ruth Cavin of St. Martin’s Press for giving this book a home; to Don Murray, for showing me the way, years ago; to members of my family, for their continued support; and to Bill Blanning, for the extraordinary gift of STS-78.
Author’s Forward
There’s an old joke that if you want to make God laugh, announce that you’re making plans. If so, writers must be at the top of the line in giving the Almighty amusement, for we’re always making plans.
The same happened to me after writing and publishing my first two Lewis Cole mystery novels --- DEAD SAND and BLACK TIDE --- to a great publishing line, Otto Penzler Books, which was part of Macmillan Books. I was working with top talent, getting great reviews and feedback, and I had a grand plan where I could write a Lewis Cole novel every year, building up my fan base and making a bit more money with each book.
Cue God going: “Hah, hah, hah!”
Publishing has always been an uncertain industry, and there was a shake-up in publishing in the late 1990s that struck home for me. Not to get into any gory details, but after the dust had settled and the wounded had been taken away, my publishing line no longer existed.
Bummer.
That meant I was an orphan, and my agent at the time worked hard to find another home for Lewis Cole, which took a fair amount of time. But I used that time to a greater advantage, for if I couldn’t find a publisher for book number three in my series, I sure as heck wasn’t going to write the fourth. So while I waited to hear on this publishing hunt, I decided to take a leap and write a stand-along thriller, my alternative history novel, RESURRECTION DAY, which has turned out to be one of my most successful books ever.
There’s a lesson in there, about lemons and lemonades, but I think we can skip that lesson for now.
While RESURRECTION DAY was being revised and getting ready to be eventually published in 1999, my agent contacted me and said that the incredible and talented Ruth Cavin of St. Martin’s Press --- who began her editing career at the age of 70! --- had agreed to take on Lewis Cole.
That was a head-spinning time… to sell my first stand-alone thriller, and to find a home for my main man, Lewis Cole.
I hope you enjoy this third book in my series. It took longer than it should have to get published, but I still like to think it was worth the wait. And I hope you understand that I’ve not changed the time and place of the novel: there are no cellphones, home computers are expensive, and only the very first stirrings of the Internet was coming alive.
And one more note… in some ways, this was the most difficult of my Lewis Cole novels to write, although I’m proud of every single word. I’ll explain more later.
Chapter One
Though I didn't have a watch on, I'm sure it was just after ten p.m. when on a cold Friday night in January the Rocks Road Motel in Tyler Beach, New Hampshire, gave up its soul and died. Its death was well-attended, with about forty or so people there --- some working, some watching --- and I was standing about seventy feet away when the roof collapsed with a crackling boom. Then there was the roaring sound of the rushing flames, reaching up to the freezing night sky, feeding on the oxygen. The sparks were bright orange and quick, and moved up into the night like fireflies looking for a home. The crackling sound of the fire, the creaking of the timbers, the rumbling of the fire truck engines, and the echoing noise of the police and fire radios all drowned out the sound of the Atlantic's waves, about a hundred feet away.
It hadn't been long since the fire had been called in, and I stood outside the ring of firefighters from Tyler and Falconer --- our sister town to the south --- as they struggled through the snow with their heavy turnout gear, air packs, helmets, and boots. A ladder truck had its spindly aerial ladder over the collapsed roof and a deluge stream of water flowed into the fiery mess. Three other pumpers, two from Tyler and one from Falconer, were parked on the narrow street, their rigid hoses twisted through the snow.
I shrugged against the cold, wearing a green parka I had bought the previous summer at the Eastern Mountain Sports store in North Conway, when a companion and I had stopped on our way up to the White Mountains for a day climb. As I stood in about a half-foot of snow, I pretended the fibers still contained a faint breath of that hot summer day when I had made my purchase. My gloved hands were in my pockets, along with a reporter's notebook, and I had a Navy wool watch cap pulled over my ears.
The hotel was near some cottages and another motel, the Dune Wave, and no lights were showing from any of the buildings. The tourist season was gone, and the bulk of the businesses and motels were closed up until April or May. There had been mild winters in the past when some places remained open during the short days and long nights, but this season wasn't one of them. Winter had struck early and hard, with a blizzard two days before Thanksgiving and a storm nearly every week after that, and though Christmas was only a few days past, most people were already heartily sick of winter.
Before me a couple of firefighters crunched by in the snow, icicles hanging from their helmets, their faces puffy and red from the cold and exhaustion, carrying another length of hose. It had not been a good winter so far for Tyler Beach and its firefighters. Since those first snows, four motels had burned to the ground --- including tonight's victim --- and none of them had been accidental. All had been arson.
The cause hadn't been determined yet for this fire, but I had that feeling, and I could tell from the nervous and edgy look of the firefighters that they had the same feeling, that the Rocks Road Motel would soon join the list. It just made sense. And though no one was saying the words tonight, it was plain to see what was going on.
An arsonist was at work in Tyler, and so far the winter promised to be a long one. I shifted in the snow again, saw the little clouds from my breath, and waited.
A woman stepped away from a couple of firefighters and came over to me. She had on a blue down jacket and jeans, and knee-high leather boots. A metal clipboard was in gloved hands, and she wore no hat. Though the light was bad, it was still easy to make out the brown hair of Diane Woods, sole detective for the Tyler Police Department. Her face was scrunched up some from the cold and what looked like frustration. Diane has a wonderful smile and light brown skin, marred only by a short white scar on her chin that came from a fight when she was a uniform cop, but this evening she didn't look particularly happy. I didn't have any envy for anyone who got on her bad side tonight.
She stood next to me and stamped her feet in the snow and said, "I, for one, Lewis Cole, am getting mightily sick of this crap."
"I can imagine," I said. "I'm not having much fun, either."
"Where's your notebook?" she said, a slightly demanding tone in her voice.
"In my coat."
/> "Not taking any notes?"
"Don't need to, right now," I said, keeping my hands in the parka. "Just observing the scene, and I don't need a notebook for that."
"Hah. Seems to me you're getting lazy. Maybe I should call your editor."
I smiled, thinking of the retired admiral who was editor of Shoreline magazine and pretended to be my boss. "Go ahead. Knowing Seamus, he'd tell you to go to hell."
"Maybe," and she angled the open metal clipboard and used a tiny black flashlight to illuminate her notes. There was another crackling and groaning sound as a few more building beams collapsed, and it seemed like the deluge gun from the ladder truck was at last having an effect. The flames were dying down some and the steady heat on my face was beginning to diminish. From near the fire scene I made out the quick shots of light that came from a camera strobe, and I knew that the Tyler Chronicle was on the scene.
"What do you have, Diane?" I asked, keeping my eye on two people, a man and a woman, the man carrying a camera bag.
"What I have is what you and everybody else here has already guessed," she said. "Empty motel goes up in flames. Possible arson and will become a definite arson once Mike Ahern and the guys from the state fire marshal's office get in there to poke around."
I shivered as a breeze came by, salty-smelling from the ocean.
"This guy's good. He gets the fire working so the building is fully involved by the time the first engine's on the scene."
"Unh-hunh," and she motioned with the flashlight to a man standing in the snow, holding a woman in his arms. The woman's face was buried against his shoulder, and he was shaking his head and kicking the snow with one foot, over and over again.
"That there's Sam Keller, with his wife Amy," she said. "Owner of the Rocks Road, and he doesn't know it, but his life is going to get even worse tomorrow."
I nodded in understanding. "When the investigation gets into high gear."
"Yep. And when Mike Ahern starts talking to him tomorrow, he's going to think that God's got a week's worth of punishments ahead of him and that God's only begun on day two. Look. There's Ahern now."
A squat man in fire gear came over to the couple, but unlike the other firefighters, he wasn't wearing an air pack. He talked some to Sam Keller, but I wasn't sure if Keller even comprehended what he was saying. The man then turned around, and a light caught the reflective letters on the rear of his turnout coat: TYLER in big letters, and underneath that, in smaller letters, AHERN. Mike Ahern, fire inspector for the town of Tyler, and one busy man these past few weeks. I felt even sorrier for Sam Keller at the sight of having Mike Ahern talk to him. Ahern had a short fuse, and every businessperson whose motel had been destroyed had come under sharp scrutiny and even sharper questioning by Ahern as the investigation started. But for all of his efforts, and those of Diane Woods and the state fire marshal's office, there had been no evidence that any of the businesspeople who had owned the motels had a part in the arson.
Usually it's easy to tell there's a lead when arson destroys a business. A day or two's worth of fact-checking, and if a guy's up to his ears in debts, if all of his mortgage notices are printed in pink, and if not-so-polite men in suits come a-visiting from banks, then that guy's vulnerable to the siren call of fire. One quick blaze and one fat insurance check later, you're back on your feet, breathing hard but breathing more free. Except these businesspeople, blind to the mountain of debts and the ringing phones from bill collectors, ignore the quiet, squat guys like Mike Ahern and the very tough women like Diane Woods, and then end up several months later appearing before a Wentworth County Superior Court on charges of conspiracy to commit arson.
But that wasn't happening here. None of the owners had business problems. One or two were even considering expanding for next year. Which meant something worse, that the arsonist was a nut, that he wasn't following any particular agenda and was just burning down buildings for the hell of it.
That thought made for a lot of cold nights these past weeks. I looked over to Diane and said, “How's things between you and Mike?"
Diane ducked her head, like she didn't want me to see her expression, and she said, "A bit of an improvement. I don't worry now about checking my Volkswagen for bombs every morning, and he’s gotten to at least returning my calls after the third try."
"Oh," I said, not wanting to add anything more, and Diane nudged me with her shoulder and said, "I should get back to work, and make the most of a ruined evening."
"Previous plans?" I asked.
She winked. "A date, and one that was going to be --- if you excuse the pun --- an extremely hot one."
"There's always the weekend."
"Thank God for that." She looked around, perhaps to see if anyone was within earshot, and then she asked, "How goes the column you're writing, on these arsons?"
I shrugged. "About as well as your investigation. We've both been down those same roads, and I don't think either of us is missing anything. But I'm still, um ... I'm still doing the research."
She touched me with a gloved hand, her voice still low. "Glad to hear that. See you later."
Diane walked away, stumbled a bit in the snow, and went over to Sam Keller and his wife and started talking to them. Diane looked good, she looked skilled, and she had been my companion that day when I had bought my EMS parka up north. Yet spending the day on a mountain peak had not changed anything between us, for her heart belonged to another, and that was all right. I walked a bit nearer to the motel. The wind shifted and the smoke was thick for a moment, making my eyes water, and I coughed.
When I was out of the smoke I came up to a man and woman, talking to each other at one end of the unplowed parking lot that belonged to the motel. Paula Quinn, reporter for the Tyler Chronicle, gave me a little half-wave, holding her notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. A reporter who carries a pencil in the winter is a good reporter, for the new ones forget that ink can easily congeal in cold weather. Paula was experienced and Paula was good, but in her talks with me, she still expressed the same old frustration of having a big talent in a small town. She had on a black wool coat and red beret that looked nice on her long blond hair but probably didn't do much for giving her warmth. Paula has a bit of pug nose and her ears have a tendency to stick out of her hair just when she wants to look serious, and tonight the poor things were red with cold.
"Glad to see Shoreline is being represented here tonight," Paula said, giving me that smile of hers that managed to tickle something deep inside of me. "If the Chronicle has to be out here freezing, at least your magazine should be here, too."
"Thanks for the invite," I said. "When did you get here?"
She gestured to the bearded man at her side. "Jerry and I drove in a couple of minutes after they sounded the alarm. Message came over the scanner that this place was going to three alarms."
A little imp of the perverse came to me, that voice that tells you to jump when you're standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. This time the voice was telling me to ask Paula just what she and Jerry had been doing before the fire alarm came in, but I managed to resist. I just smiled and said to Jerry, "Getting your fill of pictures?"
The man next to her was wearing a green heavy down jacket, with a bulky camera bag slung over one beefy shoulder. He had on jeans and, like me, Canadian-made Sorrels on his feet. His face and nose were bright red, and his brown hair was almost as thick as his beard. Jerry Croteau, sole photographer for the Tyler Chronicle, and a man I was beginning to dislike for no good reason except that he was spending time with Paula Quinn --- both on and off the job. It disturbed me, and it shouldn't have, for I had no formal hold Paula. Just some pleasant memories and odd hopes. It shouldn't bother me but it did. Sorry for the contradiction.
His smile was almost as wide as his beard. "Got a bunch of great ones we first drove up. It was a hell of a scramble, with the hoses being dragged across the snow, and even though it only took a couple of minutes for the first truck to roll in, the roof
was fully involved. Got some great shots of a couple of guys trying to ventilate the roof with axes, with the fire backlighting them. Gonna try to sell them to AP tonight."
“Sounds pretty good."
He nodded enthusiastically. "It does. Paula tells me you might be doing a piece on the arsons for your magazine. Let me know if you need anything. I also shot some color."
There was a smart-aleck remark in there about taking advantage of someone else's misfortune, which I left alone. Instead, I looked at Paula and felt that funny little tug, and wished that I felt comfortable enough to rub those cold ears.
Instead, I played professional and said, "Hear anything about arson tonight?"
She moved her feet, shivered, and said, "Not officially, but you can tell from the way the guys are working. They're tired and I think they're also scared. Firefighters are macho, but they get scared when an arsonist is working. Look at their faces. There's the story there."
There was another crackling and rumbling as another portion of roof caved in. More water was being brought onto the motel and the building was being transformed with each minute. When I had arrived, hard on the heels of the police cruisers and the fire engines, the building with its empty swimming pool in front and the two rows of balconies almost looked majestic, the flames and smoke pouring from the roof, so many men and women working desperately to save it, the lights from the vehicles making the white paint and black shingles look almost new.
But with the center and the roof gone, with the exposed beams and flying shingles and broken glass and hanging wire and pipes, the Rocks Road Motel looked sad and pathetic, like an old woman who had been hit by a car and who was lying dead in the road, pocketbook in her hands, before the EMTs could cover her with a blanket.
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