The Tempest

by James Lilliefors

“Yes.”

  “I guess we’d better go out and discuss it, then. You ready?” Luke opened the front door and Sneakers galloped out across the lawn. It was drizzling, but that didn’t bother Sneakers, who ran willy-­nilly alongside the marshlands, stopping to water the grass and to raise his nose several times at the seafood smells drifting across the harbor.

  Luke walked to the edge of the bluff, recalling the haunted look on Susan Champlain’s face. He gazed down at the Bay, and heard the loud but distant sounds of summer ­people dining by the water, feeling the cold truth of what Charlotte had said to him . . . Some ­people you can’t help . . . It was a strange evening, and he looked back in the direction of their cottage, thinking for a second he’d seen something wild running through the marsh grasses . . . Just the wind . . . Luke took a deep breath of the wet air and began to walk back.

  “She has a website, you know,” Charlotte said, as he came in. Sneakers was at his water bowl already, lapping with abandon.

  Charlotte got up to give him a look while she went into the kitchen to pour a glass of white wine. It was a modest website, self-­constructed from a template. Luke remembered, as he clicked through it, that he had visited here once before, early in summer, the first time Susan had mentioned she was a photographer. Three samples of her art were posted now, each showing what seemed to be a reflection—­or a photo-­shopped image—­on a human eyeball. The first, Light of Awareness, was of an elderly Asian-­looking ­couple seated on an iron scroll bench in an overgrown tropical garden at night. The second, Child’s Eye, was the only color picture—­bright balloons, candles, and presents from a child’s birthday party in a woman’s black-­and-­white eye. The third, Trapped, was of a seagull in flight, its wings extended upward, sunlight fringing the edges. Not trapped at all. Several lines of wavy script appeared to be superimposed on the bottom right corner of the image.

  “I sort of know what you’re thinking,” Charlotte said, coming in with her wine and leaning against the doorway. Hovering.

  “What am I thinking?”

  “As soon as you saw the photo on her camera, you felt you’d become involved.”

  “Kind of, yeah.”

  Luke stood, relinquishing the chair.

  “Have you thought about mentioning something to your friend Hunter?”

  “Well, that’s an idea,” he said, as if he hadn’t been thinking it.

  Charlotte gave Luke a scolding glance as she sat back in front of the computer. Amy Hunter was the state police’s chief homicide detective for Tidewater County. Young, independent, energetic, attractive. Charlotte had a small jealous bone, which grew more prominent whenever the topic of Amy Hunter came up. Suggesting he talk with her meant that she considered what Susan Champlain had told him to be serious business.

  “Maybe I’ll go see her in the morning,” he said.

  “Good.” She turned off her computer and let the room darken. “Are we ready?”

  They took their drinks and settled on Adirondack chairs under the deck awning, to watch what there was of the sunset, their evening ritual. It had been an unusual summer on the Bay, with lots of weekend storms and uncharacteristic cool fronts—­although as Manfred Knosum, the church’s pastor emeritus, had told Luke when he first arrived, “Every summer’s unusual in Tidewater County.”

  Their home was an old cedar-­shingled captain’s cottage, owned by the church, small but charming, with a lovely view of the Chesapeake Bay from the back deck. The Bay was the country’s largest estuary, where salt water met fresh, and this time of year the air off the water was often so salty it felt like sea breeze.

  “To gratitude. And falling,” Charlotte said, tipping his beer bottle with her wineglass. Gratitude was going to be the theme of Luke’s sermon this week, an appropriate topic for the end of July, with the cash registers all ringing, the crops headed for harvest. But he’d decided to amend it to talk about falling, too, after his own mishap.

  “Will you still be in your sling on Sunday?”

  “I’m thinking not. I may retire it before our dinner with your parents tomorrow, in fact.”

  “It’d be a nice prop.”

  Luke said nothing. He watched the fog moving across the wetlands.

  “You’re still thinking about Susan Champlain, aren’t you?”

  Luke saw her blue eyes watching in the dark.

  “I am, too,” she said and gave him a smile that struck him as slightly sad. “How about if we talk about our future tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” Luke said. “Good idea.”

  NINETY-­ONE MILES AWAY, on a jag of land near Delaware Bay, Walter Kepler sat at a corner table in a little restaurant called Kirby’s Fish House waiting for Nicholas Champlain.

  Three hours earlier, Champlain had called him on a throwaway phone and said, “I’m picking the Phillies tonight.”

  “So I’ll go with the Braves,” Kepler replied.

  In truth, Kepler didn’t follow baseball and never had. But Champlain was talking in code. If he’d said he was choosing the Braves, they wouldn’t be meeting.

  He watched as Champlain took long strides through the light rain, not bothering with an umbrella. Nick Champlain was a large, sturdy man with a boyish smile and a thick head of dark hair going gray on the sides. He’d been a fullback in high school and might have played college ball if he hadn’t quit to run his family’s business. Kepler, who had the build of a smaller athlete, a wrestler or middleweight boxer, had learned all he could about Champlain since their previous meeting.

  Kepler stood to greet him as Champlain was led to the table. Then, while the two men settled and began to peruse the menu, Kepler fought a familiar apprehension: having to negotiate his way through the carnival of mirrors again in order to make this deal work. Having to trust ­people like Nick Champlain.

  Kepler glanced out at the rain. He thought of his father, walking hell-­bent down marble corridors past the “dispensable galleries” to the masterpieces; and he thought about the “miracle,” how it would be construed and covered by the news media in another week—­things he couldn’t share with Nick Champlain.

  He waited until they had ordered their entrées—­speckled trout for both, a late-­summer specialty at Kirby’s—­and then he said, “So your message indicates we have a deal.”

  Champlain showed his assent with a flat smile.

  “Both?”

  “Both have authorized it.”

  “Good.”

  They talked around it for a while, making conversation. Champlain bringing up Anthony Patello, the man who, indirectly at least, had brought them together. Everyone in the region had read about Patello, a seventy-­seven-­year-­old retired mechanic, who was living quietly in a modest suburb of Philadelphia, trying to blend in, spend his last years on his own terms. But eleven months ago, FBI agents had raided Patello’s home on a concocted search warrant. The media had been all over it, dredging up Patello’s purported organized crime ties, and his thirty-­year-­old felony conviction.

  The raid was part of a larger strategy—­and that had been reported, too, bottom front page of the Philly Inquirer: The FBI and the Philadelphia state prosecutor believed that the raid might lift the cover on a twenty-­five-­year-­old crime—­the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist of 1990, considered the largest property crime in American history. A haul the papers liked to say was “worth” $500 million. Although, as Kepler knew, stolen art at that level was nearly worthless. There was no street value for stolen art.

  The feds still didn’t want to concede that the raid had been a mistake. They’d based the warrant on a statement given by a onetime Philadelphia capo, John Luigi, who had once run his family’s New England operation. Luigi gave the FBI details about Patello that turned out to be true—­what they’d find if they were to raid his son Dante’s pool hall in South Philadelphia, for instance. So the feds also believed
the rest of what he told them, which wasn’t true—­that Anthony Patello and his son not only knew about the stolen Gardner art, but that one or both of them could tell investigators where it was.

  Luigi had made a mess of his own life by then and was dying of bladder cancer. But he hadn’t lost his vindictive sense of humor. The feds didn’t seem to recognize how unlikely it was that Anthony Patello, who never set foot in an art museum, would be hoarding stolen paintings in his suburban Philadelphia home.

  It was apparent now that Luigi had simply been looking out for his own interests. But what the feds hadn’t figured out—­and Kepler had—­was that he’d also been shielding his nephew, Vincent Rosa, who really did have knowledge of the stolen art.

  Kepler had hired Nick Champlain as his bridge to Rosa. Champlain had done business with Rosa and his brother Frank on half a dozen projects in the Philly area. And Champlain was a reliable and reputable developer who flew under the feds’ radar, making him a perfect intermediary. The only concern Kepler had with Champlain was women; the man had a little issue with women.

  “So let me tell you what we need to do,” Kepler said at last, as they dug in to their blueberry cobblers. “And let me give you the time frame.”

  Chapter Four

  Weird morning, Amy Hunter thought, watching heavy fog float through the pine woods outside the Public Safety Complex.

  Hunter’s first thought that morning had been to text her partner, Ben Shipman. Suggest they meet up for breakfast at McDonald’s to talk about Marlena Eden, a twelve-­year-­old cold case from the next county: a thirty-­six-­year-­old mother of two found hanging by an electrical cord from an oak tree in the woods by Pike Creek. It was a case with a good suspect but still no good evidence. Hunter had been wanting to turn up the heat on it for several weeks, wanting to figure something out before the end of the year, although she hadn’t yet said that to anyone.

  It’d been a long time since she and Ship had talked about Marlena Eden. Too long. And then, lying in bed, watching the boat masts outside her marina apartment, the idea of calling Ben Shipman dissolved. She remembered: Ship was gone. There were still times when Hunter reached for her phone to call him, to get his advice or to bounce an idea off him, even though he’d been dead more than a year. Ben Shipman had lost his life helping to solve the most notorious murder case in Tidewater history, involving a man named August Trumble. The Psalmist. A man now serving multiple life sentences at Allenwood Penitentiary for murder and racketeering.

  Ship’s funeral had drawn hundreds of cops and ser­vice ­people from all over the region, who’d formed a mile-­long procession of official vehicles on the two-­lane roads to Tidewater Cemetery. It had been an apt tribute to a good man. But his death, and nearly everything else about the case, troubled her. None of it had ended in Hunter’s comfort zone. Or her frame of reference. There were still times when she heard the bizarre timbre of Trumble’s voice in her head, like some sinister music from earlier times.

  Hunter never forgot the faces of homicide victims, but the perpetrators didn’t usually stay with her like that. Most were variations of the same person, anyway; not monsters, as the media liked to make them, but self-­absorbed misfits who’d traded their lives for a few dumb—­and usually cowardly—­choices, which had also ruined the lives of others.

  Hunter headed the Maryland State Police Homicide Unit for Tidewater County. She was thirty-­one years old, although most ­people thought she was younger. Some in Tidewater’s tradition-­rich old guard had problems that an outsider—­who also happened to be young and female—­had been put in charge of Homicide. But she didn’t particularly care and that was one of Hunter’s secret weapons. She was paid a salary by the Maryland State Police, but liked to think that she really worked for the victims of the crimes that she investigated. It was a way of keeping her priorities straight, and steering herself around local politics. So far, it hadn’t gotten her into too much trouble.

  She was still thinking about Marlena Eden on Wednesday morning when Pastor Luke Bowers called. Always a pleasant surprise.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if we could meet for a ­couple minutes today? Whenever you’re free.”

  “Okay,” she said. “How about now?”

  It’d been several weeks since she’d talked with Luke Bowers and something about his voice gave her a lift. Hunter liked the way he had of seeing things from several perspectives at once—­close up and from a distance—­an instinct she was trying to hone, and she liked his irreverence. Bowers had a cop’s curiosity, she’d always thought, but without the jaded skin that many in law enforcement grew. And there was something else—­an unusual capacity to listen, to make other ­people feel comfortable by taking interest in what they were saying. Hunter had been planning for a while to ask for Luke’s input on Marlena Eden. She hadn’t expected for him to seek her out.

  She closed the file on her screen a few minutes later and walked down the long corridor to meet him in the lobby of the Public Safety Complex. The PSC, opened two years ago, consolidated municipal, county, and state police departments; fire companies; EMS; and district and circuit courts.

  “Hey, what happened?” Hunter folded her left arm into an air sling.

  “Nothing serious,” Luke said. “I was cleaning the gutter on the roof drain and slipped. Well, one leg of the ladder went into a sinkhole, I toppled over.”

  “Oww.”

  “It’s okay. It only hurts when I breathe.”

  She smiled and got him a visitor’s badge and they walked back to Homicide. Luke was tall and thin, with slightly unruly dark-­and-­light blond hair, ten years older than she was.

  Gerry Tanner looked up from his desk in the next office as they came in—­Ben Shipman’s old office. Tanner was the newest member of the state police homicide unit and one of three investigators based in Tidewater County. The other was Sonny Fischer. Tanner had transferred to Maryland from New Mexico two months ago, and was still trying to fit in. He was an old-­school cop who believed in collecting information through face-­to-­face interviews; Fischer was the opposite, a skilled assimilator of electronic data who didn’t especially care for ­people.

  As soon as Luke sat, Tanner was standing in the doorway, asking Hunter if he could borrow a highlighter.

  “Highlighter?”

  “If you have one.”

  Tanner took the opportunity to introduce himself, energetically shaking Luke’s hand. Some locals considered Tanner’s eager manner a little strange, an impression accentuated no doubt by his appearance—­long, lanky, dour-­faced. But there was a hard-­edged intelligence under the surface, which was what Hunter liked about him.

  She waited a moment after he left, seeming to have forgotten all about the highlighter, then she got up to close the door.

  “Highlighter,” Hunter said to Luke.

  They shared a quick smile. Then Luke drew a deep breath and sighed.

  “We have a woman at church,” he began. “Her name is Susan Champlain.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know her?”

  “I know who she is.”

  “She came to see me yesterday afternoon. Seemed scared to death about something. She said that her husband had threatened her, but no one would believe her if she told them. She asked me not to go to the police, so I’m not reporting her here, I’m just talking. Seeking a professional opinion.”

  “Okay.”

  The story he relayed to her was one that Amy Hunter had heard before: young woman, older man; control, repression; two ­people who probably shouldn’t have married, constantly making adjustments. In a selfish way, hearing it made Hunter glad that she wasn’t in a relationship herself at the moment.

  Then Luke got to the part about Nick Champlain threatening to make his wife disappear. And Hunter had a bad feeling. This was a story she’d heard before, too, one that didn’t end well.
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br />   “And the argument was over a photo?”

  “Well, I’m sure there was more to it. But that’s what she said.”

  “It would be interesting to see the photo.”

  “Yes. I did, actually,” Luke said. “She showed it to me.”

  “Oh.” Hunter frowned. “So she still has it.”

  “Yeah. That’s what worries me.”

  Luke described the photo she had showed him—­the faded elegance of an empty room, two men talking.

  “Did she say who these men were?”

  “Her husband’s clients evidently. She didn’t particularly want to talk about it beyond that.”

  “Except she made a point of bringing it to your attention.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  Hunter leaned back and let her eyes drift, out at the woods. “I worked on a case several years ago,” she said, “in rural Pennsylvania. Roxie Hadley. The man said almost exactly the same thing—­told his wife that he could make her disappear, and no one would ever find her body.”

  “And—­?”

  “He made good on it. No one ever did. They finally convicted him without a body. But it wasn’t easy.”

  Luke’s face tightened, watching.

  “I’m thinking I’d like to talk with her,” Hunter said. “Maybe we can figure a way to do it so it doesn’t seem like an actual meeting.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe she comes in to talk with you about volunteering, and I stop by.”

  “That might work.” Luke’s blue eyes brightened. “This afternoon? Tomorrow?”

  “Whatever you want,” Hunter said. “I’m pretty open right now.” She thought of Marlena Eden again, hanging from an oak tree in the woods. “Just let me know.”

  “I will. I’ll try to reach her this morning.”

  “Good.”

  “Maybe it’s just a phase they’re going through,” Luke added, as he stood, sounding pastor-­ish all of a sudden. Hunter didn’t believe it, nor did he. He wouldn’t be here if he did.