The Tempest

by James Lilliefors

  “Char?” he said. Where was she?

  Luke checked the living room. He walked down the hallway to the bedroom, letting his eyes adjust, his heart tightening a little.

  “Pastor?” a voice called. Luke stopped. “Is that you?”

  “Yes.” He smiled. The voice sounded very much like Charlotte’s. “Who is it?”

  “It’s me. Dr. Nicely.”

  “Oh, yes. I thought I recognized you.” It was Luke’s sex therapist, who made house calls. He sat on the edge of the bed and undid his shoes. “I’m actually rather glad you’re here,” he said.

  “Yes. I am, too,” said Dr. Nicely.

  Luke’s cell began to ring as soon as he got his shoes off, making the sound of an old rotary phone.

  Charlotte reached for it on the nightstand. “Hmm,” she said, glancing at the readout while she handed it to him.

  Amy Hunter.

  “Interesting timing,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe she’s watching through a telescope.”

  Luke glanced out at the Bay. “Not likely.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Hi, Amy,” he said.

  Hunter exhaled, rather than say hello. Not a good sign.

  “Bad news,” she said.

  Luke made eye contact in the dark with Charlotte.

  “What is it?”

  “Susan Champlain,” she said. “They just found her on the beach. She’s dead.”

  Chapter Seven

  Hunter got the call at 8:51. It was Gerry Tanner, who often monitored police radio traffic through the night, although there was, on average, less than one homicide a year in Tidewater County. “There’s a ten–seventy-­nine at Widow’s Point,” he said. “I’m heading over.”

  “What is it?”

  “Woman in the surf. A ­couple walking their dog found her. Looks like she might have fallen from the bluff.”

  The code 10–79, Hunter knew, was “notify coroner.” The fact that Homicide hadn’t been called directly probably meant that the first responders thought the woman’s death was accidental. But with a fall, it was often hard to tell. Three possibilities: fell, jumped, pushed.

  “See you there,” she said.

  It wasn’t until she’d parked along the access road, where cop cars had lined up with their light bars flashing, and was walking out onto the hard sand that Hunter realized who it was.

  The beach had already been secured with police barricades and crime tape—­two layers, one to isolate the death scene, the other to keep away spectators; a dozen or so had gathered by then behind the police tape.

  The dead woman’s fall had left her in a contorted position, her head jammed sideways into the sand, her torso jutting at 45 degrees, rump in the air, her left arm trapped beneath her.

  “The girl’s name is Suzanne Champagne,” sheriff’s deputy Barry Stilfork told Hunter, as she stood looking on. “Summer resident. Too much to drink, apparently.”

  Hunter felt a rush of disbelief. She’d assumed for some reason that it was a teenager, a summer guest who’d been partying too hard with friends.

  “You know her?”

  She shook her head and moved to the police sawhorses, for a better look at the body and to get away from Stilfork, who gave her the creeps. In fact, she’d been thinking about Susan Champlain much of the afternoon, processing what Luke had told her and expecting him to call. She’d run DMV and data searches on both Champlains. She’d also driven by the house they were renting, about a mile and a half down the coast road.

  The investigating officer on the scene was Captain John Dunn of the state police, a burly man in his mid-­forties with pocked skin and small, jaded-­looking eyes. He was always friendly with Hunter in a distant sort of way. Five ­people had been allowed past the single entry to the death scene, she saw; the others were the coroner, two evidence techs and a police artist. The artist was doing a triangulation sketch.

  Dunn shrugged when Hunter finally caught his eye. “Go on,” he said, nodding her in. There was an official protocol in Tidewater County, and there was also a working protocol. State police did the photos and the initial investigation, but the sheriff and municipal police liked to be involved. Hunter expected the usual jurisdictional conflicts.

  She nodded thanks and stepped closer, keeping a respectful distance from the state tech who was taking pictures. She crouched in the sand and studied Susan Champlain, who was barefoot, dressed in white cotton shorts and a matching blouse. Despite the body’s contorted position, she wore a disturbingly innocent expression—­eyes open, mouth closed; the ashen face of a child, it seemed, something that had fallen from the sky. Rigor hadn’t set in yet. Hunter looked closely at the hands: one broken fingernail, something under several of the other nails.

  Dunn lowered his voice conspiratorially as Hunter walked back over: “Coroner said ninety-­six point five degrees.”

  “So, the last hour or so.”

  “Mmm.”

  She looked up at the bluff, where Susan had fallen, or been pushed over, fifty or sixty feet up. The uneven edge of the land was backlit with police floodlights, creating an eerie wedge against the pine trees and the night sky. Hunter gazed at the shadows down the beach, where a state police tech was halfheartedly combing the sand with a metal detector.

  “What are the markers?” Hunter indicated the yellow vinyl evidence markers that had been placed on the beach.

  “Sandal,” Dunn said, pointing to Number 1. “Some footprints that’ve probably been there awhile,” pointing to Numbers 2 through 8. “The others are debris that she may have caught on the way down.”

  “Just one sandal?”

  “So far.”

  “How’d you ID her?”

  “Driver’s license, credit card in her shorts. Along with a house key.”

  “Purse, or phone?”

  “Not down here. They’re processing up above.”

  Hunter thanked him and moved away.

  Every unattended death should be handled as a homicide until it is determined that no crime has occurred. That was basic law enforcement procedure, and also common sense. But Hunter could tell that the coroner and some of the police investigators had already made an assumption about this one.

  She saw Gerry Tanner’s long, stubborn face as she came around the tape, his eyes fastening on hers.

  “Sight her family won’t want to see,” he said.

  “No,” Hunter said, “they won’t.”

  “Anything?”

  “Not yet. I doubt if we’ll know much tonight. Any idea where the husband is?”

  “They’re with him now, apparently. He’d been out of town since yesterday. Just returned.”

  That could be an interesting detail, Hunter thought, noticing that the sheriff, Clay Calvert, was moving their way, with his halting shuffle, upset no doubt that Hunter had been allowed so close.

  “Strong smell of alcohol on her person,” Calvert said in his throaty voice, stopping on the other side of Tanner, making sure that Hunter heard. Physically, they could’ve passed for a vaudeville duo, the sheriff thick and squat, Tanner tall and lean. “I’ve been saying for months we ought to have railings up there. God forbid, but it takes something like this.” He turned his head and spat in the sand for emphasis. “Don’t know that you ­people need to be here,” he added, squinting at Hunter.

  Hunter said nothing. This was SOP for the sheriff: decide what happened, then look for evidence to support it. Hunter slipped off into the shadows, putting some distance between her and the police and emergency responders.

  The air felt warmer in the damp sand along the cliff side, shielded from the wind. It had been just before high tide, probably, when Susan had fallen. The tide was going out now and there were several feet of beach that hadn’t been visible then.

 
Walking south, she spotted a few things in the sand, but nothing of consequence: small odd-­shaped pieces of driftwood, a circle of metal that seemed to be the rusted top of a crushed soda can, a smooth-­edged piece of glass. Then the nearly full moon caught an angled coin as the surf receded, a quarter, faceup. And a few yards beyond it, she saw another glitter in the sand, just past where the tech had been walking his metal detector. Hunter reached down and pinched it between her fingers. A long cable chain from a necklace emerged out of the wet sand, what appeared to be a broken eighteen-­inch gold chain.

  Hunter looked up again at the bluff, figuring the trajectory of Susan’s fall. Three possibilities.

  She walked back to tell John Dunn, and to have another look at Susan Champlain’s neck. Dunn sent a tech with her to photograph and mark what she’d found. Number 13 was the quarter. The necklace, Number 14.

  “Has anyone gotten pictures of the crowd?” Hunter asked the tech as they returned. He was a young, pale-­skinned man.

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  Hunter shrugged. “Sometimes a perpetrator returns to the scene to watch.”

  He stopped, his brow furrowing as if her suggestion were absurd, then grudgingly took several quick crowd shots. There were twenty or twenty-­five ­people gathered now, staring silently at Susan Champlain. It was a sight that struck Hunter as more grotesque in its way than the contortion of her body.

  “I’m going to have a look up top,” Hunter said to the tech.

  “What?”

  She drove back around, up the dark shoulder-­less road to the bluff, parking her Camry behind a line of four police cars, two marked, on the dead end of the road.

  A rusty chain blocked the entrance to Widow’s Point with the warning “No Trespassing.” It was a law that was almost never enforced. Hunter had seen city officials picnicking here.

  She walked a thin, well-­trod dirt path through the weeds to the open wedge of the overlook, which was lit up with floodlights. Two state police techs were processing the scene. A diesel engine ground away behind them, powering the lights; the air smelled like an old bus depot.

  Investigator Frances Neal came out to see her in an officious, slightly territorial manner. Neal was a large, slow-­moving woman who didn’t abide by the invisible hierarchies of Tidewater’s old guard. Hunter liked that about her. She and the other tech had been taking shoe-­print impressions by the edge.

  “Any sign of a cell phone or purse?” Hunter asked. “There’s nothing below.”

  “Nope.”

  She showed her what they had found: a plastic bottle in an evidence bag. “Something sweet. Wine, probably.”

  “The other sandal?”

  “Not here.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nope.” She could see from the twist in Frances Neal’s face, though, that something about the scene wasn’t sitting right with her.

  Hunter looked out at the Bay. It was a dramatic view: the moon a column of light, glimmering on the water; traffic moving silently back and forth over the twin arcs of the Bay Bridge. She tried to picture what had happened: Susan, sitting on the rock by the edge, or leaning over to set up a photo, had somehow tripped or lost her balance, and fallen over. There was nothing she could see, though, that she’d have tripped over.

  “Hers?” she said, nodding at the bicycle leaning on a pine tree, taped off behind a police barricade.

  Neal turned and nodded. “Be my guest. We haven’t processed it yet.” Hunter walked over to look. It was a rental bike from Tidewater Cycles, she saw, a clunky old single-­speed 24-­incher. There was a basket hanging crookedly from the handlebars and a pouch below the seat. Hunter ducked under the tape. She lifted the pouch flap carefully with the edge of her finger, saw a paperback book inside. She looked out to the point, where the police techs were bent over, talking, neither paying attention to her. The diesel engine droned. The book, she saw, was a biography of photographer Diane Arbus. Hunter flipped through it, and found something—­a receipt, being used maybe as a place marker. She leaned down and looked closer: it was a sales receipt from a health food store in town called Cool Beans, date-­stamped that morning at 8:17. Susan Champlain’s breakfast: Egg biscuit and orange juice. On the back, someone had scribbled in swirling penmanship what looked like Kairos48.

  Hunter closed the book and the pouch. She walked over to tell Frances Neal.

  “We haven’t processed it yet,” she told Hunter, an unexpected note of irritability in her voice.

  Hunter thanked her and walked along the edge. She looked down at the emergency responders and spectators on the beach. Finally, police were setting up a partition to block the view of Susan Champlain’s crumpled body.

  Susan had bicycled here from her rented house before sunset. The book maybe meant that she had come to read, that it was still daylight when she’d parked her bike. Or not. Maybe the book had just been there, from an earlier bike ride.

  Returning to her car, Hunter recalled the only time she had spoken to Susan Champlain, if it could be called that: They’d crossed paths in a hot parking lot by the raw bar outside Kent’s on a weekday afternoon. Susan Champlain had said “Hi” with a surprising familiarity, as if Hunter were a friend. Maybe she’d mistaken her for someone else. Hunter had then realized that she was with someone, a younger man with dark, floppy hair, walking just behind. But when they reached the sidewalk, they veered off in different directions, exchanging a glance, but not saying goodbye, and she wasn’t sure.

  Pulling away from Widow’s Point, Hunter called Henry Moore, who was the commander of the State Police Homicide Unit, and Hunter’s boss. “Who’s handling notification?” she asked.

  “Dunn’s ­people. They’re on it.”

  “They’ve found him?”

  “Evidently.” Moore sighed. He was an Eastern Shore native with a lot of old-­fashioned wisdom about law enforcement; but he gave Hunter slack, knowing she worked best without much supervision. “What do you think?”

  She told him, relaying the gist of what Pastor Luke had said to her that morning about Susan Champlain and then her own observations from the scene. State police troopers trained in death notification had already handled that end of it, she knew; Hunter would have liked to see his reaction.

  Three possibilities. The fact that Nick Champlain had threatened his wife days before ratcheted up the odds that this was a homicide. But there was one aspect of her death that made Hunter think it wasn’t the husband. Nick Champlain’s alleged threat had been “I could make you disappear and no one would ever find you.” But what had happened was different. What’d happened was very public: the opposite, in a way.

  Hunter drove down to the wide-­porched house the Champlains were renting, a mile and a half farther along the coast road at Cooper’s Point. It was a large Victorian-­style place with gabled windows and gingerbread latticework. A front light had been left on but there were no lights inside. Hunter parked and walked a loop around the property, through the night shadows of a big oak in back.

  She took the rural route to the PSC, figuring what might’ve happened. Tidewater was a resort town this time of year, but there were still a lot of large, dark spaces—­farm fields and marshlands and back bays. The image of Susan Champlain’s crumpled body was stuck in her head now; it would never go away for good, she knew.

  She was almost back when Moore called again. “The husband’s on his way over to give a statement,” he said. “Voluntary. They caught up to him having dinner at Kent’s. Just got back into town around nine, supposedly. If you want to walk upstairs, you can see him.”

  TWO HOURS AFTER the incident, Belasco still heard the police sirens, racing with false urgency through the night. Belasco had watched the official activity from a distance for a while, and then returned home, confident that tonight’s event would become nothing more than it seemed: an unfortunate accident.
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  It was a warm, breezy evening, with a trace of fog coming in over the water. Belasco was driving into town, still feeling a spike of adrenaline, and the lingering thrill. Killing, done right, could be an art form, an activity that aroused the higher emotions. Belasco had nearly forgotten that. Tonight’s work, which had been carried out quickly, with purpose and precision, but also with passion, had been a reminder. Kepler would appreciate that. There had been a sense of inevitability to it, as well: Susan Champlain’s recklessness had become a threat to everything they had planned. Belasco had confirmed that tonight in going through her cell phone.

  Normally, Belasco was better at killing men than women; but tonight’s incident had unfolded with a surprising ease, as if guided by some divine force. There had been just one small mistake, a hitch that Belasco should have anticipated; but it wasn’t likely that local law enforcement would pick up on it. Belasco wasn’t going to mention it to Kepler when they spoke in the morning. What would be the point? There were far more important, and practical, things to discuss. And anyway, Belasco had a knack for making mistakes disappear. This one was already beginning to seem insignificant, an undetectable flaw in the finished work.

  Chapter Eight

  Susan Champlain’s husband, Nicholas, was upstairs in the interview room at the Public Safety Complex, wearing a royal blue golf shirt, his eyes lowered, his right hand over his left on the tabletop. John Dunn and Kyle Samuels, the sheriff’s investigator, were with him.

  “Two questions?” Hunter said to state police troop commander Gary Martin. They were standing in the adjoining room. Martin was a blond, round-­faced man with a rosy complexion.

  His eyes turned to Champlain through the one-­way glass. Champlain was gesturing now, looking surprisingly put together.

  Okay, he nodded. “He’ll probably enjoy the change of scenery, anyway.”

  Hunter decided to let that one go. Pick your battles, her father used to tell her.

  She took a seat and waited, watching through the glass as Nick Champlain fielded questions. It didn’t take long to see that, for whatever reasons, investigators weren’t pushing him as hard as they should be. Part of it was the fact that he had an alibi. But some of it was his manner: Champlain was cool and sort of interesting to watch. Hunter was reminded that he’d been a politician, a one-­term city councilman in a small town in central Pennsylvania, not far from where she had been raised. Maybe the donations he’d made to the local FOP had something to do with it.