The Tempest

by James Lilliefors

  “Okay.”

  “Second.” There was a greater-­than-­usual gravitas to his intake of breath. “Joseph Sanders was discovered this morning in a rural wooded area about fifteen miles from the Virginia line. Local PD’s treating it as suicide.”

  Hunter felt her heart speed up. She had anticipated the possibility that Sanders was dead; but not like this.

  “What happened?”

  “They found him in his truck, parked there in the woods. The ignition switched on, a hose attached to the exhaust pipe and in through the front window. The truck had run out of gas.”

  “How long ago?”

  ­“Couple of days, probably.”

  Hunter was stunned. She took a deep breath, surprised to see the air twinkling with fireflies; if anything, there were more of them than ever. “What does the state’s attorney think?”

  “Wendell Stamps is still not concerned. Different jurisdiction. Of course, if this is what you think it is, if it has anything to do with organized crime, that’ll kick it into a whole different level. Federal investigation.”

  “Okay. And what do you think?” Hunter said, feeling the case sliding away from her.

  “That may be true, but it doesn’t change what happened here last Wednesday,” he said. “Susan Champlain was killed in Tidewater, it’s a Tidewater case.”

  “Good,” Hunter said. She’d misunderstood.

  “I spoke to the state’s attorney about an hour ago. He asked me where you were, by the way. Said he heard you’d interviewed Nick Champlain this afternoon in Philly.”

  “Oh.” He let Hunter absorb that for a moment. Where would he have heard it? Champlain? Champlain’s business manager?

  “Don’t worry about it,” Moore said. “I just wanted you to know. Fischer’s just sent you the report on Sanders. No rush on anything. How about we meet first thing Wednesday?”

  “All right.” So much for taking off a day or two.

  “I want to bring Fisch and Tanner in after you come back,” he said. “I want us all in the game.”

  “Good,” Hunter said. Meaning Susan’s death would become a homicide investigation. “Will do. Thanks.”

  Hunter tucked away her phone and walked into the woods, feeling better about the case. A breeze moved slowly, high in the trees, and then a cooler air trickled down through the leaves reminding her of currents in river water. She imagined a possible scenario: Sanders had been harassing Susan Champlain, making advances on her while her husband was away; her death had been a crime of passion; afterward, Sanders had felt remorse, or felt that Nick Champlain was going to come after him, so he’d taken his own life.

  Hunter didn’t quite believe that. But she didn’t have a better story yet. She thought about her minimalist conversation with Joey Sanders on Thursday: Sanders standing shirtless beside his truck, the hood propped up, parked by the house where Susan Champlain had spent her summer. Not wanting to talk with Hunter, his eyes squinting into the distance, his thoughts already somewhere down the road.

  She turned to the house and saw her mother for a moment, in the rectangle of kitchen light. The song “Silhouettes” began playing in her head as she walked back across the lawn. Where did that come from? Hunter needed to return to Tidewater County, she knew. She probably shouldn’t have come here at all.

  The air-­conditioning felt good as she slid the glass door closed to the living room, the artificial kitchen light startling her eyes.

  “Sorry, Mom. Work.”

  “Everything all right?”

  “Fine.” She smiled. Her mother had already set out dessert, ice cream and wafer cookies, the ice cream beginning to melt. Cherry vanilla, scooped from a quart carton, another tradition. They ate mostly in silence, Hunter’s thoughts far away until she realized the silence had become awkward for her mother. Afterward, she helped clear the table and excused herself. She wanted to check the report on Sanders’s death.

  Amy’s bedroom had been preserved more or less as she’d left it fourteen years earlier—­unlike her brother’s, which had been emptied out and redesigned as a den and guest room. Hunter’s track trophies were still on the chest of drawers, the brainteaser books her dad had bought her still lined up on the shelf with old math and geography schoolbooks. Some magic Wi-­Fi was at work, too, she sometimes thought, able to pick up 1999 every time Hunter visited. She only had to be there a few minutes and “Livin’ La Vida Loca” or “Genie in a Bottle” would begin playing in her head. Or she’d have some vivid recollection from Friends that she hadn’t thought of in years.

  She logged on to her laptop and quickly found the file that Sonny Fischer had sent. Not much yet. Routine unattended death report. Hunter ran some searches on Sanders, feeling sort of silly working at this old desk where she’d done her seventh-­grade geometry homework. At one point, she heard a creaking of floorboards and froze. A shadow moved under the door. She heard a tapping: her mother knocking on the door.

  “Are you okay, dear?”

  “Fine. Just doing some work, Mom.”

  Hunter stayed up until after one o’clock sifting through data about Sanders and the Champlains. Then she lay in bed sorting the case in her head until she finally fell asleep. It was eerie, the sounds this old house made; all kinds of thoughts lived in these walls. Later, Hunter dreamed she was walking in a long, creaking hallway that curved through darkness like a funhouse maze, past miniature rooms lit by slants of moonlight. And then somehow she was seated in the rear of a small boat in rough seas, watching as a tall man in a black raincoat tried to steady Susan Champlain; but Hunter could see what was really happening—­that the man was actually positioning her so he could push her off into the waves: when he turned to glance at Hunter, she saw who it was—­Randall. Hunter woke in darkness and heard crickets chirping in the yard.

  She woke again much later, smelling bacon through the air vents. There was light now in the oak branches. Her mother had her breakfast going, the Today show on television. Matt, Al and Savannah.

  “Morning,” Hunter said, coming in the kitchen in her sweats.

  “How’d you sleep?”

  “So-­so.” She got herself a Diet Coke and sat at the table. “I forgot how hard that little bed is,” she said, trying to sound lighthearted.

  “Oh, really?” Her mother, dressed for work in a nice cream-­colored pants suit, frowned at her. “Well, it never bothered you when you were growing up.”

  “I guess I had nothing to compare it with, then.” Hunter smiled.

  Her mother cracked eggs for her, another custom. “So what are your plans? Can you stay with us one more night?”

  “Actually, no, I can’t. I have business in town this morning and then I need to get back.” Her mother stood stock-­still, looking at Hunter over her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Mom. This was probably ill-­advised timing on my part. My fault. But I’ll come visit for a week when we finish all this.”

  “Well. Okay,” she said, sounding more disapproving than disappointed. She brought Amy a plate of scrambled eggs and buttered wheat toast.

  Hunter popped open her soda.

  “I wish you wouldn’t drink that for breakfast,” Joan Hunter said. “I’d like to see you start drinking coffee in the mornings.”

  “Okay,” Hunter said.

  “I think you’re old enough now.”

  “Yes, I probably am.”

  Her mother gave her a kiss on the cheek before setting off.

  “Just be careful,” she said.

  “I will.”

  Amy watched her mother pull out of the driveway, her old Camry disappearing around the corner. As she ate her eggs, she was struck by their role reversal—­Amy seeing her mother off to work like her mother had seen her off in school days.

  WALTER KEPLER WAS in the study of his beachfront condo reviewing travel itineraries when his attorney called from the pa
rking garage to say that he had arrived. “Come on up,” Kepler said. “I’m in the Italian Room.” It was one of Kepler’s small jokes. The Baroque painting in his little study was by Bernardo Strozzi, among his favorite artists, and so he called the room his Italian Room. Next door in the bedroom were small paintings by Joachim Patinir and Pieter Aertsen; he called that his Flemish Room.

  “Come in.” Kepler nodded hello and ushered the smaller man in. They sat at the round mahogany table, Jacob Weber dressed in his attorney suit, smelling faintly of menthol shaving cream and breath mint. Kepler knew him well enough to know that the news was good, even though he appeared grim.

  “Well,” Weber told him, opening his binder. “We’ve reached terms.”

  “Good,” Kepler said. “All through the one man.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And is he on board with the wording?”

  “All of it. Yes.”

  “Very good.”

  Like a miracle. Anonymously. Kepler’s words, from the script.

  “And you trust him.”

  “Yes, of course. He seems to want this as much as you do.”

  “I’m sure.” Of course, he does. They were in the game of suppressing emotions now, all around; emotions were a distraction at this stage, at best a waste of time. Kepler understood what his attorney must be feeling, though: Weber had been negotiating terms for three months now, walking a tightrope, and he was about to reach the other side. “It’s in everyone’s best interest to move quickly, then,” Kepler said, and Weber agreed. Everyone, of course, except for Scott Randall. The predator would be caught by surprise, as they had intended. Randall was still convinced the painting was being readied for a passage to the Middle East. Kepler smiled inwardly at that, while gazing somberly toward the Atlantic Ocean. It was easy to plant a story, although there was an art to planting one well. Kepler had worked up a new one, to keep himself busy and to keep Randall busy, too, in these final days. At Harlan Antiques in Dover, Delaware, which the FBI had been watching for several weeks now, he had arranged the delivery from London of a painting on Thursday afternoon measuring 50 inches by 63 inches—­which happened to be the exact size of the Rembrandt. Kepler had then placed an anonymous tip to the FBI’s Stolen Art Division informing them that a stolen work, “possibly a famous painting,” was en route to the antiques store.

  But the primary decoy was the story the CIA was banking on, which Kepler had helped set up one afternoon in Amsterdam: Ayman Al-­Bulawi, the terrorist middleman, representing the infamous financier and art collector Garrett Massoud.

  “The question he wants to know now, obviously, is when,” Jacob Weber said. “We’re saying tentatively on Friday.”

  “They can do it with twenty-­four-­hour notice, though.”

  “That’s the understanding, yes.”

  “Okay,” Kepler said. “Let’s give them that, then.”

  Jacob Weber frowned.

  “Meaning overnight Wednesday,” Kepler said, to clarify.

  Weber said nothing. Kepler watched his precise dark eyes taking this in. He’d anticipated that Kepler would change up the schedule, but probably not so dramatically. Kepler needed to shift hard now, in order to make this happen.

  “Will that be a problem?”

  “It’s sooner than expected,” Weber said.

  Kepler grimaced. “That’s how it has to be, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s the only way we can make this work.”

  “All right,” Jacob Weber said. “We’ll do it, then. We’ll make it work.”

  “Good. I know you will.”

  All three phases in a day; the truncated schedule lessened the possibility of sabotage; it also gave them the advantage of surprise. Kepler’s risk was that he could lose $5 million, if things fell apart in the first phase. But that was his gamble.

  “I’m meeting with Nick in a ­couple of hours. We’d like to commit to that.”

  “All right,” Weber said. “Are you comfortable with everything else?”

  Kepler knew that he meant Belasco. Weber didn’t approve of Belasco, even though they were, in essence, all partners—­all in it together. But Belasco made Weber uneasy. “Yes,” he said.

  “It’ll be in the news Thursday, then.”

  “Yes.”

  Two days from now, everyone would be talking about the miracle.

  “How about if we go over the details once more,” Weber said. “With your new time frame.”

  ON THE WAY to her meeting with Calvin Walters in the town of Scattersville, Pennsylvania, Hunter took a call from Dave Crowe.

  “How did it go with Bradbury?” he asked.

  “Interesting.”

  “She’s a trip, isn’t she?”

  “I guess,” Hunter said. He sounded out of breath.

  “She’s gay, you know. I forgot to tell you that. Not that it matters.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  The suburban traffic was heavy and moving faster than she had imagined. She switched lanes abruptly, almost rear-­ending a Mercedes, which had braked suddenly. She glanced at her rearview mirror, understanding why handheld cell phone use while driving had been banned in Maryland and many other states.

  “It’s interesting, though,” she said, “from what she told me, there’s some question about whether or not Belasco—­the so-­called partner—­really exists.”

  “He exists. The Bureau doesn’t know much about him because we haven’t had the resources to really pursue him. But he definitely exists.”

  A car jerked in front of her and Hunter slammed on her brakes again, dropping the phone. “Dammit!”

  The phone was on the floor now, sliding toward the accelerator. She could hear Crowe’s voice talking to her but couldn’t reach it.

  “Dammit,” she said, trying to move it with her right foot, afraid it was stuck behind the accelerator pedal.

  She slowed and undid her seat belt, reaching to the floor, feeling for the phone. Finally she managed to lift it between two fingers. The car behind her whipped into the left lane as she straightened up, its driver holding down on his horn. Hunter glanced over as he passed: a bald, red-­faced man. Hunter read his lips: “Learn how to drive!!!” it looked like.

  “What’s going on?” Crowe said, back in her ear. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right,” Hunter said. “Traffic. Let me call you later.”

  She got another call several minutes later, this one from her mother, but decided against taking it. She was pulling into the small town of Scattersville by then, and wanted to make sure she didn’t miss her turns.

  She drove past the small brick police station and made a U-­turn, pulling into a Wells Fargo lot. She parked there and listened to the message her mother had left for her: “Honey,” Joan Hunter said gravely. “I had a call for you, dear, here at work. It was very strange. A very strange man. He wouldn’t give his name, but he said you were expecting him to call. He said, and this is a direct quote, I wrote it down: ‘Tell Amy Hunter she still has a day to extricate herself.’ Do you know what that means? He wouldn’t let me say anything or ask anything. So, I can only imagine.” She sighed dramatically. “Anyway, it was good to see you again. Call and tell me everything’s all right. Okay? I love you.”

  Hunter set her phone on the seat, willing herself not to think about it until she had finished her meeting with Calvin Walters.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Scattersville was an old suburban community about seventy miles from Philadelphia. It reminded Hunter of her own home town: fifties and sixties houses with small yards, sidewalks and telephone poles, mature oaks and elms, the downtown built around a four-­block Main Street.

  Calvin Walters had worked for the city of Philadelphia for thirty-­six years before seeking a quieter life out here, battling a quieter type of crime. He was a lanky, bony
man, with small patches of white hair on his head. He favored one hip as he walked, but there was a steadiness in his dark, bloodshot eyes, and something gentle and immediately likable about him.

  “Nice town,” Hunter said, as she sat in the creaky wooden guest chair in his windowless office.

  “It’ll do,” he said. “It’s the place where old police detectives go to pasture.” He showed her a playful smile. “So how can I help you?”

  “Eddie Charles,” Hunter said. “I understand you knew him?”

  He acknowledged it with a sideways tilt of the head.

  “He died last September,” Hunter said. “His death was thought to be drug related.”

  “Thought to be. That’s what they tell me.”

  “You don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t.” He rotated his swivel chair and reached over the desk for a clipping on the bulletin board. The board was layered haphazardly with notes, photos and faded newspaper clips.

  What he handed her was a photocopy of an Inquirer story. SOUTH PHILLY DEATH MAY HAVE CRIME TIES was the headline.

  There was a photo showing a wide-­faced African-­American man wearing a loosened tie, beaming at the picture taker. Hunter had read about the case before coming here. Eddie Charles’s body had been found dumped in a small parking lot near Fifth Street and Jackson in the city last September 27. Hunter knew the neighborhood, long considered a “drug corner,” before the spread of cell phones.

  The Philly police maintained a website that anyone could access with grainy videos of shoot-­outs, abductions, and other unsolved crimes, caught on cameras mounted around the city. Many of them were years old. Hunter had already watched and rewatched the website video of two men leaving Eddie Charles in the lot and driving away.

  Detective Walters let the unedited footage run now on his computer. He’d had it queued up to go before she’d come in. They both watched: a car stopping, two men pulling from the trunk an object wrapped in a sheet. Dropping it in the lot and jogging back to the car. It was filmed from behind, almost a block away, much of the incident obscured by a store awning. The make of the car was impossible to determine.