Next of Kin

by James Tucker

  Buddy didn’t appreciate the runaround. He said, “Give me a straight answer.”

  Ward’s blue eyes didn’t turn away. “The family owns Brook Instruments, which makes high-end lenses used by Hollywood, the US military, and most consumer product companies on earth. BI is privately held by the four children of Walter Brook, the founder’s son who died about five years ago. They’re four brothers: Alton, Bruno, Carl, and Dietrich, oldest to youngest. So when someone murders part of the Brook family with a hatchet, we’re talking about murder and money. A lot of money.”

  Buddy was silent as they followed the snaking Hudson between its bluffs covered in white snow, outcroppings of rock and evergreens flecking the landscape. It seemed quiet and lonely below, away from what he considered civilization: skyscrapers and crowded streets and ambulance sirens. He said, “Sawyer mentioned but didn’t explain the Brooks’ compound. Called it a ‘great camp.’”

  Ward nodded as he gazed at the land below. He said, “Wealthy families built compounds in the Adirondack wilderness. Started in the late eighteen hundreds but really hit its peak in the first couple decades of the twentieth century. Often there’s a lodge with a large dining room, fieldstone fireplaces, and a library. The families would come up to the great camps for the summers, and they’d bring their servants and provisions and it would be a grand old time. Boats kept in wooden boathouses with cedar-shingled roofs. Everyone water-skiing and canoeing in the afternoons, and nights around campfires with stories and lots of gin. To do it right takes staff and a lot of money. But usually this time of year, the camps are closed.”

  Buddy thought about the killer’s use of a very unusual murder weapon. To be sure he’d heard right, he said, “Ray Sawyer told you it was a hatchet?”

  “That’s per the State Police, and the coroner agreed.”

  “They have the weapon?”

  Ward shook his head. “No. But it wasn’t a knife. The damage was too extensive.”

  Buddy said, “What does that mean?”

  Ward looked at him. “Sawyer told me what happened to Ben’s family was brutal, even medieval.”

  Chapter Four

  As the pilot set the helicopter down on the frozen lake, Ward opened the door, letting in the frigid wilderness air. Buddy followed him outside.

  A strong northwest wind blew across the expanse. It was cold and biting down to the bones. Upper Saranac Lake formed a vast empty whiteness. The ice spread out before them under a gray sky, and the land bordering it rose from the shore and extended away beneath the cover of spruce and other evergreens. Here and there were stands of oaks and maples barren of leaves. Buddy tried to imagine the lake populated by people water-skiing, paddleboarding, or swimming out to rafts anchored to the lake bottom. But he couldn’t.

  For him this place was strange and forbidding. At this time of year, there were no neighbors for safety. No grocery stores or hospitals or much in the way of law enforcement or fire protection. Out here you were on your own—something that hadn’t worked out so well for the Brooks. He turned around to see the camp.

  In the center stood a lodge that resembled a chalet in the mountains of Switzerland. It had second and third stories that extended over the first, with numerous gables and carved wooden ornamentation at the roof peaks and under the eaves. On either side of the lodge stood two houses in close proximity to each other. The houses shared the lodge’s architectural themes, including cedar shingles, large double-hung windows, and wide screened porches.

  A man in his early seventies was walking down the stone path to the edge of the lake. The man waved to them. He wore a camel-hair overcoat and dark-brown leather gloves. A scarf in tartan plaid encircled his neck and was tucked firmly into his coat. He had thin gray hair and a pale complexion except for the touch of pink the cold had given his cheeks.

  Buddy guessed the man wasn’t accustomed to the world of multiple homicides, but Buddy was. In the few moments he’d been on the ice, he’d noticed things the old man would probably never see:

  A pair of snowmobile tracks running in all directions, even near the camp.

  A broken window on the upper story of the house immediately to the right of the lodge.

  The face of a young woman in the lodge’s third-floor window.

  “Ray Sawyer,” the man shouted over the noise of the Sikorsky’s rotors. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Detective Lock, NYPD,” Buddy said. “And this is Ward Mills.”

  Sawyer’s face brightened. “I’m so glad you decided to work the case, Detective.”

  Buddy shook his head. “I’m here to look around. That’s all.”

  The helicopter pilot cut the engines, and the rotors began to slow.

  “Come with me,” Sawyer said. “I’ll show you where it happened.”

  He turned and led them up the fieldstone staircase to a wide path made of pavers, cleared of snow, that curled in a semicircle to the house immediately north of the lodge—the house with the broken window on the third level. When they’d reached the front porch, he pulled open the screen door and held it for them. Once they were on the porch with its stone floor and lack of furniture, presumably stored for winter, Buddy examined the brass doorknob on the house’s heavy front door. No obvious evidence it had been picked. Nothing on the brass or the wooden door indicating forced entry. On New Year’s Eve the door had been unlocked, he thought, or the killer had been invited in.

  Buddy grasped the knob, twisted it, and pushed open the door.

  They filed into the foyer, breathing warm air, unbuttoning their coats.

  Buddy had thought the crime scene would be stale, but he was wrong. Evidence of butchery remained on the floors, walls, and furniture. The scene looked much as it had on New Year’s Eve, minus three bodies.

  Buddy had never seen anything like it. Copious amounts of gore mixed with shards of glass from a smashed crystal tumbler. Some footprints left by the paramedics and the local police. Sprays of scarlet extending over the oak-plank floors. Ten feet here. Eight there. Only three there—the little girl, he guessed. Easier to kill her, less blood to flow from severed carotid arteries on each side of her neck or from the diminutive chest cavity.

  Buddy closed his eyes and imagined the scene in all its horror. The family’s confusion. The fury of the hatchet and the swift blows. He sensed it then—the loss of a mother and father and child. It was the young girl’s death that hurt most. He’d made a mistake last year and a girl had died. His chest tightened and he fought off the hardness of the loss with a single deep breath.

  Then he opened his eyes.

  Regained his focus.

  Experienced his own anger.

  He said, “Why?”

  Ray Sawyer and Ward were standing to his left, facing the long hallway that led past the living room where the murders had been committed, past the kitchen, to the back of the house. They looked up at him.

  “We know what happened,” Buddy explained. “Someone came to this spot and killed three people. The killer either opened an unlocked door and entered unexpectedly, or was invited in by a family member. The problem we need to solve is not how the family died, but why. Mr. Sawyer, do you have any thoughts on motive?”

  Sawyer shook his head. “God only knows.”

  Buddy gazed again at the dried pools of blood and decided Sawyer was wrong. Given the proximity of the lodge and the other houses, he thought someone did know. He thought it might be a family secret.

  Chapter Five

  “Buddy?” Ward asked.

  “Yeah?” Buddy woke from his thoughts and noticed the two men standing by him, watching as he stared at the dried pool.

  “Did you see the broken window upstairs?” Ward asked.

  Buddy met his brother’s lively blue eyes. Ward knew more than he did about almost everything, including deviant psychology. But he couldn’t read a crime scene the way Buddy could. Ward was ethereal, floating in the air like a brilliant hummingbird. Buddy was a plow horse working the mud. Buddy got his
hands dirty. But his familiarity with dirt made him effective and allowed him to spot possibilities—or dead ends—that others couldn’t see. He said, “Why don’t you take a look? See if there are footprints on the roof. I’ll work this floor.”

  Buddy walked down the hallway to the back of the house, Sawyer following him. The hallway was long and wide, with wainscoting stained dark brown, almost black. Above the wainscoting the walls were beige and on them hung family photographs, some dating from the late eighteen hundreds.

  He stopped and examined one of the more recent photographs. He saw four pairs of adults and several children, some in their teens. The youngest—probably Ellen-Marie—might have been one or two years old in the photograph. The teenagers and the adults were attractive. He saw that all were dressed for summer, in bathing suits and Bermuda shorts, and the boys and some of the men without shirts. The women and girls in bikinis. Lots of skin. A surprising amount of barely concealed private parts for a multigenerational family photo. Buddy wondered if it meant anything.

  After a moment he turned from the photograph and went farther along the hallway. To his right was a small bathroom. He went inside and closed the door.

  No window.

  No exit.

  Nowhere to hide.

  Then he opened the door, crossed the hallway, and entered a rustic master bedroom. Sawyer followed him as he looked around. The bed was made and the toilet seat and cover in the master bath were down. There were no clothes on the floor. The windows were closed and, more importantly, further insulated by storm windows inside the exterior windows, each screwed into steel plates nailed into the wooden window frame. Touching the storm window screws, he found that none were loose.

  Emerging into the hallway, he turned left and a few paces farther walked into a medium-sized pantry. Enameled white shelving from floor to ceiling was laden with soda cans, jars of hard candy, chocolate bars, waffle makers, canned goods, mixers, spices, and industrial-grade pots and pans of all varieties.

  Buddy said, “Maybe the boy was back here during the murders.”

  Sawyer shook his head. “He couldn’t have been. He’d have been trapped and killed.”

  Buddy turned to the gentleman lawyer. “But he was close enough to hear what was happening in the living room?”

  “That’s true. He told the police that his father said, ‘What are you doing?’ Then he heard screams. His mother’s last words were a shout. She told him to run. He must have run. Or something. But he got close to the killer and told me there was a distinctive scent in the house.”

  Buddy said, “What kind of scent?”

  “Cologne, maybe. Aftershave. Deodorant. He couldn’t be more specific.”

  Buddy searched the shelves for chests, cabinets, or sacks of food where a boy might have hidden, but there was nothing large enough. He said, “You still think he was upstairs?”

  Sawyer shrugged and said, “What if the killer didn’t have time? Maybe with the screaming and shouting, he left the house and didn’t have time for Ben.”

  Buddy thought the killer would have taken as much time as necessary for the job. No, something else had happened.

  Sawyer added, “Ben told us he heard what happened in the living room, but he didn’t see anything. He’s very bright and he listens to his parents. Those qualities saved his life.”

  Buddy turned three hundred sixty degrees within the pantry, but there was no second doorway and no window. He looked up and saw that Ward had joined them. Buddy raised an eyebrow.

  Ward shook his head. “The broken window upstairs is in an attic, and there are storm windows inside those windows. The storms are screwed into the frames. No way the boy removed them to get outside. Also, no footprints on the roof. I checked the second floor as well. Two children’s bedrooms, one for a boy, another for a girl. Plus one guest bedroom. Those windows also have storm windows inside. None removed.”

  Buddy nodded and said, “The killer knows Ben is in the house. He takes out Alton, Brenda, and Ellen-Marie in the living room. Then he comes down the hallway into this pantry. Ben must have been right here. How did he escape?”

  Ward said nothing.

  Sawyer said, “I don’t know. But when the police arrived, they found him in the kitchen storage room in the lodge, dressed in his cotton bathrobe and slippers, shaking with cold, his lips blue.”

  Buddy thought about this for a minute, imagining the boy shaking and suffering the beginnings of hypothermia. He asked, “Isn’t the lodge heated?”

  “The lodge is heated,” Sawyer said. “So Ben must have gone outside. That’s the only way to explain how cold he was.”

  Buddy paced back and forth along the pantry shelves. He ran his hands on the shelves and the vertical pillars, and began pushing on them to test their sturdiness. In the northwest corner he stopped.

  He moved a waffle iron and a bag of potatoes to the left. Then he held up his hands against the paneling behind the shelves. He constructed the house’s floor plan in his mind. “Is the master bedroom behind this wall?”

  “I think so.” Sawyer nodded.

  Buddy knew it wasn’t. “This is it,” he told them, turning around. “This is how Ben escaped. How he noticed the unusual scent.”

  Ward laughed. “You’re bullshitting us.”

  Buddy stepped aside and pointed.

  Ward approached the shelves and held his palms against the back panel. The oak was cooler than the room. Buddy watched him examine the shelving. This particular section didn’t fit together as the others did. The oak panels weren’t flush but slightly, ever so slightly, apart. With his elegant but strong hands, Ward took hold of the shelf’s vertical pillars. He pushed and pulled, but the shelf remained immobile. Then he tightened his grip and used the weight of his shoulders to push against the shelf.

  Click.

  They heard the sound of a metal latch releasing. A three-foot-wide column of shelving swung outward into the pantry.

  Buddy looked behind the door. He saw a fieldstone staircase that led down into blackness.

  Chapter Six

  Ward peered through the opening and then walked down the steps. He stood in the darkness. “A room of some sort,” he called. “Maybe a cellar?”

  Buddy said, “It’s a tunnel.” He followed his brother down fifteen steps until he reached a hard-packed dirt floor. He blinked in the cold blackness, waiting for his eyes to adjust. He heard a rustling from Ward’s direction, then Ward switched on the flashlight feature of his cell phone.

  They found themselves in a passage with a low concrete ceiling and cinder block walls. As Ward’s flashlight swept back and forth across the space, they saw that it contained nothing but cobwebs. It was barren of furniture and visible rodents. Yet beyond the reach of the flashlight lay only more darkness.

  Buddy looked back and saw Sawyer standing on the top stair, hesitant to join them. “Maybe you should stay at the door,” he told the lawyer, “to make sure Ward and I aren’t locked in here.”

  Sawyer’s face showed relief. “If you insist, Detective. I’ll wait right here.”

  Buddy turned and followed his brother. He imagined a terrified ten-year-old boy making his way blindly without a flashlight. He wondered if Ben had known where the passageway led, and thought the boy had more courage than most adults.

  Ward moved quickly, following the white glare of the flashlight. The space before them was perfectly straight. It went on for about thirty yards and ended at the base of a second fieldstone staircase. They walked up fifteen steps leading to a narrow door with a brass knob.

  For a moment Ward spun the flashlight beam around the door’s perimeter. Seeing nothing unusual, he reached for the knob and turned it.

  While the side of the door facing the stairs was only a door, a column of pantry shelving—just as in the house they’d left—camouflaged the face of the door in the bright room beyond. Buddy wondered to himself how many people knew of the underground connection.

  Switching off the flashlight
, Ward went through the hidden door, Buddy a pace behind. They emerged into a well-lit food-storage room, several times larger than the one in the house they’d just left. Buddy assumed the tunnel had led them to the lodge, where the staff would have served meals to all four branches of the family.

  “Who are you?”

  Buddy and Ward turned toward the storage room entrance. They saw a black-haired woman pointing a shotgun at them.

  Chapter Seven

  Three hundred miles away, in Manhattan, Ben Brook waited for Nan Sawyer to become absorbed in her television show.

  He missed his parents so much he almost couldn’t stand it. Most of the time he was able to keep himself from crying, but not always. Compared to his home on Seventy-Fourth just east of Central Park, the Sawyers’ apartment was small. It had floral-print sofas everywhere, and the small bedroom Mrs. Sawyer had given him had silk curtains printed with pink roses. Everything was worn out and boring. Nothing was fun or cool.

  He didn’t care how old she was, and she smelled like wet sweaters and tea.

  And yet Mrs. Sawyer had told him never, ever to leave the apartment.

  But he didn’t care what the Sawyers told him. They weren’t his parents and he wasn’t a prisoner.

  So he waited, watching a movie on his iPad in the spare bedroom they’d given him. From there he could hear the television Mrs. Sawyer was watching. After a while he put down the iPad and peeked out into the living room. She was sitting in a wingback chair, a maroon quilt over her legs, her head tilted to the side, her eyes closed, her breathing regular. He backed away, stood silently in the hallway, and texted his friend Trevor. Like Ben, Trevor went to Browning, the boys’ prep school on Sixty-Second between Madison and Park. Ben told Trevor he’d meet him a block south of Browning, at Sixty-First and Madison, if Trevor could sneak out of school. He thought Trevor would find a way, since Trevor seemed to do whatever he wanted. In the past year they’d played hooky three times: for a movie, for a visit to a video arcade, and to check out the skateboards at Modell’s.