by Thomas Kies
Also by Thomas Kies
The Geneva Chase Mysteries
Random Road
Darkness Lane
Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Kies
Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by The Book Designers
Cover images © ARENA Creative/Shutterstock, Ambar Saha/Shutterstock
Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kies, Thomas, author.
Title: Graveyard bay / Thomas Kies.
Description: Naperville, IL : Poisoned Pen Press, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019021342 | (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3611.I3993 G73 2019 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021342
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
Chapter One
Overkill.
That was the word that immediately came to mind when I saw the crime scene.
It was bitterly cold. I had on a bulky sweater, stocking cap, long underwear, jeans, calf-length leather boots, and insulated, full-length parka. I should have been warm enough, but I couldn’t stop shivering. What froze my bones to ice wasn’t the temperature. It was the gruesome way the man and woman had been put to death.
The sun was a pale smudge sliding up over the frigid horizon of Long Island Sound. The growing illumination washed pink highlights over the choppy, ash-gray water. Stuttering blue and white lights from the police cruisers flashed behind me onto the pier and the sides of the mammoth aluminum dry-stack building to my left. Crackling, disembodied voices came and went from dashboard radios.
Blustering gusts of wind hurled stinging bits of grit and tiny crystals of ice against my exposed cheeks. I stamped my boots against the snowy asphalt of the parking lot to ward off the creeping chill working its way into my feet and calves.
A swift, repetitive metallic clanging rang out in the giant open lot where the larger boats were stored, some on trailers, some on low jack stands propped under their hulls. Every time a burst of icy air blasted us from the Sound, the riggings of the sailboats beat like multiple fire alarms against aluminum masts.
When the alert came in that morning, I was in my warm ten-year-old Sebring en route to the office, travel mug filled with steaming coffee tucked into the center console. The scanner app on my phone pinged and said simply that bodies had been found at the Groward Bay Marina. Not how many and certainly not how they’d died.
I wished I’d been tipped off before I arrived.
Groward Bay was the largest marina in Sheffield, Connecticut. Only forty-five minutes by boat from Manhattan, it drew wealthy mariners from all over the East Coast. The marina boasted four hundred in-water slips, a massive dry-stack facility, a fully stocked ship’s store, fueling facilities, private showers, and marina-wide cable and Wi-Fi.
But at that time of year, the floating docks were mostly empty. With a few exceptions, the boats had been hauled out and put into storage for winter. Christmas was less than a week away, and this was a quiet, lonely place, windswept and isolated, far from curious eyes.
The perfect place for torture and murder.
Standing on my side of the police tape, I watched a marina employee, wearing a blue hooded work coat over dark brown overalls, a ski cap, and leather work gloves, lying on his stomach, seven feet in the air, on the floor of the cockpit of the gargantuan forklift. He was tinkering with the ignition wires of the massive machine perched on the side of the concrete pier. Its sheer size was impressive—a gantry in the front that was forty feet high, eight tires that were nearly as tall as me.
Overkill.
The wheels were pressed against metal stops at the edge of the concrete pier. The prongs of the huge machine rested under the dark surface of the bay. Over and over, the marina employee took off his gloves, reached into the guts of the machine, pulled on some wires, and then put the gloves back on, frustration etched onto his craggy face.
A group of cops and EMTs stood in a small knot, talking, steam rising with their words, bodies moving from side to side, working to stay warm. Temporary powerful halogen lamps had been set up on the pier. One was focused on the stubborn engine as the workman tinkered. The other two bright lamps were aimed at the swirling water below.
Mike Dillon, deputy chief of police, crossed his arms with an impatient expression on his face. He wore a reflective black-and-yellow coat marked SPD, its black hood pulled over his head and ears. Every once in a while, he stamped his feet to ward off the cold. He was standing off to one side with Dr. Foley, the medical examiner also wearing an SPD coat, the two of them talking quietly. Doc Foley’s jacket bulged under his pot belly. His red-cheeked cherubic face was accented by a drooping gray mustache that bristled in the wind. He reminded me of a walrus.
Mike hadn’t acknowledged my presence yet. I wasn’t even sure he knew I was there.
When I arrived, I discovered that the investigation had stalled before it began. There was little to do until the bodies were recovered. They’d already photographed and measured the footprints and tire tread marks on the parking lot and the pier and gathered what little physical evidence there was.
I pulled the scarf up around my face as another gust of bitterly cold wind blew in, and I sensed that someone was close behind me.
Glancing back, I saw a tall man in his sixties wearing a heavy brown coat with the collar turned up, green rubber boots, baseball
cap, and earmuffs. His hat was emblazoned with the red-and-blue Groward Bay Marina logo. His face was weathered, his skin resembling the leather of a worn catcher’s mitt, webs of deep lines radiating around his green eyes and the corners of his mouth. A two-day growth of gray stubble dirtied his cheeks and chin.
I pulled the scarf down away from my lips. “Do you work here?”
He nodded. “I’m the general manager.” He held out a gloved hand. “Rick Guthrie.”
“I’m Geneva Chase with the Sheffield Post.” We shook hands, and I motioned toward the employee tinkering with the guts of the forklift. “What’s your guy doing?”
He tossed a glance to where the cops were standing. “Whoever did this either took the keys with ’em or tossed them into the water. Kenny’s trying to hot-wire the damn thing.”
“That’s one big machine.” The huge blue-and-white forklift reminded me of the massive construction vehicles I’d recently seen on the south side of Sheffield.
He grinned and showed me stained teeth that hadn’t seen a dentist in a long time. “It’s a Wiggins Marina Bull, one of the biggest they make. It can reach down eleven feet under the surface of the water and haul up a forty-thousand-pound boat, lift it up, carry it into the dry-stack over there, then hoist it thirty-seven feet into the air. The two forks are forty-seven feet long. Machine weighs a hundred and thirty-four thousand pounds.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the dry stack building. “The floor in there is a foot thick to withstand the weight of that beast.”
I frowned. “How does it do all that?”
“The way it’s counterbalanced.” He held his gloved hands up, moving one up and the other one down as if he were showing me something. “All the weight of the Bull is in the back. It took three trucks to ship it to us. One of the trucks just for the weights.” Then his face turned deadly serious and his eyes studied the dark water below. His voice was little more than a whisper. “It’s what you can’t see—the prongs of the forklift that brings up the boats. Right now, they’re about six feet underwater. It’s where the bodies are.”
I felt a spinning lurch in the pit of my stomach. It was a cold stew of fear, dread, and the thrill of getting a great story all rolled up into one. “How many bodies?”
He cocked his head. “All I saw were two. Could be more, I reckon. Hard to see in the dark.”
I glanced at the water, then back at Rick. “How did you find them?”
“I got here ’bout an hour ago and the first thing I noticed was the Bull sitting out on the pier. It shouldn’t be here. It’s supposed to be locked up in the dry-stack building.”
He pointed behind us. I could see through a yawning three-story open doorway into the cavernous metal building where easily two hundred boats were warehoused on shelves, bows against the wall, sterns pointed toward the middle of the room, stacked one on top of another, five deep. “That’s where the smaller boats are stored for winter. Bigger boats are in the lot.” He jerked his thumb behind him.
I could easily see the larger boats. They were parked outside, winterized—drained of fluids, shrink-wrapped in white plastic, held off the ground by huge wooden blocks under their hulls, braced against the wind on multilegged, metal jack stands. There must have been at least three hundred vessels. Long, sleek powerboats and magnificent sailboats were lined up in neat rows leaving just enough room for a car or truck to drive along. They were monuments to affluence, like snow-covered markers in a lonely, exclusive graveyard.
Rick’s voice was low. When he spoke, his words emerged as a rusty growl. “I saw it and wondered what the hell it was doing there. Why were the Bull’s forks underwater? I went to the side of the pier and aimed my flashlight into the bay.” He held the big, black light up for emphasis. “I could see there was something attached to both prongs, something pale in the beam of the light. I took me a minute because the water was movin’ and it was still dark. When I finally figured out what I was lookin’ at, I thought my heart would seize up. There are people tied to them forks.”
Overkill.
The skin on the back of my neck crawled when I heard him say that. An engine suddenly belched and rumbled to life. Startled, we both turned and stared at the machine. Kenny had gotten the forklift started. He swung himself up and hopped into the black plastic seat of the cab, then pulled a lever back, and the water began to roil.
The cops all moved closer to the side of the pier as the rubber-covered metal forks broke the surface of the icy bay.
My breath caught in my throat, and my eyes struggled to make sense of what I was seeing.
Two bodies tied to the prongs, wrapped tightly with chains.
A man and a woman.
Water sluiced off the glistening corpses as they emerged into the stark glare of the halogen lamplight. Taking off my mittens, I brought the camera up to my eye and adjusted the telephoto lens. The chains glinted in the illumination. Through my lens, I could see the male was Caucasian, had a full head of sopping salt-and-pepper hair, and was most likely in his late fifties or early sixties.
The woman, also Caucasian, appeared much younger, in her thirties, with long, waterlogged auburn hair.
Dear God, I think they’re both stark naked.
For a moment I wondered if they’d died of hypothermia or drowning. What would be worse? I took a deep breath of frigid air and took my photos.
I turned back to Rick Guthrie, gesturing to the open space in the dry-stack where the forklift should have been. “Who has access to that building?”
He was staring, transfixed, mouth open at the macabre scene unfolding on his pier. The forklift was backing up, its human cargo chained tightly to the jutting prongs.
I tried again. “Mr. Guthrie? Who has access to that building?”
His attention snapped back to me. “Me, Kenny…couple of the other employees. But it wasn’t any of them. Someone busted in.” He pointed to the entrance off to the side where the door was hanging at an odd angle. “Looks like they mighta used a crowbar.”
“No alarm?”
“Someone was smart enough to cut the alarm, but we got closed-circuit cameras all over the place.” He waved his hands. “Motion-activated, the video is saved on the computer in my office.”
“Have you looked at it yet?”
“I ran it for the cops when they got here. They copied it onto a thumb drive. They said they’d have to take my computer too.”
“But it’s still in your office?”
He nodded, staring at the bodies chained to his forklift.
“And the video is still loaded onto your computer?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Holy crap.
I smiled at him coquettishly. “Can I see it?”
* * *
Rick’s office was tucked away in the back of the dry-stack building in a small one-story metal annex. We walked through the massive open doorway, across the concrete floor where the Bull should have been parked for safekeeping, past the shelves of powerboats stacked impossibly on top of one another.
I glanced back to where the cops were snapping off the locks with a set of bolt cutters. Nobody was paying any attention to us.
At the back of the building we came to a doorway with a sign saying Marina Offices. He unlocked the door, letting us into a narrow hallway. His office was the first door on the right. After he flipped on the fluorescent lights I went in and distinctly felt the rise in temperature.
“Oh, this feels so good,” I told him, taking off my mittens and shoving them into the pockets of my parka.
The office was little more than a large closet. It smelled vaguely of sawdust and aftershave. There was a single window that looked out over the floating docks. Sea charts of the immediate coastline were tacked onto the wood paneling alongside a bookcase. His metal desk was pushed up against a wall, piles of folders sitting next to a large computer monitor.
Rick took off his earmuffs, leaving on his Groward Bay Marina cap, and slipped out of his coat, draping it on the back of his chair. He sat down and brought his sleeping computer to life. “This won’t take long,” he said. “It’s always the first thing I check when I get here in the morning. We have a dozen motion-activated cameras around the boatyard and this here building. Usually, there’s nothin’ to see. But once in a while I catch a homeless guy who’s climbed over the fence, trying to sneak under the shrink-wrap of one of them boats, lookin’ for a place to sleep.”
Suddenly, the screen showed the front entrance of the marina. Under the bright boatyard lights, the video appeared black and white. There was no audio. The front gate was rolling to the side.
I pointed to the screen. “Do you need a card to activate the gate?”
Rick nodded. “Yeah, anybody with a boat down here has one. Truth be told, they ain’t that hard to get hold of.”
We watched as a white, unmarked cargo van, headlights on, drove slowly through the entrance. I got up close to the monitor, eyes straining to see the license plate on the front of the van.
They’ve put something over it. Black plastic and duct tape?
As the vehicle rolled through the marina, it activated new cameras, one after another. Finally, we watched as it pulled up and parked in front of the dry-stack building, just at the foot of the concrete pier. Five men got out, all dressed the same: black jeans, black quilted parkas, leather gloves, and black balaclavas—knit ski caps, pulled down over their faces. Only their eyes, noses, and mouths were exposed to the frigid night air. They reminded me of terrorists I’ve seen in photos.
I checked the time stamp on the screen: 2:37 a.m.
The tallest one, a big man, broad in the shoulders, carrying a crowbar, lumbered out of the video but another camera, just outside the door, caught up with him. We watched as he shoved the metal rod into the jam near the lock and, in one impossibly strong motion, yanked the door open.
Adrenaline suddenly ripped through my veins.
Could that be Bogdan Tolbonov?
The man on the screen was certainly the right body type. Bogdan was one of the biggest men I’d ever been frightened by. He was a Russian gangster who’d scared the hell out of me back in October. The man was a living, breathing Halloween monster.