The neighbor had talked to Irena, which explained her showing up at the office that afternoon. Blum was still buffed, fresh and fragrant from his shower, feeling like a new man, or at least a better one. The guilt had washed off with the dirt. Coddington had committed suicide because he was suicidal. His life became unmanageable because he could no longer manage it. A comforting cadre of tautologies, but they had the ring of truth. Had Coddington really expected to cheat on his wife—with her sister, of all people—and get away with it? Actions had consequences. Blum wasn’t responsible for the consequences! He merely expedited them.
It sounded good, but Irena was not convinced.
She burst into his office, wild-eyed, furious, potentially violent. Fortunately she was unarmed. More fortunately, his secretary had taken the day off and the office was empty—though anyone on the street could have noted her arrival.
“Where is he?”
That was her greeting. “Hello, Irena. Have a seat.”
“What happened to him? What did you do to him?”
“Irena—”
“Tell me what is going on or I will start to scream!”
“Irena, please—”
“What have you done?”
“I’ve done nothing. I assume you’re talking about Ted, but—”
“You are blackmailing him. You were snooping around the Tom Nevers house.”
“I admit I may have dropped by, but—”
“How did you find out about it?”
He had no intention of detailing his detective work for her. “Did it ever occur to you that Ted might have told me about your little lovenest? He needed—” Past tense! Correct that lapse! “—needs to confide in someone.”
She coughed out a disgusted laugh. “And that’s you?”
“Is it so hard to believe?”
“What do you want of him? Money? Or just cooperation?”
“I want nothing from him.”
“Liar!”
“Excuse me?”
“You found out about us. You knew you could destroy us both if you told Anna. You were going to be holding that over him forever. Ted couldn’t stand that. He couldn’t live with that.”
Blum reached out to touch her arm. She flinched away from him as if he had some contagious disease. “Irena…”
“Get away from me!”
He had to get her hysteria under control. He stepped back and spoke softly. “I’ll tell you what probably happened. I did go out to the Tom Nevers house. And Ted figured out I’d been there, just like you did. He realized that you can’t keep secrets in a small town. It’s not practical. You’d have to be a master spy to make all the arrangements. You’d have to be shrewd and ruthless and clever. Ted is the opposite of those things. He’s artless and sentimental and pedestrian. But lovable, I grant you. And pragmatic enough to read the writing on the wall. He knew it was over. Gossip is like good news and Chinese takeout. It’s no fun unless you share it.
“Listen, when times got rough, Ted often talked about driving onto the boat and driving off in Hyannis and just not stopping. ‘There’s a whole continent out there, Jackson,’ he said to me, once. ‘A man could hide out and never be found, start over and give himself a second chance. Just by stepping on the gas and ignoring the rearview mirror.’
“Okay, it was just a fantasy, and most of us have felt that way one time or another, living in this fishbowl. But I think that’s what he did. You could probably find him if you wanted to. Look in the places he loves—Key West, the Adirondacks, Telluride. He didn’t sign on with the Witness Protection program. Hire a detective. Track him down and bring him back. His family owns a tract of land on the coast in Nova Scotia. No roads, no electricity. His dad built a cabin there, before World War II—on the cliff over the sea. Ted might have gone there. The point is, he panicked. He’s probably already regretting it. He may come back on his own. Starting over from scratch is overrated.”
Irena just stared at him.
“What?”
She shook her head, more sad than angry, now. “I used to think you lied for gain—to get things people wouldn’t give you if you are telling the truth, But this is not true! You like to lie. You enjoy to do it! You’d rather lie than tell truth! And I know why. It is so you can control! Like now. But it won’t work. Not with me.”
“That’s ridiculous! Why would I lie if—?”
She laughed. “Why would I lie? That’s what all liars say!”
Blum stepped back and held up his hands, a gesture of surrender that was meant to slow her down. “Now wait a second…”
“I know what happened! You blackmailed the only man I have love in my life, and so he killed himself and damned himself to Hell for eternity just to save me and to save Anna from learning the truth and hating me forever! That’s what happened.”
This was too much. “Hell? Really? I know Ted goes to church, and being a deacon makes him feel important, but—”
“He was devout! He took confession every week! His faith meant everything for him. He knew Hell was real and so do I and you sent him there with your sick greedy schemes, and I can’t wait for you to join with him! And you will. Believe me, you will.”
It was like a curse. It was frightening. Her twisted scowl made it real, and Blum had no answer for her. He was speechless for once. It didn’t matter, though, because she spun around and stormed out of his office, slamming the door behind her so hard that his antique topographical map of the island rocked off the wall and crashed to the floor, cracking the glass.
She knew how to make an exit, he had to give her that.
And she was smart—tough and cunning in a way that Ted had never been. She had figured it all out, but Blum knew she’d never tell anyone. She was as invested in the lie as he was. If Anna ever found out, Ted’s death and damnation would be for nothing.
Blum had taken his tongue-lashing; he might have even deserved it. But he was safe now. Ted was gone, the new will was waste-paper, the Winthrop deal was as good as done. The rapids had been scary—a regular class IV thrill ride! But he had managed not to capsize, and it was nothing but smooth water ahead. They’d mount a halfhearted search for the body soon, but they weren’t going to find it.
With any luck, they never would.
Chapter Two
Cold Case
Nantucket, December 2017
I stood in the damp snow, staring down at the skeleton, listening to Lonnie Fraker’s cell phone play “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” Pat Folger had pulled the bones from a basement excavation at the edge of the moors in Madaket. He stood next to me as the forensic anthropologist kneeled over the remains.
The guy was named Shepherd Rollins. When I called State Attorney General Dave Carmichael for his advice, he had laughed and said, “You got a horseshoe up your ass, Kennis. My bone guy is on Nantucket right now. The best part is, he thinks he’s on vacation.”
My impression was that Rollins was happy to get away from his family for a few hours. When I gave him the address, he said, “Ten minutes.”
Lonnie answered his phone. “I don’t know. I have no idea. I’m working here, honey, all right? Yeah, as soon as I can.”
“Go home, Lonnie,” I said. “We’ve got this.”
“Yeah? It’s my kid’s birthday.”
“Go.”
“Thanks. This stuff give me the creeps anyway.”
“Toscana was working here for twenty minutes when the bulldozer dug this up,” Pat said. “I sent everybody home for the day. People get shaken up, they start making mistakes. You know? And I thought—is this a crime scene now? Could anything be left to—for you to, you know—to figure out what happened? Like on Cold Case?”
Rollins straightened up. I could hear his knees popping. Too many tackles? He had the bulky look of an ex-high school football star. “Well, there’s not m
uch, fellas. But we do have some scientific traction—hard tissue histology, skeletochronology. I can tell you right now, this man has been dead for more than ten years.”
“This guy? You can determine the sex from the bones?” I asked.
“With adults, yeah. You don’t get any significant sexual dimorphism until adolescence. Which is not a problem we have to deal with much, thank God. Anyway…the first indication is bone size. Men generally have bigger bones and this was a big strapping guy. Also, women have a larger subpubic angle to the pelvis. For childbirth. And the female forehead is more rounded. No, this was a male, all right. But we’re at least a decade too late for a lot of other markers.”
“Like what?”
“Well, see, in the first ten years postmortem we have access to forensic entomology techniques—we can pinpoint the age of the skeleton by the insect communities that colonize it, like the fish at a coral reef. Eventually the boom times are over and the insects move on or die out. But bones last much longer. This could be a Wampanoag Indian, for all we know.”
“We have to be able to narrow it down a little more than that,” I said.
He nodded, chewing at his inner cheek. “Well, Chief Kennis, that’s the good news about this skeleton’s lost decade. We’ve developed some remarkable new techniques in forensic anthropology. We can analyze the morphology of the auricular surface of the ilium—that’s this area down near the pelvis. But people age differently and after a while basic wear and tear makes any clear estimate difficult. These bones look pretty much the same after fifty, whether you’re sixty or eighty. No, it’s the teeth that give us the answers.”
“Right,” I said. “Matching the dental work for a positive ID.”
“That’s part of it. But not every victim has a good set of dental X-rays for comparison, and in a case like this, where you may be talking about twenty years-plus in the ground, those records could be lost or sitting on some obsolete media—floppy discs, remember those?”
“So what else can you do?”
His face lit up. I guessed he didn’t get to talk about his favorite topic very often, or to such an attentive audience. I could imagine his wife sitting down to dinner after a hard day, saying “Please, Shep—not the dead people’s teeth again! I’m trying to chew my food here.”
He took a breath. “Okay. Layman’s terms. The teeth are held in the sockets by periodontal ligaments, attached to the dental cementum on the tooth’s roots. The cementum is the material we study now, to determine the age of the remains. The closer you get to the chronological bull’s-eye, the fewer missing persons reports you have to wade through. Am I right?”
“Absolutely. And cementum helps you figure it out?”
“Yeah, because it’s laid down in annual bands. You know the tooth erupts at a certain age, you count the bands, and you have a pretty good idea of the age at the time of death. It’s just arithmetic, once you have the material in front of you. Plus there’s more. Under polarized light microscopy we can see two bands of cementum generated every year—a dark one in the winter and a light one in the summer. So we know the season of death as well.”
“Wow.”
“It’s a complex field involving a great deal of abstruse research, and we’ve had detailed commentaries and peer reviews in the major journals, but the gist of it is—well, I have to say you summed it up pretty well right there, Chief…wow!”
His enthusiasm was faintly alarming. I looked away, at the big house next door, closed up for the season, batting-boards covering all the windows. The heavy plywood protected the house from the harbor winds, burglars, and nosy neighbors. But this morning they also seemed to be protecting the old mansion from the vision of death lying on the ground next door. The house seemed willfully blind, and I envied it. Despite Rollins’ gusto, there’s something deeply unsettling about a skeleton. Looking at it, you’re looking at yourself without the temporary mask of flesh, the structural truth of human mortality. I made a fist and felt the linked bones curling together: dead man walking.
I pushed away the morbid ruminations. “How long will it take to get those results?”
“That’s a good news, bad news story, Chief. The bad news is that cementum analysis can take anywhere from three weeks to three months, depending on staffing and backlog. But the good news is we don’t necessarily have to rely on it in this case. This guy had a lot of dental work done—probably locally—and we should be able to expedite those results, because we’re looking at a murder.”
Pat Folger took a panicky step back from the bones, as if he’d seen them move. I ignored him and addressed Rollins. “How can you tell?”
This was probably the man’s all-time favorite question, and he crouched beside the skeleton to answer it. He tipped the skull up gently with his pen. “See that?”
There was some sort of indentation visible through the mud. He wiped it clean with a finger. I moved to stop him, but this was no ordinary crime scene. There was nothing left to contaminate.
Pat was squinting down past Rollins’ pointing finger. “Some kind of hole?”
“It’s a bullet hole,” I said. “Small caliber. Maybe a .22.”
Rollins stood, mildly irritated at my intrusion. “I was going to point out the beveling diagnostic of perimortem ballistic trauma…. But, yes. Simply put, this is a bullet hole, and given the likely caliber of the bullet, I suspect we’ll find it inside there, rattling around like a dried bean in a maraca, rifling intact. It’ll match some local gun, and you’ll have your killer.”
“Assuming you can find it, if the killer is still here,” Pat said. “A lot of people moved away since the nineties. You’d have to check the real estate sales records all over Vermont and South Carolina and even Costa Rica. That’s where most of my friends went. Cashed in and got out. I’ve been thinking about doing that myself. I own a house down there. I could sell my place here along with my business, go down there and live like a king. From Tamarindo all the way down to Quepos. People are buying inland, too. San Jose, San Marcos.”
I sighed. “That’s a lot of ground to cover.”
“But you still have those dental records, right?” Pat said. “You can at least figure out who this guy was. Is there some central database for that?”
Rollins slipped his pen back into his pocket. “I wish there was. No, you’re going to have to go to every dentist on the island, and get their records going back twenty years, if they still have them, especially the X-rays. Then it’s sort and compare.”
“The Cape, too,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“A lot of Nantucketers use dentists on the Cape. My ex-wife does. Hyannis, Brewster, Orleans, Sandwich. All those towns.”
Pat grunted, an animal exhalation of hopelessness and disgust. “Jesus. Forget it. That’s crazy.”
“No, Pat,” I said. “It’s police work. We’re ants. We just keep going. We’ll get every crumb from the picnic if you give us enough time.”
“Yeah, well good luck, Chief. Tough job.”
I shrugged. “We do all right.”
“And some of us are trying to help out, any way we can.”
Pat’s son had been hooked on OxyContin a couple of years ago, and he’d been crusading against opiates ever since. He’s been known to step over the line. “We don’t need vigilantes, Pat.”
He smiled. “No vigilantes, Chief. Just concerned citizens. Showing their concern.”
“And their citizenship.”
“Right.”
We studied each other in the freshening breeze. Rollins broke the silence. “People say to me, ‘How can you look at bones all day?’ I tell them, ‘I love looking at bones. I just wish the days were longer.’ It’s like…we all keep secrets, you know? And when everything else is gone, the skeleton is still keeping those secrets. This one’s got more than most. Who killed him, and when and how and, most of all,
why? That’s what keeps us going, right, Chief? The why.”
I nodded. “You got it, Shep.”
Rollins shook Pat’s hand. “I guess we’re done here. Call any time you have more questions.”
“I have a question right now,” Pat said. “How am I going to get this goddamn skeleton out of here?”
“Normally, we take it apart, box it, remove it from the site,” Rollins said.
“We should have an ambulance here in a few minutes,” I added.
“I’d keep running that ’dozer for a while, though, Mr. Folger,” Rollins said. “We want to be sure this is an individual grave.”
“Jesus Christ! Are you saying this is some kind of mass burial? Like some serial killer’s been dumping bodies here…?”
“Anything’s possible. But even if that were the case, this is clearly the most recent victim, the one closest to the surface, so those…activities…ended a long time ago. I don’t think you have to worry about an active perpetrator, Mr. Folger. But dig down a few more feet before you bring your crew back, and check with Chief Kennis. We need to certify the site.”
Pat snorted. “That sounds like fun.”
Rollins grinned. “Speaking of fun…I’ll be happy to perform the lab analysis of the remains. Unless you have someone…”
“No,” I said. “We have nobody. That would be great. If you’re sure you have the time.”
“My wife is always pleased when she can get me out of the house. Especially while we’re on vacation. She loves vacations and I hate them. If I get to work the whole time, it’s the perfect compromise.”
We shook on it, my hand swallowed by his big dry paw, and he folded himself into his Prius to drive home and explain his new working holiday.
“I better get busy,” Pat said as we watched the big man drive off. “Make sure this fella doesn’t have any friends down there.”
Nantucket Red Tickets Page 4