House of Secrets - v4

by Richard Hawke

  Agent Taylor was trying hard to work it all out. “Okay, we might have her in bed with someone she’s intending to be in bed with, and then two goons break in. That’s one of our possibles. And if she did go over on the ferry alone, then she met up with her bed partner on the island. He was already there.”

  Armstrong spoke up. “Or he hid in the car going over.”

  Cotton asked, “Why in the world would he do that?”

  “I don’t know. Because he was planning to join his buddies in a little pile-on and didn’t want to be seen in advance with the victim?”

  Cotton turned to Agent Taylor. “Is this what I missed by not getting my training at Quantico?”

  Armstrong balked. “Look, we’re just trying to lay out all the possibilities, Detective. Two weeks into this thing and I’m not seeing a hell of a lot of progress here in Mayberry. We’ve got to step it up. The clock is ticking on Michelle Foster.”

  Taylor snapped at his partner. “Brian!”

  The younger agent held his ground. “We don’t have the luxury of time, Tom.”

  Cotton didn’t appear to be affected by the agent’s attitude. “That’s fine, Agent Armstrong. I’m with you. Let’s run it down. One. Miss Resnick either went over with her lover in the car or she went over alone and her lover was already on the island. Two. There was no lover at all, just a nasty bunch of gangbangers, and for whatever reason only one of them got the prize. Three. They were already on the island when she got there, went over together or separately, either on the same ferry run or earlier that day or some other day. Or, for that matter, in their own boat. I think that covers it, right? Though since we’d be smart to lay out all the possibilities, I suppose they could have come swinging out of the sky. Except we’ve gotten no reports of any helicopter sightings or anyone hearing all that racket they’d make, but hey, you know, it’s possible Uncle Sam has developed himself some sort of stealth helicopter that we rubes here in Mayberry know nothing about.” He held up a hand to stop Armstrong’s protest. “In which case we’ll dispatch some hound dogs to go check out the secret hangars where y’all keep these hellies. That is, if we can get the government to cooperate and let us have a look-see.” He gave the young agent a broad smile. “I suppose this is where you could come in extra handy, friend.”

  Armstrong glowered.

  Cotton indicated the photograph that was still in the agent’s hand. He also dropped the hayseed accent.

  “I’ve got a teenage daughter, Mr. Armstrong. Whoever did all this, I want to see them skinned alive. Okay? You can trust me on that. I’m doing my job, sir.”

  The lawmen got back on track. The Feds were especially interested in the interviews that had been conducted with Joy Resnick’s circle. The portrayal was of a capable, dynamic woman. Single, with a seemingly healthy dating life. Nothing kinky. No known risk-taking tendencies. There was nothing in her personal history to raise a red flag. As best anyone knew, she had not been seeing anyone on a regular basis for several months at least. There were no indications that she had been either distracted or worried or moody in the days leading up to her trip out to the island.

  “Unless this really is just an unfortunate case of some good old boys getting some serious rocks off, we’re looking for a single assailant with a supersize grudge,” Armstrong said. “Ninety percent of the time, victims know their killers. Someone had it in bad for this lady.”

  Cotton appeared on the verge of taking on the agent’s comment, but he let it slide. Taylor declared that he wanted to see the murder site firsthand. He instructed Armstrong to take the list of people interviewed back in Manhattan and to revisit select ones, starting with Joy Resnick’s colleagues at Masters and Weiss. Clearly Armstrong’s questions were to now include the matter of Marion Mann.

  “Two of their own have now been murdered. That should be stirring them up more than a little. See if anyone is afraid that they might be next, or has any theories about who a third could be. Look for professional jealousy, anything like that. Detective Lamb is doubtless pumping these people as we speak, so you’ll get some resistance. Focus on anyone who had any part to play at all on the Dracula account, even if it was peripheral.

  Dracula was the code name the agents had chosen for Senator Foster. The name had popped into Agent Taylor’s head.

  Taylor concluded, “I’ll go walk the scene with the detective here. You go find out why someone has got their pants in a twist about this PR agency. We’ll rendezvous in the city at nine.”

  Agent Taylor and Detective Cotton drove the forty miles east to Greenport and took the ferry over to Shelter Island. It being a Friday afternoon, the ferry’s small deck took its maximum number of vehicles. Maybe a dozen foot passengers from the train also made the short crossing.

  The road from the ferry drop rose up into the island’s main village then angled to the east, climbing a narrow serpentine route that bordered the water.

  “Pipes Cove,” Cotton said, indicating the blue beneath them. “Technically, Peconic Bay. You like oysters?”

  “I’ve had them,” Taylor said. “I can’t say I’ll die if I never have any more.”

  “Time was, oysters practically oozed out of the waters down there. Clams, too. And especially scallops. These parts were known for our scallops. The hurricane in thirty-eight wiped out a good third of all the harvests. You never heard of Widow’s Hole?”

  The veteran FBI agent laughed. “I’m not touching a line like that.”

  “Yeah. Sounds kind of queer at that, doesn’t it? It’s a brand of oyster from these parts. Big and plumpy. All your big restaurants in the city are serving Widow’s Holes.”

  “You strike me as a fishing type, Detective,” Taylor said.

  Cotton looked over at him. “Is that fancy FBI profiling, or do I just reek of fish?”

  “Profiling,” Taylor said. “Though I wouldn’t necessarily call it fancy.”

  The winding road ended in a gentle descent down toward a wide inlet. Cotton jerked his thumb out the window next to his head. “The house is up on the very top of that hill. We pretty much switchback to get up there.”

  He turned left off the main road. Off to the right, Taylor noted a motel adjacent to the beach. It looked like an okay place to leave the world behind for a few days.

  The car moved up the hill along a zigzagging wooded road that ended at the foot of a steep pebble driveway. They moved up the driveway. As the house came into view, Cotton frowned.

  “Someone’s here.”

  A faded blue Fairlane was parked in front of the house. The landau roof’s years of exposure to the sun were evident in the peeling fabric.

  “Looks like someone took a wrong turn in 1969 and ended up here,” Cotton said, pulling up next to the car.

  “The scene’s not still secured, is it?” Taylor asked.

  “Two weeks in? God, no.”

  Taylor remarked, “Nice-looking old place.”

  “Yeah, it is, isn’t it? The way I’ve got it, the family has been here for quite a while. The victim’s grandparents bought the place back in the fifties. Half the time it’s rented out. You’ll get a nice nickel, location like this.”

  The two got out of the car.

  “Stays decent cool up here, even in the summer,” Cotton remarked as they approached the porch. “Your breeze comes right up from the cove, plus you’ve got all this shade. It’s prime turf, to be sure.”

  Taylor concurred. “I’d take it.”

  The pair went up onto the porch and the detective knocked on the front door. Agent Taylor jammed his hands into his rear pockets and twisted around to survey the view from the porch. Behind him, the front door lock clicked. Cotton began to speak.

  “Hello. I’d like—”

  As Taylor started back around a second click sounded, simultaneous with an explosion. A piece of the back of Detective Cotton’s skull lifted up toward the trees, and the man dropped.

  Taylor’s face was slapped with a red mist. A howl formed instantly de
ep within him. It never even cleared his chest. His hands never left his rear pockets. A second shot was fired point-blank, and Taylor collapsed like a puppet cut free. His body folded indecorously across that of the fallen Suffolk County lawman.

  Paul Jordan frowned as he responded to the doorbell. The reason he was frowning was that there should have been no doorbell. The iron gate at the foot of the driveway was secured, and no one had buzzed up to the house requesting entrance. The others were lingering over their desserts at the table, a tableau of normalcy upon which Whitney Hoyt had insisted.

  A woman in a black pantsuit stood on the front step. An abundance of silver-streaked hair was piled and clipped atop her head and a knowing smile was planted on her bright red lips. A green suitcase stood at her side.

  “My goodness, if it’s not my dear ghostly past. Hello, Paul.”

  Jordan recovered quickly from the surprise. “How did you get past the gate?”

  Lillian Turner demurred. “Well, it is a delight to see you, too.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “Twelve years and you can’t even be bothered to change the silly code. I’m surprised. You never know when the loopy old ex might come calling one night, do you?”

  Jordan conceded. “I guess one doesn’t.”

  “So, are you going to invite me into the home I once occupied, Paul? Or have we already arrived at an Alamo moment?”

  There was a movement behind Jordan. Lillian looked past her ex-husband’s secretary to see Jenny Hoyt coming in from the dining room. Jenny stopped in her tracks when she saw who was standing in the open door.

  “Good Lord.”

  Lillian grabbed hold of her roller bag and bumped it through the entrance. From farther back in the house Whitney’s voice sounded. “Who is it, dear?”

  Lillian answered first. “No one in particular, Whit! Just a bad old memory!” She turned her false smile to Jenny. “I must say, you look good enough to eat, dear.”

  Swift footsteps were sounding on the marble floor, then Whitney Hoyt rounded the corner. “Oh, shit.”

  Lillian tsk-tsked her ex-husband. “Whitney. Not in front of the help.”

  Jenny summoned Whitney into the kitchen.

  “How much do I have to say, Whitney?”

  “Very little, Jen.”

  “Well, I have to say some of it. That woman has got the balls of a bull! I know, I know, it’s her granddaughter, too. Of course. I’m not evil.”

  “Nobody said—”

  “Has she ever heard of a hotel?”

  “Of course she has. But you remember how she is. Miss Lillian needs her audience. A woman like that would go berserk all alone in a hotel.”

  “This is my house. I’m not anyone’s audience in my own home! Besides, she is nuts. Are we really going to let her just walk all over us like this? How about I get a hotel room? Maybe I’m the odd man out here. Michelle’s not my blood relative, after all. What if—”

  “No. Jen. Please. Don’t you be dramatic now.”

  “What!” She lowered her voice. “We’ve got Sarah goddamned Bernhardt sitting in there, and you’re accusing me of being dramatic?”

  “Oh God. This is exactly what she does: divide and conquer.”

  “I know, Whitney. I’ve seen her in action before, remember?”

  “It’d be a bum’s rush to hustle her out of here at this hour. She’s just flown halfway across the country. Her granddaughter has gone missing. You can’t blame her for wanting to be close.”

  “Well, there’s close, and there’s close. But don’t you see how she operates? She comes waltzing in here with her suitcase and her oh-I’ve-been-in-an-airplane-all-day routine, and now if I make so much as a peep of protest, I’m the bad guy here. I’m the one who is rude. Look, let me talk to her in the morning. I really do think at this point we give her tonight. It will only start things off on a bad foot if we tangle right now. It’s late. Everyone’s wiped out.”

  “Fine. Sure. Should we grant her the master bedroom? I don’t think that outsize persona of hers is going to fit in any of our lesser rooms.”

  “We can shove her in the attic if you’d like,” Hoyt said gently. “This is still our household.”

  Jenny raised her hands and let them drop. “Oh, hell. It doesn’t matter. She’s not my ex-wife, she’s yours. I’m not going to kick the woman out onto the street. I’ll just put on my armor. I can handle her. She got the first blow in, that’s all. Why would I expect her to be on her best behavior?”

  Whitney leaned forward and kissed his wife on the forehead. “Lillian has no best behavior. Once you stop hoping for it to appear, it gets a little easier.”

  The faded blue Fairlane bumped over the yellow connector ramp onto the ferry. Up ahead, a local teen wearing an orange reflecting vest motioned the driver to keep coming forward. The car advanced slowly, its headlights bathing the deckhand in its crossed cones of light. The teen made a slicing move across his neck, and the driver touched the brakes.

  “That’s good!”

  The driver remained behind the wheel, watching through his side and rearview mirrors as four other cars bumped over the ramp and packed in around him. A thin thumbnail of moon hung in the black sky, just visible at the top of the Fairlane’s windshield. Six or seven people emerged from the other cars and moved off toward the ferry’s railings.

  A low baying call sounded from the ferry’s horn, and the vessel began drifting off-angle from the dock. With a hard growl, the boat’s engine sprang to life and a mass of churning water began chasing the vessel away from the dock. Robert Smallwood watched as the scattered lights of the silhouetted island receded. His heart was heavy for the families of the two men he had been forced to eliminate. But there had really been no choice. As the two men had arrived at the front door, the little girl had popped a small blood vessel in her left eye, trying to make her scream heard through the layers of duct tape. He felt bad for that, too. Such a mess all the way around. He’d been forced to act so swiftly. The banging on the door. Men with sidearms. Such a monumental pain in the ass.

  As the small ferry powered forward, Smallwood’s eyes swept across the black water. He’d considered sinking the two men in the inlet. With all the house construction sites on the island these days, he could have fetched as many cinder blocks as he would have needed and used those to anchor them. He could have taken them out into the bay in a rowboat and quietly slipped them overboard. But in the end, he hadn’t taken the time. He had no way of knowing how quickly the men would be missed or how soon someone might come looking for them. Instead, he had dragged the dead weights into the house and let them remain there in the front hallway, one piled atop the other.

  The ride to the mainland took less than ten minutes. In Greenport, the ferry sidled up close to the dock, reversed its engines, then cut them altogether. The deckhand and his counterparts on the dock exchanged heavy ropes and secured the vessel. After affixing the ramp in place, one of the deckhands stepped onto the ferry and came over to the Fairlane.

  “Hey, anytime you want to sell that car, man, let me know, okay? It is so cool.”

  Robert Smallwood said nothing. The other deckhand removed the chain gate from the front of the ferry, and the Fairlane made its way slowly onto the ramp and back to terra firma. Within seconds it had dissolved into the night.

  Irena Bulakov watched as a fat juicy June bug crossed along just beneath the lip of the countertop, out of sight of the black man who was manning the front desk. The man was pointing out directions on a map to a young German couple who spoke no English whatsoever. His voice seemed to be growing louder in direct relation to the couple’s decreasing volume.

  “You want to take the B train down to Columbus Circle! You got that? Downtown!”

  The June bug covered the length of the counter and then came up onto the counter itself, though it remained behind the silver desk bell, still hidden from the black man’s sight. The German couple folded their map politely and left through the front
door. As Irena stepped forward, the black man disappeared into a small office. A lanky blond boy wearing a gigantic backpack came through the front door, stepped brusquely past Irena, and brought his hand down over and over on the silver bell.

  The June bug scooted swiftly down the wall in a panic.

  The man emerged from the office and immediately began yelling at the boy. The boy yelled right back. Irena couldn’t follow their sentences enough to know what their problems were.

  She looked down at the tabloid newspaper she had picked up after leaving the copy shop. If she had stared once at the photograph of Senator Andrew Foster and his wife and daughter posing in front of the Statue of Liberty, she had stared at it a hundred times. It was him. This same man from Dimitri’s little movie. It was this United States senator from New York. Here in the newspaper. He was a horrible man. She knew this. She had seen him with the woman who was now dead. The woman who was not his wife.

  And now somebody had kidnapped his child.

  Irena had wanted children, but her body had forbidden it. Three times her body had let her down. She had never shared this with Dimitri, but she had wanted twins. A little boy and a little girl. Irena had thought about it so often over the years that she could bring the fantasy children’s images to her mind whenever she chose. In Irena’s mind, they were nearly seven already, both in school. He was very, very good with his numbers, possibly a future engineer. One day he might build impressive buildings and bridges. She showed creative talent. She could draw, and she was also a beautiful little ballerina. Both of them were popular with their fellow students and with their teachers. The teachers called them “shining examples.” The imagined term itself could bring actual tears to Irena’s eyes. Shining examples.

  Irena’s imaginary children were the same age as the girl in the newspaper, the senator’s daughter. In a world where anything can happen, they might have been friends.

  The black man and the lanky blond boy concluded their argument, and Irena stepped forward. The sign on the wall told her how much was needed to rent a room. Irena placed the exact amount on the counter and asked for a room.