Scone Island

by Frederick Ramsay

  Dinwiddie did not strike her as an appropriate name for southern California. She changed it, more or less legally, to Sharpe. That name she borrowed from the title of a novel one of her customers left on the bar. She thought the extra E on the end looked classy. It was some years, and a few more job changes later, that she met Archie Whitlock. Their time together, she would tell to anyone willing to listen, had been exciting, maddening, and frequently dangerous. It lasted long enough for them to marry and separate. She didn’t bother with the formality of a divorce from Archie because, first, she had grown to fear him and what he might do if she pressed the issue, and second, she hadn’t bothered to get divorce from her Marine earlier and thought that fact might emerge in a court hearing. So she simply walked away. But she kept her married name, Cora Sharpe Whitlock—classy.

  Imagine her amazement then, when she’d seen Archie, after all those years, in McCarran International, on his way east, he’d said. He told her he’d retired and was living on an island in Maine. She didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but in any case declined his invitation to take up where they’d left off. He looked awful, and besides, she didn’t want to risk another go-round with him, his drinking, and the crazy things he did when he lost his temper. She’d almost forgotten the meeting until the man at the blackjack table where she was playing happened to ask about Archie. He said they had “a mutual friend.” He looked pretty hot, as her friend Deloris would say, so she agreed to have dinner with him and who knew? Over coffee and during their subsequent chat, she said she was done with the old spy and good riddance.

  That was almost a month ago and she’d forgotten all about both the man and Archie Whitlock. Then a guy stopped her in the alley and mumbled her name. She stopped, turned to run, but ran head first into another guy who was bigger and faster. She was processing that fact when everything went black. She never made it back to Circus Circus.

  Chapter Sixteen

  West Road did not appear any smoother north of Ruth’s cottage than the more southern portion she and Ike had taken from the pier. Ice or some manifestation of the snowfall, frost at least, had lifted up large clumps of dirt and gravel and created what looked like the reverse of potholes, which gave the road the appearance of a plowed field. Ruth still suffered from a low-level foot-drop, which worsened as she grew tired. She had to be careful where she stepped so as not to trip. Her expression suggested she was having second thoughts about accompanying the two men on this excursion, but the thought, however remote, of Ike being drawn into a police investigation drove her on.

  “How are you doing there, Gimpy?”

  Ruth, who was lagging behind the other two ignored Ike, and gritted her teeth against the ache in the muscles of her still healing leg.

  Ike turned back to Stone. “How much farther, Deputy?”

  “You can see the roof from here. That’s the big house. The guest house, where Staley actually lived, is to the left.”

  “Where did Mr. Potter say he saw an antenna?”

  “I think it was behind the guest house or something.”

  “What,” Ruth wondered aloud, “would the man need a radio antenna for?”

  “Mr. Potter thought he might be signaling ships at sea or sending messages out.”

  “To whom and why?”

  “He didn’t say. I think he had thoughts of terrorist cells or gun runners.”

  “You have a lot of that up here in Maine? Gun runners and terrorists?”

  “No experience with gun running, for sure. We leave that to Arizona and the Feds, but we have a pretty porous border up here and an easy one for folks to cross over from Canada. The Canadians aren’t as touchy about who comes and goes as we are.”

  Ike smiled and stopped in the path to let Ruth catch up. “You okay?”

  “Dandy. So, he’s saying that this dead bed-and-breakfast guy is sending messages to illegals on the other side of the state?”

  “Meaning no disrespect to Mister Potter, our village sage, I rather doubt we will find an operating radio antenna or any evidence of one. If your man wished to send messages surely he would use a phone.”

  Stone frowned. “Well, that would be mighty fine, Sheriff, but I reckon you forgot there’s no service out here.”

  “Would be if you wanted it.”

  “How’s that possible?” Stone kicked idly at a pebble and missed.

  “Yeah, how’s that possible?” Ruth had caught up and the idea of a phone had her attention.

  “An Iridium phone.”

  “Say again.”

  “A satellite phone. You can speak to anyone, anywhere in the world with a satphone. It doesn’t need towers or lines, just a clear path to the satellite and a means of keeping the batteries charged. A generator would do that.”

  “You think he had a phone?”

  “No, I don’t. I said if he had wanted to communicate with anyone on the outside, a radio would be the least likely option. So, antenna also not likely.”

  “Why don’t we have one of those, what did you call it?”

  “Satphone.”

  “Exactly. Why don’t we have one?” Ruth had barely heard of the devices and their availability to people generally. Her preoccupation with all things academic meant she had not caught up with the twenty-first century’s latest societal menace: the rapid dissemination and easy availability of military-grade technology throughout the global economy. It was a phenomenon many thought posed a greater danger to society than drug trafficking. Weapons, sophisticated communications equipment, explosive devices, anything an army might have or need to wage a modest scale war was now equally available to any crackpot or crazy who could visit a gun show, knew someone who knew someone, or who had the cash pay for it. Navy SEALs were not the only people in possession of the means to extract a perceived enemy from a foreign country. The Air Force was not the only entity capable of launching a missile, not to mention the SAMs, SCUDS, and other acronymous weaponry that might in turn threaten a commercial airliner, factory, or power plant anywhere in the world. Indeed, Air Force One could be brought down by an unemployed plumber with anger issues. It was a sobering thought.

  “If you had a working phone, Ruth, it would be only a matter of time before you would use it and then all the careful maneuvering we did to find privacy and protection would be gone. I thought you wanted to be incommunicado.”

  “I do. Still it would beat all those throwaways you bought on the way up.”

  “They are for emergencies and they do not work out here.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m just saying.”

  ***

  Three moderately experienced rock climbers from Denver found a body at the foot of the cliff sometime shortly after dawn. One of them had to walk down the dry streambed for a mile and found a signal strong enough to call 9-1-1. It was another two hours before the Barratt police department’s forensics team and ambulance showed up. Technically, although the area was in a federal preserve, accidents in this area were routinely handled locally. They deployed their people and quickly vetted the area. The dead man’s camp, they noted, had been hastily set up. There was no evidence of a fire, for example. They concluded that the dead man must have rushed his climb.

  The Barratt police department had experience with these accidents. City people with little or no experience thought they could graduate from a climbing wall to a real monster like this one without any intermediate training or testing. Every year, it seemed some idiot fell and broke a leg, an arm, or worse, like this one, where the fall was fatal. They took statements from the Denver people, cautioned them against trying anything too difficult too soon themselves, and guessed by the look of the three climbers that the chances were pretty good they’d be back the next day to pick up another corpse.

  Corporal Sandy Ansona circled the grassy plain before they left, in the off chance he might stumble across something the others had missed. Sandy was thorough to the point of being a major pain in the ass to the rest of the team.

  “C
ome on, Sandy, this dude thought he was Spider Man and cashed out. Let’s pack this in right now,” his partner yelled.

  Sandy waved and continued his circuit. He spent a moment studying the odd disturbances in the grass at the grassy area’s center. He stopped and inspected the grass. Before he was a cop, he was a grunt in Iraq and he recognized the swirl pattern a helicopter makes when it lands. What he couldn’t do is tell how long it had been there. The presence of a chopper in the area might or might not be important. He took a picture. Satisfied he’d seen everything and that he’d correctly identified it, he headed back to the crime scene van. He stopped one last time to look at the creek bed, frowned, removed his pocket camera and shot three pictures of the sand in the center. He walked fifty yards farther along and did it again. Then he rejoined the others and they drove off with the remains of Neil Bernstein, late of the CIA, in the back of the van.

  ***

  The police ran Neil’s fingerprints through the usual databases all of which yielded nothing. His driver’s license eventually led to an address of convenience in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., but there was no missing persons bulletin on the wire about him. The chief did not like the way all of this was beginning to shake out. Unless he was a fugitive, any normal person should be easily connected with family or employer or someone one way or another. But this guy—it looked like he was deliberately off the grid. And there was that call from some guy named Garland. What if they connected? He inspected Bernstein’s belongings and then called in the lieutenant. Two guys in fatigues showed up later and spent some time in the chief’s office. An hour later, to no one’s surprise, and without an autopsy, the men left after a final word with the chief. The body was picked up by an out-of-town mortuary the next morning. Bernstein’s file disappeared. The chief seemed pleased with the outcome.

  Corporal Ansona watched the whole thing out of the corner of his eye and said nothing.

  ***

  Charlie finally heard from the station agent in Chicago. Eden Saint Clare was at the Fairmount. He sent a message to keep her under surveillance and to trace her phone calls. He brushed aside the question about a warrant to do so. He did not have time for that. Chicago demurred.

  “If you think you need one, get one, but start the traces now.” He hung up. New kid on the block, he thought. He’ll learn. When the phone rang twenty seconds later, he sighed and picked up. “Yes, that is what I said, now move.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  There wasn’t much to see at Cliffside. As expected, the two houses were so rundown as to call into question what their late owner had in mind. To renovate them and open a B-and-B seemed very unlikely. There was no sign of an antenna, radio or otherwise.

  “Well, I guess Mr. Potter was seeing things.” Stone looked slightly embarrassed at having dragged Ike and Ruth, especially with her bad leg, out to the end of the island.

  “We should check the back yard.” Ike led the way around the house toward the farthest reach of the island. A rusty and very twisted framework that in better days could have been a mast of some sort lay in the grass.

  Ruth found a nearly flat tree stump and sat down. Somewhere nearby a fruit tree was in bloom. She did not know her scents and could not tell if it was an apple, pear, or peach, but it marginally brightened her day. “There’s your radio mast, Deputy, but I don’t think it will send any messages any time soon.”

  “Not a radio mast.” Ike stepped over for a closer look.

  “What is it then?” Ruth said.

  “I’m guessing it was part of, or a precursor to, the Maine Mesonet at one time.”

  “The what?”

  “Mesonet is a weather data collecting system that consists of towers like this one here and all sorts of recording apparatus. They are strung across the country in most states and record wind direction and velocity, temperature, barometric pressure, stuff like that on at various locations. The data is fed into computers. If you wish to, you can find out what’s happening weather-wise on or near those locations or across the whole net. There are two of these towers on Mount Desert Island and a bunch of others down the coast and inland.”

  “I doubt that that thing ever sent a computer anything.”

  “No, probably not. It looks like it was put up decades ago. Maybe the previous owner ran an amateur weather station at one time or another. Lots of people did. Before computers and the establishment of the net, information would be logged in manually and mailed in.”

  “From here,” Ruth said, “it looks old enough to have been part of the military presence during World War II.”

  “A distinct possibility, certainly.”

  “Potter said it was up when he came out to check on Staley after the accident, but the shape this mess is in, I don’t see how that could be.” Stone gave the wreckage a kick and one cross bar dropped away from the base.

  Ike walked the length of the apparatus.

  “I’m guessing Staley found it lying in the grass and tried to set it up. You can see where vines once grew up and around it but they’ve been cut away. Then there’s a rope attached near the top that he strung over that tree limb,” Ike waved at a gnarled oak twenty feet away. “It looks like he tried to hoist it up. Anyway, it must have blown over sometime afterwards. You can see it fell in not quite the same place where he found it.”

  “Why would he want to re-erect the thing?”

  “That’s a question for another day. Either out of curiosity to see what it looked like or, maybe he hoped to shore it up and put it back into working order. More than likely we’ll never know, unless it was…umm”

  “Unless it was…umm, what?” Ruth had massaged her calf back into a semblance of normal. When Ike started musing like that, she knew, it usually meant he was spinning the Rolodex in his brain for a memory or a connection that would be important later. The mast that was not a radio antenna had suddenly become interesting to him.

  “Nothing. A passing thought. I was reminded of something that I saw once when…but that was a long time ago. Let’s go look at the cliff.”

  They walked toward the fence that marked Staley’s property. Stone led them to the east cliff face which, he said, was where Staley fell or was pushed. Ike stood for a long moment and gazed out to sea. He stepped so close to the cliff edge that Ruth thought her heart had stopped beating.

  “Be careful, Ike.”

  “No problem. I needed to check something.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I was thinking worst case. Deputy, let’s assume the ME got it right and the victim was clonked on the head. What did his assailant use to do the clonking and where is it now?”

  Stone thought a moment. “If it were me that hit him, I’d chuck it over the cliff into the ocean.”

  “So would I, but let’s say he didn’t where would it be, then?”

  “It could be almost anywhere.”

  “Precisely. You said the ME suggested blunt force trauma probably executed with an iron bar or something similar.”

  “Yes.”

  “If he’s right about that, then Staley was tossed off the cliff rather than accidentally falling. Also, he had to be forced to walk this far. To make him do that, the killer, assuming there is one, would doubtlessly have had a gun. Wouldn’t he have used the gun butt to hit Staley? And since this is so remote from the few other residents on the island, why not simply shoot him?”

  “Got it,” Stone frowned. His casual “mix and mingle” appeared to be turning into something more than he bargained for.

  “Wait a minute,” Ruth said. She’d been following the conversation with a mixture of fascination and horror. “If a man is facing a gun and realizes his assailant intends to force him to the cliff in order to shove him off, wouldn’t he refuse? I would. I’d flop down on the grass and make him use the gun. No way I’m going into free fall because the bad guy wants me to do his dirty work for him.”

  “Point taken. Most people, however, will go along for a while. They may be in denial o
r hopes the bad guy will make a mistake, maybe trip, let down his guard, change his mind, or make himself vulnerable to a countermeasure, gain some time. The instinct for survival will click into place. He would wait for a chance, stall. I would, and I think the deputy would, too.”

  “But what could you possibly do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It would be a matter of chance, luck maybe. If it were my choice, I would probably drop to the ground and do a leg sweep somewhere along the path back there and…wait here.” Ike retraced his steps along the track they’d followed from the weather tower, stopped and moved to his right ten feet, on a line to the porch, and inspected the ground. “Deputy Stone, come over here and look at this.”

  Stone and Ruth walked over to Ike and stared at the ground at his feet.

  “What do you see?”

  “The turf been disturbed.”

  “There’s been a struggle. I don’t know who your Mr. Staley was before he went into the B-and-B business, but he knew enough to try the ‘drop and sweep.’ It looks like it worked. Over here you can see where someone else fell and then over there, see that thin line of indented grass?”

  “You mean where some of it is yellowish rather than green?”

  “Exactly. Unless I am mistaken a piece of something like rebar lay there until a few days ago. The guy who was knocked down felt it, picked it up, and before Staley could run or attack, he hit him with it. Then, if the rest of this mess means anything, he half dragged him to the edge and shoved him over.”