Dead Sand

by Brendan DuBois

  “No, I haven’t.” I said.

  “Lucky you.”

  “I guess.”

  “So here’s the deal, Cole,” he said. “One of the last times anyone ever saw John Todd Thomas alive was a couple of nights ago, when he was walking up Lafayette Road to meet up with a journalist. No names, but the journalist he was going to meet was driving a dark blue Ford Explorer and he was seen getting in the rear of the Ford.

  “I do,” I said, and I had the solid sense that my Ford was now being examined, inch by inch, for whatever forensic evidence in there could be used against me. No surprise there, but the fine detective before me had one more surprise for me. It wasn’t up his sleeve but in that bulging manila envelope before him.

  He slid out a plastic-wrapped package with red EVIDENCE stickers on the side, and he undid the plastic and displayed what was inside: a soaked wet reporter’s notebook.

  “Familiar?”

  “Could be,” I said.

  With a pen, he moved the notebook around so I could see the stained cardboard cover, where my name, “Shoreline magazine,” and my home telephone number were written.

  “Looks like it belongs to you,” he said.

  “Well, it certainly looks like it has my name on it.”

  Thornton poked at the notebook again with his pen. “You’re one careful person, Cole, I’ll give you that—but sometimes even the most careful person can fuck up. Like leaving evidence behind. Evidence that can connect that most careful person to a homicide. So. Care to explain how your reporter’s notebook was found not more than fifty yards away from the body of John Todd Thomas?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No, what?”

  “No, I don’t care to explain how what appears to be my notebook was found fifty yards from the body of John Todd Thomas.”

  He stared at me and said, “You trying to be tough? Or a smart-ass?”

  “I’m not very tough,” I said, “and while I’m reasonably intelligent, I’m not that smart. Though I do admit to being an ass on occasion.”

  Then something came to me, and I said, “All right. I’ll man up here for a second. Can I take a look at the notebook?”

  “What for?” he asked.

  “A deal,” I said. “Let me look at that notebook for a minute, and then I’ll tell you whether it’s mine or not. How does that sound?”

  “Why do you want to do that?”

  I shrugged. “I like cops. Besides, I don’t want you to think I’m a smart-ass.”

  Thornton seemed to think about that for a moment, and then he shoved the notebook over with the end of the pen. “All right. One minute. Not a second more.”

  I picked up the notebook, which smelled and was still damp, and I gently undid the pages until I found what I was looking for. Then I closed the notebook and passed it back to Detective Thornton.

  “That’s my notebook,” I said. “I’ve been covering the antinuclear demonstrations at the power plant, so obviously it fell out of my coat—but it didn’t fall out of my coat because I was murdering John Todd Thomas.”

  He picked up the notebook and put it back in the plastic bag. “Here’s the deal, Cole. We have your notebook near the crime scene. We have evidence that Mr. Thomas was on his way to see you when he disappeared and was murdered, and that’s just the beginning.”

  I kept my mouth shut and looked at him, and Thornton said, “At this moment, a detective from the state police is coming this way. There’s a good chance they will try to connect the murder of this young man with the murder of Bronson Toles, and the entire investigative force of Falconer and the State Police is going to turn on you, Lewis Cole. So before the state police arrive here, if you want to make a statement, make an explanation of what happened and how it happened, well … it would work out better for you to talk to me than the state police.”

  I said, “Is the state police detective Pete Renzi?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then I’ll wait to talk to him.”

  Thornton’s face colored. “One last chance, Cole.”

  “Nope,” I said. “Renzi is who I’m going to talk to.”

  Thornton said, “I can make this—”

  “Detective Thornton, you seem to be a fine young man, so let me explain this further. I’m only going to talk to Detective Renzi. You keep bugging me, and then I’ll change my mind, and then I’ll only talk to my attorney.” I gestured to the one-way glass. “Later, unless some technical glitch strikes, you can rerun the tape and tell Renzi how you screwed it up so I wouldn’t talk to him.”

  He glared at me for a few seconds, then got up and left. Then the heavyset police officer put me back in my cell, and after she locked the door, she said with a touch of sorrow in her voice, “You sure weren’t a gentleman to Detective Thornton.”

  I said, “He didn’t ask.”

  * * *

  About an hour later, I was back in the interrogation room, with Detective Pete Renzi of the New Hampshire State Police. He didn’t have a jumpsuit on like before but was wearing clean dungarees, a white shirt, a black necktie, and a dark brown jacket. He looked like he had averaged about four hours of sleep per night during the past few days, and he got right to it.

  “I understand you were dicking around with Detective Thornton,” he said.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “What?”

  “I said, am I under arrest?”

  “Not at the present moment,” he said, his eyes glaring at me, “but that might change in a big way, depending on how our little meeting here goes.”

  “Ask you a quick question?”

  “Those are the best kind,” he said.

  “You smoke?”

  “That’s your question?” Renzi asked.

  “That’s the one,” I said. “Do you smoke?”

  “Yeah, I shouldn’t, but I do.”

  “I could use a cigarette right around now,” I said.

  Renzi said, “You know how it is. No smoking anywhere in any public building.”

  “I know,” I said. “So why don’t we step outside?”

  He stayed quiet for a moment, and I pressed him. “Come on. What am I going to do? Make a break for it across the police station parking lot, with no shoes, holding up my pants so they don’t fall around my ankles?”

  Renzi kept still for another moment, then got up. “All right. Let’s do it.”

  He led me out the other door to the interrogation room, and we went out down a small hallway and then back into the booking area. From here, he pushed an outside door and we went out into the nighttime. It was cold. My feet, covered in damp socks, quickly got chilled. He stood next to me on a set of concrete steps, sighed, and reached into his coat pocket, pulling out a pack of Marlboros. He tapped it and extended it to me, and I pulled out a cigarette. I examined it, said, “Thanks,” and gave it back to him.

  Renzi looked surprised. “What the hell is that all about?”

  “I don’t smoke,” I said. “Never have, never will.”

  “You … you told me you smoked, you jerk.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said, feeling a sharp breeze cut at me. “I said I needed a cigarette, and I did.”

  He looked at the cigarette, as if he were debating whether or not to light it and then shove it into my eyeball, and he put it back into the pack and returned the pack to his coat.

  “You wanted out of the interrogation room,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “So what we say will be private.”

  “Correct again, Detective,” I said.

  “So go on. You got your ass out of there—for as long as I’m interested in what you have to say. So make it interesting.”

  I rubbed my upper arms, trying to warm up. “If you’ve talked to Diane Woods, then she’s made some statements about me, about who I am and what I do—and you must know, in your heart of hearts, that I had nothing to do with the killing of that college kid.”

  “I must, must I?�
� he asked, voice sharp. “What, you’re more than a magazine writer now, you know what’s working inside of my head and heart?”

  “Think about it,” I said. “I don’t know the kid, have no reason to hurt him, or to kill him. You’ve just got me here to shake things up, to get some information. So here we are, you and me, a couple of guys outside in a cold October night, so let’s straighten it out.”

  Renzi said, “Okay. So. Did you have any kind of encounter with him, any at all?”

  I thought for a moment, then said, “Maybe.”

  “What the fuck is this maybe?”

  “Detective Thornton said a witness saw John Todd Thomas get into a Ford Explorer, a couple of nights back. All right. A couple of nights back, I was in Falconer, at the Laughing Bee doughnut shop. I was waiting for someone to escort me for an interview with the head of the Nuclear Freedom Front. Curt Chesak. While I was waiting there, somebody got in the backseat of my car. I couldn’t see who he was.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened is that this man guided me to a place on an unmarked road in Falconer. From there, I was taken out, hooded, and brought to a campsite in the woods. I had an interview with Chesak, I was brought out, and then somebody took over my departure. The man who brought me in first—who was called Todd, by the way, the kid’s middle name—left. A little while later, I heard a gunshot. That’s it.”

  “That’s all you can tell me?”

  I had already made up my mind when I looked at the cigarette what I was going to do next, and so I did it. “That’s right. That’s all I can tell you. I heard a single shot. I don’t know who did the shooting. Along the way, I stumbled and fell, and that’s when my notebook fell out. That’s it.”

  Renzi stood there, rocked a bit on his heels, and then reached back in his pocket, took out a cigarette, and lit it up. He took a deep drag and said, “Damn, that tastes good.”

  I kept quiet.

  He took two more deep puffs, then dropped it and ground it out with his foot. “I talked to Diane one more time before I came over here. She said you’ve done some tricky things in the past but that you’re a stand-up guy. She would trust you with her life, and she says she has, and she said I could trust you as well.” Then Renzi stared right at me. “That’s very important to me, what she said. Because when she said her life, she meant more than her physical life, you know what I mean?”

  Sure, I thought. Her whole life, from her employment to her background to her sexuality. Then I saw the steady gaze of Renzi and something clicked into place.

  “So that’s important to me,” he repeated. “That she had that to say about you. So here’s the deal. You’re free to go, Lewis, but if I or any other law enforcement official determines that you had anything—anything at all—to do with that poor kid’s shooting, then I’ll hurt you. I’ll hurt in places that won’t show, that a doctor can’t pinpoint, but you’ll be one hurtin’ puppy, and then you’ll be arrested. Clear?”

  “Clear as day,” I said.

  “Fine,” he said, and his shoulders slumped a bit, as if he were so very tired, and his voice became slightly reflective. “Bad enough to deal with one homicide … especially a ball-buster like the shooting of Bronson Toles, and when you’re on the edge, trying to do everything you can, another shooting pops up, in the same neighborhood, with this fucking demonstration and these fucking demonstrators all mixed in. Most homicides, it’s easy to get a handle on it in two days or less. Love, money, jealousy, fear, or pure old craziness … but this one, man, you’ve got to dig and dig, and go beyond the surface, and then dig some more…” He turned to me. “Enough of my bullshitting you. Let’s get you out of here.”

  * * *

  About fifteen minutes later I was back to a close approximation of normal, and a tired Detective Renzi and a glum Detective Thornton watched me sign for my belongings. Thornton pushed over the keys to my Ford and said, “Get that headlight fixed as soon as you can,” he said, “or you’ll be pulled over again.”

  “Where’s my Ford?”

  He gestured. “In the rear parking lot. You’ll be getting a bill next week for towing and storage.”

  “Gee,” I said. “Why am I not surprised.”

  Renzi managed a small smile, and I looked again at my belongings and put my wallet in my back pocket, scooped up my change and ballpoint pen, and said, “My pistol?”

  Renzi said, “What about it?”

  “I’d like to have it back, please,” I said. “I’m its rightful owner, and I’m licensed in the state to carry a concealed weapon.”

  The state police detective smiled a bit more. “We’d like to keep it for a while. Two, three days tops. You’ll get it back, I promise.”

  “Why—oh,” I said. “You want to do ballistics testing on it, make sure it really wasn’t used to kill that college kid.”

  “That’s right,” Thornton said, and Renzi added, “Remember what Ronald Reagan used to say. ‘Trust but verify.’”

  I looked at them both and said, “Davehr’yay, noh praver’yay.”

  Both detectives seemed puzzled, which pleased me. I raised my Ford keys in a salute. “That’s what Ronald Reagan also said, in Russian. Same phrase. And I know because I was there.”

  I walked out into the cold night air, as what passed for a free man.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  At home, after stripping off the clothes that had the heavy scent of sweat and imprisonment, I showered up and then checked messages. There was just one message on my cell phone—from Denise Pichette-Volk, wondering when I was going to submit another piece, she was liking what I was doing, but could I make it shorter and edgier, please—and on my landline, three messages: Diane Woods, Paula Quinn, and my Annie Wynn.

  I slumped back in my couch, the television on but the sound muted, as the Allies once again stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Some other time, some other life, I would have been thrilled to get phone calls in one evening from three separate women, but not tonight. I started dialing and decided to go in order.

  At Diane’s, the phone was picked up on the third try and Kara Miles answered. “Oh, she’s gone out to gas up the Volkswagen and pick up a few things,” Kara said. “She’ll be back in about a half hour. You want me to have her call you?”

  I looked at the nearest clock. “If all goes well, I plan to be asleep by then. It’s been one of those days.”

  Kara said, “Tell me about it.”

  “How are you doing?”

  She said, “Sore. Tired. Still trying to get the stink of tear gas and pepper gas out of my clothes—and, shit, water’s boiling over on the stove. Gotta run, Lewis,” and she hung up before I had a chance to say anything more. I had wanted to ask her how she really was doing, how Diane was, and why she had been having that violent argument back at the salt marsh the previous day, when the demonstrations had collapsed. That would all have to wait. I had two more calls to make.

  At Paula Quinn’s, I went to voice mail after six rings and left a quick message, and then I was left with just one lovely to call: my Annie Wynn. I called her on her cell phone, and it rang and rang and rang and then was picked up in a burst of static.

  “Hello? Annie?”

  Another burst of static, and then Annie’s voice came through. “Wynn here, who’s this?”

  Voices, music, static, and I made another effort, and she said, “Lewis! I’m right in the middle of something! Are you okay?”

  I thought about the past couple of days and whatever was going on, and instead of belaboring the point, I lied and said, “Sure, everything’s fine.”

  Some voices grew louder. “Hey, can I call you back? Five minutes, promise!”

  “Deal,” I said, and hung up.

  * * *

  In the kitchen I rustled up some scrambled eggs with Parmesan cheese sprinkled in, and after eating and cleaning up and yawning, I went upstairs. It was late and I was tired and the phone hadn’t rung. I had read once that a week is an eternit
y in politics, so I guess five minutes was considered an hour or two in that world. Upstairs I thought about writing something for Denise Pichette-Volk of Shoreline, but that thought lasted through one big yawn.

  In my bedroom, I felt oddly out of place, and I knew why: My 9 mm Beretta was in the hands of the state police, being expertly tested to see if it had anything to do with the murder of John Todd Thomas, but that didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that I was partially disarmed. I used to own a Ruger stainless steel .357 Magnum revolver, but due to a series of unfortunate circumstances some months ago, it was still in the possession of the Secret Service, and they were reluctant to tell either me or my attorney—an old-time friend of Felix Tinios—when it was coming back.

  So I now had three weapons in my possession: a Remington 12-gauge pump-action shotgun under the bed, an 8 mm FN assault rifle in my office closet, and a Browning .32 downstairs in a kitchen drawer. No, I’m not a fetishist when it comes to firearms; I like having a full toolbox, and now it was being depleted thanks to various government officials and my own actions.

  I yawned and went under the bed and dragged out my shotgun, which was resting on a foam pad. It was within easy reach, and on the nightstand was my portable phone. I crawled into bed. Usually I read before going to sleep, but sleep was going to win tonight. I looked at the clock, then went to sleep and never looked at anything more.

  * * *

  During the night I woke up, desperately thirsty for some reason, and I moved slowly into the kitchen, got a glass of water, and tried to think of what I had been dreaming about. It was that odd mix of dreams that makes no sense when you’re awake, but makes plenty of sense when you’re in the middle of the it. There were flashing snapshots of crowds, of smoke billowing, a child crying … and I had that melancholy sense that if I thought really, really hard, I could get to the beginning of everything and have it make sense.

  When I was done with my drink, I went to the bedroom, looked out the windows to the east, saw and heard the ocean. Go to the beginning. Haleigh had mentioned that, the night she spent here in my home. The state police detective had said the same thing. That was a thought. That was a very good thought.