Nantucket Grand

by Steven Axelrod

  “Probably.”

  “And we both know that the NSA can conduct surveillance through the camera function on your computer.”

  “Thanks to Edward Snowden.”

  “Yeah. Thanks to Edward Snowden.” She let that one pass, but I knew she took the party line on the exiled leaker. “Mason’s computer faces his bed. If the NSA is monitoring him, they have footage that proves he was home and asleep at the time of the murder.”

  “And you think they’ll just hand it over to you?”

  “I was hoping they might hand it over to…to—”

  “Mark. Mark Hennesey.”

  “Right—to him. Then he’d hand it over to you, and you’d hand it over to me. Something like that.”

  “This is your craziest idea yet, Horton.”

  “A person’s a person, no matter how small. Look—Mason needs help. He’s in trouble. He matters.”

  “Not to the NSA.”

  “But he should.”

  “This is classified information.”

  “So, why not use it to help someone, for once?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, Henry. This is too weird.”

  “Will you at least ask him?”

  “Okay, but no promises.”

  ***

  We hung up and I turned to other business: a rash of burglaries, just discovered by returning homeowners, someone suing the NPD because they slipped on the ice in the parking lot during the winter. And the forensics report on the Thayer house fire, long delayed in Boston, had finally landed on my desk. It indicated that the house contained a lot of high-end filmmaking equipment—cameras, editing bays, microphones, lighting gear. That didn’t prove Alana’s theory—they could have been making totally innocuous movies out there, or even just storing the stuff—but it raised a red flag for me.

  The report identified the camera as a high Definition XF305 Canon camcorder, list price around seven thousand dollars. Not a hobbyist’s item. You could pick up a serviceable digital camera at Staples for under a hundred bucks; or just use your phone. The State Police arson forensics unit had managed to pull a partial serial number off the unit and they attached a list of seven hundred and eighty-two people in New England who had purchased this particular model, and filed the warranty papers. People came to Nantucket from all over the country, and most people didn’t bother with warranty applications anyway. But it was a start. The list of names gave me something useful to do.

  On a hunch, I saved the list as a Microsoft Word file and ran a search for the name Chick Crosby.

  Bingo.

  So it was his equipment. I told Barnaby Toll to set up an appointment and started scrolling through the rest of my inbox. The local film director Mark Toland had sent me the photographs he took on the day Andrew Thayer’s cottage burned down. I printed them out and studied them. The attached note apologized for the poor quality of shots. He was moving fast, clicking impulsively, not really sure what he was looking for beyond a sense of the moors as a possible location for his next movie. Alana featured in one shot, posing awkwardly; I could see the tailgate of the F-150 in another. Otherwise, it was just bushes and trees and blue sky. I saved one particularly blurry picture out for Haden Krakauer—it showed red specks on the turf. Cardinals probably, feeding on whatever they could find there. The cardinal was a common bird on Nantucket, but you rarely saw them in groups like that.

  I was about to leave the office when the phone rang again.

  I picked up. “Chief Kennis.”

  “Can’t do it, Hank.”

  “Come on.”

  “Mark could go to jail.”

  “For helping someone.”

  “For releasing classified information.”

  I blew out a breath. Around and around we go. “For God’s sake, Franny! It’s the video feed of a sleeping teenager.”

  “And if that teenager shoots up his high school next week? Or joins ISIS?”

  “What if he does? How does me having three hours of sleep footage change anything?”

  “It’s sloppy. It’s a mistake. It’s a protocol infraction. Senate oversight committees start asking—what other infractions did this guy commit? What other top-secret information did he share with his girlfriend? And who else did she share it with?”

  “He can’t just borrow the footage and lie about it?”

  “I can’t believe you’d even ask that. Or ask me to.”

  “It’s three hours of meaningless video. No one will care.”

  “You’d be surprised at the things the NSA cares about. When they start asking questions, you better have the right answers.”

  “So, he’s just covering his ass.”

  “Technically, no. Technically, he’s choosing not to risk his ass in the first place to help some small-town cop prove his harebrained theory and get a gold star from the Selectmen. The kid’s father is a Selectman, right?”

  “How did you remember that?”

  “I’m sitting in front of a computer, Hank.”

  “Right, of course.” I felt a quick stab of irritation, picturing her clicking away at the keyboard, while we talked. “Splitting the difference,” as she called it. I wondered briefly if I’d ever gotten her undivided attention, if anyone ever did, if there even was such a thing anymore.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked me.

  “I’m going to be persistent and annoying, like always.”

  “Oh, boy. Here it comes.”

  “The night of May twenty-third. Ten o’clock to two in the morning. Just ask Mark to pull the footage and review it. He doesn’t have to send it to me, or give it to you. It never has to leave his encrypted computer database. Then if he sees the kid coming in after midnight dripping wet, he can help us convict this kid and take a potential terrorist off the street before he plants a bomb somewhere. It’s a win-win.”

  “But you’re absolutely certain he’s innocent.”

  “Maybe they’ll catch him talking about ISIS in his sleep.”

  “If he talks about ISIS in his sleep, they already caught him. That’s why the surveillance was set up in the first place.”

  “Okay, Mark won’t help you. But you can still help me.”

  “Hank—”

  “Just back me up on this, if Lonnie calls you. Which he won’t.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I don’t—I mean, I’m ninety-nine percent sure. But I worry about that one percent.”

  “Me, too. In fact that’s my job description.”

  “Look, if he calls, just say something cryptic. Tell him everything’s classified, that’s not even a lie.”

  “What kind of scheme are you cooking up in that overheated little brain of yours?”

  I told her about Lonnie’s use of the Reid Technique. “I’m going to do to Lonnie exactly what he did to Mason with the polygraph and that imaginary ‘eyewitness.’ I’m going to run my own ‘alt key’ experiment.”

  She laughed. “I like it. Poetic justice.”

  “My favorite kind.”

  ***

  The next day I met Lonnie Fraker at the Green for lunch. He always said the wheat grass smoothies there were one of the few consolations for being posted on Nantucket. He ordered one. I took a slice of vegan gluten-free pizza and an iced tea. I would have preferred a burger at the LolaBurger but Lonnie was on a health food kick and I wanted to humor him. We sat down on the uncomfortable couch at the low table by the back door, surrounded by yoga moms and ex-hippie cabinetmakers.

  “You don’t have an eyewitness for the Mason Taylor case,” I said. “In fact, you don’t have a case at all.”

  “Dream on, Chief, I know you like the kid, but—”

  “I called Frannie Tate. She has connections at the NSA. We have surveillance footage from his computer camera. It shows him
home and in bed the whole time.”

  He stared at me, looking for the “tells” he’d learned at his Reid training course, no doubt. “I want to see the footage.”

  “Impossible.”

  “This is bullshit.”

  “I haven’t seen it myself, Lonnie. But Frannie has the report. The footage will be used by the defense and shown to the judge, in chambers, during discovery. But by then it will be too late. You’ll have railroaded an innocent kid into a murder trial with trumped up evidence, and a false confession from a discredited interrogation technique. They’ll come down on you like a rotten roof in a blizzard. Kiss this job goodbye. You’ll be directing traffic on Lyman Street in Springfield. If they let you stay on the force at all. No one wants this kind of publicity.”

  Lonnie gulped his wheatgrass. “So the kid’s just lying there, doing nothing?”

  “Well, he snores a little.”

  “Shit.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So now what do we do?”

  “You release Mason and apologize to his father. You might think about sweetening that with a case of Duckhorn cabernet. Then we both get back to finding out who murdered Oscar Graham—and why.”

  Lonnie nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Protect and serve.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s the LAPD motto. Kind of says it all.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lonnie set out to trace the drugs that killed Oscar. I decided to snoop around Straight Wharf, where the boy had been working. But neither of us got very far with our inquiries because Andrew Thayer’s body was found the next morning in the foyer of the LoGran corporate retreat on Eel Point, facedown on a thirty-thousand-dollar carpet with his throat cut.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Wrong Place,Wrong Time

  At seven-thirty in the morning on the day when he was arrested for murder, Mike Henderson was looking down at his sleeping baby, thinking, “I’ve been demoted.”

  It was all right, though, because everyone else had been demoted, too. A baby changed all the family rankings, and there was nothing you could do about it. He was no longer the primary love of Cindy’s life, and he no longer had any priority access to her body. Someone else was pawing her and sucking on her nipples. The sheer amount of physical contact with the baby both satisfied and exhausted her. She had the opposite of skin hunger now; skin saturation, perhaps. Offering to touch her was like offering dessert to the winner of a pie-eating contest. For the most part, Mike didn’t even care. He was exhausted, himself. And the baby had shifted Cindy in his mind, somehow. She had become the mother of his child, the other half of a team with a daunting project to accomplish. The fact that she was his wife, the love between them, was just fuel, the gasoline in this extraordinary car with its unknowable destination. It was a vital fluid but you never really noticed it until the needle was on empty.

  His parents and his in-laws had been demoted, too. They were no longer the center of a nuclear family, however scattered and distracted their grown children might be. Now there was another nuclear family, and they were peripheral to it. They were grandparents, to be used for babysitting when they were nearby, granted holiday visitation rights otherwise. Cindy was closer to her mother now, they shared some vital secret knowledge. But it also isolated them. Cindy’s mother had done a lot of things wrong, made a lot of unnecessary mistakes. Cindy’s childhood had changed. It was no longer a melodrama full of regrets. It was a cautionary tale.

  But it wasn’t just their marriage and their families or even their personal histories that had tilted into the unrecognizable. Their friends had been transformed, too. The ones without children seemed to fade away; the ones with children were allies, soldiers in the same platoon, swept into the same incomprehensible battle, talking about bottles and diapers, rashes and fevers, competing for the first smile or the first squeeze of a finger. Ordinary conversation had been demoted. The old topics like films, books, town gossip, politics, national news—in fact anything but the all-consuming pulse of this new life they had brought into the world—had been relegated to the status of background noise, like the hiss of tires on a rainy street.

  Mike leaned down into the crib and stroked the baby’s head, thinking, so much upset you caused, so much disruption, everyone and everything downgraded.

  “Wait till the next baby comes, kid” he whispered to her. “Then it’s gonna be your turn.”

  He leaned down, kissed her forehead, and went downstairs for a cup of coffee. He left it half-finished. He was in a hurry this morning.

  He sighed as he started his truck. This was the kind of day that made him question all his life choices. Somehow, at age thirty-four, he had gotten himself into a profession that put him at the mercy of an endless series of exigent women. The husbands never cared about the painting projects. Sometimes he thought they bought the houses (often a second, third, or even a fourth dwelling) for the sole purpose of giving their wives a way to manage the suffocating burden of their endless free time. The women treated the matter of fabric choice and paint color, window treatments and bathroom fixtures with a gravity and teeth-gritting attention to detail more appropriate to nuclear arms treaties or mainframe computer repair. Mike generally found the combination of blithe self-importance and needling perfectionism exhausting, but he had never come up against anyone quite like Sue Ann Pelzer.

  Sue Ann controlled all the maintenance work at Pell’s LoGran corporate estate and unlike most of the “Miss Ladies” (as Cindy called them) Mike had to deal with, she really knew what she was looking at. He had been refinishing one of the bedroom floors the year before when he looked up and saw Sue Ann perched on the threshold.

  “Is that hundred and twenty-grit sandpaper on that machine?” she had asked, squinting into the dust, subtle as a woodpecker. “Because I wouldn’t want you to stop at hundred-grit and this floor doesn’t look smooth enough for one-twenty yet.”

  Of course he’d been planning to stop at hundred-grit, firmly convinced that no one could tell the difference. But Sue Ann Pelzer could tell the difference. And she always did.

  This morning was going to be particularly awful because Mike had marred the brown copper downspouts with latex paint when he was finish-coating the corner boards. Naturally, Sue Ann had noticed, but he assured her he could clean them off easily.

  “Like it never happened” he had chirped.

  She stared him down. “Let’s hope so.”

  Of course, he couldn’t clean them. Sanding the paint off would ruin the patina of the copper, water had no effect, even with a little soft scrub and a kitchen scrubbie. He had nursed high hopes for the scrubbie. Sometimes fingernails were sharp enough to scrape uncured paint, but soft enough to spare the surface you were scraping.

  Not this time.

  He bought a variety of latex paint-removing products with names like “Goo-be-Gone” and “Oops.” How about one called “You really fucked it up this time, dumb ass”? He’d have bought that one in a hot second but it probably wouldn’t have worked. None of the other ones did. Had the latex bonded with the copper? He had no idea. He wasn’t a chemical engineer. If he were smart he’d have found a real job by now.

  This morning he was making his final attempt. If he couldn’t remove the white paint, he might be able to cover it up. He had bought pints of brown and black metal enamel, a plastic bucket, thinner, and a stir-stick. All he had to do was mix up a color match for the copper and then paint out the white latex.

  He parked on Eel Point Road and walked up the driveway. This was a stealth mission, but he couldn’t help pausing as the imposing front of the mansion loomed into view. He had history with this house. He had been briefly accused of killing the former owner; he had caught the man’s wife in flagrante with a kid on his paint crew, and committed adultery himself in one of the big upstairs bedrooms.

  It was an oversiz
ed, ugly, ill-omened pile, bristling with every ostentatious architectural flourish Grady Malone could scavenge from the Nantucket new money catalog: the giant fan windows, the extra dormers, the absurd cupola and ornate widow’s walk, overlooking the endless trimmed hedges and the massive Tora Bora-like stone walls that snaked around the steeply pitched property, cutting it into stepped terraces.

  The place felt fake and faintly sinister, like a gangster in the witness protection program, duly acting the part of volunteer fireman and church deacon, eating his tomato sauce out of a jar. Mike wasn’t fooled. Bad things happened on this tainted patch of ground and they always would. Maybe it was a Wampanoag burial site. Tanya Kriel had told him the place had “bad vibes” and he could feel them now, literal vibrations, like an alarm going off, beyond the human wavelength. Dogs would flee this place, tails between their legs.

  And yet he had taken the offer to stay on as the property’s house painter. Cindy couldn’t believe he was willing to work here, but he had to work and painters rarely got to pick and choose their customers. He was happy for the extra money, or at least he had been until his first run-in with Sue Ann Pelzer.

  He sighed and continued trudging up the hill, his shoes crunching on the crushed-shell driveway. He saw no one as he rounded the corner of the house and started for the back deck. Landscapers would normally have taken over the grounds by this time of day, at this time of year, but the grass looked recently mowed, shaved tight into straight lines of darker and lighter green like a baseball field.

  Mike retrieved his stepladder from behind the guest cottage, set out his pots of paint in the mild summery air, and got to work.