“No, stupid. Feathers. This island was inhabited by Indians—Wampanoags—until the English came. The history was like everyplace else in America—and the Indians were pushed off their land, up to the very tip of the island. Now the tribal lands are protected and the tribe has won official recognition from the government.”
I slowed down as the road dipped at the Gosnold bridge and nodded off to the right, telling Mike to look. Beyond the town boat landing and across the wide expanse of Menemsha Pond was my cherished hilltop. As soon as I hit this point in the drive my pulse always quickened and my spirits elevated: I was home. I hit the accelerator and raced up the winding hill toward the granite markers and row of six mailboxes which stood at the mouth of Daggett’s Pond Way. But as I made the last turn onto the unpaved path and saw the access interrupted by the neon yellow color of the crime scene tape, I braked to a halt and pulled the rented car into a clearing beside a faded bush of lacy blue hydrangeas, as I wondered what Isabella Lascar’s last moments had been like.
Chapter
8
We sat quietly in our car for five or six minutes until. Wally’s cruiser and Luther’s black sedan pulled in behind us. When they motioned to us to get out, Mike and I opened our doors and joined them on the strip of tall grass next to the roadway. It was only thirty yards back to State Road, but that was entirely out of view because of the sharp bend in the old path. And although my house and the homes of my neighbors were straight ahead, they were shielded from sight by the dense growth of pines and cedars that crowded both sides of the hilltop that crested before us.
“Not a bad place for a murder,” I remarked to Mike. “This one piece of the drive is completely secluded. It never seemed sinister to me until this moment, but it obviously presented a great opportunity for a killer to go unnoticed.”
“Now, Alex,” Luther said as he approached us, “there’s not much left here to point out to you, but I just want you to get an idea of what we think happened.”
The neon tape stretched from one of the evergreens on the east side of the path across to the old stone wall that bordered the property on the west. It ran north on the top of the wall for about five car lengths, then squared off by wrapping around a sturdy scrub oak that stood like a sentinel at the crown of the ridge.
“We figure Miss Lascar was driving back in toward the house sometime in the late afternoon. Still have no idea where she was coming from or exactly what time it was. The rental car was a white Mustang convertible, top down when she was hit. She couldn’t have been going more than ten or fifteen miles an hour on this part of the roadway.”
He was right about that. The dirt path was so deeply rutted and uneven that most cars bottomed out on it and you had to slow down to a crawl to maneuver the craters.
“We had a field team down from Boston yesterday,” Agent Waldron droned on, “but they didn’t come up with very much out here.”
“Outdoor crime scenes are the worst,” Mike commiserated. “Very hard to define.”
We had worked a few together in Central Park and in Morningside Park, so I knew exactly what he meant. Without an eyewitness and with no clear boundaries—like the four walls of a room in an apartment or the limited confines of a rooftop—it was a tough job for cops to know how far to extend the search for clues. Close it off five feet too soon and you’re likely to overlook an essential piece of evidence, but fail to limit it reasonably at some point and you’re pulling in all kinds of extraneous crap that leads your investigators off course.
“Our best guess at this point is that the killer was concealed on the far side of the stone wall. It provides a natural cover, better than a duck blind, as well as a perfect brace to steady the gun. The target drove in, moving, but nice and slow. Whoever did this was a good shot. Probably wasn’t much more than ten or twelve feet from Miss Lascar. She took two, maybe three shots to the head and neck. Not much left to help us there.”
“What kind of gun are we talking about?” Mike asked.
Waldron hesitated. I knew he wanted to be a hard-ass and not tell us anything, but his instincts seemed to be fighting that. It looked as if he actually knew he might get more feedback from a genuine Homicide detective like Mike than from Wally.
“We don’t have a coroner’s report yet. My guess is a high-powered rifle. Lots of internal destruction is what I heard from the guys at the scene. Skull was shattered.”
I winced at that description, although I had seen its image flashing in my mind’s eye thousands of times in the past thirty-six hours.
Waldron continued. “She must have been killed instantly. When her body was jolted by the shots we figure the car lurched and went smack into that big tree. That’s just where it was when she was found.”
Wally took over the narrative now, eager to give his men the credit for discovering Isabella’s body.
“Yeah, I went home to dinner ’bout six. Call came in from your neighbor, Mr. Patterson. He said his dog—you know that collie he’s got, Alex?—well, he said his dog came home, feet all covered with blood. Wasn’t cut nowhere, much as he whimpered, but he was bloodier than hell. Mr. Patterson said there must have been a big animal killed up there, makin’ so much blood. He was mad—can’t stand it when hunters start up your way before the season—and asked my boys to go on up to look.”
The secondhand description of the car, and of what remained of Isabella, was gruesome.
“Damn dog was too nosy. Got his front paw prints all over the side of the passenger door where the blood was drippin’ down, that’s how he got so full of it. The poor young lady’s head—or whatever you can call it—was resting on the top of that door. She was blown clear out of her seat—lucky there wasn’t no roof on that car or she would’ve split that in half. The blood was everywhere.”
Waldron interrupted to tell us that Wally’s crew had done a good job. “They didn’t touch anything. Just cordoned it off and called for the state police. The troopers brought us in on it because they had assumed you were the victim, Alex. Thought if you were in Massachusetts for business on any part of your trip, it might be federal jurisdiction. Someone in Wally’s office knew you’d been cross-designated a few months back to work on some interstate child pornography case. Anyway, Wally says you’ve always got work with you when you’re up here—can’t leave what you do behind you at the end of the week.”
I nodded my understanding.
“Are there photographs of the body in the car?” Mike asked.
“Of course. The scene was thoroughly processed by the team of agents.”
“Anybody hear shots?”
We were still in Wally’s territory. “Not so’s we know, Mike. This is a pretty lonely hilltop, and nobody’s let us know they heard anything at all. You got some summer people like Alex whose houses are sittin’ empty this time of year, and some old-timers like Patterson who’s so deaf I could blast my siren in the middle of his living room and he wouldn’t look up from his jigsaw puzzle. Finest kind.”
Mike had already walked over to the wall and was examining the large rocks carefully for traces of the gun or its residue. It was obvious that he would have loved to come up with a significant piece of evidence that the feds had overlooked, and equally obvious that Luther Waldron, who eyed him closely, wouldn’t give him that chance.
“Let’s go on up to your house, Alex. That’s where we hope you can be helpful. You’ll know what belongs to Miss Lascar and whether anything is seriously out of place or missing.”
“Sure.” My eyes swept the area once more as we headed for our cars. No body, no blood, no Mustang, no gun, no killer—just yellow tape strung out in an enormous square to bring home the reality that a murder had been committed on that isolated piece of road, less than five hundred yards from my house.
I led the way as I steered our rental car around the taped area through the tall weeds, behind the tree into which Isabella’s car had crashed, and back onto the uneven dirt path that climbed to its peak and then rolled over
and started downhill toward the clearing beyond the thick cluster of evergreens. In less than a quarter of a mile we emerged from the shadows of the trees and Mike was able to see, for the first time, the incredible vista at the end of Daggett’s Pond Way.
“Spectacular!” he gasped, as I paused at the divide in the roadway where my drive split off from the others and the granite gatepost to my house defined the beginning of my paradise.
“There are lots of great views on this island, Mike, but not one of them is any better than this.”
The old farmhouse is a very simple building, gray-shingled and unpretentious, sitting on a green rise that flows down to the water, at the point where Daggett’s and Nashaquitsa ponds meet. Over the years I had added border gardens along the stone walls, filled with daylilies and nicotiana, astilbe and asters, and had replaced an acre of untamed weed with a wildflower field that threw up a colorful sea of poppies, loosestrife, and cosmos. Indestructible lilacs rooted beside my front door as they had for more than a century, and impatiens—a flower perfectly suited to my temperament—lined the sides of the original foundation and bloomed till the first fall frost.
But it was the view beyond that took my breath away every time I came back to it, so I watched with delight as Mike tried to take it all in. “What direction are we facing? What body of water is that?”
“You’re looking north over the pond. There’s a tiny fishing village there called Menemsha, then beyond that is Vineyard Sound. Another strip of land—the Elizabeth Islands—and off in the distance is America. Cape Cod.” The combination of dozens of subtle shadings of blue and green was endless today, as the sun danced on the water and the sweeping scope of almost three hundred degrees gave us the illusion of being, literally, on top of the world.
Wally and Luther pulled in behind us and drew me back to the real purpose of our visit. It was a strange and uncomfortable feeling to see Luther walk to the front door of the house and hold it open for me. I had never met him until one hour ago and yet he had already been inside and knew his way around my home, without ever having had an invitation.
“Why don’t you walk us through, Alex, from room to room. Perhaps your eye will catch some detail we’ve overlooked. And if you recognize any objects that belong to Miss Lascar, or that don’t belong to you, point them out for us, will you?”
“Of course.” I hadn’t been to the house since Labor Day, not quite a month earlier, but no one else had been there since, except my caretaker, and then Isabella. “Does it matter if we touch things now, Luther?”
“Well, I’m afraid you’re going to see that my team has, uh, dusted quite a few items for prints already. Obvious things. Drinking glasses in the kitchen and bathroom, mirrors and metal surfaces…”
My stomach churned. Another thing I hadn’t focused on, despite all my professional experience. The police and agents would have been looking for clues inside the house, especially if they thought Isabella had been killed or set up by her traveling companion. Hundreds of victims in cases I’d worked on had described to me the painful intrusion caused by their well-intentioned investigators, rifling through drawers and brushing black powder on possessions to see whether the oils from someone’s fingers had left latent prints—prints not visible to the naked eye—that could link an assailant to a crime scene.
Waldron continued, “We got some lifts, Alex, so we’ll have to do a set of eliminations before you leave. I directed the coroner to get Miss Lascar’s prints, too. Sorry about the mess—that black powder is terrible. You’ll need someone to clean it up after we’re out of here.”
It was routine for the cops to take prints of anyone who had legitimate access to the location, to eliminate them from the latent prints found. It would be expected to encounter my fingerprints as well as Isabella’s on some of the surfaces. And once we were eliminated, the inquiry would tighten to find the source of the unidentified whorls and ridges that might be hiding on glassware, porcelain fixtures, and cabinet doors throughout the rooms.
I stepped through the front door into the tiny hallway central to most colonial farmhouses, with its staircase leading up to the guest bedrooms. I led the solemn troupe past that to the left, into the living room, its crisp Pierre Deux upholstery and clean lace curtains looking just as I had left them.
“She must have used the fireplace,” I observed aloud, assuming that was the kind of detail Luther might want to know. “Those cinders weren’t there after my trip. It wasn’t cold enough to want a fire.” And I had been alone Labor Day weekend, conscious of how romantic the setting becomes with a fire lighting that cozy room.
“That candle is Isabella’s, too,” I added. “I’m sure there’s one in the bedroom just like it.”
“You’re right about that,” Luther said.
“She always travels with them. Rigaud. Takes her own scent wherever she goes to create the feeling of being at home.” I had seen those tiny green votives—cyprès was the one she favored—in every hotel suite or guest room Isabella had ever planned to stay in for more than an hour.
Mike rolled his eyes in mock disbelief. The habits of the rich—whether movie stars, yupsters, or cocaine addicts—they were all grist for his mental mill, to be worked into the routines he schemed up to delight the guys back at the Homicide Squad as they waited out the night watch for news of another corpse.
I doubled back, seeing nothing else out of the ordinary in that room, and passed my three escorts as I crossed the hallway and peered into the dining room. The table was empty, eight chairs drawn close around it, and as I leaned to look at its surface I could see the thin film of dust that usually collected within a week’s time of non-use.
“It doesn’t look like she ate in here,” I said, which did not surprise me, since the kitchen was twice the size of the dining room and had a sturdy oak table where I usually took my meals, except when I was entertaining, with the help of a local catering service.
We walked single file into the kitchen, and my jaw dropped at the sight of the black fingerprint powder coating the cupboard handles, refrigerator door, coffee mugs in the sink, the wineglasses still in the Rubbermaid drain, and the receiver of the telephone.
“Sorry, Alex, but we…”
I interrupted Luther briskly. “I understand what you had to do. It’s just unpleasant to see it in my own home.”
“Would you check the food supply, please? Anything different or unusual?”
Luther held his handkerchief around the handle of the refrigerator as he pulled open the door. “There was nothing in it when I left except diet Coke and beer, so all of this is Isabella’s,” I told him.
There was milk and juice, English muffins and butter, yogurt and half a package of hot dogs.
“Was she a vegetarian?” Wally asked.
“Yes, Wally. But I guess her boyfriend went both ways.”
I looked in the pantry and cupboards, which were pretty bare. Just as I left them.
“Must have cleaned out your shelves so the mice don’t get nothing over the winter, Alex,” noted Wally.
“Wally, she’s got the skinniest roaches in all of New York City. If they wait around for Alex to serve ’em food, they’ll die of starvation,” joked Mike, knowing that my dislike of cooking meant that the cabinets were usually empty.
Luther moved to the old Welsh cupboard which held my collection of antique pitchers and opened the doors below, where the liquor was stored.
“Anything missing?”
“I don’t measure the bottles, Luther. I wouldn’t have a clue what was here last month or whether something’s an inch lower than it was before. I told Isabella to help herself to whatever she wanted, of course.” I thought of my aunt Gert, who used to swear that her housekeeper sipped gin every Wednesday morning when she came in to clean her apartment. Gert took to using the tape measure from her sewing kit to check the level in the bottle, but could never remember where she hid the slip of paper with the number on it from week to week. The housekeeper long outlasted
Aunt Gert, but the old girl would have been right up Luther’s alley.
He was about to close the door when Mike asked if the cops had dusted the bottles.
“Obviously not. There’s no powder on them, is there?”
“Well, take those three in. The front ones. I’d be willing to bet you’ll find prints—maybe Isabella’s, maybe someone else’s—but they’ve been moved since Labor Day.”
Even I looked puzzled.
Mike went on. “See how the Stoli and Jack Daniel’s are in front? If Alex was the last to use them, the Dewar’s would be the closest to the door. But the scotch is a step back and the other two are in front.”
Luther was frowning as he looked from Mike’s triumphant expression to my grin. I guessed that he was more upset by the suggested intimacy of our friendship than the thought he had missed a point he had no reason to know about. But I had missed it, too.
“He’s right, Luther. And Isabella usually drank vodka, so…”
“I thought she was a vegetarian,” mused Wally, puzzled by the significance of any of this. “Do they drink?”
“She was a man-eating vegetarian, Wally,” Mike said, deadpan, “and a heavy-drinking one at that. Alex used to tell us she liked vodka, wine, and lighter fluid best, didn’t you? That’s what kept her so arrogant and frisky.”
Luther had his notepad out and was starting his list of additional things to do. There was nothing else of significance in the kitchen and we paraded out the far door ahead of him, through the room I had converted into a small office—which seemed untouched—and into the master bedroom.
While I stopped to take in the tableau of Isabella’s interrupted retreat, Mike walked across the large room to stare out the glass doors, which made up the entire wall, at the stunning view down the grassy slope to the blue tints of the pond and sound. This room was my favorite, sunny and cheerful all day, and so private that not a curtain or shade covered an inch of the opening. My only encroachers were the deer who ventured out at night and the osprey I had built a nest for at the edge of the property. Over my bed was a whimsical trompe l’oeil painting of my wildflower field done by a local artist who liked to come to my hilltop to paint, and who gifted me with it years ago.
Alex Cooper 01 - Final Jeopardy Page 8