Sun, Sand, Murder

by John Keyse-Walker

  Two days later, I learned that Mr. and Mrs. Brooks were wanted by the BVI police for questioning about the disappearance of millions of dollars earmarked by the government for the development of Anegada. A week later, I heard the BVI authorities were seeking the helicopter crew who had aided the Brookses in their escape. Neither Johnny Ipp nor I was anxious to put ourselves in the hands of the island cops. We had seen enough of what the third-world fuzz would do watching the canh sat at work in Vietnam. We assumed that we, like Brooks and his wife, were officially or unofficially regarded as fugitives in the BVI and we never returned there.

  That is what I know, little one. What I speculate is that the bag Nigel Brooks carried over the dune at “the Camp of the Great Admiral” contained something of immense value. I heard Brooks showed up later in Brazil, lived high on the hog for a few years, and died there. The BVI cops never got him and most of the money he took was never found. They say that he took enough to last a man ten lifetimes in South America and that he could not have spent it all. I think the bag contained the rest of the money, or the means to get it. I think whatever was in that bag is still on Anegada. Go and find it.

  Keep in mind that Johnny Ipp knows some of what I tell you here, but not all of it. I never told him the whole story of that evening and

  And there the manuscript ended. Just as well, as my attention was diverted by the thrum of helicopter blades. Fifty feet off the water’s surface to the south, a mango-yellow VI Birds chopper headed straight for Captain Auguste George Airport, traveling fast.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Even as I slipped and slid down the narrow mud beach, I knew there was no way I could reach the airport in time to intercept Cat. Still, I ran the path from beach to road as fast as I could, thorns tearing at my arms and legs, rivulets of sweat drenching me in the scorching afternoon sun. I pushed the Land Rover to fifty miles per hour on the washboard sand-and-coral road, at the edge of control on the broken surface. A gaunt cow and calf wandered into the intersection of the unpaved road with the concrete airport drive; I slewed off the shoulder and missed them by inches.

  When I ground to a halt in the dusty terminal parking lot, Cat’s rented Mitsubishi was not there, nor were any other vehicles. Walking around the empty terminal revealed the VI Birds Bell 429 in the far corner of the aircraft taxi area. The ticking and clicking of the cooling engine greeted me as I approached. I placed my hands on the sides of my face to screen reflection and peered into the cockpit. I recognized Cat’s overnight bag there, stowed behind the pilot’s seat.

  There were decisions to make and I made them. There were actions to take and I took them.

  The last decision, and the corollary action, sent me on the road north toward Loblolly High Point and Flash of Beauty. I assumed Cat had preceded me by minutes. After reading De White Rasta’s manuscript, I knew there was no reason for Cat to go elsewhere. It all fell into place. Cat and Ippolito/Kelliher were working together to find the mysterious treasure that Nigel Brooks had hidden at Spanish Camp. There must have been a dispute between them and Cat had killed Ippolito. But the treasure had not been found. Cat had taken the risk of returning to Anegada for the contents of the shagreen bag Brooks had deposited at the Camp of the Great Admiral. I knew I would find her at Spanish Camp. I would arrest her there for Ippolito’s murder and the assault on Anthony Wedderburn.

  The paved part of the airport road ended a quarter mile north of the airport driveway. After leaving the pavement, I weaved and juked, trying to find the least horrible route between potholes. At the same time, I grabbed the CB microphone and called Pamela Pickering.

  “Yes, Teddy.” Pamela’s voice was raspy and wounded from her earlier crying jag.

  “Switch to the alternate channel, Pamela,” I said. No need to make this more public than necessary.

  Clicking over to channel 20, Pamela greeted me with “I’m here.”

  How much to tell her, and whoever else had shifted to channel 20 and was listening in? Not much, I decided. “I am heading out to Flash of Beauty, and from there to the crime scene at Spanish Camp for some follow-up. I thought I should let someone know.”

  “Uh … okay, Teddy,” Pamela stammered. She had to wonder why I was calling in. Normally, I did not report my patrol position or destination to her or anyone else. But she did not question it, instead asking, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  Asking Pamela to call Rollie Stoutt or even Deputy Commissioner Lane crossed my mind, but I rejected the idea. They would require more explanation and would probably order a delay in the arrest until they arrived. I needed to do this on my own.

  “Nothing, thanks. Just reporting in.” It was almost four o’clock, Pamela’s usual quitting time. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Out.”

  Ten minutes later I drove the Land Rover in low gear up the dune rise toward Flash of Beauty. Before the last curve, I stopped, killed the engine, and got out. The fresh east breeze ruffled the foliage and, maybe, just maybe, had covered the sound of the engine on the approach. Parting the sea grape branches, I was able to see the entire parking area. There was no white Mitsubishi nor any other vehicle. There was no sign of Cat or anyone else. The parking area sand was devoid of any recent vehicle tracks. Cat had not been here today.

  She was somewhere on the island. I thought I could leave and probably locate her. After all, there were only so many roads and so many places to hide. But if she stayed ahead of me, or if I guessed wrong at one of the few intersections, she might avoid me. She had to have only one destination, Spanish Camp, so she had to come to Flash of Beauty. The only other way to reach the Camp of the Great Admiral was a winding cow and goat path from the east side of The Settlement. I had been on the path once, as a teen, and it was a hard, hot, dry two-mile walk through the interior I never repeated. Except for the occasional feral cow, nothing and no one used the path now. Cat was probably not even aware it existed, and if she was, there was no reason for her to choose it over the easier route that began at Flash of Beauty.

  I decided to wait for Cat rather than driving out to try to find her. The next question was whether to wait at Flash of Beauty or to trek out to Spanish Camp. Wanting to leave nothing to chance, I decided to walk the beach to Spanish Camp. After all, I would look like a fool if she did walk in and out by the cow path and I missed her. And I was tired of looking like a fool. It seemed like I had spent the last six months at it.

  There was just enough room to fit the Land Rover out of view on the far side of the old restaurant. I squeezed into the spot, the scrub thorn scraping finger-on-a-chalkboard against the fender and driver’s-side door. To get out, I had to crawl out the passenger window. Looking back, I saw that the building and the low bushes completely obscured the car from the road and the parking lot. Brushing out the tire tracks with a sea grape branch finished the concealment.

  I backed toward the water, erasing my footprints with the branch as I went. At the surf line, I discarded the branch and turned my steps toward Spanish Camp. The heat of the day was gone. The low angle of the afternoon sun backlit the beryl-blue waters of Table Bay, revealing a school of tarpon cruising for an evening meal. A pair of frigate birds squabbled with a gull in midair, finally forcing the gull to drop the sprat it carried in its mouth. One of the frigates plucked the fish from the sky before it hit the water. It had been years since I had simply walked the beach for pleasure. This walk would have been enjoyable if not for the confrontation certain to take place in the minutes or hours ahead.

  After twenty minutes, I angled up the beach to the crest of the dune. Kneeling among the gray leaves of the stubby succulent plants for cover, I scanned the open area of Spanish Camp for signs of life. A chunky land crab, orphaned from the horde that had feasted on the remains of John Ippolito, marched across the open pan. A dozen flamingoes foraged in the shallows of the salt pond. There was no human movement.

  I picked my way along a narrow trail through the scrub, emerging into the clearing where Ippolito had spent hi
s last days searching for Brooks’s ill-gotten cache. The elements had taken their toll, slowly expunging the traces of Ippolito’s quest and his brutal end. The backpacker tent had been torn from its moorings and was now a faded sheaf of plastic pushed against the stump of a manchineel tree. Scraps of POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape clung to a bush here and a tree there but no longer pretended to be a perimeter for the site. De White Rasta’s “graves” had continued to fill through collapse and erosion, their attendant mounds of excavated material reduced to gentle humps as likely created by nature as by the hand of man. All human footprints were erased, replaced by the purposeful wakes of hermit crabs, each a set of tiny imprints straddling a deeper rut made by the purloined dwelling they each carried on their back.

  Cat had not been here today. The impassive sand and the undisturbed silence told me that. But she would visit today in the short time before the sun set. I knew she would. I had only to wait.

  Walking along the verge of the sand basin, I sought a break in the wall of sea grape, cactus, and scrub thorn. A step or two down a side path would allow me to see the entire area while remaining hidden from anyone approaching over the dune. At the southwest edge of the clearing, a gap in the underbrush opened diagonally onto a track, likely the terminal end of the cow path that started a couple of miles away at The Settlement. I stepped in and settled down to wait.

  A half hour passed. A blinking anole, skin transmuted near-white to blend with the sand, shuffled in the dead leaves beside me. Otherwise, nothing moved. Unseen beyond the dune, swells pounded the outer reef, sounding of distant thunder. Otherwise, there was no sound.

  The anxiety of waiting began, first small and mere annoyance, then prominent against the stillness. It was the anxiety of a mediocre cop, brimming with doubt and impatience, lacking confidence in the judgment and, really, the intuition that had brought him to wait in this place for the criminal he sought. A good cop might have anxiety, but only momentarily, soon to be overridden by good-cop confidence, I told myself. A good cop not only made the right choices, he instinctively knew those choices were right, even in the face of doubt.

  I resisted the urge to move. More minutes passed. More doubt visited my lonely outpost.

  Then there was a heavy rustling in the sea grapes behind me.

  Chapter Thirty

  The sound moved closer and became the steady swish of someone brushing against the undergrowth as they walked the cow path. I judged the source to be about half a cricket pitch away when the sound stopped. I waited. A minute, two minutes, then five. Silence.

  No longer patient, I moved along the path. Stealth was easy. A light foot on the sand is completely noiseless. By avoiding the dry foliage bordering the trail, my approach was inaudible to whoever had been moving toward me.

  The path took a sharp angle around a break in a tumbled coral wall, a field boundary left over from the days when Anegada’s lifeblood was agriculture. I stepped around and into a bower of frangipani and manchineel trees. The entire space was no larger than old Ned Wheatley’s one-room house in The Settlement.

  On the other side of the little grove, a cow lifted her head to stare at me with languid eyes. She had been drinking from a pool shrouded by the trees. Water trickled from her hairy chin. Disturbed, but only somewhat, by my sudden appearance, she took three deliberate steps and disappeared down the far end of the path. The noise of her departure matched the rustling I had heard earlier. I realized I had, quite literally, been on a wild cow chase. Just more quality police work, being drawn from my stakeout by a cow.

  I walked over to the pool. It was a pleasant spot, dappled with shade from the squat trees. Animals visited here regularly; the ground was a kaleidoscope of hoof and claw prints. Two sides of the pool were bordered by slabs of limestone. The water was cool to the touch and fresh to the taste. This might have been one of the limestone sinks where Columbus’s shore party had refilled their water casks five centuries ago.

  Peering into the water, I could make out shelves of rock angling away into the depths. The bottom of the well was not discernible. I was about to double back to my stakeout when the memory of words I had read twice in the past week struck me.

  He was wet from head to foot.

  It was the very first line Anthony Wedderburn had been able to decipher from the notebook found in Kelliher/Ippolito’s possessions. I had read the words again just hours ago in Anthony’s almost-complete decoding. Neville Wells had not understood why Nigel Brooks had returned from Spanish Camp on that fateful night in 1970 “wet from head to foot” with freshwater. John Ippolito had not either, spending his last days at the Camp of the Great Admiral digging when he should have been doing something else.

  He should have been diving.

  I could have returned to my stakeout location and waited to capture Cat Wells. There would have been ample opportunity to explore the pool on another day. Who knows, an interrogation of Cat at RVIPF headquarters might have confirmed her involvement and motive, and made it easy to persuade Deputy Commissioner Lane to order divers to search the pool for Nigel Brooks’s shagreen bag and its mysterious contents. Waiting would have been the prudent course of action. But in the end I succumbed to the same fever, the same yearning, the same quest for a treasure trove that had impelled inhabitants of the Caribbean since the days of the buccaneers.

  I kicked off my sandals and shed my uniform shirt. The slide from the limestone shelf into the algid water took my breath for a moment. There was just enough room for me to scissor and dive.

  A body length below the surface, color faded to a leaden gray-green but the water remained air-clear. I twisted in a tight circle and saw that the mouth of the sink was lined with broken rock shelves and cavities. Light failed to reach the rearmost confines of these ledges and hollows. I reached in up to my shoulder in the one nearest me.

  A murky cloud of silt puffed from the crevice I had probed. Leaves and bits of vegetation falling into the sink from above had decomposed where they landed, undisturbed for years. The slightest movement caused this detritus to billow up from where it lay. I reached into another shelf as visibility in the immediate area went to zero. My hand touched limestone shards and soupy plant matter but nothing else.

  Lungs bursting, I surfaced. Treading water, I hyperventilated as I do when diving for conch. After three minutes of forcing extra oxygen into my bloodstream, I plunged again, deeper this time, hoping to work from the bottom of the sink upward to keep the clouds of silt below as I searched the ledges. Now one side of the pool was clouded, as was the water below my waist, as I pulled upright to work along the rock walls. Nothing man-made met my grasp, and I rose to the surface for a rest and another lungful of air.

  I made another dive and then two others with no success. I began to doubt. Even if I was correct and Brooks had hidden his bag in a limestone sink, it did not necessarily have to be this limestone sink. There were many wells and sinks dotting Anegada; exploring the bush near Spanish Camp would probably reveal a dozen wells, potholes, and sinks of various sizes.

  I was tiring, and when I next surfaced, I kicked over onto my back to float and rest. The sun was no longer visible overhead and the light had a late-day tinge, deep purple on the eastern horizon. I told myself I would make two more dives and call it a day. Then, with luck, I could still make it back to Flash of Beauty before full dark. It would mean trying to find Cat somewhere on the island in the dark. I expected it would mean that I would not find her.

  Diving down into the roiled pool had become diving blind. The final searches would be by touch alone. My knuckles and fingertips were raw and sore, and by the time I ascended from the next-to-last dive, my ego was bruised as well. Treading water and faint from holding my breath, I thought I had failed again.

  The light overhead was pallid. The sun was almost at the western horizon. I rolled and kicked down, closing my eyes to keep out the particles floating everywhere in the water. At the front of a ledge, my hand fell upon something long and smooth. Seizin
g the object in my right hand, I felt further back into the gelatinous mud with my left. I touched something solid but yielding, certainly man-made. Sliding my hand further along, I gripped an asymmetry in its smooth surface. Both hands full and lungs empty, I rose toward the fading light above.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Breaking through the water’s surface, I flung both arms onto the rock shelf beside the well. The prizes from the dive revealed themselves. In my right hand was a cow femur, black with age and immediately discarded. My left hand was closed around the handles of a miraculously well-preserved leather bag. The leather was dimpled and gray, retaining the color and texture of the sharkskin from which it had been made. The bag was heavy for its size, the contents lumpy inside.

  Pulling myself onto the rock, I sat with my feet and legs in the water and the bag on my lap. My heart raced, as much from excitement as from the repeated dives into the pool. You have Nigel Brooks’s treasure in your hand, the voice inside my head said. I willed myself to be calm and waited for my breathing to slow.

  I upended the bag, spilling its contents onto the limestone beside me. A dozen plastic baggies, turned opaque from immersion but intact, sat piled beside my right hip. All were tied with what had been a paper-and-wire twist tie, the paper now disintegrated and the wire a lacy tangle of rust that crumbled at my touch. I emptied the first baggie into my palm.

  The last rays of the sun were captured and then cast back from the opulent cascade that rolled into my hand. Round, square, rectangular, even triangular nodes of faceted green overflowed onto the ground. Large as tern eggs, small as crabs’ eyes, and every size in between, burnished and flashing the full spectrum of green, the green of spring grass, of the pale shallows of the flats, of the ominous edge of a thunderhead, of the black-green depths beyond the boundary of the reef, of Cat Wells’s teasing eyes. Emeralds. A half pound of stones in the baggie I opened, and the next, and the next. Emeralds enough to decorate the delicate lobes of a thousand princesses’ ears, grace the décolletage of a decade’s worth of debutantes, and still have enough to appease a hundred petulant mistresses.