Nantucket Grand (5 page)

You and me, Holden. You and me.

Chapter Five

The Burning House

As it turned out, I had more homegrown crime to investigate, anyway.

I was out in the moors the next Monday afternoon, poking around for some additional scrap of evidence in the Todd Macy shooting, when I saw the column of smoke. This wasn't the lazy curl from a chimney with someone inside, sipping tea next to a cozy hearth. This was thick and toxic, a pulsing black column like a million ants swarming a tree trunk, a spreading noiseless stain on the clear blue sky.

I took off, crashing through the bracken, hearing the distant sirens as I ran. By the time I had cleared the last tangle of wild grapevines, I knew I'd been out there before. This was Andrew Thayer's house—Debbie Garrison's uncle. My kids had attended a birthday party at the cottage last summer. The big fireplace in the living room had made me nervous—all that resinous raw pine timber, all those canvas slipcovers on the old wood furniture. One errant spark…the place had struck me as a fire hazard all the way back in August, but of course that was fire season where I came from, and the big stone hearth was cold with disuse. No one was going be roasting any marshmallows in there until…well, until now. The thought of my kids in there struck a nerve. This was all edging a little too close to home.

The place was empty that day, fortunately. And there were five witnesses to the fire. That fact alone was slightly odd—the cottage sat out in the middle of nowhere, near the pout ponds, and the chances of anyone seeing the blaze were nil, especially so late in the year, during that gray, dismal patch between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But pyromaniacs linger at the scene of the crime—that's the rule. The fire lights them up and they love to watch it.

That made everyone on the scene a suspect.

If they had plausible alternative reasons to be out in the moors that day—as I did—we needed to find out quickly.
Eliminate the innocent
, that was what Chuck Obremski, my mentor in the LAPD, always used to say. That's the quickest way to find the guilty.

As the fire trucks parked and watered the surrounding bushes—it was too late to save the house—I spoke to the witnesses one at a time, pulling them away from the subsiding blaze and the sagging skeleton of support timbers.

They made an odd cross section of island life. David Lattimer, an old money septuagenarian crank who lived on the edge of the moors nearby. Alana Trikilis, the seventeen-year-old daughter of local garbage man and homespun philosopher Sam Trikilis. (“Show me a man's trash and I'll tell you his life story.”) Housepainter Mike Henderson. Local newspaper owner and editor David Trezize. And an off-island visitor. The trades, the media, the high school, the island aristocracy, and a tourist. You could make five seasons of
The Wire
out of that catalog, if Nantucket were a city like Baltimore. I glanced around the wind-bent scrub pines and brush-tangled holly trees. It could happen. Manhattan had looked like this once. But Nantucket would probably drown from rising sea levels long before anyone tried to get the first skyscraper past the voters at Town Meeting.

The witnesses agreed to meet me at the station, and I left the site to Sam Culbertson, the fire chief, and Detective Charlie Boyce. Charlie had taken some classes in arson investigation at John Jay College, and picked up some experience with this particular crime working in Boston before he came back to the island. Lonnie Fraker, our bulky and squeaky-voiced, grandstanding but good-hearted State Police captain, would show up any minute. His first move would no doubt be to fly in an off-island expert, but it never hurt to get a jump on the Staties. Charlie's “Go Whalers!” pride would spike if he found something before the big shots did.

Stumping back to my car, I heard the house collapse into a bed of charred planking and coals behind me. The fire was shocking, but at that moment I felt more irked and stymied than anything else. The Todd Macy investigation was going to have to wait now, at least for the next few days. I could send someone else out to work the case but I didn't feel confident that my other detective, Kyle Donnelly, would do anything but contaminate the crime scene. I felt overworked and outnumbered. Things were piling up fast.

And this was supposed to be the quiet season.

Chapter Six

Daughters

As it turned out I had a fair-sized crowd waiting for me at the cop shop. Liam Phelan was standing on the big compass cut into the brickwork in front of the station talking to a Laurel and Hardy team—Laurel was a tall, thin gent in what looked like a thousand-dollar suit under a cashmere overcoat. His dark steel-gray hair rose off his long bony face like a hat and he sported a thin, perfectly trimmed moustache—a policeman's dream, when it came to eyewitness descriptions. He cut a distinctive figure; even a bunch of scared people remembering a brief incident a few days before would agree on the basics, and it would be easy to pick the lanky gray-maned aristocrat out of a lineup.

I had to smile as I approached them—this guy was much more likely to be the victim of a crime than the perpetrator. Still I found it obscurely comforting to cast a jaundiced eye on the island's ruling class. Cops see everyone as potential criminals, anyway—at least the cops who taught me did.

“Just give 'em a chance,” Chuck Obremski used to say, whether he was talking about a banker, a politician, or a movie star. During my first year with the LAPD, Winona Ryder got busted for shoplifting from Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. That day, Chuck dropped the
Times
on my desk with a dramatic shrug. The story was on the front page, below the fold.

“That's what I'm talking about,” he said. “It's a bug. Anyone can catch it.” He caught it himself later on, but that's another story.

The Oliver Hardy standing next to the old man struck me instantly as a private detective. One more balding overweight schlub in a pea-coat—but he had the wary, attentive posture of a man who expected the worst and paid close attention to everything all the time, so he wouldn't miss it when it finally arrived. He scanned the parking lot as I walked toward him, eyes flicking past me to the cars pulling in behind me and the two officers crossing toward the side entrance, then back to Liam and the tall man, who patted Liam's shoulder and let Liam pull him into a hug.

Liam broke away from the conversation and jogged over. He stopped in front of me, blocking my way. He was panting, his face looked wind-burned and I could smell whiskey on his breath. “I know what happened.”

“Are you all right, Liam? You look—”

“I know what happened to my daughter. You're a copper. You've got to do something about it.”

“Your daughter suffered an overdose of some opiate drug. The lab reports aren't in, but it was probably heroin. People often shift from oxy to heroin because it's cheaper. But it's also much more dangerous. You can never tell the true quality of the load or what they cut it with.”

He grabbed my shoulders. Liam was a big man, maybe six-three, a couple of inches taller than me, and at least fifty pounds heavier, most of it muscle. “Listen to me! I'm telling you how she got the heroin in the first place! Do you understand me?”

I shrugged out of his grip. “Calm down, Liam. Take it easy. We can talk about this after I—”

“You don't get it, lad. Talking's finished with. Talking's done.” He lowered his voice. “There are men on this island, bad men. Terrible men, Chief Kennis. I served in the British Navy during the Falklands War. I saw my own paratroopers executing Argentine prisoners after the battle of Mount Longdon. Just putting a gun to a man's head while he sobbed and begged for mercy and pulling the trigger while the others watched and knew they were next. I never thought I'd see anything so dreadful again. That was enough for one lifetime. That was my quota, you understand? Or so I thought. But this is worse.”

“Liam, you need to—”

“I need to tell you this and you need to listen. These men are getting girls hooked and making them pay for the drugs by doing things…by performing…on film. Turning themselves into—”

I grabbed him this time. “Who told you this? How did you find out about this?”

“A girl told me. One of my daughter's friends. They tried to…recruit her, as well. But she was having none of it, thank God.”

“Okay, hold on. Wait a second. Who is this girl? Why didn't she come to me directly?”

“I canna tell you that. I gave my word. She thought if you heard about it from another man, you'd take action. Especially a man like me, someone who'd lost…”

“Jill's not lost, Liam. She's a fighter. The doctors in Boston say the prognosis looks good.”

“I hope that's true. I'm praying that's true. But in the meantime, you find these people and bring them to justice. Or someone else will do it for you.”

“Is that a threat?

“It's an oath. It's a sacred vow.”

“Don't turn yourself into criminal over this, Liam.”

He gave me a chilly smile. “I'll do what I have to do, Chief Kennis. You do the same.”

I watched him stalk off across the parking lot, glad that I had Alana Trikilis coming into the station. I had a lot more questions to ask her now.

“You've met my engineer,” the old man said as I approached them. Clearly I had to talk to him. The wind kicked up, pushing an icy gust across the plaza. It was cold and getting colder. I wondered for second if I was ever going to get inside.

The tall old man stuck out his hand. “Sorry. Jonathan Pell. And this is Louis Berman.”

I shook the smaller man's hand. “Private investigator?” I asked.

“At one time. Currently, head of security for LoGran Corporation.”

“I assume you have a license for that gun.”

“I—uh, yes. Yes I do.”

“How did you know he had a gun?” Pell demanded.

I looked Pell over. He had the chiseled Roman coin features of a movie star from some earlier era, when press agents enforced privacy, and glamour—that exotic creature driven to extinction by the Internet—still flourished in the high-canopy habitats of Bel Air and the Holmby Hills. Pell had a radio voice to match his face, a mellow baritone that made you want to buy whatever he was selling. I wondered what he was selling today.

I tilted my head toward Berman, answering the old man's question. “He has the look. And he should cut his suits better if he wants to conceal a weapon.” I turned to the detective. I was on a roll. “Beretta?”

He nodded “PX4 Storm compact.”

“Nice gun. Don't use it on my island.”

“I was saying…” Pell cut in, “my engineer and I—”

“Your engineer?”

“On my yacht. The
Nantucket Grand
. Phelan is chief engineer. He keeps the ship afloat, keeps it running and on course. Sort of genius in his own way. Idiot savant. But absolutely essential to the life. He'll be bringing the
Grand
up from Bermuda for race week. If he can get those fuel manifold valves repaired in time.”

I glanced longingly at the front doors of the station. Had I really been complaining that it was overheated inside? “Right now he has more serious problems to deal with.”

“I know. I fully sympathize with his daughter's tragic circumstances. We share a concern regarding the…efficacy of the local police.”

“Meaning me.”

“To the extent that you stand for your department, yes.”

“What's the problem, Mr. Pell?”

“The cottage on the LoGran property has been broken into three times in the last several weeks. On all three occasions the alarms went off—and they are keyed into the police station, at great expense. The official response was woefully inadequate. Officers arrived, but too late to catch anyone. And each time the response was slower. Do you have the figures, Mr. Berman?”

The little detective pulled a folded sheet piece of paper from his jacket pocket, straightened it out and squinted at the numbers. “Six minutes…fourteen minutes…twenty-two minutes. No land speed records there, Chief.”

I ignored him. “Did you file a report? What was missing?”

“We filed three reports. Nothing was missing, but the place had obviously been searched. And we haven't seen hide nor hair of the police since that last call-out.”

“Well, if nothing was missing…have you called the alarm company? There may be a problem on their end. Some of the alarms use motion detectors. If you have a mouse inside, or a rat…they could be setting off the alarms. It happens a lot out here.”

He stared at me. “There are no…vermin in the LoGran compound. We have a human intruder and I demand that these incidents be investigated. Is that really so unreasonable?”

“Not at all. In fact, I'll take care of it myself.”

That seemed to derail his next angry salvo. “Well…thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.”

“I'll check it out today. Have someone in the house to let me in.”

“Keep in touch with Mr. Berman, here. He'll inform me of your progress.”

“Fine.”

“Then I suppose we're done.” He reached out to touch my shoulder. “Let me know if you hear anything. Sorry I was short with you before. But these break-ins have put us all on edge. Louis is a stranger here. You know this island, you have your ear to the ground. That's like gold, as far as I'm concerned. Twenty-four carat gold.”

I clasped his shoulder, our arms and bodies briefly forming a square before we stepped back and shook hands. The sudden thaw in his attitude, dropping the gruff pose of the impatient captain of industry, combined with his nervous smile, made me want to help him; and something more. I wanted to confirm his good impression of me, win him over to the side of small-town police in general.

He turned and strode away, the squat detective hurrying after him.