Thomas Prescott Superpack (25 page)

Chapter 55

My head flooded with different components of anguish. Conner was dead, but he deserved it, didn’t he? By default, was Alex still alive? And if so, for how long?

I reeled four or five steps backward and Caleb moved in to take my spot. He opened the locker door and stepped to the side. I numbly took in the sight. The locker was a bloody mess; Conner’s limbs were in a pile at the bottom of the locker, his midsection hung in limbo—I’m guessing from one of the clothing hooks—where his initials, CED, were visibly tattooed across his ripped abdominals.

His head sat in the top cubby lolled to the left, pinning a splintered walkie-talkie against the inner wall. Conner’s face was unrecognizable, only his bright blue eyes remained, they’d somehow escaped the massacre unscathed.

I took two steps forward and Caleb yelled, “Why didn’t Tristen take his eyes?”

I heard myself say, “He wants me to know the game is over. No more clues. No more help. I lost. And I’m next.”

I called Caitlin and informed her about Conner. The conversation was one sided and I wasn’t sure if she would be playing Chief Medical Examiner on this one. Caleb and I made a pact to keep the Conner information to ourselves, nothing could be gained by defaming him at this point. I still wanted to know why. Why had he helped Tristen? And how had the two come to find each other?

The only person with the answers was laughing at me right now, and there was a good chance he would tell me about Conner’s involvement seconds before he took my life.

Caleb and I hopped back over the wall and strolled toward the Range Rover. The back bumper of the FBI Caprice was barely visible parked parallel with the SUV. Caleb and I passed the front end of the Range Rover and froze.

Caleb said uniformly, “Looks like Gregory won’t be needing Lacy’s painting after all.”

The windshield of the Caprice was covered in blood and brains. Gregory and Gleason were dead. Lacy was gone.

I channeled my anger, uneasiness, and misgivings into all-out rage. At who I’m not sure. At myself? At Gregory? At Gleason? At Conner? At Tristen? It was a combination of all of them and it wasn’t digesting well. Speaking of which, my sausage pizza from three hours earlier was now part of the Verona Rowing Club montage.

I wrenched the driver side door open and surveyed Gregory’s limp body. The bullet had entered through the back of his skull and sent the better part of his brain and chiseled features onto the dash. Gleason had taken one in the right temple, and needless to say, his left temple was decorating the driver side window.

I couldn’t understand it, how had this happened? Whoever had accomplished the feat had
obviously been sitting in the backseat. And it sure as hell wasn’t Tristen Grayer. As naïve and incompetent as the FBI was—and trust me they were—I couldn’t see them inviting Tristen Grayer into the backseat for an invigorating game of 21 Questions. There must be a third-party involved.

Caitlin arrived on the scene and I had to console her for ten minutes before she muscled out a word.

I gave her a quick run-down on the carnage, then explained the most pressing detail, “Tristen and whoever else is involved in this nightmare has both Alex and Lacy. I need you to autopsy Conner and see what exactly Tristen is up to. There has to be a clue here somewhere. This is crunch time, I need you to be strong.”

I’m not sure if she saw through my lie. I had little hope for Alex and Lacy at this point, Tristen had thrown in the towel with the clues. His legacy would continue and he would come back next year and turn someone else’s life upside down.

Chapter 56

I don’t remember falling asleep. Caleb and I had gone through two pots of coffee, but neither of us had an inkling who the third-party might be. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced Tristen could have pulled off the stunt. He could have crept up on the Caprice, pulled the back door open, blown both Gregory and Gleason’s brains out, and then snatched up Lacy. This is all assuming the backdoor had been unlocked, which wasn’t consistent with FBI protocol—but then again, it was FBI protocol. I knew preschools that ran tighter ships.

I peered across the table at Caleb asleep in a pile of spilled coffee. I grabbed the pot off the table and went to work on a fresh batch. Caleb stirred and wiped the dripping coffee from his nose, “What time is it?”

I looked up at the clock, it was two in the afternoon, “We have eight hours. We shouldn’t have slept.”

He nodded, but the both of us knew we needed the catnap. By the end of our brainstorming session last night, one of us had broached the possibility Tristen was a triplet. Could there be three of them, Tristen, Geoffrey, and Bernard?

I checked my cell phone and saw I had five missed calls, three from Caitlin and two from Charles Mangrove. My answering machine was blinking and I knew I would have the same five calls. Charles’s were first and I skipped them both. The last three were indeed from Caitlin. All three messages were fairly similar; she didn’t find any clues, but had something important to tell me and to stop by the morgue.

Terrific. Alex and Lacy were both missing and soon to be of the deceased variety and Caitlin wanted to drop the bomb on me that I needed to set aside the month of May for Lamaze class. Can you get cyanide over the counter or do you need a prescription? No, killing myself was option F. Option A-E would bring me close, but I’d probably survive.

Caleb poured two large mugs full of dark Colombian brew and the two of us hopped in the Range Rover. I chugged the coffee down in three gulps and if I hadn’t killed off all my taste buds with last night’s load, I might have thought the coffee hot. My brain started working again around mile marker 203, and was in full tilt when I parked the Range Rover next to Caitlin’s red Pathfinder in the Bangor County morgue lot.

Caleb and I walked through the front entrance and into the waiting area. My eyes found the thick steel cage door leading to the corridor. The lock was bent inward and the door ajar. The work appeared to be at the diligence of a large, heavy ax.

I crashed through the gate and sprinted down the long corridor, slamming into the door leading to the surgical annex. Caitlin was nowhere to be found. Caleb disappeared into the storage area to search the body bags for Caitlin, but we both knew he would come up empty. I tried Caitlin’s cell and seconds later heard her distinctive ring coming from behind me. I picked her cell off the counter and stared at it long and hard, as if in some way it symbolized Caitlin’s death.

I fought the image off, she wasn’t dead. Death would come for Caitlin, Alex, and Lacy at 10:10 P.M. tonight. Caleb and I had five hours.

Caleb came back into the autopsy room and shook his head. I hadn’t noticed the surgical table in the center of the room where Conner’s body had been laid out and an attempt at reconstruction made.

I looked at Conner’s tattoo, his bulging muscular body, his almost buzzed blond hair, his revered blue eyes, and his fairy tale wanger. Then I looked up at Caleb and said, “The game isn’t over. It’s just begun.”

I explained everything to Caleb on the way to the Verona Rowing Club. He shook his head in disbelief. Hell, I almost couldn’t believe it. But it all fit. The puzzle was complete.

There was quite a scene at the Verona Rowing Club and I had to find one of Caitlin’s higher ranking men before Caleb and I were let through the masses to the crime scene. The weather had gone from bad to worse and the day seemed three hours ahead of schedule. The wind was howling in from the ocean and the small waves were running up onto the deck near the lockers. I stood near the cordoned off locker and faced out to sea.

I’d yet to disclose one facet to Caleb and forged the last wrinkle in our little shit pot, “Tristen and Conner were working together on this, so I think it’s safe to say they’d worked out a plan from day one. I’d gone rowing with Conner the day before the first murder. We’d chatted it up about what we would do to Alex Tooms if we ever got our hands on him. Of course, I thought it was
a him; Conner must have known Alex was a woman, and always referred to her simply as Tooms. Conner said he would take Tooms to an island where he would make Tooms rewrite the book. He said he would torture and starve Tooms until Tooms wrote the truth.”

Caleb added the gloss, “The eyes in the locker weren’t looking at you,
they were seeing the next murder site. They were seeing the island.”

I placed it in the kiln, “Tristen has Alex, Caitlin, and Lacy on Matinicus Island.”

Chapter 57

The rain whipped against the windshield and my wipers fought a losing battle. It was ten after seven when Caleb and I pulled into the muddy Bayside Harbor parking lot. There were only two other cars, a by-product of the seven to ten foot swells smashing against the harbor pier.

Caleb ran to the Backstern and I ducked headlong into the wind towards the manager’s hut. I pushed through the door and evidentially Kellon’s deadbeat dad thought I was there to kill him. He had on a yellow slicker and shot his hands up in the air. Imagine a high school referee signaling a field goal in a typhoon, that’s what he looked like.

The deadbeat screamed, “Don’t shoot.”

I shoved my .45 in my waistband and said, “I’m not here to kill you. I need your help.”

DBD slowly put his arms down and started breathing again. I said, “This concerns your daughter’s killer. He’s on Matinicus Island and I need to get there so I can kill him.”

DBD nodded like this was a run-of-the-mill demand at the Bayside Harbor manager hut. He grabbed a map off the wall and laid it on the counter. Smoothing it out, he said, “We’re here. Matinicus Island is thirty miles directly south. It’s pretty small, it’s going to be a shot in the dark finding it in this weather.”

I asked, “How long by boat?”

“Two hours in a good sea, four in this storm. I just got off the radio with the coast guard, says it’s even worse the farther you get out. Tropical Storm Fernando or something.”

Speaking of the Coast Guard, I wish I had my FBI sidekicks to pull some strings. Unfortunately, the only strings Gleason and Gregory would be pulling would be on their
Welcome to Heaven
harps. I could get Charles Mangrove on the phone and see what he could do, but I had a feeling when all the strings had been pulled, the sand in the hourglass would be glass itself.

Kellon’s dad must have seen I was contemplating the odds of a Tropical Storm Prescott and walked to a wall safe. He had his back to me for twenty seconds and then turned around with a pair of keys dangling from his fingertips. His eyes were moist and he said, “This boat should get you there in under three hours, it has GPS so you won’t be able to
miss Matinicus. Doesn’t seem right for me to hang onto the boat now that she’s dead.”

I took the keys from him and asked him which slot the boat was parked. He said he’d show me, then disappeared into a backroom, emerging seconds later with a double-barrel shotgun. For a moment I thought he might be coming with, but after he loaded the gun he slammed five extra shells into my hand and said, “Put one in him for me.”

Caleb and I were in the big Formula 500 speedboat getting a crash course, which was fitting, from Kellon’s father. On a side note, the three-hundred-sixty horsepower vessel was named
The Kellon
. That is when Kellon’s deadbeat dad became Frank, Kellon’s father.

The crash course lasted a little under three minutes, whereby Frank programmed the exact
coordinates for Matinicus Island into the GPS console. I shook Frank’s hand and promised to inflict as much pain as possible on his daughter’s killer before I released him to the fiery pits of hell.

I eased the throttle forward, the rudder caught, and we began overtaking the crashing waves. The GPS computer read a distance of thirty-two miles, and at an estimated speed of thirty knots, that would put us at Matinicus Island at approximately 9:30 P.M.

An hour into the trip, Caleb and I were soaked with seawater down to our drawers. There were three or four times the boat would have flipped had it not been for the added weight of the water, which was coming in faster than the bilge could pump it out.

Caleb retreated to the small cabin and came up with two life preservers. These particular life preservers were made of a space-age aluminum, and the only life they preserved were those of the hop and the barley. I cracked open the can of Pig’s Eye and had never tasted anything so abhorrently satisfying. It appeared as though Frank was not a connoisseur of fine beer.

Caleb took the helm and I went in search of some actual life preservers. I found them under a cushioned seat and both Caleb and I began strapping on the bright orange vests. As I was pulling the life vest on, I stifled a laugh. What was I doing? If I didn’t make it to the island and fell at the hands of the Atlantic, then so be it. I’d read the script, and it was simple; either Tristen Grayer or Thomas Prescott was penciled in to die on this night. Tonight’s fate was not unforeseen.

Caleb had apparently drawn on the same conclusions and the both of us tossed the life jackets over the side of the boat. Drowning was supposedly the Queen of Spades in the deck of death, and I had the ingenious idea to tie the shotgun to my ankle using fishing line. I had the image of trying to pull the trigger on the shotgun with my big toe while attempting not to drown. I thought about the irony while finishing off my Pig’s Eye.

If it wasn’t for the GPS satellite, there would be no telling which direction the boat was headed. All manual operation had concluded when I’d pushed the throttle to full bore seconds after we’d escaped the harbor walls. The navigation screen began to beep loudly and Caleb informed me it was the five mile alert. I checked my watch, it was 9:13 P.M.

The ocean raged for the next ten minutes and I thought for certain we’d high-sided on several different occasions. But each time we went up, we eventually came down.

By 9:35 P.M. I still hadn’t seen a speck of land.

Caleb grabbed my arm and yelled, “The current is changing.”

He was right, it appeared we were now riding over the top of the waves, rather than running up them. Caleb stuck his arm out and screamed, “Look out.”

In hindsight, I’d assume he was pointing to the small rock bed thirty yards in front of us, not the island looming in the distance.

I yanked the wheel hard to the right, but it wasn’t nearly in time, and the Formula 500 hit
the rock formation hard. For an instant I thought I’d hit the rocks, but I was wet, salty, and hypothermic, which is consistent with a mid-Atlantic drowning.

I kept my head above water and craned my neck for any sign of Caleb. I screamed his name a couple times, but the howling wind, and raging seas, made for a futile effort. My eyes and ears might have well been painted on. I was engulfed in blackness. I couldn’t help but think, this blackness, this was Lacy’s life. I was enraged by the thought. Lacy would die before she would again see the beauty of this world.

I turned over on my back. Not if I could help it.