Dreams in the Key of Blue (16 page)

“What about Stuart Gilman?” I asked.

“Never met him. I know the name, though. He’s MI’s all-purpose ‘hands-on’ man.”

“What does that mean?”

“He does everything but plunge the toilets. Maybe he does that, too.”

“The owner and CEO seems to be something of a mystery,” I said.

“Melanie Martin,” Jacobs nodded. “Never laid eyes on her. She has to be smart. She was in business only a year
when they broke ground on that fortress they call corporate headquarters. She’s done a lot for the city, restoring old buildings, funding a women’s health center, writing big checks for the arts. I can’t say anything critical of her, except that her company sucks.”

Jacobs stabbed french fries with her fork and soaked them with ketchup. “You getting the Markham updates, Herb?”

“Last I knew was the sighting in Connecticut.”

“Plenty of time to get up this way.”

“Karen Jasper’s convinced.”

Jacobs nearly choked and then burst into laughter. “You got the frustrated feebie on it, huh? Jesus, Herb. You got more trouble than I thought.”

“She seems smart enough,” Jaworski protested. “She doesn’t care for Lucas working the case, but she’s helped on a lot of tough ones around the state.”

“All she knows how to do is play computer games, organize her file folders, and call in the feds. She’s suckin’ up because she wants to graduate from here to there. No fuckin’ help from that one, pardon my French. Oughta spend more time on her red hair and less on red herrings. Had her down here twice last year. She types shit into that laptop and says the butler did it. Trouble is, there ain’t no butler.”

Oh, yes. I imagine I was looking quite smug.

Jacobs inhaled the last of her fries and yelled for the check.

“The select board on your back?”

Jaworski snorted. “Nothing new there. They wanted me to retire five years ago. Hubble Saymes chairs the board. He says that new crimes require new cops.”

“Hubble’s full of shit. Couple of years ago, I popped his kid on a possession charge. Hubble called in every chit
he had. His pothead kid still got court diversion, same as all the others.”

“You follow up on Dorman at this end,” Jaworski said. “We’ll take a look at his history up our way.”

She nodded, then looked at me. “So, Doc, when do you do your magic?”

I laughed. “Wish I could.”

“Bullshit,” she snapped as she stood and yanked up her jeans. “I read your profile on the Markham murders first time around. You wrote it a long time before the bastard got nailed. I still think murder profiling’s a little shit and a lot of hocus-pocus, but you had him pegged. You think it’s him again?”

“I have my doubts.”

“So do I. Somebody should shoot the bastard anyway.”

The waitress brought the check and Jacobs grabbed it. “You want to know what I think?”

“Sure,” I said, wondering what was coming next.

“Karen Jasper did it,” she said, and erupted in choking laughter.

“SWING BY MARTIN INTERNATIONAL,” I SAID TO JAWORSKI
as we drove out of the city.

“Plan to. I’ve never seen the place.”

“What’s with this Saymes character?”

“It’s like I told Jacobs,” he said. “Hubble Saymes thinks I’m too old.”

“Is he responsible for the ‘dump Jaworski’ radio editorial?”

“His wife owns the station. Saymes says the public sector should be run with the same businesslike efficiency as his insurance agency. He wants a forty-year-old chief
with experience and degrees in criminology and public administration. The rest of the board didn’t pay any attention to Saymes until these murders.”

“I’ve seen young hotshots hobbled by serial murder cases,” I said. “Education, experience, age… none of it matters when you’re dealing with a psychopath. They don’t operate according to our logic. That’s why they’re always a step ahead. We follow a few threads and hope they lead us in the right direction.”

“Tell that to Saymes.”

“He wouldn’t listen to me, either,” I said.

“We had a woman come in who said she had information about the murders. Turned out she’s an astrologer, and Mercury’s screwing around with Pluto. A guy came in this morning after driving all the way from Newport, Rhode Island. Says he got hit on the head when he was a kid and now he has visions. I was staring out the window at the ocean while he was telling Jasper that our killer lives near a body of water. Maybe it ain’t efficient, but we don’t know what someone’s going to say unless we take the time to listen.”

Five minutes later we sat in the crowded parking lot in front of a fenced-in, low brick building.

“There’s no sign,” Jaworski said. “How’s anybody supposed to know what it is?”

“Maybe we’re not supposed to know.”

I gazed at the gated fortress and watched as two German shepherds approached the razor-wire-topped fence. “What’s the need for that kind of security?” I muttered.

“Keeps out people like us. You think there’s a direct connection between MI and the murders?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been a fan of coincidence. This outfit keeps coming up.”

I opened the car door. “I’ll be right back.”

As I walked to the gate, the dogs followed silently on
their side of the fence. I pressed the buzzer beneath a small plastic sign that read
INFORMATION
. A woman’s metallic voice blatted from a shielded speaker. “Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“My name is Lucas Frank. I’d like to see Melanie Martin.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

She was not a recording, but the experience was unsettling—a crisp, disembodied voice similar to a tape you would expect to hear when dialing the IRS. “Yes,” I lied. “I have an appointment.”

“I have no record of any appointment in your name, sir.”

“Then no. Ms. Martin is not expecting me.”

“This is a secure facility, and I must ask you to leave the grounds immediately. The Portland police will be notified of the name you have given and the license number of the automobile in which you arrived.”

In my best, post-ironic, clipped British accent I asked, “Are you doing anything for dinner, love?”

I walked back to the car and felt like pissing over the top of it. “Let’s head north,” I said to Jaworski.

“This the right place?”

“It’s either Martin International or the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

Jaworski looked at me. “Bastards, are they?”

“They just called in your plate to the Portland P.D.” “Must be we don’t look Iraqi,” he grumbled as he opened a stick of cinnamon gum, popped it into his mouth, and guided the cruiser out of the parking lot.

WE DROVE IN SILENCE AS WE APPROACHED THE TURN
onto the straightaway to Ragged Harbor. Gift shops and food stands lined the road, offering everything from
wine-colored murgatroyds—lawn ornaments consisting of glass balls on plaster pedestals—to neon-red hot dogs.

The commercial area gave way to mudflats and eel-grass marshes on both sides of the two-lane road.

“Did you know that Jaycie Waylon was an MI intern?” I asked.

“I saw that in one of the reports.”

“Didn’t you have an internship there?” Kai Lin asked.

“Still do, but I’ve never met Ms. Martin.”

“Why doesn’t anyone ever meet Melanie Martin?” I asked.

“Guess she doesn’t want to be met.”

“From the unofficial welcoming committee.”

“Jaycie Waylon and three of her friends came by the house the first night I was there. They brought me a gift, a carved whalebone letter opener.”

“Scrimshaw? Sounds pricey even for the kids on the hill.”

“There’s a shipwreck scene on the blade.”

“There’s stories behind all that stuff. I don’t know ‘em. Never had much interest. If you get time to play tourist, that little shack ahead on the left is Ben Loudermilk’s. Ben’s a silversmith, but he sells scrimshaw. He knows all the folk tales.”

Loudermilk’s one-room shop squatted at the edge of the tidal flats. His weathered sign offered works in silver, pewter, and scrimshaw.

Delicately etched whalebone. A whaling ship yawing in windblown seas. A sperm whale harnessed on the side of the ship. A giant serpent prepared to swallow it all.

“Why you thinking about that now?”

“I’m not. I’ve moved on.”

“What?”

I imagined the students’ apartment and retraced my
movements when I’d walked through the crime scene. “Let’s stop at the house,” I said.

“I swear I can’t follow your head.”

“I’m ready to spend more time there,” I said. “Not in my head. In the apartment.”

“Lucas, in maybe thirty seconds you went from MI, to whalebone, to murder.”

“It’s not asking why that allows me to speedthink,” I teased.

“I ain’t sayin’ it’s a talent,” he shot back.

Jaworski made the left turn onto Crescent Street and skirted the roadblock where one of his officers talked with two reporters. He stopped the car in front of 42 Crescent, and sorted keys as we walked to the porch.

Jaworski remained by the apartment door. I crossed the living room to my left, stood between the two beds, and reenacted the shooting as I had done at my house.

Squeeze off a single round to my left, another to my right. Take two steps back, aim at Jaycie across the living room.

You were confident of your shot. You knew that she went down dead, and you were not concerned about time.

I wandered into the bathroom. Black fingerprint powder coated the bathtub, sink, counter, toilet, walls, and towel racks. The counter held the usual array of toothpaste, brushes, shampoo, mouthwash. Nothing caught my attention, so I moved to Jaycie’s room.

You methodically cut away the nightgown and placed it
over the
chair’s arm. You arranged the body, and you did not cover Jaycie.

“What time did the guys in the upstairs unit return from the concert?”

“They estimated three
A
.
M
.”

“The neighbor, Luther Peterson, saw the young man with the knapsack walk to his Volvo at three-thirty.”

You heard the guys returning from the concert, didn’t you? You listened, but you were not concerned.

“An earthquake wouldn’t have distracted Dorman’s killer,” I said.

It
didn’t matter if someone came to the door. You would have killed them all.

“Who rented the video?” I asked.

Jaworski flipped open his notebook. “Kiss the
Girls,”
he muttered. “Jaycie did.”

“When?”

“Saturday at eight-fifty
P.M.”

“She was here, studying and listening to music,” I reminded him. “Someone used her card.” “The killer?”

You curled up on the sofa, ate your orange, and watched a good movie. Was it your selection?
“Possibly.”

I had a decent reconstruction of the triple murder and could begin to consider what the criminology types call “offender characteristics.”

You completed your chores, patiently attended to the decorative details, then relaxed.

“This stinks of Stanley Markham,” Jaworski said.

“It does and it doesn’t,” I said with a sigh.

As Jaworski and I stepped onto the porch, a shout from farther out Crescent Street near the lobster pound snapped my head around. A man in a police uniform ran toward us, waving his arms. His hat blew off his head.

“That’s young Dickie Stevens,” Jaworski said. “I just made him corporal. What the hell’s he doing?”

We stepped into the street.

Stevens stopped running, bent at the waist, vomited, then resumed an awkward jog. He was forty yards away, still yelling as he staggered along the road.

Finally, I understood what he was saying.

“His face,” Stevens bawled, his arms raised in the air as if he were pleading with the heavens. “Somebody shot him in the face.”

Jaworski and I converged on Stevens as the corporal’s knees buckled and he fell to the pavement.

“Oh my God,” the young cop moaned. “What is happening here?”

Two news reporters standing behind the Crescent Street barricade stiffened to alert status. One of them raised a camera, the other a cell phone.

Jaworski’s face glowed an unhealthy purple. “Dickie,” the chief began.

“He’s still in there,” Stevens gasped. “I heard noise at the back of the house. Last place on the right before the lobster pound.”

Jaworski grabbed Stevens’s portable and called for backup, and medical attention for his corporal. “Sounds like we got one dead in there that we know of,” he growled into the radio. “Shooter possibly on the scene.”

He handed me his nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. “You know how to operate one of these?”

I nodded.

Jaworski spit out his cinnamon gum, grabbed a double-barreled shotgun from the trunk of his cruiser, rammed two slugs into it, and led the way down Crescent.

The house was a white Cape Cod, its red door standing open.

“You go in the front the way Dickie did,” Jaworski said. “I’ll come in along the seawall out back.”

I watched as Jaworski made his unsteady trek through a yard of sea-thrown rocks. His eyes moved from window to window along the side of the house. He held the shotgun like someone prepared to blast clay pigeons from the
sky. Anything that moved back there ran the risk of getting cut in half.

I released the nine’s safety, engaged its action, and stepped through the open door into a narrow hall with a flight of stairs on the right and an archway ahead on the left. I slid along the wall to the arch and peered around the corner at a man lying on the living room floor, his face bloodcovered and unrecognizable.

The dead man’s multicolored T-shirt bore the logo of the Grateful Dead and the words “Highgate, Vermont, Keep On Truckin’.”

Steve Weld.

I stepped into the room in time to see Jaworski slip through the back door into the kitchen. He signaled that he was headed upstairs.

I knelt beside Weld and made the futile gesture of feeling his throat for a pulse. The body was warm with no rigor, but the soul had made its exit.

I sighed deeply. What a waste.