Ice Cap (19 page)

“That would defeat the purpose.”

*   *   *

After showering and eating, I left fully restored and filled with a renewed sense of mission. My existence had meaning, and my vocation a true purpose on earth. I would not be a punching bag for my capricious emotions or a sap for my conniving brain. Rather, I'd press the whole team into a unified effort to answer every goddamned question in my little notebook, driven by a belief that however many possibilities may present themselves, there can only be one truth in the world.

It was my job to get as close to that as humanly possible.

*   *   *

I drove over to Sagaponack under pale, overcast skies. I'd gotten used to the narrowed roadways by this time, and played the “You go first, no I'll go first” game with oncoming traffic almost by reflex. I listened to public radio and let the Volvo find its own way to Dayna Red's place.

I'd barely turned into the long driveway when Misty appeared out of nowhere and chased alongside the car all the way to the red barn. I got a nice greeting when I opened the door. Actually, she jumped up into my lap, then into the passenger seat, where she stood and looked out the windshield. I asked her if she wanted to go for a ride, then regretted it when she looked back at me with unrestrained enthusiasm.

“Maybe later, kid. We'll have to clear it with your mother.”

She followed me to the side door of the barn. Dayna answered my knock with a look that said she was almost as glad to see me as Misty was.

“Hi, there. What a treat,” she said.

“Not so fast. You haven't heard why I'm here.”

“Come in, come in,” she said, waving me through the door. Misty slid along in my wake. “I can't imagine anything bad. You're always such fun.”

We sat in her cozy office, scented with the aroma of sawdust and greased machinery. Misty immediately presented me with her tennis ball but relented without complaint at a single word from Dayna.

“Maybe you could toss it a few times before you leave,” she said to me. “It's her raison d'être.”

“Totally there,” I said. “I've been grappling with that myself recently.”

“Is that why you're here?”

“Sort of. I was hoping you could tell a lie for me.”

“Depends on the lie.”

“Of course,” I said. “I want to go to the Buczek place, but I've already been back once, and I'm afraid if I go again, I'll get a lot of resistance. I can force them with a subpoena, but that's way too heavy-handed at this point and I'd rather not turn Tad's widow into an enemy.”

“You said ‘them.'”

“She's got two hired hands living there, a married couple—handyman and housekeeper. Longtime employees of Tad's. I don't know what they think of Zina, but they have a proprietary air about them.”

“So what do you want me to do?” she asked.

“Tell a tiny lie. That you lost something the night you were over there and want to come look for it. What kind of thing, I don't know, but I bet you can come up with something.”

Do you know people who sometimes shake their head when they really mean to nod? Dayna was one of those people, sinking my heart before sending it aloft.

“Absolutely. No problem. Happy to do it. When?”

“Now?”

She reached over and slapped me on the knee.

“Why not? All I got scheduled is ripping about a million board feet of seven-quarter poplar, not even a real hardwood, much less an endangered species. Let's do it. Can I bring Misty? She'll stay in the truck.”

I followed Dayna to the commercial strip on County Road 39, where I left my Volvo in the parking lot of an electrical supply company and joined her and Misty in the truck. The cab smelled like her shop and a little like wet border collie, both of which were pleasing to the nose. Otherwise it was clean and well-kept, distinguishing it from other tradesmen's trucks I'd climbed into.

An iPod was jacked into the stereo, playing Alison Krauss.

“Girl was like a child prodigy, nationally ranked fiddle player,” said Dayna, pointing to the stereo, “and all anyone knows up North is she's cute and can sing.”

“Too many of us labor in the shadows rather than be called to greatness.”

She looked at me. “Damn, that's good,” she said.

“Thanks. I was an English major. That's the kind of thing they teach us to say.”

“I majored in the hippie arts and the testing of illegal substances. Cured of that now, but sometimes I miss it.”

Once I get to know you a little better, I thought, we can fix that.

“How about you?” I asked Misty.

“She's strung out on tennis balls and kibble, so don't ask her.”

“What are you going to tell the Buczek people you lost?”

“My retractable plow-blade stabilizer. Everyone knows you can get by without those things, but it's sure a nice-to-have,” she said.

“So they exist.”

“Of course not. Where'd be the fun?”

On the way to Tad's she took me through a condensed version of her life story, which included a lot more than counterculture zest and excess. She and Jeffery had traveled the world for three years, touring every continent and living by their wits and tolerance for discomfort and insecurity. I marvel at stories like this, having spent nearly all my days in Southampton, minus college and law school and those rare weeks in Europe, mostly France. It made me feel stolid and fixed, like a tree stump or the village war memorial.

I shared that with her.

“Nah,” she said. “I've barely read a book in twenty years. What the hell do I know?”

On the way there, I partially broke my call-ahead rule by calling to say we were on our way. Saline had answered the phone and I explained to her the situation. She seemed unhappy with the request but gave us the go-ahead.

“I'll tell Fred. He gets agitated when people wander around the property like it's the town park,” she said.

“Understand that. We'll make it quick.”

When we reached the entrance to the compound, Dayna stopped before pulling into the drive.

“So what are we looking for, in reality?” she asked.

“I don't know.” It was the honest answer. “I just want to take another look. If you put in the effort, places will tell you things.”

“I know some indigenous peoples who could help with that. Consciousness expanding–wise,” said Dayna.

“Let's see how standard consciousness works first.”

I directed her down the long drive, around the hairpin turn, and over to the cleared space next to the pergola. We got out of the truck, leaving Misty behind, who watched us move away with a stare that could have bored holes in the glass. I led Dayna to the picnic table where Franco had laid out Tad like a side of beef, then up the path to Hamburger Hill, where all the action apparently occurred.

The contours of the disturbed snow and footfalls had become even less defined as the weather continued to erode the snowpack. I'd seen it plenty, yet now would have had a hard time pointing out any important features. The crime scene was evaporating before our eyes.

“What am I missing?” I asked Dayna. “Is it gone forever?”

“I don't know,” she said. “What was here before?”

“There were a bunch of footprints between here and where the staff has a house and storage barn. That night, I counted them, and they added up to Franco's claim that he came here, went back to the barn, then returned. This area here, the main crime scene, was too covered in tracks to make anything out, though all the bloody ice, and the chunk heaved over there”—I pointed to a nearly nonexistent depression—“proves Tad was killed here. Franco says he dragged him from here down to the pergola”—I pointed down the hill—“where we saw him on the picnic table.”

“So no footprints from here to the pergola,” said Dayna.

“No. There wouldn't be any. None had been made, and if they had, dragging Tad down there would have wiped them out.”

I looked down the broad swath of snow flattened by the sliding tarp, weighted by a two-hundred-plus-pound dead body.

Dayna was looking at me like she was reluctant to say something.

“You think there might have been footprints,” I said.

“If Franco found Tad by approaching from this direction,” said Dayna, crossing the crime scene and stalking a few paces toward the staff housing, “how could there be footprints on the other side? Did someone coming from the pergola meet him up here?”

“And why cover them up,” I said, then let myself come back to earth. “Of course, this is all rank speculation. There's absolutely no physical evidence to support it whatsoever.”

Dayna kept looking around.

“This is definitely not my gig,” she said. “But I think there's something to this.”

I told her she'd come up with an intriguing insight.

“Brilliant, really,” I said aloud, and then to myself, Even if it's true, where does that leave us? Any closer to an explanation?

Dayna was clearly pleased by this, but she had the good graces to leave it at that and not try to launch another round of speculation. We poked around a little more, then drifted back to the truck. Misty was glad to see us, spinning around on the bench seat as Dayna unlocked the doors. She had a chance to pee before we took off again, our progress cut off by Fred Lumsden, whose own truck approached from the road. We both stopped and he got out of his truck and walked up to my door.

“Hi, Fred.”

“Saline told me you were looking for something. Find it?”

I shook my head, sadly.

“Nobody's finding anything till spring, I'm afraid,” I told him.

“Maybe you could describe what it is,” he said to Dayna. “I'll keep my eye out.”

“That's good of you,” she said. “But it's a pretty unusual beast. If you got an e-mail address, I could send you a picture.”

He rummaged around his jacket pockets until he came up with a piece of paper. He wrote down his address and handed it to Dayna.

“Saline and I share the same e-mail,” he said, looking at both of us as if warning not to write anything indiscreet, the world's least likely possibility.

“Got it,” said Dayna, tossing the card onto her dashboard. “I'll be in touch.”

And then she drove away, heaving her truck around Fred's by riding up high on the snowbank, fighting to keep the wheels in sync as they coped with the different angles and surfaces. Fred stood and watched us go, hands at his sides and inner thoughts enclosed within layers of canvas, flannel, and quilted down vest and fur-lined parka.

 

14

When I got back to my office, there was a bag of cabbage and komatsuna on the stoop and an envelope stuck to my door with a piece of duct tape. I used my teeth to pull off my glove and opened the envelope, handling it by the edges. The note said, “We're still watching. Signed, your reverse gardian angels.”

I was incredulous.

“That may be, geniuses, but now I'm watching you,” I said out loud, banging in the code, dashing up the stairs and through the next door to the office. I plopped down in front of the monitor and rewound the tape. I booted up the computer and started downloading the last twenty-four hours into the editing program. The little dialog box told me to wait while it transferred the files, which was a mighty task. I jumped up, got out of my coat and hat, and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, just to burn the time.

Could it be, I asked, that those jerks are even stupider than Fleming's boys, that they didn't realize there was a security camera trained on the door? They did spell guardian wrong. That was an encouraging sign.

As I sat back down, the screen filled with about a dozen little windows, segments of the retrieved video that showed any change from the fixed background. Most were me coming and going, the FedEx guy, squirrels hopping through the snow, and Mr. Sato leaving me the bagful of leftover chopped vegetables. And then there were two guys who looked like they'd been hired by a casting agency to play the parts of Ike and Connie, though aside from body type it was a poor match. The Ike character was all Caucasian, with slicked black hair and a pale, uneven complexion. He wore a dark full-length coat that looked like wool. His eyes shifted from side to side while his partner wrote out the note and stuffed it in the envelope, then ripped off a piece of duct tape and clumsily stuck it to the door.

The lousy speller was heavy like Connie, but much taller, with a round head covered in gray buzz-cut hair. Neither looked at the camera peering through its pinhole just above the doorjamb, confirming their oversight.

Professionals plying the crime-and-punishment trades knew this fundamental fact: Most criminals, especially hired muscle, were pretty stupid. You met the occasional Franco Raffini, or an entrepreneur like Ivor Fleming, or a street kid who could have run Harvard had life's lottery put him in the right household, but on the whole, they're mostly dumb as stumps.

I think I was actually whistling with excitement as I selected the clearest shots of their faces and converted the images to JPEGs and saved them to my laptop's hard drive. I even started singing a little song that went something like, “
Gonna getcha, gonna getcha, look out you dumb bastards, we're gonna getcha now…”
but then stopped, disturbed by my lousy singing voice.

I pulled out my cell and called Joe Sullivan.

“You're ready to start plea bargaining?” he asked when he picked up the phone.

“No. Confessing. Not Franco, me. But I need to do it face-to-face.”

“I thought we had Father Dent for that,” said Sullivan.

“This is more your province.”

“What did you do? How many times do we have to warn you about obstruction? What is it with you, a compulsion?”

“It's not like that. Just let me get off the phone and come see you.”