Nantucket Grand (27 page)

“I will.”

“And I must say, I find this line of inquiry rather insulting.”

“That's not really my problem, Mr. Pell.”

“It is if I complain to the Board of Selectmen.”

“Feel free.”

“I will. And the State Attorney General's office. They frown on police harassment.”

“Good luck making that case.”

We stared each other down for about twenty seconds. Finally he said “I think you should leave now. If you plan to arrest me, then do so. You'll make a prime ass out of yourself and I'd enjoy watching that little circus. If not, then disembark immediately, and never board this ship again unless you have either a fully authorized search warrant or suitably humble apology. You'll never procure the first—or perform the second. Because you're too incompetent for the one and you're too proud for the other. Not a good combination, Chief Kennis. Not a good combination at all. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have calls to make.”

The bo'sun led me out and handed me back my shoes with a small apologetic grimace of shared distaste that signaled, “I deal with this shit every day.”

I crossed the metal gangway and stood on the dock tying my shoelaces, a rudimentary set of skilled gestures most people never even think about past the age of four or five. I had been one of the last kids in Pre-K to master the art, though, and perhaps for that reason, I occasionally noticed the effortless double bow as I pulled it tight. It was nice to feel competent in some small way after having been so comprehensively outplayed and misdirected and dismissed by the tycoon captain of the
Nantucket Grand
.

I had badgered him, baited him, flattered him, threatened him, ambushed him, and tried to catch him in a series of lies, all to no avail. As I walked back along the wide public pier toward the Hy-Line docks and the shops and restaurants of Straight Wharf, it occurred to me that Pell might in fact be innocent. I wasn't missing the target with my little jabs—there was no target to hit. The fact was I wanted him to be guilty. In my own crazy way I was as culpable of profiling as any cop in Ferguson, Missouri, or Staten Island.

Sure, Pell was obscenely rich—that didn't make him a killer, or even a real estate speculator. He was an overbearing asshole but that had never been a crime. Objectively, in this case, I was the overbearing asshole, not Pell—railroading him the way Lonnie Fraker had tried to railroad Mason Taylor in the State Police interrogation room, and with as little proper cause or justification.

The man was right, I did owe him an apology. I had basically decided to go back and deliver it, take another tongue-lashing, slink home, and start re-thinking the whole mess from scratch.

But then I did the dishes.

Chapter Thirty

Circumstantial Evidence

The connection I made was visual, so I have to describe the setup at my kitchen sink.

I have a row of cups on hooks under the open shelving where I keep my plates and bowls. As I was soaping off the breakfast dishes I noticed that one of the cups had been hung up backward. The image rhymed, like a couplet in a poem, with some other jarring detail. But what was it? I stood there with the hot water running over my wrists and hands for more than a minute. Then I remembered.

I dried my hands, pulled out my iPhone and started scrolling through the pictures. When I got to the one I took in the upstairs study of the LoGran house on Eel Point Road, I spread it larger with two fingertips.

There it was: the venetian blinds were all closed, slats down. But one of them was closed with the slats up. They'd been opened and then shut in haste. Someone had been up there, standing lookout on the driveway, alerting Blount of Liam Phelan's arrival, after luring Andy Thayer into the big foyer and cutting his throat.

But who?

The only person beside Pell himself who had access to the big house was Sue Ann Pelzer, and she had been birding in Madaket when the murder went down.

Then, something Pell said on the boat exploded in my brain like one of those illegal cherry bomb fireworks we used to flush down the toilet—the same muted thud, the same ominous shudder in the pipes. The
Nantucket Grand
used aviation fuel, he said on the tour, boasting about the ship's speed and range and power.

Aviation fuel—the propellant for the arson fire at Andy's house! We had investigated the airport—what did we know? We thought jet fuel was for jets.

Yeah—jets and mega yachts.

David Trezize was right. It was Pell, it had to be Pell, all of it—the murders, the island-trashing land deal, maybe even the porn racket. That little conspiracy made the perfect cover, the perfect excuse for all the killings—a routine falling-out among thieves. No one would look farther than that, or dig any deeper. Scumbags kill scumbags—case closed.

But it was Pell's knife in the bushes, his fuel in the dirt around Andy Thayer's house, his name hidden behind the shell companies that controlled Blue Heron Estates. I thought of Jane's heroine Madeline Clark—I was in her situation now: I knew everything.

And I could prove nothing.

I needed help. I needed hard evidence and eyewitness testimony, tearful confessions, and smoking guns. I inventoried the players: Blount would never talk, assuming he was even aware of his boss' plans—Pell must have some unimaginable hold over him. Sue Ann Pelzer knew nothing, and the porn conspirators were ignorant of anything beyond their own sordid affairs. McAllister was a potential weak link, but a short jail term in a country club prison was a small price to pay for his piece of the Blue Heron deal. Besides, he was out of jail on a half-million-dollar bond and bracing him now without some compelling evidence would be pointless—a replay of my fiasco on the
Nantucket Grand.

No, there was only one person who could help me now, one person who could tell me everything, if I could only persuade her to talk.

So that's how I wound up stalking Daisy Pell, staking out Kathleen Lomax's house on Sherburne Turnpike in my unmarked cruiser, lying in wait like a spurned boyfriend, like David Trezize reading his ex-wife's diary. Lucky for me he'd done that. It set him on his own investigative trail and he had proved far more helpful unraveling the case than Lonnie Fraker and his State Police army, or even my own detectives. But stalkers had it easy—snooping and skulking and keeping out of sight. My task was different.

I had to pounce.

Predators spend most of their time waiting and I waited below the driveway of “Sea Breeze,” as the house was called, for almost three hours. I started to suspect that Daisy had left the car and gone for a walk into town, or a bike ride to the beach…or, more ominously, that she had left the MINI Cooper there as a decoy, to keep me stuck in place while she fled to the steamship terminal or the airport. A neat trick if she wanted to escape the island and my questions and her part, whatever it was, in the events of the last eight months. But she wasn't crazy enough to jump bail; I knew that.

My speculations were nothing but the product of boredom and an overactive imagination. A bad combination, the personal version of mixing a secluded town and a choice item of mendacious gossip. Still, gossip had a way of doubling back on itself, slipping up behind you with one sly push that made the silliest trumped-up lie turn true. That same thing could be happening to me right now. If I did a good enough job of treating Daisy like a panicky fugitive, I could easily turn her into one.

Down, boy. Sit tight and wait.

Good advice. Daisy skipped out of the house ten minutes later, calm and unconcerned. She didn't notice me and I almost missed her, checking e-mails on my phone. That's why I'd made a firm rule forbidding social media on stakeouts. Leave the smartphones at home. They make you stupid. Being somewhere else instead of where you were supposed to be—the central purpose of today's interconnected communications web—was the exact opposite of what you needed for a surveillance detail…as I had just proved.

That would give the boys a laugh back the cop shop.

Fuck that, I had no time to think about it. I threw myself out of the car and sprinted up the steep driveway. Daisy and I reached the MINI Cooper at the same moment.

“Daisy—”

“Chief, get in, take a drive with me. I need to talk.”

This was progress. I folded myself into the passenger side of the little car, which I have to say was startlingly roomy once I got inside. She drove down to Sherburne Turnpike and onto Cliff Road toward town. I rolled down my window and tasted the mild breeze. Most of the time, the best interrogation technique is to say nothing. Not that this was technically an interrogation. I wasn't sure what it was. I let Daisy take the lead.

“I wanted to apologize,” she said on Easton Street when we stopped at the corner of South Water Street for a pair of jogging super-moms pushing strollers. “I've been rude to you. I treated you badly and it really had nothing to do with you and I'm sorry.”

“No problem. I was only frustrated because I had some questions I wanted to ask.”

“I know.”

“And it didn't seem like you were ever going to answer them.”

She made a small apologetic grimace. “I'm not.”

“So, I'm not really—”

“I just hated that you thought I was a bitch.”

“Well, bitchy. On occasion. Like everyone else.”

“Thank you. That's a lovely distinction.”

We had skirted the bottom of town and started up Washington Street with the harbor on our left. It was crowded with boats, every mooring taken now. High summer.

“Here's the thing,” I said. “I have witnesses who place you at Howard McAllister's house in 'Sconset at a meeting of the group who—”

“I know what they were doing. Obviously.”

“I'm interested in what you were doing.”

“I was recruiting. Obviously. That's why you arrested me.”

We passed Marine Home Center as traffic slowed down moving toward the rotary. I took a breath and let it out slowly. “There's more to the story than that. Guidance counselor fast-tracking troubled kids into sex traffic and drug addiction? For money? For kicks? I don't buy it.”

“Thank you for that.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“So tell me the rest.”

“You tell me, Chief. I think you know it.”

“All right. It's about your stepfather. He and McAllister are friends.”

“Friends, I don't know. That's a term mostly used in human society.”

“But they're animals?”

“Animals have packs. They're loyal to the pack.”

“Then what?”

“I don't know, Chief. Call them partners. Business associates. People like my stepfather don't have friends, but they do have known associates.”

“Right.”

She drove on. We had rounded the rotary, and turned off onto Polpis Road.

“So when did you figure it out?” Daisy asked as we took the curves uphill past Moor's End farm. “I'm guessing…today.”

“This morning, actually.”

“So now you need me to talk.”

“You had a falling-out with your stepfather. But you still have unfinished business there. That's my theory.”

“And the origin of this theory?”

“I have a stepparent, too. A stepmother in my case.”

“Not all stepparents are horrible, Chief.”

“Absolutely. I'm thinking about a potential stepparent for my own kids right now. And she's delightful.”

“But yours?”

“She could go head to head with Pell any time.”

“Bad idea. She'd lose.”

“Tell me.”

“I can't. I don't want to. I wouldn't know where to start.”

And that was the moment I realized we were being followed.

She turned to glance at me. “What?”

“Check your rearview mirror. You see that gray SUV behind us?”

“The Escalade?”

“Right.”

“What about it?”

“It's been tailing us since…well, since we left your house obviously. I first noticed it on Washington Street. But I mean—a gray SUV. It's like noticing a shingled house. But they followed us around the rotary, and they're still back there.”

“Who is it?”

“I was going to ask you. Recognize the car?”

She shook her head, studying the mirror. “No. My people drive Beemers—and the occasional Lexus.”

I checked behind us. They were closing the distance.

“Who are they chasing?” Daisy said. “Me or you?”

“Maybe they were waiting until they got us both together. They saw us talking at Andy's funeral. The detective was there. Louis Berman.”

“Shit. This is exactly what I was talking about.”

“I must have led them right to Kathleen's house today.”

“Shit shit shit. They're going to kill us.”

“Daisy—”

“I know Jonathan Pell. This is how he operates.”

“Okay, he's got my stepmother beat.”

She snorted. “You have no idea.”

“Maybe they're just trying to scare you. Get you back in line.”

“Maybe. Let's hope.”

With a rising growl from its big V-8 engine the Escalade rammed the back of our car. The jolt banged me back against my seat and then forward. The seat belt snapped tight across my shoulders. Daisy yelped, but managed to steer the little car out of its skid.

Another impact. Daisy screamed but kept us on the road. The Escalade pulled up next to us. I couldn't see anything through the tinted windows.

“Oh, my God,” she squealed. “They're going to run us off the road!”

We came around a turn where a landscaper's truck forced the Escalade back into its own lane behind us with an angry bleat of its horn. They were going slowly, dragging a trailer of mowers. A line of cars straggled behind them.

The reprieve didn't last long, and I quickly realized the new danger: every car going the other way on Polpis Road had piled up behind that truck. Once the last of the traffic passed us, the Escalade would get a shot at clear road.

They sensed it, too, and roared up beside us, twisting the wheel sideways. A sickening smack of metal on metal and Daisy was off the asphalt, wheels chattering on the sandy grass of the shoulder, swerving toward the start of a split-rail fence. She wrestled the car back on the road as the fence blurred past us, then hit the brakes. The big SUV surged ahead of us—another respite. We flew past the Quidnet turnoff.

She was chanting, “What do we do, what do we do what do we do?”

They braked to come beside us again.

“Floor it,” I shouted. We pulled ahead and I remembered almost flipping my NPD Ford Explorer on New Lane the day before. We were about to hit one of the only other sections of road on the entire island where a small, low-slung car like Daisy's could have a chance against a top-heavy SUV. I had almost toppled that same NPD Explorer on this upcoming set of “S” curves when I first arrived on the island, siren-screaming on my way to Hoick's Hollow to make sure my first drug bust didn't turn into a firefight.

“Hit these next turns as fast as you can,” I said.

They bumped the back of the car again. “I can't! I'll flip it!”

“No, you won't. You'll flip them. Stamp on it! Accelerate into this turn. Hit it hard.”

She did it and the inertia slapped me back against my seat like a big hand.

“Brake a little, then go! Go go go!”

She took the next turn fast, too fast I thought for a second as the little car rocked and righted itself. I turned back to see the Escalade tilt on its wheels, teeter out of control for a heart-stopping second, and then keel over sideways. It hit the pavement with a tearing screech and slid off the road onto the grass.

Daisy let out a shout of glee. “We did it!”

The accident vanished behind us around the next turn.

“Go back,” I said.

“What? Are you kidding? We have to get out of here!”

“Go back. I'm not leaving the scene of an accident.” I dug my cellphone out of my pocket And called the station. I got Barnaby Toll on the line. “We have a one-car crash just beyond Quidnet on the Polpis Road. Send two cruisers and an ambulance. Proceed with caution. Victims possibly armed and dangerous.”

“Okay, yes sir, right away, I'm on it.”

I disconnected and turned back to Daisy. “I mean it. Go back.”

“You just said they could be armed and dangerous!”

“They're probably unconscious. They might need CPR. They could be bleeding. They might need a tourniquet. I have to find out. It's my job. If you're afraid, I understand. Just get me close and let me out.”