Nantucket Grand (28 page)

“You're out of uniform. You're unarmed! What about ‘proceed with caution'?”

My gun was safely locked up at home. Much to my assistant chief's annoyance, I never carried it without some compelling reason, and a chat with Daisy hadn't qualified. Haden always wore his, off-duty or on, because, as he put it, “things can go sideways anytime.”

This moment would justify his paranoia. But if you had a gun, you tended to use it, even when you shouldn't. It was the quick, easy solution, but it caused more problems than it fixed. We had argued about the topic for years.

All I said to Daisy was, “I always proceed with caution.”

“Jesus Christ. At least we won't be outnumbered.”

She spun the car around. We drove back, not talking, catching our breaths, getting ready.

The big SUV lay sideways across the bike path like a wounded animal. We pulled over and I climbed out of the car. Daisy moved to join me. I leaned back in the window. “Wait here.”

“But—”

I jabbed the flat of my palm at her. “Stay.”

She pouted at me, fully recovered from the incident, or so it seemed. “Woof, woof.”

I crab-walked to the Escalade, looked down through the side window. They were out, all right. They had banged against each other and the windows like shoes in a dryer. The glass was starred, cracked, and bloody, with more blood on their clothes and the leather seats. A Glock 9mm autoloader and an iPhone rested on the glass of the driver's side window.

Daisy appeared behind me. Bad dog.

“They should have worn seat belts,” she said.

I nodded. “It's a good lesson in basic automobile safety. Always strap in when you're planning to commit vehicular homicide on a crowded road.”

“Are they okay?”

“They're breathing.”

“Should we try to get them out?”

“I don't want to move them unless the engine starts smoking. We'll leave that to the EMTs.”

She shook her head, registering the lightning events of the last few minutes with distant thunder of a sigh. “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“That was unbelievable.”

“Do you recognize them?”

She went up on tiptoe for a good look down. “It's hard to tell with all the blood. But no.”

“Hired hitters out of Boston, probably. But who sent them?”

“I think we both know the answer to that.”

I heard sirens in the distance. “We're almost done here.”

She put a hand on my arm. “You were amazing. Talking me through it. I guess that's what they mean when they say riding shotgun.”

“Except I didn't have a gun.”

“You didn't need a gun, Chief. That was the coolest part.”

I gently removed her hand and stepped back. Her sensuality was a physical force, like the acceleration that had pressed me against my seat when she floored the gas pedal. We were both giddy, nervous, coming down from the adrenaline rush. We could easily have another type of accident. A head-on crash.

I badly needed that not to happen. “Here they are,” I said. The cavalry arriving in the nick of time.

The EMTs checked us out. One of them was John Macy, Todd's younger brother. I hadn't seen him since a bomb went off at the Steamship Authority the summer before. Bob Coffin and I helped him and his assistant pull the victims out of the car. The men were half-conscious, groaning and bleating in pain as we angled them out of the side door and eased them onto the grass.

John did a quick catalogue: concussions, broken noses and cheekbones, a broken collar bone, assorted cracked ribs. Severe lacerations, a fractured wrist, possible internal injuries. Five minutes later he and his partner had strapped the men onto stretchers, slid them into the ambulance, and driven away.

I gave Bob Coffin a bowdlerized version of what had happened: a speeding car glimpsed in the rearview as it took a turn too fast and flipped. Daisy slipped me a raised eyebrow as I told the story, but information regarding this case was now on a need-to-know basis and Bob Coffin didn't need to know anything. Neither did the rest of the station, and anything I told Bob would spread like jam on toast. Mmmm, delicious. Another slice of law enforcement gossip, please.

Not today. Finally the boys drove off and left us alone, with a Nantucket Auto Body tow truck on the way for the SUV. Lonnie's forensics team would check the Escalade when it reached the station garage. I was happy to leave it to them. My day was done.

We stood on the grass and watched as traffic slowed briefly to check out the overturned behemoth and then sped on. Two deer bounded across the road, nearly causing another accident.

“They were trying to kill me,” Daisy said.

“We don't know that. Look on the bright side. They may have just been trying to kill me.”

“No, no. They wanted to kill me. It was my car. They'll do it, next time.”

“There won't be a next time for those guys.”

“There'll be other guys. There's no shortage of…guys. If you have the money to pay them.”

I nodded “You should think about what you want to do next.” It was just a prod, I knew she'd already decided.

“I want to help you. I want to burn my stepfather to the ground. But first I have to tell you my story. I need you to understand it.”

“You told me you didn't know where to begin.”

“That was a lie. I know exactly where to begin. At the beginning, like every good story. And it is a good story, at least. I could tell it at The Moth, if they were X-rated. Do we have to go to the station? Will there be tape recordings and papers to sign and lawyers and…all that?”

“Not yet.” I still wanted to keep this under wraps for the moment. There might be a spy a the cop shop and even if there wasn't, I didn't trust anyone except Haden Krakauer to keep this information secure. Pell knew too much about police business already. We drove to a secluded stretch of beach she knew about in Squam and we settled in on the warm sand and stared into the calm blue-green ocean, and I listened and Daisy told me everything.

Chapter Thirty-one

Daisy's Story

“I did the first job for my stepfather six years to the day after he touched me for the first time. I was sixteen. The incest had been going on since my tenth birthday—January 24th, 1991. I was nine when my mom married him. So he didn't waste much time. It was a whirlwind courtship. My father had died two years before. We were broke. My mother met Pell working for the company that catered some big party in Montauk. One minute she was bussing dishes, the next minute she was fucking this millionaire on the beach. I remember when she came home, I was on the couch, I'd been trying to wait up for her but I fell asleep with the TV on. I woke up when I heard her come in. She looked so happy and I said, ‘What happened, Mom?' And she twirled around the little living room and laughed and said, ‘I got fired.'

“They were married a month later and it was like…winning the lottery, or—or like that fantasy where you find out you're really a princess. Suddenly we were living on Beekman Place and my room was bigger than our old apartment and I was going to Brearly and all the girls liked me and I had an allowance and I could buy all the clothes I wanted. We went to concerts—I'd never been to a concert before! My first one was…we saw Madonna in New Jersey, at the Brendan Byrne Arena. It's called the Izod Center now. The Blonde Ambition tour. I couldn't talk for two weeks, I screamed so much. I adored Pell, he'd saved our lives, he'd given us this whole new secret world of limousines and country houses on the beach and people who did your laundry and playing tennis on the roof at the CityView racquet club and lunches at Lord & Taylor and—and—Italian spring water and sweet butter and having to learn which fork to use for which course at dinner.

“I guess I was sort of in love with Pell right from the start and I'd always been jealous of my mother so I liked it when he flirted with me, and told me I was pretty. But he could be cold. He was moody. He could be demanding and tough and mean. He'd critique my homework and make me do it over and over again until he was satisfied. He wouldn't tell me what was wrong. I had to guess. Once it was the indentations. I wasn't indenting far enough. I went to bed crying that night but he explained everything in the morning and helped me fix it. When he slipped his hand under my skirt after my birthday party, it felt good. I was happy. He liked me. He was sweet and gentle when he touched me. And it gave me power. I figured that out right away. I could use his feelings to get what I wanted. And it wasn't just him.”

She shifted herself on the sand and her skirt slid up her thighs. I looked away, out to sea.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “I'm doing it to you now. I can't help myself. It's pathetic.”

I was about to say, pathetic? Most women would kill for legs like that, but I thought better of it. She didn't need a compliment and even the appearance of flirtation would be toxic. I said nothing. She seemed to be forming sentences and discarding them.

“Most people would enjoy being seduced,” I said finally. “I don't really see what—”

“But I do it with everyone, Henry. Can I call you Henry?”

“Sure, yes. Absolutely.”

“Thanks. What I'm saying is…I seduce the lady at the drug store counter, the paper boy, the old man next door. Everybody. I even know why. I've had the million hours of therapy. I know all my syndromes and issues and pathologies. I learned them by heart. It all comes from Pell—you never could have guessed that one. It's such a cliché. But cliché is like a rank, it's earned, you know what I mean? Some idea gets promoted by being repeated over and over and by being true every time, until it's so true for so long we're just sick of it. But it's still true. Seduction was the only way to please Pell, and it worked really well, so I never bothered to learn any other techniques. But knowing that stuff doesn't help me. That's the real problem. It doesn't get me anywhere. It doesn't change anything. I'm still flashing the police chief when I should be helping him with this case and explaining why we both almost got killed today.”

I held up a hand to slow her down. “Let's go back. Pell started touching you when you were ten.”

“I got older and it didn't stop. It got worse. I hardly ate for a year. I started flunking at school. I was scared of him. He warned me not to tell mom, but I finally did. And this wasn't some hokey ‘recovered memory'—this was stuff that happened yesterday. But she didn't get it, she didn't believe me. She was furious. She didn't talk to me for weeks. About a month later she caught us. I was wearing nothing but one of his t-shirts and he had his hand between my legs. She still didn't believe it. She said we were ‘rough-housing.'

She rubbed her cheekbones, dug her fingertips under her eyes, breathing in and out. I didn't speak. I just waited. Two seals surfaced and dove again twenty yards out to sea. They were adorable but they drew the sharks.

“The worst part,” Daisy said at last, “was afterward. He'd be colder than ever, as if I was some stray his wife had adopted against his will. Any little thing I did that was particular to me, any thought I expressed, any enthusiasm I showed, any opinion—he'd go into a rage. So I had to sort of not be there. That was the trick—to disappear, to become this sort of—this generic person. The fact that I'd be grown up in about a million years wasn't much comfort.”

“Why didn't you run away from home?”

“I did. Why didn't she? That's what I don't understand.”

“Fear of being alone? Fear of the unknown, fear of rejection? And real physical fear. Did he hit her?” Daisy nodded. I pushed on. “She probably didn't think she could make it on her own. She was angry and couldn't express it. That's tiring. She was busy pretending this stuff wasn't happening. That has to be exhausting. A couple of years doing that and you can barely get up in the morning. Being a hero is out of the question.”

“So she's the victim? I don't think so. She was a criminal. There's a legal term for it—accessory after the fact. It's a felony. You go to jail for it. Your partner can commit the crimes. All you have to do is not try to stop him.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You have children. Would you let that happen to your children?”

“No.” But you did the same thing to Jill and the others, I said to myself. Just to myself, for now. I needed to let her talk.

“Don't apologize for my mother. She should have killed him.”

“Daisy—”

“But he killed her instead.”

“What do you mean?”

“He finally told her the truth. He didn't just tell it, he…he weaponized it. That's a favorite word of his, weaponize. He told her every little detail, he knew she couldn't handle it and he was done with her. Divorce was out of the question for a man in his position. But it wasn't necessary. She killed herself. She took all her antidepressants at once with most of a bottle of Grey Goose. No cheap vodka in our house. Only the best for Johnathan Pell.”

“Then it was just the two of you.”

“I was like his child bride. Of course it was all secret. I hated him but I wanted him, too. I was like an addict. Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome. Boys my own age seemed dull and stupid. I was an orphan. I had no extended family, I'd never made any real friends, except for a few people here, but by then we were only here in the summer and the one school year, tenth grade…and I—it was hard. I didn't know where to start. No one wants to hear this stuff. So there was no one I could talk to. Pell was all I had. And I told myself…he wasn't really my dad, it wasn't incest, he was just this wildly attractive older man who adored me.”

“Legally it was incest, though. You know that now. It goes with the statutory rape and corruption of a minor.”

“The whole thing was sick and fucked up. I know that. But he said he loved me. And then he weaponized me. I was sixteen, like I said.”

“He weaponized you.”

“Someone else in the company was trying to block the purchase of this biotech company, GoRX. They had a bunch of cancer treatments and an MS drug about to be approved by the FDA, but this other executive found out that Pell had a huge stake in the company and would cash in big time if the sale went through. It was rush deal and this guy…well, let's just say it. The executive was Preston Lomax, and he thought the trials had been rigged and the drugs were phony and Pell was trying to get out before the whole thing collapsed. He said he was going to the LoGran Board with conflict of interest charges.

“Then he met this girl in a bar, that would be me, and I took him home to my studio apartment in Tribeca and more or less fucked him stupid. Seriously—I think he lost about twelve IQ points that night. There were only two problems. I was sixteen and the whole night was recorded on high definition video. Pell had bought the apartment and set it up as a state of the art sound stage. I hated the sex with Lomax, but I loved the look on his face when he got the news.”

“Power.”

“Right. That night was very empowering. I was turning into quite the little feminist. For a brainwashed sex slave.”

“So he started using you that way all the time.”

“I was a good weapon. Sometimes I didn't even have to blackmail them. Sometimes, all I had to do was ask.”

“And you never had a real boyfriend?”

“I just laughed at them. They were all so obvious and clumsy and weak. I could make them do anything, but why bother? I was a professional by then. I didn't work for free.”

“Until Andrew.”

She pressed her face into her hands. “We'd been friends for twenty years before I fell in love with him.”

“And you finally told him the truth.”

She nodded.

“And he was okay with it?”

“Andrew didn't judge people.”

We studied the ocean for a few minutes, saying nothing. I watched sea gulls diving for their lunch, a speed boat drawing a thin white line across the blue water, its engine silenced by distance and the rustle and sluice of small waves on the beach. Two black labs bounded up the hard-packed sand near the water, followed by a couple who nodded to us as they walked by. Down the beach, a little boy was flying a kite, its translucent yellow wings caught in a high breeze we couldn't feel. He played out the string, let it go taut. That was it—the kite motionless a hundred feet up, the kid holding the line. Nothing more was going to happen; there wasn't even a tree for it to get stuck in, but the translucent plastic was pretty against the blue sky, a carnation pinned to the summer afternoon's lapel. I dug my elbows into the sand and waited. Daisy would tell me the next part when she was ready.

A few minutes later she pushed a breath out from between pursed lips and launched. “When Preston Lomax died and Pell took over the LoGran Corporation, he went through all the files and ledgers and spreadsheets, all the tax records going back twenty years. He identified the Moorland Mall property and a title search of the area led him to the Thayer family. Edna had died, and the land was potentially for sale. With the LoGran holdings, it would be the biggest parcel of privately owned land ever developed on the island. Edna's will was very clear: the land could only be sold to the Land Bank, and all the beneficiaries had to agree. So Pell worked out a deal with the Land Bank using Charlie Forrest as his point man.

“But there were problems. Todd Macy was against the deal and Andy refused to sell his four-acre lot on the Thayer estate. The courts could make him go along, but they wanted to keep things quiet, and Andy could make a lot of noise. Plus, Charlie had gotten involved with Howard McAllister's home-movie business. Pell got him out of it, Charlie had to be clean, but Pell has a way of turning calamities into tactical advantages. He always says, ‘Never let a crisis go to waste.'

“This movie thing was a perfect way to control McAllister, and a perfect cover for any drastic actions he might need to take. So, naturally, I had to get involved, to supervise and recruit and make sure the whole scandalous mess could be…”

“Weaponized?”

She etched a cold little smile onto her face. “You're getting to know Pell pretty well.”

“And he knew you.”

“I was bad and he made me that way. Or I don't know, maybe I was born that way, and he recognized it. I had started a new life here, I was working at the high school, I was trying to move forward, using my real father's name, like living underground. But I was kidding myself. I couldn't say no when Pell needed me. So when the call came, I—it was fate.”

“You got involved with the porn business.”

She swiveled around, brushed the hair off her face. “Yes.”

“I don't get it. Those kids trusted you. This wasn't messing with some middle-aged businessman. Those girls were innocent.”

“I know that.”

“You must have seen yourself in them.”

“Yes.”

“But you couldn't refuse Pell.”

“It was—not just that.”

“Tell me.”

She turned back to the ocean. Twenty yards out, a couple poled past on standing surfboards. Honeymooners. “I loved the kids but I kind of hated them also. Like that happy couple out there. It's the way poor people think about rich people, it's the way crippled people think about people with healthy bodies. You don't even have to be crippled. Did you ever sprain your ankle and look at people running around, taking everything for granted?”

“I think I know what you mean. But it just made me appreciate being able to walk again, when I could.”

“But I couldn't! Don't you get that? I could never be happy like them or normal like them. I could never have their sunny little lives, their smiley emoticon casual who's-taking-who-to-the-prom dream world. It was a clean brick wall and I wanted to spray paint my graffiti on it. I wanted to mess them up. I wanted them to hurt like I did.”