Nantucket Sawbuck (2 page)

Chapter Two

The Scene of the Crime

Preston Lomax was found murdered at home in the early morning hours of December 16th. The body was discovered by his daughter Kathleen, after returning from a party in Wauwinet just after 1 a.m., according to her initial deposition, which I took on the scene. Her mother had been off-island, and her two brothers maintained separate residences, Danny in a renovated second floor condo in Freedom Square, Eric in a converted garage apartment on Helens Drive. So Lomax had been alone in the house for the evening.

“I knew something was wrong before I even got inside,” Kathleen told me.

I watched her, letting her take her time. We were sitting on one of the two big couches that flanked the fireplace, in the great room of the Eel Point mansion. If she had been drinking at the party she held it well. If her father's death affected her, I saw no sign of it. Maybe she was in shock. Maybe she didn't care. Maybe she had killed Lomax herself, and was still in some nerveless fugue state. I didn't want to rule anything out. But she seemed smaller than she had the previous night, when she had danced happily into her father's Christmas party and disappeared upstairs a few minutes later. She was pulled into herself now, crumpled like a plastic bottle when you suck the last of the water out.

“The house was quiet in this odd way,” she said. “I mean…Dad usually listens to music when he's alone—he always has his Frank Sinatra CDs with him. Francis Albert, Dad calls him. The Chairman of the Board. I always thought it was funny because Sinatra was just this old singer and Dad actually was the chairman of the board, you know? Anyway…I had downloaded like fifty of those songs onto an iPod. I was going to give it to him for Christmas and I—” She stopped talking, pulling herself back from the brink of tears.

I began to relax—this was the kind of response I'd been waiting for. “Walk me through it slowly. You pulled up in the driveway. Did anything strike you as unusual?”

She nodded. “The lights were on. I mean—all the lights in the house. Which was bizarre, because my dad is always like ‘turn out the lights, I don't own the electric company yet.' And the door was open. I mean…closed but not latched. I didn't need my key. That really freaked me out. I had reset the alarm before I went out, so I figured maybe friends had dropped over. Except it was so quiet. Then I thought, maybe Dad went out, but there's no way he wouldn't have locked up. He's paranoid about burglars, even on Nantucket where's there's totally no crime, right?”

I shrugged. “I wish that was true.”

We fell silent for a moment. The tragic absurdity of her last comment seemed to roll over her like a breaking wave. Nantucket would never be her safe, idyllic island again. She pulled her pony tail loose and was wrapping the hair elastic around her fingers, binding three of them together, doubling the band twice, cutting off her circulation.

I could hear my men moving upstairs, taping off the bedroom. I had sent Barnaby Toll back to the station for the dental stone casting kit. We‘d gotten lucky—I saw that as soon as we arrived. A brief late December thaw the night before had left the lawn and driveway muddy, the perfect medium for absorbing footprints and tire tracks. Then the weather turned cold again, the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees in the last few hours. That meant the impressions stamped into the wet soil were hardened into ice and easy to preserve. I only wished my detectives had understood the situation. Kyle Donnelly actually tripped on the icy ridge of a footprint and wound up on the ground staring at it. I had to smile when he stood up, cursing about the slick soles of his police brogans. The print he'd been staring was some kind of ridged vibram type, exactly the kind of footwear Donnelly had been requesting since the first dusting of snow in November: a man's print, but not a policeman's. And the Lomax clan didn't strike me as work-boot people. This could be our intruder, but Donnelly hadn't made the connection. That's why I go to every crime scene, when the Board of Selectmen would prefer to keep me sitting in my office fiddling with paperwork. There was no point in giving my detectives on-the-job training if there was no one on the job to train them.

I pointed out the obvious and I could see his face light up, as the synapses sparked. It reminded me of my kids' Lego blocks. With enough time and patience they could build the rocket ship or skyscraper pictured on the box. Kyle was building something much more important: the working police officer's opportunistic style of perception, always hunting for the odd detail, the small anomaly, and the connections between them.

He had a way to go, but he was getting there. One block at a time.

The state police would be arriving soon. The C-Pac unit would be on the first flight over from Hyannis. Four other officers were securing a wider perimeter around the house. One of two big red garbage cans was sitting on the front walk; the other was upstairs. I always brought them to a crime scene. It was a trick I had learned from the lead homicide detective I'd worked with in L.A. The cans were for police trash: cigarette butts, coffee cups, candy wrappers, tissues—anything that could confuse the SID people and contaminate the scene. People got careless, even cops, and especially after a late night. The trash cans helped.

Kathleen was fading. Her fingers were turning white. “I have to call my brothers. They don't know what happened. I have to tell them, I need them to be here. They—”

“You have three brothers, is that right?”

“What? Oh—yes, that's right. Timmy's in Dubai, he works for BP. But Dan lives here now. He dropped out of law school to write a memoir. Life with father? Or something like that.”

I knew Daniel Lomax. I had arrested him at a beach party the summer before and watched while his father paid off everyone to drop the charges. The money must have been pretty good because a lot of furious people turned sweet and warm way too fast, like dumping sugar into day-old coffee and popping it into the microwave. I had hauled Danny in again a few weeks ago, after a fight at the Chicken Box, and Daddy had taken care of that problem, too. The gravy train was permanently derailed now. Every tragedy has a bright side. I pegged the kid for a spoiled arrogant little bully. He didn't strike me as the literary type.

I turned back to Kathleen. “And the third brother? The youngest one? Eric, is it?”

She nodded. “Poor Eric. He checked himself out of Riggs two weeks ago. The Austen Riggs Center? In Stockbridge? It's a rehab clinic. Daddy made him go. They had a huge fight but it didn't matter. He checked himself out like two days later.”

“So he was back on island?”

“He has a crumby little garage apartment in towney-ville. You know—off Bartlett Road? Near the high school. Dad pays the rent. I mean—the company does. LoGran? Eric gets an allowance, too. He's just a tax write-off, that's what he always says. Eric's always kidding like that—kidding on the square, that's what my grandmother called it.”

“Kidding on the square?”

“Yeah…like it's a joke—but you really mean it. Except…not totally, Just—”

“Somewhere in between.”

“Yeah.”

“Kidding on the square. I like that.”

She fell silent again. I backed things up. “So Eric didn't want to go to Riggs.”

“It was horrible. They were screaming. Eric was like, ‘Why aren't
you
going? This is your fault, I learned this shit from you.' He called Daddy a hypocrite and—and other things. As if Daddy was some kind of crazy drug addict or something. And that was the last time they ever saw each other. Daddy didn't even know he was back. Eric was hiding out but—now he…he'll never be able to say he's sorry. He'll never be able to say anything to him ever again and he— he…” She started crying again.

I reached out to squeeze her shoulder. “Kathleen, I'm sorry. But I have to ask. Do you know his whereabouts last night?”

Her face pulled tight around wide eyes. “Oh no. He could never—he…the boys used to joke around about killing Daddy, but there's no way…I mean, they couldn't kill anyone. Except maybe each other. It was just—”

“Kidding on the square?”

She smiled nervously. “Exactly. My grandmother was tough. ‘Doing does it', she always used to say.”

I sat back. “All right. Let's do this, then. Can we go back to last night, just for a few minutes?”

She looked up, pushed the tears down her cheeks with the heels of her palms. “Okay.”

“So…you came inside,” I prompted.

She looked up. “What?”

“Last night. You came into the house. Did you—?”

I could see her starting to focus again. “The desk was missing,” she said. “This kind of slant top desk where we put our keys when we walk in? It was right under that painting of the black lab with the tennis ball.”

She flicked her head in the direction of the front door. I took out my spiral pad and made a note. “So you thought there had been a robbery?”

“I didn't think anything. I just…I started losing it. I was calling Daddy, but I knew he wasn't going to answer. You know when you're on your cell and you're talking and the other person's phone cuts out, like they're going through a bad reception area or something? You don't notice at first, you keep talking but you have this funny feeling because there's no response at all, and then you figure it out and you're embarrassed because you've been talking to yourself even though no one heard you, I mean obviously, since no one was there, but…anyway. That's what it was like. But a thousand times worse. Like the whole world had cut out. Like there was no one anywhere.”

“So, you went upstairs?”

“I—yeah. I was sure I was—I don't know, like someone had slipped me some bad drugs or something at the party. I figured I'd wake Daddy up and he'd, you know, I could …”

“Tell me what you saw in the bedroom. Take a few breaths, Kathleen. There's no rush. I know this is hard. But anything you tell me may help us catch the person or people who did this.”

“I knew he was dead. Does that sound crazy? I knew it. The whole house felt dead. The air felt dead. And there was this smell. I got to his door but I couldn't go in. I called out again. I knocked. The door opened a little when I knocked on it and I thought, Everything will be okay if I don't go in there, if I just pull the door shut and go to bed, this will all be gone in the morning. But the smell was worse. I realized I was breathing through my mouth. I just stood there for, I don't know. A long time. Finally I went in, though. I mean, I had to. I couldn't just…”

I reached over and pressed her shoulder. “Do you need more time? Because we could…”

“No, sorry, I'm okay. I need to…I have to get this over with. He was on the bed. There was blood everywhere and there was some kind of…tool. It was in his chest and his mouth was stuffed with money. Someone had—his eyes were wide open, they were bulging out like he was trying to say something, like he was trying to talk with his eyes. No one had even shut them. Don't you think they could have at least shut his eyes?”

“These people, Kathleen…”

“I know, I just…it seemed so…” She exhaled a long tired breath. “I don't know. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm just babbling. I'm sorry, I wish I could be more helpful.”

“You're helping. But I have to ask, did you touch the body or move anything in the room?”

“I never even really went into the room. I just ran out of there and called the police. I could never…ugh. No way.”

I tried a different approach; lingering over the horror she had just witnessed wasn't doing either of us any good. “Did your father have any enemies that you know of? Anyone who might have—”

“—been willing to kill him? To do—that…what I saw? To just—”

“Kathleen. Listen to me. There was a lot of anger in that room. It wasn't some cold-blooded contract killing. And it wasn't a heat of the moment outburst, either. Whoever did this came prepared.”

“So who had a motive, is that what you want to know?”

“Well—”

“Who didn't have a motive? That's the real question.”

“Kathleen, maybe we should—”

‘No, I'm fine. This is good. Get it all out there. No more secrets.” She gave me a crooked little smile “Let it rip.”

“So you believe that there may have been—”

“Do you have any room left in that pad? You're going to need it.”

I tipped the notebook at her by way of invitation.

“Fine,” she said. “First of all there's my Mom. Dad was going to change his will in January. He was cutting her out. He practically dared her to kill him before New Year's. He knew about her boyfriend and he was pissed.”

“He said that to her?”

“Right after the Christmas party. I was there—snooping. In the den.” She twisted around to point out an unobtrusive door at the other side of the fireplace. “I wasn't even hiding. They were so oblivious. I could have been dancing over there.”

“Did you know about the boyfriend?”

She stared at me. “I caught them together. He was—I thought…”

“Kathleen? If you're not—”

“He was my boyfriend, too. At least, I mean…I thought he was. Until last night.”

“Busy boy.”

She laughed, then clamped down before it turned into a sob. “I'll say. His name is Kevin Sloane.”

Of course; I'd seen her mother with the kid. I'd pulled them over on Milestone Road, a couple of weeks ago. It was a small island and that made it tough to do anything unobserved. People worry about our new “surveillance state.” The social panopticon of Nantucket made the NSA look puny by comparison. Half the island probably knew about Diana Lomax's love affair. “So you think they might have done this?”