Killer Waves Read online

  "No, it doesn't," I said. "Guess you poor guys will have to start doing a canvass of the motels and hotels once the State Police get here."

  Officer Calhoun said sourly, "Yeah, if they don't make us go on coffee or doughnut runs in the meantime, that's what they ---- hold on, looks like they're arriving."

  I turned and looked over at the park entrance, which was a simple wooden gate and guard shack, and which opened out onto Route 1-A, also known as Atlantic Avenue. Route 1-A runs the entire eighteen-mile length of the New Hampshire coastline, and on this particular few yards, three cars came barreling into the parking lot at high speed. They braked to a halt and doors flew open, and they were all dark blue Ford LTDs with New Hampshire license plates. Officer Calhoun said, "You know what, those guys sure don't look like the State Police."

  His partner agreed, saying, "Tom, I don't particularly like the look of this."

  Neither did I, but I kept my mouth shut.

  I counted six individuals getting out of the LTDs, five men and and one woman. She talked to the crowd for a moment, and then three of the guys switched on their own flashlights and began fanning out across the open fields of the park. Two of the guys and the woman came over. All of them had on business suits and dark blue or black raincoats, and they surely did not look as if they received their paychecks from the state of New Hampshire. The woman had on dark slacks, flat shoes and a white turtleneck, and her fine black hair was cut shoulder-length. As she came over, she got right to the point.

  "Who's the officer in charge here?" she asked, looking at the three of us. The EMTs had slunk against their ambulance, as if trying to gain some shelter there, and then Officer Calhoun spoke up and said, "I'm the senior officer, until the State Police show up. Name's Calhoun."

  "Goody for you," she said, "and just so you know, the State Police aren't showing up for a long while. Officer Calhoun, a moment, if you will."

  She took him by the arm and walked him away from us, leaving behind two of her male companions. The one on the left had a crew cut of red hair and a merry little smile, as if he couldn't think of anything else he'd rather be doing than being in a nearly deserted parking lot at two in the morning. His companion was about a foot shorter and a foot wider, and he wasn't smiling, not at all. His eyes bounced between me and the other North Tyler officer, as if he were hoping one of us would reach for a gun or knife so he could snap a few finger bones.

  Officer Remick cleared his throat. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

  'Tm no cop, but I'm guessing these gentlemen and that lady belong to the federal government."

  "My thoughts exactly," he said, and then he spoke up. "Hey, can anyone of you tell us what the hell's going on?"

  The squat man said nothing, but the taller guy with red hair said, "Your partner's getting the whole deal. Just relax, all right?”

  I looked over at Officer Calhoun and the woman, who were standing near a wooden guardrail that bounded the parking lot.

  Officer Calhoun was saying something with dramatic effect, hands waving, jaw moving, and all the while the woman was standing there with arms crossed, not moving at all. It looked as if she had done this a number of times, coming into a crime scene and taking control from the locals, and she looked bored. She said something and walked back to us, Officer Calhoun following, not looking happy at all.

  She stood and looked us over. "Officer Remick, is it?"

  He stepped forward. "Yep."

  She smiled, a tired-looking expression. "Would you please accompany Mr. Turner here and give him your statement of what's transpired? It shouldn't take too long, should it?"

  The crew-cut guy came over, still grinning. "Nope, not at all."

  Officer Remick then walked away, and I was there by myself. Officer Calhoun was standing behind the woman, hands in pockets, face now quite red, looking seriously pissed off. I looked at the woman and she managed a tired smile again. "And you're Mr. Cole, correct?"

  "You have me at a disadvantage," I said. "I don't know your name."

  "So you don't," she said. "I understand that you're a magazine writer, live down the road a bit. Officer Calhoun said you came upon this scene just a while ago. That you didn't notice anything else. Is that correct?"

  "That's true."

  She nodded. "Good. As of now, we've taken control of this area, Mr. Cole, and I'd appreciate it if you'd leave."

  "And who might 'we' be, if I can ask?"

  Even though she looked tired, there seemed to be a bit of a sparkle about her eyes. "You may ask. And I'll say again, would you please leave?"

  I looked around. Officer Remick was talking to the guy identified as Mr. Turner. Officer Calhoun just stood there, his angry expression having not changed one bit. I saw that one of the three guys who had gone out across the fields and come back and was talking to the two EMTs from the North Tyler Fire Department. And the wide and burly man with the woman was still staring at me with distaste.

  "Well, there's a problem with that," I said. "And what's that?"

  "This happens to be a state park. Public property. Perhaps I like it here."

  "Perhaps you do. And perhaps if you don't leave, I'll ask my associate here to escort you off."

  Now the burly man had a little smile on his face, as if he had finally been told he could do something he liked. I looked at him and then at the woman. I said, "Your associate may find it might be harder to escort me than he thinks."

  She said, "Oh, I doubt that. Tell you what. Would you please leave then as a personal favor to me? Please?"

  I looked over the scene again and then felt tired. There are times to fight and times to call it quits and go home. By now a stiff breeze had come up and my face and hands were getting cold. Maybe I was wrong, but I could tell by their attitude and self-confidence that these people were in fact the feds, maybe the FBI or something. A long time ago I had been in the middle of their little world, and I didn't want to go back. The woman wanted to play games. Good for her. I had seen all that I was going to see this early morning, and now I wanted to go to bed.

  I shifted, managed a smile. "Oh, all right then. As a personal favor to you, and your smile. How's that?"

  I think I embarrassed her, if only for a moment. "That would be fine. Thank you, Mr. Cole. I trust we won't see you again, will we?"

  "Not tonight, that's for sure."

  Then she nodded crisply and said something to the bulky man, and I turned and started walking away from the parking lot. I went back onto the field and up the slight hill, and then I looked back. It was a busy scene, with the dead man's rental and the three Ford LTDs and the ambulance and two cruisers. I walked up the hill and when I noted a large boulder, I squatted down so that I couldn't be seen by the sharp people back down at the parking lot.

  With the small flashlight held in my mouth, I opened up my reporter's notebook and quickly wrote down three license plate numbers I had memorized when the LTDs had come barreling into the parking lot.

  She had said something about not seeing me again. Maybe she was right. But maybe I had other ideas.

  I shut off the flashlight and put the reporter's notebook back in my coat, and when I emerged from my little hiding place I looked down to the lot.

  One by one, the blue and red lights that had brought me to this place were being switched off.

  I shivered again and headed home.

  Chapter Two

  The offices of The Tyler Chronicle are set on one floor of a two-story white clapboard building near the center of town, right by the town common. The newspaper office shares space with a dentist, a legal firm and a realtor, and on this late morning I parked out back, near a set of old B & M Railroad tracks. I noted Paula Quinn's Ford Escort was there, and I ducked in through the rear entrance, the door usually reserved for staff. I didn't want to go through the front door and the hassle of dealing with whatever receptionist happened to be working this month.

  Once inside, I went past the subscription area and piles of bundled n
ewspapers and found Paula at her desk. There were no cubicles or private office areas, just a wide area of industrial strength green carpet and metal and wooden desks that didn't have a chance of being matched. A couple of other female reporters-freelancers whose names I forgot about thirty seconds after meeting them-worked at their desks, typing hesitantly on the Digital computer terminals. Paula was on the phone as I came up to her, and sat down at a spare chair and looked around

  Up toward the other end of the large area, near a closed for the conference room, something new was hanging from the tile ceiling. I folded my arms and looked it over. It was the front pages of the two local daily newspapers that the Chronicle was competing against, the Porter Herald and Foster's Daily Democrat, and each front page had been mounted on cardboard. Stuck through the center of each front page was a plastic dagger, and some red fluid had been smeared across the newspaper, suggesting blood. Considering what I had seen not more than eight hours earlier in a certain rental car, the color wasn't even close. Suspended below the front pages was a small plastic banner stating: IT'S WAR!

  Below this delightful little display was the unoccupied cluttered desk of the paper's editor, Rollie Grandmaison, and I also noted a new desk had been butted up against Rollie's. While Rollie's desk was messy and piled high with newspapers, press releases, envelopes and other editorial debris, the companion desk was a shiny black behemoth that was empty except for a telephone, a computer terminal, two pens, a pencil and a legal pad.

  By now Paula was saying, "Uh-huh, uh-huh," in the kind of tone that meant she was desperately trying to get away from whomever she was talking to but at the same time didn't want to tick off by being too dismissive. She caught my gaze and rolled her eyes upward, and I gave her a smile. She had on tight dungarees and a simple black sweater with a faux pearl necklace, and her blond hair this spring had been trimmed back somewhat. Still, her ears stuck through the side of her hair in a manner I round charming and that she found distressing. There was a smudge of newsprint ink on her slightly pug nose and I had a quick urge to wipe it clean with a soft touch of my thumb.

  Instead, I leaned over and said in a loud voice, "Paula, editorial meeting in thirty seconds. Don't be late!"

  She grinned at me and then said, "Well, Chick, you heard the word. Gotta go. Bye.”

  Paula dropped the phone down and said, “Jesus, thanks a lot, Lewis. That woman can talk a hole through a tin pot.”

  “Somebody important?”

  “Oh, she thinks she’s important, which is all that counts. She's the new day dispatcher from Wentworth County. Thing is, if I can keep her happy and glad to talk to me, then I can get better news about what's going on in the other towns, like Bretton and Eaton. Otherwise I'd have to spend half the day trekking back and forth to county dispatch, seeing what happened the previous night."

  I remembered our long conversation from the previous night at my house about her and her job and the changes contained within, before the space-shuttle launch and before my long trek out to the state wildlife preserve. I motioned to the two newspaper front pages hanging from the ceiling.

  "More motivational signs from the new regime?"

  Paula leaned back in her chair, her own computer terminal at her elbow. Her desk was as cluttered as Rollie's. "New regime. Yeah, I like that word. Regime. Makes me think about the guillotine coming out, the nobility and merchant class being obliterated."

  "How's Rollie doing?"

  "Rollie? A company man through and through. He's a few years away from retirement, and if the new powers-that-be told him to start putting alien babies and Elvis sightings on the front page, he'd snap to it and make me paranormal editor."

  Somewhere a phone started ringing and then was picked up. "Okay, more important. How are you doing?"

  She started playing with a pen on her desk. "Like I said last night. I'm doing okay. It's just that-"

  I didn't have a chance to hear what was next on Paula's mind, for then the door to the conference room slammed out and Rollie Grandmaison came out, his face red, what few black hairs on top of his almost-bald head in disarray. His dark gray slacks seemed bunched around his waist, and the sleeves of his off white shirt were frayed. Whereas Rollie looked as if he had gotten dressed in the dark, the man coming out of the conference room behind him looked as if he had spent the previous day with a tailor. Black slacks and black loafers with tassels, blue-striped shirt with suspenders and a red bow tie that was definitely not a clip-on. His black hair was thick and slicked back, and his nose prominent. He noticed Paula and me and strolled right over, just as I heard Paula mutter, “Christ, here we go” under her breath.

  "Paula?" he asked, looking down at her, the same kind of look a hungry hawk would give a plump little hare.

  "Yes, Rupert?"

  He stood as if he were at attention, with hands clasped behind his back "You'll note that it's one hour and ten minutes to deadline. Will you get the stories listed in this morning's budget submitted by then?"

  "I will," she said, putting about a ton of disdain into each word.

  "Grand," he said. "Is this gentleman here assisting you with a story on that budget list?"

  "No, he's not," she said. "Rupert Holman, this is Lewis Cole. He writes for Shoreline magazine."

  Now his look was aimed in my direction, and I aimed right back with a look of my own. He gave a quick nod. "I see. Mr. Cole, do you have any desire to write for the Chronicle?"

  "Not today," I said. "My schedule is pretty full-up."

  "I see," Rupert said, and then he turned his head back to Paula. "Then it would appear to me, Paula, that this is a social visit, and a social visit so close to deadline ---"

  I was opening my mouth to tell him what he could do with his upcoming deadline, when Paula beat me to the punch. She reached behind herself and pulled her black leather purse free from the rear of her chair. "Actually, Rupert, Lewis is here to visit during my morning break. I haven't taken it yet."

  "Mmm," he said, nodding his head again, and I imagined little gears and cams behind that impassive face. "All right, then. Ten minutes. Don't be late."

  "Don't you worry," she shot back, but by then he was halfway back to his desk. Rollie looked up and gave Rupert the look of a scared steer, seeing a butcher in a bloody white apron heading his way.

  Outside she slipped her arm inside mine and said something in a low voice that would probably shock about half the elected officials in Tyler. We headed across the small common to a tiny brick

  building that once held Tyler's first post office and was now the Common Grill & Grill. She pushed her way in and we sat at a booth in the back. The place was nearly empty, save for the owner, John Thiakapolous, a large bulk of a man who was sweating behind the grill, and a waitress and a couple of retirees, who were making their late-morning breakfast stretch out. It's one of the smallest restaurants on Route 1, and its name comes from the fact that the previous owner lost his bar license. When John bought the place some years ago, he had a spare neon "Grill" sign, which he used to replace the hole left when the "Bar" sign had been taken down.

  Remembering what Paula had said last night, I said, "So that's the famous Rupert the Ruthless, the hired gun sent in to set the Chronicle in the black, and to drive out the heathen competing newspapers from your territory."

  She gingerly blew across the top of her coffee cup. "Yep, and to drag this little daily newspaper kicking and screaming into the new, bold newspaper age. When I started here, the paper was part of a chain of one daily and two weeklies. Now, three owners later, we're owned by a conglomerate based in London. Can you believe that? London! And to make sure they squeeze every potential penny out of each newspaper, we get an efficiency expert like that clown to make our lives miserable for the next six months."

  I took a sip from my own cup of tea. "Tell me again about the circulation wars, and what he's got planned."

  "Huh," she said. "Pretty basic stuff. We've got to increase circulation and drive back the Porter and
Dover papers that want to home in on our territory. To do that, we need stories, lots of stories. So we're getting pushed to do things we've never done before. Like community reporting. You know what that is? It means if there's no hard news to report, you get to make news. Stories about how to be a better parent. How to be a better student. Spring decorating lips. Mush like that. Plus, Rupert here has hitched his start to the New Puritans to stir up things in town.”

  “The new what?”

  Paula made a show of rolling her eyes. "Didn't you listen to anything I said last night, or were you too busy ogling my new leather skirt?"

  "I wouldn't exactly call it ogling," I replied, trying to make my voice sound hurt.

  "Whatever," she said. "Look, town meeting last month, we got a couple of new selectmen. Both of them are so conservative they think Ronald Reagan and Barry Coldwater were charter founders of the ACLU. And they want to stir things up, and Rupert's glad to help them out. They've already had one victory, if you can call it that. The assistant school district superintendent. You do remember that, don't you?"

  I surely did. "Yeah, he was fired after using the school computer to look at certain Web pages."

  "On his lunch break," Paula pointed out. "And the pages he was looking at ... okay, they were odd, but if a guy wants to spend thirty minutes of his free time looking at pictures of women's legs in stockings and high heels, why should I care?"

  "There was a deal in the works, wasn't there, to save his job?"

  She nodded, took another swallow of her coffee. Back at the counter, John started muttering to himself in Greek as he flipped over a couple of eggs. Paula said, "The school board was going to give him a couple of weeks suspension without pay, but one of the school board members is married to one of our New Puritans. One meeting with Rupert and a couple of front-page stories and editorials later, the poor bastard's lost his job and has moved back in with his parents in Oregon. Let me tell you, this is turning into a hell of a business."