Killer Waves Page 4

  1 got out and walked around the pavement. A couple of dozen cars were scattered across the lot, and people were walking and flying kites or playing with dogs, and a couple of hardy souls were actually sunbathing. I wandered over to where I thought everything had happened the previous night and sat down on a wooden guardrail, looking out across the parking lot. Several hours earlier, a man in a rental car had come right here and had been murdered. Not more than a ten-minute walk from my house.

  I folded my arms, let the sun warm my back. I am not a vigilante nor a guy who goes seeking trouble. Many years ago, trouble had found me and had injured me and had killed a number of friends, and this trouble had eventually sent me here, to my new home on Tyler Beach. For the most part, my new life had been a good one. I should just let this whole thing drop and get on with things, whatever things were out there.

  Still ... I had the image of that dead man, in a car, so close to my home. Almost insulting, really. And then there was the matter of the intense men and the very intense woman who had come upon the crime scene and had taken control of everything. I didn't like the way they had acted, and I especially didn't like the way that woman had ordered me out of there. Even if she did have a pretty smile.

  A young girl raced by on pudgy legs, a balloon trailing from a string wrapped around her wrist. Her parents chased after her, laughing, not trying too hard to catch up to her, and they ran right across the empty space where the dead man had been, and I shivered. Something bad had happened here, and for whatever reason, from the murder so close to my home to those officious people, things were out of balance. And I felt an urge to set them straight.

  So I got up and got back into my Ford, and drove out.

  The North Tyler police station is in a small wooden building near the town hall. While smaller than the Tyler police station, it was more charming, with lots of wood clapboards and black shutters. By producing my official state of New Hampshire press identification card --- complete with a photo almost as unflattering as my driver's license picture --- I wrangled a few minutes with the chief, an amiable man named Roy Tallinn.

  Roy had on a white uniform dress shirt and black trousers and black shiny shoes, and the collars on his shirt had four little gold stars on each of them. His office was smaller than Diane's, but considerably neater, and he had a beefy look about him, from his thick wrists to the flesh that spilled out over his shirt collar and red face. His gray hair was buzz-cut short, and he offered me coffee, which I declined.

  "Shoreline magazine," he mused, rubbing his thick hands together. "Sorry, I can't say that I've ever read an issue. Does it make it up to newsstands up here?"

  "Apparently not," I said. "But I could send you over a few sample issues if you'd like."

  He ignored my gracious offer. "And you're interested in doing a story about the suicide victim found last night at the state park."

  'Tm considering it," I said. "And are you certain it was a suicide?"

  He smiled. "Very certain. There was a revolver found on the floor of the car, and a suicide note in the glove box. Fingerprints found on the revolver, and gunpowder residue found on the man's hand. About as straightforward as it gets."

  "And you're not releasing the man's name?"

  "Standard procedure. It's a suicide. Not a murder, or even an apparent murder."

  "And the revolver. On the floorboards, right?"

  A slow nod, but the smile was still there. "Right."

  "But Chief," I said, trying to keep my voice friendly, "I was there right after your two officers got there. I got a good look in the car. I didn't see a revolver."

  His smile seemed to match mine. "Oh, right ... You're the magazine writer that walked in on my guys. Yeah, Lewis Cole. Should have noted that before. Then you must have missed seeing the weapon."

  "Yeah, maybe I did," I said, replaying in my mind's eye what I had seen that night, doubting very much that I could have missed seeing a weapon. “By the way, who were the other responding units there this morning?”

  “You meant the State Police Major Crimes Unit?”

  "N 0," I said, beginning to feel a bit chilled in this sunny office. "Three other Ford LTDs came in, with six people, a woman and five men. Well-dressed, arrogant, seemed to enjoy shoving their weight around. Looked like feds."

  "Hmmm," Tallinn said, slowly going through papers on his desk, looking like a bear that had just woken up from hibernation and was looking for his first meal. "Here we go. Incident report. Hmmm."

  As he started reading, I noted that the palms of my hands were getting moist. I wiped them down on my pant leg, just as the chief finished reading. "Sorry, Lewis. No mention of anybody else in my guys' report. The first officer saw the vehicle on routine patrol, and then my second officer responded. A brief mention of you, and then I show up, and then the State Police. There you go. Like I said, pretty straightforward."

  "Officer Calhoun and Officer Remick," I said quietly, "are they on duty today?"

  The chief’s expression hadn't changed for a moment since I arrived. "No, they're not."

  "Will they be in later tonight? Or tomorrow?"

  'Tm afraid not," the chief said. "They're both taking some vacation time."

  Now I looked back to the office's doorway, gauging if I could make it out to the parking lot in time if the good chief did something silly, like pull his weapon. I kept my voice even. "Gee. What a coincidence."

  A slow nod. "Yes, a coincidence. A nice word."

  I tried to see what was going on behind that chief’s merry expression, and I failed. He was good. I said, "What did they offer you?"

  He blinked. Maybe that was as good a response as I could expect. "Excuse me, I don't understand what you mean."

  "What did they offer you?" I said again. "New cruisers? New weapons? A hefty contribution to the Police Relief Association? Some other goodie to keep it all a secret. Come on Chief, I was there. I saw the other people. Saw the three LTDs. I saw it, your cops saw it, and so did the EMTs.”

  The chief’s gaze at me didn't waver for a moment. 'Tm not sure what you saw, but my cops and the EMTs didn't see anything unusual last night. And if you try to talk to the fire chief next door, you'll get as much satisfaction as you did here. Which is zero. Now, is there anything else I can do for you?"

  Leave, a voice inside of me said. Leave now and be thankful you can get out. I stood up, shook his hand. "Chief, one of these days, it'll come out. I don't know when or where, but it will come out. It might prove pretty embarrassing to you and the department. You can see this as an opportunity to let a member of the press in on what was going on."

  A sad shake of his head. "Sorry. There's nothing I can do for you."

  I turned and headed out to the office, feeling better with each step taken, and then the chief called out to me. "Lewis?"

  "Yes?" I said, turning by the door.

  He was still behind his desk. "Want to hear a secret?"

  "Sure," I said, wondering what was coming next.

  His smile widened. "Four years ago, I cheated on my wife. At a police convention in Atlanta. With a woman SWAT team leader from Oregon. There. Satisfied?"

  "Not really," I said, and then I left.

  In my Ford I locked the doors and started the engine, and then I started shivering. It wasn't cold, damn it, it wasn't cold at all, but still, the shakes wouldn't stop. I turned on the radio and started listening to the news at the top of the hour from WBZ-AM in Boston, and that calmed me down some. The fifth story in was a ten-second report about last night's successful space shuttle launch, and I wiped my face and hands with my handkerchief, and felt a little better.

  This part of North Tyler had the police and fire stations and a little town hall, and a store in a converted train station that was next to the old B & M Railroad tracks. About as peaceful as a place as one could expect, almost as peaceful as the parking lot of the state park, just a few miles away.

  But something had come traipsing into these peaceful areas, somet
hing that didn’t belong, something that scared me to death, and something that, for a while, several years ago, I had been a part of.

  When my shivering stopped, I drove out of the parking lot and headed home.

  My home is across the street from the Lafayette House, near the border between Tyler and North Tyler, and I pulled into the tiny parking lot across from the hotel. A large sign at the entrance said PRIVATE PARKING FOR LAFAYETTE HOUSE ONLY and I went to the north end, passing a few parked cars, BMWs and Volvos and Lexuses. At the end of the lot was a low stone wall with an opening where some of the rocks had fallen free. There was a narrow dirt-covered path there, just wide enough for my Ford. The path went to the right, past two homemade NO TRESPASSING signs, and my home came into view. It's a two-story house that's one step above a cottage and has never been painted and which has a dirt crawl space for a cellar. The scraggly lawn rises up to a steep rocky ledge that hides my home from Atlantic Avenue, and I parked in the sagging shed that serves as my garage.

  Inside I had a quick lunch of tomato soup and bread and cheese, and as I ate I watched CNN, hoping against hope that they would have a lengthy update about the shuttle mission and its crew. Instead, they had some sort of legal affairs program, where they dissected yet another court case where an overpaid and undereducated football player got away with murder. As I washed the dishes, looking out to the ocean, I had an odd feeling that I was glad I was near a window that overlooked the empty water. There would be no way that quiet men with long-range binoculars could keep watch on me from that vantage point.

  I then retreated upstairs to a nice hot shower, and when I was done I mechanically went through my daily routine of checking my skin for bumps, for swellings, for things that did not belong. As I did this, I also noted the two scars on my left side, one on my left knee and one on my back, near the coccyx. Daily reminders of how I had come to be here.

  I got tired all of a sudden and sat down on the toilet, towel wrapped around my waist. Then the shakes came back and I felt nauseous, and it all came back to me, like a movie in the VCR set on fast forward: my previous career as a research analyst with the Department of Defense, the friends I had made. Carl Socha. Trent Baker. And my darling Cissy Manning. Then a weekend in Nevada. A training mission, trooping around in the desert. We got lost and ended up in the middle of a test range. A test range that didn't officially exist. And out of that group, only one person came out alive.

  Alive, with memories and scars and the threat of an odd disease coming back at any time to strike me down. Which explains my daily skin searches.

  The shakes continued, and I knew why. Once I had been in the middle of a dark and deep world, with missions and projects and tasks that were classified ABOVE TOP SECRET and which were never made public. A world of intelligence briefings and missions and black budgets. A world that didn't exist in any newspaper or magazine or TV or Internet report.

  I thought I had safely left this world behind me, and for the most part, I had been right.

  Until last night. With those LTDs and that crew of people, and that smug woman who looked as if she knew all the answers.

  I bent my head down, rubbed at my face with a towel. Two options, then. To forget everything that had happened, or to stay awake nights with questions and concerns, waiting for that phone .all or knock at the door, to see if the almighty Them had finally decided to do something about a witness who had been on the scene of something highly classified.

  Or to do something else.

  I cursed and got up and got dressed. I wasn't about to forget a damn thing.

  The only person I know well in North Tyler is Felix Tinios, a native of the North End in Boston. I’m not sure if he chose the town because it had the word “North” in its name, but it’s a good a reason as any. Felix lives a couple of miles north of the Samson State Wildlife Preserve, on Rosemount Lane, a road that extends off to the east and which contains six houses. As I made the short drive north, I kept on glancing up at my rearview mirror, as if I was expecting to be tailed by one of the cars I had seen the night before. But the only traffic behind me was a bright red pickup truck, and I made the turn onto Felix's road with no problems and no mysterious cars behind me. Five of the homes are clustered together, but Felix's house sits by itself, on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic. It's a low-slung ranch and parked in the driveway was his blue Mercedes convertible.

  I got out and felt again that twinge of anticipation that comes from the scents of spring, and then I felt another twinge of guilt as I walked up to the house. I suppose I should have called first, but I didn't want to talk to Felix over the phone. I wanted to see him face-to-face before I unburdened what was troubling me.

  I rang the doorbell twice, and as I waited I looked out across his lawn. While my own lawn is the size of a couple of postage stamps and is a collection of weeds and whatever, Felix does take no small pride in his own turf. Even this early in the year the lawn looked good, and Felix had told me once proudly that since growing up in a crowded brick apartment building, he had always dreamed of a wide green lawn to call his own. Of course, his lawn also contains no shrubs, trees or brush that could obscure a gunman crawling up to visit Felix. He once told me that a door-to-door census taker had asked him his occupation, and when Felix had replied, "Security consultant," the teenage girl asking the questions just shook her head quickly in terror and walked away. Felix sometimes has that effect on people.

  I was about to ring the doorbell for a third time when the door flew open and there he was, dressed in gray sweatpants and a white tank-top T-shirt, nearly soaked through with sweat. "Jesus, Lewis, haven't you ever heard of the phone?"

  "Sorry," I said. "I was driving by, thought I'd stop by for a quick visit. Did I catch you working; out?"

  He ran a hand across this thick black hair and grinned. “Yeah, you could say that. Jesus. All right, for a few minutes, but only if it’s important.

  I followed him in through the foyer and then stopped. Piled up by the doorway were a horse saddle, knee-high leather boots and a riding crop. I gave him a look and asked innocently, "Taking up a new hobby, Felix?"

  He laughed. "No, not really. It's, uh, well ... "

  Then I made out the sound of a shower at the other end of the house, just barely drowning out a woman's voice, singing. "I see," I said, now feeling embarrassed, like a small child breaking into his parents' bedroom at an inopportune time. "Look, I won't keep you---"

  He waved a hand and led me into the living room. "No matter. Her name is Michelle, but she likes to be called Mickey. Met her a few days ago up at Sandtree Stables. She's a horse trainer and her boss hired me for a situation."

  "What kind of situation? Somebody skimming the oat bags?"

  Felix turned, still smiling. Fine black hair ran up both muscled arms, the skin a light brown, and his feet were bare. "No, not really. A stablehand was threatening to torch a barn or two unless he got some back pay he thought was owed to him. I convinced him otherwise and now he has a new and satisfying career as a fry cook, over in Keene." Felix sat down on a couch, motioned me to an easy chair across the way. "Of course, his career will be more satisfying once the cast comes off his arm. What's going on?"

  While my house is old antiques and creaking wood flooring, Felix's is relatively modern and up-to-date, with Scandinavian type furniture and polished hardwood floors. Even sitting still, Felix seems to dominate a room, which was certainly the case now. I looked at him and wondered where he kept his weapons hidden.

  "What's going on is a murder that took place in North Tyler last night," I said. "Hear anything about it?"

  With the showering and the singing continuing, I now had Felix’s attention. "No. Tell me more."

  "I was out on my deck about one A.M. this morning ---"

  “Doing some stargazing?” he interrupted, and I nodded. No use in explaining any more than that.

  "That's right. Then I saw some lights, over at the state park. Police and ambulance lights. I took a
hike over and saw what was going on. A rental car was parked in the lot, and there was a guy in the front seat, with what looked to be a gunshot wound to the head."

  His eyes narrowed some and he rubbed at the blue-black stubble on his chin. "Don't like the sound of that."

  "Why?"

  "Don't be coy," he said. "You know where I've been, what I've done. Most murders in this lovely state of yours occur between friends or lovers. It's domestic-related, usually fueled by coke or booze, and it takes place in the home or at a bar. A knife, a baseball bat, and sure, maybe gunfire. But not like this. Not a guy alone in a rental car with a tap to the hat. That shows a level of professionalism you usually don't see in the Granite State. Go on. What next?"

  I would have thought that the singing and the water running would have distracted me, but it almost made me feel calm, at peace. "What's next is that I talked to the cops at the scene and they had squat. The guy rented the car from the Manchester Airport, under the name Smith. I went over and took a look. Guy was in a suit, no necktie. Dark-skinned, mustache, blood down one side. No weapon in Sight. And then, while I was waiting there, it got weird."

  Felix now seemed tense, like a hunting dog, detecting a foreign scent. "I can hardly wait to see what your definition of weird is."

  "These three Ford LTDs came racing into the lot, like they belonged there. Five muscled guys and a sharp-looking woman came out, took control of the scene. The cops and the EMTs have been shut up, and when I had the license plates of those LTDs traced, they've been faked up. The official story today from the North Tyler cops is that this guy killed himself. The police chief said a revolver was found on the floor of the car, even though I didn't see anything. There was also a suicide note in the glove box, he said, and became it's a suicide, no more information’s coming out.”