Dead to the World

by B. D. Smith

  They slowly drifted apart - Don talking more and more about his desire to move back to Dover-Foxcroft, and Rosemary spending more time at work and climbing the ladder of success toward a partnership in the firm. Rose also found friendship and support in an unexpected place – an informal mindfulness movement in Portland that attracted a wide range of people from different walks of life, all looking for more meaning in their life, for ways to fully engage in the world around them.

  Rosemary laughed out loud when Tom told her that Don had said that she was romantically involved with Lee Lamen.

  “Don didn’t have a clue. Lee is a very sweet man who is openly gay and still searching for Mr. Right. We have fun together and compare notes about what we are looking for in a man. Lee and the meditation group he introduced me to have helped me a lot in sorting out what my priorities are in life, and what will make me truly happy.”

  Surprised by Rosemary’s openness and candor, Tom’s next question went in a direction he hadn’t expected until he voiced it.

  “Have you reached any conclusions, Rose, about what you want from life?”

  Rose stayed quiet, and after almost a full minute had passed, Tom looked over to see her looking out the window, avoiding his glance.

  Tom reached over, put his hand on hers, and apologized.

  “I didn’t mean to pry Rose. Sorry.”

  The silence in the car stretched another long minute or so before Rose responded with a deceptively casual expression and a toss-away tone of voice.

  “That’s OK Tom. I’m happy you asked. I’m still searching for answers, but I think I’ve found some solid ground.”

  Lacing her fingers through Tom’s, Rose quickly changed the subject back to the case.

  “Do you think Don was killed because of his investment business?” she asked.

  “Could be” replied Tom. “But it’s still early in the investigation, and we still don’t know that much about what he was up to and who his business partners were.”

  “Well now that you have gotten me thinking about it, there were times when he was pretty secretive about who he was talking to on the phone. I figured it was probably a woman, but it could have been business, I guess. And he had security protection out the wazoo on his MacBook Pro. It still hasn’t turned up?”

  Tom frowned and shook his head, and as they approached the border crossing, he and Rose both thought about her late husband’s missing computer – where it might be, who might have it, and if its files might provide an explanation for his killing. Tom checked his Glock service weapon with Canadian Customs, and after they crossed over into Canada, their conversation turned back to what they would do in Quebec City. Once they had checked into a small boutique hotel that was one of Rose’s favorite places to stay in the city, they still had several hours to kill before their dinner reservation. Tom was tired from the drive and thought a nap would be a good idea, but after a quick shower, Rosemary easily convinced him there were better ways to spend the time.

  Dinner was a huge success. Arvi had a great menu and very personal service, as the chefs came out of the kitchen to serve the dishes, offering information on the locally sourced ingredients and how they were prepared. Tom and Rose struck up a lively and warm back and forth with the staff and were in excellent spirits when they left the restaurant. Arm in arm, they strolled back toward their hotel through the narrow streets of Old Port Quebec City, discussing the rabbit with smoked mustard, and the P.E.I. oysters they had for dinner.

  They had turned a corner onto a quieter street when Tom heard footsteps rapidly approaching behind them. Without conscious thought Tom’s military training and years of police work kicked in and he pivoted toward Rose, pushed her roughly to the side with his left hand, and then continued the turn, instinctively swinging his left arm up and back, into the space where Rose had been a second before. The blade of the knife that had targeted her back got caught in the sleeve of his coat and clattered to the ground as Tom squared on their assailant and buried his right fist in the man’s face, knocking out several of his teeth.

  Tom kicked the knife away and turned to Rosemary, who still lay crumpled on the sidewalk, her legs akimbo, and swearing like a French sailor. Pulling her up, he held her, apologizing for the push and asking if she was OK. She gave him a confused look, and glancing past him, saw their attacker staggering away down the street and around the corner.

  “What was that Tom? What just happened?”

  Tom frowned, reached down and picked up the knife. Shielding it from her view, he closed it, quickly slipped it into his pocket, and then replied.

  “My guess would be an attempted mugging. Looks like he was going for your purse. We can report it when we get to the hotel.”

  Rosemary had seemingly mostly forgotten the incident by the time they had reached the hotel. Tom paused at the front desk to report the mugging attempt while she headed up to the room to look at the scrapes she had gotten when Tom pushed her out of range of the knife attack. Following her up a few minutes later, Tom checked his left arm, relieved to find only a shallow cut where he had blocked the knife.

  He was not convinced it had been a simple mugging. Rose had clearly been the target, and he believed that it had been meant to seriously injure or kill her. He wondered if the assault was tied to the killing of her husband. It would mean that someone had followed them all the way to Quebec City and then waited for the right time to make an attack look like a street crime gone wrong.

  Tom was worried that Rosemary would be totally freaked by the assault, and that he would find her huddled in a chair trembling in fear or packing her bag and insisting they leave immediately. Instead, when he opened the door to their suite, Rose was sitting up in bed, wrapped in a bathrobe. She had lit several candles on the side tables, dimmed the lights, and poured them each a glass of wine. He paused just inside the door as she rose from the bed, picked up the two glasses of wine, and walked slowly toward him. Her bathrobe fell open and she smiled as she handed him a glass and pressed up against him, looking directly into his eyes from only a few inches away.

  “Tom, will you show me the knife?”

  Feigning ignorance, Tom looked puzzled as he replied.

  “What knife?”

  “The knife that guy was trying to bury in my back. The one you picked up off the sidewalk and slipped into your coat pocket, thinking I didn’t see it.”

  Surprised, Tom retrieved the knife from his pocket and held it out to her. Rose took the knife and sat down on the bed. Setting down her wine glass, she opened the blade and looked at it.

  “I think he tried to kill me Tom. Why would he do that?” Rose asked, seemingly unfazed.

  “I’m not sure Rose. He was probably after your purse.”

  “You’re not a very good liar, Tom. This looks like a four-inch blade at least, and he was going for me, not you. If he had gotten to me with this I would have bled out on the sidewalk. I bet it has something to do with Don’s death and the police getting interested in the case. Somebody thinks I might know something, and they want to shut me up in case I do. That scares me, but probably not as much as it should. Mostly it makes me curious – I think my ex was probably involved in some shady stuff with some shady people.”

  Rose leaned back and looked at Tom with a now dead serious expression.

  “More importantly, you saved my life tonight and that confirmed the feeling I have had since you first started chatting me up at our initial meeting in my office. I checked up on you, and I know your history. You’re a tough guy. You hurt people now and then. I’m sure they likely deserved it. But you’re also sensitive and smart and loving – and a good man to have nearby in case of trouble. I’d like to keep you around.” As she finished the sentence, she shifted
her shoulder slightly, and the bathrobe slipped off her shoulders.

  11.

  The next morning Tom and Rosemary met with several detectives from the Quebec City Police Service in the hotel lobby. The team interviewing them quickly concluded, once they found out that Tom was a detective with the Maine State Police, that he, and not Rose, had been the intended target of the night before. Tom could see that they thought someone from one of his past cases with a score to settle had most likely followed them north from Portland to carry out the attack. Tom didn’t press the issue with them, realizing that any follow-up investigation on their part would be a waste of time. They weren’t even interested in the knife, which they decided that Tom should keep and investigate when he returned to Maine.

  After a leisurely breakfast of beignets and coffee at the Café du Monde in the Old City, Tom and Rosemary drove back south to Portland. It was mid-afternoon when they arrived back in the city. As Tom pulled up in front of Rosemary’s place, she asked him to come up for a moment – she had something to show him that she had been thinking about on the trip back from Quebec. Hoping they might hop back into bed, Tom accompanied her up to her condo. Rosemary immediately went to her walk-in closet, leaving Tom to fantasize about her reappearing in flimsy lingerie. Almost immediately, however, she reappeared holding what looked to be a beat-up small pink plastic laptop computer bearing a well-worn Flying Spaghetti Monster decal. Holding it out to Tom, she explained.

  “When Lee and I cleaned out Don’s place after his death I also found this. It’s my old computer from when I was in law school – I used it for lecture notes. I didn’t put it, or my old printer- which was also at Don’s, in with the boxed-up stuff I let you guys take. I don’t know why Don took them with him, and neither was on his desk with the other computer stuff. This computer was in with a stack of books on his bedroom floor, and I found the printer in the back of the closet.”

  Tom opened the pink laptop and glanced at its dilapidated keyboard and cracked screen.

  “Is there anything on the computer?” Tom asked.

  “I have no idea. The battery is dead on the computer and I couldn’t find the power cord for it or for the printer, which I am pretty sure stopped working a few years ago.”

  “OK, let me take both of them to our computer crimes unit office here in Portland, and I’ll see if their forensic examiners can find anything.”

  Several of the officers in the computer crimes unit had played on the state police hockey team with Tom, and with a little cajoling, he was able to get them to look at Rosemary’s pink laptop soon after he arrived. Laughing loudly, David Rosenthal, a rough and tumble defenseman on their hockey team who Tom knew well, called out to the other officers scattered around their sprawling office:

  “Check this out you guys, Tom’s brought in his pink Little Pony laptop for us to play with.”

  After a brief delay looking for a vintage power cord, Rosemary’s laptop was logged in and powered up. The results were disappointing.

  “Well, it’s pretty much hollowed out,” David muttered. “And I don’t think any deleted fragments can be recovered from the hard drive. Documents haven’t just been deleted; the hard drive has been wiped.”

  “Look again Dave – there’s got to be something,” Tom urged. Frowning with concentration, David busily looked for something, anything, of value on the cracked screen of the laptop. After a few minutes of silence broken only by the sound of the keyboard, David looked up.

  “There’s nothing Tom. It looks like it was just used for word processing. There’s no search engines, nothing in the way of external connectivity except a printer link for a printer that was discontinued long ago.”

  Looking at the laptop’s screen, Tom replied.

  “I think I might have the printer in question in my car. I’ll be right back.”

  Tom retrieved the printer Rosemary had given him, and after another search for a power cord for the printer, as well as a cord to connect it to the laptop, David was able to open communication between the two.

  “Let’s see what we have on this antique printer. Nothing in the print queue. Not surprising – all the volatile memory is lost when power is interrupted.”

  David paused, called over another forensic geek, and they muttered to each other and pointed at the laptop screen.

  “This is weird – there’s a document file stored in the printer – separate from the print queue. That’s not supposed to be there. It’s a new one on us.”

  “What’s in the file? What’s it called?” Tom asked.

  “The file’s labeled 321A.”

  David clicked twice on the file icon, and the screen filled with three long columns of numbers. Once the file had been copied to the pink laptop and from there to an external thumb drive, David transferred the thumb drive from Rosemary’s laptop into his computer.

  “I’ll print out a hard copy of the file for you,” David said as his printer came online. “We can also see what the nerds here and at the federal level can tell us about these columns of numbers, but my best guess is that we are looking at records of electronic funds transfers. Let’s hope the financial analysts can tell you if that’s indeed the case, and the origin and destination of the funds. Who knows, we might get lucky.”

  Leaving the forensic examiners to continue their recovery efforts, Tom called his partner, Doug Bateman, catching him in the middle of a late afternoon meeting at the sheriff’s office in Dover Foxcroft. Glancing around the table at Sheriff Torben, Anne Quinn, and Jack Walker, Doug looked at the screen on his vibrating phone.

  “Finally. Tom, or should I say Romeo, is checking in.”

  After answering the call, Doug listened in silence for what seemed like a long time, then responded briefly before hanging up.

  “O.K. Sounds good. I will let her know. Good work Tom.”

  Setting his phone down, Doug filled the others in on what Tom had told him.

  “It looks like we can take Rosemary and her dentist friend off our list of suspects. But the forensic examiners have found some hidden files on an old printer of Rosemary’s that her husband had been using. They appear to be encrypted and suggest he may have been into some shady dealings. It’s a promising new lead on a possible motive. They’ll be sending us copies of the files once they work around some security hurdles, and Tom thought that Anne’s contact at the FBI – the profiler who helped us a few years ago with our murder case, might be able to get someone at Quantico to pitch in with deciphering them.”

  Anne nodded.

  “I’ll give my FBI contact a call first thing tomorrow and see if she can help.”

  The mood in the room noticeably improved with the promise of a new line of inquiry, as all of their current suspects appeared to be dead ends. Jack Walker’s interview of the babysitter, Susie Arter, had backed up Ximena Lapointe’s account of the night of Don Robertson’s killing, and his follow-up conversations with Ximena hadn’t turned up any discrepancies or loose ends. Wes Fuller and Gary Crite’s stories also continued to check out, and nothing new had turned up on the murder of John Eastman.

  Anne gathered up her notes and phone and looked around the table.

  “We still need to locate this Nigel Underwood character - the guy bankrolling the patio boat that he and Don Robertson have entered in the Sebec Lake race. There’s a race committee meeting tomorrow morning that Doug and I have arranged to attend, and maybe he’ll show up there. If not, we’ll have to track him down.”

  Anne left her truck in the parking lot and she and Doug took his well-used Jeep Cherokee and headed back up to his place on the north shore of Sebec Lake, with Jack hanging his head out the window, jowls flapping.

  It was clear, in the mid-70s, with a
light breeze. After an early dinner they took Doug’s vintage Chris Craft out for a late afternoon cruise. Jack had initially been skittish about going for rides in the boat, but now jumped in with no hesitation, hopping up on the engine box cover behind the front seat and settling in. The 250-horsepower inboard, nicknamed “old reliable,” started right up when Doug turned the key, and they slowly rounded Otter Point and then turned west toward Pine Island. Doug slowed as they passed the south end of the island and they caught a glimpse of the two baby eagles perched high above on the edge of their nest.

  Doug reminded Anne of the warning she had offered to a family who had been staying at the rental cabin on the island the summer before. Oblivious to the threat posed by the hungry fledglings and their predator parents, the renters had allowed their small fluffy dog to play on the dock, drawing the attention and seemingly casual circling of the island’s eagles. The renters, from away, at first laughed at Anne’s idea that their dog represented a tasty snack for the eagles. But after taking her suggestion that they check out the bone pile at the base of the eagle’s nesting tree, they appeared to keep the dog inside for the rest of their stay on the island.

  Skirting the deceptive shallows just west of Pine Island, Doug continued west along the south shore of the lake, heading toward the point with the tall pines and cluster of cabins dating back to the 1920s and earlier. From there it was only a mile or so to Merrill’s Marina at Greeley’s Landing. Doug was going to stop at Merrill’s to gas up the boat and then continue west through the narrows and on to the South Cove and Peaks-Kenny State Park. The wind was freshening as they rounded the point and the roller rink at the marina came into view, its metal roof reflecting the late afternoon sun. Anne noticed a pair of loons on the surface at 2 o’clock, fifty yards or so away, and indicated their presence to Doug by pointing to her eyes with two fingers, then pointing downward, then toward the location of the birds – the silent signal they used when kayaking to indicate the presence of the birds without disturbing them.