He threw her the key. She uncuffed herself, stood stiffly, and handed it back. He stepped out into the freshening breeze, and he missed the quick nod she gave to Mark Toland.
Billy Delavane was groaning in the dune grass, his brother, Ed, a heap on the sand below the gallows, but Todd ignored them. He had other things on his mind: fifteen throws, just like last time. How many items of clothing was she wearing? How many captives were left inside? Four, five counting Billy, six counting Jane herself.
Sandals, no socks, pants, underwear, sweater over a T-shirt; she never wore a bra.
Five garments, six captives, fifteen throws.
His head was spinning. Jane had knocked the situation out of control, derailed his perfect tidy train, but he didn’t care. He was glad; the thrill in his blood was almost unbearable. His head was filled with some vast organic symphony, a thousand birds tweeting their territory, a million cicadas ruling the night.
He had come home for this. He hadn’t known it; he could never have guessed it, but this was what he wanted most. And Jane knew it, she had always known it, she knew him better than he knew himself. What more proof did he need?
They walked twenty feet into the dune grass. All he had in his pocket was a penny, but that was perfect, too—the penny you threw off the side of the ferry to make sure you’d come back to Nantucket someday, to make sure you’d come home, like the pennies he’d left behind when he took his captives, like the penny he had actually thrown on that last boat ride to Hyannis twenty years ago.
Jane lost the first two throws.
She had kicked off her sandals. She was pulling off her sweater—then Todd heard the soft thump behind him. It was Cindy Henderson. She was free somehow! His mind rejected the thought. It was impossible—she was handcuffed to a steel bar! This could not be happening.
But it was.
Cindy had slipped in the sand and toppled against the door of the shack. That was the sound he had heard. Before Todd could react, Mark Toland appeared in the doorway, took Cindy’s hand, and helped her up. They stumbled away, down the beach, toward Great Point and civilization. Todd fumbled his gun out, squeezed off a shot, but they were already out of range.
A moment later they were gone.
Chapter Fourteen
High Hopes
The doctors said talking about what happened to me in high school would help. It didn’t. The halfway-house people said that writing about what happened to me in high school would help. It hasn’t. The time for words is over. It’s time for action now.
COMMENT:
Interesting blog. Go to Fish Face and Mr Peanut (ffandpnut.blogspot.com) for our reunion.
ANSWER:
Contact me at the old AOL email.
COMMENT:
First delete this account. I’ll be deleting mine within the next hour. Your blog did its job. We found each other. What we do next is private.
—From Todd Fraker’s deleted blog
I stood in our bedroom holding the penny that announced Jane’s kidnapping, the thoughts going off in my head like firecrackers, sharp, fast, and loud, jumping on the string.
This penny, all the other ones, Karen Gifford’s theory, Jane’s proposed book about the connected rock-and-roll murders, her actual book Beyond Brant Point Light, so weirdly prescient, life imitating art, art imitating life, truth stranger than fiction, fiction telling the truth—lying to tell the truth, as my dad used to say…
Before I had even formulated what I knew I was thinking, I was bounding out of the room, leaping up the attic stairs two at a time. Lonnie Fraker was standing behind me shouting something, but it was just noise.
Tim had brought the “Nuremberg II” story home, happy to put the whole incident behind him and stuffed it back in the box near the vent at the far end of the narrow space under the roof, now with a cautious red ink B- on the top right-hand corner of the title page. I clambered into the attic and scuttled forward in a crouch, moving across the squares of curling plywood laid over the studs. It was hot up here, a dry, combustible heat that matched my mood exactly.
I reached the box and opened the flaps. The story was sitting on top of the jumbled papers and notebooks, cassette tapes and CDs, photographs, and an old wallet. We’d go through every scrap of junk later. Right now, all I wanted was a name.
The original title page was tucked below the sheaf of papers sitting on a manila file-folder marked Report Cards. I pulled out the sheet and stared at it, gut-punched but not surprised. This was on me. I should have followed up; I should have checked this earlier. But I was as eager to be done with the whole messy affair as Tim. So I ignored it, failed to identify the perpetrator, the UNSUB—the Unknown Subject—perched like a spider at the top of my own house, sitting here all the time.
Todd Fraker. It had to be him.
Todd Fraker killed James Bascomb and kidnapped Jane and all the others.
I said the name aloud.
Lonnie’s high, nasal voice chirped at my back. He must have followed me up the stairs. “It can’t be him, Chief. I told you. He’s at High Hopes—the halfway house in Medford?”
“He must have escaped.”
“They’d have called me. But forget that. Miles would have called the state police, and they would have called you. Anyway, I talked to Todd on Saturday. Saturday morning. With the meds they have him on, I don’t think he could kill a fucking cockroach.”
I absorbed the information. “What’s the number? Who runs the place?”
“The resident administrator is Miles DeSalvo. Decent guy. I have him on speed dial.”
Lonnie pulled out his iPhone, swiped the screen, touched it once, and handed it to me. It was already ringing at the other end.
“High Hopes. Building a better world, one life at a time. Can I help you?”
“Miles DeSalvo, please.”
“Speaking.”
“This is Chief Henry Kennis, from the Nantucket PD. I’m calling about one of your patients—”
“Clients.”
“Right. One of your clients. The name is Todd Fraker.”
“Is there a problem? Todd’s been doing really well since we started him on Abilify and cut down on his Ativan.”
“I’m actually just trying to determine his current whereabouts, Mr. DeSalvo. And—”
“Dr. DeSalvo.”
“You’re a medical doctor?”
“I have a doctoral degree in social work, Chief Kennis. I hold a BA from Wheelock and a DSW from the University of Chicago. The program’s psychiatric staff manages the pharmaceutical treatment protocols.”
I shifted to jargon. “And Todd Fraker is currently in residence at the halfway house?”
“We like to call it the whole-way house.”
Breathe, Henry. Relax. Yelling at this guy would get me nowhere. “Is Todd Fraker living there? That’s all I need to know, Dr. DeSalvo. This is an emergency. People’s lives are at stake. We need to determine this individual’s whereabouts ASAP.”
“He’s here. Of course he’s here! At this point in time he could not manage outside of a controlled care environment. That being said, I have to tell you…this is not a mandated workday for Todd, so he’s sleeping in. Which does not mean he’s lazy, by the way! Sleep is a vital dimension of Todd’s healing process. Insomnia has been an ongoing element in his psychopathology, and every minute of deep REM slumber is golden for him. But I can wake him if you like. He may sound a bit foggy.”
“No, that’s fine. Let him sleep. Thanks for your help.”
I disconnected and handed the phone back to Lonnie. “Shit. Now what?”
“Well, I grew up on this island, Chief. I know the people. I know the history. I know where the bodies are buried. I mean—there are no bodies, obviously. Except for that skeleton Pat Folger found in the moors last Christmas. Whatsisname, Coddington. And we dug a gr
ave for Billy Delavane’s dog out in the moors back in fifth grade. That probably doesn’t count, though.”
The impatience was climbing my spine like insects. The attic was sweltering. I grabbed his arm. “Lonnie, what are you trying to say?”
He tugged his arm free. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Just tell me.”
“Todd was part of a group—the dead guy in the plane, Sippy Bascomb, he was one of them. And so was your assistant chief.”
I stared at him. The sun emerged from a cloud, and the hard light through the fan window made the attic hotter. We were baking up here. I flashed on the liquor store video—Haden and Billy before both of them vanished into thin air. “Haden Krakauer…”
“They were pals, him and Todd and Sippy. They were losers. And Haden loved that story Todd wrote—the geek revenge story. They were always over at my house, once Todd moved in—after his mom died, we adopted him. I heard Haden raving about that story all the time back then. ‘A private Nuremberg trial! Someone should really do that!’—he said that all the time. ‘Someone could pull it off if they had the money and the brains.’ Well, think about it. Haden had the brains. And Sippy had the money. Sip sold this island out but good when he finally left. They put in thirty new houses on the Bascomb family property. Thirty families, every one of them with at least four cars. Because traffic wasn’t shitty enough on Old South Road.”
“Jesus.”
Lonnie lifted his hands, palm out. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“That guy is squirrelly, Chief. He’s an oddball. He’s a drunk. He likes birds more than people. The kind of guy…you find out he has a bunch of dead hookers in his basement, you’re like…hmmm, makes sense.”
“Except the people who really kill the hookers, everyone’s, like, ‘I can’t believe it, he always seemed so nice and normal.’”
Another hand-lift. “I’m just sayin’.”
I silently crunched the numbers, running everything I knew about Haden through this new algorithm of doubt. And that video, that cold, indifferent visual indictment captured on camera. Lonnie was charging ahead. “Haden disappears, and it looks like he’s been kidnapped. But—surprise! He’s the kidnapper.”
“Haden was last seen at the Islander, buying beer with someone in a gray Toscana hoodie. The kind Billy Delavane wears.”
“And he’s gone, too. Coincidence?”
“He left a note for his daughter.”
“Written at gunpoint?”
“Maybe. If it was, whoever was holding the gun had to know Billy’s family setup. His routines, and his favorite surf spots. This was no stranger.”
Lonnie shrugged. “Except maybe we’re all strangers, you know?”
“Yeah. Maybe we are.”
We stood in the airless furnace heat for a few seconds. Then I pulled out my phone and called Charlie Boyce to start tracking down anything we had on Haden Krakauer, including all known real estate holdings where he might have stashed the victims. A second after we disconnected, the guitar opening of “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” seemed to jump from my phone. The ringtone sounded gratingly jaunty, starkly out of place in that haunted attic.
I recognized the low-pitched scratchy voice on the other end of the line—Carl Borelli, the State Police forensics investigator, always sounded like he was about to clear his throat, though he never did.
“Sorry for the delay, Henry. You’re good to go.”
He was talking about Bascomb’s plane. The CSI people had been swarming it for the last two days. “Is there anything left to see?”
He laughed. “Oh, yeah. We left everything in place except the body. Of course there’s ninhydrin and bichromate everywhere. That’s gonna be a helluva cleanup job for somebody. What the fuck, Bascomb don’t care anymore.”
“And you didn’t use benzidine.”
“No, no, don’t worry about it. Best fingerprint powder ever, by the way. FYI. But, ooooh, it causes cancer supposedly, so that’s all she wrote. You have to go on the dark web to get that stuff now. Not that I ever would.”
“Sure, of course not.”
“Everything good causes cancer, you ever notice that?”
I pushed on. “Find anything interesting?”
“It’s what we didn’t find. Apparent suicide, holding a Sig Sauer 1911 in his paw. But there’s no note.”
“GSR?” If Bascomb had really killed himself with a Sig Sauer, there’d be gunshot residue visible as far up as his elbow.
“Yeah, but the funny thing is, he’s still holding the gun. Normally, you see muscular release before rigor sets in. And there’s another shot. Could be some kind of test, make sure the gun was working, whatever.”
“But more likely that shot was done to plant the residue, after the fact.”
“Yeah. These crooks today spend too much time watching TV. CSI Wherever-the-Fuck.”
“So, what do you think? Murder?”
“Probably.”
“Any CCTV footage?”
“We’re still looking, but so far we got nothing but those fuzzy screen grabs. They show a guy in a ball cap. Head down, turned away, moving sideways. This guy might suck at staging a suicide, but he’s pretty smart about dodging the surveillance cameras.”
I couldn’t help thinking: Haden Krakauer had helped install this surveillance system a few years ago. He was a tech geek, a hacker, and a tinkerer. He had to know where the airport’s blind spots were.
He could have built them in himself.
“Thanks, Carl. Keep me posted.”
I closed the phone and turned back to Lonnie. “I have to go. Karen Gifford should look this stuff over. I’ll send someone to pick it up.”
“Why bother?”
“Why not? Todd was in the middle of whatever happened back then. He and Haden were pals. If there’s something we can use, Karen will find it.”
Lonnie seemed about to say something.
“What?”
“It’s just…this is family business, you know? Private stuff.”
“No one’s going to print it in the paper, Lonnie. But if Todd left some clue up here, we have to find it.”
“Sure, right. Yeah. Of course we do. Sorry. We should both get back to work. The clock is ticking.”
“Yeah.”
I called in to the station and sent Randy Ray with Karen to pick up the box from my attic along with anything else she noticed that might be important. She had a good eye—better than mine—when it came to the details of island life.
I was in my cruiser starting up Old South Road when my phone rang again. I struggled to work it out of my hip pocket, but it went silent before I managed to get it loose. I glanced at the screen as I slowed behind a line of cars waiting for the red flashing lights of a school bus. Classes ended at 2:20; it must be almost 3. A glance at the car’s digital clock confirmed it: 2:51.
The call was from Jackson Blum.
I hadn’t heard from the owner of Nantucket’s biggest sporting goods store since he’d spent the night in jail the previous Christmas Eve. It was quite an ordeal for our local Scrooge, but the man he had supposedly killed twenty years before turned out to have been a suicide; and Blum’s gay son, Martin, survived his own yuletide suicide attempt. Blum hadn’t known any of that as he sat on the cement bed in my jail cell through the long, cheerless night contemplating life in prison and the dire consequences of his homophobic rage.
Interestingly, his redemption had stuck. He had turned into quite a decent guy, welcoming Martin back into the family, volunteering at the food pantry, teaching an AP business class at the high school, paying for the cookouts at Whalers games…and actually smiling at other human beings from time to time.
Remarkable.
“How can I help you, Mr. Blu
m?”
“I’m helping you, son. I have my drone in the air right now doing flyovers of the whole island—Tuckernuck and Muskeget, too.”
“I’m not sure…”
“We’re looking for the missing people, Chief. I know, it’s police business. But this is Nantucket, not Los Angeles. Word gets around.”
“But how exactly did you even—”
“Martin and Connor were here for the weekend, and this reporter, Joshua Talbot? Martin grew up with him. He works for The Shoals, covers local sports and town business. I suspect David Trezize is grooming him to take over the paper someday. Anyway, Josh started talking about Trezize investigating these disappearances, you know—why now? Were they all connected? He knew every one of the missing people. Sure, it’s a small town and coincidences happen…but this seemed a little extreme.
“So Trezize starts poking around, asking questions. Then he disappears! Josh starts looking into it and gets nowhere. It occurred to him that you’d have to stow the people somewhere, and not in a house they might recognize if they escaped. Maybe some of those cheap prefab sheds? Or one of those military surplus tents? But with all the hedges and walls, and with so many rich residents still on-island, it was hard to snoop and tough even knowing where to start.
“So I offered my drone for aerial photography. Josh has been curating the screenshots. But he needs your email so he can send the file.”
“Wow. Thank you, Mr. Blum. But I don’t want—”
“I know. Not a word to anyone! And nothing in the paper until the situation is resolved.”
“No problem. This could really help.”
“I know what you’re thinking. Why doesn’t the NPD have a drone? Well, I’m donating this one as soon as my new state-of-the-art drone gets delivered—it’s all carbon fiber with much better image stabilization and lift capacity.”
I had to smile. Despite his generosity, Blum couldn’t help bragging about his new toy and making sure I understood we were getting his hand-me-down.
“Well, thanks again, Mr. Blum. My email is [email protected].”
“I’ll pass it on. Good luck and good hunting.”
Nantucket Penny Page 20
