Nantucket Penny

by Steven Axelrod

  Out at the airport, Byron Lovell and Bob Coffin were lounging outside the small, sleek jet. Both of them were absorbed with their phones, which they stuffed into their pockets with comical haste when I pulled up. A strip of yellow crime scene tape blocked the open door over the plane’s wing.

  I climbed out of my cruiser and walked up to the two uniforms. “Boys.”

  “Hey, Chief,” they said in unison.

  “Anything happening?”

  Byron snorted. “We only get posted when nothing’s happening. When everything’s happened already. I mean—who’s gonna show up now? Ghosts?”

  Bob nodded. “We could start a haunted private jets of Nantucket tour.”

  The plane’s door, just in front of the wing, was open, with fold-down stairs up to the cabin: two pilot seats side by side facing a set of screens, one seat in the back with tracks and fasteners for several more, dark-gray leather and plastic, white fabric on the arched ceiling. Black dust covered everything like ash after a fire, and the interior stank of cigarettes, the chemical tang of ninhydrin and the underlying lingering musk of decomposition. Bascomb’s body had been in situ for a day or two, and they’d never get the smell out of the seats and the padding. The new owner would have to gut it, right down to the metal struts.

  I would have found the cramped space claustrophobic in any case, but I clamped down the urge to rush my search. Go slow, breathe through your mouth.

  This was far from my first murder scene, but you never get used to it. The two detectives I’d known in my career who had seemed to relish these death rooms were both dead themselves now—by their own hands. Franny Tate’s old boss at Homeland Security had been the most recent one. He’d blown his brains out in my office to avoid spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison cell. But Al Hurewitz, my first partner in the LAPD, had eaten his gun in his kitchen on a Saturday afternoon and left his friends the exact type of crime scene that had driven him to suicide in the first place.

  No note—and no need for one.

  Enough. I set my morbid thoughts aside, pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and got to work.

  I pulled the jet’s flight log from under the pilot’s seat. Bascomb’s itinerary matched perfectly with the locations of the Jane-look-alike murders, including his last port of call in Sydney, Australia. I flipped through the pages, but there were no revealing scribbles in the margins, just standard FAA notations—aircraft make and model, aircraft ID number, points of departure and arrival, all of it in aviation codes—numbers and letters that meant nothing to me, apart from the obvious airport codes like SYD. The “memoranda” pages held repair details and refueling records, nothing interesting beyond the fact that jet fuel was insanely expensive and jet engine mechanics didn’t make much more an hour than the kid who changed my oil on Nantucket.

  The log held flight routes and ground condition notations, times but no dates. Bascomb must have stopped in Sydney for a while, though—there was a postcard tucked into the flap of the notebook, addressed to J. Bascomb at a local post box. The card was invisible, tucked into the end pocket of the log, and it hadn’t been dusted for prints. The state police had obviously missed it.

  Score one for the home team.

  I held the card by the edges. The front showed a standard aerial photograph of Nantucket—green crescent floating on the blue sea. There was no return address on the other side, just a short message, “Greetings from Snake Hollow,” and a crude smiley face. No signature.

  Snake Hollow. I felt a faint chord chiming at the back of my mind, like a name I couldn’t quite recall in a barroom debate. Who was the rat-faced guy who came back from two sets down to beat McEnroe in the 1984 French Open? Anton something? Egon something. In ten seconds, Google could spit out the name Ivan Lendl. I almost reached for my phone, but Google couldn’t help me here. This reference was private.

  I slipped the postcard into a glassine evidence baggie, tucked it into my jacket pocket, and continued the search.

  A large cardboard box dominated the tight floor space behind the pilot’s seat. Covered with black powder, it had obviously been dusted, dumped, pawed through, and catalogued by half a dozen people before me.

  My own inventory:

  A Ruger .45 and two boxes of ARX ammunition.

  Two pairs of handcuffs and a ball-gag.

  A complete library of Madeline Clark paperback mysteries.

  Two copies of a Vanity Fair magazine from 2014 with an article about Jane Stiles.

  A ring-binder scrapbook full of other clippings.

  A Xerox of Todd Fraker’s inescapable “Nuremberg II” manuscript.

  A Dell laptop—harder to open than a Nantucket quahog, secured by some complex password no one had even tried to crack.

  A pocket moleskine notebook, with two pages of scribbles:

  Strategies: schemes and dreams until you act.

  Korzypski: the map and the territory.

  Blue line on the map, river gorge on the ground. See for yourself.

  Roy Elkins: takes the bait?

  Face to face. See the eyes.

  Give what he wants, get what you need.

  Research: Ed Delavane, post high school: military records, newspaper stories, police reports.

  Paydirt: October 18th 2002. Bar fight, Madison Wisconsin,

  Delavane: football scholarship

  Elkins: Attending Criminal Justice Certification program.

  Argument, brawl. Ed arrested. Elkins bailed out.

  Bar fight—bully-bonding?

  Elkins’ graduation pics: Delavane there. Big hugs.

  After Iraq: Facebook friends.

  Elkins wants Jane, needs Delavane. Money

  Delavane needs Elkins to escape

  Match making

  Honey trap.

  Bear trap? Cost? Vendors?

  Elkins, Jane: outsource the dirty work. Why not.

  Alibi research. Blackmail? Check browser history

  The key: People gone for other reasons.

  Plausible distractions.

  Mr. Peanut: “Smoke and mirrors!”

  With enough smoke, you don’t need mirrors.

  Mirrors are for seeing yourself later.

  I stood with the moleskin in my hand for a minute or two. It answered some questions and raised others. So Bascomb had dug up a connection between Roy Elkins and Ed Delavane, masterminded both jail breaks, and then left the actual killings to his stand-ins. The entries explained the strategy—and some of his tactical thinking, as well—the diversions that covered the kidnappings. And the hardware. Jesus Christ—a bear trap, seriously?

  But who was “Mr. Peanut”?

  And whose alibi was Bascomb planning to secure with blackmail?

  I set the questions and the notebook aside and kept digging.

  At the bottom of the box, I found some scraps of clear plastic shrink wrap. My first thought having struggled with enough of them over the years: DVDs. One of them had part of a label: “Commentary by Director Ma.” Matthew Vaughan? Martin Scorcese?

  No. Obviously not.

  Director Mark Toland. If he had been taken, then Cindy Henderson was gone, also. They had been together when they disappeared. My stomach clenched, a swift cramp of frustrated rage. I could feel the time passing, each second hitting like a sledgehammer on a spike. Where were they?

  The rest of the cabin was empty. I stood hunched over for a second, paralyzed, brain empty. They put out oil well fires with explosives—the blast literally blows the fire away from the fuel it’s burning. That was me in Bascomb’s jet—blank and extinguished, anchored in the smoky reverberations of his crazy plan.

  Then I remembered: the luggage compartment. If there was a suitcase stowed back there, the crime scene techs would have sorted through it already, and if they’d found something, Carl Borelli wou
ld have told me. But the thought of it got me moving, and at that moment, what I needed most was to move.

  I climbed out the hatch door and walked around the wing to the baggage compartment. It was empty except for a gray vinyl Yeti duffel bag dredged in ninhydrin, like everything else. I hauled it out, set it on the wing, and unzipped it. My surgical gloves were black by now. I peeled them off and pulled on my last pair.

  “Nothing to see there,” Byron called out.

  “More guys been pawing through that case than Casey Anthony’s underwear drawer,” Bob added.

  “Shut up, both of you.”

  They could see I was serious, and they backed off a few steps and turned to face the airport building across the tarmac.

  I started pulling out the contents of the duffel and setting them on the wing beside me: generic clothes, socks, a pair of well-worn Top-Siders, a high-end electric toothbrush, a hairbrush, some pens, a phone charger, another Maddie Clark mystery…

  And, on the lapel of a classic Nantucket blue blazer, a New York Giants Super Bowl pin from 1986.

  Something else the Staties had missed.

  It caught my eye because Jane had talked about it, described Ed Delavane gloating about it. She had wanted to give it to her dad back in the day, but Ed had delighted in refusing, even though he was a diehard Patriots fan. And there was something else—Haden telling me Ed had buried all sorts of valuables somewhere on the island when he was a kid, like some teenage Blackbeard the pirate.

  Stuff like this pin. Sippy must have raided the stash and taken it. That meant he knew where the treasure was buried and where Ed was heading when he got out of jail. He also knew what the pin meant to Jane. Of course he did…he was obsessed with her…they grew up together.

  So what was the pin supposed to represent? What was its function in Bascomb’s plan?

  Totem? Taunt? Tribute?

  Grave marker?

  Whatever he had meant to do with it, those plans died with him. But I had a direction now. I had to find Ed’s stash. Ed Delavane was headed there—it was the bait for Sippy’s trap, the center point, the nexus. My gut told me Jane and the others were there already, captive and in mortal danger.

  And the same question clawed at me, a feral cat thrashing in my hands.

  Where was it? Where were they?

  Haden had let the information slip, he knew—he had been part of Sippy’s crew of losers. So Lonnie Fraker’s instinct had proved right, for once—Haden was holding them at the spot on the treasure map marked with the X.

  It had to be on his own property. He wouldn’t be safe anywhere else. I thought of Haden’s shabby house in ’Sconset—too familiar, too public, sitting right there on Morey Lane, too central. But the Krakauer family owned another house out in Squam, a ramshackle nineteenth-century mansion, crumbling into disrepair, perched on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic, as remote and inaccessible as a piece of property could be and still be on the island.

  X marks the spot.

  I pushed myself off the wing, thinking hard.

  I called Charlie Boyce and Kyle Donnelly, told them to swing out to the airport and pick up Bob and Byron. The best foot soldier on the roster was Sam Dixon. I told him to get out to the airport pronto.

  “I’m in the middle of a domestic altercation here, Chief.”

  I heard shouting in the background. “They’re going to have to work this one out for themselves”

  “Ned Hollis is with me.”

  “Good, bring him.”

  My next call was to Peter Salros at the Coast Guard station. At twenty-six, Pete was the youngest commanding officer they’d ever stationed on Nantucket. It was obvious why—I had barely started to explain the situation when he said, “I’ll have two cutters and four RHIBs ready to launch in twenty minutes. I know the house. Twenty-five-foot rusting flagpole with a Wharf Rat Club pennant. We navigate by it.”

  Those Rigid Hull Inflatables could slide right up onto the beach. Pete had the picture. I nodded, though he couldn’t see me. “Everyone armed, but—”

  “No trigger-happy redneck-cowboy testosterone cases.”

  “Right.”

  “Just smart, fearless, level-headed Coasties who know how to follow orders but take the initiative in a jam.”

  “Right.”

  I could hear the smile in his voice. “We can rustle up a few of those.”

  “See you out there.”

  My next call was to Lonnie Fraker. I wanted the state police involved with this bust—no jurisdictional rivalries, no red tape, no hassles or delays. Besides, I was betting Lonnie knew the house, and I was right.

  “There’s an eight-foot hedge that runs right down to the beach on the east side of the property,” he told me after I laid out my plan. “Someone’s gonna have to cut through it. You go around and you’re in plain sight from the deck. I have a good pair of loppers in my garage, and my place is on the way.”

  The rest was straightforward—one group charging from Squam Road, another coming at the place from the west, and, of course, the Coast Guard taking the beach and cutting off any escape by water. We had superior numbers and the element of surprise on our side—a slam dunk.

  My old boss and mentor, Chuck Obremski, who among other accomplishments had earned a degree in Culinary Management from the Cordon Bleu school in his hometown of Atlanta, always said a good raid should be prepared and timed like a five-course meal with everything, from the lamb shanks that had been brining for five hours to the baby peas that needed to boil for just three minutes, ready to plate at exactly the same moment.

  Chuck would have approved our assault on the Krakauer house—Lonnie’s troops breaking the lock on the bulkhead and pounding upstairs from the basement while the Coast Guard boys swarmed up the beach and I kicked open the front door as my detectives burst in from the side entrance on the deck. There was only one problem.

  The house was empty.

  We stood there in the yawning deserted living room, the furniture covered by heavy canvas drop cloths, panting and disoriented. For some reason I thought of Billy Delavane’s pug Dervish chasing a rabbit right into the flooded cranberry bog. Billy had to wade in to save the little dog. We were just treading water.

  Charlie holstered his Glock. “Shit. Now what?”

  I had no answer for him. None of them said it, and none of them needed to, but I had called this one wrong, wasted precious time and resources. And my friends were still in danger. We stood in silence for a few seconds, and then my phone chimed with a text message.

  Saved by the bell.

  I checked my phone—Josh Talbot. He had sent me the screenshots from Blum’s aerial surveillance.

  “Check these out,” I said. “Anything look suspicious?” Lonnie, my two detectives, and Pete Salros gathered around me as I swiped through the pictures.

  One by one we were able to identify and dismiss every suspicious-looking structure. The new shed was a landscaper’s equipment storage, that would be Sebastian Cruz—I had helped him set it up. Kyle Donnelly and Charlie Boyce identified the new tents. They belonged to a pair of washashore entrepreneurs—one an auto-body repair guy, Cliff Jepson, the other a medical marijuana grow house operated Charlie’s cousin Gary. One giant tent was just a tented house—I remembered the permit application to fumigate the place for termites. The other tent—a massive white one—had been set up for Lena Perry’s wedding, which Jane and I had been planning to attend in what now seemed like a different lifetime.

  I swiped again and saw a skeletal structure. From the air, it looked like it was made out of toothpicks, perching in the dune grass and brambles of Coatue.

  “That’s our viewing platform,” Lonnie said. “So people can see what the panorama from the widow’s walk will be like, when they build their house.”

  Kyle was shocked. “You’re selling the land on Coatue?”


  Lonnie blew out a disgusted breath. “Don’t get me started. The family’s been fighting about that parcel for five years. The cousins who don’t even live here and never gave a shit about the island want to sell to some billionaire. My parents want to sell it to the Land Bank for lots less money, obviously, and I want to keep it in the family. No one can agree, and no one can afford to buy anyone else out…it’s like the Darling Street house. Or half the properties on this island. Families going to war with each other, and when someone wins the war, they get to go to war with a Conservation Commission and the HDC and the abutters—that’s what we call neighbors around here, Henry. Abutters, that’s the legal term—because we only talk to each other in court.”

  I seemed to have touched a nerve. “So who built the viewing platform?”

  “That was the compromise—list it, show it, make the cousins happy. Someone told me the platform was falling down. It was built like crap in the first place. I hadn’t been out there in months, since before they put the platform up. I don’t even like to think about it. Still, whatever—I drove out yesterday and yeah, there is some rot and rust, and it needs work, and we’re all gonna have to pay for it, even though most of us never wanted it in the first place. Families and property. They go together like ice cream and hot beef gravy. You can choke it down…you’re grateful, I guess. I mean, it’s better than starving—you need to eat it. But who wants to?”

  Quite a soliloquy—I don’t think I had ever heard Lonnie speak so articulately, or even say that much at one time, in all the years I’d known him. I thought of my mother’s favorite quote from Hamlet the Dane’s mother critiquing the actress overplaying her grief in The Murder of Gonzago: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” I assumed Lonnie was simply dodging the truth—he really did want to sell the Coatue property, just as he had been pushing the family to sell the Darling Street house before we moved in. It was fine to profit from those giant real estate transactions, but you had to deplore them publicly if you wanted to maintain your old-school island credibility.

  Anyway, I was only half listening to him, using the pause his diatribe created to plan out my next move.