Miller searched for the notes from that interview, found them, skimmed through the pages till he located what he was looking for. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “About a quarter mile. The address is Little Neck Lane. That’s right across Montauk Highway from the college, probably one of those small cottages along Shinnecock Bay. Some students take them as winter rentals because it’s actually less expensive than living in the dorms, not to mention nicer. Landlords let them go cheap because they can get a fortune for them in the summer and don’t want to leave them sitting empty all winter. Collect rent and have someone else pay to heat the place, not a bad deal at all.”
“So what about the second boy?”
“Same thing, more or less. His name was Brian Carver, seventeen years old, five foot six, one hundred and fifty pounds. He worked at the McDonald’s in town, left work one evening, and the next night his body was found in Peconic Bay.”
“No connection between him and the Jason White kid?”
“Not that anyone found. The cops interviewed his family, his coworkers. Apparently Carver had some trouble with drugs two years before, went through a treatment program. Nothing in the notes to say that the cops talked to anyone wherever it was he had received treatment. The general consensus of those who knew him was that the kid sometimes got depressed, but without any suicide note, and, again, without any markings on his body to indicate foul play, his cause of death was ruled accidental drowning.”
“He worked. Did he own a car?”
Miller looked through the papers, then said, “No. His parents live on North Main Street. He used to walk back and forth to work.”
“Did he go to the college?”
“No, he was a senior at the high school.”
“And what about Jason White? Did he go to school?”
“He graduated from Hampton Bays High School a year and a half ago.”
Clay nodded. “So no connection there.”
“No.”
“Okay, what about the Foster kid? What did the coroner find?”
“Yeah, well, that’s where things get tricky.”
“What do you mean?”
“The coroner has filed only a preliminary report, pending the results of further tests, one of which is the Gettler chloride test.”
“So he’s starting to think maybe this is too much of a coincidence.”
“Yeah. And he’s ordered a more complete toxicological screen, which takes more time.”
“What does that tell you?”
“Two things. First, that he’s not letting anyone rush him this time around. Second, that he might be looking for something to explain the lack of markings on the body. If you drown someone, they fight back. If they’re restrained, they fight against the restraints. Either way, there should be markings on the skin. Deep markings, because once the water enters the lungs, the real panic, not to mention the real convulsing, begins.”
“So a more complete tox screen might turn up some kind of drug in the blood that may have been overlooked in the first two boys?”
“Exactly. They generally only test for certain drugs. It’s still a shot in the dark, though. I mean, there are a number of drugs that cause unconsciousness and disappear quickly, some even within minutes. But those are usually taken intravenously, and the coroner never reported finding any injection marks on any of the boys. But, yeah, he obviously thinks there might be something beyond the obvious in Foster’s case, a pill or something he might have been given to drink.”
Clay looked up at Miller. “How do you know all this shit, Tommy?”
Miller shrugged. “I’ve been trying to tell you for five years now, Reggie, I know some things about police work. I’m not just an errand boy.”
“I guess not, huh.”
Clay looked back down at the pile of papers spread out in front of them. “All right, so tell me, why is it the cops are so bent on calling the Foster boy’s death a suicide?”
“Diversion, maybe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Three accidents would maybe be a little too much to sell. Two accidents, a month apart, and then a few weeks later a suicide, maybe that’s a little easier. Anyway, it’d keep the newspapers from printing the words murder and Southampton in the same headline, and buy the cops some time—till the tests come back, at least.”
“Time for what?”
“The longer they can keep this out of the paper, the better, right? No summer people, no money. The mayor’s a businessman. So are all the selectmen, the members of the town council. These boys were murdered, Reggie. There’s no doubt about that. They were murdered and their bodies were disposed of in a way that would cover the killer’s tracks nicely. Like I said, drowning deaths are almost always ruled accidental. It’s difficult even in the best circumstances for the coroner to prove conclusively one way or another the cause of death. Whoever is doing this is smart, and getting confident. He waited only two weeks this time. He waited a month between killings before. He’s getting good at what he does, he’s escalating, he’s calculating, picking his prey carefully. All that makes him a predator, and the thing about predators is, they don’t stop. They can’t. Do you think people would come rushing out here with their kids and their hard-earned money if they knew this was going on? The Son of Sam emptied the streets of New York for an entire summer. We’re talking all of New York—Queens, Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan. People had to be there because they lived and worked there. They couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. The people who come out here don’t have to come out here. They can go anywhere they want, anywhere there isn’t some twisted freak killing boys.”
“So the cops stick their heads in the sand and hope no one notices.”
“Or that it goes away entirely, yeah. They do what they’re told, Reggie. Someone’s telling them to keep this under wraps. They know what they have on their hands. You can see that by the notes. They’ve even given him a nickname.”
“What?”
“John the Baptist. They’ve named him, and that in itself makes it pretty clear that he’s real to them.”
Clay flipped through a few more pages, but he wasn’t really reading them now. “So it’s clear by all this that they suspect that the Foster boy was murdered?”
“Yeah.”
“Then we can use this to get the Foster family off the hook? We can leak the autopsy report to a reporter, force the cops to admit that the Foster boy was murdered.”
“We can do that, yeah. But it’s going to make a lot of people unhappy.”
“Do you really care about that?”
“Not really, just as long as we do this carefully. Someone went out on a limb to get this for me. I don’t want it coming back and causing that person any trouble.”
Clay nodded. “No, of course not.” He thought for a moment, then said, “Do the police have any suspects?”
“There are several references to a guy at the college, some writing teacher named Kane. Foster was in one of his classes. I guess the investigating detectives went to talk with him at his office yesterday and didn’t really like what they saw.”
Clay nodded, thought about his visit with Kane later that day. “Anything else?” he said after a while.
“The woman I talked to, Colette, she said that she and Foster took a class together at the college. Maybe they all knew each other, Kane and Foster and Colette. Maybe the class he taught and the class she and Foster took were one and the same.”
“They were,” Clay said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Kane’s address is in the file,” Miller said.
“He lives right around the corner. Maybe we should go talk to him.”
“He’s not home.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was just there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was just at his place.”
“What for?”
“We sent him to the chapel tonight to make a
video record of whatever was inside.”
“You guys know him?”
“A friend of Ned’s knows him, vouched for him. We needed someone who wasn’t connected to us, and since he already worked at the college, it seemed the way to go.”
“So what did he find?”
“I don’t know. He was supposed to meet up with Ned afterward, but he never showed.”
“How long ago was that?”
“An hour.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know.” Clay looked up at Miller then. “Let me ask you something, Tommy. The Foster boy, how big of a guy was he?”
“Not very.”
“Same as the first two?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“They were slight, probably not all that strong, right?”
“Yeah, probably.”
“This Kane guy, he’s on the scrawny side. You would generally pick on someone you could handle, right? If you were going to be lugging a dead body around, I mean, you’d pick someone in your weight class or smaller, right?”
“Yeah, probably. You think this Kane guy is behind all this?”
“I’m not sure what to think here.” Clay looked at all the pages spread out in front of him. He was quiet for a while, then said, “Ned should see all this, Tommy. We should show all this to him.”
“I figured you’d want to do that. But I’d rather the file didn’t leave my shop, if that’s okay with you. He can come here and look through it if he wants.”
“That’s fine,” Clay said. He pushed his chair back and stood. “I’ll call him from outside, have him meet you here as soon as he can.” He grabbed his coat from the nearby pile of boxes, started to pull it on.
“Where are you going now?” Miller said.
“To have a look around Kane’s apartment.”
“I want to come with you.”
“You need to be here, to show this to him.”
“You wouldn’t know any of it if not me for, Reg. You owe me.”
“Is that why you showed this to me? So I’d owe you a favor?”
“No. But I’m more than just an errand boy. You know that now. I can help you out. Just give me a chance.”
“Ned really should see all this as soon as possible. You can help out by being here when he gets here.”
“You can call him when we get back. How long are we talking here, Reg? Ten minutes? There’s nothing he can do with this information till morning anyway.”
Clay buttoned up his overcoat. “You’ll go over everything with Ned, just like you did with me?”
“Yeah, of course.”
He looked at Miller for a moment more, then nodded once and said, “Yeah, all right, grab your coat, Tommy. And a pair of gloves, too. But try to stay out of my way, okay?”
“Don’t I always?” Miller said.
It took less than a minute to walk from Miller’s shop on Main Street to Kane’s place on Nugent. Clay remembered what Kane had told him about the old lady who lived next door, so he and Miller climbed the stairs as quietly as they could. They entered through the unlocked door, switched on a light. Clay walked through the front room and started down the narrow hallway. Miller stayed behind and looked around for a moment, then followed Clay. The place was small; there wasn’t much at all in it. Miller had expected more, didn’t know why exactly, just did. It was hard to imagine someone who taught at a college living like, well, a student. Miller stood in the hallway, looked to his right, into the small bathroom, then to his left, at the kitchenette. A two-burner stove, a toaster oven on a counter, not much else. Clay had walked into the back room by then. Miller went to him, stood beside him. There was a narrow bed, a bureau, a few milk crates with some books. An empty bottle of scotch stood on the floor by the bed.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Miller said.
“I had hoped you’d know. You’re the boy wonder.”
Miller smiled. “He leaves his door unlocked,” he said.
“The lock is broken.”
“I didn’t see that.”
“I came by yesterday to see if he could tell me anything about the Foster kid that might help. While I was here he told me that he had come home and found that his place had been broken into.”
“Was anything taken?”
“No.”
“Not much to take.”
“Yeah.” Clay looked around. “Aren’t break-ins like this often just cases of drug addicts looking for money? I mean, looking at this place from outside, would a thief think there’d be something worth taking inside?”
“No, not really.”
“Safe to say there’d be no security system to contend with. Maybe it was just some junkie desperate for whatever cash he could get his hands on.”
Miller walked to the bed, looked down at the empty bottle, then at the bedside table. There was a lamp, a phone, and an answering machine. The indicator light on the answering machine wasn’t blinking. No messages. After a moment Miller picked up the phone, looked at the receiver. “He has caller ID,” he said.
“Scroll down.”
Miller pressed the button marked with a downward-pointing arrow. His gloves were thick; it took effort not to hit any of the surrounding buttons. “Two calls in the last hour. A Bridgehampton exchange. Unknown name.”
“What else?”
Miller scrolled down. “A call from a Southampton number. This one has a name. Meg Timmins. The rest are a bunch of calls in a row from Southampton College. All day yesterday, it looks like. And two blocked calls before that.”
“Do you have anything to write them all down with?”
“Yeah.” Miller took out a Moleskine notebook and pen from his coat pocket. He copied down the name Meg Timmins, along with the number and the time of the call. Then he copied down the number with the unknown name, and the times of both calls.
As Miller did this, Clay took another look around the bedroom, then finally walked back through the hallway. He paused, glanced into the bathroom, then into the kitchenette. He opened the upper cupboards, looked through them, found nothing but cans of soup. Then he bent down, opened the cupboard doors below the counter. A recycle bin, some empty bottles and cans, a newspaper. He picked up the newspaper, looked at it. It was last week’s Southampton Press. No mention on the front page about dead boys. No mention anywhere inside, Clay remembered. He put the paper back, closed those doors, moved to the doors directly below the sink, opened those. A bottle of dishwashing soap, a can of Spic and Span, a spare sponge still in its plastic wrapper. Beside those, a plastic garbage container, tall, almost as tall as the cupboard itself. Clay grabbed it, pulled it out, looked inside. Just looking, just being thorough. He just stared into the container. After a moment he stood up straight.
Miller had stepped into the hallway, was watching Clay, saw the look on his face. “You find something, Reggie?”
Clay nodded. “Yeah. Look at this.”
Miller moved in closer, stood beside Clay. There was barely room for the two of them in that narrow hall. He looked down into the garbage.
“Shit.”
“Look around, see if you can find something for me to put this in,” Clay said. There was a touch of urgency in his voice.
Miller began opening drawers quickly, found finally a box of plastic quart-size baggies. He pulled out the last one and opened it. It wasn’t easy with his gloves on but he moved as fast as he could. Clay grabbed a fork from the dish drainer, reached into the garbage with it, carefully lifted out a black T-shirt, wadded up and caked with dried blood. Miller held the open Baggie directly beneath it, and Clay placed it inside. When it hit the bottom, the Baggie almost slipped from Miller’s hands. “Careful,” Clay said, urgency still in his voice. He didn’t like that, didn’t like how it sounded. He didn’t want Miller to know that he was in over his head. Clay tossed the fork into the Baggie, and then Miller closed it.
Clay looked into the garbage container again.
�
��There’s broken glass in here,” he said. “Looks like a drinking glass. Maybe he cut himself, used the shirt to stop the bleeding.”
Miller looked into the container, saw that the garbage it held reached a little over halfway up. The broken glass rested on top of it. The shirt must have been on top of that.
“I don’t see any blood on the glass. No blood on the lining.”
Clay looked at him. “What does that mean?”
“The shirt was already dry when it was put in there.”
“How fast does blood dry?”
“Pretty fast. But if he cut himself and used this T-shirt to stop the bleeding or clean up, I think it would have still been wet when he tossed it in.”
Clay nodded, thought about that, glanced at the Baggie. After a moment he said, “The autopsy report will have the Foster kid’s blood type on it, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“But you said there were no marks on his body, or on any of the boys, not cuts or anything unusual.”
“Yeah.”
“So this wouldn’t have come from him.”
“Drowning can cause the sinuses to hemorrhage. The lungs, too. It’s possible that he would have bled from the nose.”
“The shirt is pretty well covered. Would he have bled that much?”
“No, probably not.”
“So what the fuck is going on here?” Clay muttered.
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
“C’mon, let’s get out of here,” Clay said finally.
“Where are we going?”
Clay didn’t answer. Miller followed him down the stairs, then across the street to Clay’s Intrepid. Clay had his cell phone out and was speaking into it.
“I need you to do a reverse lookup for me,” he said. He popped open his trunk. Miller placed the Baggie inside. Clay closed the trunk, waved his hand in a way that Miller took to mean that he wanted the number they had gotten from Kane’s caller ID. Miller opened his notebook, held it for Clay to see. Clay read the Bridgehampton number aloud. Someone had called from there twice in the past hour. They’d start there and work back. When he was done reading the number, he said, “Call me back,” then hung up.
They sat inside Clay’s car. He started the motor, turned on the heat. “This fucking cold,” he said. He looked through the driver’s door window at Kane’s apartment, his dark windows. He didn’t say anything. A little over a minute later his cell phone rang.
The Darkest Place Page 18
