Black Swan (A Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery)

by Chris Knopf

  Both Feys took longer than they should have to respond. Finally Anika said, "We don't know what happened to Myron. I thought that's what the police were supposed to figure out."

  Kinuei was pleased by that.

  "We are, ma'am. I appreciate the reminder."

  We waited around together for Hammon and 't Hooft to show, but eventually Kinuei cashed it in. He asked the Feys to have them call or stop by the barracks when they had a chance. He said to remind them they couldn't leave by ferry without him knowing it, so to save any fuss, to just make contact.

  I walked him out to his car.

  "Who are you really," I asked.

  He looked over at me as we walked across the parking lot.

  "Assistant District Attorney, Eastern Suffolk County. On loan to the state police, where I did five years while putting myself through law school, so no disrespecting the qualifications."

  "Not me. I'm all respect. So what do you think?" I added after a pause.

  "Never heard so much bullshit in my whole life. Correct that. I've heard worse bullshit, just from stupider people."

  "I'm sorry to hear that. I so much wanted to believe," I said.

  "This is no longer your problem," he said. "No sense hanging around."

  "Everybody's so concerned about my senses."

  "Though if you want to hang around, I can't stop you."

  "We need to find that kid," I said.

  "Since he's eighteen, he's not a kid and we don't have to find him until he becomes a missing person, which presents a far higher standard as to what constitutes missing."

  "But we're still going to look for him," I said, using the royal 'we' to imply that included him.

  "We are," he said.

  When we reached the cruiser, I asked him one more question.

  "What's your gut say? What do you think is going on?"

  He thought about it.

  "Whenever there's stupid big money involved, it distorts things. Can't jump to conclusions like you would in a routine case, where all the players are either poor or ignorant or both."

  My regard for Ashton Kinuei went up another notch. It compelled me to say, "Don't let the sleepy little backwater thing fool you. This island's got some teeth."

  He dropped into the cruiser, fiddled with the electronics on the dashboard, then rolled down the window and slammed the door.

  "Gettin' me back that shotgun would be a comfort," he said, before turning on to the road and disappearing into the freshly failing light.

  I went up to my room, but instead of going to bed, I packed up my backpack and left the hotel. I dug our dinghy out from under the dock and rowed out to the middle of Inner Harbor, where I figured it was safe to start the motor, then followed my nose through the breakwater, past a pair of private buoys, then using the little flashlight I always kept in my back pocket, found the entrance to my secret anchorage. A few minutes later I lit up the long white hull of the Carpe Mariana.

  As I killed the motor and drifted up to the stern I could hear a familiar bark. Lights flashed on over the cockpit and the forepeak.

  When I cut the motor and drifted into the transom, I yelled, "Don't shoot. It's me. Sam."

  "How do you know I won't shoot anyway?" Amanda yelled from somewhere below.

  As I grabbed a stanchion in an effort to steady myself, Eddie appeared above, hopping on his front legs, his face in full grin, tongue out.

  "Hey man," I said, reaching up to scrunch around a designated spot behind his ears.

  I secured the dinghy and scrambled up the swim ladder. I was unsteady climbing into the cockpit, so Eddie nearly bowled me over trying to say hello. I told him to knock it off, which only encouraged him.

  Amanda came up the companionway.

  "I'd wag my tail, too, if I could," she said.

  "Don't sell yourself short."

  She fell into me and wrapped her long wiry arms around my neck.

  "Goddamn you, Sam Acquillo," she said.

  "Nice to see you, too."

  We dispensed with further discussion for the rest of the night, heading directly to the quarter berth, deferring all that unresolved dross to yet another day.

  (

  Li

  We have a decision to make," I said, my first words of the morning.

  Those words had been churning around my mind for at least two hours, having woken up with a head full of conflicting impulses, fears, internal arguments, cautions, and a few spectral images caused by slipping unawares into real sleep.

  "I should be flattered when you say 'we'-but it always annoys me," said Amanda.

  "It does?"

  "Because you don't really mean 'we'-you mean 'I.' I have no say in the decisions you make. You might even believe that you take my interests into consideration, but you never do. We're still together because I usually defer to whatever you want to do, in order to keep conflict out of the relationship, but that doesn't mean I always endorse what is about to happen."

  "Oh."

  With that as a starting point, it didn't seem like we were entering into a seamless decision-making process. I lay there in silence wondering if there were a half-dozen or a few hundred occasions upon which Amanda had seemed to agree with a proposed course of action when in fact she would have approached it in a completely different way. I knew, at the same time, that one of my abiding failings as a human being was to be riddled with self-doubt, yet never appear as if I was. This led to the mistaken belief on the part of people close to me that I was driven by pure, unalterable conviction, when the opposite was usually the case.

  "Okay," I said, braced. "Then you decide. I'll just give you the alternatives, and you say yea or nay."

  "Does it matter if I know what you want to do anyway?"

  "You won't. I'll present the options in a purely unbiased fashion that will be impossible for you to divine beforehand."

  "Okay," she said, squirming more deeply into the tangled mess of sheets and unzipped sleeping bags that constituted the quarter berth's bed linens. "I'll play."

  I told her about the arrival of Ashton Kinuei and my spontaneous belief in his ability to master all the complicated elements of the case, physically and intellectually. With none of the biases that I had likely acquired as a result of my natural sympathies toward the Feys.

  "It's human nature to pick a side," I said. "No matter the doubts that might arise along the way."

  "I picked you. So there's your proof."

  "So now there's really no reason for us to stick around. It's now rightly out of our hands."

  "Okay, so what's the counter argument?" she asked.

  "I don't want to go yet."

  "So that's it? No reason?"

  "I'm worried about the Feys. I'm on their side."

  She laughed.

  "So your unbiased alternatives are the obvious, prudent and reasonable option versus what you actually want to do, for no good reason whatsoever. And I'm supposed to arbitrate that?"

  "Yeah. Go ahead. Your call. We'll do what you want to do."

  "You told me you've only had two intimate relationships in your life. With your divorced wife and me. And you're in your late fifties. Now I know why."

  I'd heard similar opinions expressed by my daughter on those few failed occasions when I tried to talk her out of her idiot boyfriends.

  "What's that got to do with this?"

  "I rest my case," she said.

  "So what're we going to do?" I asked.

  "I'm going to stay here as long as I can stand it. Then we're either going to sail this thing together to Southampton, or I'm going to motor over to New London with Eddie like we told everyone I've already done and take the ferry home."

  She squeezed me hard, then pulled herself out of the quarter berth and went to take a shower. I lay there for a while looking up through the forward hatch, then yelled out to her, "See, now we get to do what you want to do."

  Maybe sustaining successful relationships wasn't as hard as I thought it was.
>
  The next trick was to get the dinghy back unnoticed, a step in the process I hadn't considered until that morning. Had I done so, the obvious thing would have been to leave the boat while it was still dark and come in the last hundred feet or so the way I left, by oar. It was now about 7:30, and the sun was well up, so that option was off the table.

  Before leaving, I swam to shore with Eddie and hung out while he did all the stuff he liked to do, including a close inspection of the man-made and naturally occurring crud on the beach. Then I went back and took a shower off the transom, changed into fresh clothes, re-packed my backpack with additional essentials, and after a review of communications protocols with Amanda, took to the water.

  I went straight across from the lagoon, staying well north of the breakwater that protected the yacht club, the Black Swan and the marinas further down the channel. I hoped to find a place on shore to hide the dinghy that didn't mean cutting through private property to reach the coast road. What I found was a good hiding place in a wooded area clearly belonging to someone's summer home, but since the odds of them being there in October were pretty low, that was good enough.

  I clawed my way through the underbrush up to the road, then walked to the Swan where Anika was out in the yard, as usual fussing with the landscape.

  "Maybe if you just left everything alone it would do better," I said, crouching down next to where she was snipping twigs off an exhausted perennial.

  "That's the kind of thinking I associate with my father," she said, without looking up. "Maybe if your generation thought differently the world would be a more beautiful place."

  "So, no word from Axel."

  "No word. Where'd you sleep last night?"

  "You're not the only one who gets to have secrets."

  "I don't have any secrets," she said.

  "That's all you have."

  She stopped pruning for a moment, then went back at it.

  "I took a calculated risk with you," she said. "I'm still deciding if it was worth it."

  "That depends on what you were trying to achieve. What do you do with that computer in your room?"

  "Write emails to my friends, go on Facebook, Google stuff I want to know about. Same as anyone else."

  "Same as Axel?"

  "All he does is virtual warfare with a bunch of pathetic digital shut-ins. What else would he do?"

  "Access the development servers at Subversive Technologies?"

  She stopped pruning again, sighed, then dropped from an awkward squat onto her butt.

  "There's an interesting accusation," she said.

  "No accusation, just supposition."

  I joined her on the ground.

  "You don't know much about computer security," she said.

  "I don't know much about bank vaults, but I can break into any one I want if I have the combination."

  She used her pruning shears to poke at the ground.

  "Servers aren't bank vaults. You might leave fingerprints in a vault. In the development servers at Subversive, you leave your name, address, the time you came to visit, how long you stayed and what you did while you were there."

  "Not if you know how to be invisible."

  She smiled indulgently.

  "Things in computerland have progressed a little since the late nineties. Kids no longer get to hack into the grownups' playground."

  "Unless the kids helped build the swing sets."

  She liked that, but tried not to let it show.

  "Even if he could hack Subversive, why would he?" she asked.

  "If he could, why wouldn't he?"

  "I like you better as a boat bum."

  "I'm trying to find your brother. Are you?"

  Before I was booted out of the corporate world, I'd occasionally be afflicted by management's desire to assess my assets and liabilities. They often did this to people in the middle ranks, the part of the company that did the most work in return for the least recognition, so I didn't take it personally. One of these projects involved a psychological profiling that was supposed to help us better form and manage interpersonal relationships. You weren't supposed to be able to flunk this test, since the idea was to place you on an unbiased, non-judgmental personality spectrum. I think I managed to flunk it anyway, because they made me take the same test two or three more times, after which a woman from human resources asked to see me in her office.

  "I just wanted to put a face to the data," she said. "We've never seen such unusual scoring. My boss thinks you're doing it on purpose."

  "How would I do that?"

  "Theoretically, you couldn't, unless you were intimate with the test methodology," she said.

  She had that pale, exhausted and slightly shiny complexion that formed on people who worked in the company's over-worked, insecure professional sectors-like personnel and marketing-where it was generally understood that you were always a CFO's passing whim away from getting canned, no matter what the firm's financial prospects. Her mannish white blouse was too tight to button completely over her ample chest, and her blue skirt struggled to contain her lower half. I wanted to suggest a little more time in the gym, but even I knew that wasn't the kind of thing you said to women in human resources.

  "Your people like working for you and your supervisor calls you his best trouble-shooter. Everyone else is afraid of you, or just thinks you're an asshole. After looking at the results of your profile, I can see why."

  "I can't help that. If I do something I'm not supposed to do, you can call me back in here. Until then, you can tell the guy who came up with all this psycho mumbo-jumbo to cram it in a place I'm not allowed to specify."

  "The gal's psycho mumbo-jumbo. It's my test."

  "So let's make a deal. You stop pestering me and I'll stop screwing up your bell curve."

  If the HR lady was one of those patsies who said they were afraid of me, she didn't act like it. She smirked instead, a soft glow welling up from those weary eyes.

  "You don't always have to say what's on your mind," she said.

  Decades later, Anika said to me, "You don't always have to say what's on your mind."

  "Yes I do. All I have is what's on my mind. If you don't want to hear it, don't talk to me," repeating what I'd told the HR lady.

  "You're a lot better at stuff like finding my brother than I am." she said. "I know because I've studied you."

  "Did he take a laptop with him?"

  She took a few beats to answer.

  "Yes."

  "Has he emailed you?"

  She waited even longer this time.

  "Yes. And no, he didn't tell me where he is. Just that he's safe."

  "From what?" I asked.

  "I don't know. The elements. Wild beasts. Muggers."

  "Why won't he tell you where he is?"

  "He doesn't want to be found," she said.

  "Do you want to find him?"

  "Yes. He can't be alone. It'll kill him."

  "When are you going to tell me what's really going on?"

  "When I can trust you with my life. Your girlfriend is very pretty. I don't blame you for being faithful to her. In fact, it makes me like you more. Even though you don't pay proper attention to me and you've killed people."

  "I told you, I was acquitted," I said.

  "You killed two Venezuelans who were trying to kill you. So it was legal, and you got off. But you still did it. I have your whole police file on my hard drive. I think God brought you to me. Even though I don't believe in God."

  "Forward Axel's email to Amanda. I'll take it from there."

  Even with the age difference I could translate her expression into the words, "Oh, please."

  "No offence, Sam, but if Axel doesn't want to be tracked, he's not going to be tracked."

  "You're probably right. But what can it hurt?" I asked. "Unless you don't want me to find him, in which case, we need to change this conversation."

  The disdain on her face shifted toward frustration.

  "Fine. I'll s
end it to you. Without the text. That's private."

  "Don't need the text," I said, and was about to say more when a clap of thunder filled the air. We both looked up at the blackening sky.

  "Not again," she said.

  "It's October. The weather's very unstable."

  The sky wasn't just turning dark, it was the brownish grey dark that felt so foreboding, with good reason. I'd seen it before. I realized that with all the terrestrial commotion of the last few days, I'd completely neglected checking the skies above, a dangerous lapse at that time of year, in that place. I asked Anika what she knew.

  "With all the hub-bub lately, I haven't checked," she said.

  With no further discussion, we went into the Swan and up the three flights of stairs to her artist's garret where she kept her computer. She logged on and in a few minutes we had the official NOAA forecast.

  A named hurricane, Jillanne, was moving north about eighty miles off the coast, but close enough for the East End of Long Island and Southern Connecticut to feel some major effects. Today would see increasing winds. The next day a steady degeneration in conditions, with some rain, but mostly building wind and seas. The day after that, fullout gale force winds, small boats get to port, double-up dock and mooring lines, batten down the hatches, put in water, batteries and canned food, fuel up the generators, tape up the windows, and pay insurance bills and debts to God in full.

  "Not again," said Anika.

  "Another reminder who's in charge here."

  Without taking her eyes off the screen, she reached up and gripped my shoulder.

  "If we lose power again, Axel will be offline and helpless. That won't work," she said.

  I shook her hand off.

  "Help me bring him in or let him fend for himself. You can't have it both ways," I said, and then left the loft, finding my way downstairs to the breezy world outside, where I went out onto the docks to watch for signs of whatever was coming. The air felt uneasy, heavy and wind-whipped at the same time. I'd felt this before, years ago as I waited for a cyclone to smash into the oil rig I was optimizing in the tepid waters off Malaysia.