Stuart Woods_Stone Barrington 12

by Dark Harbor

  Lance came out of the little office. “Okay, let me have the dial,” he said.

  Stone handed it to him.

  Lance inspected the safe closely, then fitted the dial back onto the stem protruding from the front of the safe. “Now we find out whether it’s on right, or whether I have to take it off again and rotate it a hundred and eighty degrees. I don’t suppose any of you has a stethoscope on you?”

  They all looked at him blankly.

  “That’s what I thought.” He pressed an ear to the safe and began slowly rotating the dial.

  “I didn’t know you were a safecracker, Lance,” Stone said.

  “Jack of all trades, definitely master of none.”

  “Holly opened it, now that I recall.”

  “We attended the same safecracking academy. Now be quiet; I can’t listen to you and the safe at the same time.”

  Stone walked over to an easy chair and took a seat.

  Lance stood up straight, turned the handle on the safe door, opened it and peered inside. “It’s a mess,” he said.

  Stone walked back to the desk and looked inside the safe. The estate papers he had stored in it were a sodden mass. He lifted them out in a big lump and deposited them on the newspaper. Then he reached inside and brought out Esme’s diary. It was heavier than before, being soaking wet. He opened the cover and found the pages stuck together, the ink running.

  “Have you got a hair dryer?” Lance asked.

  “In my bathroom upstairs,” Ginny replied.

  “Ginny,” Lance said, “would you like to help?”

  “Of course,” she replied, running over to the desk.

  “Will you take the diary upstairs, put it on a table and start drying it?”

  “Sure.”

  Lance reached into a desk drawer and found a letter opener. “Use this to separate the pages as they dry, but don’t force them.”

  “Okay.” Ginny took the diary and went upstairs.

  A bell sounded in Dick’s little office almost simultaneously with the front doorbell.

  Lance disappeared into the office, and Seth went to the front door and came back with Sergeant Young, who looked tired.

  Stone introduced him to Ham; he’d already met everybody else.

  “Anything new?” Stone asked.

  “I’m afraid not. We’ve pretty much started the search over again, and this time we’re concentrating on the beaches and shoreline.”

  “Why?” Ham asked.

  Sergeant Young looked away.

  Stone spoke up. “Because the bodies of the missing women were all found in the water.”

  Ham nodded.

  Lance came out of the office. “Afternoon, Sergeant,” he said, placing several sheets of acetate on the desk. “I have something that might be of use to you in your search. Do you have a current map of the island?”

  “A very good one, showing all the houses,” Young replied. “I’ll get it out of my car.” He was back in a moment and spread the map on the desk. “This is the latest map available that shows all the occupied buildings. You can see, I’ve highlighted the ones already searched in green.”

  “I see you’re better than half finished,” Lance said. He picked up a sheet of acetate and laid it next to the map. “This is a thermal image of the island taken from a satellite last night, or rather an image of the north end of the island. In order to get in close, we divided the island in half. This particular image was taken at nine P.M. last evening.”

  Everybody crowded around. “As you can see, anything that radiates heat shows up in orange, to a greater or lesser degree.” He pointed at a house in the village. “Take this house, for example: There’s quite a lot of ambient light, and these concentrations are people,” he said, pointing to a group, “apparently gathered around the table, having dinner. Outside, you can see another orange object, which is the family car, its engine still warm.”

  “That’s very sensitive,” Young said.

  “Too sensitive, in fact,” Lance replied. “I’ve ordered other images for after midnight, on the next satellite pass. In those, we’ll find many fewer lights and TVs on in the houses, and the car engines will have cooled. What we’ll see then is people in their beds.”

  “What’s this in the middle of the woods?” Young asked, pointing to a dark area with an orange spot near the north end of the island.

  “Very likely a deer, maybe two,” Lance said. “The satellite can pick up heat sources as small as a dog.”

  Daisy raised her head and made a noise.

  “Good dog,” Ham said.

  “I’m not sure exactly how this will be useful,” Young said. “I mean, we can go to every house, search it and count the folks. Maybe we could see if there’s somebody extra that we didn’t count.”

  “Right,” Lance said. “The after-midnight images should be more useful. Then we can see if there’s a person where we don’t expect a person to be, in a garage or a woodshed, for instance.”

  Ham spoke up. “I don’t suppose it will pick up a dead body?”

  Everybody got quiet. Lance shook his head. “Not unless it’s still warm.”

  46

  THE AFTERNOON WORE ON until the shadows were long. Ham, who was asleep on the study sofa, suddenly sat up. “Daisy!” he said.

  “What?” Stone asked.

  “We’re not using Daisy!”

  “For what?”

  “To track Holly.”

  Stone slapped his forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that?” He ran upstairs to the master bedroom and started going through Holly’s clothes, looking for something that had been worn and not laundered, which was tough, because Mabel laundered everything as soon as it hit the hamper. He found a spare pair of sneakers and ran back downstairs with one.

  “Come on, Daisy!” he called to the dog. He grabbed her leash and ran for the door, with Ham and Dino right behind him. When they reached the end of the driveway, Stone rubbed the sneaker on Daisy’s face, and she sniffed it eagerly. “Has she been trained to track?” he asked Ham.

  “She’s been trained to do just about everything,” Ham replied. “Daisy! Where’s Holly? Go find Holly!”

  Daisy reacted at once, pacing around the area. Then, suddenly, she was moving at a brisk trot up the road, away from the village, on the left side facing traffic, her nose to the ground. The three men hurried along, trying to keep up with her.

  “We should have brought a car,” said Dino, who did not enjoy running.

  “Why don’t you go back to the house and get the station wagon,” Stone said, handing him the keys. “Follow along, but don’t get close enough to spook Daisy.”

  The sound of her name caused Daisy to jerk the leash almost out of Stone’s hand, and she resumed her tracking.

  Stone and Ham jogged along after her, and a couple of minutes later Stone looked over his shoulder and saw Dino in the station wagon, moving slowly twenty yards behind them.

  Daisy rounded a curve and started down half a mile of straight road. Then, after a couple of hundred yards, she stopped, seeming confused. She paced about, sniffing the road and the graveled shoulder, circling back and doing the same area again.

  Ham unclipped her leash and pointed at the dense underbrush beside the road. “There, Daisy,” he said, pointing, “go find Holly.”

  Daisy plunged into the brush, and they could hear her crashing around in the thicket, going this way and that, until she came back to Ham and sat down, looking at him.

  “It happened here,” Stone said. “She was put into a car.”

  “I don’t think a dog can track a car,” Ham said.

  Dino pulled alongside them in the old Ford wagon. “That’s it, huh?”

  “That’s it,” Stone said. “At least we’re sure of which way she went.” He looked down the road. “South.”

  They got into the car and drove back to the house.

  “Any luck?” Sergeant Young asked as they came into the study.

  “Holly ran south, the
n on a straight stretch. She got put into a car, so we’re at a dead end. But at least we know she ran south. Should we concentrate the search there?”

  “In a car, she could have been taken anywhere,” Young pointed out.

  “She could have been taken off the island in a boat, too,” Dino said.

  “None of the others was taken off the island,” Stone reminded him. “I think this guy will stick to his pattern.”

  “I need a drink,” Dino said, heading for the wet bar. “Anybody else?”

  Stone looked at the group. “Everybody else.”

  “I still don’t have the after-midnight thermal scan,” Lance said.

  Dino came back with drinks on a tray. “How’s Ginny doing with the diary?”

  “She’ll let us know when she gets somewhere,” Ham said.

  They sipped their drinks quietly.

  “At least we know the guy’s got a boat,” Stone said. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t have dropped the safe in the water trying to get it out of here.”

  Sergeant Young, who was staring into his drink but not drinking it, spoke up. “Just about everybody on the island has a boat.”

  “Yeah,” Stone said, racking his brain for some other thought that might help.

  Ginny came down the stairs with the diary and some sheets of paper. Everybody stood up as she walked toward the desk.

  “What have you got, hon?” Ham asked.

  “Are you people drinking?” she asked. “Why am I not drinking?”

  “Dino, get the girl some bourbon,” Ham said, looking over her shoulder as she spread out her papers.

  “What I’m doing here is working backward through the thing, drying pages one at a time, then trying to read the handwriting. It’s gorgeous handwriting, but the ink has run from being wet, and that makes it slow going, but I’m copying out everything I can get and numbering the pages to correspond with the diary.”

  “What is she saying?” Stone asked.

  “Well, it’s mostly high school girl stuff,” she said. “The last entry is the day before the family got to Islesboro. She mentions that they have to make the five o’clock ferry the next day.”

  “Is there any other mention of Islesboro or Dark Harbor in the days before they arrived?”

  “She’s looking forward to going, she says, and right here, she mentions that and says “‘…especially with X and Y neutralized.’”

  “Any idea what that can mean?” Stone asked.

  “There’s a Z mentioned, too.”

  “Are these people male or female?”

  “Z seems to be female, but I can’t tell about X and Y. These could be friends of hers at school.”

  “But what does she mean by ‘neutralized’?”

  “I don’t know. ‘Made harmless,’ maybe?”

  “How do you make somebody harmless?”

  “Take away their weapons; take away their freedom of action?”

  “How far back have you gotten?”

  “January,” Ginny said. “It’s slow going.”

  “She’s glad to be going back to Islesboro, now that X and Y are neutralized,” Stone said. “X and Y must be on Islesboro, too.”

  “Z, too,” Ginny pointed out. “She says that Z will be relieved, too.”

  “So, both Esme and Z would have been anxious about returning to Islesboro for the summer, if X and Y hadn’t been neutralized?”

  “That could fit what she’s saying.”

  “Does she give any hint about why they have to be neutralized?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Go back further in the diary, Ginny. Go back to last summer, say the month of August.”

  “That part of the diary is in very poor condition,” Ginny said, “but I’ll try.” She grabbed her drink from Dino and went back upstairs.

  “Dinner will be ready soon,” Stone called after her. “We’ll let you know.” He sank back into a chair.

  A bell chimed in the little office, and Lance got to his feet. “Something coming in,” he said. “Maybe the new thermal scan.” He went into the office. A moment later he came out with some sheets of paper.

  “What is it?” Stone asked.

  “It’s a report from one of our people who used to be a Boston cop. You remember, we checked to see if Caleb Stone had a criminal record? His boys, too.”

  “Yes, and they were all clean. The report from the New Haven police and the Yale campus cops had the boys clean there.”

  “Well, this isn’t much,” Lance said, “but the boys had a juvenile record.”

  “For what?”

  “Don’t know; the records are sealed.”

  “Can your man get at them?”

  Lance got up and walked back toward the office. “I’ll ask him to try.”

  Stone got up and followed him. “There’s something else I’d like to know from New Haven.”

  47

  HOLLY CAME SLOWLY out of sleep, but being awake wasn’t much different. She wondered if he was giving her something to make her sleep; she seemed to be doing an awful lot of it. Not that she had anything else to do.

  He was giving her precious little sensory input. He came in four or five times a day, she thought. He emptied her, fed her another candy bar and gave her water. Maybe something in the water? She certainly had not felt wide-awake since the first day. How many days was it? Two? Three? Four? She couldn’t tell. The tape over her eyes kept her from knowing whether it was day or night, and the earplugs muffled most sound.

  He didn’t seem interested in sex; he hadn’t touched her in any way, except to pull her clothing down for the bedpan. He hadn’t found her gun, either, since the sweatshirt covered it, even when she was using the bedpan. If she could just get a hand free. She tried again, but it only hurt worse. Her wrists felt bruised and chafed from trying to get loose.

  Why would he keep her, hour after hour, day after day? What use would he make of her? If he wanted her dead, she’d already be dead; if he wanted sex, she’d have already been raped. It didn’t make any sense at all. She yawned and dozed off again.

  LANCE CAME OUT OF Dick’s little office with a sheet of paper. “The FBI has come to life,” he said. “They’ve given us a profile, done by their experts.”

  Sergeant Young, who had seemed almost asleep, came to life. “I want to hear this.”

  “He’s between twenty-five and forty,” Lance read, “lives with his mother, is employed as a skilled laborer or as a white-collar worker with considerable responsibility. His father is dead or was divorced from his mother when he was a child. He’s uncomfortable around women, especially those who dress in an overtly sexual manner. People who know him think of him as quiet and pleasant. He’s not married, nor does he have a regular sex life.”

  “The dress code doesn’t sound like any of our victims,” Young said, “except Janey Harris, who wore the kind of clothes teenaged girls wear these days: you know, bare bellies almost to the crotch, tight T-shirts, that sort of thing. It certainly doesn’t fit the two housewives.”

  “It doesn’t fit Holly, either,” Stone said. “Any more of the profile?”

  Lance shook his head. “They make the usual disclaimers about the accuracy of the profile, and they say they need more to go on.”

  “I wish to God we could give it to them,” Sergeant Young said.

  They all sat quietly for a few minutes.

  “Anybody want to go for a boat ride?” Stone asked.

  “What?” Dino said.

  “I’m going to take the picnic boat and circumnavigate the island, while there’s still plenty of daylight.”

  Sergeant Young stood up. “I’d better get back to the land search; I’m not doing any good here.”

  “Ham, do you want to come?” Stone asked.

  Ham shook his head. “I want to stay here in case Holly turns up, and Ginny is still working on Esme’s diary.”

  “Grab a jacket, Dino,” Stone said. “It’ll be chillier on the water.”

  They met on th
e dock, and Stone started the engine. “Will you cast us off?” he said to Dino.

  Dino undid the bow, stern and spring lines, then pushed them away from the dock and jumped on board.

  “We’ve got to get you some Topsiders,” Stone said.

  “Huh?”

  “Wingtips don’t cut it on a boat.” Stone switched on the GPS plotter and let it warm up. A few seconds later, an image of Islesboro appeared on the screen.

  “Hey, that’s neat,” Dino said.

  Stone played with the image. “Yes, and you can zoom in and out, too.” He dug out a paper chart from below and studied it.

  “Can we get moving?” Dino asked.

  “I just want to take a look at possible hazards,” Stone said. “Maine is a rocky place.”

  “Good idea.”

  Fifteen minutes later they were under way. They passed the yacht club, which seemed mostly deserted.

  “Where is everybody?” Dino asked.

  “A lot of people have left the island,” Stone said, “and Sergeant Young says a lot of those still here are staying home until this thing is resolved.” Stone was staying close to shore, looking intently at the water.

  “You looking for rocks?” Dino asked.

  “No,” Stone replied.

  “Oh.”

  Stone continued to watch the water as they made their way toward the southern tip of the island. He hoped to God he didn’t find what he was looking for. He zipped up his jacket against the breeze.

  “Besides that, what should we be looking for?” Dino asked.

  “Look for places ashore where she might be hidden,” Stone replied.

  “She could be hidden in any house on the island,” Dino said.

  “Most of the houses are occupied by families who are spending the summer here. Look for other outbuildings—barns, sheds, that sort of thing. If we find something that looks promising, we can always get Young and his people to go search it.”

  Dino looked intently toward the shore. “We’re grasping at straws,” he said.

  “I know,” Stone replied. “But I don’t know what else to do.”

  48