by Noel Hynd
The dog didn’t care much for the site of the murder. He recoiled from it and became agitated. And the search team found nothing.
Chapter Nine
Late on that same afternoon, Tim Brooks rolled his Jeep to a halt at the end of a dirt driveway leading to an old farm house. A big female collie named Clara barked wildly at the arrival of the car, circling it and alerting her master. Brooks cut his ignition and stepped out.
Clara recognized him and stopped barking, coming over closer to where Brooks could pet her and where she could bang her rapidly wagging tail against his car.
“Hello, Timmy,” Peter McCoy said, coming out of the building to greet the detective. The farmer was a somber man, thin with untrimmed gray hair that circled a head that was bald on top. He was about fifty but appeared older. “Sorry to have to call you,” he said. He frowned. “Ain’t it your day off?”
“It’s no problem, Pete,” Brooks answered, stepping out of his car. “Not your fault. The department got real busy today. What happened?”
“Aahh…” McCoy grimaced and shook his head, too disgusted to even begin a description. He waved with an arm, indicating that the young detective should follow. “You’ll see.” McCoy’s farm was located down a dirt lane off Cliff Road, the route that led along the shoreline leaving town toward Dionis Beach. The farm was a throwback to a previous age, one of the last working livestock farms on Nantucket. Nestled between expensive housing and a wildlife preserve, it was small, modest, and marginally profitable. It had been worked by six generations of the McCoy family since 1892.
“I don’t understand stuff like this,” Peter McCoy said. “Never did. Never will. Why would someone do something like this?”
There was something hot and oppressive about the farm, particularly late on a midsummer Saturday when the sun had been pounding it for six hours. McCoy, in a wrinkled white shirt, overalls and heavy shoes, led Brooks through a dirt patch where grass never grew. He guided him toward his livestock pens where mostly he kept chickens and a few rabbits. In the middle was the largest individual pen, about fifty feet in width and oval in shape, enclosed by tightly meshed wire. There was a small man-made pond in the center and a little hutch that provided shade and a nesting area.
This was where the McCoys had always kept their ducks. For Brooks, the day that had begun with a homicide and continued with a basketball game was about to take an even more macabre turn.
“I ain’t touched nothing,” McCoy said as he led Brooks closer. “I wanted you to see. You’re my witness. I already took some pictures. Then I can get on with burying my birds and filing a claim. Criminal loss. I’m insured, but I just don’t know how people can do something like this. How do people sleep at night, Timmy? Answer me that.”
Brooks didn’t have an answer. Led to the scene of the atrocity, Brooks stopped short in revulsion. He could feel his sense of decency recoil. He uttered a low profanity. He grimaced.
“Pretty disgusting, ain’t it?” Peter McCoy said in a low angry voice. “Murdering good birds. And it don’t make no sense, either.”
Brooks stared.
Someone, in plain daylight under an open sky, had massacred McCoy’s ducks. The whole pen of them. Eighteen birds lay in little pathetic feathered heaps around the pen where for years they had led a safe, protected existence. Their necks had been wrung, each and every one, for no apparent reason. Then their bodies had been left in six clumps of three, arranged neatly with a pathologically intense touch.
“I don’t understand why people do stuff like this,” McCoy repeated. “A dozen and a half perfectly good birds. What’s it accomplish? Does this make someone feel good?”
“I don’t know, Pete,” Brooks said, consoling and continuing to stare.
“Normally, we’re pretty lucky with livestock on this island. You know that. There ain’t no foxes. Some hawks. A couple of dogs get carried away sometimes…”
McCoy shook his head.
“Can I go in?” Brooks asked, indicating the pen.
“Who’s stopping you? I ain’t.”
Brooks entered through a gate in the fence, walking carefully so as not to obliterate any clues to the source of the carnage. He pulled out a notebook to record the incident in the police register. McCoy watched him and waited on the outside.
“When did it happen?” Brooks asked.
“That’s the funny thing.”
Brooks looked at the farmer.
“I came out here to feed the birds at about two P.M. They were fine then. Took their feed. I came back half an hour later and they were all dead. Exactly like you see. I was around back with my hens. That’s the funny part, Timmy. I didn’t hear no car. Clara never barked. The ducks never kicked up a ruckus. There’s no footprints. And my wife,” McCoy said, turning to indicate a window in the house that overlooked the pen and the pond, “was right there in the kitchen baking some berry pies. She didn’t see nothing, either. So how can this have happened?”
Brooks thought about it for a moment and had no answer.
“May I?” Brooks asked. He looked down to one of the birds and wanted to move it with the toe of his shoe.
“Sure,” said the farmer. He watched. “You can see no animal was capable of doing this. A human done it. Or a couple of humans.” He paused. “Eighteen birds in a couple of minutes, all neat and stacked up. Someone’s a walking slaughterhouse, I’ll tell you that.”
Brooks nudged a white feathered carcass. Farmer McCoy was right. The crime, the massacre, made no earthly sense. One bird after another had been killed with eerie precision. Someone very strong, very fast and very silent had been bent upon some very vile mischief. Then the killer had left the corpses in their all-too-cute mocking arrangement.
“Know what I think?” Peter McCoy said.
“What’s that?”
“I think you got a real sick-o who done something like this,” he said. “Can’t be an islander. Got to be someone not from the island.” Brooks only nodded, trying to factor all the details, the sum of which made no apparent sense.
“Ever seen anything like this before?” McCoy finally asked.
“No,” Brooks answered. He looked at the six piles of dead birds, moving slowly from one to the next. Each bird had been killed exactly the same way, with no other marks on its body.
An image of the DiMarco girl lying dead at his feet returned to him, then vanished. He shuddered. He felt as if he were getting a flash from somewhere else.
Brooks’ gaze eventually returned to the farmer.
“I guess I have to ask you this, Pete,” Brooks said. “You don’t have a clue as to who might have done this? Made any new enemies lately? Got any old ones?”
“Me? Ha!” McCoy spit angrily on the bare ground. “Wish I had. Then this would make more sense.”
“Yeah,” Brooks said. “It would. Anyone you know want to drive you out of business?”
“Who’d want this business? I’m in debt. Bank in Boston bought my mortgage. They call me every few days.”
“Anyone after the land?”
“There’s better land than this that you could buy tomorrow.” The farmer’s logic seemed impeccable. Brooks nodded. He walked out of the gate and closed it.
“I’m sorry, Pete,” he said. “I’ll file the report. Come by and sign it when you get a chance. We’ll ask around, see if anyone’s heard anything. Okay?”
McCoy nodded.
“You should see my wife,” McCoy said. “She’s real upset. These birds were kind of hers. Used to come down and feed them out of her hand. Know what I mean?’”
“I know what you mean.” For a moment in passing, Brooks put a hand on the older man’s shoulder. McCoy drew a deep breath and was steady again.
Brooks stopped by the house and said a few words of sympathy to the farmer’s wife. She nodded and said little. Brooks promised that he’d investigate as best he could. She thanked him.
Wally Crossman, one of the town insurance agents, turned up with the claims f
orms just as Brooks was leaving. Crossman inspected the damage and also nodded sympathetically. As Brooks pulled out of the driveway, the farmer started to gather the little corpses onto a wheelbarrow. Nearby, he already had a shovel leaning against his barn.
Chapter Ten
Timothy Brooks was the second son of a workaholic journalist named Joshua Brooks, a man who was successively the bureau chief in Baltimore, St. Louis, Dallas and Los Angeles for a national news weekly. Timothy’s mother taught school, played the piano and died of cancer when Tim, the youngest of her three children was fifteen.
An older sister took a degree in French and became a university instructor in Rhode Island. An older brother became a dentist. Timothy was sent away to an academically competitive private school in Pennsylvania a year after his mother died, his father having little idea what else to do with him. There he came close to excelling—doing poorly in nothing and very well in almost everything, socially, academically and athletically. And as a secondary school student, a pattern emerged that would follow in later life: he was well liked and respected, but showed an unerring propensity for poking his nose into the business of others. Yet at this juncture, such traits were considered quaint.
University followed—a big-name place in the Northeast where he was a starting guard on the basketball team for his final two years. He was good enough to star in the intercollegiate ranks, but not big enough to pursue professional hoops. It was a tough lesson in life right there.
So he earned a bachelor’s degree in American Civilization, which upon graduation qualified him to do just about nothing other than drive a cab and bear testament to the reality of what he had studied. Many of his friends were going to law school, so he took a plunge at it, himself’, much to the immense pleasure of his father.
Tim Brooks astonished even himself with his LSAT scores and gained admission to a law school that was within everyone’s Top Fifteen list. After the first round of midterm exams, he held a first quintile position in his class. He was also bored silly. And he could never picture himself as an adult putting on a suit each day and poring over contracts, torts and stipulations. So at Christmas vacation, he walked.
“The problem with lawyers,” he remarked to his father as he announced his decision, “is that they have no natural predators.”
“So what the hell are you going to do?” Joshua Brooks angrily asked his son. “Be a cop or a fireman?”
Timothy thought about it. “Not a bad idea,” he answered.
Tim Brooks was hanging around Chicago at the time, following the Bears, Blackhawks and Cubs while he pursued an environmentally concerned art student from New York. Her name was Heather Gold. He had first met her in New York the previous winter where a gallery in SoHo was showing some of her tamer canvases.
Heather was in her late twenties, a woman with slow-burning eyes and very fair skin. She was so wan and plain that she was strikingly pretty. She played the piccolo and had a streak of gray in her long black hair. And as her lovers knew, a small red tulip had been tattooed just below her bikini line. The tulip, she freely told Tim Brooks, had been administered in honor of her English professor during her freshman year at Vassar.
“He was my first sex buddy,” Heather explained. Sex buddy. In reference to most of her previous relationships, Heather assiduously avoided the word “lover.”
For a fee from Cook County, she painted shockingly Technicolor multiracial murals on public building exteriors. She also liked to suggest that she was witch, and Brooks witnessed nothing within her footloose unconventional life-style to indicate that she wasn’t. She was the strangest woman for whom he had ever fallen. And at this point in his life, with school finished and nothing but uncertainty ahead of him, he was truly smitten. For several weeks at age twenty-three, Brooks considered marrying her. He finally took a long chance and broached the subject one night in bed while he watched the orange glow of her marijuana cigarette after making love. She considered the proposition very gravely for about ten days, a space of time during which she answered his request with a deafening silence.
Then she suggested they each start, as she put it, “robo-dating some other people. Strangers maybe even.” She went on to explain her philosophy. “Permanent relationships suck,” Heather pronounced.
A week thereafter, Brooks bailed on Heather and arrived on the West Coast with three hundred fifty dollars and a ’76 Colony Park station wagon filled with clothes and books. He saw an ad that said that the Police Department of San Jose, California, was hiring recent college graduates. He registered for the recruitment exam.
He passed the test with the highest grades in the history of the department. He spent a year on patrol and distinguished himself again by sauntering in and out of other cops’ cases, invited or not. Then he gravitated to the troublesome beats veterans liked to avoid. His good manners and easy bearing were often confused for softness. But by the end of the year he had as many commendations as men who had been in the department for more than five years. He didn’t look like a supercop. He didn’t act like a supercop. Yet his results indicated that he might have been on that path.
“So that’s it? A cop?” his father asked him over the long distance telephone one day. “With all that education, all you’ve become is a cop?”
“It was that or a fireman,” Tim Brooks answered facetiously. “You made the suggestion, yourself.”
Joshua Brooks hung up on his younger son and the two men stopped speaking for several months.
With another year Tim studied for a detective’s shield in San Jose, tested well and won it. As usual, he went for the most challenging work, going into undercover narcotics in the dicey sections of the city. It was nerve-shattering stuff, without a gun, without a shield, but sometimes wearing a wire.
Once, an insane dealer put a pistol to Brooks’ head and threatened to shoot. The dealer wanted to see if a backup squad would break down the doors. As it happened, due to a mix-up in timing the backups were on a pizza run and never knew that Brooks was looking into the open end of a Smith & Wesson. And when no one broke down the doors, the dealer put his weapon away. But this was one of two defining moments of Brooks’ police career on the West Coast.
The other moment came under the command of one Captain Harold G. Barcus, the controversial commander of the San Jose Homicide Division. Barcus was known as “Blood and Thunder” in the press, an appellation which suggested the contempt he held for such irksome concepts as due process and civil rights.
Barcus eventually drew a bead on a lowlife named Jerome Tweedy who had a hand in every dirty bit of non-Mafia business in the city. Barcus asked for Brooks’ help on an undercover squad that would make Tweedy, a longtime nemesis, a priority target.
The San Jose Police Department and the local underworld exchanged threats. One thing led to another. Then a member of the detective squad named Ted Hamlin was shot to death opening his mailbox one night.
Two months later, primarily on some strongly circumstantial evidence channeled from Blood and Thunder to Brook—to which Brooks diligently testified in court, a jury decided that Tweedy had been the gunman. Eventually, Tweedy gasped for his final breath in a California gas chamber.
At the execution, Barcus served as an official state witness.
“Well, I watched the exterminators do him in,” the captain confessed to Brooks and a few other of his narcs over a beer a few days later. “I watched them spray in the Raid. I watched Tweedy gag and kick and choke and barf until it was over.” Barcus grinned and mused further. “Gosh,” he concluded sweetly as he drummed his fingers on the bar. “I wonder what Jerome was really doing the night Ted Hamlin got whacked. Do you think he was really guilty?”
A month later, Brooks resigned from the San Jose Police Department. He turned in his shield and his weapon, withdrew every nickel from his pension, and, to use his words, “went on the bum” for a couple of years.
He worked as a store detective in San Francisco, then took a post in industrial se
curity in an aerospace plant in Seattle. Again, he was bored silly. One day on a lark, he pushed off from the Pacific Coast and went to Hawaii, planning to stay for as long as his money lasted.
It lasted two years. And so did a string of knockout girlfriends who were more than generous with their favors. But by then it was 2001 and even perfect waves in paradise could get boring. He assembled his old credentials and tried to latch on as a cop in Honolulu. Bad karma, no luck. Wanderlust beset him again. One May, he set out for the Lower Forty-eight again and found himself on the East Coast by August.
On another whim, he attended a convention of law enforcement placement officers at the Javits Center in New York. Impressed by Brooks’ university degree, clean record and straightforward respectability, several recruiters pressed business cards in his hands. He soon found himself sifting through job opportunities, trying to decide which he considered attractive, if any.
As it happened, it was now spring of 2002. The island of Nantucket, thirty miles at sea off the southeastern shoreline of Massachusetts, had found itself with a ticklish problem. There was not just quick big-city Wall Street money coming to the island, but there was a trickle of dirty money as well. The town was looking to add a detective or two with some big-city street smarts—exactly what Brooks had developed in San Jose.
The island eventually made him an offer.
Brooks accepted. He began in January 2003 and had been a detective on the Nantucket Police Department ever since. Sometimes it still bothered him that his father’s condemning prophesy had proven correct: “With all that education, all you’ve become is a cop?”
Well, yes. That’s what he had become. It wasn’t perfect and more and more he nurtured the hope of finding a steady woman someday—not a strong likelihood on an island where he already knew almost all of the seven thousand year-round residents. But life itself wasn’t perfect and this wasn’t the worst that could have happened, either. So, as he closed out his thirties, it would have to do.
