by Клео Коул
Jim said nothing. He continued to drive for a few minutes and then he cut the engine. We slowed on the water; I could feel the waves lapping the boat, the vessel gently bobbing.
Is this it? I half wondered whether he was going to throw me overboard now.
“I’m not trying to menace you,” he said softly. Then the ex-SEAL stared straight ahead, into the dark water, as if thinking something over. He rubbed his clean-shaven chin. There was a faint scent of citrus and soap about him. Now that his stubble was gone, I could see his jawline was magnificent. Sharp angles chiseled from marble. Twenty years ago, I would have been itching to sketch it.
He abruptly turned to face me, caught me staring.
“You ready to watch me work?” he asked.
“Does it involve firearms?”
“No guns, Clare. Just shooting.”
Rand suited up in the cabin below, exchanging his blue jeans and button-down for a black wet suit. His camera was an impressive piece of equipment, waterproof with an incredible zoom lens. It pained me to realize it, but his body was an even more impressive piece of equipment. The wet suit was skintight, revealing every lean muscle.
It’s official. The man’s a Greek statue.
“Here. This is for you,” he said, handing me yesterday’s newspaper. It was a popular paper, widely read on this part of Long Island.
“What’s this?”
“Page one. Read the photo credit.”
The front page was dominated by a spectacular shot of fireworks taking place above Bay Bar in Southampton. Everything that was wonderful about a Hamptons Fourth was in the shot. Beautiful yachts docked next to a popular watering hole. Attractive couples embracing, gazing up at the explosions of color high above them. The photo credit read Jim Rand.
“This is some shot. How did you get it?”
“From the water. I was in the water, that is. But the real question you should be asking me, detective, was when did I get it. See the date on the paper.”
“I see. You shot this July Fourth. They published it on the fifth.”
“You can see I was in Southampton at the time of the fireworks over Bay Bar. Right? You following?”
I nodded, understanding what he was showing me. “It’s your alibi. The police know the time of death for Treat Mazzelli. You were nowhere near David Mintzer’s mansion at that time.”
“That’s right, Clare. Like I told you. All of my shots at Mintzer’s were before sunset. That’s why I gave you all of the photos I took. Do you believe me now? Or do you want to see the complete set of digital shots I took in Southampton? There are only about a hundred or so that put me there from the beginning of the display to the end.”
“Mr. Rand, please understand, someone is trying to hurt my friend.”
“I hear you. But I’m not your man…” He smiled, one eyebrow arching. “At least, not when it comes to your criminal investigation.”
The flirtation was hard to miss. My reaction was visceral. I ignored it. “Did the police ask you if you saw anything suspicious that night, while you were on David’s beach?”
“Yes, of course. And, no, I’m sorry to tell you that I didn’t. Look…we’ll talk when I get back, okay? I just didn’t want to leave the boat here and find you’d lost your nerve with me, motored away, and left me to fend for myself in the Atlantic.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “You know I had that same scenario down for me. I was half convinced you were about to throw me overboard.”
“Trust is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?”
Dammit, Rand, don’t make me like you.
The ex-SEAL moved to gather the rest of his gear, an oxygen tank, and goggles. He strapped on an impressive-looking dive watch. Then he picked up a pair of binoculars, handed them to me, and pointed.
I scanned the shoreline. There were a few mansions lit up. One was having a big party on the beach. “I guess that party’s your destination?”
“You guessed right.”
I watched him jump off the stern. A chill went through me as he disappeared into the dark waves. The moonlight cast a silver hue to the ocean surface, but Jim Rand had disappeared completely beneath the black glass.
I watched patiently through the binoculars, waiting for him to emerge again. Finally, I saw him on the beach. I didn’t even notice him come out of the water.
Shadows kept him invisible. Then he used topiaries and scrub grass to keep himself camouflaged. He stayed there for a good forty minutes. The party guests moving in and out of the mansion, never seeing him, never suspecting. Couples and groups moved into his frame without knowing it, then out again. Eventually, he moved. With smooth stealth he was back in the water again. Soon, he was back on the boat.
“Still here, I see,” he quipped after removing his goggles and oxygen mouthpiece.
“Still here for good reason.”
“You finally trust me?”
“I don’t know how to start the engine on this tub.”
Jim smiled. “Give me a chance to change and maybe I’ll give you a lesson.”
Ten minutes later, he was topside again. “You want to see some of my shots? They turned out great.”
“You have the pictures already?”
“It’s digital media. Come on down.”
In the cabin below the open deck, Jim had set up a laptop and printer on a bolted down table. On the screen were thumbnails of the photos he’d just taken. He sat me down in a folding deck chair, then he leaned over my shoulder, and clicked on a few to show me the results.
I shook my head in amazement.
Jim noticed. “You can’t get over the technology, can you?”
“I can’t get over how many parties Keith Judd gets invited to on this tiny strip of land.”
“Keith Judd? Oh, yes, there he is in the background, surrounded by pretty young jail bait, as usual. My focus wasn’t on him for that shot. See here—that’s Radio Brenner, the baseball star. He’s got his arm around Gina Sanchez, the pop diva. In March they started their relationship. But nobody’s gotten a photo of them together this summer. Now my client does.”
“I see.”
Rand heard the stiffness in my voice. He turned his gaze away from the laptop’s screen to look at me. “You see but you don’t approve.”
“It’s not my place to approve or disapprove. It’s your living…”
“But?”
“But why don’t you just do the kind of photos you did at Bay Bar? Why don’t you just do legit stuff?”
“I do legit stuff. My partner, Kenny, does too. He even does accident scene photos for the police around here. You’d be surprised how many traffic smash-ups there are during the season.”
“After driving around here this summer with the displaced, impatient Manhattan elites, no, I actually wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Well, those jobs don’t pay enough. And I want my own boat by the end of summer. I want to make enough to retire on before I’m too old and too fatigued to dive anymore. Life’s short, Clare. I’ve witnessed that first hand, I can tell you.” He shrugged. “You’ve got to make the most of it while you can.”
“Like I said…it’s your business…it’s just creepy, invading people’s privacy.”
“Oh? You mean, like when you invaded my privacy today?”
He wasn’t wrong. I’d justified breaking and entering, telling myself it was for a higher cause. But it was still an invasion of his privacy. It was still breaking the law.
Jim rose, unfolding himself so high, his head nearly brushed the cabin’s ceiling. “Clare, the places I’ve been…the things I’ve seen, the poverty, the suffering…fuck it. If the worst thing that ever happens to these filthy rich people is that they have their candid photo put in a magazine, I’d say they’re still coming up winners on the global lottery…You want a drink?”
I nodded, surprising myself. But I suddenly needed something to sooth my nerves, my feelings of guilt about being a voyeur. And from the look on his face, so did Jim R
and.
He went to the galley fridge, pulled out two cold bottles of beer and opened them. He handed me one and went topside again, taking a seat on a padded bench near the stern. I stood against the rail. We both drank in silence for a fewminutes, the waves lapping the hull, the boat gently bobbing on the dark water.
“So why did you leave the SEALs?” I asked. “Age?”
“Injury. It happened during…a training exercise.”
“Oh, wow, that’s bad luck. I mean, it wasn’t even on a secret mission or anything.”
Jim laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Clare, no SEAL is ever allowed to say he’s injured on anything but a ‘training exercise.’”
“Oh?…Oh! I see. Sorry…so what exactly is your injury?”
“Decompression injury. In laymen’s terms, the bends. It messed up my inner ear, my joints. If I go any deeper than recreational diving—about one hundred feet—I’ll probably suffer severe bone damage.”
“And this work you’re doing. You don’t dive any lower than—”
“Twenty feet tops. In the Caribbean, during the winter, I’ll go deeper. Fifty…but no more.”
“I see…”
I moved to the padded bench and sat down next to him. His dark, shaggy hair was wet and slicked back, dampening the green collar of his button-down. The scent of soap and citrus was still there on his skin, along with the faint briny smell of the open ocean. I liked it. I didn’t want to like it, but I did.
Together we continued to drink our beers and watch the play of moonlight on the water. At least I thought that’s what he’d been watching. When I glanced up, however, I found his eyes on me.
A sudden gust of wind tossed my chestnut hair around my face. Jim’s brown eyes seemed to liquefy. For long, silent minutes, he didn’t move.
That’s when I realized that being this close to Jim Rand was like being too close to a lightning strike. I could practically feel his coiled energy, the burning below his surface. He wasn’t bothering to mask anything now. I could see what he wanted, and if he had touched me just then, it would have been over. I would have melted like chocolate in a five hundred degree oven. So I stood up before he got the chance—
“Jim, I need your help.”
“You need my help?”
“David’s in danger, and I need to find out who wants to hurt him.”
Jim looked away, took a long swig of beer. “You need my help?”
“That’s what I said.”
He turned back to me, met my eyes. “Will you be grateful?”
“Yes.”
An eyebrow arched. “How grateful?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether we catch the killer.”
A smile spread slowly across Jim Rand’s face. “I’m game.”
With patient silence, Jim listened to all of my theories and suspicions. Then he suggested we go below and use his laptop again. He thought we might get somewhere examining the party photos on screen since he could zoom into any image. His idea was to locate David in every photo and analyze what was happening around him.
There were about seventy photos in the file. We didn’t see anything suspicious for the first twenty-two. On twenty-three, however, I saw something that put a chill through me. The main image was of a beautiful young movie star laughing. But in the background, something caught my eye.
“Can you zoom in on David back there, make the image bigger?”
“Sure.” Jim moved the cursor and clicked. “What do you see, Clare?”
“David is talking to his restaurant manager, Jacques Papas. And look what Jacques is doing.”
“Looks like he’s handing David his drink to taste.”
“Go to the next photo in order.”
There was another shot of the starlet a few seconds later. “Zoom in again on David.”
“Ohmigod. David is handing the drink back. Jacques had David sample his drink and hand it back.”
“So?”
“So someone slipped David a small dose of MSG at his own party. And I think we just witnessed it right here.”
“You think Papas tried to murder David?”
“I think Papas had a motive to have David murdered. And I think what we’re seeing here is David being set up with the headache that sent him to his bedroom—where the shooter was supposed to take him out.”
“I follow you. But what’s Papas’s motive?”
“Embezzlement. And I think I can prove it. Even if Detective O’Rourke won’t buy the MSG mickey, I know he’ll buy a book of accounts that shows a scheme to embezzle money from Cuppa J and David Mintzer. And I know Papas keeps that book locked up in his office desk.”
Jim Rand leaned back in his chair, eyeballed me. “And how are you going to get this book?”
I folded my arms, tapped my chin in thought. “When you were a SEAL, did you have to break into things quietly?”
“Yes, Clare.”
“So you know how to pick a lock?”
“Yes, Clare.”
“Then the question, Mr. Rand, isn’t how am I going to get the book. It’s how are we going to do it.”
“You’re determined to pull me into your outlaw ways, aren’t you, Cosi?”
“That’s rich. Coming from you.”
Jim laughed. “Just remember one thing.”
“What?”
“You promised if I helped you catch the killer, you’d be grateful.”
“First things first, Rand. First things first.”
Twenty
I drove back to Cuppa J in my Honda, watching the lights on Jim’s Harley in my rearview mirror. By the time we arrived at the restaurant it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. The building was dark and deserted, the parking lot empty. As I climbed out of my car, Jim rolled up next to me and cut the motorcycle’s engine.
Together, we walked up the dark path to the restaurant. Through the glass of the front door, I saw the tiny red light on the alarm console, warning intruders that the system was activated.
Jim, hands shoved into his denims, leaned against the door jam. “So, do you want me to pick this lock?”
I shook my head. “I have the key. The lock I want you to pick is inside. Anyway, there’s an alarm system. Even if you got through the door, you’d have to deal with the keypad. You don’t know the code.”
“Alarms have never been a problem for me.”
“Okay, now you’re just bragging.”
I slipped the key into the lock and twisted it. After opening the door, I had ten seconds to punch in the security code or the alarm would go off, both here and at the police station. I tapped the code into the key pad. A single beep, and the tiny light switched from red to green.
“All clear,” I called over my shoulder.
As I stepped into the restaurant’s dining room, I knew at once that something was wrong. At first the air seemed heavy and close, then I detected a familiar odor. Jim came up behind me, gripped my shoulder. He smelled it, too.
“Gas,” we said together.
“The pilot lights must have gone out!” I cried. “We have to fix it—”
I hurried forward, but didn’t get more than two steps before Jim, his hand still digging into my shoulder, yanked me back.
“Clare, no. We have to get out of here.”
“No, wait.”
I struggled against him. But in a few seconds, I felt dizzy then woozy. I blinked, saw stars, felt my knees giving way. Jim snatched me up and carried me out of the restaurant. Choking, he stretched me out on the hood of my Honda, which felt warm against my back. I coughed and gasped for air.
“We can’t let the place blow up,” I cried between hacks. “We can’t.”
Jim pushed himself away from the hood, faced the building. I followed his eyes and noticed he’d left the front door open. Then, before I knew what was happening, he’d stripped off his button-down.
“Jim, what—?”
&n
bsp; He dug into his pocket, thrust a cell phone into my hand. “Call 911.” He wrapped his shirt around his nose and mouth and tied it behind his head. Head down, he ran back inside the restaurant.
I punched the numbers and the call went through immediately. I reported the gas leak, the address, and the fact that someone was inside the building.
I heard noise from inside the restaurant—the French doors opening, the sound of breaking glass. Still shaky, I hopped off the hood of my car and hurried to the entranceway. My head was throbbing and my feet seemed to take forever to obey my brain.
Just as I got to the front door, I saw Jim emerge from the kitchen. His shirt was still wrapped around his face, and his gait looked steady. I stepped inside to help him, but he rushed me at the door.
“Go back, Clare. I stopped the leak.” His voice was muffled by the cloth, but his words were clear.
“Are you okay?”
“Jesus, Clare, are you forgetting I was a SEAL? Any one of us worth his salt can hold his breath for three minutes.”
“What did you find back there? The stove is supposed to have a safety device. If any of the pilot lights go out, the gas should be automatically cut off—”
“The stove wasn’t the problem. The lines were sliced.”
“What?!”
“The hoses leading from the main to the stove were flapping loose and they looked sliced to me. I had to turn off the main. On the way, I opened those French doors—sorry, I had to break some of them. Are there any other outside windows in this place?”
“There’s a big window in the employee break room.”
“Which door?”
“The gas is already dissipating, Jim. Let me take care of it.”
“Okay. I’ll prop the fire doors.”
I took a deep, fresh breath, ran to the break room, and opened the door. The gas smell wasn’t so bad in here, probably because the closed door kept most of the vapors out. I began to walk to the window—then I screamed.
A body was sprawled on the couch, a woman clad in jeans and a flowered blouse. A pair of sandals lay on the floor. On the pillow, I saw loose auburn curls dangling from a disheveled ponytail. I grabbed the body’s shoulder, rolled it over. Colleen O’Brien’s skin had a faintly bluish cast, the freckles across her pug nose looked dark as blood against her deathly pale skin.
