Pepper didn't overdo it. Groaned a bit, rolled his eyes, sighed. Slipped his tank top back on, stretched, sauntered out.
Saw Captain Vinter standing in the doorway, shaking his soup-catcher in disgust. And dialing a little silver cell phone.
So, not quite how they investigate in movies. Pepper was pretty sure he hadn't found anything on the yacht that would help figure out why Agent Keser was killed…but in the real world sometimes the only progress was eliminating dead ends.
"Oh, listen, it's noon! My mama's bells!" Maddie exclaimed. Pepper had rejoined them on the upper deck. He could hear Eagle's Nest's bells ringing, faintly across the water. Maddie, standing next to Pepper, suddenly and fiercely hugged him, melting against his side. Then they all were silent, even Justin. Pepper knew that Smith had installed the bells decades earlier as an indulgence to his first wife, homesick for her native French village where similar bells rang to mark every hour of the day and night.
The details were New Albion lore: lawsuits back and forth between Smith and neighbors, between Smith and the town. The old town manager had joked that million-dollar bells should come with an off switch. Eventually, the lawsuits were settled, Smith had bought out his angriest neighbors at a fat premium to end up with a sizable compound, and the bells were reprogrammed to normally ring only once per day, at noon. Locals passing by at midday barely noticed them anymore, they were such a part of the town's fabric after so many years.
But Pepper remembered how they'd rung, on and on, the evening Maddie's mother died when Pepper was seventeen. That the town had let their strange billionaire grieve for his dead wife—no one complained. Maybe they'd rung for an hour straight? Longer?
Maddie asked Justin to go down to the lounge for her sunglasses and he grudgingly clomped off.
"Wanna hear something totally poetic?" she asked Pepper. "When Daddy got a pacemaker last year, they added a special transmitter. When he dies, a signal goes to the bell tower and it makes them ring one final time, like they did for Mother."
Crazy! "I didn't know he was such a romantic." Or was it just narcissism with a matching budget—a kind of crazy caused by too much money?
Maddie gave Pepper another hug. "I'm so glad you're here!"
"Me too. Sweet boat," he answered, into the top of her blonde head.
"No, I mean here. In New Albion. I need someone I can trust. It's just me and Daddy. And a bunch of fucking vultures, you know?" Maddie had pulled back without breaking her embrace. She was looking up into Pepper's face. And moisture was welling in her eyes.
"Maddie, what's wrong?"
She took away one hand to wipe the tears. "It's her! Daddy's secretary. She's after his fortune, I know it. What if she gets him to sign a will leaving everything to her, something like that? I just know there's something going on, the way she looks at him when she doesn't know I'm looking."
"Elizabeth Concepcion?"
"Yes! She just appeared, a couple years ago. I called Daddy from Paris one day and she answered his cell phone. The gossip is she seduced him before he got sick. And now that he's dying, she practically controls him! Almost never leaves his side. I tried to talk to Daddy about her and he got mad and took her side."
"Well, he's even less likely to listen to me." Acker Smith had hated Pepper when he was the teenage boyfriend—a no-good local, dragging down his daughter— and Pepper doubted whether time would have made Smith's heart grow fonder.
"I need you to do me a huge favor and check her out. Where'd she come from? Any criminal record? And maybe help me figure out if Daddy's got a new will tucked away, something she tricked him into."
Huh. That'd be Pepper's ticket into Eagle's Nest, and a good excuse to paw through Smith's underwear drawers, for his other, more official investigating. "Of course, Maddie, for you? I'll see what I can do."
"And I'll totally make it worth your time," she whispered in his ear. Then she hugged him again, more fiercely this time. But Pepper didn't mind because at that exact second Justin came back on deck, twirling Maddie's big white sunglasses triumphantly. He froze, mid-twirl, and the crabby look on his face made Pepper wish he had his phone camera handy, and an Instagram account…
It was around 2 PM on Tuesday and Oliver was in Croke's room at the Sanddollar Motel. Room sixteen. Oliver had insisted on having a separate room, for his own sanity. Croke's room had light blue walls. Tile floor, like in a hospital. It was a little worn out, battered around the edges. Sort of like Croke. It had two smallish beds. Croke always slept in the one closer to the bathroom, so Oliver had claimed the one nearer the door as kind of a visitor's couch.
Oliver had just come back from a quick solo run to the Chatham library to check for chat room messages from their bosses in Queens. He'd driven their new ride: a Ford Taurus snatched from outside a muffler repair shop where it'd been left with its keys in the ignition. The Taurus now sported license plates from a Ford Escort. They'd dumped the old Chevy Impala a little further down the Cape.
Oliver had made the trip alone since the elderly librarian seemed to have a thing for Croke. She'd actually gotten up the last time and asked if Croke was looking for anything special. Was that...flirting? Oliver preferred her slumbering behind the checkout desk. And Croke hadn't returned the Salt book—he still had his nose in it whenever the opportunity arose, slowly grinding forward.
But there had been no new chat room messages from the bosses in Queens. Oliver didn't know whether that was a good sign or a bad one. So he was just sitting there on the crappy little bed, imagining all the ways their silence could be bad…
Oliver was startled from his funk when the special blue client phone rang. Oliver knew it was the blue phone because it was a foreign ring, one he'd never heard before. A high-pitched buzz, like insects fighting. He fished it from his pocket and stared at it. It continued to ring.
"Shit," he said, and figured out how to activate it. "Uh, hello?"
The caller didn't give a name, just identified himself as their recent client, calling with another job. Must be super security conscious—his voice was disguised by some kind of electronic device. In case Oliver and Croke were recording the call? Or in case law enforcement had a way to listen?
The client got right to it. He wanted them to make the witness to the clambake job disappear. A fisherman named Marcus Dunne.
Oliver wondered if it was the crazy fisherman from the cop incident who got pool-cued in the nuts…New Albion was still buzzing about it.
"Why aren't you commissioning this, er, cheese order through our bosses, like last time?" asked Oliver, not entirely trusting the super secure phone was actually super secure. And not entirely trusting the client, either. Their bosses used a cheese shop in Queens as their front. Oliver could see Croke exaggeratedly nodding in agreement from his little bed.
The client spat out a grainy string of curse words. Said time was too short. That they had the phone for this very reason. Then the client stated the pay: double what they received for the last hit, to be wired to whatever accounts they instructed.
The pay was a very big number—had their bosses been keeping an oversized cut of the last fee? Oliver knew the criminal family who brokered them for the first hit would bury him and Croke in a deep septic field if they ever got wind of them freelancing. But hey, Oliver needed to make the client happy, right? Wasn't that the American way? So this time, it required cutting out the middlemen.
"Okay," said Oliver. "We can deal with that guy but we'll need some special equipment. A powerboat. Not, ah… stolen."
From the corner of his eye, he could see Croke pantomiming alarm and confusion.
The client asked a question.
"Size?" repeated Oliver. "Small. Big enough for, say, three people." Oliver thought a bit. "No, just for two."
Chapter Thirteen
Pepper wanted to find out if Zula's hunch was right—that teens may have parked at Dill Lot the night of the clambake murder. He had, at that age—with none other than Maddie Smith.
So first
thing the next morning, Pepper drove to the Holbrook home, rang the bell. His heart suddenly racing. He hadn't seen anyone from that family since his return to New Albion.
The mother answered the door. Denise Holbrook. She was a thin, tall woman in her early forties. Mid-length brunette hair and a Cape Cod tan.
Her hand came to her throat, she froze, then she came forward, hugged him fiercely. In a bit of shock from seeing so unexpectedly the man who'd saved their nine-year-old daughter from the back of a sex predator's van.
"Pepper Ryan!" Mrs. Holbrook sobbed into his chest.
In Mrs. Holbrook's arms, that night from eight years ago hit Pepper again, suddenly and intensely. He was that twenty-year-old police cadet again. The wet evening just at twilight, seeing what might have been a backpack in the tall grass, watching a brown van turn, slowly move away… And Pepper's outrageously reckless decision to run that van off the road, into a tree.
More than just remembered, Pepper actually felt what had followed next, like being in a PTSD nightmare: his hands on the police SUV’s cold, slick door handle, the burn of the first bullet that'd had hit him in the chest… He was suddenly looking again into the pale, bloodshot eyes of the man he'd wrestled in the middle of that wet street, both understanding that one of them was about to die. And he felt again the searing pain and raw itch in his left thumb's missing tip—the man's final shot had blown off the end of Pepper's thumb and the side of the man's throat. The man had bled out in less than a minute, soaking Pepper in metallic stench. But worst of all, Pepper heard again that muffled thump thump thump. The sound that Pepper first heard lying in the street, under the dying man, then followed to the brown van's rear. The terrified kicks of little Leslie Holbrook.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I should have called first, but I had a question for Leslie."
Mrs. Holbrook stepped back, wiping away tears. "A question? About the van?"
"No, nothing to do with that. Something I'm working on—I was hoping she'd do me a favor? How is she?" Leslie must be almost finishing high school.
"She's great. We're all great. We heard you were back in town but didn't want to…" She made an apologetic gesture. "She's at work at the Chatham Bars Inn right now. Would you like to come in anyway?"
Pepper thanked her but said no, he was working too, had to get back out there. If he could have Leslie's cell number, he'd leave her a message?
Of course, whatever he needed.
"Pepper, would you come to dinner sometime soon?"
"I'd love to," he said, and meant it. He said goodbye and Mrs. Holbrook gave him another long hug. Pepper could see she was crying again.
As a twenty-year-old police cadet, Pepper had been a lot more pain-in-the-ass than hero, even that night with the damn brown van. He wasn't the type to be self-sacrificing. People who knew him best would have described him as rebellious and angry. Mad at his dad. Mad at Jake. Mad, probably, at himself. And a lot more of his strength that night had come from rage than he would ever admit. But to the Holbrooks? The media, when they nicknamed him Wonderboy? Everyone who didn't know the true story? He'd been raw justice, or vengeance, or whatever the hell people prayed for when predators were loose among them.
And Pepper wished he believed those fairy tales too.
Pepper could still feel the adrenaline from the Holbrook visit burning through his blood as he reached the police station. That may be the true explanation why Pepper said what he said to a reporter from the Boston Herald who approached Pepper on the station's front steps.
"Any developments on the clambake investigation?" the reporter asked.
The prudent answer would have been a smile with 'No comment at this time'. Instead, Pepper said, "I'm confident we'll have the murderers in custody shortly. They made some really dumb mistakes. Truly moronic. They may be among the stupidest criminals I've encountered in my career."
So, probably adrenaline. But officially? He'd tell his bosses he was trying to provoke the unsubs into making a misstep…
Kicking himself for opening his pie hole, Pepper went into the station. He wanted to informally interview Dunne before he came up for arraignment, see what info he could get from him about the clambake murder. If Dunne was withdrawing from meth, that could either make him extra chatty or shut him down completely. But it was worth a try and Pepper believed Dunne might open up a bit to him. But not if Alfson was there too, Pepper suspected, so he didn't call him.
Pepper didn't view this as freelancing away from his Secret Service partner. Was there anything wrong with stopping in to see how his old high school teammate's nuts were feeling? Pepper guessed the General would have already passed the word to the SAIC, Hanley. And they would note Pepper hadn't filled in Alfson, the way any good partner would. Which wouldn't be great for the General's blood pressure.
"I'm going to borrow the interview room," Pepper told Gerry Forrestal, the duty sergeant. "Can you grab Marcus Dunne from lockup?"
"Sorry Wonderboy, no can do," said Forrestal.
Okay...what? Had the General anticipated Pepper's request and left an order to block it? "No sweat," said Pepper. "I'll pull him myself."
"Not here you won't."
Pepper didn't know Forrestal well at all; he was a career cop from Boston who'd only joined the New Albion department two years earlier.
"Sergeant, do you and I have a problem?"
"Nope. Just you."
"Which is...?"
"They released Dunne this morning. Own recognizance. A white shoe lawyer drove all the way down from Boston to spring him."
"That doesn't make any sense. Did the Secret Service interview him?"
"Officer, I just work here. You want the skinny, talk to the General."
Chief Eisenhower was at his desk, staring into a cup of coffee like he didn't know what it was. Pepper sat without invitation. "Chief, why'd you release Dunne? I wanted to continue the conversation he started while trying to kill me. About the clambake murder. I think he'd talk to me, we go way back."
The General sighed. "Dunne's lawyer says he'll talk about what he saw…if we let him off for shitkicking Hurd."
"You didn't take that deal!"
The General finally looked up from his coffee. "Of course I didn't. I can't have citizens shitkicking my guys without consequences. Bad for morale. We're going forward with all charges. But to build a little goodwill, I got a weekend approval from the bench to release him on his own recognizance. Every day's valuable during bluefin harpoon season, so Dunne owes us one.
"And somehow he got a lawyer from Scheren & Cabot to slither down from Boston. She was threatening to tearing the DA's team a few new holes. She argued Hurd didn't have probable cause to take Dunne into custody so everything after that moment was our bad. She was flinging around terms like 'police brutality', 'false imprisonment' and 'loss of consortium'. Sounded expensive for us. We'll negotiate something to get Dunne to talk, but I won't agree to let him off for what he did to Hurd."
Hmm. "You mind if I visit him at home, ask him some questions? I think he'll talk to me, for old time's sake."
The General just gave him that look. "Pepper, we know he's represented and his lawyer told him not to speak without a written agreement. The Secret Service is having their lawyers type something up, ASAP."
Pepper wondered to himself why ASAP never felt fast enough. "Alfson told me Dunne threatened the POTUS a few months ago, so they think he might be involved in the Keser killing as more than a witness. But the feds were okay with releasing him?"
"They must have patience, Pepper. Try it, it comes in handy in life sometimes. And I'm not happy I didn't hear about the Secret Service's theory about Dunne until now. I said, keep me informed!"
At which perfect time Lieutenant Hurd poked his nose in. His face was multi-colored and his arm was in a sling. "Ryan, you still talking about your skill with a pool cue, or are you back to business? We've gotten reports of at least three major activist groups in town already. Have you interviewed them yet for the Keser
case? Any of them?"
"One group, the New River Front, and they're definitely persons of interest."
Hurd made a face. "Well, don't get blinders on so quickly—check out the other two groups. Zula's got the info. One's an eco-wack group called PLANT. It's an acronym for something stupid. The other outfit's an open-border lobby, I forget their name. And you know the POTUS arrives in only three days, right? I guess we could ask him to delay a bit if you're too busy taking boat rides?"
Crap. Who'd ratted to Hurd about Pepper's boat ride with Maddie? Was Hurd embarrassed about Pepper saving his butt, so he was giving Pepper a hard time, trying to tear him down in front of the General?
Pepper decided he'd spend the rest of his day running down the known activist groups in town. See if any of them felt like confessing to the Keser murder. He'd even invite Alfson along (while hoping he'd say no thanks).
Then, if Pepper happened to find himself in the right neighborhood, he'd stop by Dunne's home. Maybe Dunne would offer him a beer and voluntarily tell what he'd witnessed. He hoped Dunne had actually seen something helpful and wasn't just bullshitting to get a free pass on the charges he'd be facing. Pepper's instincts told him he could get Dunne to open up. If Dunne wasn't still pissing blood…
Chapter Fourteen
Special Agent Dan Alfson surprised Pepper by agreeing to join him on the activist group welcome wagon. He must have been getting a lot of flak from Hanley. Or maybe it was Pepper's magnetic personality? He hoped not.
This time Alfson left his little Ford Focus Hybrid in a New Albion police parking spot. Probably didn't want to collect any more parking tickets.
"I've been checking you out," said Alfson as Pepper drove them in the direction of the first address on their list.
"I'm flattered, but I'm straight."
"Ha, funny man! No, I was surprised you're a Harvard grad. Kind of slumming here in local law enforcement, hey? You come back to snatch up the lovely Zula, or what?"
Killing Shore Page 9
